MAGDALENA

While the film is mostly focused on the music and the settings in which it was originally played, Anna Magdalena's voice guides us, providing the film's peculiar, illusive texture.

The Chronicle Of Anna Magdalena Bach disregards most conventions of costume drama to ask some very human questions about history, what it takes to be an artist, and what movies can tell us about ourselves.

Straub and Huillet invite us to ponder, as the music washes over us, what we can know and what we can't - and to wonder at what here is also false.

Straub-Huillet both depict and impose such conditions on their viewers, making for a refreshing break from 2018.