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THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
FRAMIlNG
FRAMING FILM is a book series dedicated to
theoretical and analytical studies in restoration,
collection, archival, and exhibition practices in line
with the existing archive of EYE Filmmuseum. With
this series, Amsterdam University Press and EYE aim
to support the academic research community, as well
as practitioners in archive and restoration.
SERIES EDITORS
Giovanna Fossati, EYE Filmmuseum & University of
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Leo van Hee, EYE Filmmuseum
Frank Kessler, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Patricia Pisters, University of Amsterdam,
the Netherlands
Dan Streible, New York University, United States
Nanna Verhoeff, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
EDITORIAL BOARD
Richard Abel, University of Michigan, United States
Jane Gaines, Columbia University, United States
Tom Gunning, University of Chicago, United States
Vinzenz Hediger, Goethe University Frankfurt,
Germany
Martin Koerber, Deutsche Kinemathek, Germany
Ann-Sophie Lehmann, University of Groningen,
the Netherlands
Charles Musser, Yale University, United States
Julia Noordegraaf, University of Amsterdam,
the Netherlands
William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, United States
Linda Williams, University of California at Berkeley,
United States
THOMAS WAUGH
THE CONSCIENCE
OF CINEMA
The Films of Joris Ivens
1912-1989
AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cover illustration: Frame enlargement, Joris Ivens, Zuiderzee (1930-33)/Nieuwe Gronden (1933).
Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging. © CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Cover design and lay-out: Magenta Ontwerpers, Bussum
Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the
University of Chicago Press.
ISBN 9789089647535
e-ISBN 978 90 4852 525 6
DOI 10.5117/9789089647535
NUR 670
cc @
Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0)
G Thomas Waugh / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2016
Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this
book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise).
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced
in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact
the publisher.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Notes to the Reader 7 15
Acknowledgments 9
List oflllustrations 13
Foreword byAndri Stufkens 19
Foreword by Bill Nichols 21
Introduction 25
PART I
1 Ivens and the Silent Film Avant-Garde 1926-1929 51
2 The Radicalisation of the Poet 1929-1936 103
3 Anti-Fascist Solidarity Documentary 195
4 Projects of the Forties 257
PART II
5 Torn Curtain: Ivens the Cold Warrior 1946-1956 351
6 The 'Poet' Reborn? 1956-1965 401
7 Southeast Asia 1966-1970: Reinventing the Solidarity Film 503
8 China 1971-1989 565
Conclusion: Qui s'arrete se trompe 653
Notes 657
Appendix: Films on Ivens 695
Filmography 701
Reference List 711
Index 739
61
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
NOTES TO THE READER
Original-language titles of films are used in the filmography and reference list 7
as well as upon first use in each chapter, followed by standard English trans-
lation (in italics) or the author's English translation in the event that no offi-
cial English translation exists, in turn followed by the director's name, date of
production, country of origin, and running time in minutes, where this in not
evident in the immediate context. (The only exception is Chinese-language
titles.) Thereafter in the each chapter, shortened versions of original-language
titles, most familiar variants or standard English titles are deployed, which-
ever is most appropriate according to principles of clarity and convenience
(for example The Spanish Earth is shortened to Spanish Earth, Power and the
Land is shortened to Power and Une histoire de vent to Histoire). To minimise
repetition, film citations in the text do not include data that are evident in the
immediate context of the reference.
All translations from European languages are by the author unless other-
wise noted.
Citations follow the Oxford version of the Chicago date-author system,
modified to minimise repetition within the body of the text.
DVD frame captures are used wherever possible to concretise points made
in my filmic analysis. In addition the regular use of film posters and produc-
tion stills points to the artistic and social context of certain films and periods.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project, as mammoth as Joris Ivens deserves, has taken more than for- 9
ty years, and like all scholarly undertakings and labours of love is a collec-
tive undertaking. My 'thank you's' embrace many people over those decades
whom I have forgotten or are too numerous to mention. Please know that it
would not have been possible without you.
I express my heartfelt gratitude to:
The following co-workers of Ivens for their interviews and correspondence
since the 1970s: Tom Daly, Catherine Duncan, Helen van Dongen Durant, Guy
Glover, Robert Grelier, Jay Leyda, Pare Lorentz, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, Lu
Songhe, Marion Michelle, Arthur Ornitz, Vladimir Pozner, Jean-Pierre Ser-
gent, Henri Storck, and Willard Van Dyke.
My original advisers, readers, and mentors at Columbia University and
elsewhere: my adviser Leo Braudy; my original evaluators, Andrew Sarris, Rob-
ert Maguire, and J.W. Smit; other early readers, the now departed Erik Bar-
nouw, Peter Harcourt, and especially Jay Leyda.
My students in Joris Ivens seminars in 2006 and in 2011 for their generos-
ity, curiosity, and commitment.
Literally dozens of research assistants and other students and former stu-
dents, graduate and undergraduate, over the years, including (in alphabetical
order) Laurence Houle Collin, Ryan Conrad, Jon Davies, Enrique Fibla, Philipp
Dominik Keidl, Fulvia Massimi, Braden Scott, Evangelos Tziallas, Robert Vitu-
lano, Marcin Wisniewski, and Yuriy Zikratyy.
Other friends, colleagues and researchers for miscellaneous assistance
and wisdom: the generous and knowledgeable scholars Glyn Davis and Bert
Hogenkamp, filmmakers Marielle Nitoslawska, John Hughes, Rene Seegers,
and Ephraim Smith, cinephile activists Randy Rowland and Kay Power, and
programmers supreme Ezra Winton and Svetla Turnin.
For help with translation and transliteration Jenny Chang, Louis Godbout,
Ross Higgins, Philipp Dominik Keidl, Mao Lei, Giampaolo Marzi, [Rachel]
Qiong Yu, Nick Rice, Lothar Schmidt, and Sun Hongyun.
Members of the Concordia University community, whose students, faculty,
and staff have sustained and encouraged mywork for almost fortyyears, individ-
uals too numerous to mention, without whose abiding support I would not have
written a word or seen a film. I acknowledge in particular the contributions to
this book, both financial and infrastructural, by the Faculty of Fine Arts, Instruc-
tional and Informational Services, the Office of the Vice President Research, the
Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, and the Moving Images Research Centre.
For generous funding over manyyears the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada, and at the start the Canada Council for the Arts.
Members and staff of Amsterdam University Press for their generous pro-
fessionalism, especially Jeroen Sondervan, Senior Commissioning Editor
10 Film & Media for his unhesitating and resourceful shepherding of this project.
Original publishers or otherwise facilitators of early versions of parts of
this book, in roughly chronological order, Gary Crowdus and Cineaste; Scare-
crow Press; Kathleen Vernon and Cornell University Press; Carole Zucker and
Scarecrow Press; Peter Steven and Between the Lines Press; Gene Walz and the
Film Studies Association of Canada; Alan Rosenthal and University of Califor-
nia Press; Barry Keith Grant, Jeannette Sloniowski and Wayne State University
Press; Ernest Mathijs and Wallflower Press; Patti Zimmerman and Wide Angle;
Kees Bakker and University of Amsterdam Press; Wanda Bershen, Red Diaper
Productions; Malin Wahlberg and the University of Stockholm; Richard Mor-
rison and Jason Weidemann of University of Minnesota Press; Sun Hongyun,
Deane Williams, and Studies in Documentary; conferences organised by Visible
Evidence, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and Film Studies Association
of Canada; and above all Chuck Kleinhans,Julia Lesage, and John Hess and their
exemplaryJump Cut who published my first effort in 1976 and my last in 2011.
Organisers of three essential Ivens conferences that I was kindly invited
to address: 'Joris Ivens loo: the Documentary Context', Nijmegen 1998 (Kees
Bakker); 'Cinema without Borders', New York, 2002 (Wanda Bershen and Red
Diaper Productions); 'Joris Ivens and China', 11oth Anniversary Academic
Conference, Beijing 2008 (Zhang Tongdao and Sun Hongyun).
Rights holders of Ivens films, principally CAPI-Films Paris; as well as Argos
Films, Paris; Dovidis, Paris; Fondation Henri-Storck, Brussels; Icarus Films,
New York; Mannus Franken Foundation, Hilversum; Socit franco-africaine
de cinema; National Film Board of Canada; DEFA-Stichtung; the European
Foundation Joris Ivens. Rights holders whom we have not been able to trace
are asked to kindly contact the publisher with any enquiries.
Archival stewards of our Ivens and Loridan legacy, in alphabetical order,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Archives francaises du film; La Cinmatheque du ministere des affaires
dtrangeres et de la cooperation, Paris; La Cinmatheque qudbecoise, Montreal;
Chris Marker estate; DEFA-Stiftung, Berlin (especially Ralf Schenk and Gnter
Jordan but also Melanie Hauth, Gudrun Scherp, and Alexander Iskrow); Estate
Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen; Ephraim Smith, PhD, Heritage
Productions, Fresno, CA; Impact Films, New York; Museum of Modern Art; the
National Film Archive and Library, Ottawa; Philips Company Archives; Staatli-
ches Filmarchiv der DDR; especially the Nederlands Filmmuseum (the heroic
late founder-director, Jaan de Vaal, his energising consort Tineke de Vaal, and
I have not forgotten John Luijckx, Arja Grandia, Nico Diemer and many oth-
ers) now transmogrified into the Eye Institute, ever helpful; and above all the
European Foundation Joris Ivens, Nijmegen, whose amazing first director Kees
Bakker made things happen, and whose tireless and visionary successor Andre
Stuflens singlehandedly enabled and inspired this book by his generosity, eru-
dition, omniscience, and ineradicable smile - despite everything. Out of cour-
tesy to Joris Ivens's collaborator/co-director (1967-1989), partner and survivor,
Marceline Loridan-Ivens, and in honour of her unflagging work side by side
with the artist in four major works and many minor, and in accordance with
the French moral authorship legal framework, I have complied with her wish
to indicate her copyright claim together with that of CAPI Films Paris beneath
all frame captures of films by Ivens and by Ivens and herself. Pending further
determinations, this mention may or may not apply to works in public domain,
claimed or shared by other rights-holders, or governed by fair use provisions
in other jurisdictions. With almost no exceptions, works by Joris Ivens and by
Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan-Ivens, or their preservation and restorations
and redistribution, were financed in part or in whole by public funding or in the
nonprofit sphere, and almost all were produced in collaboration with trusting,
unremunerated citizens and subjects before and behind the camera. A fervent
subscriber to the principles of fair use, copy left, creative commons, and ethi-
cal documentary, the author considers moral factors other than the intellectual
property legalities of the French bourgeois republic applicable to the access to,
and use, sharing, conservation, historiography, analysis, and validation of the
films discussed in this book.
The late Joris Ivens, whom we shall not forget, without whose generosity,
indulgence, and limitless memory during the first fifteen years of my research
and writing, and of course without whose artistic and political inspiration, cour-
age and vision, this long voyage would not have happened or been possible.
Brian, John, Raj, Ross, Ryan, and Steve for hugs, steam, food, and laughter;
Francie Brady for holding my hand and much much more, for fixing my soft-
ware and much much more, and for accompanying me in the realm of repre-
sentation, politics, and desire.
AC KN OWL ED G ME NTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION I 13
1 Joris Ivens, Portrait by Chris Marker (1963).
CHAPTER 1
2 'Avant-garde'. Poster, 1931.
3 De Brug, 1928. Production Still.
4 De Wigwam, 1912. Frame capture.
5 Etudes des mouvements a Paris, 1927. Frame capture.
6 De Brug, 1928. Frame capture.
7 De Brug, 1928. Frame capture.
8 Branding, 1929. Frame capture.
9 Regen (1929). Frame capture.
10 Regen (1929). Frame capture.
CHAPTER 2
11 Philips-Radio, 1931. Poster.
12 Borinage, 1934. Production still.
13 WUBouwen (Heien), 1929. Frame capture.
14 Zuiderzee, 1931-33. Frame capture.
15 Zuiderzee, 1931-33. Frame capture.
16 Philips-Radio, 1931. Frame capture.
17 Philips-Radio, 1931. Frame capture.
18 Creosoot, 1931. Production still.
19 Komsomol, 1933. Frame capture.
20 Komsomol, 1933. Frame capture.
21 Nieuwe Gronden, 1933. Frame capture.
22 Nieuwe Gronden, 1933. Frame capture.
23 Borinage, 1934. Frame capture.
24 Borinage, 1934. Frame capture.
CHAPTER 3
25 The Spanish Earth, 1937. Poster.
26 The 400 Million, 1938. Production still.
27 The Spanish Earth, 1937. Frame capture.
28 The Spanish Earth, 1937. Frame capture.
29 The Spanish Earth, 1937. Frame capture.
30 The Spanish Earth, 1937. Frame capture.
14 I 31 The 400 Million, 1938. Frame capture.
32 The 400 Million, 1938. Frame capture.
33 The 400 Million, 1938. Frame capture.
CHAPTER 4
34 OurRussian Front, 1941. Lobby card.
35 Action Stations, 1942. Production still.
36 Power and the Land, 1940. Frame capture.
37 Power and the Land, 1940. Frame capture.
38 Bip Goes to Town, 1941. Frame capture.
39 Worst of Farm Disasters, 1941. Frame capture.
40 OilforAladdin's Lamp, 1941. Frame capture.
41 OurRussian Front, 1941. Frame capture.
42 OurRussian Front, 1941. Frame capture.
43 Action Stations, 1943. Frame capture.
44 Action Stations, 1943. Frame capture.
45 Know YourEnemyJapan, 1945. Frame capture.
46 Indonesia Calling, 1946. Frame capture.
47 Indonesia Calling, 1946. Frame capture.
CHAPTER 5
48 Die Windrose, 1957. Poster.
49 Pierwsze Lata [The First Years], 1949. Production still.
50 Pierwsze Lata [The First Years], 1949. Frame capture.
51 Pierwsze Lata [The First Years], 1949. Frame capture.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
52 PierwszeLata [The First Years], 1949. Frame capture.
53 Pokojzdobedzieswiat [Peace Will Win], 1951. Frame capture.
54 Pokojzdobedzieswiat [Peace Will Win] (1951). Frame capture.
55 Freundschaft siegt, 1952. Frame capture.
56 Freundschaft siegt, 1952. Frame capture.
57 WyscigPokoju Warszawa-Berlin-Praga [Peace Tour 1952], 1952.
Frame capture.
58 Das Lied der Strome, 1954. Frame capture.
59 Das Lied der Strome, 1954. Frame capture.
60 Das Lied der Strome, 1954. Frame capture.
61 Die Windrose, 1957. Frame capture.
62 Die Windrose, 1957. Frame capture.
63 Die Windrose, 1957. Frame capture.
64 Mein Kind, 1955. Frame capture.
65 Mein Kind, 1955. Frame capture. 15
66 LesAventures de Till l'Espiegle, 1956. Frame capture.
CHAPTER 6
67 Lettres de Chine [Before (Early) Spring], 1958. Poster.
68 ...a Valparaiso, 1962. Production still.
69 La Seine a rencontredParis, 1957. Frame capture.
70 La Seine a rencontredParis, 1957. Frame capture.
71 Six Hundred Million With You, 1958. Frame capture.
72 Lettres de Chine [Before (Early) Spring], 1958. Frame capture.
73 Lettres de Chine [Before (Early) Spring], 1958. Frame capture.
74 L'Italia non e un paese povero, 1960. Frame capture.
75 L'Italia non e un paese povero, 1960. Frame capture.
76 L'Italia non e un paese povero, 1960. Frame capture.
77 Demain a Nanguila, 1960. Frame capture.
78 Demain a Nanguila, 1960. Frame capture.
79 Carnet de Viaje, 1961. Frame capture.
80 Carnet de Viaje, 1961. Frame capture.
81 Un pueblo armado, 1961. Frame capture.
82 Un pueblo armado, 1961. Frame capture.
83 ...A Valparaiso, 1963. Frame capture.
84 ...A Valparaiso, 1963. Frame capture.
85 Le Petit Chapiteau, 1963. Frame capture.
86 Le Train de la victoire, 1964. Frame capture.
87 Pour le Mistral, 1965. Frame capture.
88 Pour le Mistral, 1965. Frame capture.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
89 Rotterdam Europoort, 1966. Frame capture.
9o Rotterdam Europoort, 1966. Frame capture.
CHAPTER 7
91 Le Ciel, la terre [The Threatening Sky], 1966. Poster.
92 Le 17eParallele, 1968. Production still.
93 Le Ciel, la terre, 1966. Frame capture.
94 La hora des los hornos [The Hour of the Furnaces], 1968. Frame capture.
95 Loin du Vietnam, 1967. Frame capture.
96 Loin du Vietnam, 1967. Frame capture.
97 Le 17e Parallele, 1968. Frame capture.
98 Le 17e Parallele, 1968. Frame capture.
99 Le Peuple et sesfusils, 1968. Frame capture.
16 100 Le Peuple et sesfusils, 1968. Frame capture.
101 Rencontre avec leprdsidentHo Chi Minh, 1970. Production still.
CHAPTER 8
102 Comment Yukong diplaca les montagnes, 1976. Poster.
103 Comment Yukong deplaca les montagnes, 1976. Production still.
104 Les Kazaks - minorite nationale, Sinkiang, 1977. Frame capture.
105 Les Ouigours - minoritd nationale, Sinkiang, 1977. Frame capture.
106 Autour du pitrole: Taking, 1976. Frame capture.
107 L'Usine de gendrateurs, 1976. Frame capture.
108 Histoire d'un ballon: Le Lycee no. 31 a Pekin, 1976. Frame capture.
109 Le Village des pecheurs, 1976. Frame capture.
110 Une caserne, 1976. Frame capture.
111 Le Professeur Tsien, 1976. Frame capture.
112 Une rdpdtition a l'Opdra de Pekin, 1976. Frame capture.
113 Entrainement au Cirque de Pdkin, 1976. Frame capture.
114 LesArtisans, 1976. Frame capture.
115 Impressions d'une ville: Changhai, 1976. Frame capture.
116 La Pharmacie no.3: Changhai, 1976. Frame capture.
117 Unefemme, unefamille, 1976. Frame capture.
118 Une histoire de vent, 1988. Poster.
119 Une histoire de vent, 1988. Production still.
120 Une histoire de vent, 1988. Frame capture.
121 Une histoire de vent, 1988. Frame capture.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
CONCLUSION
122 Ivens retrospective, Paris, 2003. Poster.
I 17
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FOREWORD BY ANDRE STUFKENS
Director European Foundation Joris Ivens
'The next generation is sitting on the shoulder of the previous one', Joris Ivens I 19
once said to a young filmmaker. Does this only apply to filmmakers or is it also
true for film scholars?
Since Ivens started filmmaking in 1927, six generations of film critics and
film scholars have reflected on his films. From the beginning, the ancestors
of serious film criticism, a product of the avant-garde movement, with peo-
ple like L.J. Jordaan and Harry Alan Potamkin, recognised Ivens's capacity for
shaping a new kind of film with international exposure. In his famous essay,
'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Walter Benjamin
presented Ivens's films as an example of the democratic impact of filmmaking
in the 20th century. Later on, the legendary Jay Leyda devoted himself complet-
ing Ivens's first autobiography The Camera andI. During the Cold War, French
and East-German film scholars in particular started analysing Ivens's body
of work so far. They used a descriptive method augmented by some analysis,
offering labels and claims for Ivens, such as 'The Documentarist of Truth', or
either 'The Poetic Filmmaker' or 'The Political Filmmaker', thereby missing
the point that Ivens was both at the same time. It was hard to keep an ideolog-
ical distance to the subject to make a proper scholarly analysis. The subjective
'Right' or 'Wrong' analysis continued until the 1990s, and reached its pinnacle
after the Fall of the Berlin Wall in Hans Schoots's biography of Ivens, a book
with a lot of personal projection and without any proper film analysis. There
was obviously a need at that time to drag down outspoken leftist artists like
Sartre, Neruda, Brecht, or Ivens, as had been the case a decade before with out-
spoken right wing artists like Cdline, Pound, Koch, or Riefenstahl.
It was only when film studies matured in an academic context that aca-
demic discussion and analysis on Ivens's film oeuvre started to flourish. I have
always been struck by the intelligent analysis which Thomas Waugh published
in his dissertation in 1981. This was all the more astonishing because the Joris
Ivens Archive was hardly accessible, incomplete, and not at all catalogued at
the time. And how to read the Dutch language? Despite these handicaps this
was the best text on Ivens for decades. However, Waugh's research ended with
Indonesia Calling in 1946. As academic research on Ivens accelerated the 1981
monograph would no longer stay up to date.
The European Foundation Joris Ivens (EFJI), founded by Marceline Lori-
dan-Ivens one year after Ivens passed away in 1989, was able to fulfil its role of
fostering research by making both the paper archive and the films accessible.
Since 1990, the EFJI has initiated or supported film programmes in 43 coun-
tries, restored films, and produced a DVD box with 22 films (2008). Apart from
academic research, the 26 'revisit'-films that were made in 13 countries have
also contributed to a higher level of understanding and analysis. Three sym-
posia (1998 Nijmegen, 2002 New York, 2009 Nijmegen/Beijing), with scholars
20 such as Michael Chanan, Jose Manuel Costa, Bert Hogenkamp, Charley Muss-
er, Bill Nichols, and Brian Winston (as well as Waugh), stimulated further
research. In the intervening years, Waugh's academic career has taken him to
all corners of the world and made him into a specialist in global movements of
alternative film. Avoiding the trap of so many documentary film scholars with
a limited Anglo-Saxon or Western perspective, his global scope enables him to
relate Ivens's films to filmmakers and films of almost every continent and in
every decade. We cannot understand the 20th century without the visible evi-
dence captured worldwide on camera.
In a way, Waugh is not only sitting on the shoulders of all his predecessors
in Ivens studies, he is also sitting on his own shoulders, improving, expand-
ing, and broadening his dissertation of 1981, and so coming full circle. The
result is a quintessential step forward in Ivens studies. Here is a magnificent
book without precedent providing the reader with an integral, complete spec-
trum of Ivens's film oeuvre, and at the same time with an intriguing, provok-
ing view of the radical film movement of the 20th century. My word choice is
deliberate here: provocation - 'pro voce' - implies generosity, stimulating the
reader to speak out in his or her own voice.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
FOREWORD BY BILL NICHOLS
Here, as we witness the vivid and tumultuous unfolding of a new century, 21
comes a voice speaking to us from its past and its future. Tom Waugh's dis-
sertation on Joris Ivens has long been one of the great pillars of wisdom on my
documentary book shelf. Completed in 1981 and published only by UMI (Uni-
versity Microfilms Inc.) in the minimalist form that mimicked the typed dis-
sertation itself, this 636 page opus arrived as a galvanic harbinger of the great
surge in documentary film that was to take place in the 1990s and beyond.
Like Ivens himself, Waugh was there at the start, forging a theory and prac-
tice of documentary film long before others - including myself - began to do
so in the books and articles that have made this so rich and engaging a field
of study. Like Ivens, Waugh's efforts did not receive the reception and did not
instigate the transformations that were their due. The Cold War, for Ivens,
and Reaganite conservatism, for Waugh, saw to that. But Ivens's pioneering
and adventurous pursuit of strategies for the representation of reality, and
Waugh's remarkable and prescient exploration of the documentary form now
arrive in all their complexity and glory. Arrive as a reminder of what is lost, and,
too often, repressed, and that which has yet to come into being.
Few studies balance biographical commentary, textual analysis, and the-
oretical conceptualization with the dexterity that Waugh displays here. He
writes with his familiar mix of wit, self-deprecating humor, incisive analysis,
clear-headed political engagement, and unwavering passion for his subject.
Waugh traces Ivens's development over the decades that are, in effect, a sum-
mary of documentary accomplishments. And more. The penultimate chapter
takes us to China - Ivens and his long-time companion, Marceline Loridan's,
China - to reflect on two of Ivens's most striking films, the twelve part How
YukongMoved the Mountains and A Tale of the Wind. The first is a culmination
of Ivens's efforts to combine the observation of quotidian life with insight into
how a given social system shapes and inflects such life. The second carries us
beyond the realm of documentary as it is customarily imagined.
This latter move reveals Ivens's, and Waugh's, poetic powers at their great-
est. Ivens reflects on his entire career and his long-term relation with China,
filmmaking, and life itself. Waugh reflects on what this means for radical male
filmmakers in their late period work. Comparing A Tale of the Wind with late
works by Cocteau, Brakhage, Jarman, Broughton, Godard, and de Antonio,
Waugh argues that Ivens, like the others, offers a profound meditation not
simply on the vexing problems of documentary representation, but on mascu-
linity in the male subject's concluding years, on frustration, failure, judgment,
compromise, ambivalence, rage, and shame. The shame of decline and loss
coupled with the fervent desire for hope and transformation. From a mod-
est to a flamboyant style, from memory to imagination, from shame to grace,
from quotidian matters of our daily bread, to transcendent questions of our
22 ultimate purpose, Waugh, like Ivens, brings us to that precipice beyond which
we can glimpse a future we have yet to attain and a past we must remember
but leave behind. This is a book of great scholarship and political insight, but,
even more than that, it is a book characterized by that form of generosity of
spirit that defines wisdom.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
,..,
Introduction
'Documentary is the conscience of the cinema', I told him. Since then I
have never changed my mind.
-JorislIvens, 1955/1982
The Conscience of Cinema is about a film mode that played that role throughout I 25
the world film industry of the 20th century. It is about an artist who pushed doc-
umentary to the limits of conscience for more than six decades. The Conscience
of Cinema is a study, chronologically ordered, of the artistic career of Joris
Ivens, the Dutch-born documentarist (1898-1989), following him through 77
years of filmmaking on every inhabited continent. Depending on who you
talk to, Ivens was 'one of the greatest documentary film artists, the peer of
Robert Flaherty', 'one of the great classic directors', 'a man who has laid the
foundations for the cinema of the future' (Sadoul, [1965] 1972, 124-125), 'the
great poet of the documentary', 'the greatest living documentarist of the 20th
century' (Haudiquet, 1967), 'the most famous documentarist of the century'
(Boulad, 1989), the 'filmmaker of the documentary of witness [who] occu-
pies a special place in the cinema' (Lvesque, 1988), and 'one of the cinema's
outstanding lyric poets... one of the greatest camera-eyes in the world' (Gar-
el, 1989). Nevertheless, at the other extreme, Ivens is taken to have 'confused
ideas with art' (Grenier, 1958, 207), as a 'pseudo-poet' (Truffaut, 1966), 'the
Leni Riefenstahl of Stalinism [...] a Stalinist conformist' (Waintrop 1989), such
that he was 'neither a political conscience, nor an inventor of forms, but an
adventurer' (Daney, 1989). The Conscience of Cinema endeavours to objectively
adjudicate and reconcile those extravagant and contradictory claims through
historicising them and understanding the images that Ivens left us on the
screen. But this is also a very personal book, grounded in my own passion for
documentary and for the ideals of social transformation that animated Ivens's
work, as well as my own research and worldview. As a North American baby
boomer film scholar, writer, and teacher for 40 years, this passion and these
ideals shaped my first writings about Ivens as a grad student in the mid-seven-
ties and have stayed with me in my second critical grappling with the 'Flying
1. Portrait of Joris Ivens, by Chris Marker, thirty years his junior, trusted collaborator on four
1960s films (1963, probably East Berlin). © Chris Marker Estate.
Dutchman' as a senior professor on the cusp of retirement in the 21st century.
Why have I come back to Ivens after so long? For one thing the disserta-
tion I defended in 1981, already huge, covered only the first 20oyears of Ivens's
career, 1926-1946. I had had to grind it to a halt in the watershed year of 1946
with more than four decades of the then still unfinished oeuvre left to cover.
I wanted to publish the dissertation, but the Reagan-Thatcher era was not
the time for a junior faculty member to publish a book on a filmmaker whose
last works had branded him as a diehard Maoist. Instead, I published several
excerpts and a few additional instalments in, and reflections on, the path not
taken. But part of me tenaciously insisted on coming back to finish the job, to
cover the remaining 43 years of the oeuvre of Ivens, by now a historical figure
who has been dead for a quarter century.
One of the founding parents of documentary in the silent era, Ivens's
standing as the titanic genius of telling cinematic truth has fluctuated more
26 than that of any other of that cohort; i.e. Grierson, Flaherty, Shub, and Vertov.
In the decades after his death in 1989, retrospectives of his work have ener-
gized dozens of festival and cinematheque screens in 41 countries around
the world: medium-sized retrospectives unfolded on every continent in such
far-ranging sites as Mumbai (17 films, 1992), Yamagata (32 films, 1999), Rio
de Janeiro and Sio Paulo (19 films, 2000), New York (including many other
stops on a North American tour, 16 films, 2002), Turin (28 films, 2002), Seoul
(11 films, 2004), Melbourne (8 films, 2006), Thessaloniki and Athens (21 films,
2010), Maputo (20 films, 2010), and Amsterdam (both 1994 and 2008, the lat-
ter 20-film tribute timed with the release of the official four-DVD box set of
the Ivens legacy). These were outdone by ambitious, comprehensive series on
the occasion of the Ivens centenary in Nijmegen (67 films, 1998) and Valencia
(46 films, 1998), and in Paris a decade later (50 films, 2009) (Stuflens, person-
al communication, 2014). The Ivens estate, directed by Ivens's lively octoge-
narian ex-collaborator and widow Marceline Loridan-Ivens, and the European
Foundation Joris Ivens, located in the director's birthplace of Nijmegen, have
helped keep the flame alive around the world.
But the 2008 Amsterdam event unwittingly revealed the precariousness of
Ivens's standing: the retrospective of 22 films quietly 'disappeared' a whole
prolific decade of the native son's career, that called the 'Cold War period' in
this book (1946-1956), including films that had been shown in the 1994 ret-
rospective. This oversight followed the pattern established in the new box set
itself (although Amsterdam included a Cuban and a Chilean film that had also
not been included in the set).' But a perhaps more ominous 'disappearance'
followed the retrospective: the 'Joris Ivens Prize', which had been awarded
annually since 1988 at Amsterdam's IDFA, the largest documentary film festi-
val in the world, mysteriously lost its name and thereafter became the 'VPRO
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary'. (The Amsterdam 'disap-
pearance', a non-unanimous decision made officially for reasons of 'brand-
ing' [Ally Derks, personal communication, February 2014],2 echoed a similar
occurrence in 1971 when the East German Leipzig documentary festival abol-
ished its own Ivens prize, embarrassed that its favourite artist had veered
pro-Chinese and anti-Soviet; happily the Prix Joris Ivens at Paris's documenta-
ry festival Cinma du reel, inaugurated in 1990, the year after the filmmaker's
death, has been maintained for a quarter of a century.)
In this book, I offer intensive textual and contextual analysis for each of
Ivens's major extant films, as well as shorter studies of a few lost works and
several unfinished projects. This author-centred approach might seem out-
moded in the post-auteurist phase in the discipline of film studies in the 21st
century, where detailed auteur and textual studies do not seem to be the wave
of the future nor even of the present. Even when I undertook this study for the
first time in the bronze age of 1974, in the shadow of the arch-auteurist Andrew I 27
Sarris at Columbia University, I already had serious reservations about the var-
ious auteur cults around me, from Hawks to Herzog. From the beginning, I
insisted that this materialist one-man study would break new ground away
from the established formalist and cult-of-personality models. As I wrap up
this project 40 years later, certain things have come full circle. If I am contrib-
uting to a much-needed return to the old-fashioned values of textual analysis
and authorial agency, intent, and tenacity of individuals and collectivities, and
of individual works and sequences of works as the motor of history and cul-
ture, then all the better service to the short-attention spans of the digital gen-
erations. In the particular case of Ivens, textual analysis, a close look at what is
on the screen as the primary focus of this work, may help resolve not only the
contradictions inherent in a non-auteurist auteur study, but also those reso-
nating below the surface of the above 'disappearances' and many others that
punctuate the Ivens career. It may also help decipher the ambiguously fraught
relationship among the artist, the audience, the party, the state, and of course
the party-state.
The study assumes a contemporary relevance of Ivens' s work in this 21st
century. It also affirms its representativeness of both the historical evolution
of the documentary film and the trajectory of the activist cultural Left during
the same time. Ivens's oeuvre is emblematic of the response of entire genera-
tions of documentarists - radicals as well as mainstream filmmakers in what
Winton (2013) has called 'the documentary of liberal consensus' - to complex
and changing historical conjunctures, and the work of Ivens's major contem-
poraries is continuously kept in view throughout the study.
Ivens's aesthetic and ideological trajectory has its origins in the West-
ern European avant-garde of the late silent period, and moves, stimulated by
INTRODUCTION
Ivens's encounter with the Soviet social and aesthetic experiment, into the
militant workers' culture of the early years of the Depression. This, in turn,
leads to his immersion in the expanding milieu of the Popular Front in North
America and Western Europe in the late 1930s, for which he becomes a major
artistic spokesperson during its initial growth around the Spanish cause, its
slump following the Soviet-Nazi pact, its renewal after Pearl Harbour, and
finally its post-war rout during the Cold War. Thereafter, following the late
1950s, we traverse the era of New Waves and auteur expression in the 196os,
coloured by the New Left, the escalating opposition to the Vietnam War in the
West, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution throughout the global south. This
colossal movement and its sharp detours in turn shapes the seventies, and
certainly Ivens's involvement in it, and finally the decade of the 198os, herald-
ing the end of both Soviet and Chinese aspirations toward the party-state and
accompanying utopias, and the advent of globalisation - though not the 'end
28 of history'.
Within these successive geopolitical, cultural, and ideological historical
settings, Ivens's films explore virtually all of the formal possibilities open to
documentarists of the classical, direct, and post-direct periods; and of course
to various combinations of these possibilities at any given moment:
Formal mode Films Year
modernist analysis De Brug 1928
folkloric narrative Branding 1929
LesAventures de Till L'Espiegle 1956
Die Windrose 1957
Pour le Mistral 1966
Une histoire de vent 1988
essay, elemental Regen 1929
lyricism (including Indonesia Calling 1946
'city symphony') Pokoj zdobgdzie swiat (Peace Will Win) 1951
Das Lied der Strome 1954
La Seine a rencontr Paris 1957
...A Valparaiso 1963
Pour le Mistral 1965
Rotterdam Europoort 1966
Le Ciel, la terre 1966
Changhai: Impressions d'une ville (Yukong) 1976
essay, advocacy Mein Kind 1955
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
essay, postmodern/ Une histoire de vent 1988
autobiographical
publicity/commission W Bouwen 1930
Philips-Radio 1931
Creosoot 1932
Power and the Land 1940
Qil forAladdin's Lamp 1941
L'Italia non e un paese povero 1960
epic narrative Zuiderzee 1930-1933
Pesn o geroyakh (Komsomol) 1933
Pierwsze lata (The First Years) 1949
Comment Yukong deplaca les montagnes 1976
socialist-realist- Komsomol 1933
inspired personalised Power and the Land 1940
narrative (docu- Pierwsze lata 1949
drama) Demain ai Nanguila 1960
Comment Yukong deplaca les montagnes 1976
event film Pokoj zdobgdzie swiat 1951
Freundschaft siegt 1952
Wyscigpokoju -Warszawa-Berlin-Praga
(Freedom Tour) 1952
Das Lied der Stroime 1954
Six Hundred Million With You 1958
Le Train de la victoire 1964
agitprop activism Misere au Borinage 1934
Indonesia Calling 1946
compilation/collage Nieuwe Gronden 1933
Misere au Borinage 1934
OurRussian Front 1942
Know YourEnemy: Japan 1945
Das Lied der Strome 1954
1 29
INTRODUCTION
30 1
solidarity: war The Spanish Earth 1937
The 400 Million 1938
OurRussian Front 1941
Action Stations 1943
Un pueblo armado 1961
Le Ciel, la terre 1966
Loin du Vietnam 1967
Le 17e Parallele 1968
Le Peuple et ses fusils 1970
solidarity: travelogue Das Lied der Stroime 1954
Lettres de Chine 1958
Carnet deviaje 1961
.A Valparaiso 1963
solidarity: social Komsomol 1932
construction The Spanish Earth 1937
Pierwsze lata 1949
Pokoj zdobgdzie swiat 1951
Lettres de Chine 1958
Carnet de viaje 1961
Le Peuple et ses fusils 1970
Comment Yukong deplaca les montagnes 1976
interview film Le 17e Parallele 1968
Rencontre avec le presidentHo Chi Minh 1970
Comment Yukong deplaca les montagnes 1976
observation WUBouwen 1930
Zuiderzee 1930-1933
Entrainement au cirque de Pekin 1976
hybrids and The Spanish Earth 1937
combinations The 400 Million 1938
Pierwsze lata 1949
Das Lied der Strome 1954
Lettres de Chine 1958
Loin du Vietnam 1967
Une histoire de vent 1988
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The chapters of this study are arranged chronologically, and each focuses on a
nexus of political and aesthetic trajectories within a specific historical period.
