The art world has recently engaged in a renewed fascination for the heady, rigorous experimental cinema of the late Aquarian age, reviving filmmakers like Anthony McCall, Owen Land, and Morgan Fisher. Perhaps galleries and museums wax nostalgic for the high intellectualism and materialist mastery of that era's moving-image work, now seldom achieved by today's video-art one-liners. Standish Lawder, the rightly lauded subject of an upcoming retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, serves as another welcome blast from our brain-stretching cinematic past. His haute-puckish short films tickle the human thalamus with their carefully crafted compositions of wry visual wit, technological reflexivity, and luscious celluloid textures, often set within envelopes of psychedelic soundscape. Some of his films work almost as... More >>>