A Poetic History

This book uses the medium of film to explore poetic history as a subtle form of psychology expressed within Islamic and Japanese civilizations. It develops this “poetic history” as a nuanced alternative logic for understanding, and, more importantly, metabolizing the past through juxtaposed images, rather than linear cause-and-effect narrative.

History can be hegemonic, or it can be poetic. We are conditioned to accept a linear view of history, despite its repression of real but unrepresented experience. Thus, many lives, souls and stories remain latent and uncelebrated in contemporary societies. This book explores film’s capacity to be a medium, like dreams, and like poetic and spiritual lineages, for a lively and empathetic vision of the past. Because of its capacities to dip beneath the surface of the “actual”, or in Deleuzian terms to leave the bounds of the frame, film provides us with unplanned access to wellsprings of the psyche in its relationship to the whole.

The book guides the reader through a tapestry of film experiences from within the Islamic and Japanese cultural and religious worlds. We explore films that are connected beneath the surface and share poetic, psychological and religious depths. As the book unfolds, we can see film after film weaving for us accumulated realities of collective psychology: child abandonment, ecological destruction, apocalyptic warfare, and generational trauma. An archetypal image of the human “wanderer” appears again and again within both poetry and film, an image that helps chart dangers of the collective journey as well as un-looked for potentials for love, healing, and renewal.

Author Biography

David Sander is Associate Professor of History at Stonehill College, USA.