Not at all - it depends entirely on the film and the filmmaker's intentions. To cite three films about composers/musicians, Miloš Forman made Amadeus for beginners (he actually relied on their historical ignorance, in fact!), François Girard made Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould for people who at least had a broad prior idea who Gould was, while Straub/Huillet are clearly assuming fairly considerable prior knowledge of Bach's life and work. All three approaches are entirely legitimate.ando wrote:Bah. Not ready? I don't mean to dismiss your perspective or to be simply contrary, but I strenously disagree with this notion of preknowledge. Take the film for what it is. All the elements required to understand a film should be contained therein. You may be able to derive a deeper appreciation (in this case - of Bach and his music) because of a prior aquaintance with the material, but in my eyes, if preknowledge is required in order to understand a film the director has utterly failed.
In any case, it's patently absurd to say that a film has "utterly failed" when it showcases so many self-evidently magnificent performances of Bach's music - if you don't respond to those, then what was the point of watching the film at all?
Depends entirely on the film. If you know nothing about a film's social, historical and cultural context, and the filmmaker was assuming at least some familiarity with that context, it's unlikely that any amount of repeated viewing is going to help much. I watched Gary Oldman's Nil by Mouth with someone who lived a few blocks awayFrankly, I feel repeated viewings reveal more about a film, the director and his or her intentions than anything outside of them.
To give one example of a director whose work I've been watching a great deal of over the last two or three years, a complete ignoramus would probably pick up on the fact that Andrzej Wajda has an eye for a powerfully symbolic image and a sweepingly effective set-piece - but no amount of repeated viewing is going to compensate for the lack of a basic knowledge of Polish history which he assumes his (mainly domestic) audience possesses from the start. I actually asked him about this when I interviewed him a couple of years ago, and he confirmed that he makes his films primarily for his fellow countrymen, and if anyone else responds to them that's a bonus - but it's far from essential. As he put it:
Andrzej Wajda wrote:I want to speak to everybody and to be understood everywhere. But a long time ago Goethe stated that whoever wants to understand der Dichter, the poet, must visit his land.