Come Closer

Hy Hirsh was a gourmet cook and the kind of tinkerer who could fix anything. He loved music of all kinds and kept his own recording equipment ready to document live performances, of which he had many. He had worked in Hollywood as a cameraman in the 1930s, and appeared in a 1937 experimental short Even as You and I. But he left L.A. for San Francisco to escape an unhappy marriage — with his gentle, charming personality, women found Hirsh hopelessly attractive, and he himself was all too susceptible to the gorgeous women he filmed and shot for fashion spreads. In San Francisco, he worked partly for the San Francisco Museum of Art and partly freelance. He befriended Harry Smith and Jordan Belson and exposed them to film technology, including an optical printer that he had built (which allowed Smith to duplicate each frame of his drawn-on-filmstrip films so that the movement would be slightly steadier).

Hirsh also shot live-action experimental films for Sidney Peterson, but never found time to do his own projects, until he became intrigued with three technological gimmicks: the oscilloscope pattern, stereo vision and the oil-wipe screen, which he conquered and used in several films. Oscilloscope patterns form the main figures in Eneri and the 3-D Come Closer, for which he chose music from his extensive live archive — African drumming for Eneri (which is Irene, the name of his lover at the time, spelled backwards) and Caribbean steel drum carnival music for Come Closer.

Using his optical printer, he could select parts of an oscilloscope pattern and deploy them in a certain color exactly where he wanted them in a film frame. He combined them with some backgrounds made with traditional drawn animation — such as the rolling bars in Eneri which seem to make the sinuous oscilloscope lines rush faster. The oil-wipe technique also created elements that Hirsh could color and choreograph. Like Harry Smith, Hirsh cut together collages of film to be played live in jazz clubs as a light show. He continued to do this when his magazine photo assignments caused him to move to Amsterdam and Paris. In his films he began to create ever more complex layered imagery (reminiscent of Len Lye’s Trade Tattoo). Live-action figures might have animated circles or drawn wavy patterns flying through them, then, as in the brilliant Scratch Pad, Hirsh might scratch directly onto this elaborately composite image with rough jiggly lines that followed imagined energy flows. Two of Hirsh’s films received prizes at the Brussels Fair of 1958. About the same time, Hirsh helped the Polish animator Walerian Borowczyk defect to Paris, where he lived in Hirsh’s apartment building, and dedicated a film Renaissance to Hirsh’s memory. Hy Hirsh died of a heart attack in 1961 while driving his car in the Place de la Concorde in Paris; he simply slumped over the wheel and the car stopped. Because he traveled a great deal internationally on photo assignments, he usually carried his hashish in film cans which were labeled “exposed.” When the police discovered this, they impounded his entire estate — what was left after friendly neighbors had pilfered film cans for themselves. When the police finally released Hirsh’s property, several of his films were missing entirely and have never been found.

At his funeral some dozen women appeared who mostly did not know each other, but the memory of dear sensuous Hirsh was so sweet, they did not fight.

Moritz, William. “History of Experimental Animation.” Website. Absolut Panushka, curated by Christine Panushka. (Jan-Apr 1997).