Friday November 22, 2024 7:30pm
https://microscopegallery.com/lynne-sachs-for-narcisa-hirsch/
Lynne Sachs: For Narcisa Hirsch
Screening & Talk
Followed by Hirsch’s double-projection Rumi
Q&A w/ Lynne Sachs
In Person only
Microscope is excited to welcome back to the gallery filmmaker and artist Lynne Sachs for a heartfelt tribute to Narcisa Hirsch in connection with Hirsch’s current exhibition at the gallery.
Sachs will be showing excerpts from her 2008 hour-long interview with Narcisa Hirsch shot over two summers spent in Buenos Aires, about which Sachs recalls: “Clearly, she had a profound interest in unraveling the ontology of cinema . She wanted to challenge the way that film as an art had been hijacked by the entertainment industry. She was always thinking about the camera’s ability to rearrange reality and the way it allows us to better understand how we think and move. She made it clear that she had her own perspective and it was clearly female.”
Sachs will also discuss Hirsch’s 1979 film “Seguro que Bach cerraba su puerta cuando quería trabajar” (I am Sure Bach Locked his Door When He Wanted to Work) in which a group of women — some of which were her friends and collaborators — talk to themselves, or rather to filmed sequences of themselves previously recorded by Hirsch. The film will be screened in its entirety.
Sachs says: “1979 was a remarkable year for women film artists who were experimenting in startlingly radical ways with the documentary form. Chick Strand completed ‘Soft Fiction’ her ground-breaking visual meditation on women and sensuality, and Narcisa Hirsch produced this astonishing, intimate portrait of a group of Argentine women. Only a filmmaker with such radical ideas about the machinery she holds in her hands could have made this movie. It’s the headshot extraordinaire turned upside-down and inside out.”
The evening will end with a rare screening of the double projection work “Rumi” (1999), about the 13th century Sufi poet, a hybrid work in which a 16mm film is projected onto a video projection that is the digital transfer of the film itself. As the work progresses, the discrepancies in frame rate between the two mediums become ever more clear.
Lynne Sachs will be available post-screening for a Q&A with the audience.
General Admission $10
Member Admission $8
Program:
Excerpts from: Interview with Narcisa Hirsch by Lynne Sachs, video, 2008, 1 hour
Seguro que Bach cerraba su puerta cuando quería trabajar (I am Sure Bach Locked his Door When He Wanted to Work)
by Narcisa Hirsch, Super 8mm film to digital, color, sound, 1979, 27 minutes
Rumi by Narcisa Hirsch, dual projection, 16mm film & video, color, sound, 1999, 26 minutes
Lynne’s Notes
For Narcisa program at Microscope
1. Intro – 4 min.
2. Interview excerpts – Total 20 min.
3. Intro to Seguro que Bach cerraba su puerta cuando quería trabajar/ I am Sure Bach Locked his Door When He Wanted to Work – 30 min.
4. Brief words on Chick Strand and how interesting it is that both women made these kinds of films in 1979 – self reflexive, formally inventive, intimate, candid, vulnerable, fierce – 2 min.
5. Excerpt from Soft Fiction – 5 min.
6. General Discussion around Narcisa’s work I am sure Bach and Soft Fiction, and other films in Microscope show – TBD
7. Screening of Rumi
Introduction to Narcisa Hirsch and how we met.
Her deep desire to have a one-person show in NYC and disappointment that it didn’t happen until this year, but she definitely knew that MoMA presented her work with much of her family here.
Our screening of her work in 2009 as part of Ventana al Sur At Millennium Film Workshop and Anthology Film Archives – including Narcisa Hirsch, Leandro Katz, Leandro Listorti, Pablo Marin, Liliana Porter, Tomas Rautenstrauch (Narcisa’s grandson and founder of the Narcisa Hirsch Cinemateca) and others.
Describe the BsAs experimental film community.
I plan to talk about my long friendship with Narcisa Hirsch and my discovery of our shared passion for experimental film. I will share excerpts from one-hour 2008 interview I conducted with her during the first of two summers I lived in Buenos Aires with my family. From the moment we met, I knew that I wanted to spend as much time as I could with this woman who was so candid about everything surrounding film form and feminism, in equal measure. Clearly, she had a profound interest in unraveling the ontology of cinema . She wanted to challenge the way that film as an art had been hijacked by the entertainment industry. She was always thinking about the camera’s ability to rearrange reality and the way it allows us to better understand how we think and move. She made it clear that she had her own perspective and it was clearly female.
