In his film In the Memory of a Day Gone By, made in 1990 when he was still a student, Sharunas Bartas used walking to weave together multiple urban scenes in the city of Vilnius. On a street, deaf children communicate playfully in sign language; people hurry along so as not to be late for religious services; maimed people wander about; in a building doorway, a child is playing hide-and-seek … Vilnius is represented on screen as a rhythmic series of mundane micro-situations, each being unique enough, distinctive enough to stand on its own. Slowly, patiently, Bartas’s camera walks by, barely grazing the surface of these moments, and the most banal, the most ordinary turn out to be unfathomable. In Three Days (1991) and The Corridor (1995), he applies this form of urban contemplation to remote, enclosed spaces: a cellar, a corridor, a bunker – places where solitary beings roam – or run-down buildings in Kaliningrad, where bodies worried by desire meet, in a sort of dance. In these two films, the filmmaker tells tales of lonely wanderings, of troubled, tormented people, of waiting. Long, immersive shots show broken, disconsolate lives, imprisoned in squalid locales.

Lives under the Ground

In Three Days, two young men go out of an isolated house in the country and take a train to the city of Kaliningrad. Once there, they walk towards the port and reach an empty, windy square. Three people, a man who is obviously drunk and two young women, enter the cinematographic frame and go and sit on a low wall. The two young men approach one of the women, who has been waiting by herself for a moment, the other having accompanied the drunkard somewhere off screen. As she comes back, she shouts: ‘Who are you boys? Why aren’t you saying anything?’ The four of them start walking about aimlessly in the harbour. They wait, wander around, not saying anything, bathed in the glaring lights of the city. They seem reluctant to do anything, as if they refused to partake in any productive activity. Urban life and its constant bustle seem completely absent from this narrative. Once in a while, a wide shot shows the city and its harbour, but that is all.