SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Thursday, February 27, 1997

Moving Pictures of Richard Myers

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts





Richard Myers has been developing his unique world of dream-films since 1960, films which use meticulous craft to envelop the viewer in subtle but startling dislocations of logic, time and space. Moving Pictures (1990, 100 min.) is an award-winning feature “built upon a single, continuous horizontal movement of the camera–a relentless right to left tracking of the lens onto a consistently complex and enthralling dream-scape…A woman narrates her dreams which we see enacted in a number of overlapping and discontinuous vignettes… The themes of her dreams construct a twentieth-century history of magicians, circuses and cinema…(Myers’) unspoken conceit may be the notion that the history of our century and the history of cinema (spectacle) are one and the same, both tumbling to the end of the millenium.” (Jason Simon, Dialogue). Also: Myers’ earlier autobiographical 37-73 (1974).