Michel Nedjar
Nacimiento : 1947-10-12, Soisy-sous-Montmorency, Val d'Oise, France
Historia
Master of Art Brut, Michel Nedjar was born in 1947 in the Val d'Oise to a Jewish family marked by war and the holocaust. His father, born in Algiers, settled in Paris in 1921 as a tailor. At home, he tinkered on a sewing machine doll clothes for his sisters. During the Second World War, a large part of his family fell victim to Nazi oppression.
In 1960, he became aware of the magnitude of the Holocaust. At the age of fourteen, he enrolled in a vocational school to become a tailor and sells jeans with his flea grandfather from Saint-Ouen and accompanies his grandmother to the scrap fair; she makes him share his love for Shmattès (the worn cloth) that she picks up and stacks. In the spring of 1967, he left for military service. With tuberculosis and declared disabled in 1968, he spent a few months in a school of fashion stylist. He is upset by the vision of 'Night and Fog' by Alain Resnais, echoing his own disappearances in his family.
In the years 1970-1975, he left with Teo Hernandez. His travels take him to Morocco, Asia Minor, Europe and Mexico. He discovers cultures rich in symbolic expressions. He begins to take an interest in the funeral art and the dolls whose magic function fascinates him. Returning to Paris in 1976, he began making his first dolls called "Chairdâmes" with rags that he gleaned in the neighborhood of the Goutte d'Or, then made dolls dyed. In 1978, a period of depression transformed his style: his dolls look like gargoyles and terrifying totems, they are sometimes soiled with dirt and even blood. It was in 1980 that he began to draw with grease pencils on recovered flea media.
He made his first films in 8 mm from 1964 during his holidays in Greece or the Balearic Islands. Like Lionel Soukaz, he is one of the first French experimental filmmakers to address the theme of homosexuality (Le gant de l'autre, 1977). His practice will evolve towards a more formal exploration of the characteristics of cinema: luminous calligraphies (Gestuel, 1978), grain of the film (Le grain de la peau, 1986); either to direct cinema (Monsieur Loulou, 1980). These research finds their paroxysm in Capitale-paysage (1982-83), mixing snatches of conversations, work of concrete sound and rhythm, and kaleidoscopic effects.
Self
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.
Director
"The nocturnal animal life in the dark ... There you go. Here is what put the flea in my ear or rather the flea in the eye ... In almost absolute darkness, I film what I do not see, I am guided and, carried because I hear ... I FILM - I FLY - I PLAY ..." -Michel Nedjar, 23 Nov 2003
Writer
Black room revealed
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Black room revealed
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Desgarradora crónica fragmentada de lo cotidiano.
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Himself
Outtakes from the movie
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.”
Himself
Imágenes fugitivas de la ciudad del noroeste de Francia.
Director
"In this swirling and colorful hymn to Paris, a kind of new Symphony - but jazzed up - of a big city, we find the almost ethnological attention to others, the work of concrete sound. In just over an hour, condensing almost a year of filming in Paris, we get the impression of a single day of sunshine, a continuous kaleidoscope in the most diverse city in the world. The novelty is the attention to detail, which earned us, right in the middle of a series of sweeps, capsizes, Mathieu-style calligraphy, veritable little Gnoli-style paintings: a woman's shoe, a sweater button, or still lifes, in the cubist way, graphic elements: such and such of the thousand and prescriptions that populate the streets. This film thus takes its place at the forefront of all thosewho celebrate the capital today. Weaving together so many "energies", making the disparate elements communicate, it is the most complete, the most beautiful of Michel Nedjar's filmic works." - Dominique Nogues.
A principios de los años 80, este colectivo de artistas inventó un estilo de cine realizado en 4 manos, donde cada uno de los protagonistas es también cineasta.
Director
A principios de los años 80, este colectivo de artistas inventó un estilo de cine realizado en 4 manos, donde cada uno de los protagonistas es también cineasta.
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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.
Director
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.
Director
Director
An autobiographical film that orchestrates the fragments of Michel Nedjar's life, to compose an architecture. The family films shot by his father, pieces of Michel's first films shot in the Balearic Islands and in Athens, contemporary images with Teo Hernandez, to stolen dialogues between his mother and and his aunt, recorded without their knowledge. The author is the spider, at the center of a device that allows him to survive: he has woven the threads of his own web and is now in control of his personal situation.
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Himself
Outtakes from the movie
Retrato de la madre del cineasta.
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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.
Lacrima Christi, third part of the tetralogy Le Corps de la Passion (The Body of the Passion, 1977-1980), is inspired by Christian mythology, from which it draws a creative transformation force, in a search for identity that questions the two cultures to which the filmmaker belonged.
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A nocturnal "offside". Pascal Martin and the celluloid bather summon us to a strange magical rite that refers to the ambiguous games of childhood.
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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.
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Wings white, she's red, wings scream, she sings, wings fly, she moans, wings rise, she hides, wings move, she teaches me. Leila, night name, exhumates my childhood memories and introduces me to the marvelous.
Director
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.
N°27
Reel 3 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.
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.
N°27
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.
Director
This film is the most "plastic", the most "actionist" of Nedjar: it is his In contextus or his Double Labyrinth. Except that here - a single actor filmed in close-up on a plain black background. Nedjar "wiggles" his camera, with Gaël Badaud manipulating a green net or a mirror, wearing a gas mask or covering his head with a red-skinned knit like a bloody balaclava, he inaugurates a search for luminous calligraphies that will soon be shared with Teo Hernandez.-- Dominique Noguez.
Director
"ANGLE, with its brief black and white shots, almost always plunging and oblique, of naked bodies or parts of bodies, is a film of rupture. Punctuations of black primers break up the filmic continuity, isolating snapshots or brief furtive movements: the body rolling over itself, colliding with the other or falling (these terrible falls, as sharp as a fainting spell, like that of the hero of The Andalusian Dog, whose hand, as he falls, brushes for a moment against the naked back of a beautiful, insensitive woman, and which is, it seems to me, the most striking representation of the link between passion in love and death that can be given). Often these movements are repeated and the actors seem to be the descendants of Muybridge's bonshommes lost in a white room. At the end - this is the longest shot in the film - in a corner of the room, one of the two actors remains crouched, hiding his eyes in his hands. Then the corner reappears, empty."
Himself
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Self
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.
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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.
Production Assistant
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.
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.
Director
A sexagenarian transvestite in his room, confronted with his fantasies and his solitude.
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Exploration of bodies. Point, counterpoint. A black glove goes in search of a red glove.
A personal interpretation of Oscar Wilde Salome from three basic elements: the light, the color, and the projection speed.
An early Téo Hernandez film exploring the space of a garden.
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.
Director
Outtakes from the movie
