Teo Hernández

Teo Hernández (1939–1992) was a Mexican experimental filmmaker.

Early life

Hernández was born in 1939 in Ciudad Hidalgo, Michoacán. He studied architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.^[1] He became involved with the cine-club culture in Mexico City.^[1] There, he founded the Centro Experimental de Cinematografia, which planned to produce a documentary. Hernández moved to Paris, France in 1966.^[2]

Career

Hernández began to experiment with Super 8 filmmaking in the late 1960s.^[1]^[2] After meeting his partner Michel Nedjar [fr], he spent time living in a commune and working in a textile shop owned by Nedjar's parents. He made his first feature film Salomé in 1976 and began to develop his unique visual style through volatile camera movements.^[2] Hernández's work explored interactions between the camera and body. His 1978 film Corps aboli, starring Gaël Badaud, marked a transition toward choreography in film, culminating in later collaborations with Bernardo Montet [fr] and Catherine Diverrès [fr].^[3]

Death

Hernández died from AIDS-related complications in 1992.^[4] His archive was inherited by Nedjar, who donated it to the Centre Pompidou. The Pompidou presented a retrospective of Hernández's films in 1997, and the Centro de la Imagen [es] in Mexico held a retrospective in 2018.^[1]

References

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Matusiak, Thomas (September 2021). "A jaguar in Paris: Teo Hernández's shamanic cinema". Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas. 18 (3): 341–350. doi:10.1386/slac_00060_1.
^ ^a ^b ^c Proctor, Maximilien Luc (October 8, 2021). "Teo Hernández: Permanent Movement". Notebook. Retrieved September 11, 2024.
^ Suárez, Juan A. (2024). Experimental Film and Queer Materiality. Oxford University Press. p. 176. ISBN 978-0-19-756699-2.
^ Valinsky, Rachel (2019). "Teo Hernández". Frieze. No. 204. p. 189. Retrieved September 11, 2024.