Henry Ferrini – Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2007)

From imdb:
From Postman to the Postmodern, Charles Olson remains today an original American master. The enigmatic and hulking six-foot eight Harvard historian drifts back to the hard-luck New England fishing port of his boyhood summers. There he forges transcendent vision that links his besieged town, caught between tradition and modernity, to all places – in all times.

Viewers join Actor John Malkovich in a one hour race for meaning that stretches from antiquity to yesterday, from the local to the universal and from that which is most familiar to that which can only be imagined.

Documentary films about poets often fall into one of two traps: Either they assume that the poet’s life is primarily constituted by the circumstances of his or her social milieu—that is, by those famous people the poet slept with, fought with, or about whom the poet wrote nasty things; or they assume that each line of each poem has some corresponding reality in the biographical details of the poet’s life. The former assumes that the life of the poet takes place outside the act of writing, the latter that writing is simply a transcription of a poet’s experience exactly as it occurred.

Fortunately, Henry Ferrini, director of Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, which screens at Hallwalls Cinema at the Church on Saturday at 4pm, avoids both of these traps. Clocking in at a compact 55 minutes, this made-for-PBS documentary manages its biographical, theoretical, and poetical elements with remarkable finesse.

For those who don’t know Charles Olson, he was a poet from Massachusetts who wrote a very long poem (or poem cycle, if you prefer) called The Maximus Poems, which takes as its subject the polis (the Greek word for city-state) of Gloucester, Massachusetts, which he called home for much of his life. Examining this old fishing port on Cape Anne, just off the coast of Massachusetts, from a vast historical and cosmological perspective, Olson manages a poetic and intellectual feat rivaled by few poets of the last century.
— Michael Kelleher, artvoice.com

DVD Format: NTSC
Program: Mac the Ripper
Menus: Untouched
Video: Untouched (fullscreen)
Audio: Untouched
DVD extras: Untouched

https://nitro.download/view/A2BE2A8A0CA4A8B/OLSON_POLIS_IS_THIS.rar

Language(s):English
Subtitles:none