午后的迷惘

梦境的嵌套和拉康镜像理论的完美应用。结尾里梦中的男人形象被证明亦是女人的镜像投射，打碎镜面人即是打碎自我的他者，同时自己也被男性秩序所扼杀。镜面人是丈夫，是对女人的呼唤不予回应的爱恋对象，也是女人自恋的投影，阳具象化为鲜花和钥匙，女主角午休时将鲜花放在阴部接受诱惑，钥匙掉落表明恋爱中女人甘受支配、以及阉割后的焦虑，女人回家发现台阶插着刀，床边鲜花消失变为刀子暴露男性侵犯的意图，女人行走中前脚落在沙滩后脚踏着草地象征探索自我的艰难，钥匙变成刀，女人要企图反抗拥有自己的菲勒斯，全片无非在焦虑贞操的献出者，模糊到具体，自恋的主体得不到满足，最后死于焦虑本身。 在男权下，女人无法以真正的内发的主观体存在，“自我”只能在他人(镜面）的定义下形成，也就是女性是被菲勒斯情结下的男权所控制的外在环境所定义的，而打破这层定义也相当于否定了现有的自我的存在，也就是迷失了自我的、女人的意义。死在被自己打破的镜中的女人才是象征了迷惘的真正开始，如何才能脱离旧有的男性社会意识形态并得到女性的新含义，是迷惘的最后问题。

玛雅·德伦，称为美国先锋电影的代言人。是她催生了美国前卫电影的产生。她既是创作者、发行者和宣传者，也是一个理论家。先锋和前卫，都有悖于正统的电影。它无法与传统相抗衡。它只是一个稀有的参照。一束微弱的光，从幽深中缓缓而来。

诸多的意象，碎影纷飞。意象成了光影的主导者。在她《午后的迷惘》中显得很突出。午后的烈日，格外灼人。热浪烤焦了女人心，游丝晃动。如影随行的，是可能的陷阱。没有对白，没有完整的故事。彻底颠覆电影的结构，提供人们一个想像的空间。意象成了电影的主宰，也成了电影的灵魂。

《在陆地上》、《为摄影机而做的编缉研究》、《变形时间的仪式》和《夜之眼》等，都无一例外的沉浸于意象的表达中。只有《暴力的冥想》是一个特例，感受到她要借用中国一个传统武师的表演，达到某种舞蹈美的可能。中国武术套路，不管是南拳北腿，太极少林，都有一种观赏美和艺术美。但玛雅·德伦却给此一个永远的定义——“暴力的冥想”。是对武功的延伸之意。这是最终的思想表达。

玛雅·德伦的实验电影，实际上，是对好莱坞庞大工业的反叛。她要完全表达自己。但这注定只是一种歧路，难登大雅之堂。电影本身有着完整的结构，拆解和分离，只能是作者的自我实现，而不能让观众乐见其成。永远只能限定于小圈子把玩观赏。

从这一点上来说，你更欣赏雅克·图尔尼尔、奥尔顿和塞缪尔·富勒这些背叛好莱坞的独立电影人，正是他们用小制作、低成本，实现了电影表达的另一种可能。这些人影响更深远。但世界上，总需要少数离经叛道之人。他们所做的不一定是别人喜欢的，但开创性的探索，却是弥足珍贵的。所以，70年前的玛雅·德伦，仍然会在影迷中有一席位置，有她的意象表达的特殊之处。

2009、7、12

西方先锋派的魅力在于很多时候影片的意义只可意会不可言传，《午后的迷惘》是我看过先锋派电影里最接近梦境的一部，而且绝对是一场梦魇。

玛雅·德伦是战后美国实验电影的重要人物，看完电影感觉，能够拍出这么一部电影的女性，肯定有轰轰烈烈暴风雨般的一生，而玛雅·德伦的确如此。

鲜花、黑衣人、钥匙和刀、留声机、晃动的楼梯都有极强的指向性，影片在不断重复这些元素中慢慢模糊掉环境里不重要的因素，就像沉浸在梦境中心理感受是真实的，但很多时候根本没办法看清周围的细节，而在模糊中，女主人公对自我的探索也慢慢明晰，梦境中剩下的元素是自我中留下最本质的东西。

焦虑、恐惧从现实进入梦境并且愈演愈烈，钥匙和刀的一体是最让人惊艳的指涉，钥匙代表对一切未知事物的开启，后面出现的男人则表明了是对两性关系的探索，钥匙与刀的转换暗示了探索本身也是一种伤害。钥匙最终固定成刀子，毁灭了她的纳索西斯自我。

