Film Notes (April 17, 2008)

By Eric Dawson

Musical Brotherhoods From the Trans-Siberian Highway, the latest DVD release from the always-interesting Sublime Frequencies label, offers a lively, engaging collection of live music performances from Morocco. Shot on video by Hisham Mayet in summer 2005, the DVD opens with footage of a musician in the port city of Essaouira, but the remainder of its 60 minutes concentrates on the public square of Jemma el Fna in Marrakesh. There, a short opening text informs the audience, musicians gather nightly to perform for large crowds of locals and tourists.

About a dozen troupes or solo performers are represented here, playing amplified banjos, guitars and other indigenous stringed instruments with which I’m not familiar, accompanied by multiple drummers, singers, dancers and frequent clapping and chanting from the audience. The whole experience is festive and the music comprised of folk songs the assembled crowd seems to know.

Frankly, I’ve never really heard or seen gatherings quite like this in the United States (though group picking at some old time music festivals comes close), a point that is driven home in the introduction, which polemicizes this gathering as a far cry from our own culture, where “the information technological juggernaut is homogenizing and impoverishing our lives.” A bit heavy-handed maybe, but in taking that point and watching this DVD and listening to the music, one realizes how foreign this assembly of such spirited, communal music actually is to most of us.

In addition to providing a source of fantastic music you’re not likely to hear elsewhere, the DVD also serves as an instructive example of true cinema vérité. Devoid of any voiceovers or information on the performers other than their names, the context is provided solely through the images and music. The large groups of people gathered in the streets to hear the musicians perform — wearing blue jeans, ball caps and Nike and Diesel shirts — and footage of the marketplace and port provide a vivid picture of Marrakesh, independent of typical textual or spoken information common to these types of films. In this, the Sublime Frequencies releases come closer to a more pure ethnographic style of filmmaking that doesn’t impose as much of a presumptive Westernized view of this Mediterranean Arab-African culture.

Obviously, Mayet is still choosing what to shoot, and the editing inevitably excludes much of his footage, but the abrupt beginnings and endings of songs, as well as random inserts of faces in the crowd call attention to this, as if Mayet wishes to constantly remind the viewers this is merely his particular view of a few days spent in Morocco — one person’s account, not to be mistaken for a definitive document of this music or performers. It’s a refreshing alternative to the generally well-meaning but often patronizing or dry, academic methods of many documentary films.

It’s great stuff, and as these Sublime Frequencies DVDs have the frustrating propensity to go out of print, interested parties may want to order sooner rather than later.