The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach

source: The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach

"Each and every music piece is observed with mostly, a static, single take that framed with a particularly deliberated angle that often overlooks its subject, illustrious musicians - conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt and Austrian music ensemble Concentus Musicus Wien, among others, offering full rendering of Bach's baroque éclat, whether it is from a single harpsichord, or an ensemble with chorus. For any classical music connoisseur and Bach votary, the film is an ascetic paean paying deferential homage to one of the most accomplished musicians of all time, and for those less familiar with Bach's works, it constitutes an edifyingly melodious piece to wide our horizons and nourish our sensoria, however unrelieved its modus operandi is."

After reading the reviews I decided to rent the DVD version. I like classical music and wanted to learn more about Bach. I was disappointed. I guess I do not know enough about Bach music and the the comments were not enough for me to understand the importance or what music was being played. Maybe it would be appropriate with the guidance of an expert in Bach's music that can explain the film. I really tried and saw the whole film hopping that I would be able to enjoy at least some of it, but I did not. See it at your own risk.

If you value your time spare yourself the torture to see a MOTION PICTURE without MOTION. Of course you can go to a concert and see an orchestra and choir while listening to Bach but here these 2 characters Huillet and Straub just spoiled everything because there's no movement in the movie at all, there's no zooming in to the period instruments or the costumes of performers, let alone showing the magnificent surroundings of a cathedral or an altar. The zipping down of the women's voice that's supposed to be the wife and narrator reading at high speed about local happenings of 1738 Prussia is also not acceptable. Big disappointment!

"Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach" or "The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach" is a German 90-minute movie from 1968, so this one will have its 50th anniversary soon. For that time (the days of Winnetou), it was not really too common anymore that films are in black-and-white, but this one still is. If you have an interest in classic music, you will maybe realize the name in the title is the wife of famous composer Johann Sebastian Bach and here she basically tells us the story of her husband, about him as a private character, but also about him as a professional musician. I myself would not call myself a great classical music fan, but here and there I like listening to a piece. Sadly, in terms of a biopic, it did very little for me I must admit. After watching this, I do not a care a single bit more about Bach or his life than I did before watching the film. However, I am not too surprised about this. The two filmmakers here are a very special brand of movie-making and I personally find it difficult to make a connection with them as I have already found out while watching some of their older works. So I only recommend this film to people who have seen and adored some of Huillét's/Straub's other works and maybe they can understand why their film here got some awards recognition. Or you just need to be a fan of Johann Sebastian Bach. I give it a thumbs-down overall.

OK, I'll cut this a little slack for being made in 1968, though this does not fully excuse the horrible sound quality. Stereo became common 10 years before, yet this is in mono, with compressed, over-modulated, sometimes severely distorted sound, recorded on an optical film track, with background noise. I saw better-recorded educational films shown on a 16mm projector in class as a kid. Hmmm, maybe this was the audience for this project -- an educational film for European music classes? On the plus side, videos of musical performances were not as common as now; I wish they were. It is interesting to see a performance, especially keyboard or orchestral, even if the camera is static. But you need first-rate sound... and color. This is filmed in black and white. I love black and white, but this is washed out and fuzzy. I love classical music, especially Bach. What makes Bach unique is not his use of melody, which was more fully exploited later, but his use of interweaving contrapuntal lines, requiring the listener to follow multiple instruments simultaneously. This is largely lost in mono, especially with this muddled sound. This makes me suspect that the producers didn't really understand the music. However, at least having the visuals of the performers helps a bit to recapture some of that polyphonic interplay. The performances are adequate. But today with modern sound technology, and the wide variety of performances and interpretations, often on period instruments, these performances seem hopelessly stodgy. The concept was not entirely off the mark: filming Bach with period instruments, performers dressed in period clothes, with historical settings, is interesting. It would have been more interesting with audiences, for that's how the music would have been performed, but then you would need more costumes. In color with digital sound, this might have been striking, but in black and white, even the costumes are boring.

Very stark, very drab, no real drama. Why not just make a documentary? This isn't exactly The Passion of Joan of Arc. The only reason for seeing Chronicles is to hear the performances. I love Bach's music and even I found it hard to sit through this misery of a film. The great Gustav Leonhardt plays (in two senses of the word) Bach. We don't get much of a sense of him as an actor, since he's given so little to do dramatically. Mostly, he gets to walk purposefully or angrily out of various rooms. Bach's life, of course, was not an Errol Flynn movie. It was indeed fairly drab and more than a little hard. This probably means that the life isn't a terrific candidate for a film. The music, of course, is another story. I recommend The Stations of Bach. Far more information, for one thing, and some insight into the music, which is, after all, why Bach interests us in the first place.

This film may be of interest to music lovers, due to its detailed showcasing of period instruments, sheet music compositions, and unceasing Bach music. Beyond that, it has nothing to offer. It purports to be a copiously researched biopic, but is really just a performance history of Bach's pieces, with occasional voice-overs in between, accompanied by pans across period etchings or bits of sheet music. In one particularly plodding scene, Bach's music is accompanied by an image of treetops against a still sky for something like five minutes. Ultimately, it watches like a number of late-night arts channel, low budget TV performances spliced together with scant historical information, ala a fifth-rate documentary from the VHS section of your local library.

Certainly not 'a biopic', either of the composer or of his wife, who narrates most of it, Huillet and Straub's film "Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach" concentrates almost entirely on Bach's music, of which we hear a great deal, and is told in what really amounts to a series of tableaux of said music being performed, interspersed with stills of journal pages, sheet music, drawings etc. It takes around forty minutes for Bach himself to speak and for 'the actors' to appear. It is, in other words, not so much a film as an illustrated album of some of Bach's greatest hits and is either a source of great pleasure to lovers of his work or the most boring film ever made, (you might prefer simply to listen to the recordings). Of course, lacking in 'dramatic' structure it may also be the greatest film 'about' a classical composer ever made since the directors let nothing stand in the way of the music. In some quarters, I have seen it described as a masterpiece.

PDQ Bach did it better. Much of "Bach"'s speaking part is letters written to various patrons complaining about the amount and speed of his payment. Anna Magdalena's diary, mostly about the death of children and sundry other family matters, is an iota more engaging. The music is disconcerting: 17th century sized chapel orchestras and choirs producing 20th century concert hall sound. The overall production quality reminded me of a junior high slide show. J S Bach was a brilliant man whose music speaks for itself. This film adds nothing. Netflix sent me 2 discs that wouldn't play, so I streamed the movie. Clearly Netflix was trying to tell me something.