Historic Northampton

Programs & Events

Fast Forward Film Series

The Animations of Janie Geiser
Sunday, April 13, 2014 at 3 pm
Janie Geiser film stills
Animator Janie Geiser will be present for a Q&A session following
the screening.
Please note seating is limited to 25 chairs.

Program
Films from the Nervous Films Series

Arbor (2013), 7 minutes
digital video
 

Janie Geiser's new film Arbor suggests the fragility and ephemerality of memory and its artifacts. Geiser re-animates a set of photographs found in a thrift store, creating a liminal space between representation and abstraction, figure and landscape, fiction and memory. Gathering on a past hill, lounging on forgotten stone walls behind lost trees, the inhabitants of Arbor cycle through this one afternoon repeatedly, gradually dissolving into time or into the landscape without revealing what we cannot know, and becoming shadows in their own stories.

The Floor of the World (2010), 9 minutes
shot on 16mm film finished in digital video
 
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 mundane knowledge in this world, where numbers mark the way. The floor of the world turns out to be easily pierced, liquid, permeable.
Ghost Algebra (2009), 7:30 minutes
shot on 16mm film finished in digital video
 
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.
Ricky (2009), 11 minutes
 

The realms of childhood, war, and loss echo through Ricky. A found sound recording forms the spine of the film . . . a scratched audio letter from father to son.

Animated Short Film by Martha Colburn
Evil of Dracula (1997), 2 minutes
16 mm
Home-spun special effects of funnel-vision and hand-colored film with a soundtrack by Jad Fair and Jason Willett. The recipient of numerous awards, grants and residencies, Martha Colburn is represented by Horton Gallery in New York.
About the artist, Janie Geiser

One of the pioneers of the renaissance of American avant-garde object performance, Geiser creates innovative, hypnotic works that merge puppetry, film/video and performance. Geiser’s performances have toured nationally and internationally, and her films have been screened at museums and festivals around the globe. Geiser has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and many foundations. Geiser is a Co-Artistic Director of Automata, a Los Angeles nonprofit dedicated to the creation, presentation, and preservation of puppet and object performance, experimental film, pre-cinematic attractions, and other lost and neglected forms. Geiser is on the faculty of the School of Theater at CalArts, where she teaches puppet and object theater, as well as interdisciplinary performance.

With sponsorship from the Northampton Arts Council
Northampton Arts Council
This program is supported in part by a grant from the Northampton Arts Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
Massachusetts Cultural Council