Politically speaking the filmography points to a wide array of configurations/
positionings that are not only ideological but also political, in the narrow
sense. For example, the book is a chronology of relationships with the state
and with states, with Ivens exploring many different templates for the artist's
position vis-a-vis political power; from oppositional (what Nichols [2010, 223]
calls 'the political avant-garde of documentary filmmaking') to political or
financial patronage, to the privileged 'apolitical' 'neutrality' of the avant-gar-
de or traditional fine arts sector, to the fascinating alignment with certain
factions within the state, itself fraught with conflicting tendencies, that come
to light with Comment Yukong diplaca les montagnes (How Yukong Moved the
Mountains, 1976, France, 718). The advent of the post-war world, with its sub-
version of earlier imperialist cultures of domination, entailed a spectrum of
revised relationships with the state - which may loosely be termed postcoloni- | 31
al - of which Ivens must be considered a pioneer. Throughout, Ivens's political
positioning inevitably sees the eruptions of censorship, everywhere along the
ideological spectrum, and this also becomes a major thread of the book.
Formally speaking each historical conjuncture implies a different entan-
glement with technological developments, in the first instance most salient-
ly the encounter with the handheld, hand-wound Kinamo camera that would
energize the first decade of Ivens's work and the classical documentary in
general (Buckland, 2006). Next, of course, came the encounter with sound
that first transformed his work with the Philips-Radio (Netherlands, 36) com-
mission in 1931. On the whole, his filmography thereafter provides a varied
inventory of the possible applications of sound technology, his work providing
prototypes for the consolidation of the classical sound documentary. Histor-
ically, the next major challenge comes considerably later with the paradigm
shift to the direct cinema infrastructure beginning in the late 1950s, with its
whole panoply of visual as well as auditory potentialities, aesthetic as well as
political. Ivens's exploration of this panoply comes to a climax in Yukong, and,
demonstrating the often cyclical shape of Ivens's pursuits, is repudiated in
Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind, 1988, France, 78). At the same time, his
production was inflected by technological shifts such as the advent of 16mm
in the post-war era (Ivens's first use of the new medium for cinematography
came late in 1960, but he had been distributed on 16mm since the 1930s).
Each techno-historical conjuncture set up a different pattern of consump-
tion for Ivens's work: his audiences are shown to have ranged across a whole
spectrum of sociological and ideological constituencies. These ranged from
the elite constituencies of avant-garde film societies, militant workers' cadres
and unions, to the mass audiences of North American commercial chains and
INTRODUCTION
Parisian art houses - and increasingly the unknowable demographics of tele-
vision. The latter are first broached with the state broadcast networks of the
German Democratic Republic (hereafter DDR), and then of Italy, with uncer-
tain and even traumatic results, and it is only with Yukong that television mar-
keting becomes a primary preoccupation, with better, though still uneven,
results. Ivens's relations with these divergent audiences varied correspond-
ingly, ranging from agitational exhortation to expository didacticism to lyrical
enchantment to dramatic identification.
In each era and accordingly in each chapter I shall present a specific
chronological and spatially defined episode in Ivens's career, each with one or
two exemplary major works that help define the period. For example, in Chap-
ter 3, The Spanish Earth (1937, USA, 53) is presented as the most prototypical
of Ivens's Popular Front-era films, but in many ways of his entire oeuvre: in its
historical positioning at the center of the Popular Front, and in its formal com-
32 I position, as a hybrid mix of the major cinematographic modes of the classical
documentary, 'mise-en-scene', proto-direct 'spontaneous' improvisation, and
newsreel-style, 'public events' cinematography. This film has a special place
in Ivens's oeuvre and in documentary history, all the more since it is the title
most automatically associated with the name Ivens by non-specialists, the
only Ivens film to occasionally appear on 'ten best' lists, and the certainly the
only one to have had a Hollywood TV movie devoted to it, albeit not an espe-
cially sympathetic one (Hemingway & Gellhorn, Philip Kaufman, 2012, USA,
155)! Similarly Misere au Borinage (Borinage, 1934, Belgium, 34) is presented
as the special achievement of the radical paradigm shift of the early 1930s in
Chapter 2, DasLied derStrome (Song oftheRivers, 1954, DDR, 90) dominates the
Cold War trajectory of Chapter 5, and Le 17e Parallele (The 17th Parallel, 1968,
France, 113) of the Indochina period highlighted in Chapter 7. Other chapters
offer a more dispersed focus, Chapter 1 with its detailed focus on several key
formative works of the avant-garde period; Chapter 4 with its eclectic focus
on minor and unfinished wartime works bookended by two diametrically dif-
ferent major works, Power and the Land (1940, USA, 33) and Indonesia Calling
(1946, Australia, 22), marking the end of an era and the beginning of another
respectively. The final chapter considers the two Chinese masterpieces of the
last two decades of Ivens's life, again diametrically different, but which I con-
tend cannot be considered in isolation from each other. Histoire is the yin of
Yukong's yang (Bleeckere, 2002).
All of this said, it must be acknowledged that this book also demonstrates
its own yin and yang: Part I, the first four chapters covering the two first semi-
nal decades of Ivens'scareer, is developed from my doctoral thesis, written in
the late seventies and defended in 1981. As such it reflects both my youthful
ardour for the still active but elderly left documentarist who had just delivered
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
what could well have been his final epic Yukong, as well as certain methodo-
logical tendencies of film studies in the 1970s, tilting perhaps more towards
the populist newsprint Jump Cut than the high-theory acid-free and library-
bound Screen. Although updated, it retains much of these period reflections
and relies significantly on 1970s resources and scholarship, which I am proud
to have rescued from oblivion in many cases. Much of Part II, Chapters 5 to 8,
covering the last four decades of Ivens's oeuvre, 1947 to 1989, has been written
more recently over the last several years and reflects not only some current
methodological tonalities, but also more distance from my corpus as well as
my distance chronologically and politically from my subject, now dead for a
quarter century. Moreover, I am told that my relationship to my reader varies
widely throughout the book, at moments privileging the scholarly impartiali-
ty and thoroughness of the doctoral researcher covering his tracks before his
committee, at others the personable mentorship of the lecturer (I taught Ivens
seminars in 2006 and 2013 and have regularly shown individual Ivens films 33
in other courses throughout my career), at others the polemicist rushing to
the defence of the beleaguered Joris, and at still others the confessor or the
militant - or combinations thereof. In keeping with my heartfelt advocacy of
personal, intellectual, artistic, and political histories, especially in Chapter 8,
I have made a conscious decision to retain the distinct sensibilities of the two
periods, the many authorial voices that my career has encompassed from my
late twenties to my sixties, and the spectrum of relationships with my subject
and my audience thus entailed, both scholarly and politically. This book can-
not not be about history and our need to embrace and make use of history, the
author's as well as his subjects'.
One sub-theme of this book is the evolution of documentary form as a
matrix of personal relationships - among filmmakers and subjects, collabo-
rators, and audiences - one that increasingly preoccupied Ivens and his con-
temporaries during the classical period and inextricably shaped Ivens's oeuvre
thereafter. Inspired by Flaherty and by Soviet socialist realism, the gradual
mastery despite technological hindrances of what Ivens would call 'personal-
ized' documentary throughout the thirties and forties - the prototype of what
is taken for granted over the last generations of the character-driven 'story'
documentary in mainstream and marginal documentary circles alike - is giv-
en special emphasis throughout this study. This thread culminates in the two
direct-cinema epics of subject testimony covered in Chapters 7 and 8: Le 17e
Parallele and Yukong, each with their own interactive narratives of political tur-
bulence in wartime and peacetime respectively.
Another thread of this book on the 'Flying Dutchman', the moniker that
Ivens loved from early on in his career, is flying. I am not referring to the love-
ly recurring aerial shots that graced many of his films from Zuiderzeewerken
INTRODUCTION
(Zuiderzee, 1930-1933, Netherlands, 40-52) onwards, and culminating in the
exquisitely cloud-borne Histoire. I am referring rather to the roving and restless
intelligence and commitment that took him, camera in hand, to every inhabit-
ed continent, observing and adjusting to cultures and climates (political and
geographical) of every possible stripe, collaborating within those contexts
with people as complex social agents materially formed by class, gender, and
spatial dynamics, and thereby sharing with us a rich and moving kaleidoscope
of humanity in the 20th century. Ivens, however, stands apart from the 20th cen-
tury tradition of documentary constructions of the cultural 'other'. The tradi-
tion of the 'other', spearheaded most prominently by Flaherty and fleshed out
by legions of ethnographers and proto-National Geographic ethnographers,
tended to construct the 'individual as gateway to a unified, homogenized
sense of community and culture', and often constructed "'national character"
as a reductive, melting-pot idea' (Nichols, 2010, 226). Ivens, our materialist
34 I poet of work, daily production, and collective struggles, while obviously not an
insider - especially in relations to cultures whose languages he did not share -
destabilised the boundaries of otherness, whether through his intense empa-
thy, his skill at close observational understanding, or a personal humility and
openness that came out of his political solidarity, humane disposition, and
friendship with local informants.
Another theme traversing the totality of this book and Ivens's career is the
trajectory and multiple detours of what we might call the documentary indus-
try, for want of a better word to describe this transcultural network of widely
varying production contexts and economies that Ivens traversed over 60 years.
Nowhere is this more evident than in, not Ivens's trajectory of great documen-
taries, but in the following chronology of his dreams, unseen, censored, aban-
doned, shelved, and/or betrayed. No doubt Ivens is far from unique in this
trail of unfulfilled enterprises - did Vertov and Flaherty, Leacock and Marker,
Koppel and Patwardhan have it any worse? And did fiction filmmakers at any
time between 1928 and 1989 really have it any worse than their documenta-
ry counterparts? Regardless, the trail is a rich and eloquent documentation
of the diverse international spectrum of the institutions and materialities of
documentary making - from the world of pedagogy, training, and apprentice-
ship, to financing, to production, and from technological infrastructure to the
critical establishment and the festival milieu to exhibition - over this entire
period.
Though Ivens was in the international critical spotlight from his very first
major film, De Brug (The Bridge, 1928, Netherlands, 16), it was from the 1960s
onwards that an attention to Joris Ivens in several languages and cultural con-
texts really proliferated, as well as an increasing visibility of his films in both
special retrospectives and the normal channels of distribution. First set in
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
motion by the cinephile constituencies and the liberal and progressive constit-
uencies and networks of the interwar world, Ivens's followings move through
the left-aligned film cultures of the Cold War, in both East and West, and then
the confluence of the New Wave and the New Left in France during the ear-
ly years of the Vietnam era. Interest in Ivens became a veritable explosion
after the release in 1976 of Ivens's and Loridan's most recent film, Yukong, a
twelve-hour, twelve-part epic on the Cultural Revolution that quickly assumed
a lightning-rod historical relevance equal to its artistic magnitude. Worldwide
attention to Ivens peaked during the eightieth birthday celebrations centred
in his native Holland in 1978, his subsequent return visit to the US, the country
to which he had devoted perhaps the most prolific decade of his career, and
the 1979 Ivens exhibition at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, the city
where he lived for the last three decades of his life. If the first part of the 198os
were a very cruel moment for the couple, as more and more information about
the Cultural Revolution came to the surface and Yukong became increasingly I 35
fraught in many quarters, the attention did not wane but became increasingly
polarised and conflicted. Though the controversies would not totally subside,
resolution - salvation even - came in the last part of the decade with Histoire in
1988, and the all-but-unanimous honours that were piled upon it.
The current surge in interest in Ivens, following the 2008 release of the
DVD box set, is not confined to his last nor his most recent work. On the con-
trary, students in the digital age find his films of the classical period more and
more contemporary. His films seem to have an increasing relevance to the rad-
ical political currents of our day, those mass movements that branched out
from the New Left - movements enfranchising and mobilising women, racial-
ised and other ethnic and aboriginal minorities, prisoners, environmentalists,
LGBTQ's, consumers, welfare recipients, migrants and refugees, the handi-
capped, the elderly, the unemployed and the homeless, and workers both
outside of and within traditional labour organisations - in the global South
as well as the North. The proliferation of such movements in the 21st centu-
ry, from the networks of 'Occupy' and anti-globalisation initiatives around
the globe, to the local energies of revolutions whether orange, green, velvet,
saffron, maple, 'Idle no more', Mayan or Arab, surging in springtimes and on
squares from Thompson to Taksim to Tahrir to Independence. Each of these
movements is accompanied by its own lively body of militant documentary for
which Borinage, Ivens's outcry in support of striking miners, can be seen as a
prototype. And each opening of a new front of international struggle sets off a
wave of documentary solidarity from Western sympathisers for which Spanish
Earth, Ivens's appeal on behalf of the doomed Spanish Revolution, will always
serve as the definitive example. Similarly, every successful new social revolu-
tion inspires its corresponding series of romantic documentary visions of the
INTRODUCTION
new society being shaped, for which Pesn o geroyakh (Komsomol, 1933, USSR,
50), Ivens's homage to the first Soviet Five-Year Plan, is the antecedent. Indeed,
as documentary continues to be the first recourse of filmmakers committed to
political transformation and emancipation on every continent, Ivens is a fig-
ure whose pertinence will continue to be felt. In 1979, as I was writing the first
part of this book, Bard College hosted the US Conference for an Alternative
Cinema, an assembly of more than 500 media activists from North America,
and out of 85 screenings fully 70 presented documentaries, summing up the
centrality of documentary for the New Left.
Since 1979, access to filmmaking technology for activists and documen-
tarists has of course taken a quantum leap and the centrality of documentary
to the project of changing the world has followed with its own leaps. One has
only to consider the track record of 'Cinema Politica', a local initiative found-
ed in 2003 by students Ezra Winton and Svetla Turnin to exhibit political doc-
36 I umentaries at my Montreal university on a weekly basis, and which took off
beyond all expectation to create a thriving political cinematic culture, locally
and internationally. Over its first decade more than 350 screenings of politi-
cal documentaries have taken place, selected from a corpus estimated to be
approximately 3000 submissions (Turnin, personal communication, February
2014). The old-fashioned template, so beloved of Ivens, of bums in seats, of
audiences politically constituted in public spaces who follow screenings with
astute questions and comments, refuses defiantly in the digital age to go away.
In 1978, a special Ivens number of Cinma politique, a French review of
militant cinema, lists the major issues of contemporary radical cinema and
declares the direct relevance of Ivens's work to each one:
- the relationship of form and content
- collective work
- the use of re-enactment in documentary reportage
- the role of the party, political direction, and the commissioned film
- the opposition between amateur and professional [here one might add
the then increasingly important intermediate category of 'artisanal']
- the marginalization of militant cinema in relation to traditional film dis-
tribution
- exoticism, the romanticism of the distant valiant struggle, opposed to
the everyday struggles, and traversed by the complex notions of cultural
neo-colonialism. (Raverat et al., 1978, 10)
What is striking about this list is that, aside from a few overtones of seventies
jargon, it could just as easily have been written about Ivens's work at almost any
time during his career, so little have the 'issues' preoccupying radical culture
changed in the intervening years. It may be even more striking that the listed
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
concerns can with very little change be applied equally well to the generations
of political documentarists since Ivens's death, and even to those who do not
consider themselves political in the narrow sense. The work of the Maysles
brothers and Chris Hegedus, for example, to name just one 'apolitical' US doc-
umentary team active since the 196os, can also be shown to be caught up, in
its aesthetic and ethical problematic, with every one of these issues, except,
obviously, the fourth one, in its narrow sense - unless we ponder the prob-
lematic of producers and distributors and their role in documentary activity.
History does seem to have repeated itself many times, as the documentarists
following in Ivens's footsteps, from Anand Patwardhan to Marlon Riggs to Jen-
nie Livingston to Michael Glawogger to Laura Poitras to Jim Hubbard to John
Greyson, moving well beyond the hegemony of the observational and inter-
active documentary, rediscover and re-invent mise-en-scene, reconstruction,
interviewing, collage and compilation, and even the voice-over narration and
scripting - all allegedly obsolete devices that a few 1965 observers complained I 37
that the antediluvian sexagenarian Ivens was stubbornly clinging to. The same
documentarists are wrestling, at the same time, with the age-old vicious spi-
rals of financing and distribution, tormented by the dangers of selling out to
television or the Internet as if Ivens and his generation of the 1930s had never
had similar debates about the Rockefeller Foundation.
The 21st-century surge accommodates even those for whom the political,
leftist Ivens, committed to political transformation, has no appeal. Even those
attracted to the lyrical and metaphysical side of the filmmaker who never gave
up filming the winds and the waters of the planet for 60 years yet neverthe-
less refused to be pigeonholed or typecast, as enshrined in his final beautiful,
metaphysical testamentary film, co-directed with Loridan. Scholars and cine-
philes and documentary activists are all allowed a certain fence-straddling to
be sure, to choose their own Ivens, but at the same time hopefully will resist
the false polarisation of the political and the poetic that dogged Ivens from the
early 1930s onwards.
I would be remiss not to survey at the outset Ivens's evolving status within the
discipline of film studies. In short, his reputation still seems complicated, at
least in English-language film culture, by the controversy and hostility that he
knew throughout his career, or worse, indifference and ignorance. Sympto-
matically, during the Cold War he was the only major still active pioneer of
world documentary never to be included in the taste-setting Flaherty seminar,
that institution of liberal US documentary culture initially organised by East
Coast documentary gatekeepers Willard van Dyke, Richard Griffith, and Erik
Barnouw on behalf of Flaherty's widow Frances beginning in the post-war dec-
ades and thriving to this day. Well, not 'never', since the 80-year-old patriarch
INTRODUCTION
was finally invited along with Yukong in 1979, thanks to a new generation of
programming vision (Waugh, 1995). His total exclusion from a definitive and
very fat film encyclopedia (Roud, 1980) that came out as I was first writing on
Ivens in 1980 was another case in point: how could there be no mention of a
prolific international filmmaker, born in the same year as Eisenstein, Grier-
son and Bunuel and nine months before Hitchcock, who became after all the
last still active survivor of the silent generation, the author of over 60 films,
the subject of a dozen book-length studies, and double that many major ret-
rospectives over the years? More recently, after his death, Ivens's standing has
fared better, at least in documentary studies, if we can judge by the range of
reference volumes on documentary available, such as ImaginingReality (Cous-
ins and Macdonald, 2006), Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film (Aitken,
2006), The Documentary Film Book (Winston, 2013), and the bountiful Finnish
Vuosisadan tarina - Dokumenttielokuvan historia (Peter von Bagh, The Story
38 I of the Century - Documentary Film History, 2007), all of which provide lively,
nuanced, and engaged entries on his work. Among the surveys of documen-
tary history in English and French, those of Barnouw (1974), Jacobs (1979),
Barsam (1992), Marsolais (1997), Gauthier (2002), Nichols (2010), Ellis and
McLane (2005), and Aufderheide (2007) all give Ivens attention approximat-
ing his due, although only Barnouw and Nichols incorporate original research
into their accounts and the 2005 duo hilariously open the trapdoor and 'dis-
appear' the Dutchman in the 1940s, one-third of the way through his career.
Cinema encyclopedias, both in print and digital, corroborate the solidity
of Ivens's standing, judging from Ian Mundell's (2005a) erudite and sympa-
thetic Ivens profile on Senses of Cinema. If Paul Arthur (2003) was right that the
sheer dispersion of Ivens's oeuvre has been an additional hurdle to his rep-
utation, Ivens himself cannot be said to have made things easy. Granted he
ensured the proper and strategic archiving of his key films during the dark
days of World War II and the Cold War, in both North America and Europe. But
he and Loridan's decision to yank Yukong from circulation in 1985, because
of the post-Mao U-turn in Chinese politics, was improvident and shortsight-
ed to say the least. After Ivens's death, the estate's piracy paranoia coupled
with what I call in Chapter 8 a lingering political shame and even what more
uncharitable Marxists than I might call commodity fetishism, has impeded
the encounter of new generations of cinephiles, researchers, and activists
with his work. One symptom of this impediment surfaced as this book went to
print in 2014: Sight & Sound released its ten-year poll of the greatest documen-
taries of all time, voted by filmmakers, critics, and programmers from around
the world. Whereas in the 196os Ivens's place on such lists was secure, as evi-
denced by the Mannheim Festival's 1964 enthronement of The Spanish Earth
on its list of the top twelve documentaries of all time ( accessed 17 January 2015) or by Paul Rotha's (1952, 359-
380) list of 'One Hundred Important Documentary Films',3 a half-century later
Ivens would find himself utterly banished from a list of a top-50 integrated list
and the top-35 filmmakers' list for the first time.4 Nevertheless, the Internet
has gone far in remedying that inherent problem in the twenty-first century,
and many hope that YouTube will continue to appropriate and disseminate
what the lawyers and heirs deny.
Whatever the case, almost none of the undergraduates enrolling in my
Ivens seminar in 2013 had ever heard of him and were not a little surprised
that a film studies BFA programme that has traditionally offered auteur cur-
riculum on Welles, Hitchcock, Fellini, and Lynch would add an obscure Dutch
communist documentarist to the list. Part of the blame for the intermittent
uncertainty of Ivens's place in English-language film culture may be ascribed
to the myopias and peripeteias of film scholarship itself. With regard to the
field of documentary, film scholars and historians were slow to pick up speed I 39
in the seventies in re-examining the field in terms of the new methodologies
developed or strengthened earlier in that decade - semiotic/structuralist anal-
ysis; narrative and genre theory; psychoanalytic approaches; formal analysis;
ideological analysis; oral history; specialized technological, industrial, exhi-
bition, and audience history; postcolonial perspectives; and most recently
transnational subcultural angles linking documentary to avant-gardes and
technological institutions and networks (Hagener, 2007). At first few individ-
ual documentarists or bodies of documentary were receiving definitive treat-
ments employing any combination of these methods, but the situation soon
began to change. Vertov finally received exhaustive treatment with hitherto
murky areas of his career finally emerging into the light (Tsivian, 2004); Tri-
umph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl, 1936, Germany, 110)
also was subjected finally to responsible critical and historical scrutiny (begin-
ning with Sontag [1975]), after years of gushing. It was finally with book-length
studies of anthropological film and Rouch (Eaton, 1979; Feld, 2003), of Amer-
ican radical documentary of the thirties (Campbell, 1982; Alexander, 1981)
and of British documentary in the same decade (Sussex, 1975), with definitive
studies of 'Newsreel' (Nichols, 1982), Wiseman (Nichols, 1981), eventually de
Antonio (Lewis, 2000; Kellner and Streible, 2000) and above all Chris Mark-
er (Lupton, 2005; Alter, 2006; Cooper, 2008), that documentary study even-
tually moved beyond the confining formats of the single-film study and the
textbook survey that dominated the first thrust of film studies as an academic
discipline. The study of political film itself, arguably more visible than purely
documentary study, at first was dominated primarily by ad hoc critical princi-
ples, outdated conceptual models, and the frequent substitution of ideologi-
cal fervour for ideological, historical, and formal analysis. The situation here
INTRODUCTION
too has changed, thanks to original works like Michael Chanan's The Politics of
Documentary (2007) and Jonathan Kahana's Intelligence Work (2008), particu-
larly with regard to contemporary films, but also in relation to documentary
history, no longer the cinema's poor cousin. In the 21st century the breadth
and momentum have been exciting indeed, thanks to periodical work located
in the veteran political journal Jump Cut, now online, and other sites, to the
Visible Evidence conference network, and to the burgeoning of subfields from
trauma studies to colonial histories to first-person documentary.
Thanks in part to the visionary efforts of first the Nederlands Filmmuse-
um and its founder Jan de Vaal (1922-2001) and later the Ivens Foundation, to
the 21st-century renaissance of documentary itself (viz. the box office success
of Michael Moore and others, within proliferating networks of documentary
festivals), the present state of Ivens literature has moved beyond early short-
comings in the study of documentary and political film. Most of the full-length
40 I works are documentary collections of texts by and about Ivens from a wide
range of viewpoints and sources. The formats of these collections vary from
the annotated filmography (Delmar, 1979) to the Festschrift (from the East Ger-
man State Film Archive, 1963). Also of value are the major works of the pio-
neering Zalzman and Wegner from the 196os, alongside the special issue of
Cindma politique mentioned above (Raverat et al., 1978).
Works that came out after Ivens's death include the fine, rich anthology
in English assembled by Kees Bakker (1999b) from the Ivens centenary con-
ference in Nijmegen in 1998, by far the most useful source in English with its
combination of original Ivens texts, reminiscences by co-workers from Italy
and Berlin, and focused contemporary critical and theoretical pieces from
everywhere in Europe and North America; and a similar but slimmer volume
in German (Barbian and Ruzicka, 2002). Stufkens's (2008) excellent, authori-
tative book accompanying the DVD box set, in Dutch and German only, bol-
sters the solid periodical literature and book chapters adopting a wide range
of perspectives (Musser, 2002; Costa, 2002; Gunning, 2002, 2009; Arthur, 2002;
Waugh, 2004; Studies in Documentary, 2009). The documentary collections in
various languages have the obvious value of introducing the lay reader to many
interesting primary sources, and serve as works of reference as well as of pop-
ularisation. The simple service of translation thus provided is indispensable
because of Ivens's work in so many different cultural contexts.
Of critical monographs on Ivens, Grelier's (1965) is the most systematic
auteurist view of Ivens (or at least of Ivens up until Pour le Mistral [For the Mis-
tral, 1965, France, 33]), convincingly pointing to iconic play with the four ele-
ments and the human struggle against nature as being at the centre of Ivens's
visual and dramatic repertory. The book is now badly dated, vague, and super-
ficial in its textual analysis, and contains almost no contextual study of Ivens's
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
work nor any reference to the evolution of the documentary form alongside
Ivens's career. Furthermore, Grelier's adulatory attitude clouds his historical
and analytical lens. From the following decade, came a more contemporary
version of a similar approach in Carlos B6ker's 1978 dissertation, The Mythical
Presentation of a Dialectically Interpreted Reality, a 200-page holistic survey of
the entire Ivens corpus. Boker views three different formats of Ivens's oeuvre
- the war film, the work film, and the lyrical film - as variations of the same
basic struggle myth. However, Btker, an old comrade/student of Ivens from
Santiago in the previous decade, did not profit from the discipline's growing
sophistication in the application of mythic and narrative models to film (the
bibliography mentions Lvi-Strauss but not Todorov or Propp), nor from any
contextual or formal study of the individual films. An equally serious flaw is
the author's apparent view of Ivens's utterances of the last 50 years as a stat-
ic body of film theory with direct descriptive applicability to the films, rather
than as a group of evolving aesthetic conceptions with widely varying practical 41
and political relations to the work that accompanied them, from pedagogy to
publicity. (Theses by Tendler and Cassiers are conscientious recapitulations
of the available material.) A recent slim volume by the Flemish philosopher
Sylvain de Bleeckere (1997) is unique in its attention to a single film, Ivens's
last, and in its exploration of a metaphysical Ivens that earlier treatments of
Ivens's pantheism had barely dared imagine of the stout communist.
The large group of ideological treatments of Ivens's works, invariably from
a Marxist or leftviewpoint more or less coincidingwith that of their subject, are
usually weakened by the adulatory tone already mentioned. Though Ivens can-
not be responsibly discussed without a full and sympathetic understanding
of the ideological underpinnings of his films, a scholar's uncritical and ahis-
torical assumption of these - or of some inflection of them - has the ultimate
effect of the further ghettoisation if not marginalisation of Ivens's work. Most
of the ideological treatments of Ivens have been innocent of an understanding
of the complexities of filmic form or of film history, like many political and
sociological studies of film before the seventies. They likewise do not profit
from 1970s refinements in discourse about the relations between form and
ideology in systems of visual representation. Most surprisingly, such studies
often lack even the most rudimentary precision in their historical perception
of the evolving ideological context of Ivens's work: can it really be possible, for
example, that my 1981 dissertation was the first work on Ivens to mention the
Soviet-Nazi Pact of 1939 and its obvious effect on the ideological backdrop to
Ivens's films? Otherwise, the ideological studies vary widely. On the one hand
there is the blinkered partisanship of Hans Wegner (1919-1984), Ivens's offi-
cial East German interpreter (until Ivens quietly burnt the bridge to Moscow
in 1968 after the Czech invasion, whereupon, no less quietly, Ivens suddenly
INTRODUCTION
disappeared from the Eastern Bloc pantheon and Wegner quietly sat on his
archive until his death). On the other hand, readers may choose between the
view by the Dutchman Han Meyer of the filmography as a climactic build-up
towards Ivens's intervention in Vietnam (1970), and the sectarian hagiogra-
phy of the West German Klaus Kreimeier (1977). The sincerity and frequent
insight of the ideological treatments are undeniable but their efficacy as his-
torical or critical analysis is not always clear. The generally high quality of the
Cindmapolitique special issue (Raverat et al., 1978), highlighting the best inter-
view ever with the political Ivens, led by a West German radical collective, and
the careful, meticulously researched but politically sympathetic contributions
of Dutch historian Bert Hogenkamp over the last 25 years, combining political
respect and meticulous research, are of great importance for this reason.
Many of the individual milieus around the world where Ivens left his foot-
print have produced robust literature on his contribution to local film his-
42 I tories and cultures, from Belgium (Hogenkamp on Borinage and the Dutch
films, 1977-2001) to Germany (Jordan and Schenk, 2000; Jordan, forthcoming)
to Chile (Panizza, 2011). In many cases this literature is cinematic, from John
Hughes's (2009) dazzling videographic and archival exploration of Ivens's
Australian context and legacy to Ephraim Smith's (2008, 2013) diptych on the
US Film Service episode in 1940 and the stout Ohio farm family it transformed
- to mention only two English-language projects (Stuflens, 2004). In fact there
are 26 and counting documentaries on Ivens that focus on the filmmaker's
intersection with moments and movements in national and regional film his-
tories around the world, or in part on Ivens's career as a whole, as well as eleven
works that count as fiction: the largest group is from the Netherlands unsur-
prising (a total of 15 films), but also represented are from Belgium, Bulgar-
ia, Chile, China, Spain, USA, Vietnam, and both West Germany and the DDR;
most are adulatory with one important exception, a Dutch expos of Ivens's
and Loridan's alleged passive complicity in the abuses of the Cultural Revolu-
tion during the making of Yukong (Seegers, 2008; see Appendix 1 for complete
list of what the Ivens Foundation terms 'revisit films'). Focused print scholar-
ship that has emerged around the regional and historical epicenters that Ivens
passed through, from a new generation of researchers, has been dynamic and
original, from Stacey Guill (2009) on the Hemingway connection to the Span-
ish Civil War to Susan Martin-Marquez (2015) on Latin American committed
art. The Netherlands and France have of course been prolific but so have Italy
(two fine volumes in Italian by Ivens's old collaborator Virgilio Tosi [2002a,
2002b], a memoir and a festival catalogue anthology, plus a documentary!)
and China (two edited volumes, a film, and an international conference). This
output testifies among everything else to the strong impact that Ivens had on
his host cultures worldwide. (The Beijing volume [Film Archive of China 1983]
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
is especially valuable because of its hitherto untranslated contributions by
Ivens's collaborators over many years, and more than one documentary exists
here as well). These works may lack the advantage of a systematic and expan-
sive overview that I am endeavouring to achieve in this book, but they are a cor-
rective to an earlier generation of studies that were sometimes overwhelmed
with hagiographic generalities, and even worse occasionally lacked accuracy,
and were sometimes infected by tiresome name-dropping.
A separate, invaluable category of literature is the well-filled catalogues
for retrospectives from Paris's Centre Georges Pompidou (Passek, 1979) to
the Yamagata documentary festival (Bakker, 1999b) to the US tour of 2002
(Stufkens, 2002). The definitive filmography from the Nederlands Filmmuse-
um (1978),Joris Ivens 5ojaar wereldcineast, is constantly updated online by the
Foundation.
As for biographical work on Ivens, Hans Schoots's comprehensive if con-
troversial biography of Ivens, Living Dangerously: A Biography of Joris Ivens, 1 43
appearing first in Dutch (1995) and then in English (2000), changed the land-
scape of Ivens studies. Notwithstanding his irrepressible hostility to his sub-
ject's politics and his staggering cinematic illiteracy, not to mention Loridan's
withdrawal of her support for the book late in the process because of its 'very
polemic' and 'destructive' nature (Schoots, [1995] 2000, 363), Schoots added
immeasurably to the field through his extensive primary research, especially
in personal correspondence (though archival sources in Asia and Latin Amer-
ica were unfortunately not consulted), plus interviews with major collabora-
tors around the world still surviving in the 1990s (again with the almost total
exception of those in Asia and Latin America). His work added to the autobi-
ographical and biographical components of the above collections, of which
Zalzman's (1963) and Wegner's (1965) were the most substantial in French
and German respectively.
Otherwise, despite the fact that Ivens's first autobiography The Camera
and I was written in the forties, it was updated with valuable documentation
when it was finally published in 1969, and remains an indispensable resource
that has lost none of its value and charm over the years - moreover it does so in
its Dutch and German versions as well as the original English one. The book
is undoubtedly among the best dozen autobiographies by filmmakers, balanc-
ing the personal sincerity of the anecdotal with precise technical and histori-
cal information, and interlacing the chronology with a self-analysis that is as
astute as it is simple and clear. A considerable amount of published interview
material became available in the 1970s and 1980s to bring The Camera and I
up to date: the 1978 collection by Claire Devarrieux for Le Monde is the most
extensive, but those by the German periodical Filmfaust (translated for the
aforementioned special issue of Cinema politique [Raverat et al., 1978]) and
INTRODUCTION
in English by Gordon Hitchens for Film Culture are also excellent. La Memoire
d'un regard, (1982) by Ivens in collaboration with Robert Destanque, original-
ly cinematographer on Le Ciel, la terre (The Threatening Sky, 1966, France, 28)
and later one of the Paris circle of Yukong collaborators, stands as the final,
definitive autobiography, full of biographical and artistic detail despite a few
lapses, but has unfortunately never been translated. Schoots enjoys pointing
out minor inconsistencies in the Destanque volume, but one reason it is so
important is that the earlier biographical chronologies and collections tend
occasionally to contradict each other on details and to contain errors, hearsay,
and myth. Memoire gives the final version on many of these - at least to the
extent that Ivens's slightly diminished memory in his eighties allowed. One
trivial but symptomatic example of the risks of biography and filmography
dependent on several generations of secondary sources5 is the amusing meta-
morphosis undergone by the name of Ivens's writer for Action Stations (1943,
44 Canada, 50), the distinguished Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan: although
Zalzman called him 'Morlin', Grelier offered 'Malcolm' and this was dutifully
repeated by Delmar, Devarrieux, and, astonishingly, the otherwise meticulous
definitive filmography from Amsterdam (Nederlands Filmmuseum 1978).
This book owes a huge debt to this rich multi-lingual literature, endeavours to
build on its strengths, and is also designed to compensate for its gaps, which,
though present in the other languages, are particularly critical in English.
My basic framework is a critical account, biographical only insofar as Ivens's
life path intersects with his creative work, a chronological ordering of Ivens's
career, 1912-1989 (I will touch on Ivens family home movies and juvenilia but
emphasize his adult work). This framework within an illustrated full-length
volume allows me to attain a level of detail and comprehensiveness that other
studies have fallen short of because of their necessary brevity and superficiali-
ty, and the frequent second remove of their sources. For this purpose, research
at the Joris Ivens Archives, first in Amsterdam at the Nederlands Filmmuseum
and now in Nijmegen, has been essential, as have been intensive screenings at
cinematheques in New York, Montreal, Ottawa, East Berlin, and Paris, as well
as the Netherlands, plus interviews and correspondence with Ivens himself
and with about a dozen former collaborators.
Within this general chronological framework, my analyses proceed sys-
tematically through a study of three interlinked areas of film practice - pro-
duction, text, and consumption. Thus, a detailed formal and thematic
analysis of each film is connected to the political, cultural, technological, and
economic contexts of its origins and inscription, and of its reception. Much
existing Ivens literature has a flaw common in film scholarship, a mystifica-
tion resulting from the neglect of one of these three key areas, as well as of the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
connections among them. No reader will be surprised, however, that the area
of consumption or reception receives the least detailed analysis in this work.
