Editing Meshes of the Afternoon (section)

===Lewis Jacobs's discussion===
<!-- This section has been ported from the Maya Deren biography page as it is more appropriate to the article on the film itself. -->

{{Original research|section|date=December 2022}}

Writing about ''Meshes of the Afternoon'', Lewis Jacobs credits Maya Deren with being the first film maker since the end of [[World War II]] to "inject a fresh note into experimental film production".<ref name=Jacobs>{{cite journal |last1=Jacobs |first1=Lewis |title=Experimental Cinema in America (Part Two: The Postwar Revival) |journal=Hollywood Quarterly |date=Spring 1948 |volume=3 |issue=3 |pages=278–292 |doi=10.2307/1209699 |jstor=1209699}}</ref>

Further in his discussion of experimental cinema in postwar America, Jacobs says the film "attempted to show the way in which an apparently simple and casual occurrence develops subconsciously into a critical and emotional experience. A girl comes home one afternoon and falls asleep. In a dream she sees herself returning home, tortured by loneliness and frustration and impulsively committing suicide. The story has a double climax, in which it appears that the imagined, the dream, has become real.”<ref name=Jacobs />

Deren uses specific cinematic devices in this film to convey deeper meaning. In a particular scene, Deren is walking up a normal set of stairs, and each time she pushes against the wall, it triggers the camera to move in that direction, almost as if the camera is part of her body. As she pulls herself up the last stair, the top of the stairs leads her to a window in her bedroom, which breaks the expectations of the viewer. In doing so, Deren destroys the normal sense of time and space. There is no longer a sense of what space she is in, nor for how long it was there. Deren constantly asks the viewer to pay attention and remember certain things by repeating the same actions over and over with only very subtle changes.

A recognizable trait of Deren's work is her use of the subjective and objective camera. For instance, shots in ''Meshes of the Afternoon'' cut from Deren looking at an object, to Deren's point of view, looking at herself perform the same actions that she has been making throughout the film. This conveys the meaning of Deren's dual personality or ambivalent feelings towards the possibility of suicide. It is Lewis Jacobs's opinion that "the film is not completely successful, it skips from objectivity to subjectivity without transitions or preparation and is often confusing."<ref name=Jacobs /> An example of Jacobs's comment would be when Deren cuts to her point of view, which normally is an objective shot, but in this POV shot she is watching herself, which is subjective. The viewer cannot expect Deren's POV shot to contain herself.