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Saturday, July 2, 7 PM @ Xpace, 303 Augusta Ave.
Silently, Bearing Totem of a Bird
The Cine Sonnets of Storm de Hirsch
A co-presentation with Splice This! Toronto's 8th Annual Super 8 Film Festival July 1-3, 2005 (www.splicethis.com)

Though Maya Deren and Shirley Clarke garner more attention in histories of experimental cinema, their contemporary Storm de Hirsch carved her own niche in the cultural milieu of New York in the Sixties. Originally a poet, de Hirsch gravitated towards filmmaking to chase after images that words couldn’t describe. Her first film was the feature-length Goodbye in the Mirror, shot in Rome in 1964. Based on the lives of three young women living abroad, the film premiered at Cannes and is considered as a precursor to the feminist films of Yvonne Rainer, Sally Potter and others. De Hirsch moved quickly from dramatic filmmaking to a more experimental style, exploring magic, ritual and sexuality in 16mm until the end of the decade, thereafter she switched her attention to Super 8.

For our presentation at this year’s Splice This! Festival Pleasure Dome is pleased to screen a selection of Storm de Hirsch’s Cine Sonnets. Begun in the early Seventies, these films are intimate, silent studies of nature’s lightplay and our own interior worlds. Edited in-camera using her Eumig Super 8 camera, these films reveal her keen visual eye: curtains both mask and transform the outside world, trains blur through pockets of sun, and homes pose on behalf of their inhabitants. Shown on both Super 8 and as 16mm blow-ups, these rare films stand in place of de Hirsch, who passed away in 2000, and whose history is now known only through her films.