Yuli Ivanovich Blok is a music lover and enthusiast of early sound recording, who in 1889 was the first to bring Edison's phonograph to Russia, came up with the idea to record the great pianist Anton Rubinstein's playing on a phonograph. But the pianist flatly refused to sign up. Then those present, among whom was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, just started messing around with the device, recording everything that comes to mind. The film is based on a famous case that occurred in January 1890.

An adaptation of the short story of the same title by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, in which four men who have survived a catastrophic war share memories of their past lives and a civilization which no longer exists. Here, a vintage recording of Debussy's Nocturne played by Walter Gieseking becomes the vehicle by which four lovers of the humanities hover together in a cold post-apocalyptic shack of sandbags to mourn weekly over lost art and loves gone by. Barnes, who must be considered among the greatest filmmakers ever to work in the educational world, forcibly illustrates, through flashback sequences and close-up shots, how the humanities --- music, painting, literature, and theatre --- are perhaps the most enriching of all human endeavors. Their ultimate and devastating loss may have never before or since been shown with such terrifying passion.

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