Souvenirs/Florence is a watchful, dreamlike, erotic wandering through a city where stone turns to flesh to the rhythm of songs, voices, bells, and thunder. In Feuilles d’été, the regained paradise of Paris’s verdant parks brings together the static and the ecstatic, tedium and enchantment. Intoxicated, in a drive of rapid notations, the filmmaker’s camera caresses bodies and faces and dissolves landscapes. Finally, Foire du Trône, split in two halves by its passage from day to night, bears witness to the greatest rupture in Hernández’s work: After calmly documenting the fair’s rides and amusements, he returns and films like a sleepwalker, his body mirroring the world’s vertiginous—here mechanical—spins, where arm and hand extend the gaze, weaving arcs of colored light.
Souvenirs/Florence. 1981. Directed by Teo Hernández. Super 8 mm. Courtesy Light Cone. 19 min.
“To make a film on location, to leave behind all projects and abandon all subsequent manipulation of the film. The editing takes place at the same time, and there are no trick effects, no filters, no counting of frames. Nothing but my passage through an unknown world. Nothing of what we are about to see has been foreseen. Everything is new to vision” (Teo Hernández).
Feuilles d’été. 1983. France. Directed by Teo Hernández. 16 mm. Courtesy Mnam/Cci Centre Pompidou. 16 min.
“A gesture is a cut in the fabric/screen of day. A cut must be deep and encompass sky, cloud, water and leaf. A deep cut forms a mirror, a screen on which gesture is inscribed” (Teo Hernández).
Foire du trône. 1981. France. Directed by Teo Hernández. Super 8 mm transferred to 16 mm. Courtesy Mnam/Cci Centre Pompidou. 45 min.
“I asked Michel Nedjar what he thought about the beginning of Foire du trône. ‘It seems to me your gaze is too distant. You have to occupy space…. Move—move and cut at the same time. Without pause and without fear…. It is the gesturality of your body, of your breathing, that is imprinted and bears witness in the image. Dance and give the film its rhythm’” (Teo Hernández).
Total running time: 80 min.
This screening may include flashing and flickering images that can impact people who are sensitive to blinking lights.