Ted Fendt in Zurich | Classical Period

Two liberations, for a classical cinema

After its premiere at the Berlinale in 2018, I recently saw Ted Fendt’s film Classical Period for a second time, renewing the experience of liberation it conveys, liberation from the Romantic clichés of cinema. The screening at the Kino Xenix in Zurich, where Daniel Wiegand invited the American filmmaker (now based in Berlin) in the framework of a collaboration between the ZHdK and the University of Zurich, actually yields a second experience of liberation, which motivated me to write a few words.

The projection of two shorts by Ted Fendt – Going Out (2015) and Unglückliche Stunde (2023) – allows confirmation of his cinematic aesthetic as one that marries the focus on people and their dialogues in daily life with a strong opacity of sound and image. Environmental noises and the coarse grain of the 16mm envelops the action in physical matter. We can enjoy the physicality of the moving images and be content with its vintage patina, but I believe that this aesthetic also serves another possibility: actions are in this way marginalised and work as bridges in order to build an inner of our outer space of meditation and feeling, which is purely invisible but distinctly present. The sound disturbances, the unexpected cuts, the use of off-screens are all elements that switch our attention from the saying of the dialogues to what is being said.

From this perspective, the film Classical Period and its concentration on literary criticism and historical knowledge through “dry”, bookish dialogues, is the perfect example of a liberation from the dominance of the visible on screen. The experiential centre of the film is the world and the meanings of literary works, yet that is nothing but the spiritual life of the protagonists, insofar as it is accessible for us through the classical works and the knowledge that give it form. The invisible space of spiritual or intellectual life thus becomes a third territory to which we and the protagonists of the film can have the same relationship. A horizontal axis binds us and said protagonists; we are not simply following them but can actually meet them in this either spiritual or intellectual territory.

During the conversation after the screening at the Kino Xenix, the question of the difficulty of the protagonists meeting arose: is this difficulty a mark of Fendt’s cinematic narrative? The reflection on the centrality of the invisible space of spiritual or intellectual life in his cinema would allow us to answer in the negative, and to stress how the protagonists and ourselves as viewers do meet in this third territory. This meeting is far from being less important just because it is not physical. The force and exceptionality of Classical Period is in its being able to show the passion for knowledge and literature, which is a shared passion. Its most radical figure, Cal, embodies this non-Romantic passion, and it is probably not a coincidence that Christian love – be it in Dante, Campion or Etienne Gilson – is so important in his conversations, for it is a love that realises itself in a third element, Christ, in which the lovers can find a horizontal balance.

Cinema is not only the art of delusions and ephemeral ghosts, it is also able to render the invisible world (of literature, of knowledge) concrete, passionately so. This actually is the task of classical works, the reason for which a work is said to be classical. Classical Period and Ted Fendt’s cinema are a rare example that accomplishes this task: they liberate us from the tyranny of the visible, and from the anti-intellectualism of Romantism. Classical Period is not just about a period, it is classical, period. A relief for cinema.