Hindemith: A Pilgrim's Progress

Tony Palmer’s study of the German composer Paul Hindemith is one of the most challenging and rewarding in the acclaimed film director’s entire oeuvre.
　　The film is in three parts. Part One consists of a brief historical lecture on the life of Paul Hindemith, narrated by the actor Ronald Pickup. Hindemith’s associations with Jewish musicians brought him into disfavour with the Nazi regime. In response, he penned an opera, Mathis der Maler, inspired by a massive altarpiece created for a convent in Isenheim by the painter Matthias Grünewald early in the 16th century.
　　Part Two, is a series of scenes taken from the Isenheim Altarpiece itself, accompanied by the Mathis der Maler orchestral suite, and linked by passages from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress read by Sir John Gielgud.
　　In Part Three painted images merge with living pictures, Hindemith’s own words flow in and out of narrative from The Pilgim’s Progress, previously unseen archive from the Third Reich appears fleetingly, and music from Mathis der Maler embraces all in a fierce and loving embrace.