Philip Corner

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 Francois Couperin’s ‘Les Barricades Mysteriouse’, a piece he improvised daily as a private spiritual meditation, as 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, not only an extreme anomaly in both Corner and Brakhage’s oeuvres but undoubtedly one of the most singular works of art ever created by humankind. A film which consists almost entirely of a black screen, dominated by the impotence of Corner's piano soundtrack. Brakhage offers us 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 not only the first time the soundtrack is widely available to the public, but offers an entirely new way of perceiving the work. The LP holds the full unedited soundtrack, whilst the accompanying booklet contains an essay by Joshua Minsoo Kim and frames from the film, recreating the sense of motion and ‘passage’ which Brakhage intended, with flickers of vision miraculously emerging out of deep blackness into the light.