Edinburgh University Press Humphrey Jennings: Imaginative Materialism and Everyday Life

Employing the concepts of imaginative materialism and everyday life, this book offers a new critical framework for understanding the British artist and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings by linking his aesthetic and theoretical practices to the biopolitical pressures of modern life Deepens our understanding of Jennings’s contributions to film, art and cultural theory by reframing his work in terms of everyday life and biopolitical modernity Critically explores the concept of imaginative materialism and explores its relevance to documentary film and media Positions Jennings’s work as a precursor to contemporary debates about the ethics and politics of representation in times of crisis through analysis of his films, including London Can Take It!, Listen to Britain, The Silent Village and A Diary for Timothy Reopens the potential of Jennings’s films by staging a dialogue between his work and later generations of British artists and filmmakers, including Danny Boyle and John Akomfrah 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.