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PMA Films: "Black Mountain Artists in Film": Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2007)

  • Portland Museum of Art 7 Congress Square Portland, ME, 04101 United States (map)

SCREENING IN THE BERNARD OSHER FOUNDATION AUDITORIUM


This is the best film about an American poet ever made.
— William Corbett, Boston Phoenix

56 minutes. Not Rated. Directed by Henry Ferrini. In English.

From postman’s son to Postmodernism’s founding father, and from schooner fisherman to scholar, this hulking six-foot eight Harvard-educated historian drifts back to the hard-luck New England fishing port of his boyhood summers after the 1956 close of Black Mountain College. There, surrounded by the cruel poverties and sorrows of a town at war with the sea for over 300 years, Charles Olson creates a unified and transcendent vision of a besieged people caught between tradition and modernity. Featuring John Malkovich, Amiri Baraka, Jonathan Williams, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Ed Sanders, Pete Seeger, and others, Polis is This investigates the seminal avant-garde poet, Charles Olson, in conjunction with his enduring connection to his place and origin of inspiration, Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Official Website


ADDITIONAL SCREENINGS in this series:

 
Earlier Event: April 17
Access for All on Third Thursday
Later Event: May 15
Access for All on Third Thursday