![]() ![]() What does it mean that we’ve experienced everything that is necessary to get us to where we are? Are we living with an appropriate intentionality and understanding our process, born from the earth and put back into it, and our ability do something materially meaningful with the small time we’ve been allotted? ![]() ![]() It’s a film that not only wants to engage us philosophically, asking what it means to be born, but also wants to engage our own journey. It asks us to think more deeply about our interconnectedness to the Earth. Nine Days is a continuation of the themes of Whitman’s poem and Kore-eda’s movie-poem. It might beg the question, how do you even visualize that? Oda has only simple answers, to frame it as a connected process, and a trial, a purgatory-before-life, wherein applicants wishing to be born must answer some theoretical questions and choose what memory they wish to experience in their lifetimes over the course of nine days. Rarely does a movie explore life before birth. In his feature debut - and it’s astonishing this a debut - Edson Oda extrapolates Kore-eda’s themes of life after death, and does a thoughtful rearranging of that film’s structure. He interviewed dozens of Japanese citizens and presented his high-concept art piece within a documentary context. It used the series of frozen frames, all pieced together into a moving picture, to stop time. Kore-eda employed cinema’s most crucial tactic. In that film, after a person dies, they have seven days to determine what memory they will hold onto for eternity and remember their lives by. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998) asked the same questions in a different order. Then the film invites you to reevaluate everything that came before the ending, to see what it means about the birth of man, and what we must understand about life, if we’re about to live with intention and really know what is important about living. In a rousing scene of poetic expression, in Edson Oda’s Nine Days, Winston Duke launches into Whitman’s final canto: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.” Duke unlocks the whole story of humanity and our borderless eternal connection, all with the ending of one poem. If we want to experience the world, we must first understand and embody it. We say what the grass is, hoping that it brings us back to this connection, unravelling endlessly in time and space. That we were born into it, same as the grass, and that every atom of our own being, and that of the grass, are produced from the same soil. “What is the grass?” How do you answer the child, who knows the metaphor and the meaning just as well as you? We cannot define the metaphor without understanding that the metaphor has always been our own mortal truth. The poem is the author himself, trying to explain the metaphor, but the metaphor is born the same as him and belongs to the Universe. In Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a poetic biography of the author and the American’s search for inner self, Whitman conveys that the American may search endlessly for their meaning and place in the Universe, but they ultimately can only resemble the Universe, as we always have (“for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”). Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, ![]()
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