Narcisa Hirsch (Berlin, 1928) displayed her creative potential in Argentina, where she became a pioneer of experimental cinema in our country through more than fifty works, among which stand out Patagonian newspaper 1(1972), Diary 1976 (1976), Crab fishing (1979) and The passion (1992), among others. The death of the artist, at the age of 96, was announced on social networks by the Narcisa Hirsch Film Archive, a space dedicated to preserving and disseminating her work.
Furthermore, Narcisa’s life – which was divided between her home in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of San Telmo and Bariloche – has always been related to art. She dedicated herself to painting, drawing and the famous happenings that were crucial in the cultural development of the 60s and 70s.
“The experimental cinema of our time was ideological, it wanted to go against the industrial and commercial. He came with the militancy and the vehemence to make a different art. It had more to do with poetry. We did it with the awareness that anyone could do it without having to be a big businessman. In most cases we were self-taught,” he said in an interview with Infobae Culture.
With more than sixty films that address issues such as love, death or the universe, Hirsch carried out an innovative filmography that paid as much importance to the themes as to the creation procedures, which led her to manually alter the images and construct her own audiovisual editing tools to move away from any conventional narrative.
daughter of Heinrich Heuserexpressionist painter and Narcisa Kilian, the filmmaker was born in Berlin in 1928. She arrived in Buenos Aires in the early 1930s for a “visit” but the war prevented her return to Europe. In 1950 she married Paul Hirscha German Jew from Frankfurt who emigrated to Bolivia, with whom he had three children.
Inspired by the new artistic avant-garde that arrived in the country in the 50s and 60s from the Institute of Modern Art or the Di Tella, Hirsch took to the streets with what at that time was called happenings, among which were “Manzanas”, “Babies” and in 1967 “La Marabunta”.
“La Marabunta”, made together with Marie Louise Alemannwas a large structure filled with food and covered with colorfully painted doves, recorded by the Argentine documentary filmmaker’s camera. Raymundo Gleyzer.
In the 60s and 70s, Hirsch expanded his audiovisual activity in the form of installations, objects, performances, graffiti and urban interventions, consolidating his transgressive facet and building his own personal poetics over time.
He began filming in 16 mm and then in Super 8, a very cheap film material that allowed anyone who wanted to make non-commercial films. Together with her, by chance, a group of filmmakers was created -among which were Marie Louise Alemann, Claudio Caldini, Horacio Vallereggio, Juan Villola and Juan José Mugni– who also filmed and grouped together to show their films in places that were never cinemas or institutions, with the exception of the Goethe Institute, which accompanied this movement for a time and gave it a certain formality.
When Super 8 had disappeared from the market and was replaced by video, NH began writing and published 3 books: The passion, The silence and Aigokerosa book of essays accompanied by Haikus written in Spanish and later translated into Japanese.
From the beginning, his cinema was experimental, a phenomenon that had begun in the 1930s with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali in Spain, with Hans Richter and many others at the Bauhaus in Germany. In addition to purely experimental films, Hirsch made installations, such as “The Silence” and “Preaching in the Desert.”
In 2023, the Kirchner Cultural Center inaugurated The intensity of a look, the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to the artist, which delved into her complete archives, through personal film diaries, photographic documentation, drawings, interviews, writings, preserved unpublished films in his archive from the 60s and reproductions of large pieces used in the happenings in which he starred.
In 2018 he received the Distinction Award for Lifetime Achievement awarded by the National Academy of Fine Arts of Argentina and in 2022, with a Konex Platinum Award in 2022 in the discipline Art and Technology.
