“THE PLACE OF IMAGINATION”: HUMPHREY JENNINGS AND THE BIOPOETICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE SCOTT BIRDWISE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, CANADA September 2020 © Scott Birdwise, 2020 Abstract
This 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 perhaps the most significant British documentary filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century. Bringing together a concern with everyday life with questions of poetic form and meaning, then, I use 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. I argue that it is as a biopoetic vision devoted to documenting the emergence of the people as the collective subject of poetry and modernity (and simultaneously the population as expropriated object of power and information) that everyday life took on its urgency for Jennings as the “place of imagination.”
In order to draw out how Jennings’s oeuvre is animated by tensions within the people/ population, my argument moves roughly chronologically through a selection of his projects, including his critical writing, poetry, painting, and documentary films considered against the background of their institutional and historical contexts. This includes Jennings’s artistic,