This special film screening event which complements the USC Fisher Museum of Art exhibition, Narcisa Hirsch: In Relation, will showcase a carefully curated selection of films spanning over half a century. You'll have the opportunity to delve into the conceptual, formal, sensual, and metaphysical themes that populate Hirsch's frames through early films in super 8 and 16mm, which have been recently digitized at the USC Digital Repository. These historic films will be screened alongside her more recent video work “Materia Negra” (Dark Matter) from 2023.

The one-hour screening will be followed by a 30-minute panel discussion with Erin Graff Zivin (Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature, USC), Noraedén Mora Méndez (Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Latin American and Iberian Cultures, USC), Inger Flem Soto (Doctoral Candidate, Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, USC), and Franchesca Rotger (PhD student, Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, USC). Light refreshments will be served after the Q&A.

Film Program:

After Medina: Narcisa at 95, Erin Graff Zivin and Tomas Rautenstrauch (2023, Digital/ super 8, 12 minutes)

Marabunta (1967, 16mm, 8 minutes)

Aída (1976, super 8, 7 minutes)

Patinando en Nueva York (Skating in New York) (1980, super 8, 3 minutes)

Rafael, agosto de 1984 (1984, 12 minutes)

El Aleph (2005, Digital, 1 minute)

Materia negra (Dark matter) (2023, digital, 12 minutes)

Come Out (1974, super 8, 9 minutes)

About the Exhibition:

A pioneer of Argentinian experimental or “underground” cinema, Narcisa Hirsch has referred to herself as una famosa cineasta desconocida (a famous unknown filmmaker). Although she can be said to have been triply marginalized—as a Latin American, as a woman, and as an experimental artist who always moved outside of the traditional global and local art circuits —her low-budget projects allowed her radical freedom to experiment with the medium of film, always in dialogue with other artists and art forms ranging from filmmaker Michael Snow to composer Steve Reich, fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges to musician Nina Simone. Indeed, before becoming a filmmaker, Hirsch herself experimented with diverse forms and media—painting, graffiti, and happenings on the streets of Buenos Aires, New York, and London—and subsequently published several books. This exhibition focuses upon the relational quality of Hirsch’s work, including relations of translation, adaptation, and experimentation between the medium of film and other artistic media (dance, literature, music, painting, graffiti, happenings), as well as between Hirsch’s work and that of other artists (Michael Snow, Michelangelo Antonioni, Nina Simone, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Edgar Varèse, Caetano Veloso, Jorge Luis Borges, Novalis, Blaise Cendrars).

About the Curator:

Erin Graff Zivin, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature, is the Director of the Experimental Humanities Lab and Acting Director of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at USC. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Latin American literature and other media, deconstruction, the relationship between ethics, politics, and aesthetics, and the intersection of philosophy and critical theory more broadly. Prof. Graff Zivin is the author of Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham UP, 2020), Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2014, winner of the 2015 Award for Best Book, Latin American Jewish Studies Association), and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke UP, 2008). She is co-editor of Terror: La perspectiva hispana (Guillermo Escolar, 2020), and editor of The Marrano Specter: Derrida and Hispanism (Fordham University Press, 2017), The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). She is also editor of a special issue of Discourse on the work of Peggy Kamuf (2019), and co-editor (with Tracy McNulty) of a special issue of Diacritics on the topic of “Women in Theory” (2022). Graff Zivin currently heads the international “Women in Theory” collective, serves on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, oversees the digitization of the filmic work of Narcisa Hirsch (a collaboration between USC Digital Library and the Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch), and is completing a book on experimental transmedial aesthetics.

Individuals with disabilities who need accommodations to attend this event may contact Maria Galicia at (213)740-5549, [email protected]. It is requested that individuals requiring accommodations or auxiliary aids such as sign language interpreters and alternative format materials notify us at least 10 days prior to the event. Every reasonable effort will be made to provide reasonable accommodations in an effective and timely manner.