Edited by Stephen Broomer
Poetry reading and film projection of works by Storm De Hirsch
Microscope Gallery is extremely pleased to present in collaboration with Sigthtline Books and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative the Book Launch of Mythology for the Soul: The Collected Poems of Storm De Hirsch, edited by Stephen Broomer. This is the first poetry edition by the artist published since the early 1960s. The night includes readings of poems from the new collection by friends and those De Hirsch has inspired as well as projections of a selection of her films.
Storm De Hirsch began publishing poetry and art criticism in American magazines in the 1950s. Her poetry was on the periphery of the East Coast Beat movement, engaging punctuative declarations, onomatopoeia, chorus repetitions and sensual, ornithological and Cabalistic imagery. De Hirsch’s poems are shamanistic, bearing properties of the magic ritual and incantation, and her mysticism as well as her passions for new forms led her in the visionary direction of the New American Cinema. In underground film, De Hirsch recognized a new form for poetry, and the films that she made between 1962 and 1975 reflect this sensibility. She referred to some of these films as ‘cine-songs’ or ‘cine-sonnets’.
Mythology for the Soul collects De Hirsch’s two existing collections, Alleh Lulleh Cockatoo (1956) and Twilight Massacre (1965), along with previously uncollected published in little magazines and community newspapers.
Readers and other participants include Stephen Broomer (editor), Bradley Eros, Emily Apter, Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, Devon Narine-Singh, MM Serra, Mónica Saviron, Raha Raissnia, and others.
Among the films that will be shown throughout the event are several “cine-songs” or “cine-sonnets”, the trilogy “The Color of Ritual, the Color of Thought” (“Divinations”, “Peyote Queen”, and “Shaman: A Tapestry for Sorcerers”), and the double projection work “Third-Eye Butterfly”.
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Storm De Hirsch (1912-2000), born Lillian Malkin, was an artist, poet, filmmaker and mystic. Her writings appeared in December, the San Francisco Review, Intro Bulletin and Film Culture in addition to her published poetry collections. Many of De Hirsch’s films have been preserved by the American Film Preservation Foundation and the Anthology Film Archives, and are distributed by the Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York City. Her films were screened during her lifetime at the Museum of Modern Art, the Cannes Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among others and continue to be screened in museums, galleries and film venues today. She also received several awards during her lifetime, including the first independent film grant from the American Film Institute for “The Tattooed Man”, and the New York Women in Film & Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund in 2000 for “Divinations”. De Hirsch taught film courses at School of Visual Arts (SVA) and Bard College.
Stephen Broomer (b. 1984) is a filmmaker and historian. His writings on cinema and poetry have appeared in Desistfilm, La Furia Umana and Found Footage Magazine, and he has presented programs of his work at the Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Cinematheque and the Canadian Film Institute.
About the Publishers
The New American Cinema Group, Inc. (NACG) was founded on July 14, 1961 as a membership cooperation by a group of 22 New York artists, including Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Andy Warhol, and Jack Smith. The Film-Makers’ Cooperative is a division of the NACG and continues to be its operational name. MM Serra has been the director of the Film-Makers' Cooperative since 1991.
Sightline Books is a new publishing imprint based in Toronto, Canada, focused on the relation between poetry and cinema.