Cinema Is the Images We Can’t See: Narcisa Hirsch’s Documentary Disposition
Narcisa Hirsch. Courtesy of Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch
At the bottom of page 49 in a 1993 edition of the fabled Argentine film magazine El Amante, there is a sidebar titled “Experimental Cinema,” written by Narcisa Hirsch. At that moment, Hirsch was already a well-established artist for those who had heard of, or rather, seen her work. In that fragment, she rounds up some definitions for cinema, but ends up caring about only one: “Above all, there is the luminosity of images, the images that, once projected, make visible the others, the internal, the kept ones, the dark and forgotten ones, in the beam of light that crosses the field just to tear us away from where we are seated and become fused in that light in an almost passionate surrender.”1 Hirsch is invoking both the primitive and classic images of the light that spills over the white screen and what happens afterward: The luminosity of the images passes through the interior of the viewers, revealing what is “kept” or hidden inside each one of us. As if cinema isn’t the images we can see, but the images we can’t.
The materialistic and sensitive concerns expressed by Hirsch in that brief text are in tune with her importance in the history of Latin American experimental cinema. Hirsch has long been considered a pivotal avant-garde filmmaker in the region, with increasing interest in her work worldwide in the last few years. Most recently, she had retrospective screenings at Viennale (2023), Los Angeles Filmforum (2023), MoMA (2024), Open City Documentary Festival (2024), and S8 in A Coruña (2024)—the latter being the first after Hirsch’s passing in May.
Her minimalist, structural films—especially Come Out (1971) and Taller (1975)—are the most critically recognized of her work as one of the pioneers of avant-garde cinema in Latin America. Hirsch’s approach to filmmaking is a personal, organic one. Her beginnings as a painter and illustrator in the 1960s took a turn when she needed to “go out on the street” (her own words), to make happenings. She started filming because she needed to document her performances and public actions alongside her collaborators, Marie Louise Alemann and Walter Mejía. Federico Windhausen, like many other critics, praises the advent of the abovementioned structural avant-garde films in Hirsch’s filmography, celebrating the fact that she “eventually stopped focusing on relatively simple forms of documentation.”2 These early films—and her later ones—would benefit from consideration within a documentary tradition.
Because of Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch’s tireless effort in preserving, restoring, and rediscovering some key elements of her filmography, it is now impossible to limit her most valuable outcomes to structural form. Hirsch’s vast and varied body of work is both precise and fluid, rigorous and spontaneous, with differences in tone—more than in nature—from one film to the other. Narcisa Hirsch can also be understood as an exciting, singular documentarian.
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A direct reading of Hirsch’s work in the documentary tradition brings her interest in internal and secret meanings to light. Pesca de la centolla (1978) best illustrates Hirsch’s interest in playing with images in contrast to the expositional documentarian urge to dutifully transmit what’s being recorded. In the film, Hirsch’s camera accompanies a group of artisanal crab fishermen carrying out their work in the southern city of Ushuaia. With wide shots of the boats at sea and the men doing their work, the short film begins as a straightforward record of the fishermen’s routine from an observational distance, without their identities interfering in the process. But near the end, the fishermen leave and the image departs from the traditional documentary trend. Boats and men move away, leaving the remains of thousands of crabs at the seashore. As men dive into the horizon, a live spider crab walks among the carcasses, which wordlessly becomes a graveyard. The last frame is a groundbreaking orange sun setting between mountains. Tomorrow there will also be corpses.
It is challenging to establish a common thread among Hirsch’s topics. Hirsch’s film Pioneros (1976), about Jewish immigration in Argentina, speaks in the most common tongue of expository documentary: At the beginning, the filmmaker's voice tells us the story will be told “as engraved in the memory of their descendants.” Through interviews with the immigrants’ offspring and using archival material, develops as a traditional documentary about a historical phenomenon, illustrating a community in its own words.
Two years after completing Pioneros, Hirsch tells Argentine history differently, with her own distinct set of tools, in Mundial (1978). A film made in collaboration with Sergio Levin and Elías Cherñajovsky, in the context of a seminar run by the renowned underground filmmaker Miguel Bejo, Mundial centers Argentina’s victory in the 1978 World Cup as the host nation. The film makes explicit the subtext that the country was controlled by a civic-military government responsible for, naming just one crime, the disappearance of 30,000 people. The movie begins with an empty square as we hear the recording of a goal shouted over the radio. The hand-held camera indicates that there is no one near to hear it. Immediately, a title card appears, ordering: “Make a lady scream ‘goal.’ Film it." But there’s no sound. Perhaps a goal is like a tree falling in a forest, and it calls into question its reality if no one is around to hear it.