“纳索西斯自我的死亡”来自于美国评论家帕克·泰勒，纳索西斯是古希腊神话中的美少年，因为在水边看见自我的形象，留恋自恋憔悴而死，化为水仙。

《午后》中女主的毁灭一层来自女主人公自己，脸是镜子的黑衣人，后来出现的三个同样的自我，影片中不断重复的对自我的追逐，都像是一种纳索西斯式的自恋，而最后举起刀子刺向的也是她自己。另一层来自于她所接触的男性，影片中的钥匙变成刀子刺向自己，睡梦中惊醒的女人猛然睁开双眼发现刀子变成男人正要亲吻自己，随后拿刀子刺向男人，梦原来并没有醒。在纳索西斯的自我毁灭中，对女主人公这两方面缺一不可，当她心中的男性形象毁灭时，她认识到她必须去除那个理想化的自我，这是一种双重毁灭。妙啊

波德维尔说《午后的迷惘》和《一条安达鲁狗》具有较强的相似性。但比较两部影片也能明显感受到女性导演和男性导演由于性关系中的实际地位所呈现于电影中的表现方式的不同，《一条安达鲁狗》整体充满进攻性，而《午后的迷惘》充斥着不安、焦虑、恐惧的情绪，整体上是防御性的。

ps.有没有什么恐怖片是黑衣人形象啊 像黑色幽灵一般的人不断出现在身边，转过头发现他的脸竟然是镜子，这个设定也太cooool了

短片中女主的梦境共分为四个阶段，其中包含三段式重复梦境，外加一段梦中梦。

而影片结构本身则是更深入和多层次的梦魇，即使是开头和结尾的现实部分，也是导演制造的一场燥热而眩晕的幻梦。

截止到女主角坐到椅子上合眼睡着之前，她所经历的都是午后的现实场景。她先是拾起地上的花走到家门口，看到了一个男人的背影。这里已经有了男性对入侵女性世界的初步试探。女人把捡来的花束放在两腿间沉沉睡去，娇艳的花朵既是对女性本身的指代，也是对性爱、女性私处、贞操等概念的隐喻。有趣的是，这朵花是在片头被一只没有主人的僵硬手臂放在地面上的，这只胳膊是谁的呢？我的个人见解是，把花朵放置在这个场景里的人，就是将女人的本质与特性赋予她们的人，也就是上帝本尊。

第一段梦境里，镜面人拿走了象征着女性本身的花朵，女主察觉男性入侵，感到威胁来袭，刀子便从现实中的餐桌上跑到了梦境里的楼梯上。房子也开始失常：女人走上楼梯后却从窗户钻进了房间。她在床上发现刀子，上面反射着自己的脸。这把刀既是男权势力的隐喻，又兼具镜面人的属性：用自己的视角限制女性的人格。

女主把刀子藏住、电话放好，但自我意识已开始凌乱，于是在窗口和楼梯神魂颠倒地摇晃和旋转，思绪迷离。她发现唱片机没有被自己关掉，她再次移开唱针，试图挽回对自己的掌控力。而解码自我意识的钥匙被保护在口中，即最隐秘处。

第二段梦境中镜面人走入房间，深度干涉女性的内心世界。把鲜花摆在床上象征着性的引诱和控制，鲜花暗喻性爱和女性贞操。女主的形象随之在楼梯上目光呆滞地瞬移，这代表着女性自我认知的进一步抽离和麻痹。清醒后，床上的花变为匕首，女主意识到性的引诱和操控即为伤害并胁迫自己的凶器。女主再次吐出钥匙，钥匙却变成了刀：原来解锁自我意识的法则就是用和男性一样的强硬姿态保卫自己。

第三段梦境，女性手中打开自己心门的钥匙直接变成了匕首，三个阶段的女性围坐在一起摸索钥匙的奥秘，最终确认必须拿起匕首，终结曾经任人摆布的自我。举刀行刺的短短几步中，导演切换了五个场景，女主的脚步先后踏过了沙漠、泥土、草丛、路面和地毯，可见女性意识迷失的时空范围之广，女性找寻自我的道路也无比艰难和漫长。

三段式重复梦境醒来，男性出现，亲吻了自己，但女主的反应却和看到匕首时一样，充满了戒备心和防御性。两人走进卧室，男主把倒映出自己形象的镜子盖掉。镜面人之所以代表男性，是因为女性始终在他们的反馈和要求下看待自己的形象，她们不知道自己本身应该是什么样子，只能让镜子——即男性观察者——来决定自己的形象。而男性在面对镜子对自己的反射时，却可以随心所欲地摆脱它。

