Movie score plays Bach while character rides a bike.

Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the hedonistic and remarkably talented young Viennese composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

This latest feature from the eccentrically experimental Catalan director Portabella is a beautiful, sometimes faintly bonkers celebration and contemplation of the role Bach’s music plays in the world today. Blending historical reconstruction with very loosely linked ‘dramatic’ scenes and documentary sequences, the film constitutes a playful, painterly sequence of variations on the argument that Johann Sebastian changed the way the world hears thanks to his extraordinary ear for harmony.

"Bach implied; splice-free, light, airy, soft-focus reflections out the back window of a car returning from the beach on a perfect summer's day. Super 8, silent, non-narritive."

Tri-colored cycle of a dance movement set to a prelude from Bach's well-tempered clavier.

Resonating with a melancholy poetry, J.S. Bach is a subjective essay that merges a reflection on identity and the creative process with a lyrical documentary on the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. Shot in the wintry landscapes of Bach's native East Germany, this densely layered, nuanced work intertwines biography with Downey's personal visual and verbal commentary. Three nonlinear narrative strands function as a spoken fugue, while three compositions provide the musical "voice" of Bach. The tripartite structure — Death, Flashback, and Counterpoint — and complex, associative visual strategies function as a compositional analogy to Bach's own musical principles of equal temperament and counterpoint — the "organization of multiple melodies into a clear, rhythmic and harmonic relation." This fourth part of The Thinking Eye series was termed a "stunningly beautiful video... a profound vision under masterful technical control," by the L.A. Weekly.

Based on the "Toccata" of Johann Sebastian Bach.