Review of Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) by Jake C — 14 Aug 2018

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.