Narcisa Hirsch

In 1976, Hirsch won a contest from UNCIPAR with her film Comeout, which consists of two shots of a record player. In the first, through manipulation of the lens and the lighting, the record player is slowly revealed, and the second features an over head stagnant shot of the record. It was scored to the Steve Reich song of the same name, and included a voice saying "come out and show them" over and over with increasing confusion. Meant to produce a sense of disorientation in the viewers, it was negatively perceived by critics, who had yet to appreciate experimental film. Regardless, she took first prize at the contest. In that same year, she met her mentor Werner Nekes while studying at the Goethe Institutes of Buenos Aires. At this time, she also began using mostly Super 8 camera.

Hirsch has an extended body of work beyond these pieces, including Diarios Patagónicos (1972–73), Taller (1975), Testamento y Vida Interior (1977), Homecoming (1978), Ama-zona (1983), A-Dios (1989), Rumi (1999), Aleph (2005), and El Mito de Narciso (2011). She has directed several dozen more films, and began to receive critical recognition for her work from several international film festivals in the 2010s. She has been screened all over the world, including in Los Angeles at The Hammer Museum. Her work is also part of the traveling exhibit started at The Hammer called "Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960 - 1985".

La Marabunta was performed in 1967 by both her and the other members of the group she was a part of. Consisting of a giant female skeleton covered in fruit and stuffed with live pigeons, Hirsch became interested in the idea of filmmaking when she sought out filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer to record the act of passerby's removing the fruit, metaphorically and physically devouring the female body, specifically a pineapple which she placed at the sex of the skeleton. It was performed at the El Coliseo Theater.

In 1950, Hirsch married Paul Hirsch, a German Jew from Frankfurt, adopted his surname, and raised three children with him. She joined an avant-garde group consisting of Claudio Caldini, Juan José Mugni, Juan Villola, Horacio Valleregio and Marie Louise Alemann, where Hirsch's focus was on bringing art to the people through performance. She and Alemann were co-leaders of the group. Her group often was at arms with similar groups in Buenos Aires, often inciting arguments with other groups that morphed into Happenings. Her work as an artist began in the organization of these happenings, the most notable being Manzanas and La Marabunta. Because her group of experimental filmmakers was accepted by neither the politically active filmmaking groups or the commercial groups, it mostly escaped notice during the bloody uprisings in the late seventies in Argentina. The group was highly resourceful and experimental, shooting and projecting wherever and whenever they could, once projecting their films on the back of a white rabbit. Because of the highly experimental nature of their work, traditional gallery spaces shied away from the group, all except the Goethe Institute, who gave them a formal place to screen their work. Though she was well educated, she did not receive any formal training in film.

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. Recently, 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. She won the Platinum Konex Award from Argentina in 2022.

Hirsch was born Narcisa Heuser in Berlin, Germany, in 1928, to Heinrich Heuser and a German-Argentinean mother. Her father was an Expressionist painter, who left her mother and her when Hirsch was five. Heuser was an Expressionist painter, and Hirsch would explore this medium first when she began making art. She grew up in Tyrol, but was sent to a school in Vienna at the age of 8 with no prior education. At 9 she and her mother visited Argentina, which turned into a much longer stay than intended when World War II broke out. They officially emigrated in 1937.