Night of the Cobra Woman

After separating from the father of her son, a young French woman tries to find lodging and a fresh start in L.A. for herself and her son.

Low-budget film illustrates the various factors which have lead a man to hijack a plane to Cuba.

"...has the quiet beauty of rain. It is the story of a young girl afraid to enter womanhood. Taking the phone off the hook, she attempts to sleep while her would-be lover tries to call. And in her fantasy, she sees herself escaping to the playground and embracing childhood anew...perhaps the most quietly satisfying gem that you will see in a long time...contrasts with the sexual vibrance of the tones' singing with the lonely quiet of the girl's flight with remarkable effectiveness."–Bruce Covert, McGill Daily Review [Overview Selection Courtesy of The Film-Makers' Cooperative]

"... about a girl who photographs a young man in Central Park who sits in a tree and plays a pipe. He resents her photography and follows her home to get the film from her. They make love. Whilst he is asleep she develops the negative, but in the resulting print he is missing. Was he the god Pan?" – Ken Gay, Films and Filming "... has much to do with nuance of the most ineffable kind: appearance as against behavior; oddities and crudities of expression, diction and composition in the service of a texture that's unpleasant or embarrassing one moment and elaborately touching the next, with the gap never bridged. The performers are Joy Bang ... and Frank Meyer, a bored cherub who could become a key ambivalent figure for modern films." – James Stoller, The Village Voice Exhibition: Int'l Festival of Short Films, London, 1968 [Overview Selection Courtesy of the Film-Makers' Cooperative]

Two hundred million years ago, Earth had a single continent. As the millennia progressed, the single continent slowly split off into smaller continents and islands. Thirty million years ago, the country of Japan was part of the continent of Asia, and has since split off into its own archipelago. Another landmass shift is about to occur...

Featuring Joy Bang, Prescott Townsend, Rene Ricard. Music by the Unidentified Flying Objects. "The grand prize ... went to Andrew Meyer's black-and-white AN EARLY CLUE TO THE NEW DIRECTION, whose virtues had nothing to do with technical polish. Mr. Meyer's film hung on dialogue, cast and plot (of a kind), clearly moving in a new direction. Its central virtue was nothing less than a superb performance by an old man, Prescott Townsend, playing a Boston rogue long past his time, who charms a young girl with his 'snowflake theory.'" – Douglas M. Davis, National Observer

"Dawn to dusk with a commune of young people on the Lower East Side, searching fulfilment through sex and drugs."–A.M. "...one of those remarkable films incensed with the values which man forgets, caught in the sedge flats which he calls his streets. It is these disowned values that [Meyer] obstinately and with the greatest of poise works with and surprises his film spectator...The world of SHADES AND DRUMBEATS has no need for sound; for the film frames speak and contain the word, the sentence which reveals to the engrossed spectator the spirit of Meyer's work."–Gregory Markopoulos, in a lecture at Idaho State University, 1964