In 1941, the dance troupe, where Maya Dylan worked as an assistant, stayed in Los Angeles on tour. At a Hollywood cocktail party, fearing that her usual lashing out at the party owner would appear at an inappropriate time on such an occasion, a friend of Maya's specially introduced her to Alexander Hamid, a Czech exile photographer who might have thought the same thing (meaning you two go to the corner and lash out at Hollywood yourself). What the friend did not expect was that Maya and Hamid not only deeply agreed with each other's film concepts, but also completed the wedding the following year. The marriage also eventually led to the birth of a great avant-garde film, "Afternoon Lost.".
【Avant-garde base camp】
In the United States in the 1940s, Hollywood genre films were still popular, and Dylan, who came from an elite intellectual family and was well educated, mixed as an exotic dancer and poet in Greenwich Village, The most famous art gathering place in New York. In this group of artists who automatically draw a clear line from the mainstream, and are full of obedient idealistic leftists and artists who have been baptized by the multitude of modern genres and philosophical ideas, everyone is trying to find their own way of expression. "Afternoon Confusion" was born under such circumstances.
In 1943, Maya bought a 16 mm camera and enough film from the estate of her father (the famous Jewish psychiatrist Solomon Derenskovsky) to complete two films with her photographer husband Hamid: "Afternoon Confusion" and "On Land".
"The picture is not in the plan, I like the reflection of the tree, it reminds me of the Renaissance"
In fact, Maya Dylan would be hailed as the "mother of American avant-garde" not because experimental films did not appear in the United States before the 1940s. In the anti-mainstream film and the quest for expression that began to emerge around the 1920s, the United States also caught up with the footnotes of the European avant-garde. A series of early works such as "The Life and Death of Hollywood Extras 9413" (held by Grieg Toland, the cinematographer who later filmed Citizen Kane), and "H2O", are more like the excessive attempts of mobile abstract painting to film, and cannot form the movement and style of the country. It wasn't until the 1940s that several of Dylan's surreal but narrative works appeared, which really raised the level of American avant-garde by one dimension. At this point, the base camp of experimental films can be regarded as camping in the United States.
Even from the many directors who carried the banner of American experimental cinema in the 60s after that: whether it was Kenneth Anger, who incorporated all kinds of gorgeous gay symbols, Michael Snow, who was crazy obsessed with structuralism, Andy Warhow, who pushed the "minimum program" to the limit and forced the audience to scold the street, or Richard Kern, who was active in the vigorous no wave, Dylan's film is still written in a surprising way in the history of American experimental film.
Perhaps the difference between modernism and postmodernism is that we are obsessed with long dreams and genius imaginations, but in the face of elitist aesthetic principles and film philosophy, we frequently ask: Is this also called film?!
【Interpretation of Dreams】
"Afternoon Lost" is not an ambitious film in the language of cinema, nor is it merely a series of dreamscapes with a genius imagination and symbolic objects containing obvious references, as is the case with most of the surrealist films of the early avant-garde. In fact, the less than 15-minute film contains a clear narrative component and dramatic conflict, which provides a basis for most viewers to be read repeatedly.
(Flowers symbolizing women)
The story begins in a traditional situation where the heroine, played by Maya, picks up a bouquet of poppies on her way home in the afternoon, and a figure in black with an unclear meaning appears in front of her, and through the costume, we determine that the man in black at this time is a man. The heroine then returns home and takes a nap after witnessing a series of ill-intentioned symbols (dropped keys, loose knives on bread, unsung phones). At this time, the film begins to enter the consciousness of the heroine. The journey home and the objects she witnessed were repeated four times in the dream, each time giving birth to a new self, each time the object being more tense: the knife and the telephone constantly shifting their positions, the staircase as if given consciousness was against the protagonist in weightlessness and distortion, and the man in black became a woman, and became more embodied in each appearance. Ultimately, this dream, triggered by a series of disturbing motives, shows the story of how the subconscious mind triumphs over reality through "a series of ways in which the subconscious mind unfolds," and the inner world is completely externalized to the point of confusion with reality. The hostess was killed by her own consciousness in her nap.
(Not hanging up the phone is often understood as a barrier to communication)
It's hard to understand this film with a dream and a quadruple self without Freud's theory, especially if Maya's father was a well-known psychopathologist. A total of four heroines appear in the film, also played by Maya. The first hostess slept on the couch in the morning, the real "me". The second hostess, derived from dreams, has doubts in the process of repeating her return home, but remains restrained, a "superego" with moral boundaries. The third hostess, who belongs to the "self", in the confusion and the dilemma of objects, has produced the deepest "self" of the subconscious mind, that is, the fourth hostess. The "original self" is no longer restrained at this time.
(Multiple Selves Sitting)
A strong proof that the above analysis is not over-interpreted is that in an unusually tense scene, Maya asks the three hostesses derived from the dream to sit opposite each other at the table. It was as if they were discussing how to deal with the real "me." The three of them pick up the keys that appear repeatedly in the movie in turn. At the moment when the "original self" picks up, the key becomes a knife, and the opposite "superego" and "self" cover their faces in horror - when the "original self" decides to murder the real "me", the other two selves also mean that they die at the same time.
The feminist ideas in the film do not need to be explained, with high sexual implications of "flowers", "mirrors", "knives" and other props, and hamil played by the male protagonist finally became "men in black with mirrors" under the hints of many times, the heroine of the dream hit the male host with a knife, at this time, a scene of genius appeared - the hero's face became a broken mirror reflecting the sea, and the broken mirror fell on the real beach, since then, consciousness and reality are completely interchanged. In this story of trying to "break" the male power, the heroine becomes her own murderer.
【Space-time view】
In early Mayan films, a technique that was repeatedly used was the constant transformation of the spatial background caused by "stopping and resuscitating" in a continuous movement of the human body (such as human movements).
In "Afternoon Confusion", this small game that seems to be a little eye-testing is deliberately hidden by the director in the process of "ben me" holding a knife and trying to murder the "real me" (Maya later admitted that she likes to sneak aside to observe the expressions of the audience as they watch this passage). When "Ben I" turns around, a close-up of a girl's foot is immediately arranged in the film. The girl takes four steps in this close-up: sand, grass, sidewalk, and carpet. In Maya's own words, "You have to go a long way from the beginning of a person's thoughts until you finally commit suicide." Like the first life that began to emerge from the ancient waters, it is my intention that those four steps should span all time. ”
This technique is applied to "On Land", and the change of space is more obvious and has a referential significance. It wasn't until "Research on Camera Choreography" that this method was taken to the extreme: a dancer appeared in different locations during the camera's circumnavigation of the woods (actually stopping to shoot), and then as he jumped perfectly from a high altitude, Maya used the coherent movements of the human body to turn the background into a living room, and the continuous dance steps made the background constantly change - from the living room to the street, to the art museum, and finally from a fulcrum to the woods.
[Freud to Jung]
After the 1950s, a growing obsession with voodoo led Maya to travel to Haiti alone with the prize money she had received from the Guggenheim Foundation Awards in her early films, and in 1952 filmed The Strange Horseman: The Living Haitian God. With Eye of the Night (1958) as her last film, Maya had gone from an early surreal mental narrative and several later technical attempts at dance films to a aesthetic quest for the universe and mysticism. A film made entirely of negatives, in which six dancers dance under the curtain symbolizing the planets (Uranos, Urania) and moons (Ariel, Angbril, Oberon, and Titania), Maya breaks away from her Freudian riddle game and tells a story about the night sky and the planet with the final film.
Author:Kai Kai (Beijing)
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