Richard Myers

Jungle Girl, experimental film master Richard Myers’ intensely personal tribute to Frances Gifford, star of the Republic Pictures serial of the 1940’s, a gentle, dream, memory work of haunting visual beauty.

In Floorshow he presents a rich stream-of-consciousness flow of images that encompass past, present, and fantasy, a contemplation of the filmmaking process, and film aesthetics. Myers makes a bolder-than-ever attempt to break down the barriers between the conscious and subconscious, the making of a film and the film itself. What Myers projects is an acutely personal vision of life so beautifully shaped and paced that we're able to connect with it even if we cannot expect to decipher its private meanings.

Myers' CORONATION ranks with the two or three very best experimental films of 1965, according to George Manupelli

"A feature-length deluge of incessant, brilliant bursts of images (short takes and jump cuts, single frames in series, freeze-frames slightly altered between takes) it creates a Joyce-like dense and sombre mosaic of memory and sensory impressions, a texture instead of a plot, a dream-like flow of visually-induced associations often flashing by faster than they can be absorbed. Described by the director as an 'anxious allegory and chilling album of nostalgia,' its penetrating monomania is unexpectedly — subversively — realized to be a statement about American today: the alienation and atomization o technological consumer society is reflected in the very style of the film." - Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2010.

A children’s art project done at the Norton, Ohio Elementary Schools in 1962. Using scrap wood the 4th, 5th, and 6th graders plan and make wooden sculptures that have a primitive totem-like quality.

"My first film, THE PATH, was based on a dream about a group of people on an ‘outing’ or a picnic. The people in the dream meet and greet one another and then walk around and through old houses, barns, and buildings. Inside these structures they pass by other people involved in various activities. A woman is folding clothes. A man is making paintings. A young girl is sitting in front of a mirror trying on different necklaces." - Richard Myers. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007.

As powerful and complex as is AKRAN, 37-73 is more taut, richer in associative meaning .... 37-73 is about dreams, about memory and its associations with nightmare and magic.

ZOCALO is a color, optically-printed experiment that uses as its base the Zocalo Square in Mexico City. Unlike my other films … it began as a class experiment … and because of my feelings towards the square itself … pursued it in all its variations … finished in December 1972.