Pere Portabella, 2007
Nestled somewhere between playful art-film form-fuck and Bach-dork fan-piece lay this, Portugese politician Portabella’s lengthy and sketchy rumination on the meaning and legacy of one J. S. Bach. Ostensibly a series of skits and bits with no real thread to link them, Portabella’s greatest asset here is his ability to interpret the various ages’ methods of absorbing various aspects of Bach’s works; his images filled with instruments and performances and spaces that quite literally reverberate with the evergreen omnipresence of Bach’s dynamic compositions.
The stretch, though, is more that its central conceit is rather singular, and while Portabella comes close to running it out for 102 minutes it is perhaps too big an ask that each vignette set the same table in the same manner as the previous table’s setters, minus the repetition.
Off-topic: It started all those moons ago, but I am now officially slightly in love with Àlex Brendemühl. He has a face that makes me want to move to Barcelona and start a fan-site dedicated to sightings and rumours and awkward photos of me standing with him outside MACBA.
