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Puppet Noir

Melinda Barlow

From Millennium Film Journal No. 37 (Fall 2001): Idiosyncrasies

A girl sits up in bed, awakened by an argument; glancing out her window, she decides to leave. But outside the night is less than inviting:   hammers pursue her, hurdles block her path, scissors surround her, snipping at her back. Undaunted, she walks on and undergoes a sea change:   once a small figure dwarfed by a tower, she finds herself suddenly, strangely enlarged. Now, it seems, she towers over houses, and like all children, outgrows her home. Her parents are surprised when she glides by the window, to see their enormous daughter on a journey, alone.
 
That journey leads the girl through a nocturnal world where objects are enormous and every gesture is monumental. Hammers, scissors, a looming tower of Babel, all are gigantic incarnations of fear. But the slam of a fist by a father on a table, a mother’s forceful response in kind, a daughter’s insistence, her arms raised in anger, that the slicing scissors simply stop—each of these gestures is also extraordinary because of the way it distills an emotion, or expresses, in Janie Geiser’s phrase, a “universe of desires.”     
 
That puppets makes these gestures in Geiser’s film Babeltown (1992) renders them that much more extraordinary, for all three figures are barely articulate:  their elbows bend, their tiny heads turn, but like the cut-out figures in Geiser’s other films, their legs are stiff and their facial expressions, blank. We know, nonetheless, just how they feel, and what they make us feel is completely unexpected. Puppetry depends on this metamorphosis, on the ability to make the inanimate come alive. Cinema likewise relies on a kind of animism that intensifies the significance of actions and objects and draws our attention to minuscule things. Closeups, for example, transform dimension   they alter traditional experiences of scale. Thus, when in the film, the mother turns toward the father, and when he ignores her, staring straight ahead, we feel the impasse in their disagreement because their faces completely fill the frame.
 
In Babeltown such moments of emotional magnitude spring from Geiser’s careful fusion of film technique and nuanced gesture. Here, puppetry and cinema together create a strange tale of family disharmony and female self-discovery punctuated by sudden shifts in scale. But this is just one way Geiser has combined the two media during the last ten years. Babeltown was originally included in When the Wind Blows (1992), a multimedia performance blending puppet theater, spoken narration and a score by composer Chip Epsten. The Red Book has been shown several times as a prelude to Evidence of Floods (both 1994), suggesting that the woman who has lost her memory in the film is perhaps the woman in search of her identity in the performance. And in Immer Zu (1997), cut-out animation, shadow puppets, and a   soundtrack drawn largely from Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) create a richly atmospheric film noir about a woman’s attempt to decipher a mysterious code.
 
Obsession, missed connections, indecipherable messages, the ways we are haunted by all that we have lost, these are some of Geiser’s major themes;   shifting veils of light and color, striking changes in dimension and scale, nocturnal journeys through urban landscapes, moments of emotional vertigo when the world seems to spin, these are among her favorite techniques and motifs. All are present in differing combinations in Babeltown, The Red Book, Immer Zu and Evidence of Floods, the Bessie Award-winning performance whose ambiguous narrative is influenced by cinema.
           
Unfolding across eight small, individually-lit stages arranged around the periphery of a darkened room, this mysterious crime story also features a central female character on a journey which begins at night, as in Babeltown, with a decision to leave. This time, however, the woman flees not parental strife but the abuser who sleeps next to her and dominates her dreams.
 
In the first scene we feel her difficulty in making this decision. Awakened by a monstrous male figure welling up from her unconscious—at all, spot-lit rod puppet whose heavy step upends six red chairs—the woman moves back and forth from bed to window, pacing, pausing, deliberating, lifting her tiny arm rhythmically up and down. After rubbing her blackened eye and shaking her first in rage, slowly her thoughts turn to methods of murder, and a knife, a gun, and a bottle of poison swing above her head. Eventually, however, she opts for walking out. Her action infuriates her self-destructive lover, who promptly slashes his own arm with a knife.
            
