Memory, loss, and erasure surface and resurface in liminal worlds where time seems simultaneously suspended, stretched, and truncated. The films move in an out of tangible and intangible spaces, defined by material and immaterial collage sources including faded photographic slides, empty photo albums, a child’s shooting game, photographs and negatives, and renderings created with a desktop home designer program. Nothing stays in place, the ground is always shifting.
The phrase “Time, a substance” is borrowed from Marianne Moore’s poem Black Earth.
JANIE GEISER is an internationally recognized experimental filmmaker and visual/theater artist, whose work is known for its investigation of the emotional power of inanimate objects, its sense of mystery, and its strength of design. ”… Geiser gives voice to the reaches of the unconscious, pointing to the abandoned splendor that exists prior to the rules of society and language.” (Holly Willis, Res, 2004)
In addition to her film practice, Geiser has made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary performance with her innovative, hypnotic live performances that integrate performing objects and projection.
Geiser began making films in 1990, first as an element of her performance work, and then as a separate form. In 1994, she made her first film that was intended exist outside of live performance, The Red Book. An instant classic, The Red Book was screened as part of the 1996 New Directors/New Films series at The Museum of Modern Art and was later selected for inclusion in the Smithsonian's National Film Registry.
Geiser’s films have been screened at the Museum of the Moving Image, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Berkley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archives, the Centre Pompidou, the Salzberg Museum, San Francisco MOMA, LACMA, Redcat, The Getty, The Academy Museum, Filmforum Los Angeles, and at numerous festivals, including the New York Film Festivals, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Toronto Film Festival, the London International Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, Oberhausen, and the Hong Kong International Film Festival.
Her performances have been presented at The Public Theater, St. Ann’s Warehouse, REDCAT, The Walker Art Center, CalArts Center for New Performance, LaMama, the Wende Museum, and other venues.
Janie Geiser has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, a Doris Duke Artist Award, and grants or fellowships from Creative Capital, Jerome Foundation, MAPfund, the Center for Cultural Innovation, the California Community Foundation, and others.
Geiser’s films are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, The New York Public Library's Donnell Media Center, the Berkley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, and the California Institute of the Arts, and others. The Archive of the Academy of Motion Pictures has selected her body of work for preservation in their archive of experimental films
Geiser is on the faculty of CalArts and is a co-artistic director of Automata, an artist-run non-profit gallery in Los Angeles’ Chinatown arts district.
Post-screening discussion:
Janie Geiser & Maya Erdelyi
Maya Erdelyi is an award-winning animator and artist. Maya is a Colombian/Hungarian first-generation American. Born and raised bilingually in New York City, she is currently based in Boston where she teaches animation at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and lectures at numerous universities. Maya holds an MFA in Experimental Animation from Calarts and first studied animation at Harvard University. She lives with her husband, an animator, and their daughter Paloma. Her works span experimental animation, installation, drawing, printmaking, and various collaborative experiments. Screenings and shows include national and international film festivals, galleries, museums, libraries and artist-run venues including: Lincoln Center, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, REDCAT Los Angeles, Harvard Film Archives, Animation Block Party, and Boston Center for the Arts, among others. Maya presented a solo show at Trustman Gallery at Simmons University (2022), hosted artist workshops at the ICA Boston (2022), and held a Yaddo Residency (2019). Maya has an upcoming show this Spring at the Gelb Gallery at Phillips Andover Academy. Her work is in the permanent collections of Google, The Jewish Museum NYC, The Block Museum of Contemporary Art at Northwestern; Hotel Studio Allston, Isenberg Projects, and numerous private collections. Her latest film "Anyuka" an animated documentary about her grandmother's life is currently streaming and broadcasting with PBS/GBH.
Maya is a former puppetry student and assistant of Janie Geiser's from CalArts.
Reverse Shadow
Digital video, 8:00 minutes, 2019
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price
Colorist: Caitlyn Diaz
Absent Objects
Digital video, 7:41 minutes, 2020
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price
22 Light-years
Digital video, 17:30 minutes, 2021
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price
Vaporetto
Digital video, 3:16 minutes, 2021
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Heliotrope
Digital video,7:06 minutes, 2023
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price
Chameleon Law
Digital video,7:30 minutes, 2022
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Sudden Tourniquet
Digital video, 7:41, 2025
Sound Collage / Field Recordings by Janie Geiser
Sound Mix by Kari Rae Seekins
Total: 67 mins
Reverse Shadow
Digital video, 8:00 minutes, 2020
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price
Colorist: Caitlyn Diaz
“I do not claim to fully understand the complexity of Janie’s work, but there’s a particular intuition that is paramount when approaching it, as with any great work of art. Reverse Shadow is the latest product of Janie’s genius, and it’s the result of her endless imagination which has give birth to dozens of films, installations, puppet shows, performances and a vast mixture of all the former.” – Jose Sarmiento Hinojosa, Desistfilm, February 2020
Rivers run red, planes hover over waters, ships travel in darkness, and towers loom and topple. Disaster seems imminent as the hunters prepare to shoot. The body is a soft target.
