Screening Room: Standish Lawder & Stanley Cavell

A professor of art history and film, a photographer and an inventor, Standish Lawder has made truly experimental films by seeing what a predetermined idea about content, structure, or technique will produce when carried out in shooting or printing. Lawder has taught at Harvard, Yale, UC San Diego, and at Denver Darkroom, which he founded. He is the author of The Cubist Cinema.

A distinguished philosopher and professor at Harvard, Stanley Cavell had just published The World Viewed, his first book on film, when he appeared on this program. His subsequent writing on film includes Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears.

In this episode of Screening Room, Lawder demonstrates the intricacies of his home-made optical printer and shows examples of what can be achieved with rephotographing film. Gardner, Lawder, and Cavell also discuss the intellectual and psychological implications of his manipulations. Their frank commentary carries on over Lawder's test print of Intolerance, which he had just received from the lab and had not yet viewed it himself. Lawder also screens Necrology, Color Film, and Corridor.

"Standish Lawder is a cinematic magician, an American original. His films are an astonishing mix of formal beauty, structural rigor, and probing wit. He is a high-wire performer, with no net." — Clifford Ross, photographer/inventor of the R1 camera.