Uses canonical texts over archival video to repurpose meaning, destabilising received histories.
The Nine Muses is comprised of nine overlapping musical chapters that mix archival material with original scenes. Together, they form a stylized, idiosyncratic retelling of the history of mass migration to post-war Britain through the suggestive lens of the Homeric epic (The Odyssey). (https://icarusfilms.com/if-muse)
In addition to its resonance with Homer’s epic, THE NINE MUSES was devised and scripted from the writings of a wide range of authors including Dante Alighieri, Samuel Beckett, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, Dylan Thomas, Matsuo Basho, TS Eliot, Li Po, and Rabindranath Tagore.
The first thing I noticed watching this movie was the abundance of sound. I do not recall one quiet moment. Another observation was how the diegetic sound melted into the score.
‘He prefers the term ‘tone poem’ rather than documentary to describe his films, later describing his working process as treating sound and music not as an add on or after thought, but one in which “the feeling for the sound world can come first, and everything else has to line up and do their thing in relation to that.” (https://www.thewire.co.uk/about/artists/john-akomfrah/john-akomfrah_the-nine-muses)
For Akomfrah, using multiple voices rather than one narrator is part of his commitment to allegory, which is also informed by music and intertwined with a blues aesthetic, “in the sense that none of it is on the note, none of it is on the beat, but you kind of garner from it what’s going on. It’s that thing of just not hitting anything straight.” (https://www.thewire.co.uk/about/artists/john-akomfrah/john-akomfrah_the-nine-muses)