In August of 2008, I was living in Buenos Aires with my family. I was able to meet and spend quite a bit of time with artist filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch.
Link to video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk7FBX3rVnA
In this conversation, we talk about so many things including: her belief that painting on an easel had died, “Happenings”, her collaborative Marabunta (“Swarm of Ants”, which she created in 1967 in the lobby of a theater where Antonioni’s Blow Up premiered)) feminist performance as well as her baby-doll Munecos Happening in Buenos Aires, London and New York City, her discovery of 16mm, watching Michael Snow’s “Wavelength”, creating “Taller” a response to Snow’s ideas, a 16mm visualization of Steve Reich’s “Come Out”, her friend and collaborator Marie Louise Alleman, “Fuses” by Carolee Schneemann which was her first film purchase, making films in the troubled 1970s in Argentina, owning films by Su Friedrich and Stan Brakhage, rejecting making feature films with a script, filming daily life, her being world famous for 50 people, remembering Laura and Albert Honig (Argentine experimental filmmakers), support from the Goethe Institute, making “radical” work that did not threaten the government, “I didn’t go to jail because they didn’t want me,” giving away 500 little dolls on the street and saying “you have a baby” in NYC, London and Buenos Aires. All of these Happenings were filmed and each was very different, she was doing this during the same time that Cesar Chavez was encouraging people to boycott lettuce. She defines what a “happening” is including public participation and very much not a conventional gallery show, art was no longer “re-presentation” but now is a situation, not isolated from the public but including the public. They talk about Ramundo Glazer who was one of the Argentine disappeared.
Then we watch her film response to Steve Reich’s “Come Out”, film diary footage from summer 1973, close ups of leaves and water, her feet, a fly, her shadow in the sand as she carries her film camera, cherries on skin, a fly, a mouth luxuriating at the taste of fruit, a baby on the grass., a breast and a belly in the sunlight, a fly.
with Paula Felix Didier, Ruben Guzman, and Maya and Noa Street-Sachs
Excerpts from Interview with Narcisa Hirsch by Lynne Sachs from 2008
3:51 – 10:17
I ask her how she first got involved with cinema, she talks about the death of the easel, her Marabunta Happening, seeing Michael Snow’s seminal film Wavelength
12:36 – 13:20
Narcisa’s respect for Carolee Schneemann and Su Friedrich
18;49 – 20:18
Narcisa says she always had a camera with her.
21:07 – 27:30
Never making “social-political” film, I could paint with film, how she used the studio as her location in Workshop and Come Out; collapse of the avant-garde; the role of wives, the role of ideology
34:42 – 38:10
Talks about giving away tiny baby dolls in London, NYC and BsAs as part of a Marabunta happening in 1967
Seguro que Bach cerraba su puerta cuando quería trabajar/ I am Sure Bach Locked his Door When He Wanted to Work (27 min., 1979)
This is a high concept film that investigates the way that women, specifically Narcisa’s friends, look at themselves, perform themselves and speak about themselves. 1979 was a remarkable year for women film artists who were experimenting in startlingly radical ways with the documentary form. Chick Strand completed Soft Fiction her ground-breaking visual meditation on women and sensuality, and Narcisa Hirsch produced this astonishing, intimate portrait of a group of Argentine women. Only a filmmaker with such radical ideas about the machinery she holds in her hands could have made this movie. It’s the headshot extraordinaire turned upside-down and inside out.
I would also like to show a few minutes from Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction (55 min. 1979) which is on Youtube here:
Excerpt from Soft Fiction by Chick Strand
5 women communicate their experiences through direct story telling; they are voicing experiences but sometimes in a refracted way, in this case through a letter, how are the women represented and representing themselves – the film asks these questions . Both women were also fascinated by the diary film and by documenting the smallest of things the saw with their eyes – like bugs and nipples.)
Exploring sexuality, desire and abuse and consensual/ nonconsensual sex – it’s very ambiguous
