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.