In the film »Oedipus Marshal« (2006), Téllez stages Sophocles’classic tragedy, »Oedipus Rex«, with Western costumes and Japanese masks. An abandoned gold rush town in Colorado served as the backdrop. The masks and maskings in Téllez’s films introduce a meta level. As ambivalent elements, they both conceal or demystify them at the same time; they destabilize personality boundaries, but also symbolize the facility that psychiatric patients – whom Téllez tends to employ as actors – have for mimicry.
»Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See« (2007) draws on the eponymous classic by Diderot and the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant. The parable makes us aware of the fact that »reality« is by no means an objective constant, but defined instead by our own perception.
Téllez’s film »Caligari und der Schlafwandler« (Caligari and the Sleepwalker; 2008), is based on the 1919 Expressionist silent film, »The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari«. In Telléz’s interpretation, Dr. Caligari carries out a kind of therapeutic conversation with Cesare, who has been in a kind on somnambulist state for years and can only communicate by means of slabs of slate. The mixture of layers of reality, changes of identity, and polyphony are common thematic strands taken up by, but also implemented in terms of representational techniques by Téllez’s films. By selecting the Erich Mendelsohn’s icon of Expressionist architecture, the Einstein Tower in Potsdam, as the location for the film, he also points to an epoch of art and film history in which pathological disturbances were addressed for the first time and inspiration duly drawn from them.