男性开始抚摸女主的身体，床头的鲜花忽然变成了匕首，正呼应了之前的第二段梦境。女性拒绝被性奴役和压迫，持刀挥向试图控制自己的男性，砸碎了左右自己思想和行为模式的镜子。

看似镜面破碎，被大海卷走，但当现实中男性回到家里中时，却发现女主死在了破碎的镜片里。对这一结局我个人有两种解读。

一方面，尝试破坏男权社会的控制必然会导致自己遭遇险境，可能竭尽全力撕开了男权压迫的一个边角，但自己也会遭到不可抗拒的强大势力和社会定律的迫害。

另一方面，当男性左右一切的传统视角被打破，在这一体系中形成并生存的女性人格也将随之瓦解。守旧的女性意识已经被消除，但全新的女性意识尚未建立起来；在这种状况下，女性将会面临更多的挣扎，更大的困境，直至真正意义上的觉醒到来。

In chapter 3 of Ways of Seeing, John Berger explores how the nude in western art systematically objectified women, and this tradition has been continued by other contemporary media including film. In this paper, I want to focus on Berger’s claim woman constantly surveys herself that “she is almost continually accompanied by her own image”[ Ways of Seeing, John Berger, P46] and connect it to Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. Meshes of the Afternoon, with its exquisite use of symbolic associations, aligns with Berger’s feminist critique on visual culture by presenting women as self-surveyor and questions the possibility of emancipation in a surreal manner, challenging the male-assumed way of seeing and proposing a radical understanding of the self.

The overall structure of the film can be seen as a surreal mental maze of the woman played by Maya Deren herself. This multi-layered mental maze, with each layer featuring a representation of the woman’s self awareness, is fundamentally driven by her impulsion to survey herself. However, the woman’s consciousness constantly tries to emancipate herself that from this self-surveillance self-reflection arises. In my opinion, the beginning of the woman’s first entrance into the house and the ending where she kills herself are the two layers that actually take place externally in the world of the film; the other three seemingly repetitional layers in between, beginning with a zoom out from a circle-shaped window which signifies the entrance to the woman’s dream world, each represents a state of consciousness of the woman in her dream and an alternate reality. All these layers are structurally connected by the use of symbols, as these symbols repetitively appears throughout the film, forming a complex yet solid gender critic and a radical claim on the self.

Symbolic associations use discrete objects to generate abstract meanings-either meanings already given by a culture or created by the film itself. There are many symbols in Meshes of the afternoon. I will focus on the three most important symbols-the key, the knife and the mirror-to explain in evidence what meaning they convey individually and collectively and connect them to a the topic of self-surveillance in conversation with that of Berger.

The mirror, in my perspective, is the central symbol of the entire film because it really exemplifies the notion of self-surveillance and self-reflection. We often look into the mirror when we want to see our own image. In a broader cultural context, mirror represents a subject’s self awareness, self reflection and the desire to regulate one’s own appearance in accordance to certain social norms and at the same time to maintain a consistent self identity. Deren built upon such common understanding of mirror and transcended it with her adept use of symbols. In the film, the mirror first appears as the face of the cloaked figure, who we later know as the woman’s projection of her husband in her “dream.” When the cloaked figure turns at Deren’s character, she sees no reflection of herself in the mirror-face but only glass and a pure blank. Here, we should be aware that we are actually seeing the image from the woman’s mind. In this sense, the mirror-face does not simply appear contingently as an external being. Instead, the women envisions him with her eyes of the mind. This indicates that she is eager to see her own image in the first place through the mirror. However, she sees no reflections of herself from the mirror-face. Later in the film, when she is looking at the mirror in the bedroom, what she sees is only an ambiguous image of herself that no clear figure can be identified. In contrast, when the man, very likely the woman’s husband, looks into the same mirror later in the film, his reflection is clear and legible. What does this mean?

