Critics reviews

This film arrests and purifies by its refusal to add anything textural to the music itself: the camera is static, the actors expressionless.

All that is Straub-Huillet is there in Bach: The curious vitality of technically unaffected performers. The reverence for a text’s (or in this case, piece of music’s) essence. The unpredictable, stop-start rhythm of the montage, determined more by the constituents of a shot than narrative flow. The structural excisions born of remarkable changes to the source text.

Where most biopics get weighed down with the familiar rise-and-fall narrative, here there is just the music, played beautifully in real time by Gustav Leonhardt.

What struck me the most in seeing the film again after more than 30 years are the remarkable and dynamic shot compositions that Straub/Huillet use. Their treatment of screen space here is complex—they create a space that feels simultaneously ordered and bordering on chaos. Their articulation of space and geometry and composition is surprising and slightly unsettling.

Initially, seemingly restrictive images and spaces unveil new possible modes of historical examination, achieved through reduction—a paring down of images that render them so lifeless as to swing back around the spectrum and evoke the lushness of tones that accompany the cinema of the Straubs' beloved John Ford. These revelations do not negate the oppressiveness of the film's structure . . . , both serving to affect the viewer's body and instill it with the sound of Bach.

The strangest and most uncompromising of all musician biopics, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's 1968 debut feature, The Chronicle Of Anna Magdalena Bach disregards most conventions of costume drama to ask some very human questions about history, what it takes to be an artist, and what movies can tell us about ourselves. . . . What matters is that it tests our preconceptions about historical narratives and dramatic involvement, and in doing so, hits at some truth about time.

"Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach," by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, is a recording of magnificent music and a film of equally impressive contradictions. An impossible documentary, at once austere and rhapsodic, it evokes the 18th century while feeling as present as a live concert. . . . Juxtaposing these glorious sounds with the hardships that accompanied their production, "Chronicle" offers evidence of transcendence.

From the minute I started I wondered whether I saw a film or whether I listened to an audio book. The film is an extensive repertoire of Bach's music, if you wish. The first forty minutes are almost nothing more than people playing Bach's music in long static takes. Here and there we hear the voice over of Anna telling the viewer of the going-ons in the life of the Bachs. The film is radical. It upsets everything we know of film, and it did so even more, I believe, when it was released in 1967.

Because none of the sound was studio-recorded, and because any mistake made at any moment during a given performance would force the musicians and the filmmakers to stop and start again, there is, as Barton Byg writes, something unexpectedly suspenseful about what we see and hear, since "something could go wrong, be lost or forgotten."

The film conducts a dialogue between Bach as he survives in his music and Bach as he lived and worked, between enduringly beautiful music and the often worrying circumstances of its composition, between transcendent aesthetic experience and the constrictions of living in the world, between the autonomy of art and its embedment in history.

It's important, with Bach's music and with [Straub and Huillet's] films, not to mistake the absence of showmanship with an absence of emotion, or an absence of passion, an absence of anger, an absence of love. Their untimeliness, like Bach's, is a quest for universal values, filtered through personal experience. Popularity vanishes. Who remembers the artists who were more popular than Bach in his time? Yet what truly endures is often out of sync with its own times.

This film was made without much of the context from the [slow cinema] canon — it was "breaking new ground" with its pace and distance, meaning Straub and Huillet took this more academic route to fit their aesthetic needs, raise their questions (of feminine narrative), and produce a mood (of airy, solemn concert) they intended... Straub and Huillet's long takes serve their purpose, showing Bach's performances in a full context, allowing them to speak for themselves for our aural enthrallment.