The Museum of the Moving Image in New York City recently presented Time, a substance, a substantial program of recent works (2013–2023) by filmmaker Janie Geiser. This program of closely interrelated works shows an artist at the top of her game: able to create elusive, evocative collages which manage to say a great deal with very simple means, and to reveal hidden matters of the heart and spirit with uncanny power.
Geiser has developed a unique film language, in which both the soundtrack and the images are complexly multi-layered, creating an ongoing counterpoint between multiple textures of sound and imagery. Her imagery is constructed, often using stop-motion animation, from found objects, photos, and footage, and the layers of sound also include found audio and ambient recordings. Her animations are given depth through complex moving shadows, rotating lights, vignettes that focus on small portions of the screen, and frequent superimpositions. The sounds and images develop independently, moving in and out of sync. At times, there is tight coordination between sound and image, as when a sound of electronic sputtering accompanies layers of lights which rapidly flicker, as if both are caused by a short circuit. Both sounds and images tend to focus on the textures and artifacts of everyday, lived experience, and to explore, almost in an archeological sense, how these objects and sounds reveal the essence of how we navigate through life.
In Reverse Shadow, an eight minute work from 2019, we see many images of navigation and orientation: boats and trains making their way across the surface of the world, represented by maps. These images are juxtaposed with a more natural, vertical force: the geothermal energy that pushes up volcanoes. No explicit themes or ideas are ever expressed directly in Geiser’s work, but these images suggest a contrast between a masculine energy that uses compass points and meridians to map and classify movement through space vs. a feminine energy that prefers an anchored, stationary attachment to home and the earth. A pair of masculine hands is repeatedly shown holding a rifle, and the maps are often shown in a small circle, as if scanned through a scope. These hands use technology to harness the earth’s fire energy in the manufacture of firearms, as a means of dominance. A more feminine pair of hands with painted nails tries to hold onto a model of a home, and later to rocks and soil, but the threat of the man’s violence seems to make everything shake, and she drops what she is holding. The soundtrack echoes this dichotomy, mixing the natural sounds of birds, insects, and water with more analytical, technical sounds such as morse code and radio static.
Absent Objects, an eight minute work from 2020, is built around some old photo albums, with empty oval spaces meant for portraits. The pages of the album are yellowed, stained, torn in places. Both the camera movement and the animated movement of the pages create complex compositions, with light projected through the holes of the moving pages, throwing multiple moving shadows. The soundtrack is layered with everyday sounds: ambient conversation, dishes, pots and pans.
In the second section the embossed, textured paper of these old albums is lit to emphasize its textural qualities. The old photo frames are interesting as objects in and of themselves, not merely as repositories for photos. The shots examine tissue paper, meant to separate and protect the photos, and gold, embossed corners, meant to hold photos. Beautiful birdsong accompanies shots of these gold corners, highlighting their resemblance to bird wings, which is also accentuated by Geiser’s animation of the corners fluttering and jumping around. In a way, the film consists of a series of re-framings of a set of frames.
This film is a good example of the way that Geiser interrogates found objects: she asks them what secrets they hold for her, and then she listens, with a fine-tuned ear, to what they say. She uses cinema as an artistic platform where these interrogations can be structured into poetic discoveries.
22 Light-years, a 13 minutes film from 2021, juxtaposes screen recordings from a computer application used for architectural design with photos of people, especially their legs and shoes, standing on an implied “ground.” (The film is a rare example of Geiser addressing the effects of computers on our consciousness.) The soundtrack contrasts two types of sound: elongated tones, such as soprano voices or organ chords, which are suddenly interrupted by mechanically repeating sounds like phones and car alarms. The sustained tones provide a feeling of spiritual uplift, which is repeatedly broken by the jarring interruptions. The voices and organ belong to the realm of analog, continual consciousness, whereas the discreet, repeated sounds of car alarm or ringing phone evoke the disconnected structure of digital media, where information comes in packets.
“Light-years” is a term that links space to time. We see flowers through narrow slits, as if the light that carries their image is being considered apart from the flowers themselves. A clock with the hands moving backward is accompanied by a song played backwards: the rules of time are being reversed. We’re in a virtual world which allows a house to float in the air, or time to flow backwards. The laws of physics are discarded. The upside-down house whirls over the woman’s head; it’s a giddy, disorienting trip to other dimensions.
