Cristaux (1978)
Without warning, a brisk flurry of pulsing forward zooms turn light reflected on lapping water into violent streaks of explosive orange. When a human figure appears (Gaël Badaud), he smokes casually as the visuals continue to swirl around him with hectic persistence. Although the soundtrack is completely silent, there is noise enough in the image. Teo Hernández seems to observe and manipulate the surface of water in every conceivable way, hammering at it with the zoom lens lever, swinging the camera as if in a balletic trance, observing from a distance and in extreme close-up so as to capture individual flecks of light, even rapidly cutting between fleeting glimpses of the water’s surface from a (nearly) static viewpoint, animating it from cuts alone. The water’s surface is that of the Seine river, as made explicit in the title, L’eau de la Seine (1983). As the film progresses, our field of vision expands to the street above, and in an early version of a visual experiment he would continue in several other works, passing cars are transmogrified into a single entity, transient, pulsing as it fails to pass, constantly held in place despite its continuous movement. The title and author credit are written in chalk on the stone of the bridge. Hernández would typically etch his credits into the physical spaces and surfaces of his films.
I showed L’eau de la Seine to my friend and fellow filmmaker, Noah, who immediately asked if I knew the work of Paul Clipson. I did not. He showed me a few shorts. The two have much in common in terms of style, whiplash zooms, a movement through symbiosis with the camera, and an appreciation for the specificity of texture found in the Super 8 format. More specifically, one can trace a direct line between L’eau de la Seine and Headache (2016), Clipson’s film for the track of the same name by Grouper. It is a partial homage. Ultimately though, Clipson’s is a cinema of observation and creation, while Hernández commandeers a cinema of bodily presence and physical gestures.
14, Bina Garden (1968)
Born in Hidalgo, Mexico, Teodoro Hernández (1939 – 1992) established the C.E.C (Centro Experimental de Cinematografia) in Mexico City after completing his studies in architecture. The C.E.C. managed to secure funding from the French Institute of Latin America for their first documentary, but the film was never brought to fruition. In ‘66, Hernández relocated to Paris and shot his first films on regular 8mm two years later, starting with 14, Bina Garden, and followed by slow and small scrapbookish home movie studies under ten minutes, such as Estrellas de Ayer (1969), Juanito (1970) and Pause (1970), alongside longer, more ambitious films like Un Film Provocado Por (1969), Images du Bord de la Mer (1969), and Michel Là-bas (1970). The Michel of this last title is Michel Nedjar, Teo’s partner and longtime companion. The two lived together in a commune in Paris and worked in Nedjar’s parents’ textile shop. What is apparent from these first 8mm films is Hernández’s interest in documenting “spare” time, pretend play, and travelogues. What has not yet entered his stylistic fray is an interest in hyper movement.
After several years spent adventuring with Nedjar around countries including but not limited to Nepal, India, and Greece, they returned to Paris and Hernández shot his first feature film in 1976: Salomé. This was followed up a number of medium length works and a quadrilogy of features—Cristo (1977), Cristaux (1978), Lacrima Christi (1978-79) and Graal (1980), collectively known as Le Corps de la Passion—throughout which the filmmaker developed a wholly unique visual language he would carry through the rest of his oeuvre: a fully functioning lexicon, grammar, and syntax composed of circular rotations, endless whip-zooms and jittery observations. Cristo is largely static in its camera and sensually Pasolinian. The view in Cristaux is similarly “static” for the most part, yet the layers of textures investigated through interaction between the human body, textiles, objects, and projected images are at times otherworldly, and it all ends with a stop-motion sequence which kicks up the velocity. Lacrima Christi picks up right where Cristaux left off and begins highly mobile, camera spun and shaken but in some instances slightly lacking the clear self-assurance of movement of later work; he seems to be testing the waters, perhaps uncertain how the projected image will look while filming it. As the film goes on it travels into more ambitious visuals which utilize stop-motion to impressive effect. By Graal things have grown perhaps the jitteriest. Although undoubtedly unique in his cinematographic approach, Hernández cannot be entirely credited as the sole developer. He cited Nedjar as a major influence on refining his approach to the camera and capturing movement, while multimedia artist Gaël Badaud entered the fold around ’76 as a second muse and lover who became the model and subject of many of Teo’s films (he acted in all parts of Le Corps de la Passion, among numerous other titles). Despite the trajectory of his formal evolution, Teo’s works maintained a steadfast devotion to the physical, and the question of how to present the sensation of touch in an audio-visual format. In the opening credits of Cristo, we repeatedly see nails being dropped onto a surface, and into a glass, bringing to mind Man Ray’s early play with photograms in Return to Reason (1923). Throughout the other three parts of the quadrilogy (and in other short works) actors repeatedly touch, cover, or press their faces or hands to intricate and semi-translucent fabrics.
