# Storm de Hirsch [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_De_Hirsch) (1912–2000) ## Description American filmmaker and poet whose hand-etched, scratched, and painted animation placed her among the core women of the New York underground film scene of the 1960s; a co-founder of the New American Cinema Group and the Filmmakers' Cinematheque. ## Key Tags #film-poem #direct-animation #drawn-on-film #ny-underground #camera-less #feminist ## Essential Works - [Peyote Queen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_De_Hirsch) (1965) - hand-painted and scratched color film staging a ritualized, psychedelic vision - [Divinations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_De_Hirsch) (1964) - camera-less, hand-worked film central to her direct-animation practice - The Tattooed Man (1969) - part of her longer Super 8 diary/trilogy work ## Details Published poetry before turning to film in her fifties, bringing a poet's interest in incantation and ritual repetition into her camera-less, hand-worked animation technique. Active in building the New York underground's institutional base alongside Jonas Mekas, co-founding both the New American Cinema Group and the Film-Makers' Cinematheque even as her own films remained less widely seen than those of her male contemporaries. ### Concepts and Theories - [[Symbolism, Theology, and Occultism]] - *Peyote Queen* stages ritualized, psychedelic, and visionary imagery central to her hand-worked films ### Creative and Technical Practices - [[Drawn on Film]] - hand-etched and scratched imagery directly on the filmstrip, in the same camera-less lineage as Harry Smith and Brakhage ### Collaborators - [[Harry Smith]] - contemporary in the New York underground's camera-less, occult-inflected filmmaking circle ### Institutional Affiliations and Associated Movements - New American Cinema Group / Filmmakers' Cinematheque - co-founder, helping build the New York underground's core exhibition infrastructure in the early 1960s ## References ### Primary Sources Bibliography %% none yet %% ### Secondary Sources Bibliography %% none yet %%