Center for the Arts 112, North Campus
The University at Buffalo, SUNY
Film screening and discussion
Free and open to the public

Films by Lana Lin, Barbara Hammer & Barbara Klutinis, Janie Geiser, Leslie Thornton, Joyce Wieland, Storm De Hirsch, Babette Mangolte, Marie Menken, Marjorie Keller, Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid


Respondents: Thom Donovan, Meg Knowles, Vincenzo Mistretta, & Carolyn Tennant



Curator: Caroline Koebel



Sponsors: The Department of Media Study and the College of Arts and Sciences



Maya Deren’s first film experiment Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) ignited the American avant-garde film movement at mid-century, and for decades now has been screened continuously in cinema studies classrooms. At one point the film’s protagonist (played by Deren) strides in a space that only cinema makes possible: close-ups show the woman’s alternating feet against sand, grass, pavement, and rug, creating the effect that she actually exists simultaneously in these ordinarily disjointed environs.

In a like-spirited displacement, The Inventing Space of Cinema re-posits Meshes of the Afternoon within a frame of works—including live action, animation, and re-purposed footage—that use experimental means and investigatory techniques to pose questions about objective and subjective space, gendered spatiality, and filmic architectonics. The frame is intended to open a necessary entrance to Meshes, one enabling the pre-canon film’s flux and indeterminacy to sneak past into the present. –CK