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.

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.