CONTEXT: Janie Geiser's The Hummingbird Wars
"A theatrical fiction, collapsing time and place: turn-of-the-last-century performers apply stage makeup as if for war, to engage in battle for the soul of the world. The injuries are more emotional than physical, but cut deeply just the same. A visual/aural collage film, drawing on sources as seemingly disparate as Ibsen’s A Doll House, Japanese Gagaku music, makeup illustrations for Century actors, the biography of a Shakespearean performer, blooming 19th and decaying flowers, and a World War 1 First Aid Book, The Hummingbird Wars suggests theater in a time of war, which is the theater of any time.
This film started with a book that I found in a flea market in Zurich a few years ago. The book is an amazing series of about 8 plates, richly printed, featuring the heads of performers (these were painted/printed images, not photos). Each page is a visual instruction for the theater professional regarding the application of makeup in the creation of iconic stage characters. In each image, one half of the face shows the finished makeup, and the other side shows the strokes of color as they are first applied, before blending them into the skin.
The painting on their faces looked like war paint, like blood, like the painted "masks" of the Kabuki performer. The images were compelling. I started gathering together other materials and sounds to create a film with these images as a starting point. These images cycle throughout the film--evoking something about theater, of any time, and its artificiality; how the performer takes on iconic personas, essentializing the emotions and stories of theatrical stories---of love, loss, freedom, war, power---by en-acting them.
Because of the time period of the images that I found (early 20th Century), there was a poignancy about what these performers (and the world) were about to experience...the world was experiencing dramatic change, the unspeakable terror of WW1, and the craziness of the 20th Century...so the shadow of war is in the film with the explosions, with the first aid images, and with the figures running and hiding in the forests---The classical actors enact narratives of war or conflict which are, of course, at the center of Shakespeare, Kabuki, and most of theater.
In terms of the sound...I knew that I wanted some longer sections of sound, and I knew that the sound needed some irregularity---some way that time was not predicable in the music. I tried a few things before bringing in the Japanese Gagaku music---when I played that with the imagery, I knew it was right. And the music boxes doubling and tripling and being out of sync was a more European version of that idea, and express a kind of innocence or denial.
As for the spoken/performed text: at first I was working with some old recordings that I had of John Barrymore performing Shakespeare---but they didn't really add anything, they were too much in the same world as the images. Then I found a recording of Claire Bloom as Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, and tried that with a rough draft of the film. The Ibsen recording was what the film needed; it creates a mystery and a tension that seems to ignite the images. This play was a radical late 19th Century drama, with a domestic drama at its core, as Nora does the unimaginable---she leaves her home and family---this is a kind of war in itself.
The hummingbird is not a violent bird. There was something about this bird, which moves swiftly and travels great distances to find the perfect food, which seems to fit with Nora and also with the idea of a traveling group of actors. There isn't a straight, clear narrative in this film (nor in most of my films), but these narrative ideas inform my choices of images, rhythms, and sounds, and help me to structure the film.
The hummingbird is small, and not warlike, so there is something that I like about the incongruity of a hummingbird war." —Janie Geiser
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