The Silence Before Bach (2007) and Mudanza (2008) (Review)

There’s a running bit in Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle’s most irritating film, where the title character repeatedly explains the importance of making phones that are slightly smaller and more functional than other phones by comparing them to major flashpoints in art history – Dylan going electric, say, or the premiere of The Rite of Spring. Most people know these events were controversial, but few of us can really explain why, which is why these historic moments are ripe for appropriation by big business. The main feature on Second Run’s new Blu-Ray double-feature of Pere Portabella documentaries, The Silence Before Bach, aims partly to ground the work of Johann Sebastian Bach in the composer’s own time period, so we can understand his impact as his contemporaries would have felt it. It also tries to bring Bach into the present day, two aims which appear completely contradictory. Frankly, that’s probably why they appealed to Portabella.

Probably best-known for his two General Report documentaries (1977 and 2015 respectively), Portabella previously appeared on Second Run with his 1971 feature Vampir-Cuadecuc. That reappropriated behind-the-scenes footage from Jess Franco’s Count Dracula into an experimental whirlwind that also worked surprisingly well as a Bram Stoker adaptation. The Silence Before Bach almost takes the opposite journey; it appears, at first, to be a straightforward if playful documentary about Bach’s music and continued relevance, then keeps exploding outwards into other terrain. Yet for all it takes some of the most unexpected left turns you’ll see in an arts documentary, it is not shapeless and it’s certainly not purposeless. One of the core missions of Portabella’s film seems to involve taking this music – so often discussed in terms of its devotional, spiritual qualities – and grounding it in the material and the mechanical.

So we see an actor playing Bach carefully scoring out the stanzas he will fill with musical notations using a specialist pen. We see a musician’s feet skipping intricately across the bass pedals of an organ, reminding you that Bach’s now-canonical music was as much a product of his era’s technological capabilities as any modern piece of digital art. We see, before we see anything else, a player piano wheeling itself around a huge empty gallery like a Dalek, pouring out one of Bach’s piano pieces. On its own, that would be a good example of Portabella’s playful wit, but he returns to that image late on in the film. The second time round, he holds for the longest time on the punched paper being fed through the piano’s internal machinery, a long scroll of holes and strips that somehow produces this beautiful sound. It sounds dull, and yet I defy anyone not to be entranced by its strange absorption in the mechanical.

The religious aspect of Bach’s work is present more through allusion than discussion. There is, for instance, a shot of an animal’s heart wrapped in musical notations that feels like a music worshipper’s equivalent of the Christian Sacred Heart motif. This is, however, an illustration of a popular story about Bach, one that Portabella claims is told to every German schoolchild. It is said that, after his death, Bach’s artefacts were so little-valued that the composer Felix Mendelssohn found part of the original score for St. Matthew’s Passion wrapping meat at his local butcher. The point of this story is not that it’s true – it might well be an urban myth – but its popularity tells us something about why Bach is beloved. Like my country’s emblematic national genius, William Shakespeare, he is prized as a craftsman who never knew he was a genius, not because he lacked self-belief but because the Romantic idea of art as the product of a singular worldview did not yet exist.

Talking about composers as national symbols makes another part of Portabella’s project clear. In the accompanying booklet he argues that seeing art without a knowledge of its historical context not only hinders the public understanding of art, it aids reactionary movements. Most nationalist versions of history tend, after all, to yoke together different artistic and historical movements that, in their time, were vociferously opposed to one another. We need to understand this if we’re to understand how art continues to change, develop and respond to its times, rather than reducing it to a badge of our country’s prior achievements.

The flip-side of this – that some nations aren’t permitted to develop a sense of national identity or history – is central to the short film Second Run have paired The Silence Before Bach with. Mudanza is a silent observation of the dramatist and poet Federico García Lorca’s home being stripped of its furnishings. The furnishings are being archived, and they are clearly being preserved with some care. Nevertheless, the parallel is obvious. Lorca, who was murdered by General Franco’s men and disposed of so callously that we still don’t know where this great artist’s body lies, is once again being removed from the world. The anti-Francoist point reverberates particularly strongly in the context of Portabella’s work, which often returns to the question of Catalonian independence. Indeed, the Catalan term “cuadecuc” – loosely, “rat-tail” or ragged end – appears in the title of his 1971 film as a protest against Franco’s ban on the Catalan language.

Mudanza is more conventional than The Silence Before Bach, although the conventions it obeys – those of slow cinema and non-narrative documentary – are still far enough from the mainstream to make it a convincing part of Portabella’s ongoing project. The Silence Before Bach is truly radical, though. Portabella’s booklet notes that he was particularly keen to avoid establishing shots, part of a cinematic grammar that he describes as “hugely reductionist”. You might expect this to make the film harder to follow, but in fact it depends on how you watch it. The Silence Before Bach is objectively full of huge, jolting leaps in time and space, hopping recklessly between drama, documentary and musical performance. On the other hand, the lack of establishing shots also means it flows surprisingly easily, and you can be in the middle of a scene before you realise how far in setting, mood and genre it is from the last one. It’s smooth and jolting, which is exactly the sort of contradiction this director thrives upon.

Why is a TV documentary about the one-time Ginger Spice our longest episode ever? Well, when it’s directed by Molly Dineen and it offers a window into the strange media landscape of turn-of-the-millennium Britain, there’s a fair bit to talk about. Graham is joined by Mark Cunliffe from We Are Cult (and The Geek Show, for that matter) to discuss celebrity in the Blair years, Geri Horner (then Halliwell)’s disastrous James Bond audition, her friendship with Prince Charles, the often prescient films of Dineen, “ass-flavoured bubblegum”, Derek and Clive for some reason… there’s a lot, OK.

MAY POP SCREEN +

Thanks for reading Graham’s review of The Silence Before Bach / Mudanza

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