A01=Scott Birdwise
Author_Scott Birdwise
biopoetics
British cinema
Category=ATFA
Category=ATFB
documentary film
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
film directors
forthcoming
Humphrey Jennings
surrealism and film
Product details
- ISBN 9781399563970
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Nov 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Situating Jennings as a Surrealist, documentarian and chronicler of British history, it reframes his work as a critical engagement with questions of sovereignty, collectivity and historical memory.
By examining his wartime documentaries alongside his Surrealist writings and experiments, his involvement with the British social research group Mass-Observation, and his poetic-historical compilation Pandaemonium, the book traces how Jennings’s imaginative attention to the matter and materials of everyday life transforms ordinary objects, gestures, spaces and sounds into forms that both register and resist the rationalizing and destructive forces of modernity. Jennings’s work emerges as at once poetic and materialist, revealing the energies, contradictions and possibilities embedded within collective experience.
Scott Birdwise is an Instructor at OCAD University. He has published articles and book chapters in various journals and edited collections, including the Canadian Journal of Film and Media Studies, Arts, Animation Studies 2.0, The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (2015), Cinematic Ecosystems: Screen Encounters with More-than-Humans in the Era of Environmental Crisis (2026), and Cinemas of Global Solidarity (2026). He is also a founding member of Spiral Conference.
