Janie Geiser

Janie Geiser is known for her animation work using images and objects.  She won awards for her experimental animation and her collage-style work. Her films were also screened in many galleries, including the National Gallery of Modern Art, MOMA, the New York Film Festival, and many more. 

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Her film "The Red Book" was part of the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Her film was also selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Archive to be preserved. This film was also selected as one of the top ten experimental films of the past decade.  

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Geiser also creates innovative performances integrating puppets, various objects, and projections. Her puppetry work has also been featured in many museums and theatres. Her puppet work is beyond amazing to witness. 

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During her talk, I was drawn to the various films she created, especially the film titled The Red Book. It is an experimental film, using stop motion, collage, and object animation to create a dreamlike narrative. The way she used different objects and integrated stop motion into her work made it amazing to witness. It was a film that played with all my senses and was an immersive experience. The way she combined music perfectly with visuals made it one to watch. What I was most fascinated by was the use of color and texture. Using the concept of red and adding in so many different elements to the film gave it a certain charm, including the way in which she layered the backgrounds to add texture to it.

The feeling I got while watching the film was a sense of wonder. I was honestly a bit confused by the storyline, but that’s something I found interesting about this kind of film. It is left open to interpretation, and every person who watched this film might take something different away and feel something different as well. The fact that a filmmaker can achieve this type of quality in her film is something I admire about Geiser’s work.

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Another thing I found extremely interesting was her puppet work. It was fascinating to watch how she created the puppets to be controlled by people, and for the puppets to move around with utmost realism. I have only witnessed this type of puppetry once, a while ago, when I was watching the Broadway show Life of Pi, where three people were controlling one animal. In that show, the animal was lifelike, and the people became the animal. I felt Geiser achieved a similar feat with just the small puppet she created. The people controlling the puppet became the puppet, and it was fascinating to watch how they were controlled and moved around in the set.

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Overall, I loved hearing and listening to Janie Geiser talk, and it was a different experience for me to see her films because I had never seen anything like them. Honestly, before I heard her talk or watched her films, I hadn’t known how collage animation could work as a short film. It was interesting and opened my eyes to new ways of filmmaking that I had never explored before.

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