Standish Lawder

Made in 1988 at the University of California, San Diego in Standish Lawder's Experimental Film course.

Made for Intercat '73, Pola Chapelle's Cat Film Festival in New York. In the early 70's, a New York cat-lover and film-maker named Pola Chapelle produced a "Cat Film Fesitval:" which was shown in a large downtown NYC auditorium to an audience of more than a thousand cat-lovers. At the time, I lived with my wife Ursula and our daughters Katy and Cynnie, together with many, too many cats. I loved my family but not the cats. -SL

Standish Lawder's four minute abridgement of D.W. Griffith's 1916 colossus. Processed "entirely automatically" and 'skip-printed' on homemade hardware, Intolerance is played at a speed and rhythm "as fast as possible, and yet one can still follow the narrative continuity of the film itself", according to Lawder; "A kind of classic comic condensation, an encapsulation of this grand monument". Premiered in 1973 on television on Screening Room with Robert Gardner, to a lukewarm reaction from those present.

RAINDANCE plays directly on the mind through programmatic stimulation of the central nervous system. Individual frames of the film are imprinted on the retina of the eye in a rhythm, sequence, and intensity that corresponds to Alpha-Wave frequencies of the brain.

I had long wanted to make a film on Hans Richter who has been an important figure in my life, and this is the result. Almost unedited, it was shot one summer Sunday afternoon in 1968 at a picnic with friends and relatives. Jonas Mekas was also shooting the event, and his version is included in his recent films "Diaries," "Notes" and "Sketches."

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

The faces of a 5:00 PM crowd descending via the Pan Am building escalators in one continuous shot. 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.

Made from some footage I shot on a family vacation way back in 1949. It features my brother Doug and a horse whose name I've forgotten. A circular cybernetic study film. (Standish Lawder)

An unknown observer is seen traveling through a bleak corridor. At the end of the corridor they see a naked woman, whom they are unable to reach as their trip seems to become increasingly twisted and looped.

Made entirely from old classroom instructional films, Dangling Participle offers a wealth of practical advice on contemporary sexual hang-ups and where they come from.

A spectacularly silly film of animated outrageousness. Why not do it in the road?

A compilation job, a construction film, a treasure chest of bizarre and amusing footage, gathered from the entire range of the history of cinema.

An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.

Played on a distant television screen in the dark (with some additional zooms by Lawler), 'Runaway' mainly consists of looped footage of what looks like a Fleischer or Terry cartoon, in which a group of dogs, intrigued by surrounding sounds, run to the left of the screen, and then to the right, back and forth, while a frenzied, spiraling organ score plays over the top. The scene eventually begins to warp and disintegrate. The result is equal parts mind-numbing and hypnotic.

Standish Lawder's The March of the Garter Snakes effectively demonstrated that a slide can produce kinetic experiences.