Confrontations with the Self: Meshes of the After
(2022)
Meshes of the After is Meg Case and Brad Porter’s contemporary remake of Meshes of the Afternoon, the classic 1943 avant-garde film by Maya Deren and her first husband Alexander Hammid. (Case and Porter are also married, and this may have been one aspect of what drew them to the project.)
Why remake a film which is already a masterpiece? Case and Porter make a strong argument for the value of their project: by setting the action in our contemporary world, with an apartment, furnishings, clothing, etc. that we recognize from our daily lives, their film feels familiar to a contemporary viewer. The visual look of the 1943 Meshes makes it feel like watching someone else's dream: the dream of a person from the past. But Meshes of the After feels like it came out of a dream that you or I might have had last night. In addition, Case and Porter create a substantially new experience by shooting the film in color, and not just ordinary color, but lurid color, using pure red and blue lights which hit the set from different angles. It is certainly as dreamlike as the Deren version, but a different sort of dream, a dream in which the mind's eye is almost assaulted by over-intense hues, and is therefore suffused with an emotional overlay of drama and conflict.
Meg Case plays the protagonist, a woman who, over the course of this dream narrative, encounters multiple versions of herself, and has a series of confrontational encounters with knives, record players, mirrors, keys, and other symbolic objects. Case has a screen presence fully as intense and compelling as Deren's, which is quite an accomplishment, considering that Deren, who was an experienced practitioner of Haitian Vodou, was one of the most charismatic individuals ever to make or appear in films. Deren's protagonist often looks as if she's in a trance state, simultaneously present in several levels of reality, whereas Case is vividly alive, alert, and responsive to an ever-changing and unpredictable state of being.
While some sequences carefully recreate the original film, shot by shot, overall the film is less of an imitation, and more of a new entity, a poetic meditation which uses the images and ideas from the Deren film to create a parallel but original statement. As one example of the differences between the two, in Deren’s film she encounters two other versions of herself at a table, but in the Case/Porter, they are on the bed, a more sexually charged location. The Case/Porter film is altogether more menacing, more inspired by the horror genre, almost Lynchian in its tone.
About four minutes shorter, Meshes of the After also feels more dramatic, more tightly focused than the Deren film. Whereas Deren dwells heavily on repetition, the dreamlike experience of seeing a single action over and over, from multiple points of view, Case and Porter zero in on the seething anger, fear, and attraction which drive the images.
Deren’s film is often shown with a score composed for it by Teiji Ito, her last husband, although it was originally shown silently. Case/Porter’s sound collage is in the spirit of the Ito score, but adds considerable menace and emotional weight to the implied violence of the images. The score adds dreamlike Foley effects, such as weirdly echoing footfalls, which sound as if they are in a giant cavern.
Meshes of the After may help contemporary viewers to appreciate Deren’s film in a fresh way, but it does more than that. They use Deren’s film as a a template, a lens. Deren provides them with a set of images and implied situations, which they use to make an original poetic statement, their own dive into the pool of desire, fear, and violence which lies hidden within us.
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