The artist and filmmaker Jakobois eventually joined their menagerie and the four co-authored the feature named after their group: 4 à 4 Métro-Barbès-Rochechou-Art (1983). Some segments were shot together, others individually. “The definitive version comes down to this: we all film, we have all filmed each other. The movie is a movie about ourselves.” The group’s name was borrowed from a Metro station, about which Teo noted, “There is also perhaps the permanent mobility of the metro. This was quite related to our thinking about cinema, about cinematographic work.”1 The four were constantly influencing and affecting one another’s work.
The Illiac Passion (1967) / Corps Alobi (1978)
Hernández considered the camera a phallic extension, an idea taken to its extreme in one title (they tend to blur together if you watch too many in too short a span of time!) that saw him rapidly intercutting between fruits and semi-subliminal shots of his own phallus. This male-centric queerness holds ties to the work of the great mystic filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, who originally envisioned the Temenos as a site to which only men would be allowed to make the pilgrimage. While the two had wildly different stylistic solutions to the problem of presenting a purely material existence onscreen, they shared an affinity for the elegance of (predominantly queer, male, nude) human bodies, and playing with contemporary re-making of foundational myths. In terms of filming the body, there is perhaps the strongest case to be made between the sense of desire manifested in a reclining nude figure in movement in Markopoulos’ The Illiac Passion (1967) and a study of Badaud’s body in steady movement in Hernández’s Corps Alobi (1978), both bodies captured in chiaroscuro conditions.
The focus on the body-as-subject is consistent through most of the early works of Hernández, slowly moving hands in particular—and indeed his cinema is a part of the “Cinema of Coporality,” which included Greek duo Katerina Thomadaki and Maria Klonaris (Thomadaki appears in Cristo, which is rife with shots of hands scattering flowers). Later works focus on gestures embodied: the camera as the fulcrum for movement—Teo as filmmaker becomes both choreographer and performer. At the onset of the ‘80s, his camera became an essential part of his own body, used more like a whip than camera, to capture travelogues and diaries which bent physical reality to his will, complete with a signature circular downward rotation to transition between shots.
Summed up by author and acrobat M Kitchell: “it makes perfect sense that Hernández’s mid-period films were so focused on the body and the body in gesture, in movement. There's a natural transition almost in how he moved from merely filming the body to allowing the camera to become a body in motion itself.”
Citron pressé au Blue Bar (1984)
There is an entire subcategory of outtakes (chutes) that color his filmography, several collections of outtakes from single films run feature-length. There is the series of Souvenirs, chronicling visits to various cities (Barcelona, Bourges, Florence, Marseille, Paris, Rouen). There are portraits of individuals—Gaël (1978), Sara (1981), Pascal (1981), Michel Nedjar (1989)—and a visit paid to the glamor and vanity of Cannes in Citron pressé au Blue Bar (1984). While all autobiographical to some extent, there were also films such as Fragments de L’ange (1983-84) in which his ideas on cinema are spoken directly into the soundtrack, alongside personal details of surgery, the medicine taken afterward, and self-referential looks at the equipment used to make the film. Plastic bags from Fnac and a pharmacy are visually archived as relics. “Film is the action of transforming an eclipse into an ellipsis,” he tells us. While it might be considered as one massive, multi-faceted and interconnected piece, his oeuvre taken on a title-by-title basis is practically in direct opposition to the epic multi-hour modernist cycles of Markopoulos, Brakhage, and Frampton.
Pas de Ciel (1987)
Throughout the final decade of his life, Hernández continued to build his language of kinetic frenzies, an ecstatic expression he summed up by stating, “My films begin the moment the others end, the moment of orgasm. When orgasm comes I start filming, while the others cut.”2 In his final years he took an interest in the filming of dance, a natural endpoint. His entire film practice seemingly culminated in a 16mm film, Pas de Ciel (1987), focused on a performance by dancer Bernardo Montet, his final muse:
“...when he found Montet, a dialectic of rhythm and movement without limits was unleashed; feedback and coupling are carried out to such a degree that from that moment on, all of Hernández's reflections, the entire theoretical body that he has developed around the cinema, takes shape under the subtlety of the dancing image, and thus, a new cinematographic language.”3
1. http://www.elumiere.net/especiales/teo/toemetro.php
2. http://www.elumiere.net/especiales/teo/teoentrevista.php
3. http://www.elumiere.net/especiales/teo/teomauricio.php