'The Silence Before Bach'

Above, an image from the new above-titled movie by Spanish director Pere Portabella.

Manohla Dargis's January 30, 2008 New York Times rave review follows.

It All Comes Down to (or Looks Up to) Bach

The jingling piano, the humming traffic and the prancing horse tap out separate if connecting songs in the beguiling nonnarrative film “The Silence Before Bach,” from the septuagenarian Spanish auteur Pere Portabella. You could say that these three make beautiful music together, though this observation doesn’t capture the contrapuntal complexity of the film, which unfolds note against note, scene against scene.

Born in 1929, Mr. Portabella helped produce films by Carlos Saura (“The Delinquents,” 1959) and Luis Buñuel (the Franco-freaking “Viridiana,” 1961), and started making his own in the late 1960s, at times in collaboration with other Catalan artists like Joan Miró. An intermittent fixture on the festival circuit, he received the first North American retrospective of his work at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago in 2006, with the Museum of Modern Art following suit a year later with its own survey. According to the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, Mr. Portabella has not allowed any of his work to be transferred to VHS or DVD, which is too bad, because, to judge from “The Silence Before Bach,” he merits a wider audience.

And there is an audience for this work, despite the hurdles presented by foreign-language film distribution. “The Silence Before Bach” may be nonnarrative, but its pleasures are obvious, even when its meaning proves rather less so. Through a series of seemingly disconnected set pieces — some transpiring in present-day Europe, some in the past — Mr. Portabella creates a film that doesn’t address Bach in the usual biopic terms but instead as a jumping-off point for different visual and aural ideas and associations, including the cross-cultural reality of European identity. Following Bach’s influence, Mr. Portabella and his film bounce all over the map, crisscrossing the continent from Spain to Germany by way of various travelers, their harmonies and rhythms.

“The Silence Before Bach” opens with a camera prowling through a series of empty white rooms that look very much like a gallery space primed (and left waiting) for an exhibition. Mr. Portabella does not disappoint and starts the show soon enough with the appearance of a magically self-propelled player piano [top]. This ambulatory instrument — its keys and gears furiously churning out the “Goldberg” Variations — starts to move closer and closer toward the camera, which abruptly reverses its course and begins moving backward like a retreating enemy. It’s a strangely comical and mysterious image (attack of the player piano!) that suggests that this music (or perhaps its lovers) does not appreciate being shut away in a sterile, depopulated environment, like that of a would-be gallery.

Edward Said once wrote of Bach’s counterpoint: “The listener is aware of a remarkable complexity but never a laborious or academic one. Its authority is absolute. For both listener and performer, the result is an aesthetic pleasure based equally on immediate accessibility and the greatest technical prowess.” I didn’t find “The Silence Before Bach” immediately accessible, though this is far from a complaint. 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. Like the music it celebrates, this is a film made in glory of the world.