Corridor

A long narrow corridor that has overhead lights spaced evenly along the ceiling and a short flight of steps at the end leading to an utterly black doorway form the basis of this film. Sometimes a nude figure appears, drifting spectral-like along the corridor. The subject, insofar as it can be pinned down at all, is film itself. The camera zooms and tracks continuously along the corridor but the images are extensively reworked and transformed in the optical printer. Different film stocks create grain patterns ranging from full tone through to high contrast black and white.
Multi-exposures, super-impositions, of positive and negative, strobing and many other image distorting techniques are used to create what Standish Lawder calls “an occasion for medative speculation”. The images pulsate and vibrate as though the corridor has come to life and is breathing – only as a corridor could. Matching this is the marvellous hypnotic music of Terry Riley.