Passage Through: A Ritual

The Hotel presents Passage Through: A Ritual, Philip Corner’s soundtrack to Stan Brakhage’s 1990 film of the same name.

After seeing Brakhage’s The Riddle of Lumen one evening at Anthology Film Archives, Philip Corner went home and, struck by a rush of divine inspiration, started playing the piano into the night.

Corner recorded a tape around François Couperin’s ‘Les Barricades Mystérieuses’, a piece he improvised daily as a private spiritual meditation. Corner was convinced that no other piece until Erik Satie’s Vexations “led the breakthrough from material consciousness to enlightenment”.

Corner sent this tape to Brakhage, who in turn was so moved that he immediately asked Philip if he could ‘set it to film’.

The result is Passage Through: A Ritual, an anomaly in both Corner and Brakhage’s oeuvres. The film consists almost entirely of a black screen, dominated by Corner’s piano soundtrack. Brakhage offers only a handful of moments of vision throughout its 50-minute runtime – or, in Joshua Minsoo Kim’s words, “a chance at sight”.

This edition in The Hotel marks the first time the soundtrack is widely available to the public and offers an entirely new way of perceiving the work.