"The Place of Imagination": Humphrey Jennings and the Biopoetics of Everyday Life

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dc.contributor.advisorMarchessault, Janine Michele
dc.contributor.authorBirdwise, Scott William Douglas
dc.date.accessioned2020-11-13T14:00:14Z
dc.date.available2020-11-13T14:00:14Z
dc.date.copyright2020-09
dc.date.issued2020-11-13
dc.date.updated2020-11-13T14:00:14Z
dc.degree.disciplineCinema and Media Studies
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation seeks to reanimate discussion of British artist and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings by reconsidering his body of work in light of the biopolitical transformations of modern life. While biopolitics is a familiar paradigm in the humanities and social sciences that understands how the category of life, in the figure of the population, became the primary object of political management and control, Jennings is famous for his poetic documentary films about the everyday life of resistance during the Second World War. Remembered as the cinematic poet of ordinary people, Jennings combined his concern with everyday life with his ongoing interest in Classical and Romantic traditions of poetry and painting modulated by the formative influence of Surrealism, to become one of the most significant British documentary filmmakers of the first half of the twentieth century. Bringing together a concern with everyday life with questions of poetic form and meaning, then, this dissertation uses the concept of biopoetics to examine how Jennings repeatedly returns to an animating tension between the poetic imagination of the people, on the one hand, and the management of the population on the other. In order to draw out how Jenningss oeuvre is animated by tensions within the people/population, this dissertation moves roughly chronologically through a selection of Jennings's projects, including his contributions to British Surrealism and the social research organization Mass-Observation in the 1930s; his unfinished imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution, Pandaemonium; and his documentary films made under the auspices of the Crown Film Unit during the war. In each case, this dissertation examines how Jenningss use of an array of poetic and cinematic techniques emerges from a biopoetic desire to at once document and transform the everyday life of the people.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/37985
dc.languageEN
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectArt criticism
dc.subject.keywordsHumphrey Jennings
dc.subject.keywordsDocumentary film
dc.subject.keywordsSurrealism
dc.subject.keywordsBritish cinema
dc.subject.keywordsBiopoetics
dc.subject.keywordsBiopolitics
dc.subject.keywordsImagination
dc.subject.keywordsImage
dc.subject.keywordsSecond World War
dc.subject.keywordsThe people
dc.subject.keywordsEveryday life
dc.subject.keywordsPoetry
dc.subject.keywordsPandaemonium
dc.subject.keywordsMagritte
dc.title"The Place of Imagination": Humphrey Jennings and the Biopoetics of Everyday Life
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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