Michel Nedjar

The episode of Gérard Courant's Carnets filmés, Crime contre le cinéma (December 25, 2006 to December 2, 2006) is divided into four parts: Colas Ricard at Centre Pompidou, Joseph Morder at La Rochelle, the Filmer à tout prix Festival in Brussels, and Michel Nedjar and Jakobois at Centre Pompidou.

Dolls of Darkness is a feature length film that explores the mysteries and profundities of dolls, puppets and marionettes in the context of the grotesque rag dolls of contemporary French artist Michel Nedjar. It focuses on his studio and his vast collection of magic dolls and masks from around the world, and examines the role of the Holocaust in the artist’s creative process.

Experimental film by Teo Hernández.

Lacrima Christi is an exploration of the transfer between desire and myth that takes as its starting point a series of objects found in the flea market of Belleville.

A single-screen version of the Portraits / Mirrors multi-projection. Featuring portraits of: Aloual, Gaël Badaud, Raphaël Bassan, Yann Beauvais, Jean-Michel Bouhours, Gérard Courant, Berndt Deprez, Bertrand Gadenne, Mythia Kolésar, Christian Lebrat, Stéphane Marti, Pascal Martin, Michel Nedjar, Dominique Noguez, Vivian Ostrovsky, Bernard Roué, Martine Rousset, Alain Sayag, Unglee, and Catherine Zbinden.

Fugitive images of the northwestern city of France.

In the early '80s, this collective of artists invented a style of cinema made in 4 hands, where each of the protagonists is also a filmmaker.

The film Graal goes (as well as all the films which precede it) toward an open and avowed paganism, in which pagan force and magic imbue all the subjects at all times. (...) This is not about "the" Holy Grail and its legend but about the concept of the Grail, taken in a larger sense as a universal archetype: abbreviation, metaphor of the cosmos. In fact, achievement. That is what the Grail is: the achievement's completion.

Eyes and ears travel discontinuously through everyday life and the sub-worlds of the city and the body. A fragmented and subjective day-to-day chronicle that outlines a recurring obsession for registering even the most ordinary things, where the least poetic aspects of life, that is to say, the most somber ones, become the eye’s filter.

No synopsis available yet.

Teo Hernandez films waste and scrap found on the pavements of the streets of Paris. “Sidewalks are great subjects: garbage, objects and materials, stains, signs, are a movie subject.”

Portrait of the filmmaker's mother during her visit to Paris.

Chutes de Lacrima Christi is an 95‑minute experimental collage film assembled entirely from unused outtakes of Teo Hernández’s earlier work Lacrima Christi. Co‑created with Gaël Badaud between 1979 and 1980, it repurposes discarded Super 8 color footage into a series of non‑linear vignettes that fuse Christian myth with everyday imagery. Using the “chute” technique—physically gluing scraps of film into new sequences—the film explores the meeting of two cultures, Europe and America, and reveals dreamlike resonances in mundane moments. By reframing offcuts from the Passion tetralogy, Hernández invites viewers to discover hidden narratives and poetic meaning in material that was originally deemed surplus.

No synopsis available yet.

Through the use of portraits, shadow play and reflections, this series of exercises with and from body language compose a "four-handed" look against the notion of authorship: a vindication of the community content (repressed?) in every image.

Outtakes from the movie

Outtakes from the movie

Short film by Teo Hernández.

The tetralogy pieces are dominated by the concept and presence of death, foreclosure, fetal vertigo. As such, CRISTAUX is a real descent into an inner labyrinth, which we do not know if it is organic or cultural. At the same time, the film contains a dialectical break that initiates other semantic directions in Hernandez's work. Under the influence of Michel NEDJAR, the filmmaker abandons his traditional method of editing based on rushes. The operation is now completed inside the camera, filming. This more flexible way of proceeding ("the camera must become a second eye") is already reflected in the clear openings of Lacrima Christi: the Christian myth seems to be on the way to exorcising. The pantheistic intoxication - close to that evoked by Nietzsche - seizes places, objects and participants.

With Esmeralda, Hernandez shifts to the romantic mythology, but this descriptive aspect is secondary in the filmmaker's work, whose purpose is the constitution, by interposed myths, of a baroque cinematographic language. From this point of view, he joins the approaches of other contemporary filmmakers like Bene or Schroeter. In Esmeralda, he introduces masks from his creation to work on the physical and not only the filmic material. But Hernandez adds to his series of aesthetic variations of "stock-shots" of war plans, desolations, genocides, which brutally fall within the visual framework of his film. The filmmaker thus points out the cracks that overflow the myth in its darkest areas: the historical and social reality that obsesses us, that terrorizes us every moment.

All of history, that of Christ or any other, permeates the world, leaves its mark, modifying and informing history, and all that the human reproduces and creates. The best way for historical interpretation or literary adaptation is to move as far as possible from literal interpretation. That is, it is a contemporary and personal interpretation. The story of Christ is an archetypal story. It has modified and informed a morality and a vision of the human being in the West, it must be taken for what it is and what it has become: matter.

Reel 3 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

An early Téo Hernandez film exploring the space of a garden. Shot in July 1970 in the Carlsberg Glyptotek garden in Copenhagen, Pause is a 8 mm black‑and‑white silent short in which Téo Hernández roams the museum garden, alternating tight close‑ups of bodies (hands, feet, faces) and textures with sculptures and vegetation; the camera’s halting, scanning movement turns the stroll into a study of matter, framing and rhythm. Featuring Michel Nedjar, Léon Pizano and Sheena Mark, the film dispenses with narration and treats the garden’s statuary and foliage as anchors for a tactile observation of bodies in space.

No synopsis available yet.

Splendid portrait of the artist Michel Nedjar making one of his dolls, which allows to fully follow the entire genesis of the act of creation.

A personal interpretation of Oscar Wilde Salome from three basic elements: the light, the color, and the projection speed.

The desert, the sea, someone. I meet Michel Nedjar; together we went to the south of Morocco. There, a movie begins to take shape and develops as our journey continues. This is Michel là-bas.

No synopsis available yet.

As this title indicates, the rule of the game is random. The protagonist invites us to play rhythmic palpitations of radio parasites and broken images.