Audience Member
As almost everyone knows the music composed by Johann Sebastian Bach is tremendous, almost, heavenly!! Much of this film plays selections of his music. The abysmal part of the film is the very rapid English spoken by a young woman. The English is almost, but not quite, unintelligible. She needed to speak much slower or in German with English subtitles.
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
02/01/23
Full Review
Audience Member
A meditative, if not exactly intriguing or compelling, exercise in minimalism precariously situated between a broad swath of contradictions, which function like a fugue, constructing the film through thematic counterpoint. Part biopic and part concert film, but fully neither, lacking almost any narrative outside the chronological presentation of a life stripped to its bare, mundane, economic facts, few pieces played in their entirety and for no audience except the anachronistic one on this side of the years and the camera. A film lacking practically any camera movement or narrative pacing, with long static takes of stoic musicians doing little more than waggling their fingers, about polyphonic music as vivacious, byzantine, and brisk as has ever been composed. Pieces played on historically accurate instruments not by actors but by professional musicians (including as JSB Gustav Leonhardt, one of the leading figures of historically informed performances) in true-to-life costumes, in many of the same rooms that Bach premiered these same pieces, allowing the viewer an imaginary glimpse back in time to the baroque, a technical historicity that encourages us to slip into fantasy. The story of a man as told by his second wife through a mixture of narrated fictional journal entries and photographs of real textual documents (contracts, sheet music, etc.), that nonetheless obscures its narrator-the real Anna Magdalena Bach died penniless on the street-just as Bach's vision was obscured at the end of his life, just as the audience is encouraged to wonder at what it has been allowed to see, what it accepts as true, and what remains false or faraway. The end effect would make that great philosopher of music, Schopenhauer, proud: In order to hear the music as (we think) Bach wrote it and heard it himself, in order to make the music true to itself (in this sense, at least), the visuals must be falsified, the ultimate contradictions of film being those between sight and sound, reality and representation.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/30/23
Full Review
Audience Member
If you value your time spare yourself the torture to see a MOTION PICTURE without MOTION. Of course you can go to a concert and see an orchestra and choir while listening to Bach but here these 2 characters Huillet and Straub just spoiled everything because there's no movement in the movie at all, there's no zooming in to the period instruments or the costumes of performers, let alone showing the magnificent surroundings of a cathedral or an altar.
The zipping down of the women's voice that's supposed to be the wife and narrator reading at high speed about local happenings of 1738 Prussia is also not acceptable. Big disappointment!
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
01/30/23
Full Review
walter m
In trying to learn about great artists of the past, the one thing we should be concentrating on is whatever creative projects survive to the present day, and worry less about what made them great. Along these same lines, this film takes a modestly revolutionary step by putting the truly wonderful music of Johann Sebastian Bach(Gustav Leonhardt) front of center, as explained in the making-of documentary. Framing the sublime sounds is the life of the composer as narrated by Anna Magdalena(Christiane Lang), Johann's second wife, filling in the gaps of their personal struggles and his career, with minimal extrapolation. One particular episode stands out with Johann's tutorial explaining not only a particular musical instrumment but also the sounds of the era.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
WYHIWYG. Good thing it's perfect.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
01/22/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Really boring and totally non-cinematic.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
01/16/23
Full Review
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