Toward a feminist "Coney Island of the avant-garde": Janie Geiser recasts the cinema of attractions.

You hear Janie Geiser's cinematic diorama-installation before you see it. Drifting out of a darkened room are the suspenseful flourishes played on a piano when a damsel is in distress in a silent film, punctuated every so often by a thunderous clap. Produced by a motorized contraption that would be right at home on the grounds of a country fair--a large box hanging in mid-air whose side flaps are hoisted up by a rope on pulleys, then released with a violent slam--this is a sound that stops you dead in your tracks. It rings in your ears, runs down your spine, and makes you feel suddenly trapped. These sensations have a political dimension. Their hold on the body offers a lesson in history, and invites a kinesthetic insight into the freedoms and limitations experienced by women in early American films.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It is precisely this tension between female liberation and restriction that is the subject of Geiser's "The Spider's Wheels," created for the tenth anniversary exhibition of the City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Individual Artist Fellowship Program held at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park. Geiser became interested in the rapidly fading first generation of female Hollywood stars when, in 1999, she moved to LA to become director of the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts at CalArts. Intrigued by the glimpses into the once-adventurous lives of now unknown actresses from the teens and twenties afforded by their obituaries, she began to investigate the careers of Ruth Clifford, Pauline Curley, Laura La Plante, Allene Ray, and their more famous counterparts--the "serial queens"--Helen Holmes, Ruth Rowland, and Pearl White. Athletic, strong, and self-reliant, these women often performed their own stunts and were as accomplished in real life as the heroines whose exploits they enacted on screen. The press regarded them with a curious mixture of admiration and anxiety, and the characters they portrayed in serials like The Perils of Pauline (1914, by Louis J. Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie) and The Hazards of Helen (1914, by James D. Davis and J.P. McGowan) were alternately empowered and imperiled. The heroines' ambivalent condition became the basis of Geiser's installation. (1)

Utilizing found imagery from serial films and 16mm black-and-white footage of a contemporary actress playing a silent film heroine dispersed across three distinct object/projection areas, "The Spider's Wheels" focuses on the forgotten star of a fictitious serial about a female detective known as "The Spider." The central element in the installation is that compelling contraption, an opaque Plexiglas box with perforated metal flaps that also serves as a silver screen. Superimposed on both sides are luminous images of a determined White and her double, Andrea LeBlanc, crawling back and forth through a tunnel that gradually gives way to an apocryphal landscape. The screen, as its sides lift, transforms temporarily into a house. When the roof descends with a violent slam, our heroine is stuck. In this situation, she appears hopelessly boxed in.

Elsewhere in the installation, the heroine has other options. In one corner of the room, she reclines in her "web," a paper and wire mesh screen on which is projected an uncanny image of her head. In another miniature projection she is engaged in detection. Adjoining the house-screen is a closet-diorama that seems to belong on the set of a Technicolor version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, by Robert Wiene). Constructed in the foreshortened perspective favored by German Expressionist films, a deep blue corridor leads to a mysterious red door at the top of a small staircase. A latched peephole invites us to peer in on an inexplicable scene: a man's hands crush and conceal an unidentified document before deliberately dropping an inkwell onto the floor, causing a spectral female figure to abruptly open a door. The wide-eyed Spider witnesses these events and then, unexpectedly, looks out at us--as though she is acknowledging our presence as viewers. Like her, we're left wondering how these incidents add up, and more importantly, what they might mean.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"The Spider's Wheels," a video installation exploring the representation of women in silent film whose spectacular form has all the appeal of a fairground attraction, is a wild hybrid that fits simultaneously into so many histories, it is hard to know where to begin. On the one hand, its seamless fusion of film and video places the work squarely within the new genre of cinematic moving image installation made possible by the widespread availability of the video projector in the 1990s. Video's pedigree may be "anything but pure," (2) as Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer noted fifteen years ago, but those who were drawn to it in the 1960s and 1970s were performance and conceptual artists, electronic musicians, sculptors, and social activists interested in community-based television or documentary--rather than filmmakers. Experimental film had its own history, and, during this same period, the "heroic," visionary avant-garde that championed radical abstraction, rejected Hollywood narrative style, and was most associated with the work of Stan Brakhage was at its peak. Crossover between the two media was rare. More recently, however, as Chrissie Iles put it, "the languages of film and video have become conflated into a single cinematic aesthetic." (3)

This conflation signals the third distinct phase in the history of moving image installation. Following the phenomenologically oriented works of the 1960s and 1970s and the sculptural arrangements of the 1980s, the wall-sized projections of the last two decades recall the large-scale, "expanded cinema" events and slide installations of thirty-five years ago. Shot on 16mm film or video and digitally projected, often on enormous, contiguous screens, some of these new works utilize installation as a tool for interrogating Hollywood cinema. Douglas Gordon's installation "24 Hour Psycho" (1993), for example, meticulously deconstructs Alfred Hitchcock's famous thriller by slowing the film down to two frames per second and stripping it of sound, thus exposing nuances of movement imperceptible to the naked eye and making each gesture seem even more menacing. Isaac Julien's installation "Baltimore" (2003) does something different. Made in the wake of Baaadasssss Cinema (2002), his documentary about the history of Blaxploitation films, Julien's three-screen work intersperses dialogue from The Mack (1973) throughout 16mm color sequences featuring the genre's founder Melvin Van Peebles on an urban journey that ultimately brings him face to face with his own effigy at the Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore.

"The Spider's Wheels" uses a three-dimensional configuration of elements to interrogate an earlier period in Hollywood's history, thus transforming a number of experimental film traditions while taking Geiser's eclectic body of work in a whole new direction--one that makes her unique feminist aesthetic particularly forceful and explicit. It her first installation resembles a stage set, this is perhaps no surprise as Geiser is a master of puppet theatre, and what drew her to puppetry twenty-five years ago--its ability to invent "an incredibly visual world apart, where image, object, movement, sound, and text are all equal players" (4)--sounds remarkably like a definition of moving image installation. Her comment also alludes to what she loves about experimental cinema, especially the genre of collage animation: its capacity for creating self-contained worlds.

Geiser has moved fluidly back and forth between experimental film and theatre since 1990, when she made a short, black-and-white animated film titled The Royal Terror Theatre and a toy theatre segment for Half a World Away, a diorama-performance dramatizing British naval officer Robert Scott's fatal voyage to the South Pole in 1912, co-created with A. Leroy (a.k.a. Dick Connette). Since that time, she has made ten animated films that collage found imagery with found objects, and often includes films in her works for puppet theatre, projecting clips onto characters and elements of mise-enscene, sometimes borrowing footage from Hollywood films. Ether Telegrams (1999), for example, a "theatrical collage" (5) inspired by the dramatic use of gesture in nineteenth-century spirit photographs and by the ghost stories of Edith Wharton, projects imagery from the dream-like opening sequence of Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) onto a masked performer flanked by a screen to construct the winding, moonlit terrain through which she walks to a haunted mansion. More recently Geiser has integrated film and theatre via Automata, a company co-founded with CalArts colleague Susan Simpson in 2004 to explore the common ancestry of puppetry, miniature theatre, and experimental film in earlier kinds of popular entertainment like the cinema of attractions, nineteenth-century toy theatre, magic lantern shows, and cabinets of curiosities. (6)