Meshes of The Afternoon - Influence

Influence

A cloaked, mirror-faced figure appears in John Coney's 1974 Sun Ra vehicle, Space Is the Place and Janelle Monáe's video for "Tightrope".

Su Friedrich conceived her short film, Cool Hands, Warm Heart (1979) in direct homage to Meshes of the Afternoon, and used the flower and knife motifs similarly in that film.

The dreamlike (or nightmarish) atmosphere of Meshes has influenced many subsequent films, notably David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997); Wendy Haslem of the University of Melbourne's Cinema Studies department wrote about the parallels:

Maya Deren was a key figure in the development of the New American Cinema. Her influence extends to contemporary filmmakers like David Lynch, whose film Lost Highway (1997) pays homage to Meshes of the Afternoon in his experimentation with narration. Lynch adopts a similar spiraling narrative pattern, sets his film within an analogous location and establishes a mood of dread and paranoia, the result of constant surveillance. Both films focus on the nightmare as it is expressed in the elusive doubling of characters and in the incorporation of the “psychogenic fugue,” the evacuation and replacement of identities, something that was also central to the voodoo ritual.

Jim Emerson, the editor of rogerebert.com, has also noted the influence of Meshes within David Lynch's film, Inland Empire.

In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art opened an exhibit that dealt with Deren's influence on three experimental filmmakers: Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, and Carolee Schneemann as part of a year-long retrospective on representation of women at the MoMA.

Industrial metal pioneers Godflesh used a still from the film for the cover of their 1994 EP Merciless.