5 Female Filmmakers You Should Know About - Count Down - Presenting Number 2: MAYA DEREN

Creepy and disturbing visions.... At number two in our count down is experimental filmaker Maya Deren who wrote, produced, co-directed and starred in the twisted, surrealist short film Meshes of the Afternoon from 1943.

What’s it all about? Made for an estimated £200, Meshes of the Afternoon is an experimental film written, produced and co-directed by Maya Deren, one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and leaders of the 1940/1950’s Avent-Guard filmmaking movement. A woman returning home played by Maya Deren herself, falls asleep and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and complete mismatching of the objective view of time and space, her dark inner desires play out on-screen.

Why we selected this film…
Emily: I first saw this film 10 years ago at university as part of a 20th century cinema course, and it’s stayed with me ever since. It was the first time I’d been exposed to experimental film making and the surrealist, dreamlike quality of the narrative intrigued me. One image from the film has been a recurring inhabitant of my nightmares and dreams, the expressionless hooded character with a mirror for a face.Maya Deren was quite a remarkable women, she wrote film theory, distributed her own films, traveled across the USA, and went to Cuba and Canada to promote her films using the lecture-demonstration format to teach film theory, and Voudoun and the interrelationship of magic, science, and religion. Deren established the Creative Film Foundation in the late 1950s to reward the achievements of independent filmmakers. Certainly a woman who broke down many barriers.

Trivia: Meshes of the Afternoon was selected to the National Film Registry, Libary of Congress, in 1990.

The Film

So we've reached number 2 on our list, within our next blog we'll reveal the female filmmaker at number one on our list.Which films created by women have you enjoyed, who do you think we should have included on our list? Please leave a reply below, we’d love to hear from you.