Let's be perfectly clear: watching "Meshes of the Afternoon" is not a narrative experience, it is an act of evocation. It’s like finding a rusty key in a forgotten drawer, a key that unlocks not a door, but a state of consciousness. Fourteen minutes of pure, distilled cinema that, in 1943, acted as a silent Big Bang for the entire firmament of American experimental film, a telluric shockwave whose aftershocks can still be felt today in the foundations of works by David Lynch, Satoshi Kon, or even contemporary psychological horror.

Created by Maya Deren and her then-husband Alexander Hammid on a shoestring budget—a hand-cranked 16mm Bolex camera, no crew, their own Los Angeles home as a set—the film is the chronicle of a sleep, or perhaps a death. A woman, played by Deren herself with her aura of a modernist priestess, pursues a black-cloaked figure whose hands place an artificial poppy flower on a path. She picks it up, enters the house, and from that moment reality unravels. Aristotelian logic is gently shown the door and replaced by an associative logic, that of the dream, where objects—a key, a knife in a loaf of bread, an unhooked telephone, a gramophone—become fetishes laden with a sinister, polysemous energy.

The film coils in on itself in a hypnotic spiral, a looping structure that anticipates by decades the narrative architectures of a Lost Highway or the obsessive cyclicality of certain video art. Each cycle is a variation on the theme: Deren falls asleep in an armchair and relives the same sequence of events, but each time with a deviation, an intensification. Her own doppelgängers multiply, seated around a table in a card game with her own subconscious. Who is the original? Who is the reflection? The question is irrelevant. We are in the realm of the Freudian Unheimlich, the uncanny that arises not from the monstrous, but from the familiar made suddenly alien. The home, archetype of the refuge, transforms into a psychic prison, a labyrinth of mirrors where every surface reflects a distorted version of the Self.

It is all too easy, and lazy, to label "Meshes of the Afternoon" as a mere product of Surrealism. Of course, the echo of Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) is undeniable. But while that French-Spanish masterpiece is an anarchic assault on the eye and on reason, a sequence of programmatically disconnected visual shocks, the work of Deren and Hammid is something more subtle and, in some ways, more unsettling. It does not seek to destroy logic, but to construct an alternative one, hermetic and internally coherent. It is a "trance film," as Deren herself called it, a filmic ritual designed to induce an altered state in the viewer. Its grammar is not that of the waking world, but of personal myth. Every shot, every cut, is a visual rhyme, a poetic connection. The knife plunging into the bread becomes the knife threatening the sleeper; the key falling in slow-motion is a passkey to the inner abyss.

In this, the film is closer to the stream of consciousness of a Virginia Woolf than to iconoclastic Dadaism. It is an interior monologue translated into images, an attempt to map the rugged geography of the female psyche in an era when mainstream cinema relegated women to the roles of siren or angel of the hearth. "Meshes of the Afternoon" is an act of radical insubordination. The camera doesn't merely observe the protagonist; it often is the protagonist. The famous point-of-view shot of the feet walking on pavement, on sand, on grass, is a declaration of intent: we are seeing the world through her senses, we are inhabiting her perception. It is a tactile, synesthetic cinema, where the weight of a key in the palm is as tangible as the anguish it represents.

And then there is the cowled figure, whose face is a mirror. A visual invention of devastating power, an icon that condenses decades of psychoanalytic theory. It is not an external antagonist, a monster to be vanquished. It is the Self, the Other, the gaze of the observer reflected back at the subject. It is the Void gazing back at us, the personification of our own mortality or, in a Jungian reading, the Shadow that tirelessly follows us. When, in the climax, Deren shatters this mirror-face, she is not defeating an enemy, but attempting to shatter her own image, a desperate gesture of liberation that leads only to further fragmentation.

The context of its creation is fundamental. This is 1943, in the heart of the Second World War. While Hollywood was producing propaganda and escapist cinema, Deren and Hammid, two European artists transplanted to America (she of Ukrainian origin, he Czechoslovakian), turned the camera inward, exploring the anxieties and paranoias not of the nation, but of the individual. Their film is a response not to world events, but to how those events reverberate in the most secret chambers of the mind. The arrival of the male character (played by Hammid) in the final part of the film breaks the solipsistic spell. He acts according to a rational, mundane logic: he picks up the flower, enters the house, finds his woman asleep. But his gaze, his presence, is an intrusion. It is the reality principle attempting to impose itself on the dream. And the result is catastrophic. The final scene, with Deren dead, the shards of the mirror scattered, and the sea seeming to invade the room, is sublimely ambiguous. Is it the dream that kills reality, or reality that kills the dreamer? Did she kill herself, or was she "killed" by waking up?

The soundtrack, added only in 1959 by Deren's third husband, Japanese composer Teiji Ito, deserves a separate mention. Though anachronistic, it has become an integral part of the work, a percussive and spectral soundscape that amplifies its ritualistic atmosphere, transforming the viewing into a pagan ceremony officiated in a bourgeois living room.

The legacy of "Meshes of the Afternoon" is immense and tentacular. Without its exploration of domestic paranoia, would we have had Roman Polanski's cinema in Repulsion or The Tenant? Without its oneiric logic and fractured identities, would David Lynch have ever conceived the dark roads of Mulholland Drive or the red rooms of Twin Peaks? The woman in peril—not from an external threat but from the collapse of her own perception—is a topos that "Meshes of the Afternoon" all but invented and bequeathed to cinema history. The film is a genetic map, a source code from which countless cinematic nightmares have been compiled. It is a portal that, once crossed, changes forever how we look not only at cinema, but at the inanimate objects in our own homes, the shadows that lengthen in the afternoon and, above all, our own face reflected in a mirror.