In Love and Anger: Milton Acorn - Poet
1984 · 52m · Canada
Directed by Kent Martin
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Poet Milton Acorn, dubbed 'The People's Poet,' is profiled from his Prince Edward Island roots and itinerant carpentry to Governor General's Award success and his return to Charlottetown in 1981.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1984 NFB doc about a working-class Canadian poet should be a snooze, but the anger underneath—Acorn's refusal to separate labor from art, his scrappy defiance of the literary establishment—gives this a quiet bite that most biopics completely botch.
Martin's portrait sits confidently within the Canadian documentary tradition while interrogating it; the formal restraint in moving between Acorn's carpentry and his verse creates a dialectical argument about art and class that rewards close attention—this is the kind of film that reshapes how you think about its subject.
What makes this work is the decision to let Acorn's own words—read plainly, without artifice—carry the intellectual weight while the camera holds on his hands, his landscape, the physical evidence of his life; it's a single formal choice that trusts the viewer and the poet in equal measure.