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.

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.

"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 conversation with a friend – Ahmed Akbar. A short interview-type film portrait with Akbar, a black filmmaker and former student of mine at Kent State. Akbar expresses an unusual and exciting view of himself/blacks in America/and such varied subjects as ‘this moon race shit!’ A friendly, lively, exciting portrait of a very extraordinary person from Akron, Ohio.” –Richard Myers. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

The film is a portrait of Allison Krause, one of the students murdered at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 by the Ohio National Guard. It is a memorial put together from footage that Richard Myers and his students filmed of Allison (unknowingly at the time) during student war demonstrations. The film’s images are very simple but the soundtrack read by Arthur Krause, Allison’s father, is deeply moving. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

"We see a small traveling show performing in various outdoor Ohio locals; actors do scenes from Frankenstein, Dracula, and Jekyll and Hyde. Myers intercuts clips from old movies, including versions of the same three stories; as well as footage from his own effort -a "Frankenstein" begun when he was 12. All of these elements are deftly combined to interpenetrate rather than collide; the banker's voice often continues when the old movies begin so that he seems to be narrating them as well. The result is that present and past, the personal and the public, Hollywood and amateur theater all seem to meld. Myer's sensuous, grainy black and white cinematography- is the key to the film's tone and meaning." -Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

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.

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

Most of my longer films have been based on dreams and have been of a personal semi-autobiographical nature. Tarp represents my interest in more simple/basic visual themes: Color, shape, and “found object” filmmaking. I began “recording” all of the tarps in my immediate neighborhood and surrounding cities – tarps over cars and boats and campers, tarps as tents, on trucks and hanging from overpasses on freeways. The fragmented result still maintains a dream-like tone, yet speaks about the mysterious way we Americans cover-up and protect things and the strange locations in which we do it.

"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.

An experimental film by Richard Myers about the cultural devastation of the USA.

MOVING PICTURES began with a dream I had about a woman walking beside a woods and singing a beautiful aria. I didn’t remember the song, but for the film I selected Plaisir d’Amour by Jean Paul Égide Martini. The film soon became a series of other dream ideas as well. I wanted every scene in the film to be a tracking shot, moving from right to left like a dream scroll. I wanted the film to be quiet and contemplative, and I didn’t want to use subtitles.

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.

"In FIRST TIME HERE, I attempted to freely associate two or three dreams with the story of the four women who had an atomic bomb display at a carnival. I wanted the film to be a fantasy which represented various life cycles and, in a sense, to be a celebration of the absurd mess man has gotten himself into."

On Monday afternoon, May 4, 1970, four students on Kent State’s campus were shot to death and many others seriously wounded by members of the Ohio National Guard. After that tragedy, some members of the faculty and student body of Kent State put together a motion picture which documents this confrontation. The filmmakers interviewed the people in the town of Kent, students, and faculty of the university, and a member of the National Guard . . . And they asked all these people the question “Do you think that the shooting of the students at Kent was justified?” The answers they received form the content of the film . . . and these answers raise disturbing questions about the nature of our society.