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Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) could be said to exemplify Teresa de Lauretis's idea of "the really avant-garde work in cinema and in feminism," which "is narrative and Oedipal with a vengeance, since it seeks to stress the duplicity of that scenario and that specific contradiction of the female subject in it-the contradiction whereby historical women must work with and against Oedipus" (40). Deren worked tirelessly "with and against Oedipus" as a filmmaker and activist in an otherwise masculinist avant-garde art world. The critiques she waged against the dominant representations of women were met with vehement resistance by a rabidly patriarchal, and frequently misogynist, avant-garde film culture that did not hesitate to conflate Deren herself with her films in their attacks. In this way, Deren's films do not register simply as "personal cinema," but as a form of cinematic autobiography. I want to show this by mapping the connections between Deren's first and most screened film, Meshes of the Afternoon, and Deren's own role within the history of the American avant-garde. This film's critical reception and Deren's responses to it reveal a set of autobiographical themes.
Deren is credited with making the first narrative film in the history of the American avant-garde, which up to that point had been dominated by abstract representations and formal experiments with animation. Meshes utilizes characters, setting, and a narrative temporality owing as much to film noir and to Hollywood's "women's films" as to avant-garde experimentation. Yet, the fact that this film focuses on a woman, played by Deren herself, who is never assigned a name (nor does Deren give herself film credit as actress), invites the narrative themes of the film to be interpreted as autobiographical (Soussloff 123). As Bill Nichols contends, this interpretation of Meshes infiuenced both its early reception and the reasons for Deren's relative invisibility in the seventies: "Deren's early reception hinged on elements of autobiography and introspection. .. . [T]hese fell into disfavor as film studies grew into an academic discipline in the 1970s" (13). Though perhaps out of favor in the seventies, these elements were in fact a lightning rod in the film's first wave of reception. As Nichols and the contributors to Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde show so well,...