Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, 14 mins, Film Studies), created by Maya Deren and her husband Alexander Hammid to simulate the dream experience, marks the beginning of personal filmmaking in the United States. Chapters 1 and 2 of Visionary Film detail the ideas behind Deren's legendary films. Meshes, with its exploration of visionary experience and its focus on the protagonist's interior quest, is a trance film, in Sitney's analysis. He traces the use of dreams, ritual, dance, and sexual metaphor in a number of films, including Deren's A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945, 3 mins, Film-makers' Cooperative), emblematic of a shift from narrative to imagistic structures. Sidney Peterson and James Broughton, working in the Bay Area, are discussed in Chapter 3. Peterson made the ironic, dreamlike Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur (1949, 21 mins, PFA Collection) in a workshop at California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute). Broughton's bittersweet comic sensibility is traced from his first film, the autobiographical Mother's Day (1948, 22 mins, PFA Collection), to his complex later films such as The Golden Positions (1970, 32 mins, B&W/Color, Canyon Cinema), featuring naked actors in a series of witty tableaux.