Among the great filmmakers whose work is underrepresented on home video, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are high on the list. “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach,” from 1968, which I discuss in this clip, is one of the few of their films to be available in the U.S. (Much of their work, by contrast, is on DVD in Europe.) It’s a movie that both reveals their deep classicism and their advanced modernism—and it proves that those two strains in their work are inextricably connected. In a way, “Chronicle” is a fairly traditional drama—a bio-pic of a historical hero. It’s narrated from the point of view of the composer’s second wife, but her voice-over is no spontaneous reminiscence; rather, it’s her recitation of a preëxisting document, her diary (which is itself a fiction, the original creation of Straub and Huillet). Yet most of the movie’s text isn’t dramatic, it’s musical: the film is filled with the composer’s music, performed by the great harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt in the role of the composer, and the compositions become a dramatic text and a living chronicle in their own right. The connection between the documentary conception of a written work and the visual, sonic, and dramatic fiction of cinema are the essential themes that have nourished the filmmakers’ work to this day. Huillet died in 2006; Straub, who is eighty-one, is still working. His new film, “À Propos de Venise” (“About Venice”), will be screened at the Locarno Film Festival next month, along with “Dialogue d’Ombres” (“Dialogue of Shadows”), which he made with Huillet.
Movie of the Week: “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach”
