Short Sighted

Secret Stories

Shorts by Janie Geiser

Words: Holly Willis

"I like the way inanimate objects are able to speak," says Los Angeles-based filmmaker Janie Geiser, who hosted a show of seven of her animated shorts last weekend at the Museum of Jurassic Technology's small screening room, The Borzai Kabinet. Geiser is also the director of the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts at the California Institute for the Art, which makes sense: Geiser's films have an uncanny ability to make old toys, figurines and spaces powerfully evoke meaning and feeling.

Geiser's wonderful Lost Motion, for example, delineates a panicky past when a businessman, played by a nattily dressed metal figurine, can't seem to find a woman who is supposed to be arriving by train; he stumbles through an ominous urban landscape built from the clunky metal shapes of an old Erector set.

In The Fourth Watch, the camera prowls through the shadowy rooms of a tin house illuminated by the iridescent glow of old movie images shimmering like silvery ghosts in a gothic romance; meanwhile, The Secret Story is home to toy figures from the 1930s, flat, implacable cut-outs who nevertheless communicate multifaceted emotions.

Geiser shares with filmmakers such as Jan Svankmajer the rare ability to make children's toys and seemingly innocent objects from the past resonate with the most unsettling, arcane and adult fears. Better still, Geiser gives voice to the reaches of the unconscious, pointing to the abandoned splendor that exists prior to the rules of society and language. Several of Geiser?s female characters in particular hover between the realms of proper order and scary but strangely appealing chaos. Indeed, in The Red Book, a woman finds the boundary between the real world and some nascent yet delicious infinity marked across her body. Although she's a flat doll living in a paper world, her sense of psychic and bodily division strikes a deeply familiar chord.