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I saw a selection of Narcisa Hirsch's experimental shorts as part of the Academy Museum's series "Available Space". Some of them impressed me greatly, others tried my patience. This is just as it should be with "experimental" cinema. Hirsch's work deals with disembodiment and fragmentation both thematically and aesthetically. Her films pit body and voice, rhythm and cacophony against each other, making a coherent subject almost impossible to find in her work.
The film that impressed me most of all was the longest, the twenty minute-ish "Bach Surely Closed the Door When He Wanted to Work". A series of extended close-ups of several women are presented without dialogic sound. The voices of the women are heard, however, as they comment about the silent close-ups of themselves after the filming. Self becomes object, and standard psychic temporalities are disrupted. As academic as the exercise may sound, the effect of the work is not unemotional. Indeed, I found it moving.
Another highlight was "Rafael, August 1984". Composed of Super-8 images recorded by Hirsch during a trip to Patagonia with her titular lover, it includes a haunting voice-over addressed to the since estranged Rafael. This truly is cinema-as-love-poetry, to a degree that seems to me unprecedented.
Other works I, y'know, "admired" more than enjoyed. "Aida" is a frenzied dance-film that atomizes the dancers body-parts through jagged montage to which music different from what is being danced to is played. It's aesthetically pleasing enough, for a few seconds. Then it starts to seem repetitious and dizzying at the same time.
The final film shown, "Come Out" is a single Michael Snow-esque extreme close-up that comes slowly, so slowly, into focus. It is set to Steve Reich's sound-art piece of the same title which features the voice of Daniel Hamm, a Black man wrongfully accused of murder in New York, 1964. Reich loops Hamm's voice ad nauseam, until it becomes a kind of atonal "music". The piece is basically torturous to sit-through, but them again it's supposed to be.
The film that impressed me most of all was the longest, the twenty minute-ish "Bach Surely Closed the Door When He Wanted to Work". A series of extended close-ups of several women are presented without dialogic sound. The voices of the women are heard, however, as they comment about the silent close-ups of themselves after the filming. Self becomes object, and standard psychic temporalities are disrupted. As academic as the exercise may sound, the effect of the work is not unemotional. Indeed, I found it moving.
Another highlight was "Rafael, August 1984". Composed of Super-8 images recorded by Hirsch during a trip to Patagonia with her titular lover, it includes a haunting voice-over addressed to the since estranged Rafael. This truly is cinema-as-love-poetry, to a degree that seems to me unprecedented.
Other works I, y'know, "admired" more than enjoyed. "Aida" is a frenzied dance-film that atomizes the dancers body-parts through jagged montage to which music different from what is being danced to is played. It's aesthetically pleasing enough, for a few seconds. Then it starts to seem repetitious and dizzying at the same time.
The final film shown, "Come Out" is a single Michael Snow-esque extreme close-up that comes slowly, so slowly, into focus. It is set to Steve Reich's sound-art piece of the same title which features the voice of Daniel Hamm, a Black man wrongfully accused of murder in New York, 1964. Reich loops Hamm's voice ad nauseam, until it becomes a kind of atonal "music". The piece is basically torturous to sit-through, but them again it's supposed to be.
Details
- Runtime
- 11m
- Color
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