Janie Geiser

Janie Geiser (born 1957 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) is an American artist and experimental filmmaker.

Her notable works include The Fourth Watch, Terrace 49, The Red Book, The Secret Story, Colors, Immer Zu, Lost Motion, and Clouded Sulphur.

Janie Geiser was born in 1957 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

She is the second oldest child among six total children.

Janie Geiser attended the University of Georgia and graduated with a degree in visual art.

While she is known as one of the pioneers of the renaissance of American avant-garde puppetry and object performance, she did not have any defining early experiences with puppetry.

Upon completion her BFA degree, Geiser began creating work as a visual artist, exhibiting her drawings and paintings in Atlanta art galleries.

By taking a job as the curator of a non-profit, multi-arts organization called Nexus, Geiser began to meet and collaborate with artists from many different fields, including music, dance, theater, and printmaking.

After her time at Nexus, Geiser took a part-time job in the 1980s as the curator of the Center for Puppetry Arts' puppet exhibits.

It was at the Center for Puppetry Arts that she began to investigate both contemporary and historical puppetry, and she encountered a number of contemporary puppetry performers there, including Bruce Schwartz and Paul Zaloom.

She created her first puppetry performance, Little Eddie, in the Center's basement, and developed several works there under the name Jottay Theater, with puppeteers and musicians from Atlanta.

In 1986, Geiser moved to New York City where she founded "Janie Geiser and Co.", a collection of New York actors and puppeteers.

She created a number of key works there, including Stories from Here (1986), developed with the Jottay Theater, including writer Neill Bogan and composer Chip Epsten.

They were awarded an Obie for their production of Stories from Here at Dance Theater Workshop.

She collaborated as a designer with other theater artists, including The Talking Band (The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, 1988), Dick Connette (Half a World Away, 1989), and Mac Wellman and Travis Preston (Infrared, 1990).

In 1990, Geiser also released the first of her three short puppet films, Royal Terror Theater.

Other shows included When the Wind Blows (1992), Evidence of Floods (1994-1996), Night Behind the Windows (1998) and more.

Starting in 1992, Geiser began making short experimental films, a practice that continues through this day.

Her performances often combine film and live performance.

Her films have been screened at major museums including MOMA, the Whitney Museum, LACMA, SFMOMA, and others.

Her films have screened at festivals including The New York Film Festival, London International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and others.

Mark McElhatten writes in the program for the 1998 New York Film Festival:

“The dark-meshed moires of the memory book in its pulp fiction edition forms obsidian riddles that cut time to ribbons.

Life puts us in the critical condition of having to espionage with our own stolen recollection of events preserving them in a code often difficult to retrieve as it sinks into the limited access of the mental underworld.”

And in Film Threat (1998):

“Along with Kerry Laitala’s beautiful "Retrospectroscope" (already well-reviewed in a previous Film Threat), Janie Geiser’s 9-minute short is one of the few shorts at this year’s festival, experimental or otherwise, which deserves more attention than it’s getting.

Geiser has made an extremely cryptic piece of highly original cut-out animation with a mystery and menace that recall David Lynch’s early shorts.”

In the year 2000 Geiser received the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award.

She also received the 2023 Stan Brakhage Vision Award at the Denver Film Festival.

Around 2008 during the creation of her film, Ghost Algebra, Geiser experienced a strange health problem.

She has a feeling of “electricity in her nerves”.

Geiser visited all kinds of doctors, had an MRI, went to a neurologist, and what seemed to help the most was a combination of acupuncture and herbs.

The cause of her health issue was never determined and symptoms still surfaces occasionally.

This health issue served as an inspiration for her film, Ghost Algebra.

She is married to collage filmmaker Lewis Klahr.

The Red Book is a collagic animated film in which Geiser describes The Red Book as “an elliptical, pictographic animated film that uses flat, painted figures and collage elements in both two- and three-dimensional settings to explore the realms of memory, language and identity from the point of view of a woman amnesiac.”

In 2009, it was selected to the United States National Film Registry.

An elliptical, experimental film that evokes a mysterious undercover world of secret messages, cryptic language, and indecipherable codes.

Shot in luminous black and white, Immer Zu uses miniature two and three dimensional figures and sets, as well as shadow puppetry, to suggest the urgency of a nocturnal mission, a mission of life and death importance.

In this dark and richly atmospheric film, with a soundtrack collaged from several film noirs, meaning is constantly covered and uncovered in a shadowed journey toward eclipse.