By Aldo Padilla

The characters in the films of Ted Fendt are of a surprising simplicity. The simplification he realized in Short Stay of the classic lost character without a path, defined in the streets of Philadelphia, seems to be transposed in his new film Classical Period, where the characters are defined by how much do they know, how many authors can they quote and how many references can they give on every possible topic. Although everything seems like an empty discourse, which could easily be part of a paper or a thesis, since it says nothing in between this long, verbose dialogue that doesn’t seem to end.

By Pamela Cohn

Forum and Forum Expanded with its forty-eight year legacy has become its own robust festival residing still pretty much in the shadows of the main program, but with its own imperatives of collecting stories from the periphery. Some colleagues are always sure to tell me how underwhelmed they are by the programming. This year, the exhibition’s theme curated by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, expertly led by Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, is entitled A Mechanism Capable of Changing Itself, a nod to avant-garde film artist Maya Deren’s idea: “Marxism is the only theory of politics which designed a mechanism capable of changing itself – as in the concept of the withering away of the state.”