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

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.

For more information, visit the Portland Museum of Art website.