The reader will find that much of the data on audience and reception is either
anecdotal (suggestive reminiscences by Ivens and others of specific specta-
tors' responses, for example) or generalisations about the scale of the films'
outreach whether through theatrical or parallel networks, especially in the
case of state-sponsored films from Canada and the USA (six million viewers for
Power!) to the 1950s Soviet bloc and Cultural Revolution-era China. The lack of
data in this area is the chronic plague of film studies. It is all the more critical
in this case of Ivens's career since he himself could not always follow up with
the post-production dissemination of his work, and sometimes took sitting
down the horrendous things that happened to his films once finished, mostly
censorship, active and passive, from the frying pan of political to the fire of
commercial censorship. Moreover much contemporary work, mine included
unfortunately, often does not make use even of resources when they are avail- 45
able, for example market surveys or audience analyses.6 Here is an important
subject for future research in documentary history since my own frustrations
in this area will be evident.
The choice of Ivens as a subject for a historian of the documentary film
assumes not only the contemporary relevance of his work, but also that it has
a central importance to the history of the documentary, a certain representa-
tiveness of the evolution of this art form. This assumption is basic to this book.
Ivens's work is emblematic of several generations' response to changing and
complex conjunctures of political, cultural, technological, and economic forc-
es. One evidence of this emblematic stature is Ivens's adaptation to the cultur-
al and political contexts of almost 20 different countries in order to make his
films - from his native Netherlands to the People's Republic of China - and the
strength of his constituency in several other countries and regions in which he
did not make films such as the UK, West Germany, Indonesia, Latin America,
and Japan. One implication of my perspective is that the theme of 'innovation',
a premise of much Western art, cultural, and cinematic history, is in the back-
ground of this study. Although to be sure Ivens did pioneer many aesthetic ele-
ments of the political documentary, and I will argue many cinematic practices
from the solidarity genre to the transcultural bridge, I view him more as the
representative or spokesperson for the succeeding artistic consensuses of this
period rather than as a trailblazer outside of or in advance of those consensus-
es. As such, continuous reference is made in this study to ongoing theoretical
debates within the intellectual communities of which he was a part, and to the
work of his major contemporaries. Indeed, as regards the latter, Ivens's career
crossed paths with that of virtually every significant contemporary documen-
tarist, including the pre-war luminaries Walther Ruttmann, Jean Vigo, Luis
INTRODUCTION
Bunuel, Dziga Vertov, Esfir Shub, Robert Flaherty, John Grierson, Alberto Cav-
alcanti, Henri Storck, John Ferno, Basil Wright, the American radicals of the
WFPL, Nykino, and Frontier Films, Pare Lorentz, Boris Karmen, Stuart Legg,
and Frank Capra. After the war the next generations of French documentarists
from Yannick Bellon and Grard Philipe to Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Pierre
Lhomme and Etienne Becker all the way to Nicholas Philibert all benefited
from working with him. Along the way the Italians Gillo Pontecorvo, the Tav-
ianis, Tinto Brass, the Cubans Jorge Fraga and Jos Massip, the Chileans Ser-
gio Bravo, Raul Ruiz, Patrcio Guzman Lozanes and others, the Dutchman Tom
Tholen, the Vietnamese Xuan Phuong, and the Chinese Yang Zhiju and Li Zex-
iang, became the beneficiaries of his mentorship, training, or collaboration.
Moreover, throughout his career Ivens's specific contribution to formal film
education in the US, Poland, the DDR, China, and Latin America, and his ser-
vice to associations and strategic international alliances of documentarists7
46 I as well as festivals around the world, as board member, executive, frontperson
and juror, confirms our sense of him as global facilitator and catalyser of doc-
umentary production, collaboration, and networks.
In fact, the only major documentarist with which Ivens did not actually cross
paths in the pre-1945 era (other than the Britons Jennings and Watt) was Leni
Riefenstahl, but this latter avoidance is of course as crucial as the links with
the others. Ivens's great anti-fascist work, Spanish Earth, the first prophecy
of the conflagration to come, stands symbolically with Triumph of the Will at
the opposite poles of the 193os, both ideological and artistic.8 For this reason,
there are frequent references to Triumph of the Will in Chapter 3, which dis-
sects Spanish Earth at some length, one of Ivens's key films of his career, with
its hybrid form in itself an emblematic catalogue of formal possibilities. My
analysis of this film strengthened my already strong conviction that the lik-
ening of leftist documentary to fascist documentary, the cinematic indexes of
one so-called 'totalitarianism' to another - even of left 'propaganda' to right
'propaganda' (a comparison that Schoots makes), requires at the least an ana-
lytic laziness that I will not tolerate. To compare fascist iconography to that of
the Popular Front, stamped materially and verifiably on the screen by, as Badi-
ou puts it in the context of the War on Terror but applicable to this problem,
'a promise of universal emancipation supported by three centuries of critical
international and secular philosophy that exploited the resources of science
and mobilized, at the very heart of the industrial metropolises, the enthusi-
asm of both workers and intellectuals' is in fact worse than lazy:
Lumping together Stalin and Hitler [is] already a sign of extreme intellectu-
al poverty: the norm by which any collective undertaking has to be judged
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
is, it was argued, the number of deaths it causes. If that were really the
case, the huge colonial genocides and massacres, the millions of deaths in
the civil and world wars through which our West forged its might, should
be enough to discredit, even in the eyes of 'philosophers' who extol their
morality, the parliamentary regimes of Europe and America. What would
be left for those who scribble about Rights? How could they go on singing
the praises of bourgeois democracy as the only form of relative Good and
making pompous predictions about totalitarianism when they are stand-
ing on top of heaps of victims. (Badiou, [2008] 2010, 3-4)
Ivividly remember my meetings with Ivens in 1976, 1978, and 1981, a generous
and friendly elder, patient with the questions he must have heard hundreds of
times. I understood then as now the charismatic effect he had on the gener-
ations of young filmmakers whom he mentored and on critics and activists
alike. In October 1978 at the launch of Yukong at the Cindmatheque qudb- 47
coise I arrived in what I thought was plenty of time only to find the huge audi-
torium mobbed and already sold out. In a panic at the vision of my dissertation
flying away on wings of misfortune, I hovered around and discovered hidden
on the inside of a circle of tall, crazed fans the calm, diminutive white-haired
icon, buttonholed him and pled with him for help getting into his screening.
'N'ayezpaspeur', he told me resting his hand on my arm, clearly remembering
me from our first encounter in Paris two years earlier, 'on va rdgler ga', and he
did set it right, and I stayed for all four screenings. My interviews with him
on those occasions I found less than paradigm-shifting in terms of concrete
data - he had clearly done too many thousands of interviews with uninformed
journalists over the decades and to my mind was not clearly distinguishing
his memory of his work from what had been written about his work, more-
over offering the basic introduction and plot summaries rather than the more
detailed material of interest to a specialist (fortunately the archives were there
to confirm and document the facts). Moreover, to my annoyance he had not
yet broken the habit of caution in talking about his party affiliation. But it was
the encounter and the relationship that were more essential. I delivered my
dissertation to him in person in Paris after my successful defence in 1981 and
did not hear again from him until 1984, long after the disastrous termination
of his project on Florence and the publication of his final memoirs: his letter
sent from the couple's flat on rue des Saints-Peres, impeccably typed by a sec-
retary on onion-skin as usual:
Dear Thomas, For a long time, I did not hear from you. I suppose that you
are still teaching in Montreal. Please give me some news about you, and
tell me about the work you are doing. I myself am working with Marce-
INTRODUCTION
line Loridan, on a new big film project in China, which will be filmed in
the spring of next year. It is the kind of imaginary film, with also some
realistic sequences. It is about the Civilization of China, a kind of cine-
matographic poem and certainly not a didactic documentary. The Wind,
will be used, as visual vehicle. The Wind, as you know, is an old friend of
mine, whome I met in 'THE MISTRAL'. Hoping to lear (sic) soon from
you, with my all best regards. Joris Ivens.
I treasure this simple letter - so much that I presume to publish it here - and
that year I published my definitive treatment of Spanish Earth in my anthology
on committed documentary, and was otherwise busy publishing other shards
of my Ivens research in Cineaste andjump Cut, licking my wounds as every aca-
demic publisher in America laughed my pitch into the trash, and went on with
the rest of my career.
48 I In offering this study of Ivens's oeuvre, then, I come back to regler ca, to
set it right and finish the job, finally to reciprocate the relationship undertak-
en so long ago. I offer not only an author-centred study of the evolution of a
great artist, unjustly neglected in English-language film studies - and I defi-
antly affirm this old-fashioned reading as a departure point, refusing to throw
the auteur baby out with the bathwater of mystificatory pre-Screen pantheon
studies I was taught at Columbia. I also offer a passionate book about the his-
tory of documentary film, a form and calling that Ivens was at the centre of for
more than 6o years. In his 1982 autobiography, Ivens remembered a certain
moment of crisis at the midpoint of that history when the advent of television
had imposed a certain 'banalisation of information' upon the culture:
In 1955 or 1956, at the Cannes festival, a reviewer for LAurore had written
with a certain spiteful anger that the documentary film was the poison
of film programmes. I couldn't prevent myself from replying to him that
it was the other way around: 'Documentary is the conscience of the cin-
ema', I told him. Since then I have never changed my mind. (Ivens and
Destanque 1982, 257)9
In borrowing this phrase as the title of my book, I endorse this conviction and
this riposte. The following fresco paints a trajectory of similar confrontations
by generations of committed documentarists with the shifting political and
cultural problematics of six decades of the cinematic century, generations of
cinematic poison-bearers for whom Joris Ivens was both the flagbearer and
irrepressibly the conscience.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
PART I
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2. 'Avant-garde'. Poster for screening of DcDrug, Nice 1931, in shorts
programme by Belgian, German and French avant-gardists, organised
by film club led byj cean Vigo. Spectators are invited to come to applaud
or to hiss. original in colour. © European Foundation joris Ivens (EFjJI),
Nijmecgen.
CHAPTER1
Ivens and the Silent Film
Avant-Garde 1926-1929
Joris Ivens, the arranger of all this orchestration appears to me to be one
of the visual musicians of the future.
-GermaineDulac,1929
Joris Ivens's first memoirs, The Camera and I, were recorded with the assis- |51
tance of Jay Leyda between 1942 and 1944 and finalised by Leyda for their 1969
publication. Looking back in the enforced idleness and exile of wartime Holly-
wood, Ivens offered an almost idyllic account of his childhood, his Dutch and
German education, and his coming of age as a filmmaker in Amsterdam in the
late twenties.
Before we endeavour to understand the Amsterdam cultural and social
milieu into which the 28-year-old Ivens arrived in 1926 to take up the adminis-
tration of the Amsterdam branch of his father's photographic supply business
and embark on his six-decade-long professional film career, we must first lin-
ger briefly on his adolescence. This is not to duplicate biographical details,
which Schoots has already covered fully, but to synthesise the remarkable
research that Stufkens (2007, 2008) and others have done on Ivens's artistic,
religious, and cultural influences in the Nijmegen roots of his photographer
father and grandfather Wilhelm and Kees Ivens, and on the thirteen-year-old
Joris's remarkable initiation as a filmmaker in the 1912 amateur production
De Wigwam.
It is true that Ivens the future artist can be seen in the indulgent 'bourgeois
liberal' childhood that Ivens reminisced about for Leyda and forty years later
for Destanque (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 24). He can also be seen surround-
ed by the prosperous, tightly knit family, whose melodramatic gestures and
faces, made up in the 1912 theatrical manner, are preserved in that ten-min-
ute miracle of archival perseverance also known as Brandende Straal (Flaming
Arrow).' He can also be seen in the charming 'curtain calls' the boy wonder
in his Sunday best takes in a stop-motion epilogue to the movie. This accom-
plished home movie pastiching folklore about virtuous and evil Indians, virtu-
ous white settlers, horses, and of course whispering woods and meadows, was
3. De Brug(1928): Ivens in action
with his Kinamo on the Rotterdam
bridge. Production photo, 1928,
by partner Germaine Krull.
Courtesy coll. EFJ1, Nijmegen
© Photographische Sammlung,
Museum Folkwang, Essen.
52
developed by the precocious boy with a 35mm cinematograph (plus an assis-
tant or two) from his father's shop. De Wigwam recycles fodder from European
pulp fiction and imported American movies about frontier adventure that he
had absorbed as a middle-class Dutch child in the first decades of the century
and of the cinema. The plot shows a bourgeois white family's toddler daughter
kidnapped by a bad Indian 'Black Eagle' whose son had been insulted by the
Teddy-Roosevelt-look-alike white paterfamilias, but she is finally rescued by
a good Indian, 'Flaming Arrow' (played by Ivens of course), who shoots Black
Eagle dead in the process, and restored to her home with a harmonious and
conciliatory denouement ensuing in front of Flaming Arrow's eponymous wig-
wam, implausibly erasing the murderous hatred that had unleashed the plot.
It all seems to be a rehash of Thomas Ince's kidnapping melodrama The Heart
of an Indian (1912, USA, 20), which had premiered that winter and is likely the
film that Ivens is documented to have attended wearing a cowboy hat at Nijme-
gen's local cinema (van der Maden, 1988, quoted in Stufkens, 2008, 32), per-
haps with elements thrown in for good measure of Griffith's The Adventures
of Dollie (1908, USA, 12), wherein the kidnapping of the little girl is this time
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
perpetrated by vengeful 'gypsies' instead of a vengeful 'redskin'. In any case,
child abductions and happy endings were standard tropes of the early narra-
tive cinema, and the formulaic nature of the boy's first plot and its prophetic
overtones of future Ivensian morality, optimism, and elemental dramaturgy
(Stufkens, 2008, 35) are of less interest than the movie's flickering splendour
as 'family entertainment' (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 29). Its elusive docu-
mentation of juvenile creative ease, intuition, pleasure, performance, and the
boy's birthright entitlement as a confident wielder of photographic technolo-
gy is prophetic to say the least. The latter would be honed by subsequent fam-
ily movies after the war, in 1920, 1922, 1925, and 1927.
4. De Wigwam (1912). Young Ivens as
'Flaming Arrow' tells the settler family how
he rescued their daughter from the now
dead Indian. DVD frame capture. © CAPI 53
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Stufkens (2002) has convincingly laid out Ivens's genealogical heritage, two
generations of photographers whose vision of the Nijmegen regional land-
scape, with its architecture, rivers, and woods, left traces on their son/grand-
son's cinema, of their conservative Catholic mysticism that would show up in
both the filmmaker's almost pantheistic, elemental iconography of nature
and even his final encounter with Chinese metaphysics. What Stufkens (2oo8,
34) calls the Ivenses' 'family tradition with the mechanical eye' embodies 'in
the space of three generations, the organic transition between 19th -entury
photography and 20th-century film - with a well-nigh genetic preference for
documentaries' - and more concretely encourages us to see echoes in Ivens's
film of the Rotterdam bridge, subject of the mature filmmaker's first film in
1928 as we shall see, of the young filmmaker's father's stately photographs of
Nijmegen's urban landscapes.
I confess I am more interested in the adult Ivens's studies of economics
in Rotterdam, and of photographic technology in Berlin and in the factories
of Jena and Dresden, and how these respites from the bourgeois happy family
of Nijmegen must have prepared him for his career in important ways: Ivens's
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
later political development can be traced to his involvement with student pol-
itics in Holland, his exposure to the dynamics of factory organisation and the
union movement in Jena and Dresden, and even his participation in the Sacco
and Vanzetti agitation (c.1925) upon his return to Holland. Moreover Schoots
([1995] 2000, 21-33) provides rich documentation of Ivens's engagement
with avant-garde, bohemian, anarchist, and eventually communist subcul-
tures first in Germany and later in Paris - crystallised in his affair, beginning
in 1922, with bisexual German avant-garde photographer Germaine Krull,
and their later marriage of convenience in 1927. She was an influential and
frequent artistic collaborator who was likewise involved in all those overlap-
ping circles from Moscow to Paris to Amsterdam and seemingly had a finger
in every pie in the capitals of Europe. It is unclear to what extent the roots of
Ivens the eventual militant filmmaker of the 1930s lay in these initiations.
Even, if as Ivens maintains, he was involved in the study of the Marxist clas-
54 sics and immersed in Weimar culture during the years of his education, the
period before Ivens's return to Amsterdam seems just as important as one of
technical rather than ideological or aesthetic apprenticeship. Stuflens (2007)
affirms the continuities between Ivens's genealogical and local cultural her-
itage and the career of the future documentarist (after all his father Wilhelm
had attended the first Dutch demonstration of the Lumieres' cindmatographe
in Amsterdam in 1896), but this is not at all inconsistent with the above sense
of a radical, bohemian breakaway from - if not renunciation of - the Nijmegen
Ivens legacy. Most major artists within 20thcentury modernist currents inhab-
ited such contradictions - and inscribed them into the tensions and energies
of their works.
The three major early films - De Brug (The Bridge, 1928, 16), Branding
(Breakers, 1929, 42), and Regen (Rain, 1929, 16) - can best be seen in relation
to the specific nature of Ivens's interaction with dissident elements of Dutch
society during those years, as well as the outgrowth of his earlier individual
and familial history, as Schoots and Stuflens have emphasised. That is, we
shall see these films in terms of an overlapping centrifugal network of cultur-
al and political relationships: Ivens's evolving identification with the artistic,
political, and intellectual avant-garde of the Netherlands and Western Europe,
this avant-garde's place within transnational social, technological, and cultur-
al networks and institutions as a whole (Hagener, 2007), and Ivens's growing
links with the Left. These films reveal two major dynamics: an affinity with the
avant-garde insofar as they are works of an essentially modernist inspiration,
and dominated by analytic, 'formalist' modes in harmony with avant-garde
movements such as constructivism; and at the same time an intrinsic aliena-
tion from that constituency, visibly growing from one film to the next in antic-
ipation of his eventual break with the avant-garde insofar as they also express
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
in varying degrees a humanist, non-modernist sensibility, legible in various
filmic modes that are narrative, lyrical, and realist, rather than analytic.2
It is not surprising that tensions arose almost immediately after Ivens's
return from his studies between the expectations of the Ivens family and
Joris's bohemian, intellectual, and political inclinations. It was inevitable
that his primary interest in the complete array of cinematographic equipment
at his disposal was to be personal and artistic, not commercial, and that the
company he sought out in Amsterdam was that city's robust avant-garde com-
munity, artists, poets, and intellectuals like those he had known in Germany
and Paris, also frequented at the time. Still his relationship with this commu-
nity cannot have been one of total identification, but was more likely one of
mutual complementarity: educated in the social sciences and technology,
his commitment to the avant-garde must have been that of the enthusiastic
amateur and personal acquaintance, at least at first. Ivens's companion from
those years mentioned most often in his memoirs was Hendrik Marsman, the 55
Dutch poet, critic, and novelist, a self-styled 'vitalist' who was one of the prin-
cipal spokespeople for the young Dutch intelligentsia of the period, both in
his critical writing and his poetry. The former was published primarily in his
journal Het Get' and De Vr'e Bladen. Ivens's reminiscences of their intense
canal-side or cafe-table conversations create a vivid sense of the provincial
intellectual milieu, characterised by both languor and ferment, which Ivens
found in Amsterdam in 1926. Although Marsman's greatest influence was due
to his criticism, it was his poetry that Ivens admired most. Marsman's poetry
is notable for the feeling of the sea in its rhythms and moods; Ivens was to
attempt to capture this feeling in Branding, as well as in innumerable mature
films. A few years later, Marsman's updated version of The Flying Dutchman
became the basis of a scenario, contemplated but never realised, by Ivens and
Mannus Franken.3
Ivens's relationship with Krull was important, as Schoots ([1995] 2000)
and Stuflens (2008) have elaborated: a professional photographer with anar-
cho-pacifist convictions, Krull was known chiefly for stark, constructivist-in-
spired photographs of machinery and buildings. Those published in her 1929
collection, Metal, would show, in retrospect, a strong affinity with Ivens's sen-
sibility as expressed in his first film, and her presence during the production
of Brug and Regen as well as two other minor works Zeed'k-Filmstudie (ZeedUk
Study, 1927, Netherlands) and Etudes des mouvements a Paris (Movement Stud-
ies in Paris, 1927, Netherlands, 6) is well documented (Stuflens, 2008, 41-43).4
Krull would be present during, and was no doubt an uncredited participant in,
the shoots for Ivens's productions through the end of the decade. Although it
will probably never be possible to speak precisely of influence exerted one way
or another, the congruence of their interests, and the resemblance of these
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
interests to many of the preoccupations of twenties avant-garde culture in
general, are remarkable (Krull, 1929).
Ivens went through several girlfriends during those years, and his most
important affective allegiance at the time was not to Krull and not expressed
within the formality of marriage. His most significant companion was prob-
ably Anneke van der Feer, another artist, whose reputation as a figure and
portrait painter, an engraver, and woodcarver was modestly established in
Amsterdam and Paris. Once more it seems to be a case of close artistic affinity,
in this case borne out by Ivens's future career: Van der Feer's specialisation
included scenes of harbour life and working men. These themes would also
prove to be of considerable interest to Ivens, who lived with Van der Feer in
Amsterdam during the late twenties and took her to Moscow with him once his
career as a filmmaker expanded beyond the Paris-Berlin-Amsterdam circuit. It
is interesting to note Van der Feer's interest in traditional artistic media and
56 I subject matter, in apparent defiance of the most visible preoccupations of the
circle in which she and Ivens moved.
Another Dutch artist, a social realist painter named Charley Toorop,
renowned for her stylised presentational portraits and figure studies, less
politically explicit than those of the communist Van der Feer, was also a close
friend. It is interesting, as Stufkens observes (personal communication, June
2014), that Ivens experienced the 'enormous' influence of 'three strong wom-
en, who at that time shaped with much courage and trouble a new model for
the female artist, denying traditional artistic roles' and sharing his 'political
left leaning'. This book will often ponder Ivens's proto-feminist themes and
iconographies as well as working relationships with women throughout his
career, and the question of the significance of these early friendships is key. In
any case, Toorop prevailed upon Ivens to try to interest her fourteen-year-old
son in film as a final solution to his adolescent restlessness. Ivens recruited
the boy as an assistant on Branding and Regen, and this assistant, Johnny Fern-
hout (1913-1987, or Ferno, as he was eventually to call himself), was later to
become a major persona of the autobiographies, Ivens's cameraperson and
close collaborator for his finest films of the thirties as well as credited co-di-
rector for The 400 Million (1939, USA, 53).
Two of Ivens's other associates within the Amsterdam avant-garde were
also to become co-workers on Ivens's films: Jef Last, whose love story about an
unemployed sailor was the basis for Branding, and, more importantly, Man-
nus Franken, Ivens's co-director with the same film and also Regen.
It was within this circle of intellectuals and artists, then, that Ivens inten-
sified his relationship with film, the commodity he already had mastered tech-
nically, and saw it in a new light - as an art form with infinite potential as a
medium of personal expression and formal investigation. Of course it had
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
been increasingly fashionable among the European intelligentsia to look at
film in this light ever since the war; it is ironic that at this very point this con-
ception of film itself was beginning to be challenged fundamentally by a new
wave of intelligentsia, including Grierson, among others, in a way that would
have much more to do with the ultimate direction of Ivens's contribution to
the medium. In any case, the principal locus of the cultural, personal, and
political influences that shaped the early works of Ivens was the Amsterdam
film society known as Filmliga, founded in 1927. The formation of this body is
given considerable space in Ivens's autobiographies and biographies alike. As
recalled in Camera (Ivens, 1969), he had quickly familiarised himself with the
demands of the business in his charge, and almost as quickly had lost interest
in the after-hours socialising and advocacy which should have been his duty as
an enterprising businessperson, instead moving in the company of the intelli-
gentsia who became the core of Filmliga.
Those artists and intellectuals whom Ivens found so fascinating as ayoung I 57
businessman and technician were equally attracted to him as the source of
technical knowledge about the new art form. In constant touch with other
European avant-garde film scenes, the Amsterdammers became enthusiastic
not only about the non-commercial, experimental films coming out of Paris
and Berlin, but also about the progressive studio films that were being pro-
duced as well, particularly in Germany and the USSR. They were particularly
envious of the flourishing distribution systems for both varieties of films in
Paris and Berlin. It was only a matter of time before the Dutch, traditionally
closely in step with similar communities elsewhere in Europe, would attempt
to imitate, according to local needs, the specialised exhibition systems for 'art'
films in existence elsewhere.
The story behind Filmliga's founding is one of the most repeated anec-
dotes from Camera (Ivens, 1969, 20-21). The attempted suppression in
Amsterdam of Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mat (The Mother, 1926, USSR, 89) by Dutch
censors, the setting up of a private screening for Ivens and his friends in the
Amsterdam artists' club De Kring, the Mayor's private dinner with the Queen
in the Royal Palace interrupted by the police asking him to stop the screening,
and his delightfully astute reply that a private screening for a group of artists
could hardly pose a threat to the state. Filmliga was inaugurated at that point
to facilitate future screenings of all foreign films of interest to the artistic and
intellectual community, not just those considered subversive. The impetus to
form the film society arose more from the issue of artistic freedom than of
political freedom.
It was 1927 that saw the formal inception of Filmliga (Linssen, 1999),
and the beginning of its publication of the same name, an astonishingly inci-
sive film journal that was to appear continuously, despite growing ideologi-
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
cal schisms, as often as eight times a year until 1933. The founding members
of the Filmliga, in addition to the artistic circle already sketched, included a
number of prominent critics, among them Menno ter Braak, the most emi-
nent Dutch critic of his day and one of the young Ivens's most thoughtful inter-
preters, and L.J. Jordaan, who was an ardent champion of the independent
avant-garde cinema in his weekly column for the GroeneAmsterdammer. Ivens
was listed officially as the Filmliga's technical adviser. The original organisers
of the Filmliga were amazed by its early success - 2500 charter subscribers and
an eventual expansion into other cities of the Netherlands.
Ivens himself in Camera suggests an extremely helpful socio-political
analysis of Filmliga, and by extension its kindred network of avant-garde film
circles across Europe that formed the constituency for 'art films' and thus
became the constituency for Ivens's early work as well. Ivens's comments,
benefiting from the hindsight of a later ideological vantage-point, suggest
58 I the contradiction within the Filmliga milieu that eventually led to his second
renunciation, in a way as radical as that with his family: his disengagement
from the 'art film' problematic and his personal disassociation from Filmliga.
Of the Filmliga's original conception, he states:
We had no great social urge to show these films to large audiences, it
was the selfish wish to see them ourselves. It was only later, after the idea
proved a success and we suddenly saw that the need was greater than we
had realized, that we adopted a more social attitude towards the Filmliga.
However, our purpose was non-political, and always primarily aesthetic.
(Ivens, 1969, 20-21)
Filmliga's original manifesto of September 1927 (reproduced in Ivens, 1969,
21-22; MacKenzie, 2014, 525) provides more information about the appeal of
the organisation for Ivens. The document's principal posture is a vehement-
ly anti-popular elitism. It speaks of 'the herd, commercial cliches, America,
Kitsch', stresses its own appeal to 'limited audiences', and dwells on the dis-
tinction between 'movies' and 'film'. It was not the only time that this tired
semantic distinction has justified an 'art film' movement. It is important to
point out, however, that the six films which were listed across the top of the
document were, with one exception, all feature-length narrative films that can
hardly be considered avant-garde in the normal sense of the word: Die Nibe-
lungen (Fritz Lang, 1924, Germany, 288), The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925,
USA, 140), Bronenosets Potemkin (The Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein,
1925, USSR, 66), Mdnilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926, France, 38), Mother,
and Variete (Jealousy, E. A. Dupont, 1925, Germany, 72). The manifesto also
promised old films of Chaplin and Asta Nielsen. The tastes of Filmliga's con-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
stituency, it would seem, leaned as much in the direction of prestige studio
films, such as those of Lang, Vidor, Dupont, and the Russians (who were after
all building on the legacy of Griffith), as to the various kinds of non-narrative,
experimental, and 'pure' cinema also well known in the milieu. This relative-
ly popular orientation, masked by the jargon of the manifesto, is no doubt
responsible for Filmliga's success beyond the inner core of the group, rather
than its proclaimed 'belief in the pure autonomous film'.
In short, Filmliga's conception of film embraced a good many movies.
And the two films Ivens mentions having minutely analysed and charted on
his home editing-table during their Filmliga runs were narrative features from
the USSR, Arsenal (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1929, 70) and Potemkin, both ulti-
mately relying on the basic Griffithian narrative lexicon. On the other hand,
the abstract or non-narrative films that Ivens also recalls admiring, those by
Ruttmann, Hans Richter, and Viking Eggeling, glowingly referred to in Film-
liga as 'pure cinema' or 'absolute cinema', terms of reference basic to most 59
avant-garde movements of the day, are not mentioned as having received the
same analysis. Furthermore, of the city films alluded to in Camera, it is Cav-
alcanti's Rien que les heures (Nothing But Time, 1926, France, 45) that Ivens
remembers liking most. There is no record of this in Filmliga, though there
is an enthusiastic review by Ivens (1927b) of Ruttmann's Berlin: Die Sinfonie
der Grossstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927, Germany, 65), another
major city film. It is significant that Ivens should remember the former, since
Rien is notable as the single film from the city film cycle most clearly struc-
tured on narrative principles and dramatic characterisation (though Berlin of
course has its narrative moments). Finally, Turksib (Victor Turin, 1929, USSR,
57) is also given special mention in the memoir, a repository of Soviet cutting
to be sure, but at the same time a conservatively shaped, epic documenta-
ry narrative, without question an antecedent of Zuiderzeewerken (Zuiderzee,
1930-1933, Netherlands, 40-52).
Ivens's three early films, Brug, Branding, and Regen, conceived at the
time in terms of the current notions of 'pure' or 'absolute cinema', were in
fact constructed more upon the traditional narrative principles of the fiction-
al feature than upon the abstract, modernist structures suggested by these
notions. As films they had more in common with the representational realist
and humanist stance of artists like Pudovkin and Vidor, or the lyrical sensibil-
ity of Dovzhenko, than with the formal experiments of Richter and Eggeling,
etc. These decisive aspects of the early Ivens films - their narrative structure,
their realist and lyrical orientation, their humanist sensibility, and their con-
sequent popular accessibility and appeal - form the continuity with Ivens's
later works, and furthermore contain the seeds of Ivens's eventual divergence
from Filmliga.
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
The basic contradiction within the orientation of the Filmliga member-
ship was an interest on the one hand in the great works of narrative realism
of the silent period, from The Big Parade to the red parade (Mother), and on
the other hand in abstract, experimental, 'absolute' works of the modernist
avant-garde. This contradiction has been formulated somewhat differently
by Ivens's East German biographer-critic, Hans Wegner (1965, 17). He sees it
as the logical incompatibility of an interest in the Soviet film with an interest
in apolitical modernist avant-garde films in the West - the former a formally
conservative tradition insofar as it retained the narrative project, the realist
posture, and the traditional socio-political framework of popular appeal, but
(most important for Wegner) a tradition with a progressive ideological foun-
dation; and the latter a tradition that rejected all of these features. Decades
later, Nichols (1999, 2001) updates and complicates our view of the evolution
of documentary realism beginning around this time and its political and artis-
60 I tic relationship to its modernist roots, with Ivens, Kasimir Malevich, and John
Grierson exemplifying the volatility of a relationship that ranges from fusion
to opposition, from syncretism to radical shifts. Suffice it to mention here that
Ivens would increasingly experience a widening divergence between the two
poles, with his instinctive leaning toward the realist option, while an inner
core of Filmliga was increasingly attracted over the years to the non-narrative,
abstract film, and eventually articulated an outright animosity to Misere au
Borinage (Borinage, 1933, Belgium, 34) and Ivens's Soviet sympathies of the
early thirties. The inherent conflict within the original Filmliga constituen-
cy was, however, less a question of logical incompatibility than a reflection of
the ideological eclecticism, self-deception, and incoherence of most cultural
avant-gardes in Western capitalist society between the wars.
The early issues of Filmliga vividly document not only these contradic-
tions within the organisation, but also much about Ivens's specific interests
at the time. From the first he was primarily interested in the narrative cine-
ma, and the major goal in his self-directed apprenticeship was the develop-
ment of editing skills in the construction of narrative continuity. An article
by Ivens (1927a) in the first issue of Filmliga entitled 'Film Technique: Some
Notes on the Sequences of Images in Film', reveals the scope of his investi-
gations in that area. The article first outlines three parameters of the tempo
and rhythm of a film sequence, shot duration, direction of movement within
a shot, and graphic composition of a shot, all in relation to each other. Ivens
then praises the 'absolute cinema' for its discovery of a whole new terrain for
experimentation with such construction, but deplores the relative scarcity of
such experimentation: 'Only in the absolute film is a very tight and mathemat-
ical development of the image sequence possible' (Ivens, 1927a, 6). However,
Ivens then proceeds to recognise that 'non-absolute' films also can be char-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
acterised by such tight image continuity. The rest of the article is devoted to
a demonstration of the mathematical precision of the street fight sequence
from Mother, giving exact details and measurements for a short sequence
of shots in terms of his three parameters. Before closing, he speculates that
the visual and psychological laws of cinematic continuity will soon be devel-
oped, probably by a German, and that directors will provide answers for the
still unanswered questions. A footnote provides detailed measurements for a
rather intricate montage sequence from Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927, France,
240).
A second instalment in what was apparently planned to be a regular col-
umn entitled 'Film Technique' appeared in the third number of the same year
entitled 'Notes on the Two Images in a Strip of Film' (Ivens, 1927c). It consist-
ed of a short discussion of the mechanics of retinal overlap in the perception
of motion pictures, and points out for the interested reader a dissertation by
one Dr. H.C. van der Walls on such optical illusions. 61
A somewhat less theoretical article (Ivens, 1927b) appeared, however, in
the second number, a report from Ivens during one of his visits to Berlin. This
was the first of a number of such reports contributed by Ivens over the next five
or six years, not only from Paris and Berlin, but eventually from the USSR as
well. Ivens reports from Berlin that he has established contact with a number
of groups similar to Filmliga, and suggests the importance of continuing such
contact for the exchange of experience and lessons in the effort to stay inde-
pendent of the powerful studios. The article includes an enthusiastic report
of Ruttmann's latest film, Berlin. Ivens admires it especially for having gone
beyond Ruttmann's earlier 'absolute' films in its apprehension of the ordinary
things of daily life, and for combining these within a dramatic whole with-
out the resources of fiction. Ivens was inspired by this example and Stufkens
(2008, 47-48) provides more detail of Ivens's enthusiastic 1927 visit to Rutt-
mann in Berlin right after the premiere of Berlin, identifying several 'visual
quotations' of the German film in Brug, which the Amsterdammer undertook
immediately upon his return. It can be argued that he inflected his own first
city film Regen in this direction as well, lauded in almost identical terms two
years later. Coming back to 1927, Ivens's article goes on to praise a number of
foreign films currently playing in Berlin, most notably two Soviet films of spe-
cial merit, Abram Room's Tretya meshchanskaya (Bed and Sofa, 1927, 95), and
Lev Kuleshov's Po zakonu (By the Law, 1926, 8o), both narrative features. These
demonstrate for the author once more the 'superiority' of current Soviet films;
his single reservation is in regard to the over-naturalistic tone of the acting
in the two films. Ivens concludes his article by speaking excitedly of a perfor-
mance of Toller's Hoppla, wir leben! (Hoppla, We're Alive!) at Piscator's theatre,
of Gance's Napoleon, once more, with its innovative use of triple projection,
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
and of various editing experiments he had witnessed in studios in Berlin and
Dresden (Ivens, 1927b, 9).
Neither here nor at any other point in his career was Ivens primarily a the-
orist. The three articles are all principally oriented towards the practical. The
theoretical discussion of editing, for example, seems to be an offshoot of the
author's own self-education in this craft, distinguished neither for its origi-
nality nor for its sophistication. His major interest, as revealed in these three
samples of his writing from this early period, was how to make a film - the
development of a comprehensive aesthetic system to account for his art would
hardly ever interest him except as an afterthought (insofar as the absence of
an articulated system can be considered a kind of system). The connection
between his work and their ideological foundation has also always been large-
ly unarticulated (except in the realm of praxis) and instinctual, whether that
foundation has been the avant-gardism of the twenties or the militant radical-
62 ism and the conciliatory populism of later periods.
The Amsterdam Filmliga provided the forum for many of Ivens's encoun-
ters with the pre-eminent film artists within the cosmopolitan avant-gar-
de milieu. Visitors to the Dutch film society included Ruttmann, Ren Clair,
Jacques Feyder, Germaine Dulac, Cavalcanti, and the three major Soviet art-
ists, Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin, most of whom, it could be said, had
the artistic intelligentsia of Western Europe as a primary constituency. Films
screened at the bimonthly meetings or discussed in the journal included the
avant-garde works by Richter, Eggeling, Kirsanoff, Lger, and Man Ray, as well
as those of the visiting directors. Ivens would often serve as host to the foreign
guests and would show them his latest work-in-progress: his presentation of
the unfinished Regen to Pudovkin during the latter's visit to Amsterdam in
early 1929 so impressed the Russian that the direct result was his invitation
to Ivens to the USSR. Ivens's cluttered editing room on Het Singel became a
gathering place of sorts for Filmliga adherents and foreign visitors; frequently
onlookers, both artists and critics, would participate in the editorial decisions
in the process of being made.
