Storm de Hirsch

Storm de Hirsch (1912–2000) was an American poet and filmmaker. She was a key figure in the New York avant-garde film scene of the 1960s, and one of the founding members of the Film-Makers' Cooperative. Although often overlooked by historians, in recent years she has been recognized as a pioneer of underground cinema.

Biography Born Lillian Malkin in New Jersey in 1912, Storm de Hirsch left home at an early age to pursue a career in the arts in New York City. There she married her first husband, an artist named de Hirsch. She later married Louis Brigante, a filmmaker and one of the early editors of Film Culture magazine. The marriage lasted until Brigante's death in 1975. She turned to filmmaking because she wanted to find a new mode of expression for her thoughts that went beyond words on the page. In 1962 she made her first film and soon became active in the New York underground film movement, associating with filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke and others. In an interview with Jonas Mekas she mentioned Jack Smith, Ingmar Bergman, Gregory Markopoulos, Michelangelo Antonioni, Vittorio De Seta, Ken Jacobs, Federico Fellini and Jonas and Adolphus Mekas as her favorite filmmakers.

In addition to making films, de Hirsch taught at Bard College and New York's School of Visual Arts. After her husband's death she was forced to give up her studio, and stopped making films. She died in a Manhattan nursing home in 2000, following a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.

Sometimes her animations are superimposed over live-action footage. Her films are clearly influenced by her poetic background; she referred to her series of short, silent films shot in the 1970s as "Cine-Sonnets,"

Not all of de Hirsch's films are cheaply made animated shorts. One of her early films, Goodbye in the Mirror (1964), is a feature-length live-action film shot on location in Rome, with her husband, Louis Brigante, serving as assistant director. Part scripted, part improvised, the film centers on three young women living in Rome, searching for meaning in their lives. the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cannes Film Festival, and elsewhere. They are available through the Canyon Cinema Cooperative and the Film-Makers' Cooperative.

Influence According to the Museum of Computer Art , de Hirsch's work "influences and anticipates the work of many later and current video artists." Her use of technical devices such as painting and etching directly on the film stock has been called pioneering, although those techniques had been used before by Len Lye, Stan Brakhage, and others. Tools and techniques aside, critics have characterized other aspects of her work as inventive or groundbreaking. Stan Vanderbeek called The Tattooed Man "a major work in terms of style, structure, graphic invention, image manipulation and symbolic ritual." Wheeler Winston Dixon cites it as an "example of early Feminist cinema that led to the later work of Yvonne Rainer, Jane Campion, Sally Potter, Julie Dash and others."

Filmography Silently, Bearing Totem of a Bird (1962) 6:45 minutes, S8mm A Reticule of Love (1963) minutes, B/W, S8mm Journey Around a Zero (1963) 3 minutes, 16mm Goodbye in the Mirror (1964) 80 minutes, B/W, 16mm or 35mm The Color of Ritual, the Color of Thought (trilogy) (1964-1966) Divinations (1964) 5 1/2 minutes, 16mm Peyote Queen (1965) 9 minutes, 16mm Shaman (1966) 12 minutes, 16mm Newsreel: Jonas in the Brig (1964) 5 minutes, B/W, silent, 16mm The Recurring Dream (1965) 4 minutes, S8mm Ives House-Woodstock (1965) 11 minutes, S8mm Malevich at the Guggenheim (1965) 5:45 minutes, S8mm Charlotte Moorman’s Avant-Garde Festival #9 (1965) 10 minutes, S8mm Deep in the Mirror Imbedded (1965) 14 minutes, S8mm Aristotle (1965) minutes, S8mm Sing Lotus (1966) 14 minutes, 16mm Cayuga Run. Hudson River Diary: Book I (1967) 18 minutes, 16mm Third Eye Butterfly (1968) 10 minutes, 16mm Trap Dance (1968) minutes, B/W, 16mm The Tattooed Man (1969) 35 minutes, 16mm Hudson River Diary at Gradiew (1970) An Experiment in Meditation (1971) minutes, B/W, silent, 16mm Guger's Landing (1971) September Express (1973) 6 minutes, 16mm or S8mm Wintergarden. Hudson River Diary Book: III (1973) 5 minutes, 16mm River-Ghost. Hudson River Diary Book: IV (1973) 9 minutes, 16mm Lace of Summer (1973) 4 minutes, 16mm or S8mm Geometrics of the Kabbalah (1975) 11:15 minutes, 16mm

Undated:

And Send My Love to the Wind Cruger's Landing Heathrow Hello Tree Swan's Way

She also appears in Piero Heliczer's Dirt (1965), Gregory Markopoulos's Galaxie (1966), and Jonas Mekas's Birth of a Nation (1997), Peyote Queen is included on Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986, a DVD collection published by the National Film Preservation Foundation in 2008. The collection won the 2009 Film Heritage Award (National Society of Film Critics) and was named 2009 Best Avant-Garde Publication at Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna.

Feminist perspective Often described as a feminist, de Hirsch believed that when it came to the creative process there was no distinction between men and women. In 1967, Film Culture published "A Conversation: Shirley Clarke and Storm de Hirsch," in which the two women discussed gender and art.

"I think it's questionable as to whether the biological structure makes that much difference in terms of art. I have my own little theories about this, and I feel that when it comes to art, there's a question of soul, of the inner world, that's a universal thing; and I feel that the soul is neither male nor female." —Storm de Hirsch, "A Conversation"

In the same conversation, she noted that she often received written responses to manuscripts addressed to "Mr. Storm," and she suspected that her work was better received when magazine editors thought she was male.