CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH (Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet/Germany-Italy/1968)

The European art film may have never come this close to being a non-movie—and to summoning the nascent force of cinema as a primal concentration of experience. Jean-Marie Straub and Daniéle Huillet's famous, hard-to-see meta-thing, their first feature, is now on DVD, and it's a living demonstration of less-as-more. Period-dressed performances of J.S. Bach's music—in their entireties—are interpolated against a handful of static dramatic exchanges and glimpses of Bach's manuscripts and publications. All of it is contextualized by narration spoken out of the eponymous diary. That's it: But the restrictive form of the film liberates rather than limits, and, as in the movies of Warhol, Snow, and Sokurov (among others), our demands for distractive progression are slapped down and we're given pure sensual intimacy instead. Marital love is not expressed but is inherent in every word and note; history is fastidiously resurrected, but only for its sounds. The net effect is not having seen a film but having lived a real moment, in the presence of monumental music. Is this a documentary, or a biopic, or something else we've never named?
(excerpt from Michael Atkinson's Village Voice review)

This whatsit took ten years to get made, mostly because of Straub's difficulty raising the money to make it. How to get anyone to give you close to a million dollars to make your first film when given film is unlike anything ever seen before? Some of the best Bach interpreters in Europe worked for half of their regular fee. Straub and his wife Daniele lived for a decade withour car, phone, and other conveniences to raise some of the money. They managed to get permission to shoot in the cathedrals and palaces where Johann Sebastian Bach actually played. The film is quite experiential, most of the pieces are observed from a single, static vantage point, usually a place offering a side view of the musicians, as one would if one was attending the performance. Whenever Straub decides to move the camera, the pan is slow and discrete but the effect is earth-shattering.

The dvd features a serviceable transfer of this 16mm black and white film. The dvd includes a making-of doc shot at the time of shooting, and some printed essays. My only unanswered question is why b&w stock if the aim is complete realism?