Immer Zu, 1997
16mm Film still
Immer Zu
16mm, black and white, optical sound.
8:30 minutes
(1997)
Immer Zu is an elliptical, experimental animated film which evokes a mysterious 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 constantly covered and uncovered in a shadowed journey toward eclipse.
Mark McElhatten writes in the program for the 1998 New York Film Festival:
“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.”
And in Film Threat (1998):
“Along with Kerry Laitala’s beautiful "Retrospectroscope" (already well-reviewed in a previous Film Threat), 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.”
