Sharunas Bartas’s Undergrounds

In the films Three Days and The Corridor, the camera of Sharunas Bartas walks by, barely grazing the surface of these moments, and the most banal, the most ordinary turn out to be unfathomable. This chapter shows that the filmmaker 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. This chapter analyses in detail those long and immersive shots that show broken, disconsolate lives, imprisoned in squalid locales.