Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2007)
Documentary about Charles Olson, exploring his life and the significance of Gloucester, Massachusetts.
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This is How Movies Should Be Made
Let's be realistic.
After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.
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.