Lost Motion

1999
Country: USA
Duration: 11 mins
Colour,
Sound: Opt.
Available Format/s: 16mm

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Lost Motion uses small cast metal figures, toy trains, decayed skyscrapers, and other found objects to follow a man’s search for a mysterious woman. From an illegible note found on a dollhouse bed, through impossible landscapes, the man waits for her train which never arrives. His wanderings lead him to the other side of the tracks, a forgotten landscape of derelict erector- set buildings populated by lost souls. Dream merges with nightmare in this post-industrial land of vivid night.
‘Lost Motion is the sumptuously told tale of a failed search…In her most visually lush film to date, Geiser superimposes images and drapes her scenes in moving shadow patterns. She depicts the train’s arrival by superimposing images of dolls exiting model trains over the searching man’s figure… Ultimately the film’s fragmentary constructions become more than modernist denials of illusion and assertions of materiality.: essential to the film’s tone, Geiser’s obviously illusory images evoke strong feelings as the mundane drama of a failed meeting’ – Fred Camper, Chicago Reader (May 25, 2000)

More works by Janie Geiser

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