The film suggests the disjunction we all feel, as embodied animal beings, in relation to the digital world. It is often remarked that the online world is “disembodied,” and lacks the weight and substance of our bodies and objects in the real world. However, it is also different temporally, in that web pages appear static and eternal, stuck in an eternal present moment, even moving image files, which look the same on repeated viewing. Digital “spaces” (as they are commonly but misleadingly called) don’t live and breath; they don’t have a bodily presence of flowing, changing time, the way that living beings do. Try as they might, the man in the photo can’t “stand up” on the virtual floor; the woman can’t live in the virtual house.
Chameleon Law (2022) is focused on things that develop upwards from the ground, either naturally, such as trees or mountains, or man-made, such as buildings. The buildings are mostly represented in diagrams, and only fleetingly in photos. Camera movement is mostly upwards, emphasizing the growth. The film ends with the sky, the aspirational goal of trees and architects. The title refers to a concept from Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue, which tells a symbolic tale of mountain-climbing. Geiser writes that the chameleon law “prevents us from seeing the other 99% of the possibilities that are at hand in each situation.” Like playwright Richard Foreman, Geiser’s films want to open our awareness to the hidden alternative directions which are planted, like seeds, inside of each moment of consciousness. The result is a poetic form of cinema which moves not forwards, but simultaneously outward from each moment, in myriad directions and endlessly proliferating pathways.
In the films assembled in Time, a substance, nature’s way of building something is seen in juxtaposition with man’s way. The organically developing bodily forms of geology, plants and animals are contrasted with man’s intellectual structures of maps, diagrams, and blueprints. In Heliotrope (2023), for example, complex machinery, seen in diagrams of levers, pulleys, and ropes, is layered with flowers, petals, and the complex structures grown by plants. The delicate organic forms of dried petals and seeds are scattered along half-tone photos of machinery and diagrams of circuits, physically juxtaposing the organic and the representational. A woman is seen blindfolded; later she is tested for pain reflex by poking a needle under her fingernail. To sense, to suffer, is to live. An axe appears repeatedly, the fine edge that separates, defines, and kills.
Magical, sustained soundscapes of bells and tones create an atmosphere of concentrated wonder: we’re here to witness an elaborate scheme, whether cleverly devised by man or naturally evolved, which is able to accomplish miracles. Plants spit out myriad seeds, ooze pollen. Machines hoist heavy objects in the air.
These films suggest interpretations, but at the same time they resist interpretation. They stubbornly remain themselves: collages of images and sounds, evading meaning while hinting at it. There is no comforting escape from the perceptual, the bodily, into the conceptual. In the comparison the films make between the embodied and the mental, Geiser is on the side of the body, of direct perceptual experience. We’re stuck with physical sensation, just as we’re stuck in our bodies. It may not be comfortable for people accustomed to an intellectual approach to living, but it is the doorway to ultimate reality.
Just as she prefers to visually examine discarded, forgotten objects, her sound textures dwell on ordinary “background” sounds: dogs barking, paper rustling, that are normally edited out of our consciousness, while we focus more on words, music, human signals. But it is the texture of these barking dogs and other ambient sounds that make up the substance of our lives. Her films pull the quotidian out of the background and into our awareness.
In Geiser’s work, the focus is almost always on diagrams, maps, and drawings of other objects, rarely shots of the objects themselves. Hence, they draw attention to how we conceptualize and categorize the world. But this is complicated by the fact that the maps and photos are often faded, crumpling, torn; all too obviously physical embodiments of symbolic representations. The object-ness of the maps reasserts its primacy over their conceptual content. The constant passing of shadows, flickering light, and shifting frames, calls our attention to the ephemeral, moving nature of consciousness, where we can only think about an object for a moment, before our attention shifts elsewhere. The titles themselves are filmed in an uncertain, flickering light, coming in and out of focus, emphasizing that all perception and being is provisional, constantly subject to revision.
The effect of all this layering is to create a complex, dream-like texture, in which multiple thoughts, feelings and impressions are shifting across the screen at all times, in contrasting rhythms. The effect is like the images in the mind’s eye when falling asleep or resting: many competing ideas and feelings crowd in, colliding and interacting, often linked up by visual or sound associations rather than through logic. In other words, Geiser creates visual/sound worlds with the dense fields of resonance and association of the best poetry.
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