Ultima Thule

(2002)

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16mm film (color) 10:16  minutes, 2002

Sound Design by Leon Rothenberg

In a series of films from 2000 to 2009, Geiser began investigating the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a kind of deep, ambiguous space.

In Ultima Thule, gravity fails, and land and sky lose their historical meaning.  A small silver plane navigates an ultramarine storm, flying over barely-glimpsed hills, an unlikely ferry to ” ultima Thule”: the farthest point north, the limit of any journey.   The seduction of immersion in blue is too strong to avoid, the land fills with water, and time loses its line.

“To watch Geiser’s films is also to become dislocated in time…a feeling of timelessness, a freedom from the time bound, and a sense of being in a place where the irreversible forward movement to time no longer applies…”    —Melinda Barlow, “The Cinema of Humble Means: Joseph Cornell’s influence on contemporary Experimental Filmmakers.” (2007)

Selected Screening history:
Views from the Avant-Garde, New York International Film Festival (2002)
Toronto Internaional Film Festival Wavelengths (2002)
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Films by Janie Geiser (2006)
SFMOMA, Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination, Film series. (2007-2008)