"Meshes of the Afternoon" and "At Land" can be roughly classified as "dream" films and also approach, as Parker Tyler has said, "a type of personal expression in cinema analogous to the lyric poem."… There are many satisfactions of mood and implication and image in the movies, of kinds which are the unique property of the movie camera, and which are hardly even hinted in studio productions. Yet I cannot feel that there is anything really original about them—that they do anything important, for instance, which was not done, and done to an ill-deserved death, by some of the European avant-gardists, and especially by the surrealists of the 1920's. At worst, in fact, they are solemnly, arrogantly, distressingly pretentious and arty. Nevertheless, I think they are to be seen, and that there is a good deal in them to be liked, enjoyed, and respected. I don't at all agree with Miss Deren that "reality," in its conventional camera sense, cannot be turned into a work of art without being turned also into a fantasia of the unconscious; but if you have to believe that in order to try to do it—which I doubt—then I am glad that she does. For I certainly believe that it is worth doing; and I know of nobody else in films, just now, who is paying any more attention to that great universe of movie possibility than to make safely conducted little tours of the border villages. (p. 270)