Meshes In The Afternoon - Maya Deren

The surrealist short-film Meshes In The Afternoon explores how a simple reality can be turned into a chaotic confusing dream. At first we are shown everything through a woman's point of view, we see everything that she sees and can never get a glimpse of what her face is, we can only see her hands and feet as she walks. At the start everything was filmed subjectively hence the start was filmed in the woman's point of view. However once she goes into her house and falls asleep you can see that the world begins to distort a bit as her eyes shut down, this would be her dream. We know it's a dream because it is now being filmed objectively, we can see the woman's entire body and face and the dark figure that she saw before now has a mirror face. The fact that the dark figure has a mirror for a face implies what happens when the woman goes into her house in her dream. 

Firstly we notice that the knife and bread that was once on the table in real life is now on the stairs, then the woman finds another knife on her bed below the covers. As she goes further through her house suddenly the house starts tilting around and the woman gets moved about, when it stops the woman notices that she's got a clone sitting on the chair asleep. She looks out the window and sees another clone running after the dark figure with the mirror face, the mirror face of the dark figure implies that the woman's reflection are the clones. The abstract vibe of this film and lack of dialogue makes this film surrealistic.

This short film is confusing and we don't know much about it aside from the fact that the woman was just having a dream, however towards the end we don't know whether it was reality or whether it was still a dream since she wakes up twice. The end shows us how a dream can cause a traumatic experience and result in critical emotional state. In the end we're left wondering whether or not she did commit suicide or whether she's still dreaming.