Meshes of the Afternoon & Daisies Film Screening
Wednesday 30 March 2022, 6pm - 8pm
Lecture Theatre 3
Join us this Womens+ History Month for a series of Films for women, by women.
Women and the Avant-Garde
These films challenge the idea that 20thC Avant-Garde Art was only about men. We present to you two films, one from the avant-garde American tradition in surrealist art and another from the Czech New Wave.
Meshes of the Afternoon – Maya Deren (1943 - 14 minutes)
There is a whole tradition of art film that owes its life to the hand-held 16mm camera (Bell and Howell, or more prominently Bolex) that traces its lineage from Jean Cocteau all the way to Kenneth Anger. Made during the war, Maya Deren’s celebrated short film was revolutionary for its time for many reasons: its use of objects and aesthetic forms for symbolic value, its focus on the interior subjectivity of film, its play on the use of the camera for the subjective eye and its overall focus on psychological state rather than narrative form. You can see its influence on filmmakers such as David Lynch’s Lost Highway, experimental women filmmakers Barbara Hammer and Carolee Schneemann, and the cloaked mirror-faced figure is expressly referenced in Janelle Monae’s Tightrope.
Daisies (Sedmikrásky) – Vera Chytilova (1966 – 75 minutes)
A seminal work of the Czech New Wave, this film follows the anti-authoritarian adventures of two young girls named Marie. A satire on bourgeois decadence, formal rules of cinema are actively challenged as well as broken. Hilarious and wildly subordinate, including one of the grandest food fights in all of cinema, this unmissable and criminally unknown film was banned from theatres and export during the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
Feel free to stick around afterwards for the discussion.
Grab your free ticket
Lecture Theatre 3
30th March 2022
6pm-8pm!