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.
Film (film) This inevitably evokes the notorious opening sequence of "Un Chien Andalou" in which a human eye is sliced open with a razor blade. In fact, "The Eye" was an early title for "Film", though admittedly, at that time, he had not thought of the need for the opening close-up. As a student of French literature, Beckett would have been familiar with Victor Hugo’s poem "La Conscience". ‘"Conscience"’ in French can mean either ‘conscience’ in the English sense or ‘consciousness’ and the double meaning is important. Hugo's poem concerns a man haunted by an eye that stares at him unceasingly from