Sarunas Bartas

7/1/03 to 7/29/03

Three Days, July 1

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Past Films

THREE DAYS
Tuesday, July 1 7:30
Bartas's brilliant first feature is an oblique tale of love and "everlasting escape from everything" (SB). "Brittle and laconic, Bartas shows us a life at point zero, at the edge of speechlessness."-Berlin Film Festival. With In Memory of a Day Gone By.
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CORRIDOR
Tuesday, July 8 7:30
The inhabitants of an apartment building drift through a Lithuanian winter in this meditative, evocative feature shot in noirish tones. Director Bartas called it "a stocktaking of the post-Soviet reality...a corridor between yesterday and tomorrow."
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FEW OF US
Tuesday, July 15 7:30
A woman makes a mysterious journey into the remote Savan Mountains to encounter the Tolofars, a near-forgotten tribe, in a hypnotically beautiful work that bridges ethnography and metaphysical meditation. "Bartas's best film."-Village Voice
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THE HOUSE
Tuesday, July 22 7:30
An imposing lakeside country manor is the central character in Bartas's ode to home as a place of unions and separations. Stunningly shot in subtle colors, each image pregnant with meaning.
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FREEDOM
Tuesday, July 29 7:30
Two men and a woman drift ashore in a North African coastal desert, a breathtaking, harsh, and eternal landscape of sand and sea. Bartas explores the troubled territory of a modern condition-displacement. "Freedom has the clarifying vision of a parable."-Anthology Film Archives
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Sarunas Bartas

7/1/03 to 7/29/03

“In an unending chaos, people find some small light, which they quickly lose, so they have to search again.”-Sarunas Bartas, on Corridor

The Lithuanian filmmaker Sarunas Bartas creates films of singular beauty that are hypnotic and haunting, but also oblique and challenging. Bartas has been likened to fellow Eastern Europeans and PFA favorites Alexander Sokurov and Bela Tarr for his visionary minimalism and the depiction of a society at an impasse following the Soviet collapse. He has also been compared with Werner Herzog for his hallucinatory landscapes, and to Michelangelo Antonioni for his abstract narratives and lost characters. Bartas's extended takes focus on extreme close-ups of faces and longshots of spectacular landscapes, both industrial and natural. His use of sound is minimal but vital, suggesting complex situations just beyond the frame-things sensed but not fully perceived, engrossed as his...

“Narration doesn't interest me,” Bartas claims. “A film should concentrate on images.” His scant narratives, more sketches than stories, are often circular, ending as they began, emphasizing stasis over change, the present over the past or future, and thus despair over hope. And yet the detail of his observation, the deep integration of an ethnographic sensibility into his intangible fictions, reveals an intense concern with today's society.

In 1989 Bartas established Studio Kinema, the first independent film production studio in Lithuania. His films have been screened at numerous international film festivals, including San Francisco, Rotterdam, Cannes, Berlin, Tokyo, and London.

Kathy Geritz

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With thanks to Jurate Kajokaite, who curated and organized this retrospective, originally presented at Anthology Film Archives in New York; and to Tony Pipolo for his essay and film notes, on which we drew for our notes. The retrospective is made possible with the support of the Consulate General of Lithuania in New York.

Sarunas Bartas

7/1/03 to 7/29/03

Past Films

THREE DAYS

CORRIDOR

FEW OF US

THE HOUSE

FREEDOM