The Silence Before Bach

Name: The Silence Before Bach
Director: Pere Portabella
Released: 2007

Pere Portabella

2007

Synopsis

This latest feature from the eccentrically experimental Catalan director Portabella is a beautiful, sometimes faintly bonkers celebration and contemplation of the role Bach’s music plays in the world today. Blending historical reconstruction with very loosely linked ‘dramatic’ scenes and documentary sequences, the film constitutes a playful, painterly sequence of variations on the argument that Johann Sebastian changed the way the world hears thanks to his extraordinary ear for harmony.

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Recommendations

75
New York Post
Unless you are offended by a little female nudity, The Silence Before Bach will shock you not. But it will provide gorgeous lensing and art direction and some of the world's most beautiful music.
75
TV Guide Magazine
Portabella has no interest in conventional biography -- it's hard not to suspect that he included the tale of Felix Mendelsson (Daniel Ligorio) discovering the score for the "St. Matthew Passion" wrapping a meat delivery precisely BECAUSE it's probably apocryphal.
70
Variety
Arguably stronger conceptually than visually, surreal mix of the unexpected and the banal is definitely not to everybody's taste. But the music is inarguably sublime.
70
Village Voice
Not only very civilized--this cool, deliberate film suggests that Bach's music is the quintessence of European civilization.
70
The New York Times
The film demands engagement and a kind of surrender, a willingness to enter into a work shaped by correlation, metaphor and metonymy, by beautiful images and fragments of ideas, a work that locates the music in the twitching of a dog’s ears, in the curve of a woman’s belly, a child’s song and an adult’s reverie.