Monday June 29 – Thursday July 2, 10:30pm PT
Janie Geiser
Reverse Shadow
Q&A w/ the artist via live chat at 8:30pm ET
Microscope is very pleased to present an online screening of films and videos by LA-based, experimental filmmaker and artist Janie Geiser, including the premiere of her most recent work Reverse Shadow (2019) and the 40-minute series The Nervous Films, consisting of five works completed between 2009 and 2012.
Geiser’s cinema seems to be built on a mutual understanding between filmmaker and audience that there is no need to pretend what we see on screen is real, but rather is a sequence of two-dimensional images appearing within a flat rectangular surface. And in that case, why shoot the real world? Geiser’s worlds — meticulously composed on her animation stand and in no way less engaging and wondrous than real life — consist mostly of vivid paper cutouts, photographs, and other seemingly flat elements, brought to life by the artist through the magic of film animation.
The Nervous Films series includes four films shot with a 16mm Bolex camera — “Ghost Algebra,” “Kindless Villain,” “The Floor of the World,” and “Arbor” — as well as the video “Ricky,” incorporating imagery from medical illustrations, nature, found footage and objects, among others, photographed frame-by-frame and frequently superimposed in camera. The highly evocative, oneiric compositions often carry unsettling undertones, with associations to the world wars, power, anatomy of the human body, bingo cards, lost memories, and the anxiety of the passage of time.
Reverse Shadow, which concludes the night, was inspired by an actual dream and is permeated by an “atmosphere of suspended apprehension,” with scenes of hunters pointing at birds, WWII planes flying over red landscapes, and tumultuous rivers set to a soundtrack masterly collaged by the artist using fragments from Cold War’s number station broadcasts, an Edison audio recording of Irving’s story “Rip Van Winkle,” and other appropriated sound excerpts at times digitally reversed.
Geiser also redefines the shape of the imagery on screen by obscuring portions of the frame, often making visible only a narrow circular area surrounded by darkness, as though the audience were looking through a peephole or the viewfinder of a camera. This break with the traditional experience of moving image implies a sort of choreography of the audience’s gaze, now moving across the screen in order to follow and settle on its visible section.
Geiser will be available for a Q&A through live chat beginning at 8:30pm ET.
TO WATCH:
A “WATCH NOW” link will become available on this page by 7:15pm ET on Monday June 29th.Passes for viewing can be purchased then, giving full access to video introduction, film program, and live Q&A.
General admission $8 (Valid through July 2, 10:30pm ET)
Member admission $6 (Valid through July 2, 10:30pm ET)
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Janie Geiser is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes cinema, performance, and installation. Geiser’s work is known for its recontextualization of abandoned images and objects, its embrace of artifice, and its investigation of memory, power and loss. Geiser’s films have been screened at the National Gallery of Art, MOMA, LACMA, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, Pacific Film Archive, Wexner Center, Centre Pompidou, Strausbourg Museum, the British Film Institute, and at the New York Film Festival’s Projections, Toronto Film Festival’s Wavelengths, Hong Kong International Film Festival, London Internattional Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Olhar de Cinema (Brazil) and the Viennale, among others. Geiser’s film The Red Book was selected for the 2009 National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, and her films are in the collection at MoMA, New York. Geiser’s single and multi-channel installations have been presented in galleries from Los Angeles to Tokyo. A Guggenheim Fellow, Geiser’s work has been recognized with a Doris Duke Artist Award, an OBIE Award, and grants/fellowships from Creative Capital, the Rockefeller Foundation, NEA, Center for Cultural Innovation, The Jim Henson Foundation, MapFund and others. Geiser is a 2018 MacDowell Fellow. A pioneer of the renaissance of American avant-garde puppet theater, Geiser also creates innovative, hypnotic live performances that integrate performing objects and projection. Her performance works have been presented at The Public Theater, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Redcat, The Walker Art Center, and other venues. Geiser is a founder and co-director of Automata, an artist-run performance gallery in LA. She is on the faculty of the School of Theater at CalArts.
Program:
Ghost Algebra
Janie Geiser, 16mm film to digital video, 2009, 7 minutes 30 seconds
Sound collage : Janie Geiser
sound mix Kari Rae Seekins
Under erratic skies, a solitary figure navigates a landscape of constructed nature and broken bones. She peers through a decaying aperture, waiting and watching: the fragility of the body is exposed for what it is: ephemeral, liquid, a battlefield of nervous dreams. Using found and natural objects, rephotographed video, medical illustrations, and other collage elements, Ghost Algebra suggests one of the original meanings of the word “algebra”: the science of restoring what is missing, the reunion of broken parts.
