In Memory of the Day Passed By

This is the third Bartas movie I have seen and it feels like a part of Korridor, the first I have seen. Due to B / W pictures and locations, but it was different, in the way that Bartas wants us to empathize with the final product. Few of us and Korridor are 100% contemplative films without any narrative but for me, where really good atmospherical experiences, but less emotional than this one. 

In this documentary, that doesn't has an 'official' story, there are three people we follow during the entire runtime, interspersing images of the city and other people. A man with a puppet, an oldman who plays the piano and a disabled man who moves in a little table with wheels. And the first thing that jumps out are the black and white images with a guitar's music that sets the mood, a really bleak and sad. There's no context, but I suposse everything happens in Lithuania after become independent from the USSR, that also made me think in Akerman's D'est, another documentary of a city after the war has finished, that it's a masterful atmosphereic documentary. But that bleakness contrasts with the visual part, and he creates poetry with it. Not exploding the misery that seems most of people live in, but finding small glimpses of magic realism, that are still sad, but make everything really beautiful, even more, if you consider it's a documentary. Bartas cinema is one of faces and places. Faces that hide secrets, secrets only understandable under the alienating surroundings. And places where memories and dreams are the mirror of the dirtiest realism, all in a nostalgic fog of music vanishing and punding until our hearts are liberated in euphoric beats.

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors. Borges 

I rewatched this inmediatly after finishing, because I think I was not paying proper attention until the last part. Oh boy, it helped. Emotion came the second time, leaving me at times (especially the ones with the man with his puppet) almost criying. It's depressive, but I can confirm that Bartas it's a great author. Holding the camera still to make from faces and landscapes, without any single word, a portrait of a society, it's masterful cinema.