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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hyped garbage
It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.
There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
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.