Angle

Angle

1978 · 16 min · ★ 1.0

"ANGLE, with its brief black and white shots, almost always plunging and oblique, of naked bodies or parts of bodies, is a film of rupture. Punctuations of black primers break up the filmic continuity, isolating snapshots or brief furtive movements: the body rolling over itself, colliding with the other or falling (these terrible falls, as sharp as a fainting spell, like that of the hero of The Andalusian Dog, whose hand, as he falls, brushes for a moment against the naked back of a beautiful, insensitive woman, and which is, it seems to me, the most striking representation of the link between passion in love and death that can be given). Often these movements are repeated and the actors seem to be the descendants of Muybridge's bonshommes lost in a white room. At the end - this is the longest shot in the film - in a corner of the room, one of the two actors remains crouched, hiding his eyes in his hands. Then the corner reappears, empty."

Directed by Michel Nedjar

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Cristaux

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Cristaux

Cristaux · 1978

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.

Esmeralda

Esmeralda · 1977

With Esmeralda, Hernandez shifts to the romantic mythology, but this descriptive aspect is secondary in the filmmaker's work, whose purpose is the constitution, by interposed myths, of a baroque cinematographic language. From this point of view, he joins the approaches of other contemporary filmmakers like Bene or Schroeter. In Esmeralda, he introduces masks from his creation to work on the physical and not only the filmic material. But Hernandez adds to his series of aesthetic variations of "stock-shots" of war plans, desolations, genocides, which brutally fall within the visual framework of his film. The filmmaker thus points out the cracks that overflow the myth in its darkest areas: the historical and social reality that obsesses us, that terrorizes us every moment.

4 à 4 Métro-Barbès-Rochechou-Art

4 à 4 Métro-Barbès-Rochechou-Art · 1983

4 à 4 Métro-Barbès-Rochechou-Art

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.

Lacrima Christi

Lacrima Christi · 1980

Lacrima Christi

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

Cinématon · 1978

MovieDocumentary

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.

Salomé

Salomé · 1976

A personal interpretation of Oscar Wilde Salome from three basic elements: the light, the color, and the projection speed.

Sur Graal de T.H.

Sur Graal de T.H. · 1981

Sur Graal de T.H.

Cristo

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.

Graal

The film Graal goes (as well as all the films which precede it) toward an open and avowed paganism, in which pagan force and magic imbue all the subjects at all times. (...) This is not about "the" Holy Grail and its legend but about the concept of the Grail, taken in a larger sense as a universal archetype: abbreviation, metaphor of the cosmos. In fact, achievement. That is what the Grail is: the achievement's completion.

À quoi rêve l'araignée ?

À quoi rêve l'araignée ? · 1982

À quoi rêve l'araignée ?

An autobiographical film that orchestrates the fragments of Michel Nedjar's life, to compose an architecture. The family films shot by his father, pieces of Michel's first films shot in the Balearic Islands and in Athens, contemporary images with Teo Hernandez, to stolen dialogues between his mother and and his aunt, recorded without their knowledge. The author is the spider, at the center of a device that allows him to survive: he has woven the threads of his own web and is now in control of his personal situation.

Michel Over There

Michel Over There · 1970

Michel Over There

The desert, the sea, someone. I meet Michel Nedjar; together we went to the south of Morocco. There, a movie begins to take shape and develops as our journey continues. This is Michel là-bas.

Ailes

Wings white, she's red, wings scream, she sings, wings fly, she moans, wings rise, she hides, wings move, she teaches me. Leila, night name, exhumates my childhood memories and introduces me to the marvelous.

Fragments

Fragments · 1987

MovieDocumentary

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.

Portraits / Mirrors

Portraits / Mirrors · 1984

Portraits / Mirrors

A single-screen version of the Portraits / Mirrors multi-projection. Featuring portraits of: Aloual, Gaël Badaud, Raphaël Bassan, Yann Beauvais, Jean-Michel Bouhours, Gérard Courant, Berndt Deprez, Bertrand Gadenne, Mythia Kolésar, Christian Lebrat, Stéphane Marti, Pascal Martin, Michel Nedjar, Dominique Noguez, Vivian Ostrovsky, Bernard Roué, Martine Rousset, Alain Sayag, Unglee, and Catherine Zbinden.

Pause

An early Téo Hernandez film exploring the space of a garden. Shot in July 1970 in the Carlsberg Glyptotek garden in Copenhagen, Pause is a 8 mm black‑and‑white silent short in which Téo Hernández roams the museum garden, alternating tight close‑ups of bodies (hands, feet, faces) and textures with sculptures and vegetation; the camera’s halting, scanning movement turns the stroll into a study of matter, framing and rhythm. Featuring Michel Nedjar, Léon Pizano and Sheena Mark, the film dispenses with narration and treats the garden’s statuary and foliage as anchors for a tactile observation of bodies in space.

Sara

MovieDocumentary

Portrait of the filmmaker's mother during her visit to Paris.

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