If you typed “Chantal Akerman by way of John Cassavetes by way of Doris Wishman by way of Agnès Varda” into an AI generator, you might get something like Storm de Hirsch’s 1964 film Goodbye in the Mirror.
De Hirsch was a major figure in the American avant-garde community from the 1940s through the ’70s — first as a poet and critic and later as a filmmaker. Born Lillian Malkin in 1912 in New Jersey, she relocated to the Big Apple at a young age, changed her name, and published her first chapbook, Alleh Lulleh Cockatoo and Other Poems, in 1955. (She’d go on to publish three more — all of them “engaging punctuative declarations, onomatopoeia, chorus repetitions, and sensual, ornithological and Cabalistic imagery”).