Escalators to Eternity: The Choir Made Visible in Standish D. Lawder’s Necrology
Art & Trash, episode 19
Escalators to Eternity: The Choir Made Visible in Standish D. Lawder’s Necrology
Stephen Broomer, November 3, 2022
In 1970, Standish Lawder shot, candidly and at a distance, a crowded escalator in evening rush hour, at the Pan Am building at Park Avenue and 45th Street in New York City. At the time, the Pan Am building was the world’s largest commercial office space, right next to Grand Central Station. In one continuous shot, just shy of eight minutes, Lawder filmed hundreds of employees as they began their journeys home, descending from the skyscraper and into the lower world of commuter trains. Once the film was processed, Lawder turned the shot around, printed it in reverse, such that the employees, face to the camera, are carried upwards as if ascending to heaven. He called the film Necrology—a list of the dead, as in an obituary notice, an index to a necropolis, or the lists of dead and missing servicemen in Viet Nam. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer explores Lawder's absurdist humour, the film as an allegory for film projection, and its sardonic defiance of American individuality.
SCRIPT:
The Trinity nuclear bomb test at Alamogordo introduced the world to an unprecedented level of manmade mass destruction. As messy a way to go as any, the bomb survived in American consciousness as something that evaporates matter, a plummeting calamity of steel that would leave in its wake a big nothing, a hole punched in reality, an absence like Daffy Duck’s missing scenery. Within a few short decades, America would come to experience mass death on another scale, with daily reports of soldier casualties from the war in Viet Nam. Pine overcoats made their way back to the United States as a reminder that the material of life and death was bone and meat, that the consequences of war were breathless bodies, and not a forgiving whiteout. Absurdist treatments of life under the bomb began to emerge in response to the Cold War, for example, Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again” at the end of Dr. Strangelove, the mushroom cloud as a big splash like a dive in an Esther Williams film. The plenitude of life in America was becoming apparent with the growing density of its cities, the diversity of jobs, identities, customs, ways of living that people in even the most homogenous pockets of the country were becoming aware of. That America had become a melting pot—or a tinder box—was a thing of terror for much of the country, whether living and working in the tremendous density of the nation’s great cities, or far from it and incapable of imagining skyscrapers or ghettos. But those with a comic sensibility, laughing into oblivion, could find a superior metaphor, of an overstuffed box flowing over, a container that fails magnificently at its duty to contain.
In 1970, Standish Lawder shot, candidly and at a distance, a crowded escalator in evening rush hour, at the Pan Am building at Park Avenue and 45th Street in New York City. At the time, the Pan Am building was the world’s largest commercial office space, right next to Grand Central Station. In one continuous shot, just shy of eight minutes, Lawder filmed hundreds of employees as they began their journeys home, descending from the skyscraper and into the lower world of commuter trains. Once the film was processed, Lawder turned the shot around, printed it in reverse, such that the employees, face to the camera, are carried upwards as if ascending to heaven. He called the film Necrology—a list of the dead, as in an obituary notice, an index to a necropolis, or the lists of dead and missing servicemen in Viet Nam. The aura of death that hangs over this shot is reinforced by the film’s soundtrack: Sibelius’s Symphony no. 4 in A-minor, Op 63; a melancholy work that Sibelius composed during an illness, it features a foreboding atmosphere that anticipates the Great War. This endless and unbroken line of office workers is raptured to heaven, but Lawder cuts to a roll of credits, in the style of the Hollywood movie, albeit one with an acerbic wit. Lawder mixes surface description with ridiculous, elusive details, assigning identities to 76 figures, ranging from Assistant Assassin no. 2 to Man with Migraine Headache to Girl Who Looks Like Joan Baez. He counts himself among the figures, but his is one of the few names that is not a comic invention. By implication, the viewer is left to presume that the remaining hundreds unaccounted for are ‘extras’. The sombre mood of Sibelius gives way to the triumphalism of San Marcial, a bullfight march, music that strongly resembles the militant optimism of Jean Philip Sousa. Although it’s joyous, music that’s composed for bullfights is nevertheless twinned to death in the imagination, thanks in no small part to Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon.
Lawder’s work shared much with the emerging New York minimalist cinema, what critic P. Adams Sitney called ‘the structural film’. Writing in the pages of Film Culture, Sitney had defined the structural film as a perplexing, diverse minimalism against the densifying, complex forms of the avant-garde. The structural film “insists on its shape, and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to its outline.” The shape of Necrology is minimalism of form in extremity. The film consists of four parts: a title card, the main event, the roll of credits, and a signature. Both the escalator shot and the credit roll contain spontaneous and comic elements that are subsumed by the formal crawl that they share; in the escalator shot, comedy arises from candid observation; in the credit roll, comedy is imposed by the filmmaker’s absurd humour. Both shots wear the maker’s intervention: the authoring of the credits with Lawder’s distinctive humour is paralleled by his transformation of the escalator into a moving-stairway-to-heaven. Lawder made his film in a New York where the rebellious, anarchic comedy of Neo-Dada coexisted with the cool detachment of Pop—and like Andy Warhol and Michael Snow, Lawder was capable of embracing both wit and absence. Such filmmakers understood that this new cinema was pitched between insistent minimalism and improvisation. Lawder maps out the shape of the film with the escalator shot, filling a pre-conceived interval with observational, unpredictable content. He then exerts full control over the credit scroll, a distorted mirror of the escalator shot, which serve as a voyeur’s comic speculations on the faces of others.
