![]() It is fair to assume she was influenced deeply by his evocative use of objects and actions, and paid obvious homage to Eliot in her first film.ĭeren spent a lot of energy over the next few years re-interpreting the first film, not as Symbolist, but as Imagist. On the contrary, Deren’s film shows her admiration for Eliot’s use of powerful, personal symbolism in poetry, as she had described several years earlier in her thesis. These comparisons do not prove that Deren was trying to visually duplicate Eliot’s poetry, but rather that as a young artist striving toward original expression, she naturally retrieved some familiar images from her memory. In both Eliot’s poem and Deren’s film, the ‘spirit of the sea’ symbolizes a primal life and death force it is in and around the sea that both works end. Additionally, Eliot’s poem involves a cyclical journey which moves up stairs three times, ‘twisting, turning,’ reminiscent of the climb-repeated in three variations-in Meshes of the Afternoon, where the disorientation was supplied by the tilting camera. In his poem Eliot uses a single flower (a rose instead of Deren’s poppy) to symbolize a place ‘where all loves end.’ (Deren’s flower becomes a knife while her lover caresses her.) Eliot creates a veiled and silent guide who ‘moves in the time between sleep and waking ’ this character ‘bent her head but spoke no word,’ a gesture repeated by Deren’s fleeting, black-robed figure. Eliot with his objective correlative, described by Deren in her thesis as ‘an ensemble of objects, a situation, a series of events as symbols of inner reality.’ In early program notes for her film, Deren paraphrases this statement on Eliot by describing the film as one ‘concerned with the interior experiences of an individual’ which ‘rests heavily upon the symbolic value of objects and situations.’ĭeren’s first film owes even more to Eliot some images seem directly derivative from his ‘Ash Wednesday,’ described in Deren’s thesis as ‘a dreamland’ and ‘an expression of an isolated experience in a unique personality.’ She breaks a mirror instead its pieces fall into the ocean, and the man arrives home to the woman dead and draped in seaweed.ĭeren’s artistic purpose in assembling such a collection of objects and events is similar to the intention of T.S. The flower becomes a knife, with which the woman attempts to stab the man. The attacker turns into her lover, who begins to seduce her with the flower nearby. ![]() This sequence is repeated three times until the three dream selves conspire to stab the sleeping real self. She takes a nap, glimpsing as she dozes a black-robed, mirror-faced figure retreating, whom she pursues without success. A woman holding a flower and key, enters her absent lover’s home, and finds items there in disarray (a carving knife is propped on the stairs, for instance). We can easily ‘tell the story’ of Meshes of the Afternoon, inserting the significant objects as symbols to enhance the actions. Images and events work together to evoke a dark, subconscious mood. Nonetheless, the film is dependent upon a traditional poetic narrative structure, resting on a series of events which recur with variations, and on the repetitive treatment of visually potent objects, such as a knife, flower, and key. These include the fluid hand-held camera-work, particularly on the stair sequences, and numerous carefully planned and edited transitions. This film, a dream event which spirals inward from reality and back out again when a death wish apparently becomes manifest, has some peculiarly filmic qualities. It's a shame, though they were cheap cash grabs designed to capitalize on the growing home-video market, some of them weren't half-bad.Meshes of the Afternoon illustrates Maya Deren’s transition from verbal to visual expression. But with Disney's current grip on the theatrical market and the streaming giant that Disney+ is turning out to be, it's clear that there is no place for Disneytoon anymore. It's a sad end for a studio with such a curious legacy. Though a third Planes film was in development, the studio was quietly shut down in 2018. The last few films produced and released under Disneytoons were spinoffs based on Tinkerbell from Peter Pan and strangely Planes from Pixar's Cars. ![]() When Frozen grossed almost $1.3 billion worldwide, it became clear that future Disney sequels would be properly produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and released theatrically. Whatever success the Disneytoon films could achieve was peanuts by comparison now. Under Bob Iger's leadership Disney grew and grew, with its purchase of Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm, the studio was an unfathomable juggernaut. ![]()
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