The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, May 25-31
Taller (1975)
Directed by Narcisa Hirsch
Hirsch and the late Marie Louise Alemann were two German émigrés who settled in Argentina, where in the 1960s they became part of a small Buenos Aires-based community of experimental filmmakers whose ranks came to include other great artists such as Claudio Caldini, Jorge Honik, and Horacio Vallereggio. Anthology will present two screenings (programmed by Federico Windhausen) of recent blow-ups and fine digital transfers of works directed by the two women. Taller (the Spanish-language word for “workshop”) unfolds as a register of a particular moment—an afternoon, captured in one shot, during which Hirsch tenderly describes her personal history by cataloguing objects that she has gathered over time. The filmmaker, speaking by telephone, says of her 16mm short (which will screen in its English-language version, one of two versions that Hirsch made) that, “I saw Wavelength in New York in the 1970s and was quite taken by the experience, after which someone told me that Michael Snow had made another film called A Casing Shelved in which he showed and described all of the items on his shelves. I wanted to do something similar, but a step further, in which I would speak and build a narrative only about the things that one could not see. So I affixed a camera to a wall in my studio, invited my friend Leopoldo Mahler over, and told him the story of the place. The film was made with only one single camera inhabiting a single fixed frame. The image doesn’t move, and nothing much seems to happen. All the movement is in the voice.”Aaron Cutler (May 28, 7:30pm at Anthology Film Archives as part of a program of shorts by Hirsch and Alemann)