“The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach” is about to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, yet it feels several lifetimes removed from most modern films. Obviously there’s no such thing as an early eighteenth century film, but the debut feature from the husband and wife team Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet probably comes as close as possible. The film eschews almost every cinematic technique that most directors use to grab and hold the attention of an audience and instead consists only of about 80 almost always stationary medium shots, mostly showing performances of Bach’s music in exquisite period detail and in some of the same rooms and locations that Bach himself frequented. There is very little dialogue, but periodically there are voiceovers by Anna (Christiane Lang) revealing information about the family inspired by the real Anna’s letters. Supposedly Straub-Huillet were so fanatical about period authenticity that they made period eyeglasses for several performers; touches like this may be partly why the film took almost ten years to complete. It almost wasn’t made at all after a producer pulled funding unless the duo would record the performances in studio, but the directors stood firm on the authenticity of their vision and the film was saved by the financial intervention of Jean-Luc Godard. To cast Bach himself, Straub and Huillet chose Gustav Leonhardt, who didn’t look a thing like the portly Bach, but more importantly, he could play like Bach, as one of the world’s foremost practitioners of the harpsichord and the leader of a movement supporting playing period music with period instruments.
Yet it’s more than the period detail that marks the film as belonging to an earlier aesthetic era; the film’s true accomplishment is in directing the viewer to experience Bach’s music as an observer in his own time might have, in a totally immersed, enraptured state. In our own entertainment-saturated era, it’s difficult to comprehend just how rare and transcendent such an aesthetic experience could be, how distant it must have felt from the cold and austere houses Straub-Huillet depict, or the drudgery of most labor at the time. This dialectic between the possibilities of art and the demands of the everyday seems intentional for Straub-Huillet, who were both more radical in their politics and more steeped in Modernism than their film contemporaries, and it also serves as an interesting lens through which to view Anna, the subject of the film according to the title.
In many ways, “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach” is a cinema of absence, mostly shunting its ostensible subject Anna to the margins. Her voiceovers dispense such tragic footnotes as the deaths of children (they lost seven of thirteen at young ages) in a clipped, hurried tone before getting back to voluminous details on the musical career of Johann Sebastian. While Anna herself seems pleased to subsume herself to the development of her husband’s genius, it’s possible to infer a feminist critique from Straub-Huillet. Was Bach’s music only made possible by the unending sacrifices of Anna? Some portions of the film delve into the politics of gaining a musical position at a prominent church, which is very important if the viewer’s only consideration is the full flourishing of Bach’s talent, yet seems almost petty when the viewer has just been informed that several of his children died recently. With such reverence towards Bach, it’s unlikely the directors were seeking to directly question the worth of his work, but they may have sought that viewers understood the costs involved in a life lived solely for art.
By channeling an eighteenth century sensibility in “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach,” Straub-Huillet enable a new perspective on film. Their asceticism shows by contrast the extreme lengths most directors go to in order to impose a certain experience on the audience. It’s easy to see what has been gained since Bach’s time, but “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach” shows what has been lost in the aesthetic experience – the space for contemplation. Straub-Huillet both depict and impose such conditions on their viewers, making for a refreshing break from 2018. [B+]
“Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach” opens at New York’s Quad Cinema on March 2nd.