The Corridor (1995)

As much as I wanted to like Sharunas Bartas' The Corridor, I couldn't help feeling that this has all been done before, in a far better way, by Bela Tarr. It's interesting to note that Sátantango and The Corridor were made the same year, so at least Bartas cannot be accused of stealing Tarr's ideas. Like Tarr, Bartas works with an austere b&w cinematography and an approach to film-making that comes across more like a sort of cartography than as storytelling. The problem is that Bartas in this film lacks Tarr's eye for the sardonic, or the monumental. They share an interest in dishevelled landscapes and grizzled human beings. The Corridor has no dialogue. The camera moves from people's faces to their surroundings. Most of the film takes place in a run-down building. There is loneliness, but also lovers and even some dancing - the dancing is of course yet another similarity between this film and Satantango. Still, the tone is mostly lugubrious. I get the impression that Bartas tries to capture a state of in-between, limbo, a society that isn't going anywhere, a society of shock. Even though the Corridor contains a number of haunting images I never felt captivated by it as a movie. The images remained precisely that, images. In other words, the film did not, for me, have the power to introduce me to a world. Perhaps there are references and hints arcane to me that open up this film for other viewers.

Few of Us (1996)

Let's be honest. This film tried my patience.
That's a psychological remark, and it says nothing about whether Few of Us (dir. Sharunas Bartas) was a good film.
What happens when you take away almost every element of what is usually considered a fiction movie? In the best case, you are immersed and you develop a new form of attention. In the worst case, the film gets so static that it stops to mean anything. In the case of Few of Us, I'm not quite sure what category it falls into. I can't say that I was overwhelmed by it, nor can I say that the film was pretentious and dull.
If you like film by Bela Tarr, this might be your cup of tea.
Bartas works with grand landscapes, but these landscapes are never beautiful in a traditional national geographics-sense. The film takes place, I think, in Siberia. What little there is of human interaction, it is left mysterious. A young woman arrives in a helicopter. She arrives in a small village in the woods. It is not clear what the purpose of her visit is. We see her sitting in a room, smoking, with an elderly man. We also see her at a party. There is music. And then there's a fight, a knife, and violence. The woman leaves. She has a lover, it turns out.
The film contains almost no linguistic exchange. We see glances, faces, how people feel the presence of one another in a room.
Then there are images of nature where human beings and animals are almost swallowed up by the incomprehensibly vast landscape. The camera is static, and often it requires some attention to perceive any movement at all in the frames. You don't quite get the feeling of Herzogian themes (nature is unruly and grim) but nature seems completely autonomous from humans. Humans are small, nature is majestic. The composition of the frames, movement and non-movement, never compels the viewer to indulge in nature. There is nothing to indulge in. The only way I can depict the approach of Bartas is to say that the camera lingers so that we notice every aspect of the terrain, the lighting, the shapes, the tiny, tiny hints of movement.
The people the young woman meet are poor. Several times, I worried that Bartas exoticizes them, turning them into mute, harried creatures whom it is impossible to understand. One example where I got this feeling is in the mid part of the film, where we see an extreme close-up of the elderly man's face. The eyes blink. But we see no expressions. I don't sense any Levinasian gesture in that picture. The only thing I see is the man's face transforming into a landscape, just as incomprehensibly vast as the Siberian woods and mountains. But what kind of perspective is this, what kind of approach, what kind of attitude?
Few of Us may be taciturn (except for the sound of hooting birds, splashing water and galloping horses, even a few moments of non-diegetic music - sound is used impressively!) but my problem with it was that it never lets me in - I have no issue with the pace or the static camera, but what kind of world does Bartas want to invite us into? Even depicting the atmosphere of the film is difficult.
So called "contemplative movies" have been accused of exemplifying a general flight from the political - the world is stripped down, cleansed of the kind of tensions that everyday life is filled with. Generally, I find this charge quite ridiculous, but in the case of Few of Us, this argument actually started spinning in my mind. So far, non-conclusively.
I visited Jakobstad a few years ago. There, of all places, I bought a copy of Corridor, another film by Bartas. I haven't watched it yet, but now I feel quite up to it.