A Film Canon

The foundational work of the New American Cinema, Meshes Of The Afternoon presents four, successive, trance-like sequences, each of which deals (roughly) with a woman's passage from her garden path to the upstairs bedroom window that overlooks it. In the process, various developments occur: a series of domestic objects are decontextualised, then recontextualised as adjuncts to the woman's body, or desire; the woman herself progresses from being a mere shadow with an eye attached, to being a fully-fledged body, to being a disarming, discontinuous proliferation of bodies; the editing moves from a lyrical to staccato register, partly to draw attention to this discontinuity; and, finally, the house itself is increasingly subjectivised and eroticised, moving from the fluid to the vertiginous. More explicitly, a hooded, mirror-faced figure is introduced in the second sequence who, in the fourth, is revealed to be the woman's husband, thereby establishing a poetic connection between her murder of him and her own suicide; or, figuratively, between her violent destruction of his mirror-face, and her own movement through the giant sheet of glass from which she observes his arrival. Not only does this introduce a note of ambivalence into what could have been a fairly predictable study of domestic servitude, but it clarifies that the circularity of the narrative has been a mere forestalling of death - or, figuratively, of the traumatic secant that leads from window to path - explaining the concentration of intensity around those moments at which one sequence segues into the next, all of which tend to involve the woman gazing back upon the elements of the one(s) that came before.