Friday November 22, 7:30pm
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
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Lynne Sachs is an experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her films embrace archives, diaries, letters, poetry and music to take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Working from a feminist perspective, Lynne investigates the connections between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Retrospectives of her 50 feature-length and short films have been presented in Argentina, Bosnia, China, Ecuador, Germany, Ireland and Mexico, and the UK.
Narcisa Hirsch (Berlin, Germany 1928 – Bariloche, Argentina 2024) was the grande dame of Argentine experimental film. Today, many younger filmmakers in her home country, with whom she maintained an active exchange, consider her work to be a point of reference. Hirsch was born Narcisa Heuser in Berlin in 1928, the daughter of a German-Argentinean mother and the expressionist painter Heinrich Heuser. In 1937, she immigrated to Argentina with her mother via Vienna. Originally working as a painter, her interest in film arose during the documentation of collaborative public performances and happenings undertaken in the streets of Buenos Aires, New York, and London. Hirsch has completed 50+ films since the mid-1960s. Thematically, her films often deal with women, bodies, death, but also with the very personal cinematic appropriation of landscapes. Her films have been the subject of major retrospectives at venues including Viennale (2012, 2023), MoMA (2024), Media City Film Festival (2023), s8 Festival de Cine Periferico (2024). She is the author of several books including “Philosophy Is a Useless Passion” (2015). The Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch was established in 2019 to preserve her films and provide a cultural space for artists’ film in Buenos Aires. She was active as a filmmaker until the very end of her life, and her great influence on the following generations will remain. She lived and worked between Buenos Aires and Patagonia.
