Mary Leed

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.

"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.

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.