Chronique d'Anna-Magdanela Bach

This isn't available on video, unfortunately, so you'll probably have to see it at some retrospective. As any film biography of a composer should be, it is saturated with Bach's music, and much of the film is little more than a filmed recital, in costume. But it contains much significant biographical material so that we get an insight into the difficulties of life in Bach's time. It seems that one of his children is always dying. This is quite factual: of Bach's 20 children that were born of his 2 wives, only 6 survived to adulthood. This is a masterpiece that should be seen if at all possible.

Most films about composers are awful. Really awful. Liszt, Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart--all dumbed down or hyped up by Hollywood. And then there's Ken Russell's desecrations of Tchaikovksy and Mahler. By comparison this film might have come from another planet, not just a different country. I first saw it 35 years ago, and was delighted to find it as engrossing and moving as it was then. It's about the music, stupid. But it's also about how grinding, tedious, and incredibly demanding Bach's everyday life was, while he wrote and performed some of the greatest creations of the human mind. And also how he was a family man, living an intense domestic life. Yes it's austere and demanding. But stay with it, it's worth it.

"Dogmatic," as another reviewer described this film, is a fitting word. The director's idea was to present Bach without plot, acting, fun, theatrics, dialog, narrative, or drama. Mission accomplished, Monsieur Straub. "Pretentious?" Yes. "Cinematic?" No way. This is anti-cinema. No one moves. Hardly anyone talks. The camera holds static shots for 10-12 minutes at a time: very very occasionally the camera will dolly in. You may catch a glimpse of Gustav Leonhardt's fingers moving over the keys. That's it.

If you like the idea of staring at the back of a harpsichordist's (bewigged) head for 7 minutes at a stretch while listening to Bach, this is the film for you. I'd rather listen to Bach on my stereo with my eyes closed.

OK, I'll cut this a little slack for being made in 1968, though this does not fully excuse the horrible sound quality. Stereo became common 10 years before, yet this is in mono, with compressed, over-modulated, sometimes severely distorted sound, recorded on an optical film track, with background noise. I saw better-recorded educational films shown on a 16mm projector in class as a kid. Hmmm, maybe this was the audience for this project -- an educational film for European music classes?

On the plus side, videos of musical performances were not as common as now; I wish they were. It is interesting to see a performance, especially keyboard or orchestral, even if the camera is static. But you need first-rate sound... and color. This is filmed in black and white. I love black and white, but this is washed out and fuzzy.

I love classical music, especially Bach. What makes Bach unique is not his use of melody, which was more fully exploited later, but his use of interweaving contrapuntal lines, requiring the listener to follow multiple instruments simultaneously. This is largely lost in mono, especially with this muddled sound. This makes me suspect that the producers didn't really understand the music. However, at least having the visuals of the performers helps a bit to recapture some of that polyphonic interplay.

The performances are adequate. But today with modern sound technology, and the wide variety of performances and interpretations, often on period instruments, these performances seem hopelessly stodgy.

The concept was not entirely off the mark: filming Bach with period instruments, performers dressed in period clothes, with historical settings, is interesting. It would have been more interesting with audiences, for that's how the music would have been performed, but then you would need more costumes. In color with digital sound, this might have been striking, but in black and white, even the costumes are boring.

Certainly not 'a biopic', either of the composer or of his wife, who narrates most of it, Huillet and Straub's film "Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach" concentrates almost entirely on Bach's music, of which we hear a great deal, and is told in what really amounts to a series of tableaux of said music being performed, interspersed with stills of journal pages, sheet music, drawings etc. It takes around forty minutes for Bach himself to speak and for 'the actors' to appear. It is, in other words, not so much a film as an illustrated album of some of Bach's greatest hits and is either a source of great pleasure to lovers of his work or the most boring film ever made, (you might prefer simply to listen to the recordings). Of course, lacking in 'dramatic' structure it may also be the greatest film 'about' a classical composer ever made since the directors let nothing stand in the way of the music. In some quarters, I have seen it described as a masterpiece.