3910 Los Feliz Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Co-presented with Los Angeles Filmforum
The Mexican-born, Teo Hernandez, embarked on a self-imposed exile to Paris in the late 1960s and became part of the super8 film movement, L’Ecole du Corps. This loose-knit group of filmmakers used film to elliptically document and emulate the body in movement. Hernandez’s reworking of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé is impressionistic, moving over the surface of fabrics and architecture with as much care as it weaves its story arc. The film was initially projected at varying speeds, with differing soundtracks provided by the filmmaker, who requested that it be shown late in the evening, to best induce its dream-like trance upon audiences.
We bring you Salomé in 2019 with an original soundtrack performed by Dorian Wood, marrying the operatic evocations of Wood's singular voice with Hernandez’s baroque cinematography in the unique, Mayan-inspired architecture of the Philosophical Research Society.
An underrepresented figure in the European gay counterculture, Hernandez was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Centre de George Pomidou in early 2019, who concluded, “similar to shamanism, Hernández’s cinematographic technique explores other ways of seeing, hearing, and ultimately other bodies that may provoke another way to feel, to re-create and to re-write the world.”
Teodoro Hernández was an artist, filmmaker and writer, born in Hildago (Mexico). During his architecture studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, he founded the Experimental Cinematography Center (CEC). In 1966, he settled in Paris. With his fellow cine-artists Michel Nedjar, Jacques Hautbois aka Jakobois and Gaël Badaud, he created the experimental film collective MétroBarbèsRochechou Art. In 1984, Centre Pompidou mounted a retrospective of his work. Teo Hernández was also a photographer and writer. Hernandez passed away from HIV/AIDS related complications on the August 22, 1992. He produced more that 100 films, most of them in Super 8. Shortly before dying, Teo Hernández bequeathed his film work and personal files to Michel Nedjar, who donated them to Centre Pompidou for its conservation and dissemination.
Artist Dorian Wood seeks to glorify both the sanctity and irreverence of intimacy. They revel in challenging the artist-audience separation, using subject matter informed by their own position in society as a non-binary person of color and an autodidact. Their work has been showcased in concert halls and performance spaces around the world, including at such institutions as The Broad (Los Angeles), LACMA (Los Angeles), The Stone (NYC), MASS Gallery (Austin), Kulturhuset (Stockholm), and the City Hall of Madrid.
Support for this program comes from Consulate General of France