This ruse sets in motion a complex tale of abuse, deception and pursuit which artfully blends visual and thematic elements from the best films noir with real insights into the subtext of domestic violence that often drives their narratives. Thus, in a shadowy world of diners, rented rooms and run-down apartment buildings—rendered primarily in reds and blues rather than the traditional black and white—a woman on the lam adopts the guise of a femme fatale-turned-private-eye to throw both her abuser and the law off her track. “Pushed around” like Kathy Moffatt in Out of the Past (1947) and all the women with bruised faces in L.A.Confidential (1997), and pursued by a policeman who whistles Robert Mitchum’s signature hymn from The Night of the Hunter (1955), our disguised P.I. dons a new identity like Mrs. Neil in The Narrow Margin (1952), only to see her former self peering timidly through the diner window. Chasing that self across the jagged rooftops of the inner city, she saves her from suicide with two small gestures:  pulling her back from the edge of a building, she gently strokes her arm, and comforts herself.   
 
As in Babeltown, it is the emotional purity of such gestures which gives them their enormous power. Sparingly used, each gesture becomes huge. Each is also tremendously moving, in part because we view them at such close range, standing or sitting in front of each diorama, following the woman’s flight through the city by moving to a new scene every few minutes. When our heroine, for example, tries to catch her breath, wedged in a corner of her newly rented room, her fragile wooden frame moves quickly in and out through the delicate manipulations of puppeteer Trudi Cohen, one of Geiser’s long-time collaborators. I wanted to rescue the tiny marionette at this moment, so human in her exhaustion, vulnerability and fear. I also wanted to help her during a scene later on, one in which she ultimately rescues herself.
 
The stage for this scene takes a slightly different format. Instead of a square diorama with a proscenium front framed in punched tin, Geiser designed an elongated, four-walled booth with wire mesh slots on two sides to permit something akin to a cinematic closeup. Peering through the slots, we see the rented room changed in shape and dimension, its furniture now flattened, its occupant undisguised. We watch as the woman who has resumed her real identity paces back and forth, peeks out the door, and puts a hand on her forehead to stop the vertigo making her spin. All of a sudden the room fills with waves. Frantic, panicked, her arms begin to flail; but then, imperceptibly, she starts to swim. She rises above the flood of anxiety by seeking salvation within herself.  
 
Exquisitely lit by Emily Stork, this scene half-way through turns a shimmering green-blue which enhances the feeling of being underwater. A deeper blue bathes most of the other dioramas, a blue that evokes the city at night as well as the boxes of Joseph Cornell. And like the best of Cornell’s blue or blue-green boxes—A Swan Lake for Tamara Toumanova (1946) Tilly Losch (1935), Untitled (Cerrito in Ondine [1947])—Geiser’s dioramas are utterly enchanting. Luminous enclosures that appeal to our sense of whimsy, each is an intimate, miniature world—a jewel-box, dollhouse, or place for make-believe. Yet unlike Cornell’s delicate constructions, which protect the tiny women suspended within their frames, these dioramas offer little protection to the woman who moves through them and needs to escape.          
 
Chip Epsten’s subtly relentless score adds to the impression of a world without protection. Like his percussive soundtrack of snips and clangs which makes the night seem so menacing in Babeltown, the twenty-five minute ambient loop he composed for Evidence of Floods helps create the feeling of unease in the piece. As his haunting motifs recycle, the action comes full circle:  when the woman, at last, comes back to her apartment, the building is rocking, the city askew. She returns not to live with her former abuser, but to retrieve a boat that has been there all along. From the place of her torture emerges a means of liberation. And although, in the end, her abuser still pursues her, she now skillfully navigates the waves filling the world. That world, Geiser suggests, offers new kinds of refuge, because in it the woman finds solace in herself.


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this article was printed in: Millennium Film Journal No. 37 (Fall 2001): Idiosyncrasies

MILLENNIUM FILM JOURNAL