Cinema Releases - The Nine Muses

★★★★

“With its mingling of black and white archive footage, breathtaking landscape shots and a mass of literary quotations, it firmly appeals to both the head and the heart.”

“A beguiling and haunting piece of filmmaking”

Isabel Stevens, VIEW LONDON

"Has African and Caribbean immigration to Britain ever been dealt with in such a creative and poetic way?"

Davina Hamilton, THE VOICE

Read interview

“Some films are there to be “consumed”, whilst others are to be “savoured”.
John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses falls in the later category.”

Read and See

http://cinema-architecture.blogspot.com/2011/07/john-akomfrahs-nine-muses.html#!/2011/07/john-akomfrahs-nine-muses.html

“A handsome, restful, thought-provoking film.”

Phillip French, THE OBSERVER

★★★★

“Confirms British-Ghanaian director John Akomfrah as one of Britain’s most extraordinary filmmakers.”

“A singular and fascinating investigation into identity, memory and myth.”

Rita di Santo, MORNING STAR

Anthony Quinn, THE INDEPENDENT

★★★★

"Quoting The Odyssey, and also Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce and Beckett, the film makes the immigrant experience seem fresh again as part of something wider than just British political, social and cultural history."

Derek Malcolm, THE EVENING STANDARD

★★★★

“Poetic, provocative and demanding in equal measure…spoken word, music and imagery come together to create moments of transcendent beauty.”
“Wise and rather wonderful.”

David Parkinson, EMPIRE

“Unlike anything else you’ve seen…an oral history project speaking of immigration and the experience of people who came to the UK to make it their home”

“It paints a world that is cold and white…cuts in with some incredible archive footage from the 1940’s…you are in for a real treat”
Dan Carrier, CAMDEN NEW JOURNAL

"Engaging and pregnant ideas

"A thoughful cine-essay"

Peter Bradshaw, THE GUARDIAN

‘meditative, formal beauty...Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses... wraps the viewer in literature, music and archive footage, summoning up a mood rather than a story that reflects on the immigrant experience and the violence of displacement with a majestic grace.’

Jason Solomons, THE OBSERVER

★★★★

'The Nine Muses is the kind of nonfiction film I actively hope for: a picture of intuitive, free-associational power that cuts far deeper emotionally than a dry recitation of dates and facts could ever hope to...One of the most haunting and irresolvable films I've seen in years, The Nine Muses might be some sort of masterpiece.'

Chuck Bowen, SLANT MAGAZINE

‘Beautiful and beguiling…it has a lyrical richness that will impress audiences looking for something challenging and thoughtful.’

‘The film is a fascinating blend of glorious snowy landscape footage (shot in Alaska) and archival scenes balanced by literary references and readings and an evocative soundtrack. The core of the film is dwelling on the history of mass migration to post-war Britian, largely from the Caribbeam, but also using Homer's poem The Odyssey as a narrative reference.

‘A fascinating film…an easy watch with a sense of disorientation and dislocation – whether it be  footage of new immigrants struggling to adjust to a gloomy Britain or shots of solitary figures set against a beautifully bleak landscape – the prevailing emotional response.’

Mark Adams, SCREEN

‘Unusual and genre defying story about chance, fate and redemption.’

‘Structured as an allegorical fable and loosely inspired by existential science fiction, 'The Nine Muses' is a stylised, unusual and idiosyncratic retelling of the history of mass migration to post-war Britain through the suggestive lens of the Homeric epic.’

‘Divided into nine overlapping musical chapters and mixing a vast array of archival material, The Nine Muses is a modern recasting of Homer's epic as a 'song cycle' about journeys, migration, memory and the power of elegy.’

BRITISH COUNCIL CATALOGUE

‘Through and through a work of art.’

‘That the images are as engaging and entrancing as they are is merely icing on top of a thick, multi-layered cake of self-exploration.’

‘An emotional, abstract look at the intense period of migration to England after World War II up until the 1960s. …rewarding and anxious’

‘By far the best film this critic saw at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival’

Dan Mecca, Interview with John Akomfrah THE FILMSTAGE

‘Highly engrossing cinepoem…there’s no denying the dazzling beauty of the piece’

‘A salutary reminder of how things were for immigrants to Britain not so very long ago.’

Geoff Andrew, TIME OUT

‘A genuine original’

‘Lyrical, impressionistic and mythical…the soundtrack is equally eclectic, ranging from Schubert to Indian folk.’

Jeff Robson, EYE FOR FILM

‘This new feature work confirms John Akomfrah as one of the UK's most singular and visionary filmmakers’

‘Akomfrah wears his erudition lightly: the sophistication of his investigation of identity, memory and myth is breathtaking but understated, and social history is rarely re-imagined as lyrically as this.’

Sandra Hebron, LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2010

'A dense, extended "tone poem", a siren's song of migration, memory, alienation and working life in Britain.'

'Akomfrah…weaves a tapestry from painstaking research on hundreds of hours of archive … remarkable images - the frigid expanses recall a sensation the director has spoken about: the sense-memory of that first, shocking slap of the cold on arriving in England from a hot country.'

“Engaging work of history and a reflection on Britain here and now….remarkable images, in colour and in black and white, capturing snippets of life in the new England, especially in the Sixties and Seventies.”

Nana Yaa Mensah, NEW STATESMAN

‘Cerebral and sensual… Akomfrah's steady, patient pace makes it fairly easy and ultimately fascinating to absorb his many heady references’

‘Considers the history of the African diaspora to postwar Europe through a highly unusual prism of structuralist cinema, archival footage, spoken-word recordings and the nine muses birthed by the union of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory.’

‘The soundtrack …featuring Richard Burton reading from Dylan Thomas' "Under Milk Wood," reminds that this is one of the great recordings of verse in English.’

‘The film's crystalline images and a powerful, multilayered re-recorded soundtrack conveys huge movements of history across time and space.’

Robert Koehler, VARIETY

'An evocative and unashamedly highbrow essay on memory and migration from the Black Audio Film Collective founder.'

Daniel Trilling in SIGHT & SOUND, BEST FILMS OF 2010 by International critics.

‘This is both an aesthetic and a political stance: his lyrical film essays sow doubt and ambiguity rather than seek to impose a single point of view.’

Daniel Trilling, FRIEZE

‘Eloquent art …codified beneath the film's crisply beautiful top layer: very moving in places, it's a gentle reminder of just how far we've come as a society, and - by way of evidence of a truly English sensibility behind the camera ‘
Mike McCahill, CINESTHESIAC

'Mnemosyne: a mind-blowing film that merges documentary and artistic essay in a way that astonishes, confounds and moves.'

Ken Russell, THE TIMES

'There are films which are “consumed”, there are films which are “savoured”. If you are one of those people who likes the first and dislike the second, The Nine Muses is not for you. If you are one of those who likes the intensity of flavour in your cinema, The Nine Muses is for you.'

Cinema / Architecture

Listen to John Akomfrah talking to Andrew Marr in BBC's Start the Week about his desire to find a new way of using archive material as art, rather than documentary, in The Nine Muses.

Read an interview with John Akomfrah in Sound and Music

Read a review in the film blog Cinema / Architecture