“I had a recurring dream that I was walking in the woods and a hunter mistook me for a bird. I could hear him moving through the forest. I always woke up before the gun was fired, but that feeling of apprehension would stay with me throughout the day. Lately, even without dreaming this dream, that apprehension is present.” -Geiser
Reverse Shadow draws on a range of sources, from a child’s target practice game to brochures of WW2 warplanes, medical books, panoramic photographs, and iphone videos shot from an airplane seat. The sound collage includes, among other sources, recordings of Cold War shortwave “numbers stations” and an Edison recording of the Rip Van Winkle story. Immersed in an atmosphere of suspended apprehension, we sense disaster is waiting, waiting to happen.
Absent Objects
Digital video, 7:41 minutes, 2020
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price
Three empty photo albums, vessels of lost time and memory beyond reach.
22 Light-years
Digital video, 17:30 minutes, 2021
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price
A time clash in suspended time, light-years away and light-years long. A house / home is imagined and re-imagined, inhabited by a family who never met. They leave and return. This goes on and on and on.
22 Light-years draws on a range of visual sources, including photographic negatives, diagrams, found patterned papers, and archival footage. These sources merge, sometimes uncomfortably, with video that was screen-recorded while operating desktop home designer software. Creating digital floor plans, landscaping, and roofless homes in real time, and manipulating this imagery away from the software’s intent, Geiser fabricates a digitally lush, elliptical, uncanny world, where endless planning never results in a tangible home.
Combined with tangible collage materials (negatives, diagrams, flower seed packets), filmed frame by frame, the material world wears the skin of the immaterial one, or vice-versa---they bleed together, suggesting time as simultaneous, mutable, and unknown.
"In the experimental films of Janie Geiser, the shadow itself also becomes the space of projection, the space where the imagined other, in the form of a video image, makes its unexpected return." --- Dennis Cooper
Vaporetto
Digital video, 3:16 minutes, 2021
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
A “reality film”, a chance stereo view from a Vaporetto (water bus) ride in Venice, 2019.
Heliotrope
Digital video,7:06 minutes, 2023
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price
A subterranean unraveling, seeds fall to the ground with nowhere to land. The only witness is blindfolded, and she, too, falls at some point. The underground factory operates day and night, the burrowing continues, in a long slow attempt to fabricate what could actually make itself.
“The interplay of filmic layers (in Geiser’s work) creates a complex aesthetic of collage, a term borrowed from art history but also used in cinema to describe the collage film or, more generally, the principle of montage. The collagist structures of Geiser’s rephotography films engage critical issues of surface, space, and film history in distinctly hauntological terms, which, following Derrida, constitute an aberrant space, wholly other, infinite and ungraspable.”
---Genevieve Yue, The Grey Room, Lost At Sea.
Chameleon Law
Digital video,7:30 minutes, 2022
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
A found faded set of vermillion 35mm slides, ---evidence of time and change. Their red hues transform the slides’ subjects –mountain landscapes of the West, long-span bridges, tourists and tourist sites—into simultaneously sublime and corrosive views.
The title of the film comes from a concept articulated in the allegorical / surrealist novel Mt. Analogue. “Chameleon law” rocks us asleep and prevents us from seeing the other 99% of the possibilities that are at hand in each situation. With conventional ‘common sense’ we could easily fall prey to the chameleon law, as the landscapes of the world fade to red.
In Chameleon Law, these time-altered images, alternately depleted and extreme, suggest a heated landscape of the past and future.
“ Another way of approaching Geiser’s characters is to imagine where they go after they disappear from view. Instead of dematerializing, we might think of them as transcending their media forms, and reaching for a place that exceeds our ability to represent it: in short, the sublime.”
---Genevieve Yu, Parallax View, On the Recent Films of Janie Geiser
Sudden Tourniquet
Digital video, 7:41, 2025
Sound Collage / Field Recordings by Janie Geiser
Sound Mix by Kari Rae Seekins
Song: That's That's That #1
Written by Dick Connette
Adapted for voice and sung by Daisy Press
Recorded and mixed by Jeff Cook at 2nd Story Sound and Linden Underground
Produced by Jeff Cook, Daisy Press, and Dick Connette
Medical illustrations and paper model buildings merge with images of cultivated and wild plants in an elliptical journey toward ephemerality. Bodies lose their volume and exist, somehow, without flesh. Now they are outlines, traveling through indeterminate spaces, domestic and otherwise. Cut open, but not bleeding, what do we see when we no longer have eyes?
“Geiser’s universe is a fascinating experimental manifestation of the moving image through the use of shards, refined sharp shards that penetrate deep into the unconscious”.
--- Jose Sarmiento Hinojosa, Desistfilm.