The Dutch intelligentsia in particular were taken with Ivens, that native
son who received rave reviews in the major artistic circles of Western Europe.
Prior to Ivens, the only noteworthy Dutch filmmaker had been a scientist
named J.C. Moll who specialised in microscopic films of crystals; otherwise
Dutch cinema had been as colonised as any national cinema of the period.5
The Dutch press, therefore, covered each new Ivens film with a special
indulgence. In the avant-garde art journals as well, at home and abroad, a
vigorous dialogue continued through the last years of the decade about this
new Dutch artist: the French critics in particular were fond of relating him to
the tradition of Dutch realist painting, not without a trace of condescension.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The foremost voices of avant-garde criticism sooner or later paid him hom-
age in print: he was discussed by Dulac, Harry Alan Potamkin, Bla Baizs,
Lon Moussinac, Richter, Jean Epstein, Florent Fels, the London Film Society,
as well as by the Dutchmen Ter Braak and Jordaan. Ivens's particular promi-
nence in Paris may have been due to the existence of prosperous rivegauche art
houses that programmed his films.6 In London and other cities, it was more
likely to be a film society like Filmliga that provided a showcase for Brug and
Regen among their Eisenstein and Vertov programs.
Ivens's films from this period are products of this milieu and gestures
toward this constituency, but he would soon move decisively and irrevocably
beyond this framework. The allegiance of the avant-garde audience to Ivens,
particularly that of its Dutch component, would prove surprisingly tenuous.
The Dutch intellectuals were catholic enough in their tastes to admit the dubi-
ous ideological premises of the Soviet artists to their screens, so long as they
were suitably obscured by innovative cutting, but as soon as the same themes I 63
appeared in the work of their compatriot, their enthusiasm would wane dra-
matically.
The contradictions in Ivens's short-lived relationship with the avant-gar-
de can easily be read in the layers of conflicting texts that constitute the films
of the period. The following analyses of the three major films - Brug, Brand-
ing, and Regen - reveal both Ivens's affinity with the avant-garde and his
divergences from it; they also reveal, on the one hand, an anticipation of the
thematic and above all the stylistic preoccupations of the mature Ivens, but,
on the other hand, a very clear coherence as a unit quite distinct and anoma-
lous within Ivens's oeuvre.
It is not difficult to catalogue the ways in which these films do anticipate
the mature work of Ivens, and Ivens's past biographer-critics have amply
demonstrated this continuity (Grelier, 1965). They have quite perceptively
accumulated a whole repertory of recurring motifs, stylistic tendencies, and
other elements of Ivens's mature oeuvre that are traceable in the three early
films in varying degrees: the genius for seeing the beauty of the ordinary day-
to-day world, the sensitivity to the expressive details of a concrete landscape,
the talent for linking these details with an epic overview, the insight into the
role of the natural elements in the human cosmos and of the human presence
in the natural environment, and the attention to the lyrical or connotative
potential of surfaces, reflections, and shadows. It is even possible to point out
signature tropes that will recur throughout the entire oeuvre - a water surface
punctuated with drops, an insert-shot of a child or group of children at play,
a movement from a close-up detail to a panoramic landscape. And, of course,
there are the specific themes to which Ivens will return, with slightly varied
emphasis, as he matures: in Brug, the functionality of the machine and the
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
ultimate human and social reference of that functionality; in Branding, the
themes of social injustice, of exile, of harmony between human preoccupa-
tions and the cosmos, and the reliance on the dramatic authenticity of the
non-professional actor; in Regen, the beauty of everyday objects and settings
(though surprisingly the future Ivensian iconography of labour, present in the
first two works, is absent in this film).
The list is accurate as far as it goes. However by isolating several of the
more prominent characteristics of Ivens's film language and themes, this
approach neglects the totality of Ivens's work. It neglects both the unique,
specific implications for each film of his relationship with the changing cir-
cumstances of film production and consumption at each point throughout
his career, and the fundamental continuity of this relationship. The former
will emerge from the individual analyses of each film, but in the meantime it
is possible to generalise about the latter. In general, the early period's reliance
64 I on the aestheticised language of the late twenties avant-garde is consistent
with the continuous tendency throughout Ivens's career to rely wholehearted-
ly and unquestioningly on the current lexicon of his specific cultural environ-
ment, of the community within which he is located, and of the constituency to
which he addresses himself, whether that will mean the populist rhetoric of
New Deal America, the mass choreography of Cold War Eastern Europe, or the
direct cinema of the late sixties in the West. Frankly imitative, uninterested
in the fetishised innovativeness of modernism once he is detached from its
influence, and fully confident in this principle of popular accessibility, Ivens
from the very beginning has been, despite his many innovations, a formal con-
servative. The modernist overlay and the deeper narrative structure of the early
works are both reflections of this insistence on communicating directly with
his constituency in whatever film language was currently in vogue.
In the face of this deep, underlying continuity, many of the apparent the-
matic resemblances between the early work and the mature work seem rather
superficial. The auteurist catalogue of Ivensian motifs must be carefully qual-
ified. In Brug, for example, because of this film's distinct context and constit-
uency, the mythologisation of steel and structure is clearly quite different in
its emphasis from similar themes in the epic Dutch construction films of the
next four years, and even more so in the socialist realist works, Pesn o geroyakh
(Komsomol, 1933, USSR, 50) and Pierwsze lata (The First Years, 1949, Bulgaria/
Czechoslovakia/Poland, 99), in which industry and scaffolding are unambig-
uously subordinate to their social reference and not subjects in themselves.
Similarly, in Branding, the simple study of social inequality, a feature of the
story on which it is based, seems more metaphysical than political and is
almost peripheral to Ivens's interest in the ocean and the dunes, not a basic
preoccupation as in Borinage. And the cityscape of Regen is markedly different
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
in its inflections from those superficially similar cityscapes of 30 or more years
later such as La Seine a rencontreParis (The Seine Meets Paris, 1957, France, 32),
...A Valparaiso (1963, France, 27), Pour le Mistral (For the Mistral, 1965, France,
33) and Changhai: Impressions d'une ville (Shanghai: Impressions of a City, 1976,
France, 6o), where natural phenomena provide the focus for detailed study of
the economic and social life of a community, rather than serving as a source
of fascination in themselves. Nature as the raw material and crucial setting
for the human struggle scarcely enters Ivens's 1929 perspective of rain - the
water trickling down the irrigation trough of The Spanish Earth (1937, USA, 53)
seems to have no relation to the aestheticised object of Regen. The specificity
of the work of Ivens at the end of his twenties will be apparent from the follow-
ing detailed examination of the three early films and the contradictory artistic
impulses and contextual forces that shape them.
I 65
DE BRUG
It is perhaps no more than an accident that Brug, of all the filmic exercis-
es undertaken by the young camera enthusiast in his first working years in
Amsterdam, should have reached such a stage of completion that we now
know it as Ivens's first fully realised work. Many of the other exercises that
Ivens undertook during those years remained unfinished fragments and have
not survived. According to Ivens's recollections of the non-extant subjectivity
exercises, compiled in a Kinoschetsboek (Film Sketchbook, 1927, Netherlands),
and to other brief accounts of them, they were largely inconclusive self-train-
ing exercises. His first project, ten minutes of rushes of the interior and clien-
tele of a waterfront bar belonging to Juffrouw Heyens, the mother of a sculptor
friend of his, appears to have been among other things a test of his new Ger-
man camera's mobility. The one surviving item, tudes, is comprised of four
minutes of movement studies shot in 1927 in the streets of Paris, a city that
Ivens increasingly frequented and inhabited briefly with Krull. Preserved by
the Cindmatheque franaise and included in the 2008 box set, Etudes offers
shots of traffic and tramways that have as much in common in their approach
to Brug, with their bold diagonalism, kinetic energy, and taste for striking
angles, as to Regen, the city film whose subject is superficially similar. At
least one narrative edit and a recurring vignette of a burly horseback traffic
cop anticipate future interests as well, but for Stuflens the work is very much
about the 28-year-old's here-and-now energies, as reflected in quasi-Futurist
musings in a personal letter: 'You know what it's like in your car, the bliss of
travelling at speed, and you don't want that speed in your own inner life?... No
half measures. I wanted to shout: all the way... go for it... you have to run, we
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
can be horses...' (10 November 1928, JIA, quoted in Stufkens, 2008, 44). A 1928
screening of the material led to a very positive assessment by a reviewer in the
Dutch publication Focus (1 April 1928, quoted in Stuflens, 2008, 45) as an 'out-
standing [...] extraordinary work of films'. No doubt this 1927 sketch has sym-
bolic importance, other than its training role, because of its realist attitude in
its exploration of a physical and human environment and its anticipation of
the mise-en-scene and proto-direct 'spontaneous' modes that Ivens would later
perfect as elements of his classical hybrid style.7
5. tudes des mouvements a Paris (1927).
Point-of-view tracking shot through the
traffic in the city he would permanently
adopt thirty years later. DVD frame capture.
© CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
66 Loridan-Ivens.
Another exercise, now referred to as the 1k-film undertaken by Ivens and his
actor friend Hans van Meerten in the winter of 1928, was an experiment in
the 'subjective camera', presumably deriving from a number of similar exper-
iments in the German commercial cinema of the period, for example Varidtd,
as implied in a footnote to Camera (Ivens, 1969, 43). This exercise included a
sequence in which the camera 'drinks' a glass of beer, and another in which
the camera walks with the aid of a mechanical dolly that Ivens designed to
simulate the rocking motion of the human walk. Other studies mentioned in
Camera, or in other works on Ivens, seem to have been motivated by similar
interests in technical possibilities, including the 'subjective' project focused
on skating. 'Subjective' shots of one kind or another, whether shot/counter-
shot point-of-view shots or a moving-camera take implying movement through
a space, were included in all three of the early films.
Brug seems to have started out as one of these exercises and was brought
to fruition as a completed film and found an audience almost as an after-
thought. It is probable that the coherence implicit in the subject matter itself,
rather than any particular technical gimmick or theoretical concept, is what
ultimately gave the film its inspiration, its unity, and the momentum that led
to its full realisation and an audience. According to Ivens's recollection in
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Camera, the choice of a bridge as the film's subject was more or less arbitrary.
The impulse that led to the film was a desire to study movement and rhythm
in a controlled situation without the risks of human intervention. The bridge
seemed merely a suitable setting for such a study:
I sought a subject for a more thorough study of the ABC of movement and
rhythm, not trusting myself with the complexities of a story or the move-
ments of human beings. When my friends heard what I was looking for
- an inanimate, subject with a wide variety of movement and shape - Van
Ravenstein, a railroad engineer, suggested that I look at a railway bridge
over the Maas River in Rotterdam.8 The middle part of the bridge moved
up and down between two towers to let ships pass underneath and trains
pass overhead. This was exactly what I wanted.
For me the bridge was a laboratory of movements, tones, shapes,
contrasts, rhythms, and the relations between all these. I knew thou-|67
sands of variations were possible and here was my chance to work out
basic elements in these variations. In all the films I had seen at the Film-
liga I noticed a rich variety of images and of expression; but in talking
with the people who made the films, I got the feeling that they were work-
ing without enough technical and artistic knowledge. What I wanted was
to find some general rules, laws of continuity of movement. Music had
its rules and its grammar of tones, melody, harmony, and counterpoint.
Painters knew what they could do with certain colours, values, contrasts.
If anyone knew about the relation of motion on the screen he was keep-
ing it to himself and I would have to find out about it for myself. (Ivens,
1969, 26)
The modernist thrust of this account of a novice's search for the ground-rules
of an art form is readily apparent: in addition to the goal of technical appren-
ticeship elaborated here, there is also a validation of formal investigation as
an end in itself, the basis of much modernist culture of the first half of the 20th
century.
The finished film does indeed fulfil this end, and lends itself readily to a
modernist reading. Certainly the contemporary audience saw it in these terms,
as a significant contribution to the modernist enterprise of the French, Ger-
man, and Soviet experimenters whom Ivens and Filmliga admired so much.
For this audience, Ivens's talents as a storyteller, as a metteur-en-scene, and as
a spontaneous 'documentary' observer of the world were all overshadowed by
his analysis of movements, rhythms, and structures. Dulac's (1929) reaction
was typical:
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
I have seen a moving symphony, with harmonies, accords grouped in
diverse rhythms, I've felt a theme whose sensitive resonance goes beyond
the object. Forces that are assonant, dissonant by choice, the opposition
or the grouping of the harmonies, the architecture of masses by the shot
angles, rhythms by the cadence of the measure. Joris Ivens, the arranger
of all this orchestration appears to me to be one of the visual musicians
of the future.
Ivens's own contemporary discussion of the film fully supported a reading
such as Dulac's and emphasised his modernist theoretical base, analytical
goals, and unwittingly of course, the contradictions in his own approach to
the subject and the film. In a 1928 article, Ivens begins by recapitulating his
commitment to some of the ideals of twenties modernism:
68 I The film The Bridge was finished at the beginning of this year. The bridge
at Rotterdam served as its subject. The multiple movements that occur
when this powerful iron construction is raised and lowered offered a
broad field of action for a film in which I wanted to examine the possibil-
ities of composition of movements. I wanted to go further in the domain
of film that is located between documentary actualities or the technical
instruction film, and that which is called the acted film. My project was
to make, with the material offered by the bridge and the trains, without a
true action or story, a film which would hold the attention of the spectator.
Furthermore I had the intention of making a title-less film, and I was
thus forced to concentrate completely on the purely visual elements of the
film. (Ivens, [1928] 1965, 141, my emphasis)9
This concentration relies heavily on Ivens's developing editing skills. For
Ivens, as for many independent filmmakers of the late silent period, editing
was an intrinsic element of filmmaking: the division of labour among the
various crafts was a feature of industrial filmmaking that independents fully
adopted only in the late thirties. Ivens's amateur status also encouraged the
central place of editing in his work: as with his Soviet contemporaries a few
years earlier, time at the editing table was more affordable than the extra stock
required by other approaches to filmmaking based on long and multiple takes.
His editing studies of such films as Potemkin, Arsenal, Mother, and Napoleon
had a decidedly practical orientation. The system employed for sketching the
editing techniques of Eisenstein and the others became incorporated into
his own methodology as editor: 'I made a rough sketch of every shot on a film
card with arrows indicating the movement within the shot, and then arranged
these cards before I cut my precious film strips' (Ivens, 1969, 28). Today Brug
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
reads like an exuberant textbook of the virtuoso editing of Ivens's mentors in
both the USSR and the Western European avant-garde. Many of the cuts are
flamboyant articulations of contrasts in scale (a skyline vista punctuated by
vertical crane structures, cut to an extreme close-up upward pan along rivet
heads in a steel girder), contrasts in direction of movement within the frame
(slow descending track of the lowering ballast weight of the bridge, cut to a
view of the end of the bridge span rising), graphic echoes (a head-on close-up
of a round railway coupler, cut to a lateral view of a wheel), or of contrasts in
kinetic or rhythmic configuration.
However skilful this repository of modernist cutting is, an impressive
achievement for an amateur's first film, perhaps even more impressive is the
kind of editing-within-the-shot that is also central to the film's analytic orien-
tation. This achievement clearly stems from the long hours of obsessive obser-
vation that Ivens has described in Camera. Many of the film's articulations of
contrast in scale, composition, and movement, are realised without a cut, 69
either with the aid of a smooth, concise tilt or pan, or taking advantage of the
movement of the object itself. An example of the former is a tilt up from close-
ups of girder joints to a vista of the whole city horizon. An example of the latter
is a shot capturing simultaneously the foreground rising of the bridge span
and the background lowering of the ballast weight. Some shots are an even
more intricate orchestration of various movements: in one, as a girder rises
toward the camera, striped shadows move across it, and then another shadow
corning from the opposite direction covers it completely. Other shots exploit
the foreground-background play already mentioned as a framing device, as
in a shot where a huge foreground wheel in the bridge mechanism provides
a rotating frame between its spokes for another rotating wheel in the back-
ground. Other intra-shot analytic articulations occur through the juxtaposi-
tion of camera angles, points of view, surface textures, etc. In short, the film
reveals quite as much editing done by Ivens perched on the beams high above
Rotterdam as in the Amsterdam editing room.
6. De Brug (1928): 'a laboratory of
movements, tones, shapes, contrasts,
rhythms, and the relations between all
these'. Frame enlargement. Courtesy coll.
EFJI, Nijmegen © CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
6,.-
El, 0
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
There are specific technical factors involved in this particular achievement
of editing-within-the-shot. The camera used by Ivens during the Amsterdam
years, and often thereafter, was the small portable 35mm Kinamo, pioneered
by one of his teachers in Germany (Buckland, 2006). The importance of this
camera in the non-commercial filmmaking of the late silent period cannot be
exaggerated - it permitted the young filmmakers to shoot in the streets with
a spontaneity and mobility that the larger studio-oriented cameras could not
achieve. It was also suitable for small budgets because of its simplicity and
minimum of gadgetry. No doubt its limited magazine capacity contributed to
the interest of many cineastes in Soviet-style cutting. Interestingly enough,
Boris Kaufman was one of the first to exploit the possibilities of this camera
in France, though his wildly hallucinatory handheld pans for Vigo in propos
de Nice (1930, France, 45) have more in common with Ivens's 'subjective' exer-
cises than with the precise analytic movements of Brug. In any case, the image
70 I of Ivens balanced on the bridge scaffolding with his Kinamo is crucial to an
understanding of Ivens's artistic evolution, because it is linked directly to the
two major cinematographic modes of Ivens's mature hybrid style: the 'sponta-
neous' mode and the mise-en-scene mode. The Kinamo, in permitting Ivens to
tilt the running camera up instinctively to catch an unexpected burst of smoke
from a train, an example recalled in Camera, was instrumental to the aesthet-
ics of spontaneity that for some observers have established Ivens as a precur-
sor of direct cinema/cindma vrite. Ivens's limited initiation into this mode in
Brug would be considerably expanded in the two subsequent films with the
greater opportunities for on-the-spot decision-making created by human sub-
jects, and even more so in later works. As Ivens would comment to an inter-
viewer at the time of Regen the following year, 'I deliberately used a small
camera with takes limited to 25 metres [c. 55 sec.] in order to be resolutely free
in my movements' (Fels, 1929a, 303). On the other hand, the Kinamo facilitat-
ed the careful observation of the pro-filmic event and meticulous organisation
of a take according to the event's intrinsic structure rather than according to
the demands of tripod and setup. (Certain longer takes of slow-moving parts
in Brug were done with CAPI's American DeVry, also a small portable camera
[Stuflens, 2008, 49]; this approach would evolve into the mise-en-scene mode
of the mature period.) The skills of observing inanimate structures acquired
during Brug would later be employed in the filming of animate subjects.
An examination of Brug in its totality, however, reveals a realist narrative
text submerged by, and in contradiction to, the dominant formalist-analytic
text. This text is imbued with the documentary sense of the bridge not only as
an abstract 'found' sculpture but also as a point of convergence of numerous
social and environmental forces of the real world. The submerged text also
renders in narrative terms the slow inexorable movement of the raising and
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
lowering of the bridge, never lost sight of despite the artist's digressive empha-
sis on microcosmic detail. The realist narrative text did not attract contem-
porary critical comment, but is strikingly discernible in the attention to the
bridge's context through foreground-background play, and, most important-
ly, in the use of conventional narrative and expository structures and codes to
give chronological shape to the actual first-up-then-down event being record-
ed. Such contradictions were by no means rare in the late twenties avant-gar-
de; they have already been remarked in the eclecticism of the tastes of the
Filmliga constituency, and are also visible in, say, Krull's vacillation between
such strikingly disparate subjects as constructivist-accented machinescapes
and folkloric landscape and portrait work, or, for that matter, in the 'realist'
texts within the classic works of literary modernism such as Joyce's Ulysses or
Eliot's The Waste Land (both 1922). In fact, the tension between the different
texts may be responsible, as in those literary works, for their enduring force.
Ivens's 1928 article, which appeared in the Dutch Cinema en Theater, pro- |71
ceeds, after its elaboration of Brug's modernist conception, to reveal how from
the very inception of the project, its representational narrative text was struc-
tured with quite conscious intent; that is, the shooting was guided by a written
scenario and the editing was based on narrative conventions. Ivens offers his
readers at this point a summary of the scenario that outlines in a straightfor-
ward, linear manner the opening and closing of the bridge:
- Opening title
- Introduction (Diagram of the bridge, panorama, bridge, the con-
struction engineer Joosting, the camera with which the shooting was
accomplished)
- Beginning (going through the bridge)
- Coming and going of trains on the bridge
- Construction of the bridge [the ironwork is presumably meant here]
- Approaching the bridge on a train
- The train halts
- Raising the bridge
- Boats passing through
- Lowering of the bridge
- Green Signal
- The train going through the bridge
- Passage of the train on the bridge
- End (passage of absolute film). (Ivens, [1928] 1965, 141-142)
The diegetic progression of the film, based as it is on this 'scenario', proceeds
through a conventional beginning, middle, and end in a manner of which even
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
Aristotle could be proud. This overall narrative shape has a specific graphic
manifestation as well: 'Needless to say, the vertical movements are dominant
when the bridge is rising and lowers, and horizontal ones dominate when the
boats are passing, with, however, indispensable variations'. Some of the shots
of the denouement in fact are the exact reverse of the shots of the opening
movement. Ivens's ([1928] 1965, 142) discussion even proposes the standard
narrative device of suspense as one of his architectonic goals: 'During the pas-
sage of the boats, the film shows from time to time a train waiting. Thus the
spectator doesn't leave the subject and is anxious to see if other boats are pass-
ing, and presently he will be happy when the bridge closes again and the train
is able to continue' ([1928] 1965, 141-42).
7. De Brug (1928): 'treating the bridge
in human terms of reference'. DVD
72 | frame capture. O CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
This conventional narrative orientation is consistently discernible at the lev-
el of microcosmic narrative units in the film. For example, Ivens's instinct to
show the functional working of the structure and his insistence on treating
the bridge in human terms of reference (whether conscious or not) leads him
at crucial points to insert shots of the bridge engineer working the lever that
activates the mechanism, or of the signal man giving the signal to the train to
proceed. These inserts, in combination with the shots that precede and follow
them showing their effect, create short narrative syntagms, each with a dis-
tinct structural autonomy. The following rather intricate narrative sequence is
elaborated in full because it demonstrates not only how Ivens exploits narra-
tive expectations in this particular film, but also suggests the borrowed narra-
tive techniques on which he would rely within the framework of documentary
for the rest of his career:
1. high angle tracking movement of the rails, apparent optical movement in
2. signal down
3. train decelerates, approaching camera - a short shot
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
4. close-up of hand flicking switch
5. closer view of 3, emphasis on coupler as train comes to a halt
6. lateral view of the same, slight overlap chronologically, and continuation
of the same action
7. head-on close-up of coupler approaching camera
8. halted wheels, same scale as coupler, a visual echo
9. smoke from the chimney stack
10. steam from wheel
11. tilt down a control panel
12. longer shot of control panel
13. closer shot of same again
14. signal man on the telephone
15. huge wheel
16. signal man cranks handle of phone in close-up
17. hangs up phone 173
18. the huge wheel is now still
19. close-up of cogs or gears starting to move
20. another part of huge wheel moving
21. hand pulls back lever, tilt up to close-up of face
22. close-up of thermometre-type gauge rising
23. small piece moves
24. span starts to rise
In contrast to this rather embellished, indirect manner of narrating the halt-
ing of the train and the rising of the span, there are also narrative tropes as
simple and short as this shot/countershot trope:
1. a signal man running along girders pauses and looks down
2. high angle point-of-view shot of river and town
Coexistent with the film's analytic project, then, and basically in contradiction
to it, are conventional narrative structures. Furthermore, Brug's linear narra-
tive diegesis is itself used uncritically and non-reflexively - illusionistically
even - unlike a contemporary film such as Man with a Movie Camera in which
narrative structures themselves come under analysis. Dulac witnessed not
only a symphony of movements, but the story of the rise and fall of a bridge.
The great narrative realist filmmakers of the twenties, studied by Ivens for
their editing technique and admired by Filmliga, must be seen as the presid-
ing inspiration of Brug, along with the avant-garde formalists whose presence
is perhaps more explicit (Richter, for example, seems to be explicitly quoted in
the fragment of 'absolute' film with which Ivens concludes Brug, an animated
swelling cube, black on white). It is perhaps the mark of Ivens as yet an ama-
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
teur that neither the 'realist' text nor the 'modernist' text dominates the film
in a unified, coherent manner.
One other aspect of Brug, more purely ideological, also links the film to
the avant-garde milieu of the twenties, namely a quasi-Futurist aestheticisa-
tion of the machine. Brug comes virtually at the end of a stream of films from
the twenties that are more or less in love with the machines of the modern
age. This stream includes films as diverse as Ldger's Ballet mdcanique (1924,
France, 19), Lang's Metropolis (1927, Germany, 153), Ruttmann's Berlin, and
such Soviet representatives of the genre as Vertov's Odinnadtsatyy (The Elev-
enth Year, 1928, 52), Man with a Movie Camera, and Eisenstein's essays on the
Leningrad bridge and the cream-separator in Oktyabr (October, 1927, 95) and
Staroye i novoye (The General Line, 1929, 121) respectively. Potamkin ([1929]
1977) responded to Brug foremost as one of the machine film genre, comparing
it to predecessors as various as Gance's La Roue (The Wheel, 1922, France, 273),
74 Henri Chomette's A quoi rvent les jeunes films? (What Do Young Films Dream
About?, 1924, France) and Eugene Deslaw's LaMarche des machines (The March
of the Machines, 1927, France, 9), as well as Ldger's film and Clair'sLa Tour (The
Eiffel Tower, 1928, France, 14). In defining the scope of the machine film, Pota-
mkin definitively locates it, not in relation to the social role of machinery, but
in terms of the formal interests of the modernist movement:
In filming a machine or machines, there are several things to aim for -
the relation of the entire machine to its parts, the relation of the machine
at rest to the machine in motion, the relations of the moving parts, the
increase and decrease in speed, the texture or lustre, the sense of volume
and sense of power. A machine film can be very dramatic! (Potamkin,
[1929] 1977, 74-75)
Potamkin is particularly interested in the lyric possibilities of the machine
film, and, like Dulac, praises Ivens for his command of rhythm and pace, rec-
ognising at the same time the overall narrative shape:
A machine-film is like a lyric; it must not be too long. Ivens carried his
film beyond its logical point of duration, thereby weakening it. Still it is a
good film. [...] Ivens followed the languid pace of the opening and closing
of the bridge heeding, all the time, the nature of the structure. (Potam-
kin, [1929] 1977, 77)"
Another text from the period gives us a much more precise sense of the ideo-
logical roots of the machine film genre of which Brug can be seen as a kind of
culmination. As we have seen, Krull, present at much of the shoot, published a
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
collection of her photographs (Krull, 1929) shortly after the appearance of Brug,
a forceful collection of images of machinery and structures clearly inspired by
the same perspective of the machine as outlined by Potamkin. The collection
included photos of the same Rotterdam bridge as appeared in her husband's
film, dramatic low-angle views of the girders, wires, and towers, and close-ups
of cogs and gears similar to those of Ivens, still versions of the idioms of the
machine films. There is also a range of related material, including magnificent
silhouetted harbourscapes punctuated by cranes (an image which would even-
tually become an Ivens signature), and assorted views of gleaming metal furnace
pipes, scaffolding, and machinery parts, taken in Amsterdam, Paris, Marseilles,
Saint-Malo, and a French Citroen factory. The preface to this collection was
by the same Florent Fels who was to praise Ivens warmly after the premiere of
Regen; in his preface, Fels displays the ideological implications of the machine
film with an alarmingly naive hyperbole. It deserves quotation at length:
I 75
Steel is transforming our landscapes. Forests of pylons are replacing sec-
ular trees. Blast furnaces are being substituted for hills.
Of this new aspect of the world, here are some elements fixed in
some beautiful photos, representative of a new romanticism.
Germaine Krull is the Desbordes-Valmore" of this lyricism and her
photographs are sonnets with sharp and luminous rhymes. What an
orchid this Farcot regulator is, and what disturbing insects these exhaust
wheels are.
The superimpression gives a fantastic face to the most precise mech-
anisms and before a milling machine, covered with thick oil, of dead
debris and trickling water, one thinks of Dostoevsky.
In the halo which surrounds them, the powerful generators, silent
and peaceful in action, seem to radiate luminous vibrations, and what a
trumpet call these chimneys throw towards the sky, these gods at the end
of our road! Bridges penetrate space. Trains break in their fracas the line
of the horizon. They leave the sun and, in the fatal advance of progress,
slide on the ether, sweeping along marveling living beings toward starry
stations. (Fels, 1929b, 509)
The anti-humanist potential of such an aesthetic would hardly need to be
pointed out (even if Marinetti was not yet at that point on the brink of his leg-
endary panegyric to Mussolini's Ethiopian adventure, offered in much the
same terms a few years later). In his article in 'Phases of Cinema Unity: III',
Potamkin even proposed the construction of a special machine to be used for
'absolute' machine films in which it would be possible to eliminate entirely
the human factor, and suggested that, regarding the 'absolute' film:
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
nothing so interferes with the unity of an absolute film as the presence
of a human figure not arranged into the entire absolute structure. It may
be true, as one critic has observed, that the appearance of a human figure
into a film of non-human contents relieves the spectator's tension. But
that very relief is intrusion. [...] The absolute film of all films makes no
compromise with the spectator's prejudice and habit of mind. Its unity is
its only determinant. (Potamkin, [1930] 1977, 30)
In parentheses, Potamkin adds, 'In one of the most pleasing of the machine
films, Deslaw's March of the Machines, at one point a man is visible behind the
machinery. The austerity is broken for the moment and the mind needs to
reconstruct the absoluteness'.
There can be no question that such a sensibility is legible in Brug. It can
clearly be read as a hymn to the strength, solidity, and mobility of the structure
76 I that is its subject, without any necessary reference to that subject's social con-
text or function. Ivens's perspective is loaded with this attitude: the striking-
ly composed angular shots of the huge wheels that operate the mechanism,
the graceful pans along the girders, the camera's low-angle prostration before
the oncoming train demanding passage. Potamkin ([1929] 1977, 77) elabo-
rates a few other specific strategies whereby Ivens underlines the solidity of
the bridge: 'He was very careful to capture only so much of the edifice as would
convey its solidity. He understood that to take in too much of the bridge at a
time would make the steel look webby rather than solid'.
Ivens's recollections in Camera confirm Potamkin's impression. One finds
references to the technical means necessary to convey the 'feeling of iron',
'the feeling of power behind [the wheel]', to the use of filters to 'help intensify
the texture and substance of the material - the clean steel and the oily cable',
and the mental image of 'the fast trains from Amsterdam to Paris, streaking
across in a powerful drive of black metal and white steam', or to the bridge's
'enormous variety of action, turning wheels, trembling cables, rising masses'
(Ivens, 1969, 26-27, 30-32). It is no surprise accordingly that Fels (1929a, 303)
sensed that the 'personality of the bridge was so great that it got the better of
the headstrong Ivens and submerged the entire film'.
The New Romanticism of the machine age, proclaimed by Fels in his
preface to Metal, was hardly new at all, having been espoused by the Italian
and Russian Futurists as much as fifteen years earlier, and in fact was in a
state of decline in 1927, on the verge of its dissipation before the onset of the
Depression, Fascism, and the Popular Fronts. And it is an indication of this
perhaps that Ivens, for all his sympathy for the cult that Fels and Potamkin
embraced so uncritically, is not swept away irredeemably by it. The 'realist'
text continuously subverts the machine film discourse. As Grelier (1965, 26)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
states, 'the object, its plastique, its function, remain human, within the scale
of man'.
One aspect of this human scale is the emphasis on the bridge's functional-
ity. The film is not simply a symphony of shapes and movements, but a careful
exposition of the working of an intricate feat of engineering. This is accom-
plished partly through Ivens's adherence to the sequentiality of the opening
and closing of the bridge, with the two perpendicular streams of traffic fol-
lowing each other. The systematic progression of each phase of the event is
communicated with a clarity that is remarkable in view of the indirect and met-
onymic manner insisted upon by the director. The functionality of the bridge
is also underlined on the shot-to-shot level: the causal connection between the
wheel turning and the span rising, for example, is explicitly articulated by the
sequence of individual shots and often even, as we have seen, within a single
shot. The signal is seen falling before the stream of boats proceeds.
The spectator's sense of the bridge as a functioning whole is periodical- | 77
ly reinforced by an extreme long shot of the entire apparatus, locating it on
the skyline of the city and the river, and in the context of the immediately
surrounding buildings and the traffic it serves; furthermore, the film is intro-
duced by a drawing of the bridge's design on much the same scale as the long-
shot image of it. Even during the analytic dismemberment of the structure in
Ivens's expressive and wandering close-ups, the view of the Rotterdam skyline,
or of the river or rail traffic, often comes into background view, reinforcing the
sense of its functional and geographical context. The constant reference to the
bridge's spatial relationship to the river traffic below is directly connected to
the sense of the bridge's functionality. This effect was deliberate according
to Camera: 'And far below, seen through the turning spokes will be seen tiny
shapes of traffic. I must be sure that there are many trucks to keep the idea of
Rotterdam as a port' (Ivens, 1969, 38).
In this respect, Bela Baizs's estimation of the film, although perceptive of
its tendency to abstraction, seems unnecessarily harsh:
Even when Ivens shows a bridge and tells us that it is the great railway
bridge at Rotterdam, the huge iron structure dissolves into an immaterial
picture of a hundred angles. The mere fact that one can see this one Rot-
terdam bridge on such a multitude of pictures almost robs it of its reality.
It seems not a utilitarian bit of engineering but a series of strange optical
effects, visual variations on a theme, and one can scarcely believe that a
goods train could possibly pass over it. Every setup has a different physi-
ognomy, a different character, but none of them have anything whatever
to do with the purpose of the bridge or its architectural qualities. (Baizs,
[1952] 1970, 176)"
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
It may be true, as Balizs implies, that there is a mannered overlay of virtuoso
effects, both editorial and compositional, stemming from Ivens's avant-garde
orientation and his amateur status. It is true that there are occasionally eccen-
tric camera angles (for example, a few diagonally off-kilter bird's-eye-views of
the train), an occasional indulgence in some trompe l'oeil effect with move-
ment and shadow, or an obtrusive use of a visual rhyme. It is true also that
the exposition of the bridge's functionality may only be partly successful, as
Ivens's recollections of audience response during his Soviet tour in the early
thirties suggest (as Ivens, [1969, 56] remembers it, workers in his audiences
still wanted to know what cities are connected by the bridge and why there
are no people on the bridge). Yet Ivens's understanding of the way the bridge
works, apart from its purely visual and structural properties, and his sensitivi-
ty to its social functioning, are both undeniably inscribed in Brug, even if these
talents would only achieve their fullest realisation in the mature period begin-
78 I ning with Zuiderzee.
Naturally, the human role in the bridge's functionality is essential, and
there is more recognition of this in the film than Balizs admits. Although
occasionally the machinery seems self-animated according to the require-
ments of the machine film genre, as prescribed by Potamkin, the operator
is repeatedly brought into view - flicking a switch, pulling a lever, talking on
the telephone, consulting the gauge. Except for a single close-up perspective
of the man's face, the human reference is admittedly somewhat imperson-
al, despite the details in Camera about the friendly, co-operative relationship
between worker and artist. If the humanist text is ultimately secondary, it is
all the same the germ of Zuiderzee, that monument to human ingenuity, mus-
cle, and perseverance. And Ivens's interaction with his human subject, as he
photographed him operating the mechanism, is the germ also of his mature
mise-en-scene methodology. Ultimately, one wonders whether Ivens's attitude
toward the bridge might not have more in common with the Soviet variation
of the machine cult - tractors and dams in the service of society - than with
the anti-humanist ideology of its Western counterpart. The bridge is raised so
that human traffic can pass; the cogs and wheels do not dance for their own
benefit, but in response to the human hand on the lever and in subservience
to the busy city below.
Brug's success must be measured historically not only in the foregoing
conversation it sparked among the most sophisticated critics on both sides
of the Atlantic, but also in its commercial and popular success, both domes-
tically and abroad. Stuflens recounts the upswell of applause by a 400-strong
audience that greeted the May 1928 premiere in Amsterdam, and a Dutch crit-
ic's recognition of 'a fundamental energy, a painstaking gravity, a wealth of
fantasy and an unmitigated terseness that was difficult to equal' in the film
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
(Jordaan, 1931, 1o-11). But immediate sales to Moscow, Berlin, and Paris
(Stufkens, 2008, 51) and a subsequent international tour may well have been
no less significant for Ivens. The career of the filmmaker was on its way.
