Meshes of the Afternoon

It opens with a hand and a poppy, a manikin’s hand, descending to the surface of the street. The sequence of events is much closer to Hitchcock than to Buñuel and Dali, though there is a certain kinship with Un Chien Andalou.

Silhouette and knocker coincide. So do Cocteau, Vermeer, and Teiji Ito’s extremely adroit music.

You can’t beat Maya Deren. Hitchcock decreed that a knife must gleam (or so he says), and she contrives to get her face reflected in one. The handheld POV, the key in the mouth, the knife—it’s the business of the avant-garde to be unutterably beautiful.

The tensile strength of the acutely-controlled stream of perceptions that makes a close-up of lips and hair a monumental image, like the cloaked figure whose face is a mirror, culminates in the shattered image.

 

Witch’s Cradle

The artist’s piece of string, the girl’s vein of feeling.

 

At Land

N. a pris les dés, as Robbe-Grillet says, it’s a laborious process, if you want to look at it that way.

The chess piece dismissed in the routine game can be found where two girls play by the sea, distracted.

Which is where the protagonist comes in.

 

A Study in Choreography for Camera

Trees in the forest, statuary, these are the inspirations of the dance.

 

Ritual in Transfigured Time

Mother’s skein runs out, mournful daughter at convivial cocktail party (Con and Viv and Al in-between) meets bouncy boy, a statue who pursues her to the drowning sea, a negative.

 

meditation on violence

A controlled substance, of Chinese manufacture, brought into action under tensely ritualized conditions of swordplay, gradually calming and subduing itself as the day’s work (boxing) is done.

 

Divine Horsemen

“The Living Gods of Haiti”.

Rituals and ceremonies of the voodoo religion.

The gods are they who ride men, they are named and their worship shown.

A great artist has it all in the palm of her hand.

 

Ensemble for Somnambulists

The characters are ballet dancers printed in negative who come and go brightly on a dark ground, as Breton says of thought, curves.

 

The Very Eye of Night

Uranus and moons, Gemini, Noctambulo and Urania, luminous figures (negative ballet dancers) in the starry night.

The muse of astronomy capers with the sleepwalker (Ensemble for Somnambulists), but her place is in the heavens.