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.
Art film make "art films", and film critics did not use the term "art film". However, there were films that had sophisticated aesthetic objectives, such as Carl Theodor Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928) and "Vampyr" (1932), surrealist films such as Luis Buñuel's "Un chien andalou" (1929) and "L'Âge d'Or" (1930), or even films dealing with political and current-event relevance such as Sergei Eisenstein's famed and influential masterpiece "Battleship Potemkin". The U.S. film "" (1927) by German Expressionist director F. W. Murnau uses distorted art design and groundbreaking cinematography to create an exaggerated, fairy-tale-like world rich with symbolism and imagery.