The Red Book, 1996
16mm Film still
The Red Book
16mm,color
11:00 minutes
(1994)
Sound design by Beo Morales, engineered at Harmonic Ranch.
The Red Book is an elliptical, pictographic animated film that uses flat, painted figures and collage elements in both two and three dimensional settings to explore the realms of memory, language, and identity from the point of view of a woman amnesiac. The Red Book suggests the ways in which language defines us, and reaches back into dismemberment myths about the creation of different tongues through the breaking apart of bodies (in this case, the woman’s body). As the film progresses, the submerged images of her stored memory appear and collide with the present world in circular rhythms, and there is a sense of irretrievable loss.
The Red Book was shown as part of the 1996 New Directors / New Films Festival at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The New York Times critic Caryn James wrote:
“The Red Book (is) Janie Geiser’s beautifully mysterious, animated short. Images appear as in a graceful collage: glimpses of words are written in white vanishing ink; a woman is drawn in outline, as if she were a paper doll made of red construction paper. Everything is red, white, black, or gray in this smashing little film, which has graphic flair and a surrealist edge.”
