Janie Geiser is an internationally recognized visual and theater artist and a creator of puppet theater. Since 1990s she’s also been making experimental films, which she first used as an element of her performance work. Her work is known for its sense of mystery and detail, and its evocation of self-contained worlds. She lives in Los Angeles.
Lewis Klahr is Los Angeles based filmmaker working with computer-generated animation, creating poetic animated collages using photographs and aging ephemera from every conceivable source (such as encyclopedias, postcards, 1950s fashion magazines, medical texts, or real estate brochures).
Curator: Henry Hills
Janie Geiser
Lost Motion (1999). Music: Tom Recchion. 16mm, color, 11 min.
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.
Terrace 49 (2004). Sound: Leon Rothenberg. Color, optical sound, 6 min.
Images of impending disaster — slamming doors, a truck careening down a hill, and a frayed, almost snapping, elevator rope – collide with the repeated image of a woman’s body, cycling toward ephemerality as the the woman disappears into the texture of the film itself. In my recent films, I have been exploring the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a lush, disorienting, ambiguous film space, and an atmosphere of temporal suspension. In Terrace 49, the space is shattered further, broken into shards; as fractured as memory and as fragile as glass.
Ultima Thule (2002). Direction, design, camera, editing by Janie Geiser. Sound Design by Leon Rothenberg. 16mm, color, 10 min.
In her recent films, Geiser has been exploring the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a kind of deep, ambiguous space, a suggestion of the floating world. In Ultima Thule, gravity fails, land and sky lose their historical meaning. A small silver plane navigates an ultramarine storm, flying over barely-glimpsed hills, an unlikely ferry to ultima Thule: the farthest point north, the limit of any journey. The seduction of immersion in blue is too strong to avoid, the land fills with water, and time loses its line.
The Fourth Watch (2000). Direction, design, camera, editing by Janie Geiser. Music: Tom Recchion. 16mm, color.
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 mid-century 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.
Lewis Klahr
Two Hours to Zero (2004). Music Guitar Trio by Rhys Chatham. color, 9 min.
Engram Sepals (2000). b/w, 6 min.
The Aperture of Ghostings (1999–2001) Three films, 13 min.
Elsa Kirk (1999). color, 5 min.
Catherine Street (2001). color, 4 min.
Creased Robe Smile (2001). color, 4 min.
Her Fragrant Emulsion (1987). color, 10 min.
