In chapter 3 of Ways of Seeing, John Berger explores how the nude in western art systematically objectified women, and this tradition has been continued by other contemporary media including film. In this paper, I want to focus on Berger’s claim woman constantly surveys herself that “she is almost continually accompanied by her own image”[ Ways of Seeing, John Berger, P46] and connect it to Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. Meshes of the Afternoon, with its exquisite use of symbolic associations, aligns with Berger’s feminist critique on visual culture by presenting women as self-surveyor and questions the possibility of emancipation in a surreal manner, challenging the male-assumed way of seeing and proposing a radical understanding of the self.

The overall structure of the film can be seen as a surreal mental maze of the woman played by Maya Deren herself. This multi-layered mental maze, with each layer featuring a representation of the woman’s self awareness, is fundamentally driven by her impulsion to survey herself. However, the woman’s consciousness constantly tries to emancipate herself that from this self-surveillance self-reflection arises. In my opinion, the beginning of the woman’s first entrance into the house and the ending where she kills herself are the two layers that actually take place externally in the world of the film; the other three seemingly repetitional layers in between, beginning with a zoom out from a circle-shaped window which signifies the entrance to the woman’s dream world, each represents a state of consciousness of the woman in her dream and an alternate reality. All these layers are structurally connected by the use of symbols, as these symbols repetitively appears throughout the film, forming a complex yet solid gender critic and a radical claim on the self.

Symbolic associations use discrete objects to generate abstract meanings-either meanings already given by a culture or created by the film itself. There are many symbols in Meshes of the afternoon. I will focus on the three most important symbols-the key, the knife and the mirror-to explain in evidence what meaning they convey individually and collectively and connect them to a the topic of self-surveillance in conversation with that of Berger.

The mirror, in my perspective, is the central symbol of the entire film because it really exemplifies the notion of self-surveillance and self-reflection. We often look into the mirror when we want to see our own image. In a broader cultural context, mirror represents a subject’s self awareness, self reflection and the desire to regulate one’s own appearance in accordance to certain social norms and at the same time to maintain a consistent self identity. Deren built upon such common understanding of mirror and transcended it with her adept use of symbols. In the film, the mirror first appears as the face of the cloaked figure, who we later know as the woman’s projection of her husband in her “dream.” When the cloaked figure turns at Deren’s character, she sees no reflection of herself in the mirror-face but only glass and a pure blank. Here, we should be aware that we are actually seeing the image from the woman’s mind. In this sense, the mirror-face does not simply appear contingently as an external being. Instead, the women envisions him with her eyes of the mind. This indicates that she is eager to see her own image in the first place through the mirror. However, she sees no reflections of herself from the mirror-face. Later in the film, when she is looking at the mirror in the bedroom, what she sees is only an ambiguous image of herself that no clear figure can be identified. In contrast, when the man, very likely the woman’s husband, looks into the same mirror later in the film, his reflection is clear and legible. What does this mean?

According to Berger, “the mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman”[ Ways of Seeing, John Berger, P51

] throughout the history of western visual art, in which the moralizing was actually hypocritical since it is men who put mirror in women’s hands and enjoy the pleasure of gazing upon them. Deren embeds her film within that tradition only to criticize it. Deren’s character tries to seek her own image in the mirror of course, but is she doing it out of vanity? I think not. Instead, she is lost existentially and wants to pursue her self-identity by looking into the mirror. The woman’s lack of clear reflection or no reflection at all in the mirror suggests that her self identity is shattered in pieces that she cannot form a consistent and unified narrative of herself. This is an accurate depiction of women “trapped” in domestic spaces and constantly being gazed upon by male and themselves. Though, on the surface, a clear and unified self-identity, as that of the man, seems more determinate and doubtless, it is really this lack of clear self-identity that grants free and open space to interpret oneself. Different from the man who sees himself as who he is and acts according to the social norms, the woman continuously questions herself and their relationships through her mental voyage. I will discuss the last appearance of the mirror together with those of the key and the knife, but now we can agree on that Deren successfully critiques male-centered tradition of mirror in western visual art by cutting off its original function using blank reflections and focusing on the woman’s attempt of self-reflection.

