Horrible Tragedy

The tetralogy pieces are dominated by the concept and presence of death, foreclosure, fetal vertigo. As such, CRISTAUX is a real descent into an inner labyrinth, which we do not know if it is organic or cultural. At the same time, the film contains a dialectical break that initiates other semantic directions in Hernandez's work. Under the influence of Michel NEDJAR, the filmmaker abandons his traditional method of editing based on rushes. The operation is now completed inside the camera, filming. This more flexible way of proceeding ("the camera must become a second eye") is already reflected in the clear openings of Lacrima Christi: the Christian myth seems to be on the way to exorcising. The pantheistic intoxication - close to that evoked by Nietzsche - seizes places, objects and participants.

"Sounds of images" come to me from the windows overlooking rue Saint-Maur (the former pilgrims' path to Saint-Denis) and suddenly make me want to take a closer look. "Images", at the same time, spring from T.S.F.'s post, Louis Moreau Gottschalk starts playing on the keyboard of the pedestrian crossing at the bottom, there, just below my windows; Henri Vieuxtemps makes the umbrellas dance to an old American tune and Gaël, on a visit, takes up this tune on his magic flute. "Some naturalists claim that insects adapt to the vegetation around them and modify their physiology accordingly," says Louis Moreau Gottschalk; I claim that some filmmakers adapt to the spectacle around them and modify their perception of the world accordingly. Certainly I am one of them, and I console myself by thinking that I am not the only one of my kind.

"...the main thing, both during filming and during editing, was not to pay attention, simply to wait to be surprised by a detail and let myself be carried away to another visualization in a dance-like movement."

One of Mark Rappaport's later narratives (which won the Gold Hugo for Best First Feature at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1979), Impostors is an off-kilter comedy/mystery focused on two magicians trying to find Egyptian jewels, their promiscuous assistant, and a man who loves the assistant.

In the early '80s, this collective of artists invented a style of cinema made in 4 hands, where each of the protagonists is also a filmmaker.

Magical Super-8 (shown on 16mm) single frame portrait of the Notre Dame cathedral featuring luminous light and a dense score incorporating players from the square. - Early Monthly Segments

Lacrima Christi is the longest of the over 150 films made by the Mexican filmmaker resident in Paris, Teo Hernández. Part three of a tetralogy devoted to Christ’s Passion, Lacrima Christi is an exploration of the transfer between desire and myth that takes as its starting point a series of objects found in the flea market of Belleville.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

All of history, that of Christ or any other, permeates the world, leaves its mark, modifying and informing history, and all that the human reproduces and creates. The best way for historical interpretation or literary adaptation is to move as far as possible from literal interpretation. That is, it is a contemporary and personal interpretation. The story of Christ is an archetypal story. It has modified and informed a morality and a vision of the human being in the West, it must be taken for what it is and what it has become: matter.

Eyes and ears travel discontinuously through everyday life and the sub-worlds of the city and the body. A fragmented and subjective day-to-day chronicle that outlines a recurring obsession for registering even the most ordinary things, where the least poetic aspects of life, that is to say, the most somber ones, become the eye’s filter.

Outtakes from the movie

Chutes de Lacrima Christi is an 95‑minute experimental collage film assembled entirely from unused outtakes of Teo Hernández’s earlier work Lacrima Christi. Co‑created with Gaël Badaud between 1979 and 1980, it repurposes discarded Super 8 color footage into a series of non‑linear vignettes that fuse Christian myth with everyday imagery. Using the “chute” technique—physically gluing scraps of film into new sequences—the film explores the meeting of two cultures, Europe and America, and reveals dreamlike resonances in mundane moments. By reframing offcuts from the Passion tetralogy, Hernández invites viewers to discover hidden narratives and poetic meaning in material that was originally deemed surplus.

An autobiographical black-and-white short in which Teo Hernández portrays his Purépecha father by holding backlit old photographs atop the Montparnasse Tower while reading a manifesto of sorts on his filmmaking.

Outtakes from the movie