This film by Phil Grabsky is at the Museum of Fine Arts. It's a documentary outlining Mozart's life, with interspersed commentary from European music historians, instrumentalists, singers, and conductors. Here is a link to the MFA film info. It's playing again at the MFA on August 2. And you can get to the film's web site here.
I liked the film very much. Enjoyed learning about Mozart's financial and practical struggles to establish himself, the friction with his father, his boldness. Grabsky matches the synchronous music compositions to the events described by the narrator and the interviewees. Completely absorbing.
One problem for such films that Grabsky didn't completely resolve is that we're sometimes overwhelmed by information. There's Mozart's music, of course, which is in the background or foreground (as we watch and hear an orchestra or an opera in performance) almost all the time. There are the interviewed learned scholars and musicians describing their insights. There is the narrator. There is footage of letters, Baroque buildings in Salzburg and Vienna, street scenes, of modern performers acting, singing, playing -- everything that's visual. But the audience can only attend to so much at once. Some elements are just out of our focus. I think Grabsky does well, but I did find a few places -- such as where we watch and hear and orchestra, with closeups on soloists -- where we get taken by the music and can hardly hear the narrator telling us something important.
"Are we in...Salzburg now? Or Vienna? Was that his father who said that nasty to him?"
Ken Burns, in his documentaries, does such a great job of keeping us focused on these cinematic elements so that we absorb them, and he keeps them from conflicting with each other, so that we see and hear the details and nuances.
All those scholarly European music historians -- like, what's with their teeth? Maybe they're true, those jokes about how Europeans rarely go to dentists.
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