The key and the knife both carries individual meanings developed throughout the film. Normally, a key’s function is to open a door; a knife(a table-knife here in particular)’s function is to cut food into smaller pieces. Both functions are depicted at the beginning of the film: the woman uses the key to open the front door of the house and sees the knife on the bread. It is worth noticing that the key bounces down the stairs and the knife falls off the bread onto the table, both of which evokes the woman’s uneasiness. This indicates that these two items in the film have meanings beyond their regular functions. Metaphorically, the key is a pathway to an answer or a tool to decipher certain meaning and the knife is a tool for violence. The “bouncing down” of the key is an signifier for the woman’s painstaking attempt to form an understanding of herself later in the film; the “falling off” of the knife serves as a prologue for the woman’s final violence to “break free.”

As the key and the knife transform into each other several times in the film, their independent meanings intertwine, forming a synthesized meaning overall. The key and the knife start to appear intensively at the “fourth layer” of the film. As we see the woman sees another self of her trying to catch the cloaked figure, she takes the key out of her month and it turns into the knife. This indicates that the key and knife has become internal signifiers of her consciousness instead of simply external everyday objects and they have a transformative relationship between each other that requires interpretations. After the third alternate version of the woman(I call her woman Omega) enters into the room and puts the knife on the table and it turns into the key immediately, the three of them finally meet. Two of them try to take the key but failed. Woman Omega successfully takes the key and it turns into the knife again with her hands turning black. This is a moment of self realization for the woman as the three versions of herself form a consensus to kill the original self with the knife, as if only by killing the trapped, unrealized version of herself can they(also her) finally be free. The key here represents the attempt to realize oneself, and the answer to that attempt is the knife which itself represents the force of violence to break through constrains by killing oneself. With these two symbols working correspondingly, a message forms: true self-reflection is a form of self-annihilation. Where is this self reflection pointing to? We should bring the mirror back into the conversation in order to answer it.

The mirror represents the attempt to achieve a unified understanding of the self, and it is so far a failed attempt for the woman because there are no reflections in the mirror for her at all. However, the blank also suggests that there is actually no absolute essence of the self that can be clearly reflected as an image. In this sense, a clear reflection of the self in the mirror is actually the real illusion(as with the case of the man). This is why the woman finally decides to break the man’s mirror-face with the knife, as he is objectifying her with his gaze exemplified by the close-up shots of her lips. After she breaks his mirror-face, an open sea representing the vast open world appears. This is a decisive moment: by breaking the mirror with which she was struggling to find her reflections, the woman is forever letting go of her very attempt to achieve a unified self understanding. Since there is no absolute self essence, the very concept structure of the self needs to be get rid of in order to achieve absolute freedom. At the same time, the mirror is also the man’s face. This synthesization of the mirror and the male face indicates that the woman’s self-reflection takes the form of male surveillance in the way that “the surveyor of woman in herself is male.”[ Ways of Seeing, John Berger, P47] By radically breaking the very structure of her own self-conception, the woman is also annihilating the male surveyor in herself. The last scene in the film brings us back to the real world: the woman lies dead on the sofa with fragments of the broken mirror all over her body--the broken mirror literally kills her. The radical self-emancipation in her consciousness comes with the greatest cost--the demise of her physical body. At the end of the day, the inescapable self surveillance of objectification can only be “escaped” spiritually with the annihilation of the body which carries the historicity of the unrealized self.

In conclusion, Deren embeds her film Meshes of the Afternoon within the tradition of western visual art that Berger criticized only to transcends it through gender and philosophical lenses. The adept use of symbolic associations, mainly exemplified by symbols such as the mirror, the key and the knife, altogether forms a radical yet inspiring message: the inescapable male surveyor within ones consciousness can only be transcended with the violent annihilation of the original self. If this reading of the film is solid, then it really exemplifies film’s striking capability of making philosophical and cultural claims through the language of image as a media.