As part of the Russell House Writers Series, filmmaker Henry Ferrini presented an hour-long documentary on Wednesday night, composed in memory of poet and post-modernist thinker Charles Olson ’32. The documentary, entitled “POLIS IS THIS: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place,” comes as one of a series of studies by Ferrini on the hometowns of New England writers. It delivers a basic chronology of Olson’s life, but falls short in its aesthetics and its method of delivery.
“POLIS IS THIS” is from a line of Olson’s poetry—poetry which seeks to reconceptualize the experience of the physical world. Olson writes about and throughout space, time, and the body—these are his poetic tools, and, in his estimation, physical attributes like rhythm and sound are the fundamental units of poetry. This physical base comes in the form of the line and the syllable, which Olson uses in a completely unprecedented way. Some of his poems fan out across the page, and their lines form spirals.
Others are more conventionally structured, but the subject reaches back in time to try to make sense of how things came to be—to Theogony, for example, the creation poem of the Greek gods.
Olson, who himself occupied a great deal of space at a barrel-chested 6’7”, created an alter-ego in his poetry, named Maximus, to reach out across nature and space in his search. This search across the terrain of America and the world led Olson once to remark: “My memory is the history of time.”
But, “polis” literally means city-state—a local concept—and Olson’s polis is Gloucester, Mass. He spent his childhood there, from the age of five until his matriculation to Wesleyan, and then returned in the mid-1950s to live in Gloucester until his death in 1970. During this span, Olson wrote the bulk of his corpus of work. His long-standing ties to the fishing-port city are what led Ferrini, a current resident of Gloucester himself, to film the documentary.
“When I moved to Gloucester and started making films, I knew I’d cross [Olson’s] path,” Ferrini said.
A Charles Olson festival in Gloucester in the 1990s called his attention to the poet, as did a friendship between Olson and Ferrini’s uncle.
The film itself is a carefully-researched project, combining interviews of Gloucester residents with shots of the city itself, often beautiful panoramas of the ocean and coastline. Ferrini also includes extracts from Olson’s poetry, footage of Olson at work and at leisure, and still photographs of Olson’s family, interspersed with unhesitatingly dramatic readings by John Malkovich.
If all of this sounds a bit jumbled, that’s because it is. Ferrini himself used the phrase “cobbled together” to describe his editing process—over 80 hours of film were originally shot, while the documentary lasts an hour—and, despite sketching a biography of Olson, the sequence of clips and shots seems random and non-cohesive.
A general lack of aesthetic sense also pervades the documentary. Josh Pavlacky ’08 and Zack Davis ’08 noted the “tacky special effects,” which include crude computer-generated superimpositions of Olson’s poetry onto billboards and cheesy dissolves from nature scene to nature scene. Ferrini and a colleague wrote an ineffective introduction, intended to capture the essence of Olson’s poetry and read by a woman who sounds as if she were dictating the Ten Commandments to Moses. Several pieces of music in the soundtrack, particularly the punk-styled setting of an Olson poem during the credits, seem ridiculous and out of place, as well.
The documentary does convey a sense of Olson the man and his poetic project—what Olson would call his manner of living. As an educational tool, the documentary succeeds, except where its misguided attempts at aesthetics distract.
Leave a Reply