MoMA Screens Over 19 Teo Hernández Super 8 Films in a Rare Retrospective

In early 2025, the Museum of Modern Art is presenting a concentrated retrospective of the Mexican-born filmmaker Teo Hernández, placing some 19 of his Super 8 shorts and features in dialogue with a smaller selection by his collaborator and heir Michel Nedjar. Hernández died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, leaving behind a substantial but still too little seen body of work. He shot more than 150 films, mostly after settling in Paris in 1975, forging a language of constant motion that blurred his subjects into pulses of colour and light.

His early pieces leaned on static, camp-inflected tableaux, riffing on spiritual and mythological imagery with a directness that invites passing comparisons to Kenneth Anger or Maya Deren. What came later was more destabilising. Hernández held and swung the camera without fixing on a steady subject, zooming and reframing relentlessly. Watching the results can feel like tracing Jackson Pollock’s arm movements through paint, a ritual of kinetic ecstasy that in longer stretches forces the eye to blink with the film’s own frantic rhythm. Silence on the filmstrip gives way to found sound, old Spanish ballads, ocean waves, street noise, anchoring the pictures to a world outside the formal trance.

Repeated figure studies of handsome men, often nude, share the frame with young women, Christ-like poses, bread breaking, wine drinking, city streets. There is a worshipful charge to it all, neither celebratory nor mundane but something between. Three Drops of Mezcal in a Glass of Champagne (1983), the only work in the programme with narration, acts as a kind of manifesto. Film, it says, is sex searching for the sun as a partner.

Hernández worked closely with friends and lovers like filmmaker Gaël Badaud and Nedjar, who also appears under the name Jakobois or as part of a collective. MoMA’s decision to fold in some of Nedjar’s films acknowledges that the work was never made in isolation. The retrospective draws on a practice that demanded a handcrafted, meticulous attention from its maker and an equal willingness from its audience to let go of the idea that an image must sit still.