Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) 16 mm, black and white, sound, 14 min

In 2015 the BBC named the film the 40th greatest American movie ever made. From a deceptively simple introductory premise, Maya Deren modulates the mise-en-scene of seemingly mundane objects to create overlapping, yet non-intersecting planes of existential reality, using permutations of recurring images - mirrored surfaces (the apparition's face, polished metal spheres, a hand mirror), glass, duality and doppelgangers - to represent variably interlocking narrative fragments of observation, inference, deduction, and memory.

Unfolding with the narrative discontinuity characteristic of nouvelle roman literature (creating an idiosyncratically dissociative filmic language that also characterizes Alain Resnais' subsequent feature films, particularly Last Year at Marienbad and Je t'aime, je t'aime), the film posits a series of subtle structural, temporal, and logical mutations, creating a sublimely recursive, mind-bending meditation on the interaction between experience and memory, domestic banality and violence, imagination and causation.