The year 1968 was something of a watershed for Johann Sebastian Bach—not only would Wendy Carlos’s Moog synthesizer recordings of some of the composer’s essential work, “Switched on Bach,” achieve platinum sales, making it the best-selling classical album of all-time, but he would also effectively star in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, one of the acknowledged major works of that year’s watershed New York Film Festival (also boasting feature-length debuts for Werner Herzog [Signs of Life] and Maurice Pialat [L’Enfance nue]!)

“Switched on Bach” remains an enjoyable listen, worked out around a very simple idea: Carlos wanted to bring electronic music out of the chilly, academic ghetto of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and she used one of the most rich, robust bodies of music she could find as her conduit to do so. Straub-Huillet’s Chronicle, by contrast, creates a sort of idiosyncratic perfection in chartering the expressiveness of Bach within the rigor of the directors’ essentially academic style (my first exposure to the duo, as I imagine with most, was in the classroom, watching 1973’s impossible History Lessons with an aghast bunch of freshmen). The frissons created between the music of Bach; the dry performance of Dutch-born organist, harpsichordist, and conductor Gustav Leonhardt as Bach; and Straub-Huillet’s rather flat compositions, spare camerawork, and low-contrast black-and-white photography make for a tiered work that’s fascinating, frustrating, and entirely without precedent.

Anna Magdalena, Bach’s second wife, provides the film’s narration, documenting the events of her life with the Great Man from their marriage in 1721 to his death in 1750. The information relayed is, outside of frequent references to God’s grace, blankly informative in the whole, suggesting something you might find on a History Channel with integrity enough to steer clear of R. Lee Ermey and cheapjack backyard war reproductions. The couple, if you keep count, have 13 children, seven of whom die young. Bach moves from aristocratic patronage in Cöthen to argumentative municipal service in Leipzig, then before the Prussian court in Potsdam. He plays, writes, argues, then dies.

But these bits of firsthand biography, often accompanied by a camera nodding over one of Bach’s letters or hand-drawn compositions, are only interludes between the film’s main attractions, which comprise the better part of the work: some 20 performances, recorded live during filming, by either solo players (Junior on Prelude 6 from The Little Clavier Book for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach), practicing ensembles (Cantata BWV 24-4a featuring Mrs. Bach, herself an accomplished soprano), or full orchestras, including the Hanover Boy’s Choir (a roiling St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244, which resolves into one of the movies three non sequitur ellipses, a shot of a lapping shoreline by night).

The sudden break from the movie’s strictures to stare at the open water is a very moving moment, and some of the movie’s bare camera gestures—long, measured dollies—work similarly to augment the deep feeling in the songs. More often, however, there’s that tangible push-pull between the emotional density of the music and the film’s sparsity and opaque, arm’s length performances. Leonhardt (who, with his poodle wig and long, gravestone face, looks a lot closer to Brian May than the jowly composer we recognize from portraits) is a barely present protagonist; at the height of his powers, conducting, he’s mostly a just discernable figure adrift in a sea of piled-up wigs. It’s a beguiling, stoic biopic: should we extract something of Anna’s grief from her playing as she discusses the early death’s of two of her children? How does what we see of Bach the man—back to the camera (and to Anna), driven, intent, proud, ambitious—inform Bach the body of work? I’m not certain; I only know I will watch this movie again. Not soon, but again.

New Yorker, whose DVD packages have been somewhat spotty in the past, seem to have been coming around lately; they’ve done commendable work for The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, forgiving a slightly less-than-dignified disc menu (come on guys, a lil’ music note for a cursor?). The notes include essays by a surprisingly cogent Armond White and NYFF co-founder Richard Roud, a handy-dandy timeline following Bach’s career, comments by both Straub and Leonhardt and, best of all, a comprehensive match-up of music to scene. The Mono score sounds clean at middle-range volume, though I should say from experience this is, if ever such a thing existed, a “headphone DVD.” Aside from any quibbles, it’s great to have a Region 1 premiere for Straub-Huillet: long may they continue to send Matrix-weaned mouth-breathers screaming from film classes, wondering what they’ve gotten themselves into.
—NICK PINKERTON