NE Corridor (Joshua Solondz, 2022)
Added 2022-11-28 06:23:19 +0000 UTCThis is the first of several catch-up posts, so I won't be going into as much detail as I probably should. But some of these films I honestly couldn't write about because I programmed them, and it felt vaguely like a conflict-of-interest. So here goes.
Although Joshua is very clear that this film is a direct homage to Luther Price, that can be a bit misleading. This is no cinematic cover-version of Price. While NE Corridor displays formal elements that are unavoidably Price-like (blotchy painting, mutilated found footage, and the intensive layering, collaging, and puncturing of the filmstrip), Solondz does something quite different with them. For one thing, Joshua inserts passages of what looks like original footage -- a zipper opened with a wire, an ambiguous recumbent figure -- that are absolutely in line with the dirty-basement atmosphere of his recent films.
And while the primary found footage Josh uses (it looks like a marketing convention) has affinities with, say, the nursing home film Price exploded into the Biscotts -- a repressive institution baring its horrifying unconscious -- it also exhibits genuine normalcy. I had mistakenly thought the title of the film was pronounced "northeast corridor," but Josh corrected me. It's just "NE corridor," which is of course "any corridor." Formalism both generalizes the image and subjects it to a deeply specific interrogation, and the treatment of this nondescript industrial footage displays the ugliness that is already implicit in the banality. One final note: the 16mm print is amazing. There is deliberate damage to parts of the sprocket holes, which makes the image roll and flutter out of registration, then snap back into place.