BRANDING
Branding, Ivens's second major film, appeared in the wake of the enthusiasm
which greeted Brug. A joint project undertaken in collaboration with Mannus
Franken, it was shot in June 1928 in the North Sea fishing village of Katwi-
jk, and was completed later that year. This 33-minute film, somewhat of an
anomaly in Ivens's career, is one of Ivens's rare experiments with fiction. It is
marked by an unevenness stemming not only from this venture into an unfa-
miliar area, and from problems arising from the collaboration with Franken,
but also, it is clear, from the uncertainties of an artist who was still an appren- | 79
tice. If Potamkin ([1930] 1977, 36) was right in praising its 'dignity and serious-
ness of effort', it is also true as Wegner (1965, 28) remarks, that many passages
have 'a certain primitiveness'. The film is given short shrift in Ivens studies,
including in this book, but it was rehabilitated, so to speak, by being excerpt-
ed by Ivens and his partner Marceline Loridan in Une histoire de vent (A Tale of
Wind, 1988, France, 78) 6o years later. Still it was unaccountably not included
in the 2008 box set, though one 'extra' included a charming video episode of
Ivens returning to Katwijk in 1980 with his former collaborator Henri Storck
and Loridan's former collaborator Jean Rouch for a lively session of reminis-
cences.
Based on a novel by Ivens's friend, Jef Last, who also plays the film's pro-
tagonist, and strongly influenced by Franken, Branding is a much less per-
sonal film than Brug, and clearly shows the strain of its multiple authorship.
The story is simple and downbeat: an unemployed sailor, in love with a young
woman from his fishing village, is led to pawn his watch, his ring, and even his
boots to a vividly parasitical local pawnbroker, 'the neighbour, who gets rich
on the misfortune of others' according to the intertitles, in order to buy her a
gift, and to have enough to eat himself. Ultimately, the sailor chooses exile at
sea over the stagnant village milieu because, 'First I must break with the past
- completely'. This downbeat ending, the only one in Ivens's entire career, is
clearly the contribution of his more melancholy collaborators.
Franken had been a technical student in Delft and eventually set up a
base in Paris where he was known as a journalist and as a director of outdoor
pageants and two short films, LesJardins du Luxembourg (1927, Netherlands,
14) and Redding (Rescue, 1929, Netherlands), the latter shot like Branding in
Dutch fishing ports. Articles by him on Lger and Clair appeared in Filmliga.
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
Franken would go on to make a pivotal contribution to the fledgling Indone-
sian cinema after his two films with Ivens, employing the same semi-docu-
mentary approach pioneered by him and Ivens in Branding. Ivens may have
been attracted to the story because of its social theme, but he was not involved
either in the formulation of Last's story or with Franken's development of the
scenario.
An article bylvens (1929) describing his experiences with the film appeared
the following year in Filmliga, probably in connection with the film's Amster-
dam premiere in February 1929. This helps clarify Ivens's stake in the project.
It is implied that although Franken was an experienced filmmaker with two
films already to his credit, he was primarily involved with the staging while
Ivens's responsibilities included the technical aspects of production, shoot-
ing, and montage.
The article begins with a preamble about the film's intentions based on
80 a recapitulation of a few basic formulas of modernist aesthetics of the peri-
od. Ivens writes that the acted film is an attempt to transpose human material
into film rhythm, to portray the human figure, not as an actor but as a picto-
rial surface at the service of montage. In other words, the human figures in
the story were supposedly playing the same structural role as the Rotterdam
bridge had in Brug. Ivens's article goes on to mention a few digressions from
Last's original story required by the budget but concludes that the changes
were ultimately insignificant and that the main line of the story was retained.
He then suggests that one intention was to convey the atmosphere, to let the
actors (non-professional, he emphasises) interact with the inanimate objects
of the environment, to show the influence of the unemployment crisis on actu-
al material objects and the quality of life, and, in terms of the story's heroine,
to convey her femininity, by purely visual means.
The rest of the article is devoted mainly to a discussion of various techni-
cal aspects of the film that seem to have enlisted most of his creative energy.
He mentions the limited magazine capacity of the Kinamo and the conse-
quent need to invest more creativity in the editing than in the actual shooting.
The technical devices for the development of the image, he explains, were less
limited than those for the actual recording of it; that is, in-camera dissolves
and various optical and filtering effects were not possible. He remarks as well
that the interior scenes shot later that fall offered the challenge of using the
interaction of artificial light and daylight in actual surroundings outside of
a studio. Again, future techniques of documentary mise-en-scene were being
explored.
The problem of filming people, non-professional actors as well as the
local townspeople, is also discussed. He describes his naturalist rationale in
filming the actors without makeup, a strategy consistent with the relatively
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
subdued style of acting. The problem of people losing their self-consciousness
before the camera comes next: apparently he viewed his success in solving this
as mixed - the male actors' performances are adequate, and in the case of Co
Sieger, the dancer who played the heroine, her awkwardness and shyness are
used to good advantage. The villagers, who served as extras, either willingly or
unwittingly, were more of a challenge. Many of Katwijk's conservative inhabi-
tants regarded the Amsterdam bohemians living in a rented house by the sea
as 'pure devils' and refused to have anything to do with them - Ivens gratefully
lists the names of the families who did co-operate. Ivens's later preoccupation
with the technique of filming non-professional actors thus received its first
concerted expression.13
8. Branding (1929): tiying out the technique
of directing non-professional actors.
DVD frame capture. © Mannus Franken
Stichting/CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
In conclusion, Ivens mentions that special music was composed by Max Vre-
denburg for the film's exhibition, a first for a Dutch film of any description,
and finally gives special thanks to his 14-year-old editing assistant, Johnny
Fernhout.14
Like all of the early works, Branding reveals a host of the influences that
shaped the outlook of that decade of the European film avant-garde. Frank-
en was more of a Francophile than Ivens - he lived in Paris during the period
- and the influence of the French avant-garde, the self-styled Impressionists
grouped around Dulac and Louis Delluc, is perhaps most evident. 15The inter-
ests of Jean Epstein, in particular, seem most clearly paralleled (if not actually
echoed) in Branding: the use of objects to convey psychological states, a well-
tuned sense of landscape, an attraction to everyday characters and to folklor-
ic themes. Epstein's commitment to the principle of non-professional acting
identifies him as a possible model for Ivens, as well as, for some film histo-
rians, a precursor of neorealism and direct cinema (Marsolais, 1974, 45-46).
Certainly La Belle Nivernaise (The Beauty from Nivernais, 1924, France, 69),
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
Epstein's 1923 tale of bargemen travelling the Seine between Paris and Rouen,
using both authentic settings and non-professional actors, seems to antic-
ipate Branding. Epstein's Finis Terrae (1929, France, 80), almost exactly con-
temporaneous to Branding, also has an almost uncanny resemblance to the
Ivens-Franken film, particularly in its use of a remote Breton maritime setting
for its simple, semi-documentary story. Branding also displays a visible overlay
of the Soviet influence that was virtually unavoidable at the time. This influ-
ence is particularly felt in the cutting of the film, presumably Ivens's sphere
of authority. Especially ostentatious, for example, is a mannered and incon-
gruent trope of flash cutting used to convey a sudden movement by the hero
during a courtship sequence in the dunes along the shore (he whirls around
to confront the heroine who is following him flirtatiously). A reliance on kinet-
ically articulated transitions and such devices as superimpositions can also
be seen as partaking of this general influence, as can even the intensely met-
82 onymic mode of narrative. The use of landscape as a reflection of the drama
as well seems just as evocative of Mother in its understated lyricism, as of the
hyperbolic and artificial spirit of many German films of the period (it is diffi-
cult not to see Ivens's turbulent passages treating the surf as echoes of almost
identical sequences in Murnau's Nosferatu (1921, Germany, 81).16 In short,
the film is characterised by a virtual patchwork of echoes and influences that
reflects both the genuine cosmopolitanism of the cultural milieu in which it
was made and the susceptibility of Ivens, the apprentice artist, to absorb the
diverse influences abounding in this milieu.
It seems at first odd that the almost abstract study of a bridge imbued with
distinct Futurist overtones, should have been followed in Ivens's filmography
by a simple melodramatic tale set in a rustic community scarcely initiated
into the 20th century. In fact, it is often overlooked that the entire Europe-
an avant-garde of the period, especially in the Low Countries, had the same
kind of schizophrenic interest in the folkloric reservoir of the parent cultures
alongside the preoccupation with the material of the Machine Age. Lang's
Metropolis, Vertov's The Eleventh Year, Storck's Images d'Ostende (1929, Bel-
gium, 15), and Dulac's abstract films such as Disque957 (1928, France, 6) were
balanced by films by the same directors representing an entirely antithetical
folk orientation: respectively, Die Nibelungen, Shestayachastmira (One Sixth of
the Earth, Vertov, 1926, USSR, 65), Unepdche au hareng (A Herring, Storck, 1930,
Belgium, 15), and La Fete espagnol (Spanish Fiesta, Dulac, 1919, France). The
pages of Filmliga and of Variete, a Belgian art journal which was particular-
ly enthusiastic about Ivens's early films, reflect this divergence in a dramatic
way. The photography appearing in Variete, during the late twenties (includ-
ing Krull's), balances Futurist-inspired studies of machine parts with rural
landscapes, portraits of peasant artisans at work, and scenes of idle fishing
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
boats and rugged wharfs. Ivens's Amsterdam circle, as we have seen, includ-
ed a number of artists who had resisted the trends of modernism in favour
of the folkloric and social subjects and media of traditional Dutch realism.
Branding, then, follows this pattern. Potamkin ([1930] 1977) was one of those
who recognised the importance of indigenous folk subjects for Dutch and Bel-
gian artists, particularly filmmakers, and was perceptive enough to note that
Branding's treatment of such a subject was its most commendable feature.
Remarking on the affinity between Branding and Epstein's Finis Terrae, he reg-
istered considerable surprise that the Amsterdam audience had found Finis
Terrae 'wretched', for he found that in its treatment of indigenous Breton folk
material it succeeded where Branding had failed, that is, in 'working with the
indigenous life of Holland'. Potamkin wondered in the same article whether
the 'French absolute film [is] the source for the Dutch and Belgian artist', and
speculated on the possibility of a 'permanent Dutch cinema attitude' ground-
ed in folk roots, 'an autochthonous and original Dutch cinema' based on the I 83
'apprehended experience of the Dutch people'. He continued,
Finis Terrae should have meant something to the Dutch practicians
as a study in the utilization of natural tempers and in the exploitation
of native types. [...] I think it would be well for the Dutch cinematists
to remain concerned with the physical evidences offolk. They have at
hand a rich source in their graphic art. They should go, not necessarily
to their greatest artists (though Rembrandt can teach every cinematist
much about tones) but to those Flemish or German artists, who have
remained most folkish: an Abel Grimmer, for instance. Or for grander
employments of folk activities to the paintings of the Brueghels and to
Bosch - these are full of the kinetic. The galleries in Antwerp, Brussels
and Amsterdam are replete with sources. [...] The Dutch and Belgian
cinematists will do well if they study their folk-painters, look into their
folk-writers, watch their folk-movements and remain folk for a while.
(Potamkin, [1930] 1977, 36-37)
It is possible that Potamkin, had he examined Branding somewhat more close-
ly, might have recognised his own prescriptions in effect: there is scarcely a
painter from the tradition of Dutch folk realism that is not somehow evoked
by the film. A shot of the heroine scaling fish in a sunny court has the simple
household subject, precise outline, and glowing warmth of a Vermeer or de
Hooch; cinematic renditions of classical still lifes abound; and the landscapes
of town, harbour, and shore that provide the backdrop for the story have that
expressive dynamism and richness of suggestive detail, as well as authenticity
of local colour, that the Dutch landscape tradition has made familiar. As for
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
the Brueghel recommendation it is unfortunate that Potamkin would not live
to see dozens of Brueghel-inspired scenes in future Ivens works.
Yet, the Amsterdammers' rejection of Finis Terrae is not as surprising as it
seemed to Potamkin: Ivens recalls in his memoirs that at the time the sophis-
ticated Filmliga audience was too 'snobbish' even for Brandingwith its simple
melodramatic plot and its local setting (Ivens, 1969, 34). The latter was per-
haps a little too local for an audience that was considerably more interested in
the current output of artists in Moscow, Berlin, and Paris than of homegrown
artists, especially now that the novelty of a purely Dutch filmmaker that had
inflected the reception of Brug was past.
Whatever the case, Branding's most durable asset is its peculiarly Dutch
folk consciousness, articulated through the mode of documentary realism
and filtered through Ivens's and Franken's cosmopolitan sensibilities. It is
best in its straightforward observation of the details of setting, costume, and
84 I gesture. Potamkin's perception is more astute than he knew: this departure
from the standards of the French 'absolute' cinema not only gives the film its
lasting freshness but is a promise of Ivens's mature work. His evocation of the
Katwijk community and its surrounding environment of ocean, dunes, and
tulip fields, and the integration of this environment with the village's econom-
ic and social life, anticipate Ivens's highly tuned sense of the interaction of
place and society during his mature work.
As with Brug, the reality of the environment in Branding is conveyed with a
combination of clear close-up detail and a sense of the long-shot totality of a
landscape. The filmmakers intercut, on the one hand, a high-angle long-shot
pan of the village roofs, an intricately textured idle harbourscape, or a sym-
metrical view of the townspeople walking in file in their black Sunday suits
to church with, on the other hand, a whole array of close-up details: a cat in a
window, a view of the hero's bag with a fishtail sticking out, the reflection of
a boat's hull in the motionless surface of the water, a close-up tilt down the
rigging of a fishing boat, a Van Gogh-inspired pair of boots. Ivens and Franken
are particularly skilled at building up the heroine's persona by fitting her into
the daily life of the community with vivid details of her daily activities. Each
time she is seen engaged in a different household chore - scrubbing the street
with a long-handled brush, scaling fish, washing windows, drawing water - an
anticipation, surely, of Ivens's mature interest in working people and work.
Though Franken was more responsible for the direction of the actors than
Ivens, the details of everyday working-world objects are evoked with a preci-
sion and sensitivity that are clearly Ivens's. And Grelier (1965, 69) is right that
the extraordinary lyricism and expressiveness of the landscape passages -
those in the dunes, the tulip fields, the surf - anticipate Ivens's consistently
exercised talent in this direction in later years, and testify to his remarkable
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
affinity with Dovzhenko, whose work he may already have been studying.'7 The
recurring leitmotif of children in Branding likewise seems a precursor of what
was to become a mature stylistic signature. If here this began as a tactic for
circumventing the hardness of the adult villagers, the presentation of children
at work or play, or simply posing for the camera, became an almost formulaic
element of Ivens's universe, the image of a child becoming a validation of the
struggles that he would document as well as an injection of spontaneity into a
film. In contrast, the filmmakers' approach to the romantic couple is charac-
terised by a certain delicacy, possibly awkwardness. A kind of reticence about
sexuality is a hallmark of Ivens's work, and of the socialist realist tradition that
he would assimilate and refine within the next decade. This seems more bla-
tant in Branding, a film focusing entirely on a sexual relationship, than it does
throughout the rest of a career in which such subject matter is always periph-
eral to other concerns. In contrast, Storck's similar Belgian work, Une idylle a
la plage (Romance on the Beach, 1931, 35), seems very erotic indeed. I 85
The most valuable contemporary critic of Branding is Ivens's fellow mem-
ber of Filmliga, Menno Ter Braak (1929a). His long, sensitive review of the film
in Filmliga points to a number of basic problems, and is particularly sugges-
tive as to what Franken's and Ivens's respective contributions to the project
might have been. In fact, Ter Braak immediately recognised the creative ten-
sion within the collaboration and centred his critique on it, which is worth
paraphrasing at length.
Ter Braak's biggest complaint was in relation to the psychological dimen-
sion of the narrative, and it was Franken he held responsible for a 'complete
failure of psychological intuition'. In his opinion, the dramatic restraint, the
economy of the means of expression intended by the film backfire: instead
of an 'aphoristic' narrative style, there is a kind of 'visual stuttering' on sev-
eral occasions, and a general unintelligibility in the visual language, a lack of
continuity between the various scenes arising from the invisibility of the tran-
sitions. The story seems to have inspired Ivens even less than it did Franken:
it was a pretext for Ivens's visual virtuosity, which Ter Braak detects in 'visual
intermezzi', 'masterly fragments' that 'remain hanging loose' from the psy-
chological development attempted by Franken. The movement of the film, Ter
Braak concludes, fluctuated between two directions, at one point psychologi-
cal motif and then again cinma pur.
The material with the actors was often used differently from natural
material, without this difference being justified by the particular worth
of the actor. There was again no director for this film; there was a director
for the rhythmical sea and carnival studies, (Ivens) and a director who
understood the film in general (Franken), but the right man in the right
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
place was missing, the man who should have found the psychological
links. (Ter Braak, 1929a, 68)
For Ter Braak, the film was ultimately an Ivens film, with his imprint as reflect-
ed in the ocean intermezzi more or less dominating the sensibility of the film.
Ter Braak's perceptions still seem well-founded almost 90 years later. The
distinctly Ivensian sequences of the film, the lyrical interludes, are quite dis-
tinct from the more strictly narrative parts. In a few cases, however, the art-
ists seem to have been working together more closely than Ter Braak gives
them credit for, namely in two beautiful sequences in which the lovers meet
on the dunes. In these two sequences, the first blissful and sunny, and the sec-
ond, precarious and cloudy, landscape and nature seem to be in close accord
with the simple psychological states of the two characters. In the first, a long
handheld track follows the pair into the dunes and from that point, extra-long
86 I shots, some in silhouette, place the lovers in relation to the rolling terrain and
the expanseless Dutch sky while contrapuntal close-ups reveal the intimacy of
their relationship - the heroine's shy smile, their two hands joined, her bare
feet playing in the sand as they kiss, a pattern of sand sifting down a tiny hill-
ock, their hands meeting in the sand, gulls floating against the clouds as they
leave. The effect is marred only by a miscalculated insert shot of the sneering
pawnbroker. The second, less happy meeting on the dunes is introduced by a
low-angle pan of the dune grasses sifted by a strong wind, and the lovers are
wrapped in shawl and coat against the cold and sunless sky.
Other sequences of a similar lyrical virtuosity are indeed intermezzi,
as Ter Braak states, with only an arbitrary connection to the narrative. The
major recurring visual motif of the film, for example, a view of waves break-
ing on the shore, evokes the savagery as well as the rhythmical grace of the
sea, but its metaphorical thrust is stated rather than felt, as both Ter Braak
and Potamkin point out. Consequently, the hero's final decision to seek exile
on the sea seems unmotivated either aesthetically or psychologically. Still, in
itself, this motif is expressive, and Ivens's camera demonstrates a Flahertian
sensitivity to a range of graphic and emotive qualities in the surface of the
ocean. Ivens's memoirs confirm that this motif held much of the interest for
him in the film:
It took more than one film to teach me to work with actors, but the
important accomplishments for me in this film were some successes in
photographic ingenuity. In order to film the movement of the sea and the
surf in a dramatic subjective way, I constructed a rubber sack with a glass
front to contain my head and arms and camera. This enabled me to shoot
while breakers rolled over my camera and myself, producing shots of
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
sea movement with a violent quality that nobody had seen before on the
screen. (Ivens, 1969, 34)
It is true that the shots of foam dashing against the lens itself are dazzling, in a
way the logical culmination of Ivens's previously unrealised experiments with
a subjective camera. But all the same, in its isolation from the rest of the film,
such virtuoso embellishment simply constitutes additional exercises for the
apprentice.
One aspect of Branding that seems the most startling departure from
Brug is its use of the popular melodrama in apparent defiance of the sharply
anti-popular prejudice among the Filmliga public. The directors suppressed
many of the histrionics that would have been present in a commercial version
of the same story. But a very strong residue of this tradition remains nonethe-
less, in the exaggerated stereotype used for the expression of the character of
the villain, for example, shot typically in low angle, a malignant expression I 87
distorting his face. According to Grelier (1965, 69), the realism of the film, its
authentic effects of atmosphere and setting suppress this intrusion of melo-
dramatic formulas, but it is more likely that the realist text and the popular,
melodramatic residue coexist in unresolved conflict. In fact, there is a more
disturbing rupture between this eclectic narrative text itself, and the modern-
ist overlay to be read in the so-called intermezzi, an overlay that represents
the real continuity between Ivens's first two films, Brug and Branding. In other
words, the narrative elements, whether realist or melodramatic, are at odds
with the almost abstract texture of other elements. If Brug involved the con-
struction of 'absolute' cinema on the basic sequential conventions of the nar-
rative film (the opening and the closing of the bridge), the reverse process is
evident in Branding, and is less coherently realised: the construction of a nar-
rative film on the conventions of the absolute film. All three of the early films
are similar in their welding together of disparate forms of filmic discourse,
and this is apparently why Ivens was able to move from one project to the next
with no apparent sense of discontinuity. However, in Branding, the fusion of
the constituent materials is the most problematical of the three. It is not sur-
prising, then, that Branding has usually been discussed in terms of the serious-
ness of its intentions and of the success of certain of its elements, rather than
as a fully achieved work, and had less success in finding an audience than the
other two films - which may explain its absence from the 2008 box set.
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
REGEN
Regen is at first glance the most artistically unified and fully realised of the
three early major works; at least it seems to a large extent free of the tensions
between modes of discourse that marked the two earlier films. As such, this fif-
teen-minute 'film poem' has been traditionally accepted as a classic of the late
silent documentary, is still widely distributed and shown, a 21t-century staple
of YouTube, and has even been characterised by polemically motivated critics
of Ivens as an achievement on a level that he would never surpass (Grenier,
1958). The circumstances surrounding the production of the film, however,
suggest that it must be regarded as the last product of the apprentice phase of
Ivens's work, rather than as the first important milestone of his career. Begun
late in 1927, carried out intermittently along with the production of Brug and
already exhibited piecemeal as early as January 1928, delayed at first by a dry
88 I spell, and finallywrapped up soon after the completion of Branding, Regen was,
like that film, a collaborative project undertaken with Mannus Franken and
was charged by the persistent rain that had hampered the shooting of Brand-
ing (Ivens, 1969, 34). The project was conceived, shot, edited, and repeatedly
sneak-previewed over a period of two years (Stufkens, 2008, 65-67), and was
finalised more or less concurrently with Ivens's work on his film for the Dutch
construction workers' union that signals an entirely new phase in his career,
WU'Bouwen (We Are Building, 1930, Netherlands, 110-141). Two entirely differ-
ent sets of production circumstances thus overlapped at this crucial point:
the last of a series of personally motivated, privately produced artisanal works
aimed at the cosmopolitan avant-garde film community is finished simulta-
neously with a commissioned film aimed at an audience of workers and union
officials, a film with a specific prosaic message and publicity function to be
delivered for a price to consumers who had no interest in film as an art form
per se. Regen was first shown in December 1929 at Filmliga's Uitkijk cinema,
and the premiere of that other strikingly different film followed shortly there-
after. Within a month of their successful releases in their respective circuits,
Ivens was to leave for his first trip to the USSR, both films under his arm, and
an entirely new phase in his career was underway, a phase building directly
upon the initiative established with WUBouwen.
Technically, Regen was as much of a collaboration as Branding - a 1929
note to Filmliga by Ivens protests against the publication's habit of referring
to Regen as an Ivens film rather than a joint project. But it is no doubt signifi-
cant that the Filmliga constituency did see it as an Ivens film, as did Ter Braak
(1929a, 65). Although the finished film is still dominated by that melancholy
that is said to be characteristic of Franken's sensibility, Ivens's artistic person-
ality and his technical and artistic evolution are all clearly legible within the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
film. For one thing, the film was entirely shot by Ivens with the help of his grow-
ing circle of assistants and students, who by this time included, in addition
to Fernhout, Helen van Dongen, the young secretary-translator for the Ivens
firm, CAPI, who was becoming increasingly involved in the Filmliga group.
Ivens (1969, 40) states that Regen was 'made almost entirely as a cameraman's
film'. Thus, although Ivens gives Franken credit for considerable involvement
with the scenario or 'outline', and for having come to Amsterdam from his Par-
is home 'for a short time to assist in the editing' (Ivens, 1969, 40), the Filmliga
critic opined that Franken's contribution had been 'a gentleness and a soft,
melancholic romanticism that unexpectedly lifts the somewhat grim pragma-
tism of Ivens's concept to a different level: that of individual emotion' (Jor-
daan, 1931, 16, quoted in Stuflens, 2008, 70). Still it is difficult to imagine how
the usually absent Franken's role could have been the determining one.
Other details in this account of the production reveal the presence of a
specific shooting method and stylistic element considerably more important I 89
in Regen than in the two earlier films. A spirit of spontaneity in the finished
text resulted from a new on-the-spot, spur-of-the-moment approach to the
subject. Ivens remembers how the group of collaborators would watch for rain
and would rush out into the streets at the first sign to capture it on film:
With the swiftly shifting rhythm and light of the rain, sometimes
changing within a few seconds, my filming had to be defter and more
spontaneous. For example, on the big central square of Amsterdam, I
saw three little girls under a cape and the skipping movements of their
legs had the rhythm of raindrops. There had been a time when I thought
that such good things could be shot tomorrow as well as today; but you
soon learn that this is never true. I filmed those girls without a second's
hesitation. They would probably never again walk at that hour on the
square, or when they did it wouldn't be raining, and if it was raining they
wouldn't have a cape, or skip in just that way, or it would be too dark - or
something. So you film it immediately. With these dozens of interrelated
factors you get the feeling of shooting - now or never. (Ivens, 1969, 36)
Wegner (1965, 26) echoes this, depicting the shift from Brug to Regen as an
expansion from the Here and Now to the Now or Never. As Ivens (1969, 36) put
it, the challenge of the new subject 'forced me to relax the rigid and over-ana-
lytical method of filming thatI had used in Brug'. Indeed the role of the ephem-
eral, random gesture or nuance is pivotal in Regen, as it is in varying degrees
for the other key documentaries of the late silent period by Vigo, Cavalcanti,
Vertov, and Ruttmann.
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
9. Regen (1929): three little girls under a
cape, 'now or never', 'relax[ing] the rigid
and over-analytical method of filming that
I had used in Brug'. DVD frame capture.
© Mannus Franken Stichting/CAPI Films,
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Technical aspects of the new-spontaneous shooting style are also dwelt upon
in Camera:
90
I found that none of the new colour-corrective film emulsions on the
market were suitable for my rain problems. The old extra-rapid Agfa film
with no colour correction at all, and used without a filter, gave the best
results. All lenses were used with a fully opened diaphragm because most
of the work was done with a minimum of light. (Ivens, 1969, 37)
Most of the shooting was done with Ivens's by now well-worn Kinamo, with
the assistance of another hand camera, the DeVry. The light, flexible Kinamo,
used to good advantage on the girders of the bridge and on the dunes of Katwi-
jk, is here exploited fully for the first time, adding to Ivens's analytic precision
of framing and composition the freshness and inspiration of spur-of-the-mo-
ment impulse. If the spontaneous movements of the two earlier films were
based on long hours of careful observation, here a more immediate kind of
perception is in play, based on instinct, a quick eye and a nimble camera. The
painstakingly premeditated shot of a dripping rail in close-up, for example,
is balanced by a jerky movement, handheld, following someone boarding a
tram.
Camera movement is thus an essential stylistic byproduct of the spon-
taneous method. Both Brug and Branding had employed tracking shots: the
former as introductory and concluding train-borne apprehensions of the
bridge-subject, and the latter as virtuoso handheld inflections of certain nar-
rative moments. In Regen, handheld tracks and pans responding to ongoing
events are expanded and refined, and integrated into the narrative and expres-
sive texture of the film. Now that Ivens's subject has changed from an inani-
mate structure or a preplanned scenario to a dynamically unfolding human
universe, his images have become much more fluid and flexible. Almost every
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
shot is built on a movement of some kind: either the camera itself pans across
a streetscape, lurches through a crowd, or follows feet along a pavement; or
else, when the camera itself is stationary, it focuses on a movement within that
universe, from the flap of cloth to the scurrying of pedestrians and the glide
of trams. In Regen, then, Ivens's self-processed affinity with Cavalcanti, and
with Flaherty as well, is confirmed: the rhythm and movement of the subject
and of the camera's encounter with the subject are emphasised, rather than
an independent rhythm based solely on the artifice of montage, as with Rutt-
mann and other Soviet-inspired editors. Through the proto-direct 'spontane-
ous' method, Ivens anchored his vision more firmly in the pace of the outside
world itself. Although the determining mediation of the artist between spec-
tator and the world is obviously still present, Regen nevertheless does reflect
on Ivens's part a certain heightened realist sensibility that was by no means
shared throughout the avant-garde community.
At the same time, the analytic elements are still important in Regen, in 91
the fastidiously composed close-ups of objects reflecting the passage of the
storm, for example; however, they too show a discernible evolution towards
a more realist sensibility. There are none of the flamboyantly diagonal shoot-
ing angles, for example, that seemed obtrusive and even mannered in Brug,
nor any of the non-figurative, textural articulations of Storck's images of the
sea in Images d'Ostende.18 Here the overhead surveys of street scenes impress
the spectator more with their efficient summarisation of the movements with-
in the landscape than with their sheer physical bravado. The framing of the
analytic perspectives has also evolved a greater delicacy. Ivens tends to articu-
late the rainstorm through understatement, suggestion, and metonymy; he is
reluctant to show any object when a part of it will do, or a muffled reflection,
a partly obscured view of it, or a shadow. Passers-by are often shown by their
images in puddles or by their feet alone at the top of the frame. A frame is often
divided by an awning, an umbrella, or a window-frame that removes a subject
from direct perception.
In addition to the spontaneous and analytic elements, there are also a few
shots involving documentary mise-en-scene, a not unimportant element of the
two previous films, as we have seen, and a trademark of Ivens's later films: for
example, a passer-by approaches the high-angle lens, stops precisely in frame,
looks up at the sky, hand extended, then turns up his collar and hurries away
- a shot altogether too felicitous in its composition and overloaded literary sig-
nification to be anything but the performance of an obliging collaborator fol-
lowing directions (Fernhout in fact).
Regen then offers for the first time a hybrid camera style anticipating that
of Ivens's maturity: a combination of first, the analytic approach most char-
acteristic of Brug and applied with great care to the environments of certain
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
future subjects that would attract his attention; second, a proto-direct spon-
taneous mode, expressed most coherently in Regen, which would be essential
to the documentarist who, after 1929, would confirm the human universe as
his subject; and finally, another major ingredient of his mature style, mise-
en-scene, learned on location with the amateur actors at Katwijk, but given a
documentary validity and signification in its one or two uses in Regen. It only
remains for the abrupt change in subject matter precipitated by the WjBou-
wen project to stimulate further reconstitutions of the hybrid documentary
form.
In Regen, as in the two previous films, these different elements come
together in a fundamentally narrative structure. Ivens himself summarises
the simple narrative progression that gives the film this narrative shape:
The film opens with clear sunshine on houses, canals and people in the
92 I streets. A slight wind rises and first drops of rain splash into the canals.
The shower comes down harder and the people hasten about their busi-
ness under the protection of capes and umbrellas. The shower ends. The
last drops fall and the city's life returns to normal. The only continuity in
Rain is the beginning, progress, and end of this shower. There are neither
titles nor dialogue. (Ivens, 1969, 35)
If the subject is more diffuse than that of either previous film, it nevertheless
does have a self-contained temporal and spatial coherence that the film con-
structs using the conventional narrative codes of the silent cinema (in boast-
ing of the absence of titles, Ivens is influenced by that elusive ideal of twenties
filmmaking, the purely visual, title-less narrative, the inspiration of Murnau
and Vigo, among others). Two of the earliest city films, those of Ruttmann
and Cavalcanti, had both used a vaguely chronological dawn-to-dusk frame-
work as a structural base, but did so much more loosely than Ivens used the
progression of the storm in Regen, embarking at every turn on associative and
dramatic digressions. In both of the earlier films it is the sequence that is the
primary location of the narrative impulse; in contrast, Ivens situates the narra-
tive impulse at every level, within the shot, within the sequence, and, perhaps
most importantly within the overall shape of the film. In compressing the tem-
poral and spatial dimensions of the event, in using this as a pretext for his city-
scape/symphony, and in restraining any impulse to intrude upon or diverge
from the apparent integrity of the event, Ivens gives his film a narrative purity
that is unique among the city films, a crystalline simplicity of form.
Ivens's basic narrative orientation is evident also on the level of the shot.
In many cases a shot is built upon a tiny incident or self-contained anecdote -
a boat, passing under a bridge, a woman waiting for a tram, a flock of sparrows
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
alighting and then taking off. This sensitivity to the single suggestive narra-
tive detail is no doubt one of the factors which have led to the classification of
Regen as a 'painterly' film par excellence, and of Ivens as a descendent of Brue-
ghel, Vermeer, and Van Gogh (Stuflens, 2002).
Sequences are also often given a narrative shape, and Ivens's discovery
of the power of the editor to construct a documentary event is revealed. Fre-
quently, several shots are organised into a narrative sequence, following a
single recognisable figure, for example, or the stages of a single event. In a
number of cases the use of a subjective camera is connected to an implied sub-
ject by editorial manipulation and a small narrative unit is formed, based on
the familiar shot/subjective shot syntactical formula of the fictional cinema.
For example, a track follows a man with an umbrella through a crowd; there is
then a cut to another track through a similar crowd, handheld, and from the
angle that would suggest the point of view of the walker. In a reversal of this
pattern, a subjective track from a bicycle, handlebars fully in view, is followed 93
by a long pan of a moving bicycle as it is reflected in the wet pavement - the
same bicycle as in the previous shot, the spectator is invited to assume. Else-
where, the relationship within such syntactical units is more ambiguous than
this. For example, the group of girls under a rain cape first passes the camera.
Ivens then cuts to a close-up of a gushing eave, then to a reflection in a canal
surface spotted by rain, and then back to the girls, whereupon this cluster of
four shots assumes the shape of a miniature narrative syntagm whose princi-
ple of cohesion is left quite open.
According to Camera, one variation of this basic narrative sequence being
perfected by Ivens at this point in his career was developed accidentally.
Although he sees this particular example in terms of humour, it is also a con-
firmation of the power of the editor in documentary film to construct a dieget-
ic universe of causal and sequential coherence out of unrelated elements
quite as effectively and arbitrarily as the editor of fiction:
Another interesting thing I learned about the value of shots and move-
ments was their relation to humour. In editing I guided the eyes of the
audience to the right of the screen by a close shot of water gushing out of
a drainpipe, following this immediately by a shot of a dripping wet dog
running along. My intention was merely to pick up the movement and
rhythm in the pipe shot with the shot of the dog and my simple move-
ment continuity always got a laugh. If I had been a more skilful editor at
that time I would have made a more conscious use of such an effect, but I
was still learning. I was still too preoccupied with movement and rhythm
to be sufficiently aware of the special film capacities for communicating
the humorous movements around us. (Ivens, 1969, 38)
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
Upon close examination of the film, it seems probable that the humourous
reaction to this cut comes not so much from the continuity of the two shots,
that is from the artificially induced impression that the dog has been soaked
by the drainpipe, but merely from the frisky gait of the dog and its indignant
glance at the camera. The shots work only very roughly as a continuity. How-
ever, the possibility of obtaining a narrative effect through the juxtaposition
of two disparate images was certainly not lost on the young editor, nor the
importance of carefully analysing audience response. But perhaps the most
important lesson to be gleaned from this experience was that a shot could
never signify only movement or rhythm in the abstract; a shot also inevitably
signifies the facts and predetermined codes of the pro-filmic world and these
speak to an audience directly or indirectly, regardless of the director's inten-
tion or consciousness.
One of the most protracted of the narrative tropes of Regen follows a shot
94 in which the cameraman boards a tram. The narrative logic of the sequence
is not impeccable - it is interrupted by an exterior shot of another passenger
boarding - but otherwise the series of tracking shots from inside the tram,
following logically from the boarding shot, pointing both to the front and
the rear, and including from time to time the driver's shoulder or the steer-
ing wheel, constitutes a graceful and coherent narrative sequence, depicting
a tram ride through the use of a subjective camera, anticipating a favourite
device throughout Ivens's career and apotheosised in the lyrical essays of the
1960s. It is also of course a view of the storm from a smoothly mobile vantage
point, a variation on the film's attitude of viewing the rain at one remove.
One other less common approach to syntactic construction in Regen is
the development of a sequence according to thematic logic rather than strict
sequential logic. There is a whole sequence, for example, arranged around
windowpanes, of the rain seen through windows, reflected in windowpanes,
and dripping from or across windows. Another is focused on a parked car, and
the events of the storm and the traffic are reflected in its fender, its hood fig-
urehead, and its headlights.
Ivens's use of narrative syntax in the documentary medium is thus consol-
idated and refined with Regen. The simple discovery in Brug that the narrative
formula of shot/subjective shot is equally operative within the nonfictional
mode as within fiction becomes expanded into a basic principle of his film-
ic construction. In searching for the laws of motion and rhythm, as any con-
scientious child of the twenties avant-garde was motivated to do, Ivens had in
effect rediscovered the basic syntax of narrativity. Laws of motion and rhythm
were not discoverable for Ivens in the abstract, but in terms of their interac-
tion with a real audience who had completely assimilated the codes of the nar-
rative fictional cinema and utilised them indiscriminately in their reading of
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
the nonfictional cinema as well. Ivens, like the majority of contemporary doc-
umentarists, from Flaherty to Vertov, was employing these codes to build up a
diegetic universe from the raw material of actuality, as coherent and self-con-
tained (and in many ways as illusionistic) as the fictional universe. Ivens (1969,
37) offhandedly mentions in Camera that the beginning of the storm in Regen
is a composite of ten actual such beginnings photographed on different occa-
sions. It is this approach to reality, the editorial assemblage of the raw material
of actuality according to the narrative codes of the classical fictional cinema,
that would be integral to his work for the six decades.
There are no references to Flaherty in the Filmliga publication or Ivens's
other writings of the period, and none of course to Grierson, whose Drifters
(1929, UK, 49) was roughly contemporary to Regen.'9 It would seem that Ivens's
consolidation of his approach was made in isolation from similar strides in
the documentary of the English-speaking world. This stems partly from the
fact that the concept of documentary or nonfiction film was not yet an oper- | 95
ative one for Ivens - indeed Grierson had scarcely developed it. He was still
dominated by the modernist terms of reference. The great documentarist was
still apparently under the impression at the time of Regen that he was making
an 'absolute' film.
Although some comments have already been made about the role of mon-
tage in Regen in connection to its 'spontaneous' elements and to its narrative
construction, there remain some general observations to be made about the
general function of montage in the film beyond these two specific applica-
tions. In general, montage adds to the overall strengthening of Ivens's real-
ist sensibility in Regen: for the most part cuts do not function as self-reflexive
formal articulations in themselves as they often do in the previous films, but
rather submit to the diegetic task at hand or to the construction of the atmos-
pheric effects for which the film is famous. If in Branding it was often a single
explicit shot or trope that had the job of preparing the mood of a dramatic situ-
ation, here the progressions are more gradual and low-key. A number of visual
motifs are woven subtly into the narration, contributing to its gradual unfold-
ing; the motif of birds, for example, described by Ivens in Camera, appears
from time to time to register the progress of the storm, or as Ivens said,
To strengthen the continuity of Rain I used the repetition of a second
visual motif - birds flying in the sunlight and then as the rain starts, a
flock moving against the gray sky (continuing a rhythm indicated in the
previous shot by leaves rustling in the wind). During the storm I showed
one or two birds flying restlessly about. After the rain has stopped there is
a shot of some birds sitting quietly on the wet railing of a bridge. (Ivens,
1969, 39)
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
There are other similar motifs: the use of eaves as an index of the progress
of the storm, and a constant reference to surfaces - of canals, streets, pud-
dles, vehicles, windows, etc. - for the same purpose. The citation suggests that
some of the threads of continuity do not rely on denotative images alone but
also on what Eisenstein might have called overtonal values. The motion of
objects within the frame seems to be used in this way: in addition to the rustle
of leaves mentioned, an early series of images signaling the approach of the
storm includes the flutter of clothes, the flapping of an awning, and the swoop
of the birds for cover. Light values, as Ivens also suggests, are orchestrated in
the same way, at times with such subtlety that the effect is almost subliminal.
The editorial principle of contrast - in scale, in direction of movement, in shot
angle, etc. - is still important in Regen, but to a much different end than the
same principle in Brug. Cuts employing contrast are carefully integrated into
the narrative continuum, contributing, for example, to the feeling of the accel-
96 eration of the activity with the onset of the storm: the opening of an umbrella
exactly matches in pace and scale the closing of a window; a stationary per-
spective of a slowly dripping eave spout is followed with a fast movement of a
car out of frame; a low-angle view of a passing car is matched with a high-an-
gle long shot of two passing trams. Or else, such cuts construct an echo or
a rhyme that adds to the cumulative unity of the whole. Similarly, the use of
long-shot close-up articulations is much less emphatic than in the previous
films; a higher proportion of medium-range shooting contributes to a more
fluid visual fabric. In short, if Brug showed the seriousness and the experimen-
tal orientation of the apprentice, the montage of Regen shows the growing ease
of a master, the growing commitment to the use of montage to construct a
unified diegetic universe. It seems even that Ivens is working toward the ideal
of the invisibility of the cut that would preoccupy his contemporaries in the
classical fictional cinema over the first generation of sound technology.
10. Regen (1929): A 6-second walking
shot encapsulating subjectivity, fluidity,
narrative, lyricism - but masking
contradiction? Frame enlargement,
courtesy coll. EFJI, Nijmegen. © Mannus
Franken Stichting/CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Potamkin's ([1930] 1977, 35) response to Regen proves once more to be a relia-
ble one: he praises the film for its purity, for succeeding in communicating an
emotional statement without being sentimental or self-conscious, and with-
out being 'troubled by effecting a mood on the spectator' or 'perpetrat[ing]'
its mood, unlike Kirsanoff. It is true that Regen is the most subjective and per-
sonal of the three early films and, in fact, the most successful in communicat-
ing a certain emotional point of view, arguably, of Ivens's entire oeuvre. Few
critics fail to discuss Regen in terms of its atmosphere or its lyricism, or as a
'cine-poem'. No doubt the spontaneous shooting style has much to do with
the film's emotional statement, and of course Ivens's heightened editorial
fluidity. Potamkin correctly suggests that another important factor is Ivens's
familiarity with, and evidently great passion for, his indigenous subject mat-
ter. If Branding could, somewhat uncharitably, be termed a folkloric fantasy of
urban intellectuals, Regen radiates the sincere, unpretentious response of an
individual to a well-known, authentic environment, articulated with restraint 97
and simplicity. It is difficult not to concur when Ivens (1969, 36) himself
emphasises the lyrical aspects of the film in retrospect, inevitably alluding as
he does in Camera, to Verlaine's lines:
H pleut dans mon coeur,
Comme i pleut sur la ville.
(It rains in my heart,
As it rains on the city.)
It is perhaps surprising in retrospect that not all subsequent critics would
agree with Potamkin and that an apparently innocuous cine-poem like Regen
should have become the butt of fierce criticism within a few years of its pre-
miere, not the least by Ivens himself. It is important to situate this criticism
carefully in relation to the context in which Regen was made and to the chang-
es Ivens underwent in the next years, since Regen's skilfully rendered formal
and thematic unity almost completely masks the contradictions in Ivens's sit-
uation in that context; there are few of the tensions and disjunctures that are
so visible in Brug and Branding.
Although the emotional clarity and simple lyrical-narrative form distin-
guish Regen in a certain way from the sophisticated modernist sensibility of
its constituency, there are other aspects of the film already touched upon that
firmly link it to that sensibility, which no doubt account for its success within
the avant-garde circuit. Regen differs from Brug in its emphasis on surfaces
rather than structures, but does resemble that film insofar as it can be read
as an abstract film, that is, as a perspective of objects purely in terms of their
formal properties as sources of light, rather than as a reflection on or rep-
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
resentation of a given actuality. Balizs, in his analysis of Regen, emphasised
this tendency of the film and connected it thereby to the avant-gardist move-
ment from which it had emerged:
The rain we see in the Ivens film is not one particular rain which fell
somewhere, sometime. These visual impressions are not bound into
unity by any conception of time and space. With subtle sensitivity he has
captured, not what rain really is, but what it looks like when a soft spring
rain drips off leaves, the surface of a pond gets gooseflesh from the rain,
a solitary raindrop hesitatingly gropes its way down a windowpane, or the
wet pavement reflects the life of the city. We get a hundred visual impres-
sions, but never the things themselves. Nor do these interest us in such
films. All we want to see are the individual, intimate, surprising visual
effects. Not the things, but their pictures constitute our experience and
98 I we do not think of any objects outside the impression. There are in fact
no concrete objects behind such pictures, which are images, not repro-
ductions.
This style of the 'absolute' is obviously the result of an extreme sub-
jectivism which is undoubtedly a form of ideological escapism character-
istic of decadent artistic cultures. (Balizs, [1952] 1970, 176)
Aside from the unnecessarily Zhdanovist tone of Baizs's conclusion,2o his
description does speak to many elements of Regen's conception. Ivens did in
fact subscribe to a prevailing aesthetic of twenties modernism detected by
Balizs, the sufficiency of the object itself. As Ivens told Florent Fels in an inter-
view,
I am not seeking the symbol, the object alone interests me: the rain is
highly photogenic, for it is movement and light. [...] In Regen, it's the
object which is getting in our way for it imposes its imperious presence
upon us. If I shoot, for example, an auto in the rain, I have to defend
myself against the normal standard object which takes away the atten-
tion which I want to fix upon the event, that is to say, the rain. The sun,
the wind, the first drops, the water in torrents, the return of the sun, form
all of the elements of the drama, with all literature removed. (Fels, 1929a,
304)
The same interview also contains a rather contradictory reference to Ivens's
interest in the effect of the rain on human actions, their life, and their walk.
In view of Ivens's stated primary interest in the event, and its realisation in the
text of the film, it would have been more accurate to phrase it as the effect of
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
human actions on the rain; the role of the rain in the human universe is clear-
ly peripheral to the main thrust of the film. Are people just one more variety
of surface upon which the effect of the rain can be recorded? There is much
less sense of the individual or collective personality and its interaction with its
environment than there was in the Cavalcanti film admired by Ivens or even in
Branding. The anonymous inhabitants of this anonymous city clearly have the
minor role in the film: the setting is recognisably Amsterdam of course, but
few of that city's peculiar social or economic energies are inscribed in the film.
People are presented for the most part as disembodied parts of bodies or as
indistinguishable long-shot shapes who respond to the storm as instinctively
and indecisively as the flocks of birds. A hand pulls in a window or extends
an umbrella, pairs of legs are reflected in a puddle, a tram's steering wheel
is guided by another unseen hand, a bicycle is operated by an unseen assis-
tant. In pursuing this interest in 'the object alone', and employing his indirect
and metonymic attitude, Ivens systematically filters the human presence out 99
of the universe of the film (except for his own subjective point of view). Even
when Ivens's camera does record the human factor, it is timid and uninter-
ested. The long-shot appraisals of serious Dutch pedestrians boarding trams,
holding umbrellas, and hurrying home, always stop short of confrontation
or extended close-range perusal, not to mention the self-revelation and even
interchange of Man with a Movie Camera. The lesson learned by Ivens in work-
ing with and observing ordinary people as subjects of his art in Branding had
yet to be applied to modern urban society.
Much of the subsequent criticism of the film dwelt upon this latent
anti-humanism, its indifference to the lives of its human subjects in its preoc-
cupation with the surfaces of a universe of objects. Pudovkin, Ivens's lifelong
friend, was both gentle and severe a few years later when he compared Zuider-
zee favourably to Regen:
It is quite interesting that, in his film on the Zuiderzee, Ivens comes final-
ly and for the first time, to the human. His first film, Brug, had no human
characters. In his film, Regen, there were still no real characters, only
shadows with human shapes: wet raincoats, umbrellas, shoes, clothing
set into motion by hidden motors which interest no one. Regen is a cere-
bral work and suffers from all the defects of whatever is too cerebral, too
much outside of reality. Also, it is not an organized work, and certain pas-
sages remain comprehensible only to the artists. It is lacking emotion,
and its form is so confusing that it has lost all dynamism. It is otherwise
in the film on the Zuiderzee: Ivens has here come into contact with metal
and machines - as in Brug - and with water and humans - as in Regen -
but the result appears completely different. The organized dynamism of
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
the work suddenly becomes, in Ivens's vision, life itself. [...] Men are no
longer automatons putting garments in motion - as in Regen. (Pudovkin,
[1931] 1965, 135)
Though Pudovkin unfairly denigrates Regen's organisation and feeling, Ivens
himself would echo his critique in a public re-evaluation of the film. There
are reports of his having told a Paris audience that Regen lacked foundation
because man and his soul are absent (Hulsker, 1933). In 1933, he came under
extremely harsh attack in the pages of Filmliga for a similar lecture (perhaps
the same one?) in Paris. The correspondent, Hans Sluizer, scolds him for
'fiercely' criticising his earlier work, yet showing it nevertheless. Sluizer relates
that Ivens told his audience that he found his early work,
too empty, too literary, lacking the accentuation of the social element.
100 [...] He told them that he would make Regen differently were he to do it
again, emphasizing how people react to things, which are given now as
documentary. In Regen, we see many aspects of phenomena, we see rain
in a street and rain in a canal - but we don't see the harm done by the rain
to some people, and the advantages of it to other people. (Sluizer, 1933,
130-131)
Sluizer adds that Ivens was spouting 'Russian propaganda' and 'Communist
slogans'. Ivens's own lecture notes from a slightly later period (made in Eng-
lish for an unspecified lecture, probably early in his American tour) suggest in
their fragmentary way the same message:
Rain. It rains. Just it rains.
eye-cut Bunuel
without aim, purpose
strong point of view, of departure.
All this gives no inherent creative power, dead end. (Ivens n.d., lecture
notes, JIA)2"
By the time Ivens was to record his memoirs with Leyda in the forties, his esti-
mation of his own earlier work had mellowed somewhat, possibly because of
the warm American response to the films. He was still referring, however, to
Regen's 'lack of content' and its failure to emphasise human beings' reactions
to the rain ('everything was subordinated to the aesthetic approach'), but at
the same time he justifies the early films because they were laying the foun-
dations of technical and creative competence before his work on more impor-
tant subjects (Ivens, 1969, 40).
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
While the hindsight criticism of Pudovkin, Balizs, and Ivens himself has
an undeniable validity, they are perhaps too ready to remove Regen from its
historical context and to deny a certain progressive, tentatively humanist text
struggling to the surface. The questions posed by Ivens's Soviet audiences (as
he remembers them from his first tour) are admittedly justified. They asked
'Why are you afraid of faces? If you could look at a face with the same frank-
ness with which you look at a raindrop you would be wonderful', and remarked
that Ivens seemed to have 'fallen in love with reflections and textures, showed
too little of human reactions and concentrated too much on objects' (Ivens,
1969, 56-57). But it must not be forgotten that an audience in Soviet Georgia
wept on seeing the film. The fundamental and enduring power of the film's
emotional appeal and lyrical perception should be seen as the first expression
of that same honest, often sentimental lyricism with which Ivens would paint
the dignity of human labour and the struggle against fascism. It must also be
seen as a decisive stride past the cold formal analysis of Brug. Furthermore, 101
Regen's humanist sensibility must be read in the accessibility of its narrative
form, in its devotion to the personal exploration of a familiar everyday human
environment, in its abstention from the alienating constructions of the mod-
ernist mode, in its power to bring tears to an audience fully on the other side of
Europe. It was probably the directness and simplicity of Ivens's lyricism that
had inspired Pudovkin, when he saw Regen in the editing stages, to invite the
filmmaker home with him. It was the same direct emotional appeal that Ivens
himself had admired in the work of Dovzhenko in his dispatches to Filmliga
and which he would consistently refine himself for the rest of his career as
he moved on to greater subjects. This factor led Regen to become one of the
most widely shown and loved of Ivens's films, in both its silent version and in
its two scored sound versions of 1932 and 1940.22 Immortalised in the official
Dutch national film canon (Stuflens, 2008, 82), in dozens of YouTube varia-
tions, and in thousands of Film Studies courses and textbooks, Regen became
a canonical institution, archived in at least eleven different celluloid versions
and often the only Ivens film available in the dry spots and dry periods of film
history, one that would follow Ivens for better and for worse for 60 years.
IVENS AND THE SILENT FILM AVANT-GARDE 1926-1929
11. Philips-Radio (1931): poster by Ivens's girlfriend Anneke van der
Feer won prizes for its stylish modernism but elided the Ivens 'human
element'. original in colour. Courtesy coil. EFJI, Nijmecgen.
CHAPTER2
The Radicalisation of the Poet
1929-1936
'We cannot show this film, c'est trop de realitd'.
-French censor, 1933.
WU BOUWEN 103
The production of WY/ Bouwen (We are Building, 1930, Netherlands, 110-141)
beginning in mid-1929 marks Ivens's immersion in a set of production cir-
cumstances entirely different from those of the Amsterdam avant-garde
milieu that had fostered his first three films. It was the start of a complete-
ly new phase in his career. Commissioned by the educational director of the
Nederlandsche Bouwvak Arbeiders Bond, the Dutch construction workers'
union, the film was to serve the double purpose of celebrating the union's
tenth anniversary and to aid it in its recruitment drive. This was an early ven-
ture of Dutch unions in imitation of earlier efforts by Dutch political and reli-
gious groups to use non-theatrical film in their public work, beginning about
three years previously.
The original conception of the project was one set out by Ivens after receiv-
ing the initial commission and thereupon agreed upon by the union manage-
ment:
The central theme was the professional pride of the building workers.
This really was the old guild idea: the pride and importance of a man who
works with his hands, who builds factories, homes, schools, and dams.
The pride of labour in itself, in its results and its function in society, and
the feeling of dignity, solidarity, and force that comes through that pride.
The sketch ended with the construction workers carrying on their
long Dutch tradition of architecture and construction into the new era
and the fight through their union for the rights of all labour. (Ivens, 1969,
43)
I 12. Borinage (1934):
Ivens and Henri Storck
(in glasses) on location
directing their non-
professional actors,
including workers in
gendarme costumes.
Production still, courtesy
col. FFJI, Nijmegen ©
CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Ivens's eager acceptance of this first commission meant his transition from
amateur to professional status as a filmmaker: his films and those of his Film-
liga associates had never had this kind of financial footing. The traditional
Filmliga was too small and specialised to permit a non-artisanal professional
status, and the colonised commercial cinema in the Netherlands, such as it
was, was not open to 'art' filmmakers. The union commission was an impor-
tant opportunity offering not only a budget, but also an audience. Ivens and
his brother Willem, a physician, prevailed upon their father to let them set
up a separate production department within the family firm CAPI. The infor-
mal collective working arrangements of the previous films thus became for-
malised into the crews of subsequent productions, and Studio Joris Ivens was
formed in 1930. Ivens's co-workers for this first professional film included
Willem Bon, Jan Hin, Joop Huisken, Mark Kolthoff, and of course Van Don-
gen and Fernhout. WijBouwen, then, marks the end of Ivens's private artisanal
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
work and the beginning of his professional use of film, not only as a medium
of personal expression (for it continued to be that), but also as a means of com-
munication of specific messages to specific publics - in short, as the memoirs
put it, 'the integration of an artist in society' (Ivens, 1969, 44).1
Ivens tackled the apparently prosaic subject of construction workers with
an enthusiasm that must have baffled his friends in Filmliga. It would always
be thus: a large proportion of Ivens's oeuvre consists of such commissions
on subjects that might seem minor in relation to conventional film history.
Georges Sadoul (1963, 20) discussed this aspect of Ivens's work, seeing him
as an artist of little, unimportant assignments of the kind that Flaherty, say,
would be of too great a stature to attempt. The integration of the artist in soci-
ety has meant for Ivens many occasional works done as favours to people and
causes, as well as the series of 'masterpieces' that film history is usually about;
it has meant the artist at the disposal of many varied social forces, the artist as
a worker always having to earn a difficult living as well, the artist answering the I 105
demands of film prose and pragmatism as well as the demands of 'art'.
This commission, however, once completed, was not to become just
another 'minor work'. Its various offshoots and revisions would preoccupy
Ivens over the next five years; it would evolve into the two great films of the
Dutch period, Zuiderzeewerken (Zuiderzee, 1930-33, 40-52) and Nieuwe Gronden
(New Earth, 1933, 30). WY/ Bouwen and its various descendants gave a conti-
nuity to Ivens's career during those years despite the two industrial commis-
sions, Philips-Radio (1931, Netherlands, 36) and Creosoot (Creosote, 1932,
Netherlands, 81), the Soviet project, Pesn ogeroyakh (Komsomol, 1933, 50), and
the Belgian film he undertook before leaving Holland permanently in 1934,
Misere au Borinage (Borinage, 1934, 34). After the completion of each of these
projects, Ivens would always return to Amsterdam to make another addition
to the ongoing epic that WU'Bouwen had become.
Ivens was still involved with the final stages in the production of Regen
(Rain, 1929, Netherlands, 16) when he accepted the commission. His first task
was a conscientious tour of building sites throughout the country scouting the
various possibilities of the subject. Eventually the film would cover the con-
struction of housing and offices in Amsterdam, factories and caissons in Rot-
terdam, chemical plants in the south near Maastricht, dikes in the Zuiderzee,
a new railway line in Limburg province, and the sinking of piles in Amster-
dam. Also included were a survey of new architectural trends, and glimpses
of various union activities such as a 1929 Rotterdam congress, outings, and
demonstrations.
The seven-reel version of the film that premiered in Amsterdam at the end
of 1929 apparently did not include all of this material. Some of the extra foot-
age Ivens incorporated into a series of one and two-reel shorts produced for
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
CAPI, including Heien (Pile-driving), Nieuwe Architectuur (New Architecture),
Caissonbouw (Caisson Building in Rotterdam), Zuid-Limburg (Railway-building
in South Limburg), Congres der Vakvereenigingen (Trade Unions congress), Tim-
merfabriek (Carpenters), Jeugddag (Youth Day), and Zuiderzee. The last-men-
tioned film documented the draining techniques in use in the project and was
the specific departure point for the feature-length Zuiderzee finished several
years later.
It is not clear whether the version of WijBouwen deposited by Ivens with
the Museum of Modern Art in New York during the early years of World War
II is in any way a definitive version of the film. In fact, it is unlikely that such
a thing exists. Ivens (1969, 44) mentions that he was editing the last reel dur-
ing the projection of the first reel at the premiere at the start of January 1930,
and it seems probable that the film continued to be modified regularly during
its active use.2 We know for example that the second public screening a few
106 weeks after the premiere was a different version since the director had taken
the 150-minute original with him to the USSR (Stuflens, 2008, 131). The note-
book shape of the feature-length MOMA print also suggests that the film was
never planned or used regularly in the form in which it has been preserved. Its
style is uneven: some parts are infused with Ivens's lyrical flair or with his ana-
lytic perceptiveness, others are efficiently prosaic, still others have a charm-
ingly amateurish sprawl to them. Its overall structure is loose, episodic, and
digressive, though there are tightly cohesive passages. This shape no doubt
reflects the public for whom it was intended, a lay group enthralled by the fact
of seeing itself and its universe on the screen for the first time rather than pre-
occupied with an aesthetic experience in the Filmliga sense.
The MOMA version of Wij Bouwen is organised around short thematic
units focusing on either certain aspects of building - scaffolding, bricklaying,
roofing, etc. - or on various union events - an excursion, for example. The only
suggestion of architectonic design is in the fact that one of the final sequences
takes place high up in a near-completed skyscraper and includes views of oth-
er near-completed buildings set against an urban skyline. The entire film thus
seems to move toward the completion of a job.
In any case, it is the smaller units of the film that offer the most insight
into Ivens's evolving use of the film medium, his commitment to his new sub-
ject matter, and his relationship with his new public. What is immediately
clear in the film is that, despite the radical change in Ivens's subject matter,
the stylistic and syntactic repertory he accumulated in his first three films is
continuing to serve him in good stead and is becoming increasingly refined.
All three modes of visual style developed in those films are basic to this one:
the modernist-inspired analysis seen most clearly in De Brug (The Bridge, 1928,
Netherlands, 16); the spontaneous, lyrical style characteristic of Regen; and the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
semi-documentary mise-en-scene most clearly visible in Branding (Breakers,
1929, Netherlands, 42). Ivens's continuing analytic orientation is still legible
in the frequently bold, diagonal compositions with which he often depicts the
structures or the machinery on the construction sites. There are also breath-
taking bird's-eye-views of the sites and surrounding areas which are reminis-
cent of the views from the top of the Rotterdam bridge in their play of scale
and angle. There are many other echoes as well: a composition celebrates the
play of sunlight on planks falling from scaffolding, a striking travelling shot
uses the elevator scaling the side of an uncompleted building, a forceful trian-
gular composition of a roof situates a worker at the apex. But formal analysis
no longer gives the work its momentum - here it is more a question of a sty-
listic veneer or of the insertion of certain digressive passages, both of which
are exploited to pay tribute to the workers' skill and the immensity of their
creations. A close-up discovery of an intricate pattern of bricks in a newly con-
structed wall is more a testimony to the skill of its builder than a formal artic- |107
ulation in itself.
Heien, one of the short films to emerge from the original commission is
worthy of particular mention as an example of Ivens's continuing preoccupa-
tion with modernist themes. Ivens (1969, 45) describes the film quite accu-
rately as an 'impressionistic' one, centred on the archetypally Dutch activity
of anchoring huge wooden piles in the wet surface soil of Amsterdam. Grelier
(1965, 71) describes the film as 'a homage to workers more obscure than those
in the great epic deeds of our century, the construction of blast furnaces and
dams', but it looks most like a formal exercise inspired by the intense dynam-
ic energy of this job. The film is full of staccato passages of Soviet-influenced
fast cutting conveying the repetitive rhythm of the work. There are also some
fascinating experiments along the lines of Ivens's old interest in the subjective
camera - at one point, the camera is even mounted on the pneumatic ham-
mer. Some of the oblique and low-angle perspectives of the plunging ham-
mers are stunning. Though the short does have recognisable affinities with
Wj Bouwen in its retention of the overall narrative shape of the process - fol-
lowing the transport of the logs through the streets to the final carrying off of
the leftover pieces, and in its considerable attention to the workers themselves
who are doing the work - this tiny gem of a film is more reminiscent of Brug
in its concentration on the compositional and kinetic potential of its subject,
a reminder that Ivens had certainly not abandoned the preoccupations of his
avant-garde period (Heien was first shown only eighteen months after the pre-
miere of Brug).
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
13. WijBouwen (Heien [Pile-driving]) (1929): .
kinetics and composition show lingering
avant-garde preoccupations. Frame
enlargement, courtesy coll. EFJI, Nijmegen.
Federatie Nedl andse Vakbeweging. ©~n
F d rteN d ra d eV k e ei g CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-
Ivens.
G
The spontaneous lyricism of Regen is no less visible in WUjBouwen than Ivens's
analytic sensibility, but ittoo is ultimately subordinated to the primary purpose
1o8 of the project. The cinematographers were evidently called upon to improvise
frequently in the course of the shooting, not only in the largely unstructured
excursion and parade sequences, where groups of exuberant young workers
in their Sunday best are forever moving about and posing for the camera, but
also on the job sites. Here, the camera follows a worker as he moves about with
his tools, recording economically and precisely every gesture of the job. Or it
zeroes in on workers engaged in lunching, washing up, or collecting their pay
envelopes at the end of the day. Here the human subject is not skilfully avoid-
ed as in Regen, but is confronted head-on in all its unpredictability and com-
plexity. The authenticity of the rich behavioural canvas recorded by the artist
is one of the most appealing aspects of the film.
Ivens's tendency towards a kind of documentary mise-en-scene has also
been adapted towards the needs of the new subject matter. Frequently a cer-
tain worker is followed at such close quarters by the camera that it is clear that
there is a collaboration taking place between artist and subject. In some cas-
es an individual worker is patently catering to the camera as it moves in for a
close-up examination of the job, or has paused while the camera changes its
shooting angle or lens. The short-take narrative syntax employed by Ivens in
the description of his subjects' work virtually demanded at this point in the
development of documentary technology the kind of director-subject interac-
tion more normally associated with studio fiction filmmaking, and Ivens was
to deepen his reliance on this mode throughout the next two decades.
As work progressed on Zuiderzee, as the extensions of the original union
project emerged, Ivens's style became increasingly refined and integrated,
achieving at the richest moments of the work a kind of hybrid of these three
stylistic tendencies. In the meantime, I have mentioned the fundamental-
ly narrative syntax that binds these elements together and this needs to be
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
examined at closer range. The narrative syntactical conventions visible in the
avant-garde films are all repeated in WUjBouwen, in fact have been expanded,
systematised, and refined. On the syntagmatic level, for example, Ivens now
relies systematically on the shot/subjective shot trope appearing sporadically
in the early films, and on shot/countershot constructions also borrowed from
fictional narrative wherein, for example, close-up detail of a subject's work
is interpolated with views of his face or his whole figure. Both of these con-
structions imply a direct narrative continuity for the spectator. On the level of
the larger units as well, the sense of narrative sequence is rigidly adhered to:
a short sequence on bricklaying near the beginning of the MOMA version, for
example, begins with a view of workmen carrying bricks up a ladder against
the side of the building before it proceeds to analyse the specific details of the
job itself, the application of mortar, the chiseling of the odd-sized bricks to fit
and so on, and then concludes with a tilt down the facade of the house to pres-
ent the viewer with the dimensions of the finished job. 109
The chronological clarity of Ivens's narrative exposition has implications
- not only in terms of his evolving mastery of a particular filmic discourse, but
also in terms of his new subject and his goal of celebrating the skill and indus-
try of the union members. The material totality of a job is never lost sight of in
the attention to its details. The laying of a single brick is always seen to be an
essential contribution to the overall design of a building. Every worker con-
tributes his effort to the totality, and the montage constantly keeps the impor-
tance of this contribution in view - the vital connection between the individual
and the collective. Ivens's polished use of standard narrative devices such as
that of the establishing shot, or of the standard narrative rhythm of establish-
ing shot/medium shot/insert close-up, can thus be seen as the integral expres-
sion of the basic conceptual framework of the film.
A commissioned film thus provided the terrain for Ivens's first concen-
trated exploration of labour, perhaps the most important single subject of
his oeuvre, and for the first tentative staking out of the ideological stance with
respect to that subject that, as it evolves, will inform the contours of his entire
career. As we have already seen, the overall narrative shape given to the film by
Ivens implies already an attitude to the human endeavour to shape the world
by physical effort - it is a tribute to its rationality, order, and design, to its will,
in short, to its heroism. On the level of the individual shot as well, there is an
implicit ideological stance. I am speaking not only of the patent romanticisa-
tion in such shots as those that habitually depict a group of workers from a low
angle, heroically silhouetted against the sky. More important, in the passages
of more prosaic exposition, Ivens's patient close-up and medium-shot atten-
tion to a single bricklayer, carpenter or metalworker, carefully including every
detail of the work, his instruments, and his expression, implies an unstinting
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
solidarity with the subject. In such passages, by avoiding the mannerisms of
the cinema of personal expression, the artist subordinates his own subjectivity
to that of the worker. The worker expresses himself by his labour and the artist
provides him with the technology whereby he can show that labour to others.
An important step is being taken towards a fundamental radicalisation of the
relationship between artist and subject. The politics of this relationship not-
withstanding, at least one Dutch critic of the day saw Ivens's remarkable ico-
nography as an outcome of "inclination, of instinct" rather than of ideology or
Soviet influence (Jordaan, 1931, 7, quoted in Stufkens, 2008, 146).
Other initiatives attempted comparable radicalisations during the Depres-
sion, in both Europe and North America, and those of Ivens must be situated
with respect to parallel efforts elsewhere. By 1930 both the Empire Marketing
Board headed by John Grierson and the American Workers Film and Photo
League (WFPL), to name only the most prominent such initiatives, were paral-
110 leling Ivens's gradual engagement in the problematic of the representation of
workers on the screen. Ivens, however, an employee of the construction work-
ers union, had perhaps a head start in that his was the only initiative actually
undertaken by workers themselves.
At this point in Ivens's career however, the contradictions inherent in mak-
ing worker-centred films within bourgeois society are still legibly inscribed
on the film in a more or less unmediated form. Although Wegner (1965) has
isolated a breathtaking image of collective endeavour in discussing W'Bou-
wen - a group of workers jointly lift a huge concrete conduit pipe and carry it
on their shoulders, their arms interlocked, the camera following, to its place
in the construction - such images are not typical of W' Bouwen in its early
forms. The collective iconography of Zuiderzee was not yet being inscribed by
the cinematographers as systematically as it would be in the next year or two.
WY'Bouwen pays more attention to the skill of individual workers than of the
collective. As Wegner (1965, 34) is careful to point out, the film stops short of
articulating a single destiny for workers, not to mention positing the terms of
collective struggle.3
The question of the nature and scope of the contradictions imposed upon
Ivens by the film's union sponsorship is also relevant, since it is a question that
will recur with nagging regularity throughout the rest of Ivens's career. During
the fifties, Ivens was to add a detail to his earlier recollections of the WU'Bou-
wen commission. Using a socialist paper as a forum, he remembered that one
of the original ideas for WY'Bouwen had been to show the contrast between
the entrepreneur capitalist who smokes cigars in armchairs, 'building' for a
profit, and the worker who pays with his sweat for the building of homes and
cities (Lacazette, 1951). The union management apparently rejected this idea
as being too combative. However there are traces of it in the finished film, in
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
sequences devoted to the administrative hierarchy of the building industry,
with cigar-smokers having a certain prominence to be sure, and with a cer-
tain incongruity and ambiguity attached to such sequences. At one point, for
example, a man in a business suit is seen looking at the photo of an uncom-
pleted building before we are introduced to the actual building site itself
where roughly dressed workers are doing much more than looking. The point
is suggestive but far from explicit.
A comment in Camera about Ivens's original conception of W' Bouwen
confirms the possibility that WU'Bouwen contradicts or at least skirts Ivens's
political beliefs of the time. The gap between what was believed and what
was permitted to be said was a problem that had already presented itself: 'My
thoughts about content and what I wanted my films to say had actually been
ahead of the films I had made. But now I was going to catch up with my best
aims' (Ivens, 1969, 44).
Ivens scholarship has occasionally evinced confusion as to whether Ivens 111
was a member of the Communist Party of Holland (CPH) at this time or at any
other,4 and it was only towards the end of his life that he allowed a full picture
of his political affiliations and activities of this period to begin to emerge. It
seems unlikely that Pudovkin's invitation of April 1929 would have been pos-
sible without some clearly understood political alignment. Ivens was certainly
involved that year in activities of the Workers International Relief (WIR), an
international workers' aid organisation centred in Germany and funded by
the Communist International (Hogenkamp 1980). He also acted as camera
operator in February 1929 for the film Arm Drenthe: De nood in de Dreutsche
venen (Poor Drenthe: Poverty in the Peatlands ofDrenthe, Netherlands, 15) show-
ing a visit of the Communist deputy Louis de Visser to that impoverished area
and produced by Leo van Lakerveld, a WIR delegate and the founder of Asso-
ciation for People's Culture (Vereeniging voor Volks Cultur, VVVC). Ivens also
participated in workers newsreel activities for VVVC that are remarkably sim-
ilar to those pursued soon after by WFPL in the US, another group affiliated
with WIR:
Up to this time, my experience in idea editing had been rather sparse. My
earliest experience was some time in 1929 when I was given charge of the
film programs for a series of workers' cultural and educational Sunday
mornings. On Friday nights we would borrow a number of commercial
newsreels. On Saturday we would study the material in the newsreels in
relation to the international and national situation of the week, re-edit
them with any other footage we happened to have available to us giving
them a clear political significance, print new subtitles (the films were still
silent) showing relationships between events which newsreel companies
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
never thought of, and which would certainly have shocked them if they
had ever seen our uses of their 'innocent' material. For example, we could
relate the injustice of an American lynching with the injustice of the Japa-
nese aggression in Manchuria, making a general statement about injustice
which we would then localize with a current event in our own country. Pre-
viously miscellaneous material was knit together into a new unity, some-
times with the addition of a spoken word on the public address system or
some cartoons, photographs or Photostats of an editorial from the Dutch
conservative press. After our Sunday morning show was finished we would
take the film apart again, restore its original form and return it to the news-
reel companies who were none the wiser! (Ivens, 1969, 96-97)5
Another account of the same activities by Ivens provides two further signifi-
cant details to this slightly laundered Camera description:
For the Party we used to show newsreels on Sunday mornings to the
workers. That was on the Haarlemmerdijk in Amsterdam. We hired cin-
ema-newsreels and cut them into pieces. We put in between shots from
the Russian revolution and from the construction of socialism there.
After the performance the newsreels were hurriedly restored to their old
state. (Van Zomeren, 1972, 6)
Hogenkamp, a historian of European workers' film movements of the thirties,
provides considerably more information, and some convincing speculation,
worth quoting at length, about the nature of the newsreel activities and other
connections of Ivens with the CPH:
In January 1928 the Vereeniging voor Volks Cultuur (VVVC) was founded
with the aim 'to facilitate the organization of film, cabaret and other
performances, and in such a way that undesirable interference from
authorities who are not kindly disposed towards us can be limited to a
minimum' (De Tribune 1928, 5).6 The foundation of the VVVC has to be
seen as an attempt by the Communist Party of Holland to increase the
effectiveness of its film shows. [...]
De Tribune, the daily newspaper of the CPH, published regular news
about Ivens's trip [to the USSR in 1930] and after his return Ivens lectured
about the experience he gained in the new Russia, on a VVVC morning.
About this time (April 1930) Ivens must have become a member of the
Party. The report of his lecture in De Tribune speaks about 'the words of
comrade Joris Ivens' which 'made a very deep impression and let loose a
real storm of applause' (De Tribune 1930a, 1).
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
THE NEWSREELS
The first VVVC-newsreel was shown September 28, 1930 in the Cinema
Royal, Amsterdam. De Tribune wrote: 'The VVVC-news reel - which
turned out to be nothing else than a common bourgeois newsreel, but
for this occasion a bit re-edited and provided with new titles - really
hit the nail on the head. It made it clear to those present how such
topical news on the screen, shown every week in all theatres, had to be
viewed. It was wittily accompanied by Bern Drukker with improvised
organ-playing' (Tribune 1930b, 4). In contrast to subsequent numbered
newsreels nothing further is to be found on this newsreel. One can
assume that it had been edited the way Ivens described above and then
restored to its original form, and returned to the distributor the next
day.
The next VVVC-morning - this time in the biggest cinema of the I 113
city, Tuschinsky - saw the premiere of the so-called Tribune-film Breken
en Bouwen (To Break and Build) (Tribune 1930c, 1). The title of this film
refers to alterations being made at the premises of De Tribune, alterations
which were carried out by Party members in their spare time. During the
various actions to save this daily newspaper (in that period De Tribune
was attacked from many sides) in December 1930 and January 1931, the
film was intensively used.
The 'first' VVVC-newsreel (the unnumbered one from September
not counted) was premiered on November 16 in Amsterdam. De Tribune
called the newsreel 'a fine choice of images from the southern part of the
Soviet Union, from Baku, Kharkov, Kiev, elucidated by some spoken texts
and parts of an older film in which we see Lenin and Stalin in action, and
later a beautiful series of images showing how the Russian comrades
celebrate their October' (De Tribune 193od, 4). The newsreel was, accord-
ing to De Tribune, 'shot personally by one of the friends of the VVVC in the
Soviet Union'. The identity of this friend of the VVVC is not disclosed (the
names of members of the VVVC film collective were as a matter of course
never mentioned). A cautious supposition points, however, at least in the
direction of Joris Ivens, for Ivens had just made his trip through the USSR
and moreover he had visited some of the cities that were shown in the
newsreel (Ivens 1969, 51). [...]
Why the VVVC-film collective did not continue the series after 1931
is hard to discern. Perhaps the departure abroad of Joris Ivens was a rea-
son. (Hogenkamp, 1977, 6-9)
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
Stufkens updates this account with the detail that the above activity was also
sponsored by another organisation, Internationale Rode Hulp (International
Red Aid, MOPR) and that Ivens himself composed a title card for one 1930
newsreel show, 'The International Red Aid is the organized defence against
fascist terror and [for] class justice', which the Dutch censors banned for
being 'inflammatory', 'exceptionally crude and even untrue', and 'a matter of
worldview', rather than for being syntactically challenged (Stufkens, 2008, 5,
my translation).
The VVVC film activism is highly significant in terms of not only politi-
cal practice but also artistic practice (insofar as these two categories can be
differentiated, which of course this book ultimately argues is impossible).
Although none of this material survives, it is clear that the weekend newsreel
re-edits were prophetic of later work in the genre of compilation, beginning in
earnest the next decade with the masterpieces Nieuwe Gronden and Borinage
114 I and evolving through Ivens's entire career. If we employ William Wees's (1993,
2007) breakdown of compilation subgenres, namely 'compilation', 'collage',
and 'appropriation' as belonging historically to realist, modernist, and post-
modernist aesthetic tendencies respectively, then these early newsreel exper-
iments with their critical edge and their subversive operations of 'wit' and
'alteration" patently belong to the second, modernist category of collage, and
that Ivens was in the forefront of such experimentation alongside film pio-
neers like Esfir Shub and, in the visual arts, John Heartfield. Nonetheless in
this study, I would prefer to use the blanket term of 'compilation' to frame
Ivens's work re-using others' footage since his practice over the decades spans
all three tendencies.
As for the intriguing questions as to why Ivens's avant-garde films would
not have reflected more directly onscreen the indisputable political sympa-
thies he was clearly manifesting offscreen, there is perhaps no answer except
for the historical fact that many elements of the pre-Depression European
avant-garde, for example, the French surrealists, claimed a similar political
allegiance but saw no contradiction in refraining from expressing such alle-
giance in their art, except in the most oblique fashion.
WUj Bouwen then was an important landmark in Ivens's career, not
because it was the film in which he first expressed his political sensibility, but
because it was the film in which he first encountered the aesthetic and ideo-
logical problems inherent in doing so, the web of contradictions surrounding
the act of political filmmaking in capitalist society. The contradictions are leg-
ible in the ideological 'stopping short' noted by Wegner, in the awkward traces
of the original plans for explicit class analysis that the idealistic young artist
had been forced to shelve, and in the disparity between the moments of great
insight and the moments of 'commission' filmmaking. Ivens was to learn that
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
the kind of political filmmaking he was aiming at was not simply the result of
catching up to one's 'best aims', but of hammering out the practical transla-
tion of those aims in a long process of struggle. Ivens had not yet had a film
abandoned by a sponsor halfway, or butchered by the censor, or left idly in the
can without a distributor. But his encounter with the limitations of the union
sponsorship was a mild foretaste of the struggle ahead.
One other aspect of the contradictions imprinted in Wj Bouwen is that
Ivens still kept a foot in the Filmliga camp when engaged in the union com-
mission and his communist cultural activities. In fact, Heien and NieuweArchi-
tectuur were both given privileged exposure at Filmliga screenings. The latter
film, a survey of recent trends in indigenous architecture, was more a trib-
ute to Ivens's architect friends who were members of Filmliga than a gesture
towards the union membership audience. Grelier (1965, 72) describes the film
as a kind of manifesto in favour of functional dwellings. Ivens endeav- | 115
ours to propagate some new ideas in the architectural field: restrained
lines, total purification of structure, and dynamism of reinforced con-
crete. He wants to react against illuminated design, and the decorative
excesses of rococo.
That Ivens gave this shape to footage left over after the (provisional) final cut of
WUBouwen confirms that there was a continuing gap between his own person-
al interests and his obligations to the presumed public of his work.
The generous and perceptive review of WQ'Bouwen in the Filmliga journal
confirms that Ivens was still very successful at this point in addressing the
Filmliga constituency, and adds much to our sense of the context in which
the film was received. The major point of Charles de Graaff's (1930) article
is a comparison of WY' Bouwen to Staroye i novoye (The General Line, Sergei
Eisenstein, 1929, USSR, 121) in which Eisenstein is cast in Ivens's shadow. De
Graaff's predilection for the indigenous Dutch subject matter with its 'unadul-
terated', 'honest work' over the 'margarine-tainted, imported taste' of the Sovi-
et film is perhaps somewhat chauvinistic, but his arguments are revealing. De
Graaff feels that WUBouwen fares better as a propaganda film than The General
Line because it lacks the latter's manipulation of psychological effects. Ivens,
rather, keeps himself simply to the task at hand and tries to make the best of
it, attaining a real 'clarity' from start to finish (despite a weak and too long
middle part), unlike the doubtful impression left by Eisenstein. De Graaff is
clearly aware of the whole new critical problematic introduced by Ivens's new
subject matter, this new species of film, and warns against letting an appre-
ciation for the artistry of the film divert one from the new significance of the
documentary as a publicity film. He makes a very clear distinction between the
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
new Ivens and the old Ivens: Eisenstein is a great individualistic director and
Ivens a primitive social artist who had gone against his own nature in making
a 'cultural film' such as Branding. Ivens's talents do not lie in the direction
of personal expression in the tradition of aesthetic 'individualism' but in the
simple, direct, and honest submission to a 'social' goal, to the use of an indig-
enous subject matter and style (as opposed to the imported tastes of the Film-
liga public, one assumes). Similarly, Jordaan (1930, quoted in Stuflens, 2008,
147) emphasised the Dutch national character of this work, its fondness for
'usefulness' - or what Nichols (1994) would decades later call 'discourses of
sobriety' - and its distaste for 'artistic ambush' (1930, cited by Stufkens, 2008,
18). In what is perhaps another reminder of the tension between Ivens's two
publics at this point in his career, De Graaff finally mentions that in his opin-
ion, Heien and Zuiderzee are the best sections of the collection and will be seen
shortly, adding a note of exasperation with the boring union oratory that had
116 apparently preceded the screening.
Whether or not the Filmliga public as a whole was as perceptive as de
Graaff in recognising and approving the spark of a 'primitive social artist' who
had suddenly found himself, it must have seemed obvious to all that a radi-
cal change of some kind had occurred. As to whether Ivens's union audience
approved of the film there can be no doubt. As far as the film's short-term goal
was concerned, it is said to have reached a public of 22,000 workers in eight
weeks and was extremely successful in its effect on the union's recruitment
campaign (Ivens, 1969, 44). Ivens would later put more value on the success
he had had in reaching the workers and showing them new things about their
lives. For the rest of his career, Ivens would proudly repeat anecdotes about
the initial reception of the film by the union public. One anecdote tells, for
example, of the worker's wife who, according to Ivens's 1951 recollection, told
him, tears in her eyes:
It's very moving what you have done. I thank you for it. You have shown
me something that I've never been aware of during six years of marriage,
that is to say, the dangers, the joys, the beauty of the work of my husband,
all that he had never been able to make me understand. This discovery
will be a precious help to me in our life together. (Lacazette, 1951, 26)
The success of this first union film enterprise was such that it spurred a series
of subsequent films commissioned by unions, including Stalen Knuisten (Fists
of Steel, Jo de Haas, 1930, 30) and Triomf (Triumph, Jan Jansen, 1931, 80).
According to Hogenkamp (1980), this was the start of the genre of the com-
missioned documentary that was going to be typical for the Dutch cinema in
the 1930s, of which the best-known practitioners were to be, in addition to
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Ivens, Max de Haas, Otto Neyenhoff, and Jan Hin (the last named was a veteran
of Studio Joris Ivens).
De Graaff's remark about Zuiderzee being especially popular suggests that
it was the public reception to this part of W 'Bouwen that may have inspired
the group of filmmakers to continue their investment in this project. What-
ever may have been the case in Holland, there can be no doubt that the pub-
lic reception of the film and its predecessors by its Soviet audiences during
the long-awaited Soviet tour undertaken immediately following the premiere
of WQ' Bouwen had an enormous formative influence on Ivens's career: the
memoirs set down over thirteen years later recall in great detail the various
responses accorded the films by the Soviet public. We have seen that Soviet
spectators had certain criticisms of the avant-garde films that Ivens himself
would often repeat to Western audiences. But the Soviets were unanimous
and ecstatic in their approval of the union-sponsored film, particularly of the
Zuiderzee section. There were of course many questions about the living con- | 117
ditions of the Dutch brothers seen on the screen, and curiosity as well about
Dutch construction technology, all of which the 'primitive social artist' found
enormously gratifying. There were however other questions that got directly to
the root of the very aesthetic problem that Ivens was in the process of solving.
Ivens's description of his middle class roots apparently set off the exchange
that resulted in 'one of the most significant evenings in my young film career'.
Camera's description of this event deserves quoting at length:
'You say you are from the middle class, yet the film we have seen was
surely made with the eyes of a worker. I know, because it is exactly the
way I see the work. So either you are a liar and bought the film in Holland
from somebody else or you are a worker who's pretending to be from the
middle class - and that is certainly not necessary here in a workers' and
peasant state', he [a worker in the audience] added smiling.
I couldn't have asked for a higher compliment: The film is exactly the
way I see the work. I had no documents with me and I made no attempt to
prove that I was really a member of the middle class. Somewhat desper-
ate, I tried to pin the questioner down on his sharp observation. I asked
him, 'Where in my film do you see the work shown exactly as you see it?'
'Several places,' he said, 'especially in that heavy stone-work, on the
dike. I have done that kind of work'.
'I see what you mean. I can explain how I filmed that sequence. I
could not find the right angle of my camera on this stone work. So I start-
ed watching the work to see how it begins, how it ends, what its rhythm
is; but still I could not find my camera angle. Then I tried to move the
heavy basalt stones myself because I thought it would be valuable to get
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
the actual feel of the work before filming it. I soon became exhausted
because I wasn't used to the work, but I found out what I wanted to know.
You have to feel first where to get a grip on the stone - not in the middle
but at certain corners. I found out there is a trick of balancing with the
stone - how to use your own weight to get the stone from one place to
another. I found that the greatest strain in the work was on the shoulder
muscles and on the chin. Therefore those were the things to emphasize
when photographing this action because they belong organically to the
work. From then on the camera - its angle and its composition - were all
dictated by that muscle and that chin. Those became the two focal points
for the action. Reality dictated the photography, not any aesthetic effort
to achieve a nice balance of lines and lighting. But this realistic angle also
happened to be the most beautiful angle. I could not satisfactorily and
truly photograph the stone labourer until I found out the physical strain
of his work'. [...]
That man had discovered a secret of my working method which I
myself had not fully realized. No film critic had ever touched the cause
of the realistic quality in my films which they had observed and written
about. It took the common sense of a Russian worker to do this. (Ivens,
1969, 59-61)
Ivens thus encountered a whole set of aesthetic criteria that he had never pre-
viously systematically articulated, the criteria of audience accessibility and
response, of honesty and authenticity of conception, of the priority of com-
munication over pictorial beauty, of the validity of lay criticism. What in effect
occurred with the Soviet audiences was a consolidation of all the changes that
Ivens had already made instinctively in his exploration of a new subject matter,
a new constituency, and a new social goal. Reinforced in his new way of film-
making, Ivens returned to expand Zuiderzee into a full-length film as it now
exists. Of course, the continuation of the project over the next few years would
be shaped by Ivens's gradual mastery of the crafts of editing and directing, not
to mention growing ideological sophistication and aesthetic maturity, which
he would acquire in the three projects taken on in the interim - Philips-Radio,
Creosoot, and Komsomol.
ZUIDERZEE
Zuiderzee, although an outgrowth of WijBouwen, must now be considered as
an autonomous work that had its premiere in May 1930, a month or so after
Ivens's return from his first trip to the USSR. This silent short feature should be
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
considered not only as a WUjBouwen spinoff, but as an early instalment in the
enormous artistic and political growth that would see Philips-Radio, Komso-
mol, Nieuwe Gronden, and Borinage all succeed each other in fast and dramatic
progression. There is ambiguity about what the definitive version of Zuiderzee
might be, if such a thing exists, since the filmmakers kept adding to this silent
masterpiece after each successive landmark in the huge national public works
project of reclaiming the Netherlands' great inland sea - notably the closing
of the preliminary dike the Wieringermeerdike in 1929 and the closing of the
final 34-kilometre seadike in May 1932 - culminating in the final version of the
film three years later as a dramatically reshaped sound film Nieuwe Gronden
that must also be considered as its own autonomous work. The Soviets cer-
tainly considered Zuiderzee as a stand-alone work since they had ordered 200
prints of it right after Ivens's first visit (Ivens, 1969, 67).
Nevertheless it seems to have been the 1932 final dike closing, while Ivens
was in Magnitogorsk, that was the pretext for the filmmakers' decision to I 119
assemble all of their material into a definitive short feature (45 minutes) that
ended up in the Museum of Modern Art and other collections. Van Dongen
would periodically prepare official 'record' films of the dike construction and
of the reclamation of the new lands as part of the ongoing CAPI enterprise and
in consultation with the Maatschappij tot Uitvoering van de Zuiderzeewerken
(MUZ, Society for the Implementation of the Zuiderzee Works). The fact that a
'professional' camera operator from abroad, the French Eli Lotar, participat-
ed in the ongoing cinematography confirms that by this time the Ivens films
were moving considerably beyond the artisanal level of his early work.
Although the term 'epic' was used somewhat indiscriminately in early film
criticism, Balizs's ([1952] 1970, 166) classification of Zuiderzee (along with
Turksib [Victor Turin, 1929, 75], the Soviet epic of railroad-building) as an 'epic
of labour' is in no way hasty or imprecise. This film fulfils all of the descriptive
and evaluative components of the category 'epic' and it is useful to approach
the film from this point of view. For this purpose, my model of the epic is pri-
marily socio-historical (epic as historiography and as socio-historical theory),
but I would also stress elements that might be instrumental in a mythological/
archetypal approach (epic as heroics and as combat mythology). McConnell
(1979) connects four literary-cinematic genres - epic, romance, melodrama,
and satire - to socio-political relationships as defined by Rousseau's 'social
contract'. The epic in its 'primary' variation is about fundamental political
relationships, about foundings, either by warrior gods or by law-givers. The
'secondary' epic, to which Zuiderzee corresponds most, is described as com-
bining these two earlier founding figures in a human hero. The hero contin-
ues the task of the founders, building civilisation and the political state. The
hero's tools and technology for this purpose are given special emphasis in this
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
variation, according to McConnell. Man ofAran (Robert J. Flaherty, 1934, UK,
76) and Oktyabr (October, Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, 1928,
USSR, 95) are films he proposes as examples of this form, but Zuiderzee and
Turksib are both important additions to this list since they bring to the epic
form an innovation made possible by 2o'-centuiy film technology: the possi-
bility of 'present-tense' or 'ongoing' epic historiography.7
The label 'epic' applies to Zuiderzee first in terms of the historical mon-
umentality of the event the film describes: the ten-year construction project
certainly compares to the colossal feats of nation-building, of 'founding', nar-
rated in such other great silent film epics as October, Napoleon (Abel Gance,
1927, France, 330), The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915, USA, 165), and
The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924, USA, 150).
The giant project becomes for Ivens a microcosm of a society caught up in
the process of actively asserting control over its destiny, a society's mastery of
120 its natural environment to the satisfaction of its needs. Furthermore, the film
offers a vision of the functioning of such a society as encyclopedic in its way as
the works of Eisenstein and Griffith, from the opening images of children play-
ing in the sunlight as their fathers pause for lunch, an image that proclaims
the continuity of human society before a single clod of earth is moved, to the
final images of new land appearing from beneath the foam. Such universal
implications of the film are on the one hand a reason why the film is often said
to have lasted exceptionally well' and on the other hand a reason why Ivens
would soon feel that he had to step so definitely beyond it with the succeeding
films, in the direction of a new specificity and immediacy.
The problematic of technology in the foreground of Ivens's avant-garde
period and of the whole modernist movement of the twenties is finally here
resolved. McConnell (1979, 62) states, 'in the vision of the secondary epic,
then, tools play almost as important a role as do heroes. For heroes in this
14. Zuiderzee (1931-33): the epic hero's
strength and skill in the stone-moving
sequence that fascinated Soviet worker
audiences. DVD frame capture. Federatie
Nederlandse Vakbeweging. © CAPI Films,
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
id-
pr
-~
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
world are defined by their command of tools, of the technology which makes
founding possible'.
While Zuiderzee continues many of the conventions of the machine films of
the earlier years - there are forests of swinging cranes that are balletic in their
precision and a continuous celebration of the graphic and kinetic force of the
dredgers and pumps - the technology is subordinated socially to the human
project of social construction. There is no rhapsodisation of the machine in
isolation from its use value. The crane, Ivens's favourite image in the film,
is always connected editorially to its operator and then to its function in the
unfolding of the project. If a sequence contemplates for an extended moment
a particularly lyrical juxtaposition of crane movements, it immediately turns
to the deposit of a load, the taking up of another, and then to a summation of
the current situation of the dike in relation to the sea. A profoundly material-
ist vision of society is thus articulated by this epic. Technology is related to its
function with such clarity that the spectator is reminded of Vertov, who could 121
hardly show a loaf of bread without tracing its route from farmer to consum-
er, or a strip of film without following it from cameraperson to audience. As
with Vertov, the ultimate term of reference is always the societal subject. The
opening sequence is of crucial significance in this regard. The image of the
workers sitting with their hefty bowls of soup as their children play declares
the ultimate principle of history, the fundamental Marxist axiom that human-
kind reproduces itself through labour. A similar sequence later in the film is
an additional reminder of this principle: footage of workers leaving the site at
the end of the day and washing up again includes their children playing and
waiting for them. Rich in the spontaneous detail of the quotidian, the footage
is interpolated with flash-forward dissolves of the completed project, a device
that is basic to the epic repertory.9 Ivens juxtaposes in this way both the new
generation and the ideal new environment that is being shaped for them by
the present generation. Like all great epics, Zuiderzee has the shape and the
dynamism of the movement of history and implies a conception of history as
coherent, purposeful, heroic, even utopian.
Zuiderzee partakes of the traditional romantic mode of epic narrative,
exalting as it does the super-human powers of its heroic protagonist. Ivens's
particular inflection of this mode, like Eisenstein's, derives from contempo-
rary Marxist ideology, and would resurface in subsequent decades of his career
as socialist realism left a more 'personalized' imprint on his vision: for now his
heroics are embodied in collective rather than in individualist terms. Baizs
([1952] 1970, 68) sees Zuiderzee as a tribute to the rationality of this collective
hero: 'An invisible force is made visible in this film; the directing intelligence
of man, just as an invisible wind is made visible by the bending of treetops.'
Ivens's strict adherence to the logic of causality and sequence in the struc-
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
ture of the film is at the base of this impression. Each phase of the gigantic
project is clearly connected to the next, never viewed in isolation: the willow
matrices are towed out into place in the water so that a ballast of rock can be
dropped into them forcing them to sink so that they can serve as foundations
for the earth and clay that are to be moved. The animated diagram-map that
traces for the spectator the gradual metamorphosis of the Zuiderzee into the
Yselmeer simply echoes the already clear precision of the filmic exposition.
But these heroics of human design are perhaps secondary in Ivens's
vision to the rather more cinematic heroics of human labour, of strength and
struggle. Zuiderzee and Turksib are also, according to Baizs ([1952] 1970, 68),
'film memorials to human effort, proclaiming the glory of human labour, toil
which at the cost of skill and sweat is labouring to make this earth a garden'.
These heroics of the worker, discovered tentatively in WjBouwen, extended
but ultimately suppressed in the industrial films because of their publicity ori-
122 entation, rediscovered and transported to a socialist realist mythic plane in
Komsomol, are here consolidated in the artist's own indigenous environment.
Perhaps for this reason, these heroics are expressed in Zuiderzee with an integ-
rity and passion that Komsomol, the work of an expatriate, would not succeed
entirely in putting across. Here they are given the fullest and richest embodi-
ment of Ivens's career. The romantic affirmation of the proletariat as hero, as
the dramatic subject of the film, of its labour as the prime dramatic impetus
of the film, arises from the deeper principle held by the artist: the faith in the
proletariat as the subject of history, and in labour as the means by which his-
tory is transformed.
Ivens's heroics are rooted in specific cinematic approaches to the sub-
ject. As we have already seen, the most typical attitude of the camera is lit-
erally a respectful one, a medium or medium-long low-angle perspective of
one worker or a small group: one memorable shot is of two men shovelling
clay in a complete synchronisation of effort, one tossing his shovelfuls of
clay onto the shovel of his co-worker who in turn passes it on while the first
worker reloads. As in Komsomol, the symbolic propensities of such a choreo-
graphic configuration are exploited to the fullest: the spectator is led by the
length of the shot to be caught up in the physical rhythm of the movement
and thence in its symbolic aura. The opening images of the film are an even
more forceful poeticisation of collective labour. A file of men is seen in long
shot carrying one of the long willow coils through the shallow water, cre-
ating a graceful moving arc composition on the screen, the leaders in the
foreground, the whole configuration caught in partial silhouette against the
water and the sky. The most famous such sequence is one justly celebrated
by Wegner (1965, 34) for its heroic connotations of collective strength. This
sequence, with its two perfectly synchronised columns of men, arms inter-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
locked, carrying a huge concrete conduit pipe, is a short one but radiates the
entire complex of idealism.
15. Zuiderzee (1931-33): the choreography
of collective work with its 'entire complex
of idealism' would become the Ivens
visual signature throughout more than five
decades. Frame enlargement, courtesy coll.
EFJI, Nijmegen. Federatie Nederlandse
Vakbeweging. O CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
123
Although Ivens is maybe borrowing from the Soviet repertory in his romanti-
cisation of his subject, particularly in the use of silhouette effects and chore-
ographic configurations, there is no sense in which his attitude is a borrowed
veneer, imposed arbitrarily on the Dutch subject. His heroics are deeply root-
ed in his close-range observations of, and intimate involvement in, the local
situation. Ivens is careful to balance in a way far more systematic and purpose-
ful than in Wj Bouwen a sense of the individual with the sense of the collec-
tive. He fully employs his license as omniscient epic narrator to move directly
from his colossal bird's-eye perspectives of the entire construction site and
the aforementioned long-shot constellations to close and medium-close anal-
yses of the work of individual men. The emphasis in such close perspectives -
for example, a sudden close-up examination of the hands and tools of a single
worker (who acknowledges the camera with a dignified, matter-of-fact glance)
during a long-shot sequence dealing with the construction of frames for a
concrete embankment - is on the strength and skill of the individual worker's
contribution to the total effort.
The stone-moving sequence that so interested the Soviet audience fits into
this general pattern: the close-range analysis of the single worker's effort in
this job includes close-up attention not only to the subject's straining neck and
bulging arms as he grapples with the boulder, but also his feet firmly braced in
their clogs, and the surface of the boulder as he chips it and eases it into place.
At the end of this sequence, both worker and spectator admiringly survey the
completed stone-paved embankment. This link between the individual task
and the global situation is a major absence in IndustrialBritain (1932, UK, 21),
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
the almost exactly contemporary, similarly motivated project directed by Fla-
herty for Grierson. Consequently, a whole range of Luddite, anti-union, and
pro-Empire sentiments may be inferred from the British film's exaltation of
the self-sufficient craftsmanship of the solitary worker. The individual-glob-
al link is essential both to the epic form and to Ivens's ideological underpin-
nings of that form.
Zuiderzee, filmed prior to and concurrently with Komsomol, naturally
makes no use of the principle of extended dramatic personalisation that Ivens
would appropriate from socialist realism at that time - in fact the individu-
al workers that do emerge so concretely in Zuiderzee are occasionally literally
'composite' workers, ideal subjects constructed in the montage. All the same,
the collective subject of the film is not an anonymous mass but a collective of
specific individuals frequently glimpsed with great expressiveness and detail.
One has only to think of the portly worker on his lunch break who emerges
124 I through a trapdoor onto the deck of a barge and strolls about surveying the
surrounding work site with self-satisfaction, all the while balancing his huge
bowl and spooning down his soup with aplomb.
A further principle of epic dramaturgy, that of combat or struggles, also
provides the filmwith a basic structural principal. If the struggle against nature
is a central theme of Ivens's work ready to be gleaned by an auteurist sifting
of the filmography,'0 this struggle, colossal in proportions, finds the quintes-
sential expression in Zuiderzee. It provides the work with its basic structure of
accelerating tension and a climax of epic magnitude. To be specific, it is the
final closing of the dike that provides the film with this mounting intensity as
the project moves through its various phases: the construction of the barrages,
the sinking of the piles, the preparation of the cribbings, the work of the exca-
vators, the erection of concrete and metal frameworks for the dikes, the work
of the barges unloading earth and stone on the dike foundations, and the final
battle to close in the last gap in the finished dike with barges and excavators
together. If in traditional epics the antagonists were rival camps on the human
level, here society as a unanimous whole becomes pitted in its epic struggle
against the elements, specifically the North Sea.
The final struggle, in which the ocean finally submits to society and the
earth, was composed, as Ivens (1969, 94) remembered in Camera, of a num-
ber of smaller closings of secondary dikes as well as that of the final closings
of 1929 and 1932. Welded together by periodic overviews, occasionally aeri-
al, in which the armies of workers and cranes dump endless tons of clay and
earth onto the dike and the waves continually lash back to undo their work,
the climax is without question a brilliant study in action editing. Ivens's note
of pride in his description of the 150-metre (c.5.5 min.) dike-closing sequence
'as the most complex and successfully dramatic editing I have ever done', is
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
entirely justifiable. Ivens attributes the success of the sequence to the fact that
the material was shot according to three separate opposing points of view, the
camera operators adopting respectively the perspectives of the sea, the land,
and human society, thus providing three complete 'hubs' for the editing. Cer-
tainly in the slightly compressed and sharpened Nieuwe Gronden version of the
climax (1934) the sense of combat among three poles is quite pronounced.
This scene is further enhanced by the application of an Eisensteinian juxta-
position of shots containing contrasting directions of movement. Each move-
ment of earth or water or machine contradicts the movement of the previous
shot. Explosive splashes of sea-water are cut so as to seem to be leaping up in
reaction to the huge glistening cargo of mud that has dropped across the sur-
face of the screen. Or, an imperturbable pipe-smoking crane operator swings
a lever to the right upper corner of the frame as if in response to a surge of
white water moving in almost the opposite direction. There are also numer-
ous shots in the manner of Brug in which contrasting movements are captured I 125
on the single frame at once, thus heightening the dynamism of the climax;
for example, a current of water rushing in one direction is imprinted with the
shadow of the crane moving in the opposite direction. At one point there is in
fact a whole trope of four such shots each filling the frame with cranes moving
in opposite directions background and foreground, the effect being cumula-
tively hypnotic. Predictably, the rhythm is accelerated by many short inserts,
lasting less than a second, of explosions of foam or of the teeth of a crane-
scoop sinking ferociously into a pile of mud. (This technique would be used
later to denote explosions in The Spanish Earth [1937, USA, 53].) This strategy
is relieved from time to time by virtuoso tracking shots that make full use of
the availability of the cranes at hand: one such shot lasts a staggering ten sec-
onds as the camera soars along with its close-up load of mud in an expansive
right pan that keeps in the background a high-angle view of the left-rushing
current below until the load is released. The resultant rhythm of the climactic
battle is thus not one of unmitigated acceleration but of a mounting of tension
through fits and starts, through pauses and regroupings. According to Wegner
(1965, 56) the working out of this final climactic rhythm made such demands
on Ivens's powers of concentration that he would have to set it aside for days
at a time before returning to it. The final point at which a released load of mud
refuses to sink beneath the water, settling instead on the emerging dike, an
image signifying the victory of society over its adversary, is a moment of tre-
mendous exhilaration even for spectators whose visual literacy has been worn
away by the 80 years of sound cinema that have intervened between the editing
of Zuiderzee and the present.
Zuiderzee must now be analysed as Ivens's final, most mature expres-
sion of filmic discourse that can be described as both indirect and narrative.
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
Nichols (1976, 34) identifies two basic modes of address of the documentary
film, direct and indirect, 'according to whether or not the viewer is explicit-
ly acknowledged as the subject to which the film is addressed'." The former
mode, which does explicitly and directly acknowledge the viewer, was used
almost exclusively by the classical sound documentary during the approxi-
mately 30 years of its heyday (1930-1960): the dominant diegesis of the classi-
cal sound documentary was almost always situated wholly or in part on a level
of the soundtrack, and could be pure narrative, as in, say, The Battle of San
Pietro (John Huston, 1945, USA, 32), pure exposition (which is in any case a
sub-category of narrative as far as filmic discourse is concerned) as in The Song
of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1935, UK, 38), or, most often, a combination of both,
as in Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread, Luis Bunuel, 1932, Spain, 30) or Nieu-
we Gronden, with or without additional rhetorical stances such as exhortation,
interrogation, exclamation, etc. By the time Ivens had completed Zuiderzee,
126 the apogee of his silent, indirect, narrative style, this style had already been
tentatively challenged by the abrupt disjuncture in filmic practice occasioned
byKomsomol and was about to be permanently reshaped in Borinage and Nieu-
we Gronden, the sound version of Zuiderzee, as we shall see. The formal shift
from the indirect narrative mode of Ivens's silent documentaries to the direct
mode, in which he would combine expository, denunciative, and hortatory
elements with the customary narration, coincides with a radical shift in the
socio-political dimensions of his filmic practice as well. This shift involved a
realignment of the artist-subject-viewer configuration posited by his work so
that his films would intervene directly in socio-political problematics. Zuider-
zee was the last of his films to abstain from this kind of socio-political inter-
vention.'2
There are minor departures from indirect address in Zuiderzee, it is true,
glimpses of the posture of direct address soon to be taken up: an occasion-
al silent intertitle addresses the spectator directly in its illustration of certain
phases of the dike construction. However, these intertitles function as inter-
mittent summaries of the visual narrative rather than as the determining
diegetic element, as the intertitles of Borinage and the soundtracks of Komso-
mol and Nieuwe Gronden would do. Otherwise, the spectator is not explicitly
acknowledged as the subject of the film's address in Zuiderzee, the last film in
which this is true. As far as Nichols's additional distinction between narrative
and expository diegesis is concerned, the tendencies we have already noted
in Ivens's documentary discourse towards a narrative structure are continued
here, enriched by expository impulses, such as an occasional close-up insert-
shot that adds a sense of 'this is how it was done' to the more continuous 'this
happened'.
The visual style of this overall narrative indirect mode integrates with a
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
maturity and coherence all of the tendencies hitherto distinguishable in
Ivens's work. The analytic tendency expressed in the digressive and flamboy-
ant aestheticism of Brug, is here traceable, for example, in the boulder-moving
sequence, in certain long-shot compositions, or in certain vestiges of 'Soviet'
cutting. The mise-en-scene tendency is visible in the extreme precision of the
blocking of the figures in a sequence such as the conduit-pipe sequence. The
spontaneous 'life-caught-unawares' tendencies are especially noticeable in
the candid scenes of workers relaxing between shifts. All three tendencies are
integrated smoothly into the seamless, narrative form of what should be seen
as one of the last great silent documentaries and one of Ivens's best works.
I have already stated that Ivens was not present at the actual final clos-
ing of the dike. He was in fact spending less and less time in the Netherlands
during this whole period. The sound montage of Philips-Radio took place in
Paris, the shooting of Creosoot took him all over Europe, and of course the sec-
ond Soviet visit of almost a year considerably loosened his ties with his original I 127
milieu. As he went further and further afield for longer and longer stretches
of time, Ivens relied more and more for the actual shooting of the Zuiderzee
project and for the post-production work on the other films on the team of
filmmakers that he had more or less trained. Van Dongen, who was apparently
still involved in the camerawork at this point, Fernhout, Joop Huisken, a CAPI
salesman, Jan Hin, a theological student, Willem Bon, a medical student, as
well as Eli Lotar, a politically inclined French cameraman who apparently
took leave of absence from the Zuiderzee project in the spring of 1933 to shoot
Bunuel's Las Hurdes.'3 The collective spirit with which Branding and Regen had
been realised here became the fundamental principle of the production of the
film. There is no doubt that Ivens's vision and inspiration gave Zuiderzee and
the other films their coherence, but this soon-to-be familiar pattern of delegat-
ing large amounts of creative responsibility to co-workers is formalised here
for the first time. Ivens would contribute to the camerawork in Philips-Radio
and Borinage, but Creosoot, Komsomol, and all subsequent works were shot
by cinematographers. Van Dongen for her part would gradually take on more
responsibilities as editor over the next decade. Although her role in Ivens's
films would never be as all-embracing as it would be with Flaherty, it was nev-
ertheless crucial. Even before the American period, Van Dongen's reputation
as editor and as innovator of procedures for sound montage in documentary
was well established and her career began to take on more and more of its
own autonomy. Correspondingly Ivens's own role as director took on more
and more aspects of the producer's role. One probable outgrowth of Ivens's
increasing preoccupation with the demands of producing would be the great-
er conceptual coherence of his films. Subsequent work would attract little of
the criticism for cinematographic gimmickry and aestheticism that had occa-
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
sionally met the films for which Ivens had been cinematographer. Another
aspect of this new role for Ivens was that it was a reflection of the increasing
role of the films as interventions in specific social situations.
