Synopsis
The members of a reading group exchange cultural and literary references with such vigor that there’s little room for anything else: an attempt to leave the modern world behind or merely their own solitary existences?
Classical Period
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A film that feels like an emergency brake is violently pulled on modern cinema - where fluff MCU/legacy sequels/ip is constant and what used to be the summer blockbuster season is just an every week affair now. This is the antithesis to that shit.
Just nerds talking about cultural and literary references with the same vigor that others argue about Iron Man vs Thor or Yankees vs Red Sox. Also they're so awkward lol. I love how awkward they are. Half the time I couldn't tell if it was bad line readings or just excruciating awkwardness.
Invigorating discussions. No plot. Trolling cinema
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[5]
A film I deeply respect without really liking, Ted Fendt's Classical Period really shifts the grounds on which conventional evaluation typically takes place. I'm not sure the film wants to be "liked," per se, and besides, what's so important about being likable? Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, whose work is such a clear influence on Fendt, used to claim that they were making films for audiences who did not exist yet. It seems to be that could apply equally well here.
Inasmuch as it makes sense to describe Classical Period as being "about" something, it is about a group of mostly young scholars who attend a Dante reading group, and a few others in their orbit. They are working…
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Hell yeah, this movie is so comforting to me, like lowering into a warm bath. These gentle nerds are my kind of people. People who open conversations with "What have you been reading?" and who desperately want to talk about heady stuff. Movies barely ever accurately show off smartness; it's refreshing to see one get it right. This movie nails the mind of a grad student. I've participated in and witnessed plenty of reading groups and seminars with discussion that scintillated, and afterwards I would think, "if you just filmed that and put it on a screen, it would be boring for almost the whole world but it would be one of my favorite movies ever." This film is aiming…
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Hay una parte de Correspondencias cuya fuente no pude identificar en la cual Sophia de Mello Breyner Anderssend dice que La poesía le pide a la gente dos cosas contradictorias. Ese fotograma con subtítulo es mi fondo de pantalla desde que vi Correspondencias hace unos dos años y medio y con el tiempo la verdad es que me olvidé completamente cuales eran esas dos cosas. Las únicas veces que me confrontaba la idea de no saber es cuando proyectaba algo desde mi computadora y pensaba: ¿y si alguien me pregunta? No me acuerdo. Un día hasta me pasó antes de una función de el corto de Monteiro sobre Sophia y Frágil como el mundo. Pero siguió así. Hoy volví a…
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On one level, this movie is the simplest thing you've ever heard of: a handful of nerds spend 62 minutes talking about books. As with Fendt's previous feature, it seems amateurish on the surface: there are a couple slow pans, but mostly it's still camera placements in direct light. At one point, Fendt shoots a guy with a window in the background so that the outside sky seems blown-out: a big cinematography no-no. There's one very long shot of a guy reading and taking notes. Then another very long shot of that guy reading again. Then a shot of sunlight on the floor. The actors can't act. Nothing happens. On the other hand, it becomes quite clear early on that…
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So you spent the better part of a decade in some unattractive university town reading up on obscure and ephemeral topics and trying not to get too distracted by the party-lifestyle you were juggling alongside your studies. You were enjoying yourself quite a bit but with a nagging worry about the purpose of it all.
But there was this one guy you kept meeting in seminars who was of the same age as you but didn't seem to share any of your concerns. From the very beginning he was totally self assured regarding his field of interests and the scholarly lifestyle he had chosen. You silently disapproved of him since he didn't seem to have any notable features outside of… -
The viewer spends an hour watching the faces of characters who can ramble on endlessly about stuff that they've read but couldn't hold a real conversation to save their lives. Sad, funny and moving.
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i didn’t want to copy anymore because what came next was too ridiculous.
hearkens back to that time when i was a college student and the pursuit of knowledge was an end, not a means to anything, where learning about the lives of various historical figures (both well-known, and not so much) was by far more fascinating than the lives of today’s pop-culture celebrities. a film that captures that subdued enthusiasm of a professor lecturing to students who are only taking the class because they have to, not because they want to - except you, you actually appreciate the anecdotes. you have to be in that class, but you also want to be there, too.
(09/01/22)
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Ted Fendt’s love for the filmmaking duo Straub-Huillet finds its richest realization in this playful ode to language, theology, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. As academic jousting sessions give way to interpersonal micro-dramas, Classical Period wryly interrogates the constitution of the scholastic ego.
Now showing here.
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When Cal sits and quietly reads Etienne Gilson... I felt that.
This film is a cross section of virtually all of my most pressing interests, and it has the gumption to stick with a monaural, seemingly untampered-from-source optical soundtrack (complete with undisguised film mag clicking) along with its 16mm image, an effective reminder that the enthusiasm for that and other film formats among (especially) many new and emerging filmmakers doesn’t usually extend past surface aesthetics. In doing so, Fendt immediately renders his film not “art” so much as artifact, replete with both a sense of tactility and the mantle of a long disappeared era of making, consuming, and thinking about cinema (regrettably I’ll have little to say on the Straub-Huillet…
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