Broken Specs

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.

Broken Specs [2012]

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