[Frameworks] Richard Myers' AKRAN (1969) restored, showing Monday in LA

[Mark Toscano]

Sorry, usually the shows I do in L.A. automatically end up on the 'This Week'...' mailings, but this one's at UCLA, and I forgot to do it myself!

If you're near or in L.A. this Monday, hope you might try to make it to the Billy Wilder Theater in the Hammer Museum for a 7:30 screening of Richard Myers' legendary AKRAN, from 1969.  It's a remarkable, unique, and intense piece, incredibly rich and layered, masterfully executed, visually and aurally arresting.  In its day it was monumental, but it hasn't been screened much in the past 2-3 decades.  The film has been restored by the Academy Film Archive (and the heroes at Colorlab) and I'm eager for people to (re/)discover it.  (And there's no Redcat conflict.)

Some quotes:

"Richard Myers is unquestionably a major talent of the American avant-garde and AKRAN one of his most important films .... 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." (Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art)
 

"...the most influential film since Godard's early work... the single most important event of this year's Chicago Film Festival, Akran is so good, so inventive, so radically original, that it may even be flatly rejected by the audience... It is beyond our previous experience.'' (Roger Ebert) (?!)

Hope to see you there,

Mark Toscano