Michel Nedjar is a French visual artist and experimental filmmaker born on October 12, 1947 in Soisy-sous-Montmorency (Val-d'Oise). He currently lives and works in Paris and is known for making dolls with various materials that have often been associated with the practice of Outsider Art. He also has a well-known career as an experimental filmmaker, which began in 1964 with the short film Voyage aux Baléares and which he developed until 2004, with his latest short film, Black Room Revealed. During the 1970s and 1980s, he co-directed several films with his colleagues from the MétroBarbèsRochechou Art film collective: Teo Hernandez, Gaël Badaud, Jakobois and Pascal Martin. In these movies each cineaste films and is filmed by the others, affirming his own vision and story, preserving and at the same time diluting his identity in a single flow. In 1978 he made a film called Gestuel, after seeing an exhibition dedicated to Francis Bacon: in this film, Nedjar uses the technique commonly known as undercranking to reproduce the deformations of Bacon’s faces. The presence of a “Velpeau bandage” with which the protagonist masks his face and directly evokes his work with dolls. The film was presented at the eleventh Biennale de Paris, after being acquired for the permanent collections of the National Museum of Modern Art at the Center Pompidou.
