‘Meshes of the Afternoon’, directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid in 1943, is a short American experimental film following the strange adventures of a woman who dreams. Deren plays a woman who returns home and falls asleep. In her dream she chases a hooded figure with a mirror for a face but is unable to catch him or her. With every failure, she re-enters the house and repeats the cycle. It’s a creepy and oppressive film filled with disturbing imagery and objects. The repetition reminded me of the murder mystery scenes in ‘Celine and Julie Go Boating’, gradually with each repeat the imagery corrupts like a degrading set of photocopies. This, apparently, was a strong influence on David Lynch, and you can see both the nightmarish cinematography of this in ‘Eraserhead’, and the oneiric twistiness in ‘Lost Highway’ and ‘Mulholland Drive’. There is not much plot here, but plenty of atmosphere, clearly drawing on the early work of Luis Buñuel such as ‘L’Age d’Or’, but with a particular American twist.

Would I recommend it? It’s an American surreal movie with a darkly unsettling tone and a complex network of Jungian imagery. It’s short and very watchable – maybe in a double bill with ‘L’Age d’Or’.