Article published in the newspaper “Avui” on page 47, Friday, September 7, 2007.

The Catalan director asks himself about the composer and cinema in a film presented at the Venice Film Festival.

Portabella, Bach and the Sound of Silence

A white screen is the beginning of The Silence Before Bach, the light that cinema is made of, the screen awaiting colors, the music score without notes.  Pere Portabella’s new film, presented yesterday in Venice outside the competition, orchestrates questions, presents suggestive images, a sense of humor and magic, demonstrating that the freshest, youngest cinema in this festival comes to us from veterans like the Catalan filmaker or the one hundred year old Manoel de Oliveira that Portabella so much admires.

Portabella smiled with pleasure on being applauded as a “new tendency” filmaker, atypical in his type of films – because he neither wants or is interested in a conventional narrative – as well as in a career that has alternated a multidisciplinary vison of art and other less poetical areas such as politics.

Portabella’s presence on invitation to the Orizzonti section of the festival, anticipates the retrospective and exhibit to be held at the MoMA in New York at the end of the month.  He feels most comfortable with “one foot in the movies and the other in a museum”.  And although he will never deny the first to the second, after New York the most probable thing will be the premier of The Silence Before Bach in the MACBA.

The spectator may end up confused if he expects a conventional plot or a biopic of Bach where he would be completely off track.  Portabella puts us before a work of art which is open to interpretation.  The adventure “of  both, the filmaker and the spectator”, that José Luis Guerín was talking about when he presented his film En la ciudad de Sylvia. (In Sylvia’s City).  The German musician who interprets Bach in Portabella’s film, Christian Brembeck, came out with one of the best compliments:  he who knows the composer’s work so well has discovered a “new way of looking at his legacy, of asking himself about the essence of his music”.  A music that can have no better orchestra conductor in a film than Portabella, who gives equal treatment to the “sound track, the image and the silence”.

Today, the Catalan filmaker will coincide with Jonathan Demme who is also in Venice presenting his documentary on the ex-president of the United States, Jimmy Carter.  They have been in contact by mail for some time and Demme will be introducing one of Portabella’s films in New York.