Rita Dove: An American Poet

Rita Dove An American Poet is an American documentary film produced, directed and edited by Eduardo MontesBradley. It is a biographical sketch of U.S. Poet Laureate and National Medal of Arts winner Rita Dove. The film explores the poets life beyond the otherwise extensive and readily available information in Internet and Social Media, exposing fundamental facts of Doves childhood and formative years growing up in Akron, Ohio in the 1950s and during the turbulent 1960s.

The film is made of a series of indepth, oncamera interviews with Poet Laureate Rita Doveconducted and recorded between September 2012 and October 2013. These interviews were edited with hundreds of still images and several hours of home movies from the Dove familys collection. The intimacy of the dialogue between Rita Dove and MontesBradleys camera provide a rare personal insight into the wide range of Doves artistic passions. Most of these images are the results of the efforts of Rita Doves father Ray A. Dove to record family life in the 1950s and 1960s. Mr. Ray Dove recorded in 8mm and Super 8mm birthdays, the opening of gifts on Christmas Day year after year, holidays and family excursions. According to the filmmaker, Ritas father is omnipresent and perhaps the silent protagonist of the film as he captured images of Rita which have become fundamental clues to the evolution of the suburban middle class African American child into the celebrated poet we know and recognize.Rita Dove An American Poet is structured in eleven parts chapters Prologue, nine consecutive books simulating the preference shown by Dove in recent works and the Epilogue. Each book, numbered with Roman numerals, targets a different aspect in the life and whereabouts of Rita Dove, each of them introduced by the poet reading a poem significant to the theme. Cinematically, these readings are set apart from the core interview by being shot at night and in black amp white, although the director continues to approach his subject through a decidedly poetic lens. The themes of the nine film books include Childhood in Akron, grandfather Thomas Thomas and Beulah, Great Migration, Doves relationship to music with the cello in particular, her relationship to her father, being nonreligious today after growing up in the bosom of the Church, her encounter with Mexico and the Spanish culture which would eventually prompt her to write Parsley, one of her most celebrated poems, the segregated b

Source: Wikipedia