Film Series | Doll Parts: Meshes of the Afternoon, Les yeux sans visage
Overview
Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon
14 min., 1943
Georges Franju, Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face)
88 min., 1960
Maya Deren inaugurated the American avant-garde with Meshes of the Afternoon, her iconic short film shot in the Hollywood Hills with her husband and co-director, Alexander Hammid. The Lynchian psychodrama follows a woman’s dream quest down a rabbit hole of multiple personas and mirror-faced apparitions. In George Franju’s seminal horror feature, Les yeux sans visage, a prominent surgeon is driven to seclusion after the “death” of his daughter. He becomes the target of a police investigation when the bodies of faceless women are discovered; their faces removed in a horrific experimental transplant procedure. His daughter is alive, of course, hidden in their Victorian mansion. Physically maimed from the accident in which she was allegedly killed, she is forced to wear an expressionless porcelain mask, heightening the emotional turmoil that her fallen beauty brings to the unsuspecting victims at the hands of her maniacal father.
About Doll Parts
The Broad's Doll Parts film series took place from June through September 2016 in conjunction with the Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life exhibition. Tearing through underground and pop landscapes from Maya Deren to Hole, Doll Parts reframed the Cindy Sherman special exhibition as a moving-image feast of international films, artists’ tapes, and music videos. From fairy tales to horror, femme fatales to “office killers,” Doll Parts examined the iconography of Sherman’s photographic practice, showcasing influences, like minds, and apparent heirs to the artist’s evolving body of work. Outré artifice, feminist trailblazers, and plasticine appendages reign supreme.
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