manohla dargis on the silence before bach

Like a lot of people in last night's audience at the Billy Wilder Theater, I had my mind blown by The Silence Before Bach, which screened as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival's "Films That Got Away" series. It's an extraordinary movie. I'll have my review in my next Consumables column, but for now, here's Manohla Dargis in The New York Times:

Edward Said once wrote of Bach’s counterpoint: “The listener is aware of a remarkable complexity but never a laborious or academic one. Its authority is absolute. For both listener and performer, the result is an aesthetic pleasure based equally on immediate accessibility and the greatest technical prowess.” I didn’t find “The Silence Before Bach” immediately accessible, though this is far from a complaint. The film demands engagement and a kind of surrender, a willingness to enter into a work shaped by correlation, metaphor and metonymy, by beautiful images and fragments of ideas, a work that locates the music in the twitching of a dog’s ears, in the curve of a woman’s belly, a child’s song and an adult’s reverie. Like the music it celebrates, this is a film made in glory of the world.

I, too, needed to meet the movie halfway, but once I did, it was an overwhelming experience.