The Dryden will screen Short Stay (Ted Fendt, U.S. 2016, 61 min., 35mm), preceded by Broken Specs (Ted Fendt, U.S. 2012, 6 min.), Travel Plans (Ted Fendt, U.S. 2013, 7 min.), and Going Out (Ted Fendt, U.S. 2015, 8 min.) with filmmaker Ted Fendt in person.

Cinematic renaissance man Ted Fendt—filmmaker, projectionist, translator, and scholar—has over the last few years quietly made a name for himself with a small body of short films. Intentionally (and hilariously) anti-dramatic and uneventful, they seem to stand in opposition to a feature-film sensibility. Nevertheless, Fendt's first feature has arrived, and by some miracle it sustains its brief running time without sacrificing the perversely minor-key recessiveness of the short films. The aptly titled Short Stay finds Fendt continuing to mine his home turf—the unspectacular environs of suburban Philadelphia, where he grew up—though this time he (and his protagonist) expand their purview to the neighboring metropolis itself. The film centers on Mike, a socially awkward, directionless young man, who finds himself temporarily moving to the city to take over an acquaintance's free walking tour "business" while he's away. Fendt's formal precision and preoccupation with gesture and manner rather than psychology, however, brings the film much closer to the work of Straub/Huillet or Rohmer than to mumblecore. (This dimension of his work is further underlined by his commitment to shooting—and exhibiting—his films on 16mm or 35mm). The animating mystery of Short Stay is to what degree Mike possesses self-awareness, and it's a mystery that, to its great credit, the film declines to resolve, allowing Mike to keep his inner life to himself and remain an enigma rather than an object of pity or scorn.

[source: George Eastman Museum calendar, 2017-Jun-12]