Narcisa Hirsch

Narcisa Hirsch

Directing
1928-01-16
Berlin, Germany

Biography

Narcisa Hirsch (née Heuser, born 1928) is an Argentine experimental filmmaker of German birth. Her work centered on themes of the body, love, sex, death, movement, and the female gaze. Despite this focus on women, she has resisted being labeled as a feminist. She began as a painter, and but her later and better known work centers on performance and film, though she has also written several books. She cites Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel as influences to her experimental film work, as well as the Bauhaus artists of Germany. During her time as an experimental filmmaker in Argentina, she frequented the Di Tella Institute and the Goethe Institute, a place where many of her works premiered. Recenlty, her work has been honored through several retrospectives at international film festivals, though it was relatively unknown outside of exclusive circles when it first premiered. Description above from the Wikipedia article Narcisa Hirsch, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Known For & Full Filmography14 Titles

#1Herbaria

Movie - 2022, 2h 15m as Self

9.0 / 10
Documentary

In his second feature film, Leandro Listorti establishes a parallel between two worlds he seems to know well: that of plants and that of cinema. This delicate cinematographic work, full of beautiful images—both archival and current—gives an account of the immense work of classification and preservation, and generously invites us to think about forms of representation and memory.

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#2Narcisa

Movie - 2014, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

6.0 / 10
Documentary

This documentary is an approach to the experience of seeing and listening to the trajectory of Narcisa Hirsch, a pioneer of Argentine experimental cinema, but who has also been part of the happenings and performances of the 1960s and 1970s.

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#3El Aleph

Movie - 2005, 2h 15m as Narrator (voice)

6.6 / 10
Fantasy

The Aleph is the point where diachronic and synchronic times meet, and each second represents a moment in life, from birth to death.

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#4Reflejo Narcisa

Movie - 2014, 2h 15m as Main

8.8 / 10
Documentary

A portrait of Narcisa Hirsch, Argentine filmmaker, pioneer of experimental cinema. The artist explores the path of her memories, where the traces of some men appear, which are transposed with the constant reference to the desert.

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#5Butoh

Movie - 2013, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

1.0 / 10

An outstanding performance featuring brilliant storytelling, high stakes drama, and unforgettable character arcs.

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#6Yo veo conejos

Movie - 1967, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

8.8 / 10

An outstanding performance featuring brilliant storytelling, high stakes drama, and unforgettable character arcs.

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#7time/ OUT OF JOINT

Movie - 2015, 2h 15m as Herself

8.8 / 10
Documentary

With research that spans the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Martin Heidegger to modern mythologies in which time reversal plays a crucial role — such as failed time machines, speed of light travel, and occult practices involving speech — Stracke combines science and philosophy in an attempt to defy death through cinema and the notion of time reversal.

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#8Marabunta

Movie - 1967, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

6.0 / 10
Documentary

Marabunta, a ceremony in collective anthropophagy involving a six-meter skeleton completely covered in fruit and food, inside of which were live doves and parrots painted with phosphorescent colors that flew out as people were eating.

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#9Apples

Movie - 1966, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

8.8 / 10
Documentary

Happening by Narcisa Hirsch, where she gives free apples in the street while we hear passersby's comments.

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#10Surely Bach Closed the Door When He Wanted to Work

Movie - 1979, 2h 15m as Ella misma

8.8 / 10
Documentary

Portrait of women where they look at the images of their own faces and reflect on that experience.

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#11Pradera

Movie - 2024, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

8.8 / 10

The hands of Narcisa Hirsch, a nonagenarian, open another Super 8 film cartridge to load a camera. In what seems like a ritual of passing on a legacy, the grandmother and her grandson, Tomás Rautenstrauch, watch a film of a meadow that gradually fills the frame.

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#12Muñecos (Have a baby)

Movie - 1972, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

8.8 / 10
Documentary

The Super 8mm film “Muñecos” (1972) — shot by the artist, Leopoldo Maler and Carolee Schneemann — combines recordings of a happening by Hirsch that took place in three cities: in Buenos Aires, London, and New York. In each, she is seen handing out 500 tiny baby dolls to bystanders, while candidly suggesting to everyone: “Have a baby!” This work was made in response to a period of strong pro-natalist and anti-contraceptive policies pushed by the Argentinian government.

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#13Instead of Trees

Movie - 2026, 2h 15m as Self

8.8 / 10
Documentary

A film critic with philosophical interests, played by the film critic Roger Koza, wonders about the nature of Nature. And he obsessively tries to capture it with his phone camera. Other experts—filmmakers from different countries, art historians, a scenographer in charge of a natural science museum, and members of the human species from a distant future—think about ways of representating nature. A kaleidoscopic, playful collage, sometimes fiction, sometimes documentary, the film cannot help but wonder about the nature of cinema itself.

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#14Tambores en la plaza

Movie - 1970, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

8.8 / 10
Documentary

Hirsch’s first steps in filmmaking were documentations of her performances and happenings in public spaces. These were collective actions, filmed initially on 8mm or 16mm film, which record the reactions of a randomly chosen spectator.

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