Standish Lawder
"Born
in Connecticut in 1936, Lawder attended Williams College and the National
Autonomous University of Mexico as an undergraduate, and studied at the Ludwig
Maximilian University of Munich. While at the University of Munich, he became a
test subject for a neurologist researching phosphenes at around 1960. During
these experiments, he was injected with measured amounts of LSD, mescaline and
psilocybin, and "spent a whole day in the clinic". In this, he became an early
subject of psychedelics. Afterwards, he received his Doctor of Philosophy as an
art historian at Yale University. His thesis, which was later published as The
Cubist Cinema, examines the correlation between the history of film and its
impact on modern art, described as a holistic overview by Anthony Reveaux in
Film Quarterly.
His body of work is purported to span over 25 films and his literary works
encapsulates several essays on experimental film. His first endeavors with
experimental films started in his basement during a sabbatical of his in the
late 1960s and early 1970s. One of his works during this span, Necrology, has
been cited by fellow filmmaker Hollis Frampton as "the sickest joke I've ever
seen on film".
Lawder died in 2014.
Lawder utilized a coffee can to house a contact printer for the production of
his films Runaway and Corridor.
For production of his first two films, Runaway and Corridor, Lawder built his
own contact printer using a incandescent light bulb housed within a coffee
can.\With it, he would process his films by manipulating the brightness of the
light bulb, then shined the beam it created through the flashlight tube to the
film gate of his camera. All release prints struck from these films were made
using this printer by Lawder personally." – ubu.com
"In NECROLOGY, a 12-minute film, in one continuous
shot he films the faces of a 5:00 PM crowd descending via the Pan Am building
escalators. In old-fashioned black and white, these faces stare into the empty
space, in the 5:00 PM tiredness and mechanical impersonality, like faces from
the grave. It's hard to believe that these faces belong to people today. The
film is one of the strongest and grimmest comments upon the contemporary society
that cinema has produced." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice
"Several short films (at the Ann Arbor Film Festival) seemed notably successful
in the creation of special effects. Among these was NECROLOGY, by Standish
Lawder, an eleven-minute panning of the camera down what seemed an endless
stairway, upon which people stood motionless and glum. These circumstances, plus
the constant idea of the title, gave a haunting suggestion of people on their
eventless way to hell. I was told later that the film was made with a stationary
camera trained on a down escalator, and then the film was run backwards. A long,
humorous 'cast of characters' at the end ... seemed to me to destroy a desirable
mood, but it certainly pleased the crowd ...." - Edgar Daniels, New Cinema
Review
"Without doubt, the sickest joke I've ever seen on film." - Hollis Frampton" -
canyoncinema.com
"Further examining the medium of film itself,
Colorfilm is a work Lawder made while trying to make a minimalist, "pure color"
film. Using spliced-together strips of colored film leader in white, yellow,
blue, red, green, etc., Lawder ran the film through a projector and found the
results to be quite boring. While he was running the film, though, he noticed
how beautiful the colored strips of film looked as they ran through the
projector. So, he turned a camera on the projector and filmed the colored film
gorgeously winding its way through the projector's machinery." - Noel Black,
Colorado Springs Independent
Music by The Mothers of Invention", - ubu.com
"Music
by Terry Riley. Sound for prologue by Standish Lawder.
CORRIDOR took two years to make. It is my best film. (Standish Lawder)
Quote:
"... an extraordinary exercise in visual polyphony ... the pyrotechnic surface
is exfoliated with Hegelian relentlessness from an elemental formal core ... the
many are no less the many for being inescapably the One." - Sheldon Nodelman
Quote:
"CORRIDOR is a marvelous meld of music and cinematic tension that maintains a
visual excitement throughout with its constant exploration of horizontal and
rectilinear patterns, chiaroscuros and deep grains, pulsating double and
negative exposures, and constant tracking shots of a nude figure standing at the
end of a long, close corridor. A first-rate piece of work that has to be seen to
be appreciated. CORRIDOR is a film of which any filmmaker would be rightly
proud." - James Childs, New Haven Register
" - ubu.com