“…a story that lurks just on the edge of consciousness.” – Holly Willis, KCET, Janie Geiser’s Fantastic Films
“It’s a subtle film. A beautiful but difficult film…Geiser’s ‘algebra’ theme seems to peek through at times in images of severed limbs or broken bones, teeth, spilled blood, and of course the various number machines that pop up. The word algebra apparently used to have a meaning related to restoration or reunion…But this film is not really about mathematics. At least not the usual kind. It’s about piecing together a vision of the world. Immersion.” — Alessandro Cima, Candlelight Stories
Kindless Villain
By Janie Geiser, 16mm film to digital video, 2010, 5 minutes
Sound collage : Janie Geiser
Sound Mixed by Kari Rae Seekins
In Kindless Villain, two boys wander through a stone fortress, while the history of never-ending battle forms traces in the waters below. Seemingly alone in their island world, the boys succumb to fatigue, and to rituals of power. Scratched phrases from an ancient recording of Hamlet reveal a sad cry for vengeance. War is a child’s game, played quietly in this forgotten world.
“… a haunted landscape…” – Manhola Dargis, New York Times
The Floor of the World
By Janie Geiser, 16mm film to digital video, 2010, 9 minutes
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound Mixed by Kari Rae Seekins
In a shifting landscape of dirt and sky, excavation and construction merge. Figures move back and forth between life and death, and possibly somewhere else. The ephemerality of existence is a mundane question in this world, where numbers mark the way. The floor of the world turns out to be easily pierced, liquid, permeable.
“… letters appear through a clearing of dirt, later removed by a paper shovel to uncover a black and white photograph of a girl. The earth opens up, then swallows back up, its many secrets. “ — Genevieve Yue, “The Parallax View: On the Recent Films of Janie Geiser”
Ricky
By Janie Geiser, digital video, 2011, 11 minutes
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix by Kari Rae Seekins
The realms of childhood, war, and loss echo through Ricky. Double vision illuminates, and simultaneously obfuscates, what can be remembered, lost, or retrieved. A found sound recording forms the spine of the film…a scratched audio letter from father to son.
“Multiple pasts come alive in Geiser’s films. This speaks to the density of the frame, an often crowded cluster of images and objects layered over each other, always passing across one another, and covered, at times, by deep shadow. Just as we see photographs in their negative reverse, we also hear songs played backwards, creating an effect of simultaneity where all moments from the past are active at once. Objects are loosened from their historical fixity and made to interact with elements that came from elsewhere; this is, of course, the nature of collage, where different historical moments are placed in spatial proximity to each other. Here, the juxtaposition is equally temporal, a recombined and heterogeneous past alive and buzzing in an unfolding and uncertain present.“ — Genevieve Yue, “The Parallax View: On the Recent Films of Janie Geiser”
Arbor
By Janie Geiser, 16mm to digital video, 2012, 8 minutes
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound Mix: Kari Rae Seekins
From a set of photographs found in a thrift store, Geiser creates a liminal space between representation and abstraction, figure and landscape, fiction and memory. Arbor suggests the fragility and ephemerality of memory and its artifacts through subtle manipulations of the photographs: reframings, layerings, inversions, and the introduction of dimensional elements, including flowers and leaves. The photographs’ subjects rarely engage the camera; they are glimpsed, rather than seen. They look elsewhere, and wait for something inevitable. Gathering on a hillside, lounging on the grass beyond now-lost trees, the inhabitants of Arbor cycle through their one elusive afternoon, gradually succumbing to time or dissolving into landscape, reserving for themselves what we can’t know – and becoming shadows in their own stories.
“Janie Geiser’s Arbor (2012), made from a set of found photographs, also produces a sense of ghostly apparition. She doubles the images of men and women, people unknown to Geiser, over themselves as they recline on a broad lawn, distorts them through various lenses and sheets of transparent paper, and finally erases their figures and replaces them with the grass around them. No traces of their bodies remain. This return to nature, so to speak, also haunts the media of film and photography. As Arbor hauntingly illustrates, both share a shadowy condition in which, as Roland Barthes has argued, the presences recorded by a camera are, by the time of their viewing, inevitably gone.” — Genevieve Yue, REVERSE SHOT
Reverse Shadow
By Janie Geiser, digital video, 2019, 8 minutes
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Rivers run red, planes hover above the water, 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.
Reverse Shadow draws on a range of sources, from target practice games for children. brochures of WW2 war planes, medical books, panoramic photographs, and iphone videos shot from an airplane seat. The sound collage includes elements from the The Conet Project (recordings of Cold War era shortwave “numbers stations”), and other found sources including an Edison audio recording of the Rip Van Winkle story. Together, these elements evoke an atmosphere of suspended apprehension, the sense that some disaster is waiting to happen, but we don’t know exactly what it will be or where it will come from.
Q&A with Janie Geiser
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Microscope Gallery Event Series 2020 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).