Janie Geiser came to Cinematheque a few weeks
ago.1 Most of Geiser’s films in this program follow the same
basic template: frustrated narratives told (generally) through cutout animation, miniaturizing and abstracting classic
hollywood editing structures but without guideposts to what’s really “happening,” so that we watch
the sequence of shots returning and varying, more as a musical composition (repetition, variation, etc.) than as story ...
(in retrospect, an interesting relationship between this work and Morgan Fisher’s (), screened the following
weekend, constructed from “insert” shots, which seemed to build a sort of musical structure out of their
de-narrativized repetitions ... but Geiser’s films tease with a sensation of meaning just out of reach, where
Fisher’s film kicks meaning in its ass and sends it to bed without its supper ...)
I’ve liked the animated films on the program as I’ve seen them individually over the years, but frankly I
was sagging a bit after awhile; it’s natural for humans to try to make meaning, particularly if
they’re presented with some simulacrum of a meaning-bearing object, but it’s tiring to be
frustrated in the same way repeatedly over the course of five films. Yes, they all have different (non-)plots,
but the strategies of negation seemed not so dissimilar, and the technique was not so varied, and after awhile
I started to zone out ... until the last film on the program, The Night Watch, which I thought was a
phenomenal piece of work.
Figures from old black-and-white movies, “filtered” through television artifacts, are superimposed, in
proper scale, over color images of dollhouse interiors. The contrast of b/w against color, the abstracting effect of
the raster lines, the intermittent, hypnotic tracing of the rollbars, their silenced speaking and screaming, all give
these characters the qualities of ghosts ... restored to a mute half-life in an ersatz, knockdown environment like the
various cardboard-counterfeit realities of PK Dick, obsessive-compulsively repeating the gestures of their former
life.2
The scenes lifted from the old films all take place during the titular night — sleepwalking, restless turning
in the bed, midnight assignations — all seeming to play out in that slightly-altered state of consciousness
that one experiences when waking in the middle of the night, after a short first sleep, and their movements and the
editing of the film mirror that time-stretched slowness. Because it’s not actually their nightwatch
which is the subject of the film, but the viewer’s; (dare I say: as in all film,) the matter of the film is the
matter of the viewer’s consciousness. That sense of temporal displacement is not simply identification with the
characters’ experience of temporal displacement, but is the result of the film’s operation itself; and for
myself (and I suspect for Geiser and for most of the folks who were at the screening) that effect is magnified by
a subconscious mnemonic sympathy available in a few generations of potential
viewers: the disjointed, intercut, flickering blue-white figures are the dominant visual markers of insomnia,
because those images were, for a substantial chunk of our lives, the accompaniment of our own anxious nightwatches.
The black-and-whiteness of a film-on-video seems to me now to have meaning of its own, separate from that of the story it carries,
and nearly invariant; because the dominant mode of seeing those images was in that nightwaking state, and because the
images themselves were rendered unreal by the passing of time, images of a time we knew only by images, there was always
a sense of having been translated into some other realm of time, a magic ritual time of Oldfilm, where even the most
realist-in-its-time narrative took on some of the qualities of dream, as the viewer’s mind drifted and lost focus,
or irised in on some period detail — the art deco mantelpiece ornaments, the absurdly-padded jacket
shoulders — or the reflexive motion of the thumb on the remote at the commercial break snatched the viewer into
the universe next door, to pick up, however inflexibly the pieces of that half-finished
narrative.3
Geiser’s film draws us back into that state in the theater, in waking life, with yet another layer of nostalgia
applied (yes again, nostalgia for chimeric nostalgia), as this experience is now hopelessly unavailable in
its “natural environment.”