Silence as a form appears also in a later work, Warnes (1991), a short film that pictures the demolition of the Warnes Hostel, an illegally occupied building complex where 600 families had been living since 1951. Hirsch takes the din of the explosion out of it, as well as the conversations or noises of the audience of people watching the building go down. Two audiences remain in complete silence: the spectators of decadence, and the audience, years later, who watch the film. What Hirsch displays isn’t the action of the Argentine goal, but what that action and its sonic representation mask.
Other Hirsch films also disturb the evidentiary capacity of documentary. In Marabunta (1967), filmed by the great militant documentarian Raymundo Gleyzer, Marie Louise Alemann, Walter Mejía, and Hirsch fill up a giant human skeleton with different sorts of food and live pigeons, and then present it as a happening inside a movie theater. The members of the bourgeois audience of the Teatro Coliseo begin to eat ferociously and throw food at each other, releasing the flying animals in the room. For us, the camera doesn’t act “simply as a direct witness.”3 With the addition of Edgard Varèse’s percussion-only Ionisation as the soundtrack, Gleyzer’s aggressive shots make everything increasingly strange. Hirsch adds surrealism as we witness a grotesque, Buñuelian scene on a regular Tuesday in Buenos Aires.
In Manzanas (1969), filmed by another great documentary filmmaker, Gerardo Vallejo, the three collaborators take to the streets again, distributing apples to streetwalkers. This time we have a sound recording, so the documentation becomes a small installment of cinema vérité. Conflicts emerge. A man confronts the artists by saying he needs to know why they are handing out apples. Another one says it’s the first time someone gives him something for free in Argentina. The artistic action installs surreality in the everyday life of the city, but it also works as a detonator for dialogue, creating a small glimpse into the political climate on the streets of Buenos Aires.
Another chapter of Narcisa Hirsch’s approach to documentary is apparent in her portraits of artists and loved ones. For each person portrayed, the film takes a different shape. In Aída (1976), a Super 8 camera captures ballerina Aída Laib dancing vigorously in Hirsch’s atelier to the sounds of Nina Simone. The dancing movements intersperse with a visual exploration of the artist’s naked body, where Hirsch’s sensual gaze grasps textures and reaches abstraction. For screendance expert Silvina Szperling, Aída “plunges into a frenzied dance that transports her body into an ecstasy of movement.”4 The film is so hot it literally catches fire toward the end, with Aída’s image being burned in front of the camera.
The approach is radically different in Retrato de Marta Minujín (1974). The famous conceptual artist engages in a conversation with Hirsch about her ideas and methods, telling us about past happenings in Montevideo and New York. Minujín reflects on her current painting procedures and imagines a future project on failure. The framing is much wider than in Aída as the camera explores the space populated with Minujín’s objects. True to Hirsch’s experimentation, however, the interview is far from regular. There is a constant interaction between the two women, with the filmmaker playfully dialoguing with Minujín’s visual world. While Minujín talks about a happening at the Sandridge Hotel in New York, which involved a feast with local beggars, we see a table set for a banquet. The artist sits at the head and all the guests, including the filmmaker, have their faces covered with politically provocative masks (one is Henry Kissinger, another is the devil). The film reaches the humorous, provocative world of Marta Minujín with an equally playful formal approach.
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If writing letters is, by definition, a way to feel closer to someone, filming them can be a way to discover a layer of intimacy that talks more about the journey than the destination. In Hirsch’s film letters, an element provides closeness with the addressee along with the act of seeing: the voice of the filmmaker. Since it is not recorded at the same time as the images, the voice-over creates a mismatch with them and persists as a testimony of the director’s own gaze during the revisions and projections of the material. This makes Hirsch, before anything else, a spectator of her own films.
In Andrea (1973), she tells her daughter, the addressee of the letter, “I felt like being with you alone through this.” Here, uniting images that were born separate through editing is a form of intimacy similar to telling a bedtime story, using the voice mainly to describe the images and to accompany the viewer through Andrea’s life.
