Oct 21, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Music in an historically contested region that means “home” to numerous ancient ethnicities defines Jumana Manna’s documentary, A Magical Substance Flows into Me. The film’s overarching structure follows the work of Robert Lachmann, a German-Jewish ethnomusicologist who emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s and made archival recordings of local music—Kurdish, Moroccan, Samaritan, Bedouin, and more. A voice-over narrator reads from Lachmann’s journal about his research, with archival images accompanying the descriptions. Lachmann tells us how he’s new to the country but hopes to share its Arab music through his love for it and his knowledge of its history. He’s found that the locals are dissatisfied with their musical traditions and seek something new, but he believes they should be encouraged in their pure, unspoiled sound. He also comments that these communities live together but as separate cultures, and thus Jerusalem is best suited for the archive he intends to build. As part of his work, he creates Oriental Music for the Palestine Broadcasting Service, believing such a program “can provide a neutral background that’s needed to enable both parties to collaborate.”
For the program, Lachmann invited the
various communities to perform and we hear clips of their songs. Manna films some
of the communities for a current portrayal of the music. These intercutting
scenes take place in the musicians’ kitchens, living rooms, or terraces,
emphasizing the music’s homey roots, its local focus. The musicians of today
talk about their culture and in some cases the region’s ethnic complexities.
They then perform a song.
The documentary’s shortcoming is its
omission of adequate guidance for the viewer. Most of the time we don’t know
for sure who we’re listening to, in order to clearly understand the speaker’s
particular ethnic background and contribution. Identifying subtitles would
greatly improve the film’s coherence, but this information appears at the very end
of the movie in the form of end credits—too late for the audience to match up with
the speakers. It may have been Manna’s intent to omit such identification as a
way to make a statement about the historic blending of the region, but for the film’s
strength, the lack causes the viewer to continually grope for context.
Nevertheless, Magical Substance’s effort to capture the roots of Arab music, its
many community expressions and the world of its descendants, opens doors to
another region so distant from our own and brings us closer.
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