Die Stille Vor Bach (The Silence Before Bach, 2007)
“Richard Brody’s New Yorker review captures some of what makes this film extraordinary. Portabella, writes Brody, ‘brings Bach’s music to life with a mysterious, magnificent blend of drama, documentary, and quasi-surrealist whimsy. Beginning with a scene of a player piano rattling off the Goldberg Variations while rolling through a bright, bare loft, Portabella tickles the senses with a series of skits while a great and serious notion emerges: the construction of modern Europe on the basis of classical music.’ Manohla Dargis, in The New York Times, adds the insight that the film is constructed contrapuntally, as Bach’s music was, ‘unfold[ing] note against note, scene against scene.’
“What these reviewers in the secular press don’t mention, however, is the film’s subtext: that brilliant art made from and for faith can carry a culture through the centuries—and carry that culture back to God.
“‘Carrying’ is a major visual metaphor in the film. We get multiple images of transport: a truck speeding down the highway, a tourist boat churning over Germany’s waterways, subway trains hurling through the dark underground. These images from contemporary life ‘carry’ Bach’s music in various inventive ways, from the truck driver playing Bach on his harmonica to the subway car that fills before our eyes with young-adult cellists in jeans, all playing Bach in unison.”
