According to Jaroslav Andel's biography of Hackenschmied, in 1930, Hackenschmied created his first film Bezúčelná procházka (Aimless Walk) which inaugurated the movement of avant-garde film in Czechoslovakia.
During the late 1930s he collaborated with the American filmmaker Herbert Kline on the feature-length documentary Crisis (1939) and moved to the USA where he met and married Eleanora Deren, he later on named her "Maya".