Message of the Afternoon is a 1943 U.S. experimental silent black and white short film. The 14-minute film is written , produced , directed and edited by American Ava-Gard and Surrealist filmmaker Maya Deren , and co-directed and shot by Alexander Hamid. Starring Maya Darren and Alexander Hamid. The music score, directed by Tiji Ito, was added to the film in 1959. This is the first work created by the Daren-Hamid couple. The narrative of the film is circular and has multiple motifs , including a flower on a long driveway , a key falling , a door open , a knife in a loaf of bread , a mysterious grim reaper or anthropomorphic death - a mirror scene with a mask , telephone hook and sea. The film is almost incomprehensible as the last example of Ava-Gard and Surrealist films of the 1980s. Through Darren's creative editing , distinctive camera textures and slow motion , the supernatural film depicts a world where reality becomes more difficult to capture. In the 1990s , in the second year of its inclusion in the registry, the Message of the Afternoon was chosen by the Library of Congress to be preserved in the U.S. National Film Registry as "culturally , historically , or aesthetically significant." In 2015, the BBC ranked the film 40th on the list of best American films of all time.