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Articulated Light, 1995.
Hy Hirsh Dr. William MoritzThe brilliance of Hy Hirsh's films often arises not so much from their technical originality as from their canny coupling of imagery with music that perfectly matches its mood. Hirsh's homemade optical printer and oil wipe instrument were copied from John Whitney's originals, but the intricacy of what Hirsh did with them in films like Eneri (1953) and Chasse des Touches (1959) (with their duplicated, layered abstract imagery sometimes printed into several simultaneous smaller "screens" that contrast in push-pull colors) far exceeds Whitney's use of these same tools. Hirsh knew McLaren and Lye before he scratched and painted directly on film, but his Scratch Pad (1960) has a witty jazz expressionist personality different from his predecessors. Lye had used the optical printer for synthesizing surreat clusters of imagery, but again Hirsh's complex interface of imagery in his final four films create a more radical and ironic world view (fireworks turning into an H-bomb blast, a cat watching football while walking backwards, autos racing through a woman's nude body, Chaplin pratfalls repeated in loops until they become menacing) that belongs more to the Post-Modern vision of Bruce Conner and Pat O'Neill than to the formalist/modernist past. In the visual music films of Hirsh his exquisite taste shows up most strongly: in the parallel between the impossible three-dimensional occlusions of ribbons in Come Closer (1952) with wild infectious Caribbean carnival music, or in linking the jagged moving camera and staccato cutting of images of Paris posters in Defense d'afficher (1958-59) with an equally frenetic Cuban jazz. Similarly the mellow Modern Jazz Quartet sounds that accompany the fluid reflections in Amsterdam canals of Autumn Spectrum (1957) or the layers of metallic reflections from Constant Nieuwenhuis' sculpture in Gyromorphosis (1957) seem so perfectly matched as to render comparison with predecessors tike Ruttmann's In the Night or Moholy-Nagy's Lightplay Black White Grey (1926) irrelevant. One should also note that Hirsh recorded his own sound from live performances so that they are not exactly equivalent to the appropriation of commercial recordings so common in later films. Hirsh's use of the oscilloscope pattern as a source of non-objective figures and movements may well be the earliest (though experiments by Norman McLaren and Mary Ellen Bute were developing at about the same time) as well as the most inventive in its variations, such as, in Eneri, the spectacular rolling lissajous in front of vertical ribbing, the fragmentation into texture for larger figures, as well as the sub-screens — all of which scrupulously corresponds to the complexities of African drumming rhythms. Moritz, William. "Hy Hirsh." Articulated Light: The Emergence of Abstract Film in America. Boston: Harvard Film Archive, 1995, 12. |