Standard Gauge

Standard Gauge was made not as a television program but as a 16mm independent film, It is unconventional both in form and subject matter. Standard Gauge presents a selection of odd bits of 35mm film that its maker, Morgan Fisher, collected during the several years he spent working, mostly as an editor, in and around the American motion picture industry. The pieces from discarded prints, out-takes, leaders, and other film debris from features, trailers, and newsreels. Standard Gauge shows these pieces one after the other, not bringing them to life by projecting them, but instead simply presenting them as inert objects made of transparent celluloid. Fisher talks about the pieces in a narration that ranges from the anecdotal and confessional to discussions of film history and economics of motion picture technologies. The film is both an autobiography and an oblique documentary about the institution that made these pieces, the commercial motion picture industry. By taking films made in the industry as its subject, by examining them and finding within them some of the concerns and themes of less conventional filmmaking, Standard Gauge suggests that between commercial motion picture and films of a more personal kind, there is, despite their profound differences, a mutuality. Standard Gauge was broadcast by WNET in its series “Independent Focus” on July 20, 1986. “Independent Focus” is the New York Metropolitan area’s longest running and most popular broadcast forum for independently produced films and videos. The audience for this broadcast was estimated by WNET to be about 50000 viewers. Standard Gauge was shown in the 1985 Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Act, at the 1985 New York Film Festival, and at the 1986 Berlin International Film Festival.