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.

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

Klappentext

David Sander invites readers on a cinematic journey through Islamic and Japanese cultural and religious worlds. This unusual juxtaposition crosses boundaries established by a strictly linear view of history, revealing astonishing connections beneath the surface.
Sander shows how certain films continue older poetic and mythic traditions, evoking archetypal moments of spiritual crisis that are both unique and universal. This filmic journey allows a meeting with countless lives, souls and stories that remain latent and uncelebrated in contemporary societies. As Sander traverses deep parallels and channels between these worlds, a landscape of poetic history is revealed. Poetic history, he contends, is an age-old mode of cognition, a nuanced alternative logic for understanding and metabolizing the past through juxtaposed images, rather than through linear cause-and-effect narratives. It preserves access to otherwise intangible relationships between the psyche and the whole.
As the book unfolds, we can see film after film, with their subliminal spiritual and poetic roots, weaving together a subtle tapestry. An archetypal, border-crossing image of the human "wanderer" appears, an image that helps chart dangers of the collective journey. The cinematic wanderer, like the rest of us, faces profound trauma and the possibilities of ecological destruction and apocalyptic warfare, that may both hide and reveal the wellsprings of love, healing and renewal.