Standish Lawder

b. 1936
d. 2014

3 X 3: A TIC-TAC-TOE SONATA IN 3 MOVES (1963)
16mm, color, silent 24fps, 5m
Predating his canonical first films by nearly 6 years, this film was made by Lawder as a 75th birthday gift for Hans Richter (his then-father-in-law).

BUDGET FILM (1969)
16mm, bw & color, sound, 8m
On a recommendation from his friend, filmmaker Robert Nelson, Lawder had solicited Audrey Sabol (arts patron and wife of NFL Films founder Ed Sabol) for funds to produce some of his earliest films. Sabol asked him for a budget of what he needed, and instead of producing one on paper, he made this film instead. It worked, and she gave him some money to make a number of his early films. The iconic ‘Thank You Audrey’ that appears at the end of a number of his films is a reference to her support.

CATFILM FOR URSULA (1969)
16mm, color, sound, 3m
Lawder made this film for Intercat ’69, a cat film festival organized by Pola Chapelle. According to Lawder, this film won him a carton of cat food.

ELEVEN DIFFERENT HORSES (1969)
16mm, color, sound, 4m

HEADFILM (1969)
16mm, bw, sound, 5m
Finished and released in b/w, there was also a color variant of this film, which Lawder does not seem to have distributed.

ROADFILM (1969)
16mm, bw & color, sound, 2m
The original cartoon used as the primary material in this film is The Foxy Fox (1935) by Paul Terry/Terrytoons.
Some of the material for this film was produced by Lawder by contact printing found footage on his homemade coffee can contact printer.

RUNAWAY VERSION ONE (1968-69)
16mm, bw, sound, 5m
Lawder’s initial version of Runaway lacks the television set opening (and possibly exhibits some other small differences), and this first version did screen somewhat before it was superseded by the canonical version of the film soon after. Lawder tended to refer to the earlier version as “Runaway One” or “Runaway Version One”.

RUNAWAY (1969)
16mm, bw, sound, 6m
The original cartoon used as the primary material in this film is The Foxy Fox (1935) by Paul Terry/Terrytoons.
Some of the material for this film was produced by Lawder by contact printing found footage on his homemade coffee can contact printer.

CORRIDOR (1970)
16mm, bw, sound, 20m
The soundtrack for this film was taken by Lawder from Terry RIley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, with permission from Riley. The sound in the film’s prologue is by Lawder.
Some of the material for this film was produced by Lawder by contact printing found footage on his homemade coffee can contact printer.

NECROLOGY (1970)
16mm, bw, sound, 12m
The escalator in this film is in New York’s Grand Central Station, on the north side of the terminal, leading to/from the MetLife Building (Pan Am Building in 1969).
Lawder told me that he initially filmed the entire bank of four escalators in frame, then refilmed it with just two visible, then finally settled on a tight shot of just one escalator, filmed with a telephoto lens from the upper level on the other side of the terminal. I don’t believe all the escalators at that entrance face the same direction, so either he was misremembering or perhaps the earliest concept of the film didn’t involve everyone facing the camera. The film was shot with the camera upside-down, so that the resulting negative would produce an image that was rightside-up, but running backwards.

DANGLING PARTICIPLE (1970)
16mm, bw, sound, 18m
A color printing master exists for this film, seemingly to create color, sepia-tone prints. Lawder did not remember having done this when I asked him about it.

CONSTRUCTION JOB [FIRST VERSION] (1971)
16mm, bw, sound, 3m
This early version comprises titles and what would later comprise the last 100ft of the final version of the film.

CONSTRUCTION JOB (1971)
16mm, bw, sound, 6m
The year for this film has sometimes historically been given as 1969 by the filmmaker, but it can’t be earlier than 1971, based on the dating of the film stock in the original.

COLORFILM (1972)
16mm, color, sound, 3m
The title on this film seems to be presented as two words, but in print has always been given as Colorfilm.
The music used in this film is “Invocation And Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin” by Frank Zappa & The Mothers, from the album Absolutely Free.

SPECIFIC GRAVITY (1971)
16mm, bw, sound, 5m
The year for this film has sometimes historically been given as 1969 by the filmmaker, but it can’t be earlier than 1971, based on the dating of the film stock in the original.
The sound for this film was not a traditional recorded track, but uniquely hand-scratched into the one print Lawder ever made.

INTOLERANCE (ABRIDGED) (1972)
16mm, bw, silent 16/18fps/24fps, 10m (at 24fps), 15m (at 16fps)
Lawder created this condensation of D.W. Griffith’s film Intolerance (1916) by double-printing every 26th frame of the source print. This was initially done, in part, as an exercise devised through Lawder’s teaching practice at Yale, as he became interested in the degree to which one could condense an existing film and still have it “read” effectively. It was initially intended for screening at 16 or 18fps, but in later years 24fps became common.
In his 1973 appearance on the television show Screening Room, Lawder shows a few minutes of footage from this project, and describes it as having been made by printing every 40th frame (a natural enough decision, given 40 frames = one foot in 16mm). He also mentions on the show that he had literally picked up the footage from the lab that day, and it was his first time seeing it. Lawder told me that in making the film, he had experimented with a few variations, and eventually settled on double printing every 26th frame as a final choice (this data is also confirmed in an extended article on his work in the May 1974 Artforum). It’s interesting that, purely based on the Screening Room episode, incorrect information about this film now permeates – not just about the process info (40th frame instead of 26th frame), but even the running time (in a number of places online, given as 4 minutes presumably because that’s the amount of footage shown on Screening Room).

