At Land

Maya Deren's second film is closest in spirit to her first, the brilliant Meshes of the Afternoon, although it has a less ingenious structure and didn't strike me as deeply. Deren plays a woman washed to shore who goes on an Odyssey through space and time - I guess, it's hard to really know. It has some very striking and curious moments and is worth seeing.

I'll say two things about my reaction to the film. First, I came across a version on Youtube that had been rescored. That score is to me less evocative than the original, which I found later on the Internet Archive, where someone has uploaded all her works. Had my first experience been with this score it might have affected my overall impression.

Also, I saw Meshes when I was a twenty-something film student and I saw At Land as a sixty-something guy. I might have had a stronger reaction in film school, but this film just never crossed my path.

My point being that a younger me might have liked this better, but still not as well as Meshes.

Like Maya Deren's first short Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land is a narrative story infused with surrealism. It flows more smoothly comparing to Meshes, but lacks the energy that her first film has. Also, the structure of several fragmented episodes lacks coherency; some parts may reflect the director's personal experiences and/or mindscapes so that the audience may get confused. For example, the scene of the female protagonist walking with a young man and then meeting an old man in a bed seems barely related to the main story and unnecessary.

There's less of the symbolic to grapple with in AT LAND compared to Maya Deren's MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON, although there's probably a good deal to analyze, if you're so inclined, about a woman looking for a chess pawn, then clutching it to her chest and running on a beach as her other selves look curiously at her. Less jarring (although Maya Deren does walk in on her own POV shot at one point!), more linear and sure of itself, this is almost the Lucifer Rising to Meshes' Invocation of my Demon Brother (to bring Kenneth Anger into the fold). Whereas Meshes had a syncopated, almost nervous quality about it, AT LAND is more lyrical, still dreamlike in atmosphere, but exchanging cramped apartments, hooded figures and knives for open beach spaces, giant scaffolds, and games of chess. I won't presume to know what it all means, and like Meshes, I suspect I would find the answer infinitely less satisfying or intriguing than the question itself but lovers of the avant-guard will find a lot to like.

At Land is first and foremost a dream projection. Meaning that, while if it's either surreal or not, what we see is a not the narration of a dream or even the interpretation of a dream; it's the shared experience of a dream. Like, in dreams, you change from one location to another, or the person you are talking to suddenly become somebody else, or a Walt Disney look alike in a bed may be creepy, without any logical reaction to the strange nature of it because while you are dreaming you are just experiencing it, not trying to understand it. I strongly suggest that with this film, in fact, most of Deren's films, to let got to the rational function of "understanding" and just flow with it.

I don't think that most of Lynch or Buñuel's films are really onirical, maybe they are surrealistic on an absourdist level or rich on Jungian symbolism, but in the end, they have a basic narrative structure and usually bring a closure to whatever the film is about. Maya Deren's At Land is not based on rethorical figures or a discernible point; I don't even think there is no explicit symbolism to it (maybe Deren has explained it in some essay, but I haven't read her yet). It's experiencing the whole thing as if we are in Deren's head while she is dreaming. Of course, this implies the alienation of most viewers who may be in need of closure. Few films are successful as shared dreams, Malle's Black Moon or Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet come to mind.

Comercially, Kubrick tried and achieved to some extend the share dream with Wide Eyes Shut, but it's only last year's blockbuster Inception the one which has nailed it. Of all the references that are to be found about the excellent Inception, At Land it's the most clear influence, from the beach opening to the dream experience to the search of the totem and getting back to the first "dream layer".

So, even 60 years and something later, Deren is still a truly influential filmmaker

A woman lies on the sand, left there by the tides and waves (and in a pose that would be copied in From Here to Eternity). She reaches up across tree roots and makes a difficult climb. Only to discover herself climbing horizontally along a long dinner table as bourgeoise black-tie guests chat and drink and smoke, oblivious to her. At the top of the table, a man is playing chess but abandons the game. Fascinated, she gazes at board, the pieces moving unaided. The woman chases a pawn as it falls to the floor. Falls down a waterfall. Is lost.

She meets a man on a path through a forest. They chat and go to a big house - at his suggestion - where the furniture is covered with white shrouds, as if no-one lives there. (The inside of the house is quite grand, although from outside it is a mere wooden shack). She stares at an older man lying under a white sheet.

The woman descends the cliffs to the sand dunes and the beach. Two women are playing a relaxed chess and having a good time. She caresses their hair seductively. They play without needing to look at the board. The woman then takes a pawn and runs across the dunes, triumphantly recalling earlier scenes but leaving only footprints in the sand. Maya Deren's second short film is perhaps the only one to resemble her more famous Meshes of the Afternoon in terms of structure and style.

While both experimental films have a surrealist narrative that is suggestive rather than literal, the oppressive, frightening tone of Meshes is here replaced with one of joyous discovery. In Lacanian terminology, it celebrates a healthy return to an inner essence. In this it is almost the reverse of the psychotic nightmare of Meshes. It has also been seen as one first films addressing feminine subjectivity, although an anti-materialist reading would be equally possible (Deren had also been a left-wing political activist in the thirties).

In her classic text, Cinematography: the Creative Use of Reality, Deren says, "In my At Land, it has been the technique by which the dynamic of the Odyssey is reversed and the protagonist, instead of undertaking the long voyage of search for adventure, finds instead that the universe itself has usurped the dynamic action which was once the prerogative of human will, and confronts her with a volatile and relentless metamorphosis in which her personal identity is the sole constancy."

Cinematically, the unmatched shots also create a sense of disorientation in time and space. The viewer is forced to form their own 'story' or 'meaning' according to her or his own ingenium. The use of surreal structure for Deren was not so much an artistic preference as a belief that cinema needs to find its own instrument as an art form, to relinquish its reliance on, "narrative disciplines it has borrowed from literature," and its, "timid imitation of the causal logic of narrative plots."

The fact that At Land works so well reminds us that Meshes was no accident: Deren understood the way symbols are used by the subconscious well enough to elicit direct, meaningful responses in an audience. Sadly for cinephiles, Deren mostly moved back to her other love, that of the dance, in her use of film thereafter. Yet it is particularly her two early surrealist classics that continue to provide inspiration to viewers and filmmakers alike, such that she is still often referred to as the 'Mother of U.S.-Avant-Garde.' She developed a new vocabulary of film images and a new syntax of film techniques. Things she continued to strive for and lecture on until the end of her tragically short life.