[Frameworks] Meshes of the Afternoon question

[David Tetzlaff]

> Speaking of Meshes of the Afternoon, One shot has always bugged me, because as far as I know, 
> Deren and Hammid made this film entirely on their own, filming each other. The shot that bugs me is the only one in which you see both of them: he stretches out his hands to pull her out of the chair. Maybe it's not his hands, or maybe someone else is filming; the camera is not on a tripod. Any ideas?

Occam's Razor suggests they probably had a friend assist them with minor elements on a few especially tricky shots. 

The shot above is not the only one where two different figures appear and in which the camera moves. 

At about 6:30, Maya looks out the window and there's an eyeline match to a shot of a hooded figure carrying a flower walking away down the sidewalk. The camera tilts and pans to follow the figure, and BEFORE the figure exits the top of the frame, Maya enters the bottom of the frame running. So, on set, there's Maya, the figure, and whoever is working the camera. 

The figure is definitely too tall and angular to be Deren. (The costume seems to have been made for someone with shorter legs than the person wearing it here, and in the earlier shot where the camera tracks backward through the tube looking out the window, it seems to cover more of the figure's leg). It could be Hammid, with someone else executing the camera move -- (Sasha certainly would have had friends from his professional work who could handle a simple pan and tilt, and it would have been a lower hurdle to get a friend to do that than to don the costume.) But if we consider that the hooded figure is probably played by Deren earlier (there are splices in the middle of both swish pans from the figure back to Deren's running legs that begin around 3:30), and given that in the shots in 'At Land' where we see Deren and Hammid walking together in the same frame, Sasha appears to be a good head taller than Maya; then the hooded figure at 6:30 is probably not Hammid, but a somewhat shorter male.

As for the shot Pip mentions, the camera definitely IS on a tripod, but indeed the camera move could not have been executed either by Deren or by the person's whose hands pull her up. However, the hands barely enter the frame, betraying no individuality. They are also rotated into a different position (thumbs out) than Hammid's were in the previous shot (thumbs in). So my guess would be that those are someone else's hands, and Sasha is behind the camera.

While there's no obvious evidence, I would also guess that Sasha had some help in executing that track back through the tube. It would just be so much easier to recruit a friend to act as a grip for a few tough shots than to figure out complex mechanisms to do it ALL yourself.

Regardless, whether one takes "entirely on their own" absolutely literally, or as a bit of mild hyperbole that expresses the functional essence of the situation, the distinction strikes me as trivial.