[Frameworks] Meshes of the Afternoon question

[Gene Youngblood]

The  hooded figure was a woman, and she happened to live in Albuquerque at 
the end of her life. She was there when I moved to Santa Fe in 1988, and she 
died about ten years ago I think. I know all this because my friend MaLin 
Wilson was a friend of the woman, who was an artist and had a pretty 
interesting life.  MaLin offered several times to arrange an interview and I 
never followed up on it. I regret that. At the very least I would have had 
some good stories for my students,  who of course always wrote about Meshes 
in their term papers. I've forgotten the woman's name. One would think she 
must be identified in the literature, but in any case I can ask MaLin if 
anyone wants to know.



-----Original Message----- 
From: David Tetzlaff
Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2012 8:58 PM
To: Experimental Film Discussion List
Subject: Re: [Frameworks] Meshes of the Afternoon question

> 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.
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