'Meshes of The Afternoon ' Movie Yang Perlu Kau Tengok Sebelum Kau Mati.

What I really like about Deren is the way she makes unashamedly symbolic films. she turns things like keys and cats into tokens of subconscious patterns. she broke loose from the typical pattern of expressing interior states through mise-en-scene, dramaturgy, storytelling convention, etc... she completely ignored the way cinema always tries to comprehend the exterior and interior in the same frame. what we get in Meshes of the Afternoon is a blast of pure subjective cinema that without a shred of irony accepts a woman's dream as a legitimate form of expression. we live in a post-resnais, post lynch world in which we find these kinds of subjective expressions and cyclical, psychological narratives all over the place. but Meshes is from 1943. this is a whole fifteen years before Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Marienbad, which register as key films in the next wave of cinema that dealt with memory, gender, and violence with the same uncritically post-modern verve that motivated Deren. of course it is a throwback to Cocteau and Dali, but there is something very distinctly post-war about it as well.