Puppet Noir
Melinda Barlow
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.