Caught Pere Portabella’s The Silence Before Bach today at the melbourne international film festival. This is a really awesome non-narrative kinda film that really sees cinema as a surrealistic mirror-image memory laden medium. A string of disconnected yet suprisingly fluid meditations on Bach that are transhistorical, it is like being in a contemplative dream state with the subject of Bach in mind. This brings to mind the transcendental style of directors like Tarkovsky and Don Askarian.
But Portabella’s exercise in transcendentalism moves towards an updated stylisation similar to Apichatpong’s Syndromes and a Century. The scene in The Silence Before Bach that most clearly reflects this is when the camera moves into the church organ pipes as it is being used. Very much like the scene in Syndromes and a Century when the camera follows swirling smoke trails. While Portabella uses one of Bach’s compositions, played through the church organs, to induce a rhythm, Apichatpong utilised a non-digetic drone-hum (which is much more effective)
