Meshes of the Afternoon Hammid's desire to create an avant garde personal film that dealt with devastating psychological problems, like the French surrealist films of the 1920s such as Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel's "Un Chien Andalou" (1929) and "L'Age d'Or" (1930). Deren and Hammid wrote, directed and performed in the film. Although Deren is usually credited as its principal artistic creator, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who knew the couple, has claimed in his book "Film at Wit's End" that "Meshes" was in fact largely Hammid's creation, and that their marriage began to suffer when Deren received more credit. The original print had no score.
Jean Painlevé actually consider himself a surrealist. He did, however, share the surrealists' interest in psycho-sexual stimulation and the ultimate weirdness of procreation. Painlevé first came to the cinema as an actor, alongside Michel Simon, and also as assistant director in the René Sti unfinished film "L'inconnue des six jours" "(The Unknown Woman of Six Days)", 1926. (Later, he would appear as "chief ant handler" in Luis Buñuel's "Un Chien Andalou", 1928). Soon, he was shooting his own films, starting with "L'œuf d'épinoche : de la fécondation à l'éclosion", 1927. Painlevé sometimes scored the music and background sounds for his films, such