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.

4.29GGB | 1h 00m | 1920×1040 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/F39D0BCE96E5BF9/Short.Stay.2016.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-NTb.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish (Softcoded)

The post Ted Fendt – Short Stay (2016) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
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.

I will never forget the refrigerator magnets of football-playing kids, something like the Facebook posts of a friend-from-when-I-was-young whom I recently reconnected with, whose life revolves precisely around the family, four kids, all ten or eight, — while some of us still suffer, barren, unattended, make the movies. Not that Fendt’s in a category as pathetic, by any means, but it’s a small glimpse of where a life fifteen years prior meets the improbabilities of this, the unbelievable now.

110MB | 5 min 47 s | 1280×720 | mkv

http://nitroflare.com/view/479854994ECF990/Broken_Specs_%282012%2C_Ted_Fendt%29.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Ted Fendt – Broken Specs (2012) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

124MB | 7 min 46 s | 1280×720 | mkv

http://nitroflare.com/view/BF20F06D4E2BCC5/Going_Out_%282015%2C_Ted_Fendt%29.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Ted Fendt – Going Out (2015) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

Finally, he is himself a filmmaker quite unlike any other. His short films are uncompromising yet spendthrift miniatures shot on 16mm—and, in the case of his most recent output, blown up to 35mm for exhibition. Broken Specs (2012), Travel Plans (2013), and Going Out (2015) all follow the faintly absurdist travails of a group of ostensibly unremarkable denizens of Haddonfield, NJ, the mesmerizingly anonymous suburb of Philadelphia where Fendt grew up. The elegance of these episodic works is matched only by the precision with which Fendt magnifies the humour and emotional texture of a socially awkward young man whose glasses are broken at a party (Broken Specs), a UPS employee considering taking a trip (Travel Plans), and a girl going on a date to see the recent remake of Robocop (Going Out). The films’ non-professional performers are pure presence, and their opacity accentuates the air of spontaneity and mystery. These cipher-like figures float from one encounter to another, telling and retelling stories, attending house parties, drinking cheap draught beers in dive bars with Big Buck Hunter-type arcade games clamouring in the background. Surrealist flourishes—impenetrable narcolepsy is a recurring motif, as are social interactions so brief they can’t be considered conversations—are grounded through a sneakily rigorous materialism born equally of the means at Fendt’s disposal and his staunchly upheld preference for shooting in lived-in domestic spaces with a skeleton crew, mostly natural light, and direct sound. Fendt’s austere style and laconic writing aims at a dramatic relaxedness, and accordingly the films feel slight and charming rather than cold and cerebral.

His feature-length debut, Short Stay, which just received its world premiere in the Berlinale Forum, steadfastly continues the project of Fendt’s short-form work. The taut 61-minute feature follows Mike (Mike MacCherone, a key member of Fendt’s troupe), a listless Haddonfield pizza delivery guy who offers to fill a sublet for a smarmy sort-of friend (Mark Simmons) in Philadelphia and pick up his shifts at a walking-tour company. From there the shaggy-dog narrative unfolds segment by segment, and in each leg of Mike’s anti-journey Fendt subtly plays with his limitations as a leading man, almost completely dispensing with dramatic psychology in favour of a documentary-like attentiveness to gesture and openness to chance. Along the way Mike figures into an ineptly pursued romance with Liz (Elizabeth Soltan, the star of Going Out), and becomes subject to a series of somewhat failed attempts at kindness made by Mark’s spurned girlfriend Marta (Marta Sicinska) and her roommate Meg (Meaghan Lydon). Fendt renders these incidents—whether they be practical discussions about where Mike can spend the night or all-too-familiarly limp party scenes that throw Mike’s disconnectedness from his own milieu into harsh relief—with a deliberation, assurance, and sensitivity to forms of everyday inconsideration that evidence his status as an unapologetic formalist, sly humorist, and unlikely moralist.

Short Stay manages to contain multitudes despite initially seeming unassuming and sparse, unexpectedly locating a wholly new and refreshingly unsentimental brand of humanism within the mundane fabric of the kinds of lives that cinema hasn’t hitherto deigned to depict. Fendt carefully bypasses any immediate resemblances to mumblecore, instead drawing from his own unique host of influences (Straub-Huillet, Moullet, Rohmer, Henry King, sundry others) to arrive at a way of working and a constellation of themes and tones that has become his and his alone.

CinemaScope

https://nitro.download/view/3698EF369C7546E/Short_Stay_(2016,_Ted_Fendt).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Ted Fendt – Short Stay (2016) first appeared on Cinema of the World.