The Mirror-Faced Grim Reaper in Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), dir. Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

“This film is endowed with an acute sense of restlessness and alienation; reflecting this uncanny estrangement in the doubling, tripling and quadrupling of its central character, and in its cyclic narrative, a structure that seems condemned to repetition. Why is the hooded Death figure constructed as a kind of mirror? Are we dealing with Nietzsche’s notion of ‘eternal return’? (…) You could go on forever about the meaning buried in this particular work. It invites and eludes analysis.” – CINEMA AND DREAM-LOGIC IN MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON