film comment magazine:

Man with the Movie Camera

The Dutch Filmmaker Joris Ivens Traveled the World Using Cinema as a Tool of Discovery and an Instrument in the Exercise of Political Power
by Paul Arthur

The films of Joris Ivens will be featured at the Walter Reade Theater from March 20 - 28, 2002.

The philosopher Francis Bacon said that "travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience." By this measure, the Dutch documentarist Joris Ivens (1898 - 1989) might be the most educated and experienced filmmaker in history. An itinerary of his lifelong travels make the peregrinations of Marco Polo look like the proverbial walk in the park. The grandson of a pioneering photographer and son of a camera shop tycoon, Ivens made his first film at age 13 - a home-movie parody of Hollywood westerns - and over a protean 60-year, 60-film professional career crafted lyrical, if often fiercely partisan, explorations around political and environmental themes, toiling on every continent for 20 different countries in almost every imaginable context for documentary production. Avant-garde studies of place or mechanical process in the City Symphony tradition jostle with films forged by the immediacy of newsreel reporting. Fictional techniques and hybridized forms collide with straightforward social observation. The scale of his work ranges from 12 minutes (The Bridge, 28) to 12 hours (the 14-part How Yu-kong Moved the Mountains, 76). Individual projects received sponsorship from government agencies, corporations, foundations, private donors, and left-wing committees. Energized by the spirit of international cooperation and creative synergy, his myriad collaborators included prominent cultural figures of his time - Hemingway, Hanns Eisler, Jacques Prévert, Virgil Thomson - and his generosity toward younger filmmakers and fledgling national movements is legendary. That his oeuvre is today so little-known is partly a function of its massive dispersion, but that is hardly an adequate excuse.

Following a stay in Germany studying photochemistry, during which participation in workers' street demonstrations in Berlin contributed to the hardening of his political beliefs, Ivens helped initiate Amsterdam's important Filmliga cine-club in 1927. It quickly became a hotbed of film activism and education, hosting lectures by Vertov, Pudovkin, and Eisenstein along with screenings by experimentalists such as Walter Ruttman, Viking Eggeling, and Hans Richter. Among other subversive activities, club members would borrow commercial newsreels from sympathetic projectionists, re-edit them to fit a Marxist perspective on current events, and after screening and discussing the revised versions, return them to theaters in their original state. An inveterate student of movie style and technology, Ivens spent hours analyzing shot sequences in newly emerging Soviet masterpieces. His intense engagement with the principles of montage inflected his approach for decades to come, but this influence is especially evident early on in The Bridge and Rain (29).

The former has a prelude reminiscent of Vertov, several shots of a cameraman in action, before settling into a poetic evocation of the mechanics of a Rotterdam railroad bridge, which he called a "laboratory of movements, tones, shapes, contrasts, rhythms, and the relations between these." Given its abstract goals, the film has a clear narrative shape in which a freight train starts out, is halted while the bridge is raised to allow for boat traffic, then resumes its journey. As in Léger's Ballet mécanique, a reflexive correspondence is established between the inherent beauty of the bridge's mechanical operation and cinematic properties of shooting and editing. Indeed, the modernist celebration of potential harmony between man and machine would become a major theme for Ivens, who, unlike contemporaries like Robert Flaherty or the British documentarists led by John Grierson, never attempted to disguise or naturalize the presence of the camera as an avatar of industrialism.

On the surface, Rain is a softer treatment of the modern city, an ode to the aesthetic transformation of a bustling metropolis by an afternoon shower. Shot in numerous Amsterdam locations over four months, this classic exercise in accelerated rhythm, odd angles, and the patterning of water on reflective surfaces provided Ivens with a crucial lesson in technique as well as an abiding philosophical stance. Shouldering his camera at a moment's notice to catch the appearance of rain in far-flung neighborhoods, Ivens taught himself to compose on the run, experiencing the freedom of improvised scenography. At the same time, he discovered the unique power of nonfiction cinema to capture the invisible, that which is overlooked or devalued or suppressed in daily life and in popular - i.e. "official" - imagination. In short order, the desire for "visibility" would be redirected at the elucidation of social injustices and the political crises of the Thirties.

Accepting an invitation from Pudovkin to lecture and show his films in the Soviet Union, Ivens embarked on a successful tour that included a visit with Dovzhenko in his Ukraine studio for a screening of Earth, which along with Kalatozov's 1931 film Salt for Svenetia made a deep impact on Ivens's subsequent handling of landscapes. A return trip resulted in the filming of Song of Heroes/Komsomol (32), where for the first time Ivens demonstrates his ability to sketch in concise visual terms a complex industrial process - the building of a giant blast furnace by Communist youth brigades. Although the overall effect is a bit turgid, there are thrilling shots of workers' bodies moving in unison against bleak rural backdrops, reminiscent of compositional strategies in Diego Rivera's murals, that are rhymed with the swinging of cranes or the pouring of molten steel. The formal synthesis of manual labor, the elemental forces of fire and water, and heavy construction equipment confers a sense of grandeur on common labor that is fully in keeping with the Utopian aspirations of the period.

After completing Song of Heroes, Ivens went back to a project begun in 1929, filming the draining and reclamation of land in the Zuider Zee, an inlet of the North Sea that had been a source of agricultural struggle in Holland for centuries. The New Earth (34) marks a turning point: triumphant scenes of nature harnessed for human needs are ballasted by a harsh condemnation of capitalist greed. The first part lays out the arduous stages of building dikes, dumping a clay foundation to sustain landfill, planting and harvesting crops. As editing proceeded, outside events intervened: in order to prop up grain prices on the international commodities market, much of the newly harvested wheat crop was dumped into the very sea from which fields had been salvaged. Hence the film's final section leaps aggressively into a montage of crop destruction juxtaposed with newsreel shots of hunger and poverty in American and European cities. This angry finale testifies to a growing commitment to documentary as a "weapon, not just an interesting story about something that happened."

Reacting to critiques of his method by Soviet colleagues as overly concerned with form at the expense of individuals, in The New Earth and Borinage (34) the director abandoned what in retrospect he understood as a "super-slickness" plaguing European documentaries, an aestheticizing tendency of which his own corporately sponsored Philips Radio/Industrial Symphony (31) was a prime example. Nonetheless, for all of its jangly musical cutting and factory-thumping optimism, the latter film contains a haunting sequence that echoes across later films: gaunt workers hand-blowing amplifier tubes, a process in which objects are shaped "organically" via the exertion of breathing. Ivens's obsession with the effect of winds - a result of his intermittently severe asthma - suggests a curiously personal investment. Borinage, instigated by and co-directed with Henri Storck, records the brutal working conditions of Belgian coal miners. A strident call for political action, it extends the theme of misery and contradiction as inevitable consequences of capitalism, revealing yet another aspect of Ivens's mature technique. He disagreed with Vertov over the value of dramatic re-enactment and here, as in subsequent films, narrative vignettes - of protest and police suppression, anchored by the plight of a 15-year-old miner - are staged using real people and quasi-subjective continuity editing. Banned in both Belgium and Holland, the film gave Ivens his first taste of direct censorship.

Buoyed by a growing reputation in radical film circles, Ivens arrived in New York in 1935. He delivered a series of lectures at the New School and elsewhere, offering support to the burgeoning Nykino collective. During a brief sojourn in Hollywood, he visited the sets of fiction films, investigated new studio technologies, and publicly railed against a system that sanctioned technical mastery without the freedom to advance film art or social causes. Although Ivens professed admiration for The Informer, Fury, Modern Times, and other commercial offerings, the Hollywood system contributed to what he deemed a "moral disarming of the masses." If his call for a non-profit "experimental studio" never got off the ground, contacts with American artists and intellectuals of the left resulted in what is probably his best-known work, The Spanish Earth (37).

A group that featured Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, John Dos Passos, and Clifford Odets sent Ivens and frequent collaborator John Ferno to Madrid to make a film that would raise money to buy ambulances for the Loyalist army. Like his eyewitness coverage of the Japanese invasion of China, The 400 Million (38), Spanish Earth was intended as a "warning film" alerting audiences to a world crisis. "A documentary filmmaker," he remarked, "has to have an opinion on such vital issues as fascism or anti-fascism . . . if his work is to have any dramatic or emotional or art value." Rejecting the shibboleth of non-fiction objectivity, Ivens joined the front ranks of Thirties cineastes who claimed that polemical argument, taking a clear stand, was not inimical to film art. Moreover, Ivens implicitly sided with Walter Lippman's contention that in an increasingly complex society citizens required not just raw information but analysis in order to make responsible decisions. In contrast to the supposedly anti-authoritarian, "uncontrolled" documentary ethos of the Sixties and beyond, Ivens and his comrades believed that there were solutions to pressing social problems, with cinema functioning as both a tool of discovery and an instrument in the exercise of political power.

Backed by a poignant yet judiciously low-key commentary written and spoken by Hemingway (the filmmakers felt that Orson Welles's original reading was too bombastic), Ivens, who once compared organizing a documentary shoot to a military campaign, creates a snapshot of the Spanish Civil War that, while sidestepping the left coalition's internecine battles, deftly interweaves personal suffering with collective struggle. The story is divided into two fronts that connect city and country, agriculture and industry, farm labor and armed self-defense. As the town of Fuentedueno builds an irrigation system to raise food for the hungry cities, a young soldier is caught up in a critical skirmish on the outskirts of Madrid. Certain images are unforgettable: two dead children lying face down in the lobby of a building, glass embedded in their backs; in the aftermath of a bombing raid, women slowly emerge onto deserted streets in a paroxysm of fear and grief. The film was moderately successful and despite the distributor's excision of several graphic images and scattered references to Italian and German intervention, Ivens accepted another American assignment, this time for an agency of FDR's New Deal social policies, Pare Lorentz's short-lived U.S. Film Service.

Albeit compromised in important respects, especially in the muted criticism of private utility companies, Power and the Land (40) is an impressive achievement. Employing a "before and after" structure, the film depicts labor-intensive daily activities on a small farm in Ohio, the decision by local farmers to form a power cooperative under the Rural Electrification Administration - 75 percent of American farms were without electricity in 1935 - and the incredible benefits wrought by access to electricity. The Parkinson family farm served as a perfect model for Ivens's ideas about cooperative work, the essential roles of women and children in the productive process, and the capability of centralized government to address the needs of individuals. The notion of "power" accrues multivalent, didactic meanings - abetted by a clever narration written by poet Stephen Vincent Benet - encompassing the interdependency of family members, local communities, government, machines, and animals. Not nearly as self-congratulatory as The River (37) or as emotionally manipulative as The City (39), Power was distributed by RKO to 5,000 theaters, reaching a mass audience that seems to elude contemporary documentary releases.

Despite the vast diversity in Ivens's career, certain motifs, images, sound elements, and stylistic preferences recur across the body of work. Water (as both unfettered waves and tamed resource), the digging or plowing of earth, the presence of wind in blowing trees or clothes on a line, wheeling birds, maps, heavy machinery, women's labor, and desolate landscapes, are all constants. So are choral songs and speeches by political leaders broadcast on radio, machine sounds either rendered directly or mimicked by musical scores (especially the tracks supplied by Hanns Eisler). Lacking Flaherty's impeccable eye for light and shadow or Vertov's pitch-perfect timing of shot-lengths, Ivens manifests a graceful feel for sweeping pans and movements executed from trucks or barges, high angle or overhead views, and expressive montage. If not a key formal innovator, in his later work Ivens introduced some striking visual tropes. For instance, in ...A Valparaiso (63) he constructs a portrait of the Chilean seaport around oblique movements of funicular cars as they navigate steep hillsides. In the underrated The Mistral (66), a series of nearly two dozen freeze-frames of postmen, schoolboys, romantic couples, and other denizens of a French town hammer home the everyday travails of a wind-wracked region.

After World War II, Ivens bounced around the Communist bloc, making films and aiding the consolidation of documentary production in Poland, Bulgaria, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, China, and Cuba. His 17th Parallel/The People's War (68) was a landmark in conveying the wartime conditions and indomitable spirit of the North Vietnamese citizenry, pairing interviews with victims who fled American bombing in the south with ongoing cultural activities conducted in underground bunkers around Hanoi. It also contains a frequently quoted scene of a downed American pilot being led through a mob of angry villagers. Ivens continued his controversial coverage of the war with a film shot in Laos and a pithy interview with President Ho Chi Minh.

At the ripe age of 90, Ivens completed his final film, A Tale of the Wind (88), co-directed by his second wife and longtime collaborator Marceline Loridan - one of the stars of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's 1961 verité documentary Chronicle of a Summer. It is a somber yet completely unsentimental meditation on a lifelong commitment to the Invisible and the Impossible, the significance of origins and endings, in which a legendary wind that rushes across the Chinese desert is cast as a twin metaphor for the approach of death and the perseverance of the creative will. What is genuinely surprising, and rewarding, are moments of self-deflating humor and the bold mixture of memory, fantasy, travelogue, reflexivity, and Chinese history and culture. The opening features a first-person evocation of Ivens's childhood in Holland: wind and sea, the turning blades of a windmill, a boy's desire for flight - "The old man, the hero of this film . . . was born in a land that has striven to tame the sea and harness the wind." The journey through his beloved China takes fascinating detours, interviewing an elderly tai chi master who informs him that "the secret of breathing lies in the rhythm of the autumn wind," tracking down the artisan who made a totemic metal wind mask, surveying the Great Wall. A hilarious episode finds Ivens in prolonged negotiations with an obstinate bureaucrat to film the museum of the Seven Thousand Warriors guarding the tomb of Shih Huang Ti. When discussions collapse, Ivens sends his crew to purchase scores of souvenir warrior statues and shoots the sequence on his own terms, a triumph of documentary improvisation. Spending a night alone on a chair atop a sand dune, Ivens feigns slipping into unconsciousness, is carted off to a hospital, and experiences a "delirium" during which he recalls scenes from his early films, wanders through a re-created set of Meliès's A Trip to the Moon (made just four years after Ivens's birth), and tours a soundstage on which several Chinese genre movies are being rehearsed simultaneously. Recovering from this (fictionalized) interlude, he returns to the desert in time to summon the wind. Near the end he confesses, "I want everything to move," a statement that could stand as an epitaph for cinema's most prolific voyager.

Paul Arthur is working on a book about representations of New York City in the movies.

© 2002 by Paul Arthur