Storm de Hirsch

The filmmaker Storm de Hirsch, is considered one of the key figures of the New York avant-garde scene of the 1960s. Like many experimental filmmakers of the time, de Hirsch began her artistic career not as a filmmaker, but as a poet. She made her first film in the early 1960s and soon became active in the New York underground film movement, collaborating with filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke and others. Her films explored the possibilities of light and analog effects to create kaleidoscopic images inspired by the aesthetics of Far Eastern religions and rituals. 

How the effects of the film projection condition the viewing experience by blurring different levels of perception is a recurring feature of her cinema. For her projection is both physical, as the film mechanically runs through the projector, and mental, as one state of consciousness enters another. Again in this case, the film enables the transition from one state to another and determines the appearance of the intermediate body, which is ever-present during this period in the filmmaker’s work. In terms of form, the film is shot in double 8mm and uses a split screen format that is made more complex by dividing the screen in eight identically sized parts. The American poet and film critic Parker Tyler explains that ​“such filmmaking corresponds directly with abstract style in painting of pictograph type; that is, with a set of cubicles each containing a different though perhaps related pattern.” This expanded composition disrupts any effort to distinguish relations of scale from abstract patterns. The infinitely large meets the infinitely small and shapes merge with colors.

The filmmaker makes multiple visual experiments inspired by the diverse range of colorful and abstract butterfly wing patterns. Kaleidoscopic shots and superimpositions come and go in the image, in tune with the soundtrack’s repetitive sounds, as if this were an attempt to translate the multi-color effect of butterfly wings into an expanded film experience. Intended to be projected in double screen using two synchronized projectors, the film creates the illusion of seeing two butterfly wings animated by the flicker of the projected images. An eye, ​“the great Eye,” appears several times in the center of an endless spiral framed by the words ​“Third Eye Butterfly.” This third eye, a metaphorical outgrowth of the anatomical eye, bolsters Storm de Hirsch’s pet idea that the experience of the film projection and the reversibility of the film apparatus are essential aspects of poetic expression. On this matter, the American theorist Casey Chanress explains that ​“the 70mm like effect of Third Eye Butterfly encourages the mind to work as a third eye by fusing the two side-by-side screens into a third meaning, just as Eisenstein caused the meaning of two juxtaposed shots to result in a third implied meaning. 


THIRD EYE BUTTERFLY, 1964
16mm film, digitalized, color, sound
10 min.
Courtesy The New American Cinema Group, Inc. / The Film-Maker’s Cooperative, New York