PRIME TIME (1972)
16mm, color, silent 24fps, 5m
Although Lawder considered this an unfinished work, its raw material was of interest enough to him to screen it on a few occasions, including in December 2007 at a retrospective series at Anthology Film Archives.

RAINDANCE (1972)
16mm, bw & color, sound, 16m
The soundtrack in this film was composed and performed by Robert Withers.
The original cartoon used as the primary material in this film is The History of the Cinema (1956) by John Halas & Joy Batchelor.

SIXTY SUICIDE NOTES (1972)
16mm, bw, sound, 7m
The raw material used in this film was shot by Lawder, and depicts an audience leaving a screening of his film Corridor (walking through a reconstruction of the Corridor set, which had been installed for the show).

SUNDAY IN SOUTHBURY (1968/72?)
16mm, bw, sound, 7m
This film was shot on a visit to Southbury, CT in 1968, to spend time with Lawder’s then-father-in-law, Hans Richter, and probably in commemoration of Richter’s 80th birthday. Jonas Mekas also visited at this time, filming material that would eventually be included in his film Walden (aka Diaries, Notes, and Sketches) (1968).
Curiously, this film was shot in 1968, and Lawder’s extant personal print of it is on 1968 stock, but the year given on the film is 1972.

AUTOMATIC DIARIES 1971-73 (1973)
16mm, color, silent 24fps, 10m
Not widely shown, this film consists of footage documenting various social gatherings with other friends and filmmakers, including Robert Nelson, David Rimmer, and others.

CATFILM FOR KATY AND CYNNIE (1973)
16mm, color, silent 24fps, 3m
Lawder made this film for Intercat ’73, a cat film festival organized by Pola Chapelle.

NEGATIVE SPACE (1975)
16mm, bw, sound, 11m
The film’s subtitle reads “A Stereoscopic film by Standish D. Lawder”.
This film has a curious background, and was not really shown or circulated by Lawder. Lawder told me that this film was made to satisfy the AFI requirement of a finished film print before they would disburse the remaining funds of a grant he had gotten. Lawder thought this rule was ludicrous, i.e. having to provide a finished print before being able to get all of the money needed to make the film. So, he made this film as a sort of tossed-off “fuck you” to the AFI, as well as a way to get his remaining grant money. As a result, this film is not highly regarded by Lawder, and he didn’t really make a point of showing it. Essentially, the film was made by rephotographing a 16mm projected image with a 3D lens attachment to create a side-by-side stereoscopic movie. The joke, of course, is that it’s not real 3-D, because the photographed image is itself 2-D. The footage rephotographed is some material from Sixty Suicide Notes, with some goofy psychedelic abstract stuff and shots of a subway train and a woman in a room.

REGENERATION (1980)
16mm, bw, sound, 4.5m

UNCERTAIN FILMS

The below titles are primarily works which have some kind of identity, and even a title, and may even have been edited into some kind of finished, printable form, but were never really printed, circulated, or entered Lawder’s canonical filmography, though it’s possible some were shown here and there as one-offs. It should be said that Lawder had a very open definition of what constituted a film in comparison with the typical willful, intentional sense of a completed film made by a filmmaker as a specific creative gesture. One of my very favorite experiences ever as a film archivist involves Standish teaching me a lesson about this very subject. I described this moment in my Preservation Insanity blog and will quote it here:
“And in the course of these discoveries with Standish, a defining, epiphanous moment was given to me. In light of these newly uncovered films of his, I started to ask him about some of the other items that were turning up, all labeled by him with Dymo tape. One can said ‘See You at Mao’. I asked him what this was, and whether it related to the Godard film. He said it was a little thing he had shot during a visit by Godard for a screening of See You at Mao (1970) at Yale in the early ‘70s. I asked him, ‘But is it a film?’ (meaning ‘do you consider this a finished film of yours?’), and he looked at me like I was an idiot, responding, ‘Can you put it on a projector?'”

PAINTING THE CELLAR (1968)
16mm, bw, silent 24fps (?), 3m
I was not able to confirm with Lawder whether this was in any sense a “film” versus a home movie, but perhaps it’s a bit of both.

FILMJOB (1969)
16mm, bw, silent 24fps, 5.5m
This film was never printed or circulated, but Lawder considered it to some degree to be a work of his. Some of the material for this film was produced by Lawder by contact printing found footage on his homemade coffee can contact printer.

BATON TWIRLING – NTH HAVEN (approximate year TBD)
16mm, bw, sound, 16m
This seems to be pretty much a fully edited and tentatively completed work, but Lawder appears not to have printed or circulated it.

SEE YOU AT MAO (1970)
16mm, color, silent 24fps, 1.5m
This is a film made by Standish Lawder at a Yale University screening of the Godard film of the same name, with Godard in person. Lawder shot single frames of the screen throughout the movie and gave it the same title as Godard’s film with the idea that it was an amusing condensation of the original film. Never in distribution, or really shown as a finished “film” but Lawder did tell me he considered it one of his works.

KYOTO TWO-STEP (ca.1971)
16mm, color, silent 24fps, 4m
This film was never printed or circulated, but Lawder considered it to some degree to be a work of his. Filmed on a trip to Japan, along with Tokyo Subway.

TOKYO SUBWAY (1971)
16mm, bw, silent 24fps, 8m
This film was never printed or circulated, but Lawder considered it to some degree to be a work of his. Filmed on a trip to Japan, along with Kyoto Two-Step.