Richard Myers – Akran (1969)

B&W, SOUND.

Electronic music by Fred Coulter. With Bob Ohlrich, Pat Myers, Jake Leed, Mary Leed. “… a work of ambition and great technical virtuosity … there is enough going on in AKRAN to command anyone’s attention. And much of that is lovely and wonderfully difficult.” – Greenspun, The New York Times

“AKRAN by Richard Myers was unquestionably the discovery of the year …. It captures in rapid brilliant flashes the fears, the frustrations, the hang-ups, the hopes – the emotional texture of young people today …. It is a fascinating, penetrating film, and introduces Myers as one of the most original and creative independent talents around today.” – Arthur Knight

“Richard Myers is unquestionably a major talent of the American avant-garde and AKRAN one of his most important films. 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 somber 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 America today: the alienation and atomization of technological consumer society is reflected in the very style of the film.” – Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art