Standish Lawder

CINEMA16 celebrates the short film by showcasing some of the best classic and award-winning shorts on DVD. With over three hours of films CINEMA16: AMERICAN SHORT FILMS is essential viewing for anyone with an interest in the moving image. Films include Gus Van Sant's 1982 adaptation of a William S. Burroughs short story, The Discipline Of DE, Tim Burton's early stop motion animated classic Vincent, George Lucas' USC short Freiheit, Alexander Payne's previously unreleased UCLA graduation short Carmen, Paperboys by Mike Mills, D.A. Pennebaker's Duke Ellington scored Daybreak Express, Todd Solondz's NYU short Feelings, along with Oscar Winner The Lunch Date by Adam Davidson, Stefan Nadelman's multi- award winning documentary Terminal Bar, Joe Nussbaum's cult classic George Lucas In Love and 2006 Sundance Winner The Wraith Of Cobble Hill by Adam Parrish King. Films are subtitled in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese, and include commentaries from many of the directors involved.

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

A spectacularly silly collage combo of old-cartoon-loop, colored light display and superimposed B-roll-- Why not do it in the road?

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

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.

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. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2010.

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.

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.