When her father died of a heart attack in 1943, Deren purchased a used 16 mm Bolex camera with some of her inheritance money. This camera captured her first and best-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), in Los Angeles in collaboration with Hammid. Meshes of the Afternoon is recognized as a seminal American avant-garde film. It is the first narrative film in avant-garde American film, which critics have said took on an autobiographical tone - for women and the individual. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, music for the film was composed by Deren's third husband Teiji Itō in 1952. The film can be described as a expressionistic "trance film," following the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind bleeds in and out of reality. It follows a woman, played by Maya Deren, who walks to her friends house in Los Angeles, falls asleep and has a dream. The sequence of walking up to her friend's gate on the partially shaded road restarts numerous times, and ends in varying situations inside the house. Movement from the wind, shadows and the music sustain the heartbeat of the dream. Certain symbols reoccur on the screen, including a mirror-faced-cloaked figure, and a key, which gets switched out with a knife. The loose repetition and rhythm make the audience lose track of what has happened, and where the dream began. The camera initially avoids her face, which may be meant to serve as a representation of when she was still awake and not watching herself walking. Multiple selfs appear, shifting between the first and third person, suggesting the super-ego is at play, which is in line with the psychoanalytic Freudian staircase and flower motifs. Very aware of the "personal film," her first piece goes to such depth of a woman's inner world that it is confounded with the real, external world. George Sadoul said she may have been "the most important figure in the post-war development of the personal, independent film in the U.S.A." By starring herself, feminists see the flag that announces, "the personal is political." As with her other films on self-representation, Deren only partially navigates the tendencies of the self and other, and the differences and similarities, through doubling, multiplication and merging of the woman in the film. Following a dreamlike quest with allegorical complexity, Meshes of the Afternoon has an enigmatic structure and a loose affinity with both film noir and domestic melodrama.

Maya Deren (April 29, 1917, Kiev – October 13, 1961, New York City), born Eleanora Derenkowsky (Russian: Элеоно́ра Деренко́вская), was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer. The function of film, Maya believed, like most art forms, was to create an experience; each one of her films would evoke new conclusions, lending her focus to be dynamic and always-evolving.  She combined her interests in dance, voodoo and subjective psychology in a series of surreal, perceptual, black and white short films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump cutting, superimposition, slow-motion and other camera techniques to her fullest advantage, Deren creates continued motion through discontinued space, while abandoning the established notions of physical space and time, with the ability to turn her vision into a stream of consciousness. Perhaps one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema was her collaboration with Alexander Hammid on Meshes of the Afternoon. She continued to make several more films on her own including At Land, A Study in Choreography for Camera, and Ritual in Transfigured Time - writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them with help from only one other person, Hella Heyman, as camerawoman. She also appeared in a few of her films but never credited herself as an actress, downplaying her roles as anonymous figures rather than iconic deities.