Films by Janie Geiser
Geiser is still best known for her work in puppetry. (Her ensemble, Janie Geiser & Co., will perform June 1-4 at the School of the Art Institute as part of the Chicago International Festival of Puppet Theater; see the Critic’s Choice in Section Two.) Born in Baton Rouge, she discovered the art world late in high school and in the 70s at the University of Georgia, where she was an art major specializing in painting and metalwork. After graduation she pursued drawing: “I started working a lot with my dreams, almost illustrating them,” she told me. Once she’d made a moving diorama with pop-up figures, a friend suggested she see a puppet presentation by Bruce Schwartz, and within a few years she had her own company. After experimenting with film as an element of her puppet performances, she made The Red Book, her first autonomous film. (The Chicago Filmmakers program includes all but one of her completed films and two works in progress; Geiser will attend.) Geiser acknowledges being influenced by the cutout animations of filmmakers Harry Smith and Louis Klahr; she’s married to Klahr and the two live in Los Angeles.
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One always perceives Geiser’s figures and objects as creations of film rather than filmed theater. When the mother/Snow White figure first appears in The Secret Story, she has her back to us. Geiser then rotates the figure to show her face, a device that’s the cinematic parallel of a theatrical curtain raising. This little rotation within the frame sets up the work’s whole system of object and figure movements. Early on Geiser superimposes two dense floral patterns on a similar one, creating a fairly abstract moving tapestry of flowers; later, when the doctor meets his male patient, a similar pattern adorns the wallpaper. Although this connection clearly locates the action in the past, Geiser seems as interested in the textures the floral patterns create as she is in the linear narrative.
Lost Motion is the sumptuously told tale of a failed search. Inspired by the figure of a man with a coat over his arm–it “really felt like he was waiting for someone,” Geiser says–she concocted a narrative of missed connections. A letter suggests that a woman will meet the man at a Chicago train station, but when he goes there she doesn’t arrive–though her face replaces those of the passengers, presumably as he thinks about her. Eventually he winds up on the wrong side of the tracks, in a forest of industrial buildings obviously built from erector sets, including such moving pieces as a turning wheel. Seductive female figures appear, and he lies beside one; Geiser says that someone dubbed this the “erector-set brothel scene.”