To describe Lawder’s work here as staging would be inaccurate, but he has knowingly positioned his shot so that figures recede from light into darkness, framing such that a highlight falls on figures lower in the frame. This reinforces the metaphoric rapture of these figures, as Lawder shoots with a telephoto lens which compresses the distance between them, flattening them, allowing only light and position to distinguish their relative distance to the lens. Light gives distinction to the figures as they pass up from the lower boundary of the frame, something like an act of recognition from the heavens, or at least, from the harsh fluorescents of the Pan American building. But the figures inevitably recede into darkness, their features swallowed up before they even reach the upper boundary of the frame. It becomes an act of evaporation.
Necrology is an absurdist vision of the plenitude of humankind, and both its first and second acts are copious inventories, one that subsumes all the visible phenomena that passes on this escalator, the other that emphasizes some details over others in a clowning performance of presumption and mind-reading. Lawder doesn’t use the full length of a 400’ camera roll of 16mm film, which would be roughly eleven minutes; he uses only eight minutes; but there is a sense of material acknowledgement in his use of the persistent vision of a motorized camera running a maximal load of film continuously. Such material acknowledgement resonates in the overall project, as the escalator also serves as a mirror of the film strip as seen by a projectionist, as it winds up onto a take-up reel on a 16mm projector. Lawder plays with expectation and satirizes self-serious cinema, but his film is also a cohesive integration of the material facts of cinema, the serial nature of the film strip becoming an arch-metaphor for the population of the earth, and vice versa. Cinema becomes the ideal vehicle for the fantasy of a final rapture, because that lively ‘seventh art’ is itself an ultimate, rapturous medium.
Lawder’s credits recall an earlier act of satire, Nikolai Gogol’s picaresque novel Dead Souls, in which protagonist Chichikov purchases the ‘souls’ of dead serfs, relieving the tax burdens of landowners while amassing an illusion of wealth and standing. It is a classic and comic fraud but one that bears its own gruesome metaphor. Like Chichikov, Lawder exerts a kind of mock-ownership over his cast, the credits assigning them identities, relations and secret lives. Even those are reduced to a mix of mundane observations, superficial assertions, surreal jokes. Imagined details of the lives of the ascendant figures function simply as an accounting of souls. It gives the illusion that these figures are meant to be taken as vessels of humanity, complete with their own private histories. Humankind is a plentiful resource, easily exploited. In Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, Satan creates a little world of clay people, only to massacre them, sealing them in a chasm. Our hearts were broken, the narrator says, we could not keep from crying. But Satan corrects them…“don’t cry,” he says. “They were of no value. We can make plenty more.” In its credits, Necrology offers that private details echo out from the great mass of being, but the search for meaning remains absurd.
The American ideal of individuality is under distress in Necrology, where the roles that people play are reduced to signifiers and secrets, and where the crowd passes like objects on an assembly line. The ecclesiastic tone affected by the music would speak, inevitably, to the true believer’s vision of that final passage to glory-land. It is met on screen by futility. The factual futility of the crowd who repeat this escalator ride daily; the metaphoric futility of a crowd of souls that beget souls that beget souls, grist for the mill. Here in this sanctum, be it the Pan American Building or some limbo in-between, individuality is at odds with continuity. Life on earth, it seems to suggest, is simply continuity. And its continuity is as simple as a single roll of film, a static shot, with one variable comically subverted. By reversing their descent, Lawder is not just rapturing souls to heaven; he is sending them back to work.
CREATOR’S STATEMENT
Death isn’t subtext in Necrology, it slaps us in the face from the opening title and its ornamental, funereal font. But what does death mean to Lawder? I talk in this piece about laughing into oblivion, with Bruce Conner being the obvious example of an apocalyptic jester; Necrology functions in much the same way that A Movie functions, in how it reflects the medium back on itself, funnelled out through the broken-toothed grin of damnation. There are a few observations made here that I think are original (unless I got ‘em by osmosis, you know, off an escalator in the MetLife building), and worth subsuming into the common analysis of Necrology going forward. The one that I’m particularly pleased with is where we end up: that Lawder’s sending these souls back to work. There’s nothing mystical about that: he’s telling them to do a double-shift.
The film’s playing on a question that plays as a backdrop to many lives on earth: where do you wanna go when you die? To the mushroom in the sky, to heaven or hell (at least there, like on earth, we can be free), or for that matter, anywhere but Viet Nam? How about anywhere but Kansas? Necrology’s thanatopic collage of work-drudgery, medium-specificity, and those big mortal-coil questions makes for some mystical contemplation, and this is where, perhaps, the joke turned a little too sick for Hollis Frampton, where contemplation is forced to an end, like a cannon-shot giving way to a bullfight.
The second act of the film—a rolling credit list that assigns identities to ‘some’ of the figures—is more obvious in its jocular dimension. It’s a marvellously juvenile rejoinder to the severity of the first act. Lawder’s list doesn’t just serve its overt function, but also as another parallel of the relation of screen action to the medium itself and the object tendered.
I see a link here to other satirists, Nikolai Gogol and Mark Twain, whose works, like Lawder’s, had pangs of absurdist futility breaking through their jackets. The idea of the accumulation and worth of souls as something to be commodified, measured, or even just dismissed as bountiful and boundless, is one of the ways that proto-absurdists like Gogol and Twain suggested some of the themes that artists like Lawder and Conner would later pick up. I won’t repeat all of that here, but I’ll also say the visual structure of this essay (which runs longer than its subject) is based on this idea of doubling-up, running in parallel, overlapping, of, as I put it, “souls that beget souls that beget souls.”