The Secret Story

Janie Geiser takes us along on her search for the original meaning of the word 'algebra' with the help of a remarkable series of found objects, medical illustrations and a rich variety of animation techniques.

Short experimental animation by Janie Geiser

“A young woman moves between light and dark, life and death; a latter-day Persephone. The natural world responds accordingly. Neglected negatives, abandoned envelopes, botanical and anatomical illustrations, and found recordings reorder themselves, collapsing and reemerging in her liminal world.”—Janie Geiser

This movie is an overview of the history and practice of Toy Theater. Each frame is on for 5 seconds, but you can pause it if you need it on longer.

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.

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.—Janie Geiser

Evidence is scientifically arranged and catalogued, suggesting a corridor to knowledge. Elusive. Crimson.

A found faded set of vermillion 35mm slides—evidence of time and change. Their red hues transform the slides’ subjects—mountain landscapes of the West, long-span bridges, tourists and tourist sites—into simultaneously sublime and corrosive views. In Chameleon Law, these time-altered images, alternately depleted and extreme, suggest a heated landscape of the past and future.

Slideshow reveals moments in time in the lives of strangers. Strangers to me, but maybe not to each other. Found in a Berlin flea market in the 1990's, these slides originated in the DDR (East Germany):an embossed DDR decorates the top of many of the vivid plastic slide frames. The slides' photographic images were made of ephemeral materials. As objects, they have a certain graphic power, especially when illuminated on a light table. Scattered among the boxed-up slides were also a few educational slides highlighting working sites. Additionally, there seem to be a few commercially produced images of soldiers, the border---these were in cardboard slide frames and may have been produced by West German companies. Time and place are suggested---sometime before 1989, when the wall came down. Working with the slides, I came to feel that I knew some of the people. Many emerged across multiple slides. But I can only know their traces.

This ain’t no Pixar. This is ain’t no Disney. This ain’t no foolin’ around. ANXIOUS ANIMATION presents six contemporary film artists who take us into surreal worlds of delirium and paranoia… The reigning proponent of cut-and-paste, LEWIS KLAHR nourishes intensely private visions on the compost heap of collective fantasy through old magazines, comic books, and cocktail iconography.Complex, full of charm, and pervaded by themes of loss, JANIE GEISER simultaneously creates and deconstructs fantasies through doll-like figurines, cut-outs, and found objects in her cryptic narratives.JIM TRAINOR’s handmade animations explore the inner lives of animals that appear strangely self-aware even as they instinctually copulate, feed, fight, kill and die.The Bay Area collective of RODNEY ASCHER, SYD GARON, and ERIC HENRY conjure diabolical visions with digital savvy, accompanied by the manic music of Buckethead and DJ Q-Bert.

Medical illustrations of bodies, with model paper buildings and images of cultivated and wild plants in an elliptical journey toward ephemerality. These bodies lose their volume and exist, somehow, without flesh. They are mere outlines, traveling through indeterminate space, domestic and otherwise. Cut open, but not bleeding, what do we see when we no longer have eyes?

In the early part of the 20th Century, Los Angeles, with its warm, dry climate, was a haven for the chronically ill. Working from archival images of pre-suburban Los Angeles, medical illustrations, charts, photographs of abandoned hospitals and miniatures, Silent Sister centers on the intersection of landscape and the body; both become the location of narrative, memory, erasure, history and loss.

A chance stereo view from a Vaporetto (water bus) ride in Venice, 2019.

Initiated by an unearthed photograph of her father and his colleagues around a conference table in a generic mid-century office, Geiser’s evocative collage film charts a personal-political path through the recesses of America’s industrial ecosystem. Using animation and re-photography effects, Geiser presents an array of images (geometric diagrams, blueprints, live-action landscape shots) in a prismatic reflection on power structures in the workplace.

LOST MOTION uses small cast metal figures, toy trains, decayed skyscrapers and other found objects to follow a man’s search for a mysterious woman. From an illegible note found on a dollhouse bed, through impossible landscapes, the man waits for her train which never arrives. His wanderings lead him to the other side of the tracks, a forgotten landscape of derelict erector-set buildings populated by lost souls. Dream merges with nightmare in this post-industrial land of vivid night.

A found psychological test kit yields puzzle figures with cutout ears, cutoff heads, and pullaway body parts. The ear opens into an interior world of shifting science book images which, when isolated, evoke mysteries more than they reveal facts.