European Films

Catalan master Pere Portabella's delightful audiovisual meditation Die Stille vor Bach (The Silence Before Bach) is unapologetically made for the arthouse and museum crowds. The film is an exploration of Bach's music and European identity through various unconnected vignettes set between Bach's lifetime and the present. It is about as far away from a conventional composer biopic as Kraft's products are from real cheese. Die Stille vor Bach will never break any boxoffice records -- at least not on the high end -- but it will provide its target audience with some mesmerizing images and a starting point for some intense after-film discussions. The film premieres in the US this weekend.

Portabella, who has never let a need for narrative get in the way of what he has to say, has crafted an ingenious little work that reflects on both Bach's music and on the way Europeans try to give their cultural icons a place in the monotonous greyness of their everday lives -- often taking the icons down with them in the process. The absoluteness of music is also hinted at, most clearly in a hypnotic sequence in which a playing pianola moves through an empty white space that could be a museum or a gallery.  

The director has collaborated with several figures of the contemporary music scene on the film, including composer Carles Santos, who collaborated on the screenplay with Portabella and Xavier Albertí; German organist Christian Bembeck who plays Bach and Spanish pianist Daniel Ligoria, who plays Felix Mendelssohn in a delightful sequence in which the probably apocryphal story of the discovery of the manuscript of Bach's St Matthew's Passion on paper used to wrap some meat for Mendelssohn is played out. The discovery would lead to a Bach revival in Mendelssohn's lifetime.

Cinematographer Tomàs Pladevall alternates the matter-of-fact simplicity of the historical sequences and the greyness of modern Europe with breathtaking shots that include a piano plunging into water from a great height and a scene in which one of Bach's cello suites is played by a group of young musicians in a moving underground carriage.  

The exact meaning of Die Stille vor Bach is not clear and is clearly not meant to be so. Instead, it offers some very interesting points of departure for a discussion of European identity, music and how nothing is quite as absolute as silence.

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