The Silence Before Bach is a movie in which to take refuge, and it abjures the summer heat of pop culture for a cool and lasting immersion in the miracles that people are and can create.
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08/20/09
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The Silence Before Bach (2008)
86
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:14
Fresh:12
Rotten:2
Average Rating:6.9/10
Runtime: 1 hr 42 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: The Silence before Bach is an approach to music and the trades and subjects that surround it through Bach’s works. A look at the profound dramaturgic relationship between image and music where... [More]
Director: Pere Portabella
Reviews for The Silence Before Bach
1 - 14 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
The engaging enigma of The Silence Before Bach demonstrates an artistic wisdom that is as satisfying as it is challenging.
08/01/08
A dog watches its blind master tune a piano. It's only 10 minutes into The Silence Before Bach and already I am bored as that dog.
08/01/08
Think of it strictly as a wonderful music video. Hey, Pink Floyd has a movie, so why not Bach?
03/03/08
Driven solely by the filmmaker's prosaic associations. Portabella does not discover the composer through his music.
02/05/08
About as far away from a conventional composer biopic as Kraft's products are from real cheese.
02/03/08
The demolition of the music bio-pic as witnessed by Todd Haynes' I'm Not There and the parody Walk Hard continues robustly with this time-tripping melange from Spanish director Pere Portabella.
01/31/08
Provide[s] gorgeous lensing and art direction and some of the world's most beautiful music.
01/30/08
Like the music it celebrates, this is a film made in glory of the world.
01/30/08
Top CriticA slippery formal exercise of the kind that divides viewers into the enthralled and the infuriated.
01/30/08
Arguably stronger conceptually than visually, surreal mix of the unexpected and the banal is definitely not to everybody's taste. But the music is inarguably sublime.
01/29/08
Top CriticAt once cerebral film essay and unsweetened ear candy, Pere Portabella's The Silence Before Bach is nearly as tough to categorize as its maker.
01/29/08
The film swings back through history with its own delicate meshing of enchantment and mystery, contemplating a planet whether before Bach or in our own time 'of emptiness with no resonance.'
01/24/08
Brings Bach’s music to life with a mysterious, magnificent blend of drama, documentary, and quasi-surrealist whimsy.
01/24/08
1 - 14 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
Latest News for The Silence Before Bach
January 31, 2008:
Critics Consensus: Over Her Dead Body is DOA, Guess The Eye's & Strange Wilderness' Tomatometer!
This week at the movies, we've got creepy visions (The Eye, starring Jessica Alba), haunted romances (Over Her Dead Body, starring Paul Rudd and Eva Longoria Parker), woodland... More...
January 24, 2008:
The film swings back through history with its own delicate meshing of enchantment and mystery - even nude cleansing as a musical rite - contemplating a planet whether before Bach or in our own time 'of emptiness with no resonance.' 
More...
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