The Nine Muses

Director John Akomfrah
Country UK

The first bad sign is the endless opening credits for UK funding bodies and NAXOS CDs. The second omen was the ten minutes spent looking at snow.

Director John Akomfrah apparently wanted to create a lyrical homage to the mass immigration to Britain during the 50s and 60s from Africa, Asia, India, the Caribbean. So, naturally, he shot fully half this documentary in Alaska.

Titles appear periodically, listing the nine muses, daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus. With the exception of Terpsichore, the muse of dance, the titles have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the film. Cut to snowy mountain thousands of miles from the subject. Here is a tree. Now, the same tree for another month. Compare and contrast. Which side has more icicles? This is a horse. Here’s some snow falling backwards. Why? Some obscure ruling of British arts funding gets you more money if you can show frozen water defying gravity.

Somebody gave Akomfrah a room full of crumbling celluloid and a lot of splicing tape. Clips, hundreds of clips, thousands of clips from the NAXOS archive. Scratchy recordings of old songs, live performances, grainy old b/w footage of people in hats wandering filthy streets, in refineries boiling steel, getting off boats and hugging… Where’s that horse got to? Still running about. Lovely. No, go back! That bit about people getting off boats! Finally, something to do with the subject of the movie! Having had their countries claimed by the British Empire millions of people uprooted their families to come here for a chance at a better life, bringing their cultures and aspirations. Most found only racism and ostracism. Richard Burton reads Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood for fifteen minutes, and Laurence Olivier reads a bunch of Shakespeare for thirty. Another tree. Many trees. Every tree in Alaska. Give each tree nine minutes. Cut to Rick Astley singing Swedish opera for eleven days. Intersperse with Rasta dude in shades lying on the ground looking bored. Yaaay! Horsie! I’m glad it’s still doing well, having fun.

All the pictures in the world do not eventually tell a story, or even give an impression. Endless layers of content result in an absence of context. It’s one thing to challenge your audience, creating a clash of wonderful images and sounds, but expecting the viewer to make the film for you is lazy. This film took two years to make in order to find enough snow. It is four hundred and fifty years long, and says nothing very eruditely. Akomfrah was available following the screening for questions. I wanted to meet him, to ask if the horse was very smooth to pet, if he had a chance to feed it an apple, but I was afraid I might slap him.

So I let the horse go. Cue shot of snow angel. Cut to bullfight. Old Irish gentleman eating cheese. A hamster.

THE END.