Maya Deren

The silent black-and-white film The Private Life of a Cat is an intimate study of a cat who gives birth to a litter of kittens and cares for them as they grow up. It is filmed entirely from the cat’s eye-level.

Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid took inspiration from surrealist films like Un chien andalou and L'Age d'Or by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel for their own avant-garde short film—even though they repeatedly denied it themselves. Following a similar dream logic, Meshes of the Afternoon tells a circular story about a dreaming woman.