The Corridor

The title of The Corridor instructs the viewer a little in how to interpret it: it’s “a corridor between yesterday and today, containing many doors,” as the director Šarūnas Bartas said himself. The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February of 1995, just over three years after the fall of the Soviet Union in December of 1991. Lithuania’s much-welcomed independence ruptured history and, along with it, daily life. And that’s the best way to describe the experience of watching The Corridor: a series of self-estranging images that rupture the past with the present.

The now disgraced Bartas’s second feature glimpses non-sequitur moments in the lives of several Vilnius natives. These moments, with seemingly no relation to one another beyond sharing an apartment building (whose hallway creates the literal corridor), come without any discernible dialogue—the noises the characters make could be described as mumbling at best, nonsense at worst—and are stitched together with random landscapes and urban artifacts. One of the main faces we become familiar with is that of Bartas himself; another is of the Russian actor Yekaterina Golubeva, Bartas’s then-wife (and the future partner of Leos Carax) who died under foggy circumstances in 2011.

The eyes of the people, at least the adults, roll sulkingly away from the camera like shy ghosts. The looks seem unmotivated, as if there is no object on the other side of their vantage points and the editing corroborates this by refusing the traditional shot-reverse-shot rhythm. (There is probably a more interesting autistic interpretation of the blank stares that I’m not capable of fleshing out fully.) A man looks out his window and smokes, a woman (Golubeva) sits in a pensive depression, a young boy shoots a bird with a shotgun, a group of people have fun at a party, and some sex is had. But no one we meet is ever actually happy with their lives. There is no narrative in a conventional sense. Only images.