According to Berger, “the mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman”[ Ways of Seeing, John Berger, P51

] throughout the history of western visual art, in which the moralizing was actually hypocritical since it is men who put mirror in women’s hands and enjoy the pleasure of gazing upon them. Deren embeds her film within that tradition only to criticize it. Deren’s character tries to seek her own image in the mirror of course, but is she doing it out of vanity? I think not. Instead, she is lost existentially and wants to pursue her self-identity by looking into the mirror. The woman’s lack of clear reflection or no reflection at all in the mirror suggests that her self identity is shattered in pieces that she cannot form a consistent and unified narrative of herself. This is an accurate depiction of women “trapped” in domestic spaces and constantly being gazed upon by male and themselves. Though, on the surface, a clear and unified self-identity, as that of the man, seems more determinate and doubtless, it is really this lack of clear self-identity that grants free and open space to interpret oneself. Different from the man who sees himself as who he is and acts according to the social norms, the woman continuously questions herself and their relationships through her mental voyage. I will discuss the last appearance of the mirror together with those of the key and the knife, but now we can agree on that Deren successfully critiques male-centered tradition of mirror in western visual art by cutting off its original function using blank reflections and focusing on the woman’s attempt of self-reflection.

The key and the knife both carries individual meanings developed throughout the film. Normally, a key’s function is to open a door; a knife(a table-knife here in particular)’s function is to cut food into smaller pieces. Both functions are depicted at the beginning of the film: the woman uses the key to open the front door of the house and sees the knife on the bread. It is worth noticing that the key bounces down the stairs and the knife falls off the bread onto the table, both of which evokes the woman’s uneasiness. This indicates that these two items in the film have meanings beyond their regular functions. Metaphorically, the key is a pathway to an answer or a tool to decipher certain meaning and the knife is a tool for violence. The “bouncing down” of the key is an signifier for the woman’s painstaking attempt to form an understanding of herself later in the film; the “falling off” of the knife serves as a prologue for the woman’s final violence to “break free.”

As the key and the knife transform into each other several times in the film, their independent meanings intertwine, forming a synthesized meaning overall. The key and the knife start to appear intensively at the “fourth layer” of the film. As we see the woman sees another self of her trying to catch the cloaked figure, she takes the key out of her month and it turns into the knife. This indicates that the key and knife has become internal signifiers of her consciousness instead of simply external everyday objects and they have a transformative relationship between each other that requires interpretations. After the third alternate version of the woman(I call her woman Omega) enters into the room and puts the knife on the table and it turns into the key immediately, the three of them finally meet. Two of them try to take the key but failed. Woman Omega successfully takes the key and it turns into the knife again with her hands turning black. This is a moment of self realization for the woman as the three versions of herself form a consensus to kill the original self with the knife, as if only by killing the trapped, unrealized version of herself can they(also her) finally be free. The key here represents the attempt to realize oneself, and the answer to that attempt is the knife which itself represents the force of violence to break through constrains by killing oneself. With these two symbols working correspondingly, a message forms: true self-reflection is a form of self-annihilation. Where is this self reflection pointing to? We should bring the mirror back into the conversation in order to answer it.

The mirror represents the attempt to achieve a unified understanding of the self, and it is so far a failed attempt for the woman because there are no reflections in the mirror for her at all. However, the blank also suggests that there is actually no absolute essence of the self that can be clearly reflected as an image. In this sense, a clear reflection of the self in the mirror is actually the real illusion(as with the case of the man). This is why the woman finally decides to break the man’s mirror-face with the knife, as he is objectifying her with his gaze exemplified by the close-up shots of her lips. After she breaks his mirror-face, an open sea representing the vast open world appears. This is a decisive moment: by breaking the mirror with which she was struggling to find her reflections, the woman is forever letting go of her very attempt to achieve a unified self understanding. Since there is no absolute self essence, the very concept structure of the self needs to be get rid of in order to achieve absolute freedom. At the same time, the mirror is also the man’s face. This synthesization of the mirror and the male face indicates that the woman’s self-reflection takes the form of male surveillance in the way that “the surveyor of woman in herself is male.”[ Ways of Seeing, John Berger, P47] By radically breaking the very structure of her own self-conception, the woman is also annihilating the male surveyor in herself. The last scene in the film brings us back to the real world: the woman lies dead on the sofa with fragments of the broken mirror all over her body--the broken mirror literally kills her. The radical self-emancipation in her consciousness comes with the greatest cost--the demise of her physical body. At the end of the day, the inescapable self surveillance of objectification can only be “escaped” spiritually with the annihilation of the body which carries the historicity of the unrealized self.

In conclusion, Deren embeds her film Meshes of the Afternoon within the tradition of western visual art that Berger criticized only to transcends it through gender and philosophical lenses. The adept use of symbolic associations, mainly exemplified by symbols such as the mirror, the key and the knife, altogether forms a radical yet inspiring message: the inescapable male surveyor within ones consciousness can only be transcended with the violent annihilation of the original self. If this reading of the film is solid, then it really exemplifies film’s striking capability of making philosophical and cultural claims through the language of image as a media.