The Corridor

A man's voice hums slowly, feebly, in resignation. We see a tabloid-style picture of a colourless shantytown. The only detectable movement is from the billowing chimney smoke. A single bird flies by. An abrupt cut takes us to a room where a young man, completely apathetic, is lying on a mattress. Another cut and we find ourselves in a square where down-and-outs are walking, more like shadows than individuals. All the time the world has been presented as grey, colourless. This is the beginning of Sarunas Barta's The Corridor. Through this barren and ascetic visual style the viewer sees an apocalyptic, fragmented world where the possibility for real communication between people seems to have broken down. A corridor binds the fragments and images which are hidden behind its doors. People wander around in this grey and chaotic ''ghost world'' speechless and unable to comprehend. Both spacial and temporal logic is disrupted. Moral and ethical values have also become unimportant. The frame story consists of following a number of individuals as they, in different ways, view this collapsing reality. In The Corridor, the form, the filmic style, and the thematic structures can be seen as creating a mosaic of associations. These alienated and lost souls view their surroundings and reality with increasing resignation. This is nothing new thematically. Charles Baudelaire was also concerned with the problematics of modern man. He discovered a symbolic correspondence between on the one hand powerlessness when facing modern society, and on the other hand humanity's predicament in an industrial Metropolis with its semantic abundance. In a similar way The Corridor plays upon contrasts. The suspense in Barta's film is a result of the tension between ''spleen et ideal'': between misery and ecstasy. This symbol studded film contains influences, both stylistically and thematically, from the Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov. It is especially evident with its stacking of symbols upon each other, allowing them through this to narrate more explicitly. The lack of temporal and spacial logic is reminiscent of surrealists such as Maya Deren and Luis Bunuel, and even Alain Resnais with his Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Burdened by its lack of speech, a ruinous refusal to compromise and an Angst-ridden atmosphere, the film is, despite its open cynicism, an in equal parts poetic and dazzlingly beautiful work of art. RL

Premiärstatus
Skandinavisk premiär: Orig. titel
koridorius: Medverkande
Katerina Golubeva, Eimuntas Nekrosius, Viachaslav Amirkhanian: Producent
Sharunas Bartas & Ilona Ziok: Manus
Sharunas Bartas: Foto
Rimvydas Leipus: Talat språk
Lithuanian