But in Para Virginia (1984), the voice adds more layers to the story being told, acting as a way to travel in time. “I would have liked to see you live,” Hirsch says. The gesture changes, as we are told that the addressee, Virginia, is not able to experience it. As well as in the voice, the phrase replicates through images, as if duplication was a way of creating a symbiosis between image and text, between light and voice. The camera slowly follows the words graffitied on urban walls, discovering them one by one. To produce an impact, one must slow down, but to remember, one needs to be rushed. Narcisa’s camera remembers Virginia’s dancing, moving along the beach. Meanwhile, the background music is an electronic song, where the “loop” prevails over any other aspect. That same loop accompanies the memory of that tortured body, dancing on its axis, which is no longer there. Sometimes, expectations and real life collide, and there’s no correlation between memories and self.
In the group of letters dedicated to Rafael Maino, a painter who was Narcisa’s former lover, Rafael (1975), Rafael in Rio (1977), and Rafael, August 1984 (1984), the relationship between the voice-over and the images changes as their relationship does, making palpable their intimacy. In the earliest film, “It looks like a letter but it’s different,” Hirsch says, over a close-up of Maino’s face. We can hear the smile in her voice, and it looks like he can too. The curiosity lies in the fact that the image seems to be reacting to her words, not the other way around, becoming glad or taciturn, depending on the confession. But in Rafael in Rio (1977), the stability between the voice and the images drifts, as well as their relationship. What we see is Maino diving into the ocean until he becomes just a point on the horizon, and we (and she) can no longer reach him.
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John Grierson once said that the first chapter of the history of documentary should be the travelogue. The early travel film has inspired many documentarians. Film historian Jeffrey Ruoff also made the connection that “the episodic, descriptive, non-narrative form of the travelogue appeals to many experimental filmmakers” as well.5 In this particular intersection between documentary and the avant-garde, Hirsch has worked again and again with the travelogue form, both in films that were more constructed and staged, such as the two versions of Patagonia (1973 and 1976), and in those that were for many decades considered mere domestic movies.
Diarios Patagónicos 1 (1970) could be described as a documentary account of a family vacation in Argentine Patagonia. Although there is a resemblance to Jonas Mekas’s diaries, with the joy of filming loved ones taking over the film, Hirsch’s gaze has a very particular way of mingling place and body. Filmed closely, a breast becomes a mountain, and a belly button filled with water turns into a Patagonian lake. Filmed sensually, a landscape becomes a turgid body. There are echoes of Ana Mendieta’s body art—the Silueta series—and of Barbara Hammer’s exploration of the arousing qualities of nature, especially Multiple Orgasm (1976). But Hirsch does it in an unpretentious family movie. And when she walks in water, holding the Super 8 camera from the height of her chest, we see the artist’s genitalia floating over the lake, embracing an unparalleled point of view that is visceral, lyric, and revolutionary.
In Diarios Patagónicos 2 (1972), an account of a trip from Bariloche to the Atlantic coast with her friends and collaborators Horacio Maira and Marie Louise Alemann, Hirsch’s sensual gaze continues to grasp landscapes and bodies, but in this film, as in the core of the Latin American documentary tradition, racial and class relations come to the foreground. The camera opens up to the presence of the Patagonian workers—most with Indigenous features—around the white group of friends. They come as glimpses of otherness, disturbing the homogeneity of the group, gazing defiantly into the axis of the camera. A stark contrast between leisure (the artist swimming with sea lions) and hard work (fishermen unloading their boats) imposes itself. A rapid-fire montage interrupts the tender pace, as if otherness required a change in form.
