samuelsebastian

The first sequence of "Die Stille vor Bach" is highly significant: a completely white piece, similar to an art gallery, the camera makes a long travelling in a complete silence and then appears a mechanical piano moving freely while plays a piece Bach. In the next scene a blind man plays a new piece accompanied by his dog German shepherd. Although the film is an open book, an excellent piece of camera to be reinterpreted in intimate spaces and inclined to reflection, the segment that has captivated me most deeply is the translation in images of how music can fill the void of people throughout history and in particular since the time that Bach changed the way of conceiving music reinterpreting the technique of low encryption. The film of Portabella, like all his films, is strongly experimental and avant-gardist in its technical planning, full of discrete virtuous details, with a non - narrative development: scenes take place in a more aesthetic narrative, more intellectualized than purely logical and the film has the ambition to translate the spiritual world of Bach's music in a series of visual images of great power despite its apparent simplicity as the concert of violoncellists wagon in the subway or the image of the staff with the music of Bach. As expresses another of the images in this film, "Die Stille vor Bach" is a journey into the bowels of music, to its essence and has the great merit of represent a world of sensations in a motion picture that sometimes becomes a bit topical, as the image of the half-naked woman playing the cello but others makes subtle tributes to the History of Art, such as the back of the subway cellist, reminiscent of Man Ray's "Women-Violin" or the same half-naked cellist, a voluptuous figuration of Malevitch's "White on White".

Alex Brendemühl plays Hans, a German man, a bit silly, without past, starts working for Tanca, a millionaire who lives in a small town of Maiorica. This is the enigmatic beginning of an enigmatic film, very well supported by the Brendemühl and the other actors.

Filmed on location, the film of Rafa Cortés shows us a person who is boring about its own life and tries to live the life of another man but probably it doesn't give him the happiness. The rhythm of the film is quite right: very slow, leaving for the spectator many questions without answer, full of silences and black humour etc. but it's a pity that the end is so precipitate and the spectator has a feeling of dissatisfaction.

As a curiosity, director Rafa Cortes made a few strong rules for the shooting of the film, for example Brendemühl is shooting from just one side. The reason of these rules were for increase the subjective sensation of the film.