Fourth Watch, The


Rental Format(s): 16mm film / Digital File

Music by Tom Recchion.

The ancient Greeks divided the night into four sections; the last section before morning was called the fourth watch. In these hours before dawn, an endless succession of rooms is inhabited by silent film figures occupying flickering space in a midcentury house made of printed tin. Their presence is at once inevitable and uncanny. A boy turns his head in dread, a woman's eyes look askance, a sleepwalker reaches into a cabinet which dissolves with her touch, and hands write letters behind disappearing windows. The rooms reveal themselves and fill with impossible, shadowed light. It is not clear who is watching and who is trespassing in this nocturnal drama of lost souls.

"Of the three Janie Geiser works screened, perhaps most haunting was THE FOURTH WATCH, in which images of people in black-and-white movies rephotographed from a video monitor are superimposed on shots of a dollhouse interior. Bluish, spectral figures float by as sunlight mingles with flickering shadows on brightly colored tin. A beautiful somnambulist vanishing into TV bar rolls suggests a poetic metaphor for the current state of avant-garde cinema, when the medium's past, future, and even its own death are being transformed into material for provocative new films." - Kristin M. Jones, Film Comment, Nov-Dec 2000.

Rental Fees

  Fee  
16mm film $40.00  
Digital File $40.00  

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