An Evening with Richard Myers – 2014
Screening Deathstyles and 37-73
Monday, April 14, 2014 7:00 PM
Richard Myers:
“My films are based on what I see in the dark and in the light. Most of my films come from dreams and autogioraphical information…..
I think of film as a plastic and time art in which the visuals are the most important part. My films deal first of all with dreams and memory and then with pictures, forms and images. The forgotten and subconscious ideas are combined and filtered internally and then assimilated into a conceptual image. This then emerges through the camera as a plastic image. My films also deal with considerations of rhythm, length, progression, and juxtapositions…..I think of my films as myths. Myth as a means of unification of reality. Myth as the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition.
Deathstyles
1971 60 min. Color
I wanted the film to portray what a man sees as he is driving around a city, looking at people, observing cars and buses, etc. That idea soon changed. What began with the word LIFESTYLES, which was a cliché anyway, soon changed to DEATHSTYLES.
37-73
1974 60 min. B & W
I was born in 1937, and the film was shot mostly in 1973. It begins with a song from my childhood that all the kids who lived around my father’s beer joint used to sing: Lemonade, lemonade, five cents a glass. If you don’t like it, stick it up your ask me no questions, tell me no lies, if you fall in a bucket of sh*#! be sure and close your eyes.