THE NINE MUSES is an elegiac look at the journey and the immigrant experience
THE NINE MUSES (John Akomfrah, 2011)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
October 6-12
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.icarusfilms.com
Making ingenious use of footage previously shot for other projects, Ghana-born British filmmaker John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses is a beautiful, elegiac poem about migration and journey, both physical and metaphysical. “Every day is a journey and the journey itself is home” reads a quote from Matsuo Bashō, one of many excerpts that show up as onscreen intertitles or are read by offscreen voices. Divided into sections devoted to the nine muses born to Zeus and Mnemosyne, including Clio (muse of history), Euterpe (muse of music), Melpomene (muse of tragedy), and Thalia (muse of comedy), the film cuts back and forth between footage of men working in a hellish underground foundry, an angry Akomfrah lying down along a waterfront, staring directly into the camera accusatorily, and stunning shots of a vast Alaskan landscape of sea, sky, and mountains with one of a pair of characters in brightly colored parkas looking out at the wide, almost blindingly white expanse. (Composer Trevor Mathison is the Yellow Man, David Lawson the Blue Man). Akomfrah, who cofounded the Black Audio Film Collective in 1982, adds in archival black-and-white film of Africans and Indians arriving on the shore of a post-WWII England while also focusing on various modes of travel, including boats, trains, and planes, poetically edited together by Miikka Leskinen to capture intriguing aspects of the immigrant experience. The narration features such actors as John Barrymore, Richard Burton, Alex Jennings, and Jim Norton reading from such plays and novels as John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Homer’s The Odyssey, William Shakespeare’s Richard II and Twelfth Night, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable and Molloy, Oedipus’s Sophocles, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with interlude poems by Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Kahlil Gibron, Countee Cullen, William Blake, and Zelda Fitzgerald. There are several live performances, with Leontyne Price singing “Motherless Child” and Paul Robeson singing “Let My People Go”; the score also features music by Arvo Pärt and the Gundecha Brothers. A self-described “Proustian” odyssey, The Nine Muses is a fascinating hybrid of sound and vision, of history and memory, that will be playing October 6-12 at MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater; the October 8 screening at 4:30 will be introduced by Akomfrah and followed by a discussion moderated by Sally Berger.