The title refers to an aphorism of E. M. Cioran, who said that before Bach there was only silence; we also hear Cioran's claim that Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe is not a complete failure. Well, maybe; I have my Bach's-is-my-favorite-gospel moments, too, but happily there are others as well (and I don't just mean books). What made me want to recommend the film were an opening scene with a mobile player piano in an empty museum (which we later see is not empty at all but full of lights the seemingly undirected camera beforehand skilfully avoided letting us see), a baker's dozen of young cellists playing one of the suites for unaccompanied cello seated in a subway war hurtling below Barcelona, and the scene above, which comes right after a used bookseller hands someone a book by Simon Laks about music and the Holocaust and concludes that "music can hurt." I saw this picture in the Times review and somehow imagined the piano would be levitating (suspended by - why not? - piano strings). In fact it is falling and this is the moment before it crashed into the water, breaking up and producing horrible roiling patterns in the water, showing - well, what? The power of music or its vulnerability?
Friday, February 01, 2008
Mezzopiano
I thought I was going to have an effusive film recommendation for you about half past six this evening, half-way into Pere Portabello's new "The Silence Before Bach," but I'm not sure anymore. It's a non-narrative film with little snibbets of narrative (some hammy historical scenes including an elaborate early 19th century market, many minutes into whose chatter the legendary moment where a piece of meat is wrapped in a page from the manuscript of the Matthäuspassion for a Mr. Mendelssohn), some perhaps too-gentle suggestions that making music is the soul of civilization and some perhaps too heavy-handed reflections by the cantor of the Thomanerchor in Leipzig, who remarks that Bach leads all the boys in the choir, while from unreligious households, eventually to be baptized. 
The title refers to an aphorism of E. M. Cioran, who said that before Bach there was only silence; we also hear Cioran's claim that Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe is not a complete failure. Well, maybe; I have my Bach's-is-my-favorite-gospel moments, too, but happily there are others as well (and I don't just mean books). What made me want to recommend the film were an opening scene with a mobile player piano in an empty museum (which we later see is not empty at all but full of lights the seemingly undirected camera beforehand skilfully avoided letting us see), a baker's dozen of young cellists playing one of the suites for unaccompanied cello seated in a subway war hurtling below Barcelona, and the scene above, which comes right after a used bookseller hands someone a book by Simon Laks about music and the Holocaust and concludes that "music can hurt." I saw this picture in the Times review and somehow imagined the piano would be levitating (suspended by - why not? - piano strings). In fact it is falling and this is the moment before it crashed into the water, breaking up and producing horrible roiling patterns in the water, showing - well, what? The power of music or its vulnerability?
The title refers to an aphorism of E. M. Cioran, who said that before Bach there was only silence; we also hear Cioran's claim that Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe is not a complete failure. Well, maybe; I have my Bach's-is-my-favorite-gospel moments, too, but happily there are others as well (and I don't just mean books). What made me want to recommend the film were an opening scene with a mobile player piano in an empty museum (which we later see is not empty at all but full of lights the seemingly undirected camera beforehand skilfully avoided letting us see), a baker's dozen of young cellists playing one of the suites for unaccompanied cello seated in a subway war hurtling below Barcelona, and the scene above, which comes right after a used bookseller hands someone a book by Simon Laks about music and the Holocaust and concludes that "music can hurt." I saw this picture in the Times review and somehow imagined the piano would be levitating (suspended by - why not? - piano strings). In fact it is falling and this is the moment before it crashed into the water, breaking up and producing horrible roiling patterns in the water, showing - well, what? The power of music or its vulnerability?
