Janie Geiser

is an internationally recognized filmmaker and theater
artist whose work is known for its sense of mystery, its detailed evocation of self-contained worlds, and its strength of design. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and she has been recognized with numerous awards, including an Obie Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant and a 2002 Rockefeller Fellowship in film. Geiser has also made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary puppet theater through her innovative original theater works. She began making films in 1990, first as an element of her performance work, and then as a separate form. Since that time, Geiser’s films have been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, where her film The Red Book was featured in the 1996 New Directors / New Films Festival. Her short films have previously premiered four times (1996,
1998, 2000, 2002) at the New York Film Festival. Other major showings include the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, three San Francisco Film Festivals, ALIVE TV, REEL NY, and other PBS venues. Her film The Secret Story was
chosen by Film Comment’s Gavin Smith as one of the Best Short Films of 1996, and The Fourth Watch was on Film Comment’s list of the Best Short Films of 2000.

Geiser, a former New Yorker, lives now in Los Angeles where she is the Director of the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts at CalArts.

note: tom Recchion, the composer of both of these films, is also an LA artist and performs with a number of bands here including Extended Organ.

------------------------films-----------------------

Lost Motion

A film by Janie Geiser

Music: Tom Recchion
16mm, color, 11 minutes
(1999)

Lost Motion uses small cast metal figures, toy trains, decayed skyscrapers, and other found objects to follow a man’s search for a mysterious woman. From an illegible note found on a dollhouse bed, through impossible landscapes, the man waits for her train which never arrives. His wanderings lead him to the other side of the tracks, a forgotten landscape of derelict erector- set buildings populated by
lost souls. Dream merges with nightmare in this post-industrial land of vivid night.

Fred Camper writes in the Chicago Reader (May 25, 2000):

“Lost Motion is the sumptuously told tale of a failed search...In her most visually lush film to date, Geiser superimposes images and drapes her scenes in moving shadow patterns. She depicts the train’s arrival
by superimposing images of dolls exiting model trains over the searching man’s figure... Ultimately the film’s fragmentary constructions become more than modernist denials of illusion and assertions of materiality.: essential to the film’s tone, Geiser’s obviously illusory images evoke strong feelings as the mundane drama of a failed meeting becomes
intertwined with an essay on the way our lushest dreams fail by virtue of their very extravagance.”

Recent Screenings:

2001 American Film Insitiute
2001 Images Festival (Toronto)
2000 Walker Art Center
2000 Chicago Filmmakers
2000 New York Film Festival
2000 Pacific Film Archives
2001 Museum of Modern Art
2001 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

-------------------------------------
The Fourth Watch
A Film by Janie Geiser
(Direction, design, camera, editing by Janie Geiser)

16mm, color. (2000)
Music: Tom Recchion

The ancient Greeks divided the night into four sections; the last section before morning was called the fourth watch. In these hours before dawn, an endless succession of rooms is inhabited by silent film
figures occupying flickering space in a midcentury house made of printed tin. Their presence is at once inevitable and uncanny. A boy turns his head in dread, a woman’s eyes look askance, a sleepwalker
reaches into a cabinet which dissolves with her touch, and hands write letters behind disappearing windows. The rooms reveal themselves and fill with impossible, shadowed light. It is not clear who is watching
and who is trespassing in this nocturnal drama of lost souls.

Mark McElhatten, co- curator of the 2000 New York Film Festival’s Views From the Avant-Garde, where The Fourth Watch premiered, writes:

“A small masterpiece of the uncanny brought about through beautifully controlled use of superimposition and scale and a cross breeding of “incompatible” species of texture and (cathode - solar) light.
Glacial blue poltergeist -somnabulists, melodramatic stars and damaged children from silent films - emerge at night into a tin dollhouse opening up invisible envelopes of space, comingling with hypnoticic
chiaroscura cast by trembling sunlight.”

Kristin M. Jones, in her review “NYFF: Views from the Avant-Garde” in the November-December 2000 issue of Film Comment, writes:

“Of the three Janie Geiser works screened, perhaps most haunting was The Fourth Watch, in which images of people in black-and-white movies rephotographed from a video monitor are superimposed on shots of a
dollhouse interior. Bluish, spectral figures float by as sunlight mingles with flickering shadows on brightly colored tin. A beautiful somnambulist vanishing into TV bar rolls suggests a poetic metaphor for the current state of avant-garde cinema, when the medium’s past,
future, and even its own death are being transformed into material for provocative new films.”

Selected Screenings:

2000 New York Film Festival
2000 Pacific Film Archives
2001 Rotterdam International Film Festival
2001 Images Festival (Toronto)
2001 San Francisco Film Festival
2001 Imageforum, Tokyo
2001 Museum of Modern Art, NY
2001 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Title: Watch
Show: Have You Ever... / Secret Films of Girls







.Click Above to View