This film was so popular when we premiered it in September that we decided to bring it back and pair it with one of Portabella's earlier films, Warsaw Bridge, previously unreleased in the States. Pere Portabella, the legendary Spanish Surrealist and 79-year-old enfant terrible, was honored with a retrospective in 2007 at the Museum of Modern Art. His newest and arguably greatest film, The Silence Before Bach, "brings Bach's music to life with a mysterious, magnificent blend of drama, documentary, and quasi-surrealist whimsy. Beginning with a scene of a player piano rattling off the Goldberg Variations while rolling through a bright, bare loft, Portabella tickles the senses with a series of skits... From puckish humor and borderline kitsch, a great and serious notion emerges: the construction of modern Europe on the basis of classical music." (Richard Brody, The New Yorker) Portabella does not release his films on DVD. In Spanish, Catalan and German with English subtitles. more at shadowdistribution.com. 35mm
2007, color, 1 hour 42 minutes, Spain