John Akomfrah, the award-winning international director from London, has made a mind-blowing film that merges documentary and artistic essay in a way that astonishes, confounds and moves.
His film Mnemosyne opened two days ago at the Public — that giant magenta arts centre with windows like puddles of mercury — in West Bromwich, home of industry and former coal mines, five miles northwest of Birmingham. Mnemosyne will run until February 21. It’s worth a journey through snow and ice to see it, and the film itself, by happy coincidence, centres around a traveller in snow and ice.
“Every immigrant I spoke to, the first thing they mentioned was being surprised by how cold England is,” says Akomfrah, a genial and likeable fellow.
The film is one of the bravest films I’ve seen, like a labyrinth turning in and out upon itself as it questions the immigrant experience (which is Akomfrah’s own tale, as an African from Ghana). He looks at the migratory impulse, identity, history and cultural assumptions through the medium of memory’s accompanying song. Mnemosyne’s protagonist is the opposite of the hero of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000), who was an amnesiac with a short-circuiting brain disorder. Our Mnemosyne protagonist remembers everything. What he is can’t be seen in tattoos or with a cursory glance. He is a blue and yellow coat in a white blizzard.
The goddess Mnemosyne presides over memory. Mnemosyne had illicit sex with Zeus for nine days and gave birth to nontuplet daughters, the Muses: Epic Poetry, Tragedy, History, Music, Sacred Song, Astronomy, Comedy, Erotic Love and Dance. Akomfrah has used the nine Muses as an ordering device for his nine tone poems, which potently explore each theme as it relates to migration and specifically the industrialised migrant population near Birmingham.
Advertisement
In Mnemosyne, what’s imprinted in the heart serves as memory. A song cycle is how Akomfrah describes his film, a series of quasi-fictional scenarios that question the evidence found in archival material about the pan-African migrant experience as well as exploring the way in which the traffic of memory combines, connects and distorts — in what Akomfrah calls “the fragility, the burden and the excess of remembering”.
Akomfrah manages to guide us by use of his own moving images (some of Alaska’s ice-blue mountains stood in for Skye), and by means of classical and modern poetry — Homer, Samuel Beckett, Shakespeare — and through subtitles, old movies, music, sounds, archive footage; sliding on the music into the notion of belonging. The BBC opened its archives so that he could explore life in the West Midlands during the 1960s through to the 1980s. His film is part of an Arts Council and BBC English Regions initiative on behalf of British art called Made in England.
In Mnemosyne the journey itself is the story, particularly Telemachus’ journey in The Iliad to find his far-wandering father Odysseus (missing for 20 years) — and the journey will be eternally remembered and refigured from different perspectives as “time unveils its face”. Akomfrah makes less obvious choices: in Comedy he examines riots and racist remarks, in Love loneliness and a solitary figure preside. In Astronomy, a reclining man leaves his body in daydream and travels above urban rooftops. The astonishing voices of the opera singer Leontyne Price, singing Motherless Child, and of the bass Paul Robeson, in his classic Vanguard recording of Let My People Go, fit easily beside German lieder, Purcell, aboriginal toning, orchestral blues, guitar, mandolin and piano solos. Those footsteps in the snow and that clanging chain sound like music when used so deliberately.
Akomfrah is from the Ghanaian capital, Accra, and moved here at the age of 6 with his parents and four brothers. In England he worked in factories, studied art and sociology at Portsmouth Polytechnic (now University) and was drawn to the Midlands on the trail of documenting the Birmingham riots of 1981 and 1985. Age 28 he made his seminal film, Handsworth (1986), one of the most influential documentaries to date, about the race and civil strife of 1980s Britain, and has since made 16 others, including Testament (1988), Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), Martin Luther King: Days of Hope (1997) and The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong (1999).
“What’s it like to be British?” asks a man in the film. “Do we have to be so British?” asks another. Mnemosyne stitches all such questions together, as does the loyal Penelope (Odysseus’ wife) with her tapestry. Then Akomfrah immediately unravels the questions, again as Penelope does — and as does the action of memory. Questions and imaginative possibilities are dispensed through the prism of Akomfrah’s startling and generous offering, which does not rely on bitterness or moral high grounds. One feels a tenuous hopefulness, seeing Mnemosyne — like a possible future of thoughtfulness. It’s a film about race and getting beyond race.
Advertisement
I just hope that the fellow in the blue and yellow coat comes in from the cold.
Mnemosyne is at the Public, West Bromwich (0121-533 7161; www.thepublic.com), to March 7.