Klaus Kirschner's critically acclaimed opus on Mozart's life is contemplative rather than speculative, its visuals (shot in black-and-white) spare rather than sumptuous. Though a work of fiction, its impetus is documentary in employing, as a text, the personal diaries of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the letters exchanged between the boy, his father, mother and sister. In short, Mozart-A Childhood Chronicle is the diametrical opposite of Milos Forman's Amadeus (screening February 12), and far closer in spirit to Straub's The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach. Yet, as Vincent Canby has written, "Klaus Kirschner's fine film...conveys...the laughing spirit of this most debonair of geniuses while also seeing all of the humiliations and frustrations that are the givens for an artist who survives at the pleasure of his patrons...." The film depicts young Mozart's initiation and growth into music, and his relationship to the society around him-succumbing to, even as he rebels against, the marketing strategies of his father in unending European tours that thrust the child prodigy into society and yet reinforce his detachment. Kirschner elicits marvelous, underplayed performances from three young amateur actors portraying Mozart at the critical ages of 7, 12, and 20; and from Karl-Maria Schley as his father, Leopold. The portrait of eighteenth century court life is as subtle as this portrait of Mozart himself. As Edward Rothstein writes in the New York Times, "Emotion in this world is not in the broad gesture but in the detail, not in speech but in shape. Mr. Kirschner succeeds in being Mozartean."