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

User Rating:

7.9/10   

Director:

Henry Ferrini

Writer:

Ken Riaf (writer)

Release Date:

1 April 2007 (USA)

Genre:

Documentary

Plot:

Explores Charles Olson's amazing world, where the ordinary landscapes of our daily lives become extraordinary portals to timeless truths about the place we live.

Cast

Ammiel Alcalay
Willie Alexander
Amiri Baraka
Robin Blaser
Charles Boer
Shahar Bram
Robert Creeley
Diane Di Prima
Gerrit Lansing
Charlie Olson
Michael Rumaker
Ed Sanders
Pete Seeger
John Sinclair
Chuck Stein
John Stilgoe
Susan Thackery
Anne Waldman
Jonathan Williams

Runtime:

USA:56 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Company:

Ferrini Productions

A perfect realization of the principle: "Form is an extension of content."

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

This film is extraordinary. Meticulously photographed and edited, interwoven with archival footage and filled with the briny textures of Gloucester, Mass., it opens up the writing of Charles Olson in a way few films have done for a poet. It is the flawless embodiment of a core principle of Olson's work (here in the words of his friend and fellow poet Robert Creeley): "Form is an extension of content." In Olson's Gloucester, there breathed the rhythms of the ancient Greek city state and the myths of Hesiod, cast into a mordant, salt-bitten Yankee English that rings more powerfully than ever in our present era. As he brought Gloucester alive in poetry, Olson waged a losing battle with pancreatic cancer, urban development, and the reign of "pejorocracy," as bulldozers and dynamite brought down historic buildings and superhighways connected Gloucester with greater metropolitan blight. This film deserves a larger audience. It tells a tale that is American down to the bone.