Beyond the Veil: Teo Hernández Uncovered
On the occasion of the great experimental filmmaker's first U.S. retrospective, Chris Cassingham explores Teo Hernández's prolific, ecstatic body of work.
“The Super-8 camera is light like a feather. In order to employ it well, the filmmaker should be light as a feather.”
To watch a film like Nuestra Señora de Paris or L’Eau de la Seine, both made around the time of this 1983 diary entry, is to witness a succinct encapsulation of Teo Hernández’s embodied approach to filmmaking; a dance between camera, light, and object, each is a portrait of an iconic Parisian landmark—Notre Dame Cathedral and the river Seine, respectively—through ecstatic jitters, lurches, and flicks of Hernández’s trusty Super-8 camera. The light shining through the stained glass of Notre Dame is not formed into blunt beams, but thin razors that flutter in berserk, whipping motions guided by Hernández’s unconscious eye and hand. The shimmering Seine, too, flickers in agitated waves, a strip of liquid as reflective of light as the celluloid on which it was filmed is absorbent, light which the viewer drinks down in delirious gulps. In these films are two of Hernández’s foundational subjects: God and nature, the divine and the elemental.
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