In L’Eau de la Seine, water is treated as both living entity and poetic matter, a solar mirror of fractured instants or a musical current pointing toward the future. From the top of the Tour Montparnasse, Teo Hernández sketches, in Trois gouttes de mezcal dans une coupe de champagne, his first autobiographical account. He grants the photographs of his father, gathered at the moment of his death, the same confessional value as his reflections on cinema, through which the spoken word enters his work. In Mesures de miel et de lait sauvage, he films garbage dumps and market detritus—the “erogenous zones of the city”—over three years, likening sidewalks to “immense cloths unrolled into infinity.” The succession of sequences ultimately incorporates photographs, shoots, frames taken from the editing viewer, diaries, and notes on the film itself. Its everydayness expands to engulf absolute totality.
L’Eau de la Seine. 1982–83. Directed by Teo Hernández. Super 8 mm transferred to 16 mm. Courtesy Mnam/Cci Centre Pompidou. Silent. 11 min.
“To be inspired means to feel suspended…one could say, when this doesn’t happen, that ‘there isn’t enough water.’ Indeed, it’s like floating in water—at once without weight and without pressure, enveloped” (Teo Hernández).
Trois gouttes de mezcal dans une coupe de champagne. 1983. France. Directed by Teo Hernández. Super 8 mm transferred to 16 mm. Courtesy Mnam/Cci Centre Pompidou. 16 min.
“My new phase is the Word. I began it with Trois gouttes de mezcal…, formally burying my father and proposing dream as a riddle. I found cinema behind the Montparnasse Tower (yesterday I saw it without knowing it when I went to film in order to ‘know,’ and I left thinking I had ‘found’ nothing—when in fact I had ‘lived’ it). There lies the meaning I give to my autobiography: to find cinema” (Teo Hernández).
Mesures de miel et de lait sauvage. 1981–84. France. Directed by Teo Hernández. Super 8 mm transferred to 16 mm. Courtesy Mnam/Cci Centre Pompidou. Silent. 43 min.
“No frame measures, but handmade measures. One measure of honey and two measures of milk; or three measures of milk and two measures of honey, but wild measures, made with the eyes and the hand. Measures of life—of vision, seized abruptly, or almost” (Teo Hernández).
Total running time: 70 min.