Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach

The regularity of the outline of five lines giving the condition of the possibility of freedom for music, which must always be embodied in itself standardized notation marks in order to be able to be heard in its always similar and yet new arrangement. Straub and Huillet created an extremely faithful chronicle: Bach's life is composed of musical notes, which are constant repetitions of all those own names, names of institutions and cities he went through during his career, of all the titles he fought for, and of all the names of people who shaped his family and life. The directorial duo perfectly doubled the genre of period chronicle and created, as it can only be done, a faithful (because not anachronistic, thus not violated from today's perspective) reconstruction. It is faithful because the people of that time considered these exact themes worth recording for future generations: the era of romantic individualism - bourgeois novels full of emotions and psychologies came later. If we compare this film with the Hollywood "crap in silk stockings" (as Napoleon dubbed the classicist genius Talleyrand) "Amadeus," we once again have proof of the Hollywood ideological violation of anything that is not Hollywood into its own form. Straub and Huillet therefore created a fragmented and flat portrait, but nevertheless a portrait composed of authentic historical sources without retroactive domestication for the 20th-century viewer. (2016.05.13)