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

To borrow Morse's phrase, atmosphere is something "you had to be there" to perceive. (20) But evocative description is enriched by context, and corporeal sensations offer lessons in history. Which brings us back to the shocking slam that boxes in our heroine and echoes throughout the space-in-between the sculptural components comprising "The Spider's Wheels." Here, in Geiser's deconstructed chamber of cinema, the mood is one of serious exhilaration, but the longer you linger the more your initial sensation of delight is punctuated by pangs of dread. Every time that roof goes up you anticipate its crash back down. Other visitors to the installation seemed to feel the same: they gasped, or winced, or stopped in their tracks, reacting each time the Spider was trapped. And while such reactions are not gender-exclusive--I saw both men and women respond in similar ways--they may be especially gender-poignant. The image of a woman engaged in struggle is nothing less than archetypal, and seeing this struggle repeatedly thwarted can be especially painful for female visitors, if not traumatic. It is something that has happened consistently throughout history (in the United States it took feminists seventy years of activism to achieve the right to vote) and is an experience women know all too well in the world.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

To have created a form of political commentary that possesses what might be called somatic authority--that registers kinesthetically, in our bodies--is one of the greatest achievements of "The Spider's Wheels." An installation that is alternately riveting and discomfiting, that encourages us to be analytic while filling us with awe--these things make the work extraordinary. Finally, a feminist Coney Island of the avant-garde whose spectacular attractions both astonish and critique.

NOTES (1.) See Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Chapter 8, "Power and Peril in the Serial-Queen Melodrama," was an important resource for Geiser in thinking through her ideas for "The Spider's Wheels." Interview with the author, Los Angeles, May 2006. (2.) Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, eds., Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (New York: Aperture in association with the Bay Area Video Coalition, 1991), 14. (3.) Chrisse Iles, "Video and Film Space," in Space Site Intervention: Situating Installation Art, Erika Suderburg, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 257. (4.) Janie Geiser in Melinda Barlow, "Interview with Janie Geiser," Animac, No. 3 (2004) (Spain), 3. (5.) This is Geiser's phrase from her program notes for the work, 1999. (6.) For more on Automata and Geiser's role in the international revival of miniature theatre, see Melinda Barlow, "Size Matters: In the Micro-Universe of Toy Theatre, Startling Shifts in Perspective Require Audiences to Look Closely" American Theatre, Vol. 22, No. 22 (February 2005), 60-64. (7.) See Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), for a detailed discussion of female fans and the serial film craze. (8.) Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-garde," in Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 61. (9.) Fernand Leger, "A critical essay on the plastic qualities of Abel Gance's film The Wheel," in Edward Fry, ed., Functions of Painting, trans. Alexandra Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 21, cited in Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions," 56. (10.) See Sergei Eisenstein; Maciej Sliwowski; Jay Leyda, Annette Michelson, "Notes for a Film of Capital," October, Vol. 2 (Summer, 1976), 3-26. (11.) Gunning, 61. (12.) Ibid, 61. (13.) Carolyn Walker Bynum, "Wonder," American Historical Review (February 1997), 1. (14.) Ibid, 1. (15.) Gunning, 61 (16.) Margaret Morse, "Video Installation Art: The Image, The Body, and the Space-in-Between," in Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, eds., Illuminating Video, 153-167. In the last fifteen years there have been other books and essays that have also explored the phenomenology of installation--but not moving image installation--and these do not discuss what Morse isolated in 1991 and what most concerns me here: that elusive thing called atmosphere. Significant, however, for their examination of the "nomadic" aspect of installations are James Meyer's "The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity," and Miwon Kwon's "One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity," both in Suderburg, 23-37 and 38-63, respectively. Two other useful sources on kinesthetic insights in a variety of media are Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) and Caroline A. Jones, ed., Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). (17.) Morse, 167. (18.) Ibid, 153. (19.) Ibid, 166. (20.) Ibid, 165.

MELINDA BARLOW is associate professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the editor of Mary Lucier: Art & Performance (Johns Hopkins, 2000) and the author of Lost Objects of Desire: Video Installation, Mary Lucier, and the Romance of History (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press). She is currently working on a collection of essays on Janie Geiser titled Curiosa in Motion.