Ted Fendt's Outside Noise is showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries starting August 31, 2022, in the series The New Auteurs as well as the series Missed Connections: Three Films by Ted Fendt.
The feeling hasn’t changed. I write this having just returned to Germany from the United States. Like my past two visits, it again confirmed to me that I was right to follow the nagging pull and leave. To a large degree, Outside Noise deals with the last years I spent in New York. At some point, a strong sense of stasis, the feeling that I couldn’t develop any further there, began to overwhelm me. Perhaps there were things I could have changed, but I couldn’t articulate what was in my head. Through a bit of chance or gentle encouragement, circumstances led me to Vienna and Berlin, and toward this film.
It is clear to me now, but I could not have described this while filming or prior to doing so. Perhaps an autobiographical reading is not the most productive one anyway. But I am the author... The film transposes my listlessness and uncertainties in my late twenties to a woman in Vienna, looking for something else without knowing what. She has been in New York and, to delay going home, she makes a brief trip to Berlin to visit a friend.
Much of what happens in the film, i.e., wandering around foreign cities or the pleasure in showing others around their own cities, comes straight out of my own life circa 2016-2018 (apologies to all who I made walk Grand Concourse to Little Italy of the Bronx). In transposing my own experiences, the actresses and I also transformed and shaded them with their own contributions: here, fictional and biographical elements merge, stories from one person are recontextualized for another person’s character.
I suppose I had in mind taking elements of Classical Period and returning to certain aspects of Short Stay, if that means anything to anyone other than me. I thought often of Warhol before making the film, too, and the idea of casually observing characters in a room hanging out. I remember a particularly memorable screening of Au hasard Balthazar in the summer of 2018: it seemed the principle of introducing contextualizing information only at the end of a sequence preserved a sense of immediacy.
Anyway, three years on, and here I am promoting my own work despite not being much of a writer and a sizable pile of work for other people on the desk beside me. If I don’t get through it all, the next film could remain stillborn.
I dedicate these MUBI screenings to the mother and son who run Cafe Leibniz, who tolerated us while we were re-loading the camera.
Berlin, 5 August 2022