Sharunas Bartas - Koridorius (1994)

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Lithuanian director Sharunas Bartas belongs to a group of Eastern European filmmakers who for more than a decade have chronicled the ruined lives and waning spirits of societies in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet empire. Like the Russian Alexander Sokurov and the Hungarian Béla Tarr [and the German Fred Kelemen, ed.], he makes films about inarticulate loss, about people who can neither free themselves from the past nor look forward to the future, who are so far beyond hopelessness and despair that verbal communication seems superfluous. In Bartas’s films, aesthetics fuses with ideology: by eliminating dialogue and reducing his cinematic vocabulary primarily to faces, gestures, and landscapes, the already minimalist narrative situations he portrays — however rooted in present-day reality — become archetypal, universal. The very titles of the films evoke the general rather than the particular: Three Days, Few of Us, The Corridor, The House, Freedom.
Although these are challenging works, viewers who give themselves over to the spare lyricism they offer are rewarded with a unique space for contemplation and affective resonance.

Bartas described his starkly poetic second feature as "a film about the extremes of exhaustion caused by loneliness, aggression, and love" in the post-Soviet experience. Set amongst the melancholy inhabitants of a rundown apartment building in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, the film unfolds as an associative collage of memory fragments, shards of experience, and chance events amongst a number of the building’s inhabitants — all connected by the metaphor of the corridor, a passage between "yesterday and today, containing many doors." As in the director’s other works, narrative logic is eschewed in favor of the poetry of loss and desire, here made even more abstract by the haunting black-and-white cinematography.

Harvard Film Archive

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Friday, July 2, 2010

Sharunas Bartas - Koridorius (1994)

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