10 Weird Movies That Purposely Tried To Confuse You

10. Meshes Of The Afternoon (Maya Deren)

Cyclical narratives are no longer a rarity in cinema. However, there is one film that not only started the trend, but arguably immediately pushed it as far as it could possibly ever hope to go. Maya Deren's Meshes Of The Afternoon is a film whose name always comes up in analysis of avant-garde cinema and justifiably so. It remains confounding, complex and horrifyingly abstract over 70 years after its conception. Largely inspired by surrealism and Freud's writing, MOTA is fairly simple in terms of content. It is effectively a looping sequence of repeated images, including a flower, a key, the ocean and an ever-present cloaked figure, which are shown to the viewer multiple times. What is difficult about the film, though, is its refusal to make clear links between these images. Slight changes occur in each loop, while unusual camera angles and extreme slow-motion do not permit the viewer any comprehension of why these motifs have been selected and presented in such an apparently abstract order. The film can be, and has been, read in many ways. Perhaps it is a deliberate play on the mysteries of cinema, creating many enigmatic strands that never actually lead anywhere in order to agitate its curious audience. Or maybe it is, as Deren claims, a comment on unconscious desires and the fetishistic nature of cinema. It could just be an aesthetic experiment, designed to study the ways in which the same images can be presented in increasingly unusual ways. Whatever its intention, the film's narrative is so bewildering that it verges on uncomfortable. It remains a landmark for narrative experimentation, and continues to be an unresolved mystery of cinema.