Watching Janie Geiser’s short films makes me think about nostalgia in a new way. Nostalgia is no longer a case of images, sounds, or any other material, pointing to a memory in a suggestive manner, but a suggestion referencing nothing but itself – pure suggesting. Geiser’s film Lost Motion (to which I haven’t been able to find a link online but which you can buy from the wonderful people in The Other Cinema, San Francisco, on the DVD Anxious Animation) felt more nostalgic to me than almost anything I’ve experienced before; it brought to me the kind of feeling of deaf and dumb opaqueness that makes up my most intense nostalgic experiences. I believe now that what has characterised the way in which I have experienced the recollection of past experiences – what must characterise so many people’s experience – is not a the repeating of certain aesthetic or actual experience that can be repeated, but the way in which the world refuses us in these moments of nostalgic recollection, dumbfounds us, repeatedly strikes us with a sense of awe, bewilderment, of something greater and unfathomable – and, subsequently, a sense of fear… I can remember watching films and, perhaps because I was too young to have a sufficient understanding of this world’s signifiers, my mind would create all sorts of suggestions and inferences from images that otherwise made no sense at all. This might still happen to me when I watch a film without concentrating or if I keep falling asleep. Something fills in the blanks, creates narratives and signification for me. This is precisely the feeling I got from Geiser’s film – an inability to follow any tangible narrative, and my mind, already in a dream-like state thanks to the film’s unique form, entering a state whereby it creates the vaguest and most incomprehensible inferences from the images and sounds that it encounters. Perhaps from this sense of fear comes an introversion, a retreat into oneself, the creation of a bubble where everything makes sense, where one feels warm and protected. Maybe it’s whence that feeling of warmth and innocence so often associated with nostalgia comes? Then perhaps nostalgia can be divided into different – at least two – elements or states: the protective reaction, and the droney, unintelligible sensory experience that leads to it?
In this sense, nostalgia is it not possible that nostalgia is not the re-enactment of an old experience per se, but a re-experiencing of this awe in a way that’s different each time.


Here's another film by Janie Geiser, albeit not as powerful as Lost Motion.