The perfect anti-hero, Mike is 30, ambitionless and not particularly skilled for anything. When offered a better job in a bigger city, Philadelphia, he decides to go. Aimless as always, Mike floats, as if in a trance, from one low-key comic folly to another, each one a strange and subtle moral tale.Read More »
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One of the best comic shorts (6 minutes) I’ve seen recently — Broken Specs by Ted Fendt, whom many people already know as the great translator of significant French texts by Godard, Straub, Moullet, Daney. It begins with shots like Caroline Champetier-era Godard, cuts to the credits the same way an ’80s Godard might. Haddon Township, New Jersey. Smashed glasses. “Mike,” the protagonist, eats NJ pizza with his family, his father with glasses pristine. Mike’s fall into the pie. A (high-school? home-from-college?) party comes next. The comedy goes far and quick. It’s a cross between the end of Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha and all of Rohmer’s Paris vu par episode Place de l’Étoile.Read More »
Going Out. 2014. USA. Directed by Ted Fendt. 8 min.
Liz thinks she’s going on a date with Rob to see RoboCop, but things take an unexpected (and inexplicable) turn.Read More »
The Only Luxury: An Interview with Ted Fendt
By Dan Sullivan
For the past few years, Ted Fendt has been one of the busiest under-the-radar figures in film exhibition in New York: a projectionist at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, he is also the city’s go-to live-subtitler of rare, unsubtitled prints of French films, and ranks among its most active moviegoers. But his contributions to film culture extend beyond the local scene to the online sphere, where he has become an essential translator of texts by Jean-Luc Godard, Luc Moullet, Eric Rohmer, and Jean-André Fieschi, among others. He has also produced new English subtitles for a number of films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (having taught himself German in order to so) and co-edited the catalogue for an upcoming retrospective of their films to tour the US later in 2016.Read More »