I don’t know that this response (to this particular material, at any event) is available to those who came of late
night TV-watching age after 1984 or so — I don’t know that younger audiences will have the kind of triggers
to set off that I have (it’s hard to imagine that Anthony Robbins or Girls Gone Wild! infomercials have the same
kind of potential for numinosity-generation). It’s somewhat analogous, I think, to the appeal of images from
Victorian advertising to a previous generation (La Femme Cent Têtes, Heaven and Earth Magic Feature),
a way of using images experienced as a child (but long forgotten) to re-stimulate the mental state in which they were
first experienced (most pronounced when that experience dates back to the boundary of infancy, when the mental state
was profoundly different).4 I would say that I was sure there were artifacts from the late 70s (e.g.) capable of
engendering the same response from people born in the
early 70s (and parallel cases for the following micro-generations), but I’m not so sure; it seems that part of the
equation is the effect of those images is their status as revenants (the shock of seeing something for the first time
in 20 years, and painfully, thanks to the endless revival/rerun cycles of boomer culture too much stuff never
got “lost” (How can I miss you if you won’t go away?). Or not; it’s also a boomer
syndrome to say Aw, the Kids of Today can’t possibly have the experiences we have with the kind of depth
of meaning that was available in the ******SIXTIES****** ... Balls to that. (But maybe the particular skewages of
60s/70s revivalism over the last few years, where people who weren’t born yet are rooting through the same
years as classic rock radio, but making their own sixties out of scraps of Basil Kirchen and Sandoz, rejecting
both the “canon” of the old decades and the surface levels of the present,
aren’t so far removed from those of us who spent “the acid years” plowing through second-string
pulp heros and off-brand golden age comics and, yes, getting up in the middle of the night to watch Poverty Row noirs.
And I’m too old to tell and suspect that speculation is just a different variety of boomer
youth-cooptation ...)
Such a little forest of synchronies whilst reading Crosby’s diaries these last weeks ... a mail from out of the blue from someone wanting to screen Photoheliograph for the summer solstice (alas! too late to actually get it shipped cross-country in time) ... there on the front page of the newspaper, a real-life Transit of Venus ... sitting last night reflecting on those and reading the entry for 12.27.28 which includes:
Red Black Red Red Red Red Black Black Black Red Black Red Red Black Red Red Red Red Black Red Black Red ... Red Black Red Red Black Black Black Black Black Black Red Red Black Red Red Red Black Red Red Black Red Red ...
... which y’know given my film is actually constructed (vs. the way P– the poem is actually constructed) kinda slays me where i sit ... but not to dwell on such things. ("Better not to speak of these things/Better not to speak.")
And just reading this book every day during the last two weeks of this abortion of a month and morning after morning being slapped in the face with the ritual exhortations Not To Be a Slave. Not To Be a Slave. Not To Be a Slave.
Yesterday all afternoon with a vicious headache, giving up on accomplishing anything, taking the painkillers in and my clothes off and lying down with Tom Carter on the stereo and the fog coming down over the houses across the street, the spectral beauty of it wiping me into unconsciousness and coming back to with the disc having progressed to the Scorces track, the endless repetitions curving what was left of my thought into tighter and tighter loops, the last three days’ incessant rerunning of Monday’s conversations mapping onto the nested loops in the code I had been trying to write as the sleep paralysis took over my body while the loops kept churning and churning, tighter and tighter and I watched the street get greyer and greyer ...
... and awake three hours later, still in some hypnagogic state as I throw my clothes back on (no time to think about what I’m doing) and stagger out the door to catch the bus to the Mission to see Burmese (how could I miss Burmese? and of course they were phenomenal but that’s not what’s going on here), and watching the absurdly-animated people drinking in the bar at the transfer point on Haight Street, and up over the hill and back down and into the Elbo Room and up the stairs and up to the bar for my second glass of scotch in two years ...
... and as I sat in one of the small pools of light, during the latter part of the opening act’s set, reading and looking at the crowd around me, washes over me the same feeling I had sitting in the cafe on 16th Street, on a Saturday afternoon earlier in this abortion of a month, the feeling that for once I am among my own people, that I have somehow returned from some exile. That what I have been and where I have been are not what and where I am supposed to be, that I have squandered myself ... and back out and into a noodle shop and the noodles taste better than any food I’ve eaten in months, and again the sense that this empty ethnic lunchcounter at midnight is somehow where I belong and so home to bed again ...
And today less pain but still no sense of how I can ever be at home in my own skin again. (Sorry folks, nothing to learn here, I’m still as lost as you are.)
