Immer Zu

(1997)

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16mm film (b/w), 8:30 minutes  (1997)

Sound collage: Janie Geiser

Immer Zu is an elliptical collage film that evokes an 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 alternately covered and uncovered in a shadowed journey toward eclipse.

“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.” –— Mark McElhatten, program notes, 1998 New York Film Festival.

“…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.”  — Film Threat  (1998)

Immer Zu is featured on Other Cinema’s DVD Anxious Animation.

Selected Screening history:
New York International Film Festival (1998)
Rotterdam International Film Festival (1999)
Museum of Modern Art (2001)
San Francisco Cinematheque, Dialogues in the Dark (2004)
Cinema Project, Portland; The Emotional Lives of Inanimate Objects, 2004