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We prefer to think of Hirsch’s body of work as a pendulum between spontaneity and structure. Her extreme concentration in the film form and radical openness to the world can coexist in the same film. That is, Hirsch’s “structural rationalism” is constantly tempered by her poetic meditations, her autobiographical drive, and her avidness to plunge into the outside world.6
At first sight, Potrero (1973) could be paired with Andy Warhol’s experiments with repetition or James Benning’s structural landscape films. To document the changing of the Patagonian scenery over a year, Hirsch sets an exquisite, stratified frame, encompassing a nearby tree, a grassy field with a walking path, and snowy mountains on the horizon, and leaves the camera on a tripod to be activated by a local farmer. The unchanging frame and the rigid set of rules certainly situate Potrero in P. Adams Sitney’s classic definition of the structural film, where “the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape which is the primal impression of the film.”7 In that sense, we don’t believe that Come Out and Taller represent a “radical paradigm shift, a sort of evolutionary leap” in Hirsch’s filmography because Potrero, made in between those two masterpieces, also sits within that tradition.8 For Paulo Pécora, Hirsch experiments both “in a poetic and intuitive line of work as well as in a structural and minimalist one.”9
Thus, what makes Potrero special is not just its inventive, predetermined shape but also its unexpected documentary qualities. Snow comes and goes and comes again. Lighting, wind, the aspect of trees, everything changes radically from one shot to the other. A red flower is born and dies within the film. After a while, the invariable framing begins to welcome multiple presences, from the artist herself to human passersby and defiant farm animals. In between shots of the landscape, the frame is suddenly occupied by a restless child, the drifting figure of a dog, or a cow looking straight into the camera. The notion of participatory documentary can certainly be invoked here since the farmer turns the camera on from time to time and becomes a coauthor of the film. Still, it can also be expanded in scale: the final shape of Potreros only exists because of the unpredictable participation of multiple entities, human and nonhuman. By withdrawing from the scene and restricting her authorship to the gesture of setting a static framing, Hirsch opens up the film to the participation of the cosmos.
Participation is what makes possible one of Hirsch’s most ambitious cinematographic exercises, which took place in 1974, 1979, and 2005, called “Women who speak with their own image.” The series recalls some self-reflexive documentary experiments, from Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961) to Sara Gómez’s Mi Aporte (1969), where the filmmakers invite participants to reflect on their own image. In the final version of 1979, Seguro que Bach cerraba la puerta cuando quería trabajar, eight women, including the director herself, are confronted twice: once with the camera and once with themselves. While the image is being projected in front of them, they search for words to battle against that image. The history of cinema speaks for itself: those encounters can’t be anything but confrontations. Each woman reacts differently. The majority criticize their physical defects. Others affirm what they can recognize about their faces. One thanks herself for being alive; another is unable to be with herself and laugh.
The viewer, the third invited voyeur, adds another layer of meaning. This active viewing emulates the gesture extended to the participants, including outsiders. In this sense, the presence of the director adds even more complexity. While one would expect her to have more tools to understand how it works to represent through the gaze, she places herself in the middle of all these women. Having no better tools to understand her own image, she affirms that “behind that face is oneself,” as if it were necessary to explain why this exercise is unique and strange, even if it consists of nothing other than looking at oneself in the mirror.
Hirsch repeats her self-portrait in El Mito de Narciso (2005), where the filmmaker revisits the series by leaving behind the rest of the women who had been offscreen and putting herself inside the frame. She is present in three ways: her past projected self, in the voice-over, and seated in the filmed present, watching the projection. Thirty-one years after making the source material, she says, there’s nothing left to ask but “Who is the self that asks who? [...] Who am I, the beholder or the gaze?” Hirsch closes the process with nothing more than questions. As Narcissus knew, it’s not about falling in love with yourself through the mirror. It’s the audacity of wanting to get close to the reflection, even though you can never accomplish the task of knowing yourself. Some images will always remain unknown.
Lucía Requejo is a writer, teacher, and editor from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She runs the cultural section of the daily supplement Buenos Aires|12 and is a frequent collaborator with Con los ojos abiertos.
Victor Guimarães is a film critic, programmer, and teacher based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He is currently a columnist at Con los ojos abiertos. His work has appeared in publications such as Cinética, Senses of Cinema, Kinoscope, Desistfilm, La Vida Útil, La Furia Umana, and Cahiers du Cinéma.
Notes
1. Narcisa Hirsch, “El cine experimental,” El amante 2, no. 19 (1993): 49.
2. Federico Windhausen, “Narcisa Hirsch en cuatro lugares,” laFuga 26 (2022): 4. Available in: http://2016.lafuga.cl/narcisa-hirsch-en-cuatro-lugares/1101.
3. Pablo Marín, Una luz revelada: El cine experimental argentino (Córdoba: La Vida Útil, 2022), 192.
4. Silvina Szperling, “Ritual in Transfigured Time: Narcisa Hirsch, Sufi Poetry, Ecstatic Dances, and the Female Gaze,” The International Journal of Screendance 3 (2013): 82.
5. Jeffrey Ruoff, “Need name of essay in book” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), need page number.
6. Marín, 202.
7. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde, 1943–2000, 3rd ed. (Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, 2002), 348.
8. Marín, 193.
9. Paulo Pécora, Super 8 argentino contemporáneo (Buenos Aires: Universidad del Cine/Editorial Biblos, 2022), 45.