Not surprisingly, there’s a fair amount of music in “The Silence Before Bach,” a documentary-narrative hybrid that pays tribute to the legendary German composer Johann Sebastian Bach. At its best, the movie, which begins a two-week engagement today at Film Forum, offers a meditation on the power of music to transcend geography and time and unite humanity in a kind of universal ecstasy. It’s a bit of a mishmash, but even at its weakest moments, the film implies that the true majesty of music is to be found in the melding of perfection and imperfection — the marriage of the flawless composition on the page and the unpredictability of the human performer.

“The Silence Before Bach” was directed by the 78-year-old Spanish surrealist Pere Portabella, who rose to fame in the 1940s as the producer of a series of films that criticized General Francisco Franco (notably Luis Buñuel’s 1961 sensation, “Viridiana”) before flexing his own muscles as an avant-garde filmmaker. It was Mr. Portabella’s 1972 short “Acció Santos” that stood out during a recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The 18-minute film toys with the dichotomy of music as an intellectual and emotional art, contrasting harmony with silence in the difference between performing and then listening to a piece of music. There seems to be a direct parallel connecting “Accio Santós” and “The Silence Before Bach,” namely a prominent tension between music as a vehicle for the senses and music as a vehicle to intellectual revelation.

The film garnered mixed reviews upon its release last year in Spain. Viewers expecting a purely sensory experience were frustrated by Mr. Portabella’s jarring sequences, some of which challenge the physical, impersonal nature of the piano, others that witness performers taking music from the concert hall to such locales as subways, semi-trucks, and bedrooms. Using an array of vignettes that, it must be noted, link up somewhat sloppily, Mr. Portabella seems most interested in deconstructing the mysticism behind Bach’s lofty legacy. Many music lovers regard the composer’s career as almost supernatural in its perfection, having revolutionized the way composers and performers consider the range and sound of the piano. Well into “Bach,” Mr. Portabella presents two such characters as they chat about Bach as the defining artistic force of modern Europe. It was the precise pleasures of the great musician, they say, that finally offered proof that God had not erred in creating the human race.

Heavy stuff, yes, but Mr. Portabella counteracts the extreme canonization with numerous scenes that strip the music of its magic. The movie’s opening sequence fades in to the image of what appears to be an abandoned art gallery — a pristine, but undeniably artificial space. Turning right, then left, then right again, the floating camera finally catches a glimpse of a player piano. Rolling under its own power, with its panels stripped off and its inner workings exposed, the piano’s keys start to move and Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” slices through the silence. Yet as the piano dances with the camera in an elaborate, inhuman waltz, something seems woefully incomplete.

Jumping between Europe of the past and present, Mr. Portabella starts rounding out the human aspect of his story. Between 1723 and 1750 (the last 27 years of his life), Bach served as a cantor for Thomasschule, the school adjoining St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany, and produced the majority of his memorable works. Mr. Portabella re-creates some of those 18th-century scenes, complete with a fictional Bach in a prop wig, before jumping forward in time to the image of a modern-day tour group navigating the same space. Standing mere feet from Bach’s final resting place, the tour group is told that it took 50 years before the composer’s work was rediscovered and he was hailed as a brilliant artist of his time.

From scene to scene, Mr. Portabella strives to help his viewers appreciate Bach’s musical feats not as the work of some god, but as an ordinary man with extraordinary abilities. Mr. Portabella watches as the modern-day cantor of St. Thomas Church sits down at the pipe organ in the same space that Bach once occupied, playing the same exact chords, the harmonies echoing off the same towering arches. Later, the director goes more intimate, cutting to a woman taking her morning shower and then watching as she sits in her bright bedroom, playing Bach’s music in the morning light.

Those expecting a musical romp, or perhaps something akin to the “Best of Bach,” will be disappointed. Mr. Portabella has wisely steered clear of a concert film or a straightforward biopic. Instead, he has focused on evoking the spirit and legacy of this artist, shedding light on the lasting beauty of his work and the ways in which Bach took a mass of wood (at one point, Mr. Portabella even destroys a piano by dropping it in a river) and uncovered its true potential.

ssnyder@nysun.com

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