Cinematheque 108 Presents: Visual Artists Lewis Klahr and Janie Geiser

7:00PM on Thursday, September 11, 2008

George Lucas Building, Room 108
850 W. 34th St., Los Angeles, CA 90007



Open to all USC students, faculty, staff and alumni.

Called the “reigning proponent of cut and paste” by critic J. Hoberman of the Village Voice, master collagist Lewis Klahr has been making films since 1977. He is known for his uniquely idiosyncratic experimental films and cutout animations, which have been screened extensively in the United States and Europe. Klahr's work is in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art and has been included in the Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Musuem of American Art (1991 & 1995). His epic cutout animation The Pharaoh's Belt received a special citation for experimental work from the National Society of Film Critics in 1994. Lulu was commissioned in 1996 by Copenhagen's Gronnegards Theater for The Rotterdam Film Festival, which also commissioned Klahr in 2004 to create Two Minutes to Zero for a series of 10 one minute films. Klahr has received extensive funding, including a 1992 Guggenheim Fellowship. Commercially, he has created special effects and animation for television show opening credits, music videos, commercials, and a documentary. He created cutout animation for director Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000). Since moving to Los Angeles in 1999, he has become involved with screenwriting and co-re-wrote The Mothman Prophecies for director Mark Pellington. The Lakeshore Entertainment film starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney was released in February 2002.

Janie Geiser is an internationally recognized visual/theater artist and filmmaker whose work is known for its sense of mystery, its detailed evocation of self-contained worlds, and its strength of design. Geiser's experimental films are ”as extravagantly beautiful as they are difficult, and as allusive as they are elusive” (Cinemascope, Spring 2001). She began making films in 1990, as an element of her performance work, a practice that she has continued to expand. In 1994, she made The Red Book, her first film to exist outside of the performance realm.

Geiser’s films have been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her short films have premiered five times (1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004) at the New York Film Festival. Other major showings include the Toronto International Film Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, four San Francisco Film Festivals, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the London International Film Festival, ALIVE TV, REEL NY, and other PBS venues. Her film The Secret Story was chosen by Film Comment’s Gavin Smith as one of the Best Short Films of 1996, and The Fourth Watch was on his list of the Best Short Films of 2000. Geiser received a Rockefeller Fellowship in Film for Magnetic Sleep, a black and white film that centers on a female hypnotist. The first episode of Magnetic Sleep premiered at the Getty Museum in October 2006. Geiser was awarded a COLA (City of Los Angeles) Fellowship in the Arts for her installation The Spider’s Wheels, which was exhibited in Los Angeles in spring 2006. The Spider’s Wheels draws on ideas and imagery from the early Serial Queen films, which centered on stories about female heroines in life or death situations.