In 1951, while still in San Francisco and using a hand-made optical printer, Hirsh completed his first film, Divertissement Rococo. The presence of the experimentally-oriented Art in Cinema series at the San Francisco Museum of Art-it was already presenting films by Broughton and Smith-may have motivated Hirsh. His second film, Come Closer, in 1952, was shown at Art in Cinema and Eneri in 1953.

Hirsh was a technophile, and he acquired new inventions such as the magnetic tape recorder (which became available shortly after WWII), which he would use to create his soundtracks. He built an optical printer to do his own special effects, matting and color printing processes. Hirsh also made pioneering use of oscilloscope patterns (images filmed from a cathode-ray tube) as a source of non-objective abstract figures which were then colored and multiplied through the use of the optical printer. These oscilloscope pattern movements may well be the earliest (though experiments by Norman McLaren and Mary Ellen Bute were developing at about the same time) as well as the most inventive in its variations, such as, in Eneri, the spectacular rolling lissajous in front of vertical ribbing, the fragmentation into texture for larger figures, as well as the sub-screens-all of which scrupulously corresponds to the complexities of African drumming rhythms.