I've not seen much buzz about it, but I'm beginning to. Be on the look out for it. Critics are raving about it . . . but having a difficult time categorizing the movie.
One review: "The Silence Before Bach" is a melange of genres including narrative vignettes and documentary sequences on the theme of the transformational power of great music. At one moment his camera records a subway car packed with passionate cello-playing musicians; at another he is following a guide who gives tours of Leipzig dressed in full Bach regalia; and in a third he stages Felix Mendelssohn's discovery of sheet music for the "St. Matthew Passion" used by a butcher to wrap meat. By turns funny and serious, poignant, sexy and refreshing, "The Silence Before Bach" is very nearly unclassifiable, like so much of Portabella's oeuvre.
Some words about the movie:
"There are no traditional historians in Portabella's film, no critics, and no commentators explaining to us about the importance of Bach's music," writes Cullen Gallagher at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. Much like in Jem Cohen's documentary on Fugazi, Instrument, Portabella eschews the conventional MTV approach and refuses to tell the audience why the music is important and leaves it up to the performance and the audience to develop a relationship. By having the camera be the only intermediary between them, Portabella nurtures a much more intimate and boundless relationship between the music, the image, and the audience."
"The film's purpose is nothing more than to demonstrate the reach of Bach everyday, everywhere, and for everyone - twaddle pitched somewhere between a music appreciation class and a modernist experiment attesting to art's ability to ennoble the quotidian," objects David Pratt-Robson in Slant. "As if Bach were a new totalitarian, and Pere Portabella his propagandist, The Silence Before Bach doesn't glorify everyday living but substitutes it altogether for a world governed by Bach devotion."
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