Chutes de Maya

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.

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.

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.

A group of disillusioned American expatriate writers live a dissolute, hedonistic lifestyle in 1920's France and Spain.

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.

The purpose of the film is to go beyond the notion of the body as a system of functions, symptoms and reflexes that try to delimit the whole body. The body, represented here with all its norms, confronted with itself in a space devoid of causal references, moves towards the abolition of its image and the springing of its inner source: it is the luminous nucleus of the human body.

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

The outcome of Hernández’ friendship with the dancer and choreographer Bernardo Montet, this work, ranging from black-and-white to color, is the vertiginous record of a cross-dressing act, or a therapeutic performance on identity. Presented for the first time in Rouen, on May 26th 1987.

"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."

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.

Portrait of the contemporary dancer and choreographer, Montet Bernardo.

Fugitive images of the northwestern city of France.

Filmed in 1988 on the occasion of the parties at the house of Marie-Noëlle Delorme. Shot with camera in hand to small bursts of frames and almost image by image, but then slowed down.