Home : Immer Zu : JANIE GEISER

An internationally known filmmaker and theater director/designer, Janie Geiser is the recipient of a 1989 Obie and a 1992 Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other awards and honors. She began making films in 1990, first as an element of her performance work and later as a separate form. Her films have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Cinematheque in San Francisco, and in festivals throughout the world. Her animated film THE SECRET STORY was recently shown on the PBS program NEW TELEVISION. IMMER ZU had its European premiere recently at the Rotterdam Film Festival in the Netherlands and was featured in the 1998 New York Film Festival's "Views from the Avant-Garde." She is also an accomplished illustrator, and her book, THE TORNADO TREATY, is in the Artists' Books collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Questionnaires were sent to each artist participating in REEL NEW YORK -- Season Four. Below are the artist's written responses.

	Janie Geiser
	Immer Zu
	What inspired you to make this piece? With IMMER ZU, I worked with imagery that refers to both film noir and spy films, but I subverted these genres for my personal use. The quest in the film is a search to decipher meaning from the coded messages of life, an attempt to translate these cryptic messages before their writer/speaker departs the world.  From IMMER ZU. Tell us a little about the process involved in making this work. The process for making IMMER ZU involved both gathering found objects and images and creating miniature figures and sets in order to shoot the animation. The animation itself was done over a period of about two months, with a lot of improvising under the camera, and the use of in-camera superimpositions using a Bolex 16mm camera. The structure developed in the editing process, working with a kind of elliptical narrative that is emotional and associative rather than linear.  From IMMER ZU. Is there a relationship between your work as a video/filmmaker and life in the New York metropolitan area? My work has been very affected by New York and the landscape of buildings, light, and decay. In IMMER ZU, I used a papier-mache cityscape, with archetypal skyscrapers lit from within. The shapes of the buildings, the eternal night, evoke not only the city, but the city as it has been depicted in film and photogrpahs. Beyond a door, a factory hums with whirring machines, creating a tickertape message, as I imagine might exist somewhere in the city behind the thousands of closed doors. How has the burgeoning independent movement affected your life and work as a video/filmmaker? The independent film movement has had very little effect on me.

Home : Immer Zu : JANIE GEISER
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