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The Academy of Muses
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José Luis Guerin’s The
Academy of Muses is among the most exciting and stimulating films, from
anywhere, of recent years. Armed with extremely modest resources – a digital
camera, small crew, an ensemble of non-professional actors – Guerin and his
collaborators began with the documentation of a university seminar (led by Rafaelle Pinto) in which this gregarious Professor tries to
convince his (mainly female–enrolled) class that the ancient concept of
Woman–as–Muse remains a viable and important concept for our modern, fallen
world – and for the renewed (or persistent) possibility of creating poetry
within it.
From there, the assembled team collectively weaves a
highly intriguing fiction concerning the various relationships (on various
levels) between the teacher, several of his students (played by Mireia Iniesta and Emanuela Forgetta, among others),
and his no-bullshit wife (Rosa Delor Muns). There are discussions, excursions, confrontations …
and finally, even a few surprise revelations.
A plot summary does not even begin to capture the
dynamic texture and movement of this great film. As if to answer all those dour
critiques that pegged Guerin as a idealising-fetishist-voyeur guy-type after In
Sylvia’s City (2007) and its various offshoots in video, photography and
installation, Guerin upends his own seeming auteur-system by staging the
relentless comedy of women challenging the hero about his views – often in
stunningly vibrant, intellectual exchanges. (Pinto, it should be added, gives
as good as he gets.)
But, more than
that, The Academy of Muses is a
genuinely dialogical film, in its
entire structure and form. (On this plane, it would make for an intriguing
triple-bill with Joseph Kahn’s splendid Bodied [2017] and Erik Anderson’s unbalanced but captivating My Thesis Film [2018].) I have rarely felt such a vivid
sensation of a movie as an agora for
contesting views, and clashing viewpoints.
A
very verbal work – and a dramatic essay about speech itself, as gesture, act and posture, power and seduction – The
Academy of Muses nonetheless manages to achieve wonderful, new effects of mise en scène (frames crammed with
faces, reflections in glass, superb close-ups) using the
digital image.
© Adrian Martin February 2016 |
