Against a blank studio wall, a half-naked Chinese boxer performs in two traditional modes. To a solo flute, balletically flowing movements (Wu-tang) are captured by similarly fluid camerawork. This turns into a more erratic and jagged movement (Shaolin), reflected in the abrupt editing for the boxer's jabs and kicks. A drum is added to the flute, the music and action quicken, until the boxer makes a jump-cut leap to a flat rooftop where, now armed and in a warrior's robes, he enacts dramatic swordplay to the sound of rapid drumbeats. At his climactic jump, midway through this section and at the apex of the film, the boxer is held in mid-air in a long silent freeze frame. Finally the boxer is back in the room, where in reverse motion (so continuous as to be barely perceptible) he moves from the aggressive style back to the fluid kind of movement. With its cycle complete, the film ends.

Meditation on Violence has never shared the popularity of Maya Deren's psychodramas, being too stylised and preconceived for some critics, and too objective and impersonal for others. Perhaps in protest at the over-psychological interpretation which she felt her earlier films had received, Deren seems to abandon symbolic narrative here to concentrate on a single figure and on cinematic gesture. These aspects may link the film to Action painting of the period, as does the camera's insistently frontal view of the leaping swordsman, and the 'push-pull' filming of the boxer in shallow space. But, in highly abstracted form, it also echoes a major theme of Meshes of the Afternoon, in which imagination (here the stylised fantasy of ritual fighting) becomes action. The role of the film's style is to evoke metaphors for consciousness from a physical process.

Narrative drama and lyrical images are replaced by a spartan style which suggests not only a search for the essence of the medium but also defiantly asserts the poverty of this film's funding. Like Deren's earlier works, it is characterised by fragmentation, a mood of threat and dream, and a camera which participates in the action. But Deren's characteristic fusion of sorcery and aggression is here transposed to the abstract form of the film, so that its overall shape, not its episodes, make up an erotic metaphor (the rise and fall of a climactic moment). In these respects, it is related to other films which expand on a single moment or gesture, made by Deren's younger contemporaries from the 1940s onwards, some of them inspired by her own earlier example, A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), Makers of such 'imagist' films (as P. Adams Sitney called them) include Kenneth Anger, Bruce Baillie, Gregory Markopoulos, Charles Boultenhouse, Stan Brakhage and, in Europe in the 1950s, Kurt Kren and Peter Kubelka.

Like Meditation, their dynamic is based on the expansion of space, with mini-narratives composed from changes in body movement. Often they serve as analogies for the movement of an imaginative consciousness by which (in Deren's words) "a person is first one place and then another without travelling between". This amounts to what Deren saw as essential to film, "the change from instant to instant". In Meditation, changes in film style are systematically matched with changes in the action, from flowingly holistic camerawork for the opening dance-like gestures to abruptly fragmented shots in the aggressive sequence. What also lends the film an added contemporary resonance is its stress on performance, the body, trance-like rhythm, and an exotic display of biomechanics in an open cross-cultural mix: Haitian music, Chinese martial arts, and Deren's Western modernism.