De Hirsch (born Lillian Malkin) was a founding member of The Film-Makers’ Cooperative and a key participant in New York City’s experimental film scene of the 1960s. A contemporary and peer of Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, and Jonas Mekas, she was a pioneer of frame-by-frame etching, painting, scratching, and generally disrespecting film stock. De Hirsch was also an accomplished poet before coming to film, just like the celebrated underground filmmaker Maya Deren, whose career was cut short just as De Hirsch’s began. Beyond both using pseudonyms, they shared an interest in the occult and earthy, dark subject matter. Many of her works also have a feminist provocation with an all-female cast and decidedly feminine perspective, specifically in Goodbye in the Mirror (1964) and her treatment of male nudes as an object of the gaze in Journey Around A Zero (1963). De Hirsch published her first collection of poems, Alleh lulleh cockatoo and other poems (Brigant Press, 1955), before making her first film in 1962.