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.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Place of Imagination1. The Promise of the Unknown: Humphrey Jennings and the Use of Surrealism2. What Remains: The Matter of Everyday Life in Mass-Observation, May the Twelfth and Spare Time3. The Means of Vision: The Biopoetics of Industrial Modernity in Pandaemonium 4. The Poet-Reporter: Visionary Poetics in 'I See London' and London Can Take It! 5. Poetry in Action: Audiovisual History in Words for Battle 6. All One Symphony: Audiovisual Civics in Listen to Britain7. What is to be Done? Solidarity in Action in 'I Saw Harlequin' and The Silent Village 8. Everyday Life and Everyday Danger: Infancy, Experience and the Essay Film in A Diary for TimothyCoda: The Absence of MonumentsIndex

Poet, painter, historian and filmmaker, Humphrey Jennings was a magus and a magpie who imaginatively rendered Britain in all its oddness and ordinariness. In this brilliantly written and forensically researched book, Scott Birdwise has given us a Jennings truly fit for the twenty-first century.