Zuiderzee was widely distributed only in its 1930 version. The gradual
winding down of the activity and harmony within the avant-garde constituen-
cy is likely responsible for the lack of evidence of any subsequent high-profile
distribution. An additional factor, of course, is that by 1933 the silent docu-
mentary was an obsolete form, and directors who continued to work in this
mode were usually persuaded to add sound, as Flaherty was with Man ofAran
the following year. In any case, Ivens himself contributed to the immediate
obsolescence of Zuiderzee by making his own shortened sound version, Nieu-
we Gronden, shot and edited in the summer of 1933.
128 PHILIPS-RADIO
Capital was not far behind Labour in recognising Ivens's talent and a poten-
tial use for it. Ivens had only just returned from the USSR in the spring of 1930
when he received an invitation from the publicity department of one of the
largest and most prosperous of Dutch firms, the Philips Radio company at
Eindhoven, to make a film in its factory. Both Ivens and the family firm already
had a relationship with Philips (Stufkens, 2008, 92-93) and the young filmmak-
er was immediately attracted by the generous contract and budget offered,
since his artistic career had yet to be consolidated as a profitable undertaking,
this commission would finally establish the production section of CAPI as a
solid and prestigious outfit in its own right.
The terms of the commission were quite general: 'They left the choice of
sub-text entirely in my hands. Their directives at this early stage were: "Look
around the factory as an artist would. Whatever attracts you in the plant - go
ahead and make a film about it"!' (Ivens, 1969, 61). Like Flaherty's and Gri-
erson's industrial sponsors, the company was less interested in an explicit
publicity film than an 'arty' film that would bring them prestige and publicity
indirectly. Philips was an early proponent of the idea of corporate sponsoring
of 'art' filmmakers: Jean Renoir had already been a beneficiary in 1928.
For Ivens the Philips project had more than financial advantages. The
budget and the factory setting meant that for the first time he would be able
to make a film with the luxurious technical facilities taken for granted by stu-
dio filmmakers. At Philips, Ivens was to have the full cooperation of the com-
pany's engineers and full use of the factory's technical facilities, as well as
the means to hire a crew of six members (made up mostly of his Amsterdam
co-workers including Van Dongen, Ferno, Huisken, and Kolthoff, but also the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
French cinematographer Jean Drdville, a French avant-gardist who had been
an assistant of Marcel L'Herbier as well as Krull's lover). The crew and the
engineers transformed the factory into one huge studio, adapting the cranes
and conveyor belts for the travelling shots. Ivens even had a special scaffold
constructed for the filming of some of the glass-blowing material. He also had
access to a formidable array of Philips lighting equipment: the film was to
be shot almost entirely with artificial interior lighting and Ivens experiment-
ed with a rectangular frame fitted with very hot Philips incandescent lights
attached to his camera, achieving some interesting novel effects thereby. In
addition, the cast of thousands paid by Philips were to obey him exactly and
not to complain as he hovered about their workplace with his battery of assis-
tants and lights. The camera chosen for the film was the new Debrie, notable
at the time for its non-reflex viewfinder, a camera much larger and more sta-
tionary than the handheld Kinamo, which was to be available as a backup only.
The team's pleasure in experimenting with this real-world studio is palpable I 129
in period accounts.
Perhaps the major attraction for Ivens was that Philips-Radio would be his
first sound film - and the first Dutch sound film to boot (Stuflens, 2008, 94).
The prospect of pioneering in sound technology for the documentary greatly
excited both Ivens and Van Dongen, who moved into this area as her own field
of specialisation. Very little had been done in the field of sound documentary
up to this point. During Ivens's stay in the Ukraine, he would certainly have
heard tell of Vertov's ongoing work on Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa (Enthu-
siasm: The Donbass Symphony, 1931, USSR, 67) and have absorbed the great
excitement within the Soviet film industry about sound in general. It is also
probable that he would have seen or heard a great deal of Ruttmann's Melodie
der Welt (Melody of the World, 1929, Germany, 40) as well, then barely finished,
which was to be shown in Paris as part of a double feature with Philips-Radio in
October 1931. In preparation for the sound montage, Van Dongen undertook
an intensive six-month apprenticeship in Paris at the Tobis Klangfilm studios
studying the Western Electric system, and she and Ivens were mentored by
Rene Clairwho was then working on his second sound feature Le Million (1931,
France, 81). Van Dongen spent a further period at UFA in Berlin studying the
RCA system. There she was joined by Lou Lichtveld, the Filmliga music spe-
cialist who was to come up with the score for the film and who brushed up on
the technical aspects of this assignment with Oskar Fischinger, the avant-gar-
de animator. The film was to be shot silent like almost all sound documenta-
ries of the thirties - with the astonishing Soviet exceptions of Enthusiasm and
Esfir Shub's K.S.E. - Komsomol Shef Elektrifikatsii (The Komsomol - Sponsor of
Electrification, 1932, 56) - and the soundtrack would be added later in Paris.
The shooting took about five months during the fall and midwinter of 1930-
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
1931, but not surprisingly the editing and sound editing took even longer,
with the premiere occurring in the fall of 1931.
The shape of the finished film is among other things a vivid testimony to
Ivens's ability to vary his style and sensibility not only according to his budget
but also according to his constituency and his sponsors. Philips-Radio could not
be further from the straightforward style of WYjBouwen; it recalls instead the
elaborate, self-consciously artistic style of Brug and Regen and of Ruttmann's
Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927, Ger-
many, 65). It was replete with all of the Soviet-inspired excesses in montage
virtuosity which for contemporary audiences indicated art and sophistication
and which the Philips management undoubtedly equated with the company's
prestige. The pace is often frenetic, the continuity is often obscure, and the
indulgent use of such late silent mannerisms as superimpositions, accelerat-
ed motion, and other lab tricks, makes the film seem like the swan song of the
130 I twenties as much as a harbinger of the sound era.
The repertory of the machine films and ballets mdcaniques of the late silent
era is much more visible than in Brug - there are stunning tableaux of spin-
ning bobbins, close-ups of dancing cogs and gears, choreographies of fields of
cylinders, tubes, and microphones, and compositions saturated with gadget-
ry. A number of sequences seem to be following Potamkin's ([1930] 1977, 30)
prescriptions for the elimination of the human presence from the machine
film; there are whole sections dealing with highly automated parts of the plant
in which the presence of the workers is suppressed and in which repeated
shots of conveyor belts moving products and parts past and towards the cam-
era, filling the screen with orderly mechanised movement create the domi-
nant impression. The concluding passage, a half-minute 'ballet' of spinning
'Philite' speaker discs against a black background gives a final touch of lyrical
fantasy on the verge of abstraction, no doubt inspired by Fischinger but also
anticipating later work by Norman McLaren - but that did not stop Philips
from excising this touch of whimsy from later corporate versions of the film
(Stuflens, 2008, 104).
Other passages recall the tendency of Ruttmann in Berlin, and Ivens in
Regen to a lesser extent, to characterise the city's inhabitants by portraying
only isolated body parts, usually hands in Ruttmann's case. Philips-Radio has
a passage, for example, devoted to hands screwing together parts on a moving
assembly line, and another devoted to hands slapping labels on the cartons
of finished products. Often, the cutting is excessively abrupt and the effect is
entirely rhythmic because there is insufficient time for given shots to convey
their visual information. The film has dated badly in those passages where
imitative stylistic veneers and intrusions are most self-conscious. Ivens (1969,
63) would later recognise the temptation that the Philips commission had
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
posed 'of becoming so glib and skilful in my work that I could do this sort of
film as easily as a juggler keeps five balls in the air'.
16. Philips-Radio (1931): Ivens's 'job was
to concentrate on the people in the plant
rather than the gadgets'. DVD frame
capture. O Philips, Amsterdam/CAPI Films,
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
131
In its stronger moments, Philips-Radio departs from the glib tendencies, how-
ever, and does live up to one contemporary commentator's remark that the
film is about 'the relation between men and machines' (Winter, 1931, 267-
269), or Ivens's (1969, 63) assessment that his 'job was to concentrate on the
people in the plant rather than the gadgets'. Such moments build upon Ivens's
discovery in W Bouwen of a subject matter and a style more suited to his per-
sonality and world outlook. One recurring image is the face of a worker framed
by the objects of his or her work in a foreground arrangement, for example, a
low-angle view of a draftsman framed by his tools arranged beneath him on a
transparent draughting table. Some of the assembly-line sequences achieve a
similar effect insofar as workers are kept in view long enough and a coherent
enough picture of their work is conveyed, so that the repetitiveness of the job
and the nervous tension of the worker are effectively communicated.
Part of the reason for the unevenness of the film's perception of the
human factor in the plant may very well be the intimidating effect of the shoot-
ing technology on the spontaneity of the workers, particularly the heat and
glare from the lighting. Ivens does recall employing tricks so that employees
wouldn't be nervous when filmed, for example, pretending to shoot with the
larger camera in one direction while another surreptitiously takes the desired
shots. No doubt the tendency to rely on disembodied hands and feet in certain
passages of the film is also a reflection of this effect.
This problem, however, did not apparently affect the celebrated glass-blow-
ing images. According to Wegner (1965, 37), this material constitutes Ivens's
first masterpiece. By any standard the three scenes built from it are a remark-
able tour de force, the longest single theme of the film, invariable singled out
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
by critics for praise. It occupies a prominent place near the start of the film,
interpolated twice by passages on other subjects, and is strikingly different
in visual and editorial quality from the rest of the film. Ivens's discovery of
these medieval craftsmen buried in the heart of a Bauhaus factory, distending
their cheeks around their ovens, clearly left an indelible impression on him:
their faces would become familiar elements of several Ivens compilation films
over the next decades. Ivens was struck so forcefully, not only because here
were men who habitually die at the age of 45 and earn little more than assem-
bly-line workers, but because here was a perfect visualisation of the theme dis-
covered almost by accident in the previous commission and reinforced by his
Soviet audience, the theme of labour. Philips had brought Ivens face to face
with a particularly 20thcentury form of capitalist exploitation, the dehuman-
ised rationalisation of the assembly line. But, although the monotony and
tension of work on the line is dealt with adequately in the film, Ivens did not
132 I linger unduly on it. Instead, he sought out those images of labour that not only
expressed a more classical vision of the capitalist relationship, the toil of mus-
cles rather than nerves, but also those that echoed his classical Marxist faith
in human potential and the dignity of the human struggle for subsistence. The
glass-blowers offer images of suffering and exploitation, but they also offer
images of strength, skill, struggle, and even heroism.
If Ivens's vision of these men differed radically from the romanticisation
of his contemporary Flaherty when confronted with the identical subject in
IndustrialBritain, or the childlike wonder of his junior compatriot Bert Haan-
stra in Glas (Glass, 1958, 11), it is because Ivens never lets the raw beauty of
their images obscure the very bitter social context in which they are inscribed.
He recalls the editorial means by which he brought home his own particular
perception of those men:
In polishing Philips-Radio, I learned a great deal about structure, particu-
larly the dramatic structure of a sequence. For example, in one sequence
I wanted to show the hard physical labour that still had to be done even
in such a modernized factory as Philips. I found such hard labour in the
glass-blowing department. Heavy lumps of molten glass are pulled apart
like taffy. Two men handle each lump and one blows air through a pipe
into the lump to get the right diametre and thickness for the long glass
tubes that are being made. As the blower walks backward blowing the
glass thinner and longer, his cheeks puff out - further than you could
ever imagine cheeks could puff. The cheeks lose their human aspect and
begin to look like those of a frog.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
17. Philips-Radio (1931): Ivens repeated
such views 'to silence the audience and
make them aware of the inhuman aspect
of the work'. DVD frame capture. © Philips,
Amsterdam/CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
I foresaw that many people would laugh at this effect so I deliberately
repeated the glass-blower's puffed cheeks in an even bolder close-up to
obtain a more grotesque effect, and then came even closer to the flesh 133
of his cheeks and intercut this close-up with the slow careful backward
steps that he took throughout the process. This deliberate repetition
tends to silence the audience and make them aware of the inhuman
aspect of the work. (Ivens, 1969, 64)
The effect of Ivens returning twice to sequences based on this same material
has much the same effect as this escalation of increasingly intense close-ups.
This rhetorical, accumulative piling up of images was a device to which Ivens,
unblinking chronicler of horrors of zothcentury war and peace, would return
many times in other contexts.
The basic narrative constructions of the previous films are used inPhilips-Ra-
dio to articulate the new subject matter but with a much more self-conscious
sense of purpose and of rhythm than in W j Bouwen. A typical sequence fol-
lows the familiar pattern of establishing long or medium shots introducing the
long intent close-ups of hands, faces, tools, and products, regularly interrupt-
ed with medium- or long-shot summarisations of various stages in the process-
es. All of this unfolds with a deliberate, reflective rhythm, with a minimum of
subjective intervention on the part of the filmmaker. The many perspectives of
the glass-blowers are habitually low-angled; one contains an echo of the motif
already mentioned, a medium view of the blower framed by the close-up fore-
ground view of the bulb he is forming, a carefully efficient image that encap-
sulates the worker, means of production, and product all in a single intimate
frame. Perhaps it is Ivens's growing sensitivity to the importance and mechan-
ics of audience response that is behind the new purposefulness of his narrative
construction. In retrospect he was minutely aware of the way the orchestration
of the glass-blowing material affected different kinds of audiences:
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
In Philips-Radio, there is a man who is blowing into a ball of glass, and I
can be in a theatre with my eyes closed and tell what kind of audience is
watching the film. An intellectual public, for example, laughs at the first
image; then at the second, it laughs even harder with great guffaws; but
the third time, when the worker is disfigured in close-up, looks at the
spectator, then this audience remains silent. This look is almost an accu-
sation. However, with workers, from the very first images, they remain
silent. They understand that physically, because they know what you can
do to the human body. (Ivens, [195511965, 74)
It is interesting that here, in these sequences, there appear to be none of the
problems mentioned in connection with the other parts of the film, the effect
of the cumbersome camera and lighting paraphernalia on the spontaneity of
the workers. The reason is obvious: the atmosphere of trust and cooperation
134 I between artist and subject pioneered on the scaffolding of Amsterdam con-
struction sites, and the related mode of documentary mise-en-scene, prevented
such problems from arising. With the glass-blowers, no tricks were necessary.
Aside from this striking progression of three glass-blowing sequences in
the first half of the film, the overall structure of Philips-Radio is rather loose.
A vague chronological framework groups early stages in the manufacture of
various products in this first part and later stages such as testing, packing, and
shipping in the final part. Grelier (1965, 73) detects a three-part structure to
the film: the first establishing the factory as a whole, the second treating the
details of the various manufacturing processes, and the third suggesting the
power of the firm through surveying the shipping of the products, this last part
interpolated with more glass-blowing imagery. But Ivens's intention is clearly
less to offer a clear systematic view of the manufacturing processes, showing
the links from one stage to the next as he would do in Zuiderzee, than to build
up random impressions of the various environments of the factory. This 'asso-
ciative, fragmentary, discontinuous approach' did not please everyone at the
company of course, but the brass felt their prestige artistic commission had
achieved its goals (Stufkens, 2008, 11).
Ivens's montage notes support this interpretation of the film. At a fairly
advanced stage in the editing, Ivens listed all of the various sequences, already
organised around thematic and geographical reference points, according to
what he called 'important moods' and noted alongside each sequence the var-
ious feelings, impressions, and questions that the sequence was intended to
evoke in the spectator. Alongside a sequence about the manufacture of receiv-
er tubes, for example, the list includes:
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Many small things
Carefully
hey! a little pigeonhole
funny machines
a lot of work by hand
That must be the controle [tube-testing site]
What a huge amount!
I have a lamp like that at home.
This one is expensive - don't let that one drop.
Alongside a sequence in an electro dynamo department:
Big halls,
Also transport up above [aerial conveyor belt]
Monotonous
still it's clean and simple
this goes fast 1 135
Control
there go those loudspeakers again [Vertovian motif using the PA system
of the factory]
Pretty face. (Ivens, production notes, JIA)
It is clear from these examples that Ivens's intention, at this stage, is neither
to dazzle with formal virtuosity nor to methodically transmit detailed informa-
tion about the manufacturing processes, but to puzzle, delight, and fascinate
the lay viewer with an accumulation of visual impressions, to alternate initial
puzzlement with reassuring glimpses of familiar objects recognisable in these
strange surroundings. The question of course is whether the modernist intri-
cacy of some of the editing did not occasionally contradict this decidedly pop-
ulist orientation or whether it successfully contributed to the desired effect of
puzzlement.
The use of sound in the film appears to be designed to complement this
aim of building a progression of random impressions and moods. The use of
a written text is restricted to several silent intertitles, giving a technical detail
here and there meant to introduce certain sequences, 'mechanical glass-blow-
ing', for example. Aside from the intertitles and a single spoken word at one
point ('Beautiful'!), there is no commentary, the tendency towards an omni-
present voice-over that would dominate documentaries at a later stage in the
thirties (including some of Ivens's own) having happily been forestalled.'4 The
sound effects added in the Paris mixing studios by means of the labourious and
much-publicised process of breaking down real sounds and adding synthetic
ones (there was even a radio-trained vocal imitator standing by making the odd
contribution) serve mainly to accentuate the visual impressions being transmit-
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
ted, the sound of flames and breath in the glass-blowing sequences, for exam-
ple." The score, composed by Lichtveld for a small jazz orchestra (including
trumpet, clarinet, piano, and drums, with harp strings occasionally audible) also
seems planned to reinforce the moods created by the visual impressions and
was integrated with the sound effects track. Despite its unquestionable tech-
nological innovativeness, what is most striking today about the soundtrack is
its timidity, particularly in comparison with such work as Enthusiasm, in which
sound plays an organic part of the aesthetic structure and filmic experience
rather than just a supporting role. There are some nice touches, such as an aural
joke in which background music turns out to be in-film music being played by
a Philips phonograph,'16 but Wegner's (1965, 38) claim that Ivens and Van Don-
gen were already surpassing Alberto Cavalcanti's English sound documentary
experiments of three years later is absurd. Philips-Radio could be shown silent
without a serious loss of filmic coherence, all the more so since speech (and
136 I text) were downplayed to encourage international audiences (Stuflens, 2008,
94). The film's major achievement in regard to the sound it had pioneered was
a complex but discreet subtlety rather than any structural breakthrough. It was
not until Komsomol, undertaken the following year, and Nieuwe Gronden that
sound would play an integral role in Ivens's documentaries.
That one of Ivens's desired impressions in an assembly-line sequence
was 'monotonous' suggests that he was attempting to make a few covert crit-
ical comments regarding his subject matter, under the nose of his sponsors.
Among the desired 'moods' for the glass-blowing sequences were 'heavy work'
and 'why don't they do that with a machine'? It is clear that the audience was
intended to ask such questions as this latter one in response to the film. But
whether such subversive intentions on the part of Ivens were fully realised, and
how they may be considered in any analysis of the film, are complex questions.
Upon its premiere in September 1931 in Amsterdam and the following
month in Paris, accompanied by a brilliant modernist poster by Ivens girl-
friend Anneke van der Feer,'7 Philips-Radio was greeted with unanimous criti-
cal praise for having risen above what were already felt to be the cliches of the
industrial film; beyond that, however, the film was read according to the ide-
ological predispositions of the spectator. Leftist critics invariably saw the film
as a denunciation of rationalised capitalism. Lon Moussinac of L'Humanitd
was the most eloquent of these exegetes:
[The film shows] how intelligent spirits can sometimes get the better of
their difficulties and, against all predictions, succeed in presenting us,
within a publicity theme that has been imposed, whole films, in a broad
sense, with a powerful social character.
Industrial Symphony [the title given to Philips-Radio upon its French
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
release, October 1931] is dramatic. It sets up in high, strong images and
a wilful rhythm, the spectre of a moral and physical ruin that threatens
those workers who are victims of capitalist rationalization and those
whom the machine hasn't yet been able to liberate from certain jobs.
Here is a 'model' factory, that is to say, where everything is contin-
uous: machine, equipment, organization, so that industrial profit is
carried to its maximum, so that production reaches this curve of intensity
beyond which there can only be catastrophe. Machines and muscles taut
for a stretch of hours that wears out, ruins, and disorganizes the poor
human mechanism, the assembly line that permits no more mistakes or
clumsy gestures, that ties the worker to his job and, instead of liberating
him from a superfluous part of labour, forces from him a production
whose accelerated rhythm and unorganized allocation only serve to
increase the profit of the bosses - until the crisis. [...]
Industrial Symphony is, to a certain extent, all the while being a suc- |137
cessful film in cinematic terms, an act of accusation against the present
economic system. It is for this reason that we're laughing at the idea of it
serving as a publicity film. (Moussinac, 1931)
If the critics of LesNouvelles littdraires (Arnoux, 1931, 1o),LeMonde (1931), and
La Revue du cinma (Dreyfus, 1931, 37) all gave more or less the same reading
to the film, as well as Baizs ([1952] 1970, 99) (and of course Wegner [1965,
36] and Grelier, [1965, 73]), their perspectives were not at all shared by other
critics who could easily have been seeing a different film entirely. The critics
of Filma, Vu, L'Intransigeant, and Le Haut-parleur (all 1931) all joined Journal
des ddbats (1931) in universally praising the poetic power of the film and its
'kaleidoscopic vision [that ultimately] drew the spectator into a whirlwind and
created an impression of greatness and of ineffable power', with no reference
whatsoever to possible subversive texts.
The fundamental ambiguity of his film thus exposed,'8 Ivens gave a great
deal of thought to the problem of working within the restrictions of the com-
missioned film. Philips's only restriction had been their refusal to allow Ivens
to shoot outside the factory, that is in the workers' homes; the commissioning
executive N.A. Halbertsma had been tolerant enough to allow him to leave in
a short comic sequence about the upset of a loading trolley that the manage-
ment felt put the firm in a bad light and did not seem phased that almost all
of the firm's international branches returned the film as unusable (Stuflens,
2008, 103). Moreover Halbertsma's corporate feelings had been hurt when
Ivens talked to the Dutch communist paper about Philips's animosity to left-
wing filmmakers (De Tribune 12 November 1931, quoted in Stufkens, 2008,
103; Schoots, [1995] 2000, 105).
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
An article by Ivens ([19311 1965) appearing in the Paris Revue des vivants
the same month as the French premiere of Philips-Radio and shortly after the
completion of Ivens's second industrial film, Creosoot, is striking as a revela-
tion of some of the still unresolved contradictions in his thinking about his
work at that point. The article also reflects the rapid growth he was undergo-
ing at the same time and can be seen as a manifesto of the aesthetico-political
principles that motivate the best aspects of his work of the first two years of
the decade. Not surprisingly, the article alludes constantly to the conceptu-
al terms of reference of the avant-gardist disdain for the commercial cinema
with its pandering to an ill-educated public, its mystification of the independ-
ence of the artist, its adherence to the notion of some built-in progressive
character of the avant-garde cinema:
The avant-garde cinema is a cinema that tends to provoke the interest
138 I and the reaction of the spectator. And I call the avant-garde cinema
that cinema that takes the initiative of progress, and the guardian, the
flag-bearer of cinematic sincerity. The independent cinema has in effect
an auto-critique that drives it towards progress, the industrial cinema has
only the critique of success, the critique of a badly educated public.
The industrial cinema brings only technical progress. The avant-
garde cinema adds spiritual progress thereto. (Ivens, [193111965, 143)
However a new element has also been introduced to this standard formula-
tion, the Grierson-inspired use of the word 'documentary', Ivens's first system-
atic use of it in print that I am aware of.'9 For Ivens at this point, documentary
becomes the sole medium by which the avant-garde can struggle against the
establishment film industry. This is because, he continues, documentary has
some kind of privileged access to truth and truth is all one needs to force Hol-
lywood to its knees:
The documentary is the expression of reality in its causal and inevitable
aspect. [...]
In the present state of the cinema, the documentary is the best
means of finding the true directions of the cinema. It is impossible for it
to be obscured in the theatre, in literature, or music-hall, all that is not
cinema. [...]
It is impossible for a documentary director to lie, not to be in the
truth. The subject matter will not let itself be betrayed: a documentary
necessitates the development of the human personality of the filmmaker
since only the personality of the artist distinguishes him from any actual-
ity whatsoever, from simple cinematography. [...]
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Documentary must not be content to appeal to emotion, the liter-
ary exaltation of the beauty of the subject matter, but it should provoke
latent activities and reactions. (Ivens, [19311 1965, 142-144)
To some extent Ivens's championship of the documentary within the con-
text of the avant-garde is a confirmation of what had already occurred.
Although Ivens shows traces of the twenties avant-garde dogma of the
'pure cinema," the European avant-garde had been greatly weakened since
the beginning of the Depression and the cultural arena thus vacated had
been occupied by a corresponding increase in political expression. In any
case, if the foregoing discussion does have a defensive (as well as ideal-
ist) ring to it, it is because Ivens may have felt the need to account for the
fact that his contributions to this independent truth-centred medium were
in fact sponsored by two of the largest industrial organisations in Europe.
The argument that follows is that the industrially sponsored documentary 1 139
has much more freedom than the products of 'Big Film Industry', that is
Hollywood:
In effect, since the documentary lives principally from commissions, and
since it is the best means of publicity for industry, its director only has to
deal with one man: a businessman, foreign to the cinema. It is thus in the
interest of this director to succeed in making a film whose truth and doc-
umentary character are at the same time the only criterion. In contrast,
when he works for Big Industry, he finds himself shooting along with
councils of administration, with artists, with censorship. He is limited,
he is no longer independent, and, so to speak, in a certain kind of slavery.
(Ivens, [193111965, 143)
If Ivens does seem somewhat less ingenuous here than, say, Grierson was
when tackling the same issue with his tough-minded pragmatism during
the same period, perhaps what Ivens (1969, 66) describes in Camera as the
'inner conflict' of those years is responsible. After all, Ivens could not have
been unaware of the implications of Philips's decision to limit the shooting
to the factory premises, nor of the major campaign being conducted by the
CPH specifically against Philips during the shoot. In fact, he must have sur-
mised, as does Hogenkamp (personal communication, December 1980), that
the Philips restriction was not unrelated to the campaign.
In any case, a third element entering into Ivens's article, the expression
of certain left-populist terms of reference, anticipates the more developed
political sensibility of Borinage and Nieuwe Gronden a few years later at which
time the 'inner conflict' would have been left behind. This emphasis is almost
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
directly contradictory to the avant-gardist snipes at the ill-educated public ear-
ly in the same article:
The documentary film is the positive means left to the avant-garde
cineaste of working and of putting the most of himself, as representative
of the expression of the masses, of popular expression into his work.
[...]
The good director lives surrounded by his subject matter, by reality.
He chooses on each occasion to interpret only a part of this reality, and
the success of his film is at the same time dependent on the trust of the
masses in his personality and provoked by this trust, the human person-
ality of an individual who has chosen a part that seems important to him,
and only a part of reality, leaving all the rest aside.
In other films, there doesn't exist a criterion as real and as impor-
140 I tant as this for evaluating the personality of the director or his integrity.
(Ivens, [193111965, 143-144)
The irony is that talk of the 'trust of the masses in his work' and of the artist as
'representative of the masses' is still at the theoretical stage for an artist whose
constituency remains largely an intellectual elite. Yet, though such principles
were probably first absorbed in the Soviet milieu into which Ivens was about
to immerse himself for the second time, there is little doubt that as theory they
had been tested at least provisionally in the crucible of concrete experience,
with the shooting of Wij Bouwen and Philips-Radio. The camerawork in the
glass-blowing sequence alone, with its intentness, its clarity, and its intimacy,
is adequate testimony to this, and Ivens's recollections of the editing of this
material in response to specific audience feedback and specific didactic goals
confirms this. Taking these limited but important theoretical and practical
advances at this stage to their logical conclusion in terms of production, spon-
sorship, and distribution, etc., would be a step that would be consummated
only after Ivens's return from his second Soviet trip.
At that point, Ivens would be able to analyse the Philips experience with
more clarity and consistency, with the additional benefit of almost two years
hindsight, recognising as he would later state in Camera (1969, 62) that the
Philips film 'could not possibly be a work with forceful social implications'.
He explained to a Paris audience in 1933 after his return from the USSR:
One is obliged in such a film to make an abstraction of social life both
inside and outside of the factory, and you end up making a film that
shows only the process of manufacture, without any relationship with the
social life of the individual: when you are constrained to do without the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
real dramatic action, you replace it by the shot angle and montage, for
example, the effort of the glass blower. (Ivens, 1933c, 171)
And, as he added in Camera a dozen years later,
Almost as a reaction against the restrictions placed upon the film's social
content by the Philips Company - understandable from their point of
view - I concentrated on achieving the highest technical perfection,
polishing the camera work and exploiting every nuance of texture in the
glass and metal surfaces of the factory. (Ivens, 1969, 63)
During the Paris lecture quoted above, Ivens praised the current working
methods and choice of subject matter in the USSR, and drew a number of les-
sons for the European avant-garde:
I 141
The director should not manufacture easy illusions to lull and amuse the
masses. His duty is a nobler one. He should embrace the deepest prob-
lems that are posed to us every day and the examination of these prob-
lems alone will make real works of art and artists. [...] I could remake this
film more or less well and there will be others who follow me, but there
are new possibilities in the development of documentary film. That is the
task of the avant-garde. (Ivens, 1933c, 171)
Despite such uncustomary vagueness, the audience knew exactly what was
meant by this committed young filmmaker fresh from the Magnitogorsk blast
furnaces - that the ambiguous artistry of Philips-Radio had been reassessed
and found wanting. An enraged Filmliga critic used the next issue to attack
Ivens for spouting communist propaganda at the lecture and to deride the
fatuous 'radical chic' of his audience (Sluizer, 1933). Other Dutch critics pro-
nouncing on Philips-Radio in 1931, no doubt less ideologically invested than
Moussinac, were less enraged than Sluizer but symptomatically ambivalent
- one muting his praise by complaining that Ivens had not paid attention to
the people operating the machines he deftly portrays, another critiquing an
objectivity that needs more emotion in a work that is 'too impersonal, too flat
and monotonous' (Het Volk 29 September 1931, Maasbode n.d., both quoted in
Stufkens, 2008, 104-105).
I say 'symptomatically' for two years of Ivens's development had had pro-
found effects on his relationship with the Filmliga community and his Dutch
constituency at large, and the rupture was at hand. All the same, 80 years lat-
er, Philips-Radio has turned out to be one of Ivens's most canonical works,
ensconced in the 2008 DVD box set and exhibited in the permanent collec-
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
tions of both Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and Paris's Centre Pompidou as a
key document of European modernism and modernity.
CREOSOOT
Creosoot is a commission received and hastily completed during the last phase
of the sound montage for Philips-Radio, it is a feature-length industrial doc-
umentary on the creosote industry sponsored by an international cartel in
which an old school friend of Ivens had a position of authority. Like the Philips
film, this assignment was undertaken not so much because of any personal
interest in the subject (although Ivens apparently relished the location shoot-
ing required in Poland, Belgium, Paris, and Danzig), but out of a desire to keep
the CAPI production unit intact and profitable, and thereby to assuage the per-
142 I sistent tensions over Ivens's neglect of the family business.
The film chronologically followed various phases of creosote extraction
in industrial settings in the Ruhr valley, in Paris, and in Belgium. An open-
ing section on the lumber industry in the Polish interior culminated in a
sequence treating the river transport of the lumber down the Vistula to Danzig
and thence by sea to Amsterdam; a final movement demonstrated many of the
uses of this wood preservative and led to a climactic rapid montage of Paris
streets showing their creosote-treated paving blocks. The producers also add-
ed an animated appendix prepared by UFA's scientific department showing
microscopically the various causes of wood decay and other topics.20
Drdville came back to shoot this film, and Ferno was to assist since he was
not yet ready for the entire responsibility for the camerawork (Ivens, 1969, 65).
According to some reports, Ivens relegated most of the work to these two men
because of his involvement with the completion of Philips-Radio (Michaut,
1953, 5). Camera, however, does contain some fascinating first-hand reminis-
cences of the shooting in Poland. The first Creosoot showing happened in Ds-
seldorf in October 1931, just a month after the Paris premiere of Philips-Radio,
followed by the official January 1932 bow in The Hague.
By all accounts, Creosoot continues along the same lines established by
Philips-Radio, although in the eyes of the Filmliga critic (H.S.[cholte] 1932)
and one other unidentified Dutch critic ('De Creosootfilm' 1932), it was not
nearly so successful. As with the earlier film, the film's most obvious charac-
teristic was Soviet-style montage, 'well mastered and therefore very supple and
discreet', according to the latter critic and the source of its 'power' accord-
ing to the other, but still, with both writers, disappointing in comparison
to Philips-Radio. Both critics as well remarked on not only the Soviet flavour
of the film, but also specific parallels to Turksib. This was no doubt as much
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
because of the similar subject matter as of the specific approach to the cut-
ting. The comparison in any case was not a favourable one: the Filmliga critic
stated tersely that the film was not better than Turksib, while the other elab-
orated that the film was not a Turksib, but a reminder of Turksib and, what is
more, a reminder at inappropriate moments. The Filmliga critic added that
Creosoot's 'gimmicky procedures' provoked admiration in their own right but
not as part of the whole film, and, as if in an echo, his compatriot spoke of
'a lot of little, pretty filmic things'. Such 'things' singled out by the two crit-
ics for praise included Drdville's recognisable talent in the treatment of the
Polish forest landscape, the provocative camera angles and movements, and
the 'extraordinary liveliness', accomplished framing, and play of line in the
shots. Their consensus about the film's overall impression must have been
disheartening for Ivens and contributed in no small way to his decisions about
his future: 'our interest is awakened, but not our deep feelings [...] persuasive
but never grips us', 'an overall creative spirit guiding the film has not material- 143
ized', 'the mis-union of the film's overall plan and its details', 'does not show
the stamp of definite artistic quality or vision', 'too long for the general public,
should be cut from feature length to one half or one third'.
18. Creosoot (1931). The Polish forest phase
of the creosote commission allowed views
of 'heavy, skilful handwork' reminiscent of -
Zuiderzee. Production still, courtesy coll.
EFJI, Nijmegen © EFJI, Nijmegen.
In short, the basic problem with Philips-Radio had compounded itself:
moments of clarity and control and a polished, derivative stylistic veneer
could not redeem a film from its lack of personal commitment. It is not sur-
prising that Ivens was not able to put much creative energy into the task of
depicting creosote manufacturers as 'benefactors of humanity', as he would
later describe the assignment in a rare moment of irony (Ivens, interview with
author, February 1976).
The newspaper critic's reference to the lumbering sequence as being
particularly impressive and the shooting-plan/shot-list in the Ivens archives
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
('Drehbuch Film Creosote', JIA) suggest that this forest phase of creosote man-
ufacture, with its emphasis on manual labour in a natural setting, may have
brought out more of the Zuiderzee Ivens than the Philips-Radio Ivens. Certainly
many of the shots listed treat manual labour, at medium and close range - one
shot description actually specifies 'heavy, skilful handwork'. Much of the riv-
er navigation material with its rafts and transports, and the harbour material
with its cranes and ships must also have brought out the archetypal Dutchman
that critics are always identifying in Ivens (for example Grenier, [1958, 205]).
According to Wegner (1965, 40), who cannot have seen the film, Drdville's style
may have been apparent in the landscape and overview material, but Ivens's
own approach informed the images of workers. One can speculate that the
opening lumbering sequences were the Creosoot equivalent of the glass-blow-
ing material in Philips-Radio.
The shot-lists for the rest of the film confirm the critics' impressions that
144 I the predominant style was Soviet-modernist, self-conscious, and analytic.
They reveal a great interest in movement both of the camera and within the
frame - of falling trees, sliding logs, and swinging cranes - in diagonal shot
composition, and in montage built on contrasting graphic composition - a
number of simple storyboards evoke this principle. It again seems permissi-
ble to speculate that the later industrial material in the Belgian blast furnaces,
the Ruhr chemical factories, or the Paris gas factory brought out even more of
the conventions of the machine film than this part. Another principle enter-
ing into the shot lists is the consistent searching out of establishing shots, fol-
lowed by a much closer, varied perspective of an event. The implication is that
the now experienced documentarist is covering himself well on location: one
typical entry specifies 'detail and overview' ('Detail und Uebersicht').
In conclusion, then, Creosoot was anything but a step forward for Ivens.
Instead he was merely continuing to waver indecisively between the two ten-
dencies, modernist and realist, as he had with Philips. Even the critics I have
mentioned were astute enough to recognise this basic tension at work, one
calling the film more an 'absolute film' than a documentary, and referring to
it pejoratively as 'artsy' (filmkunstnmverheid') before asking the fundamental
question, 'How do you rise above a documentary by means of a documentary'?
Or, to phrase the question from our point of view, 'Why should a documentary
try to rise above "being a documentary"?'
In any case, the Creosoot salary made it feasible for Ivens to accept the
standing invitation to return to the USSR to make a film at that time. It was
not the first time in film history, nor the last, that the success of a conscien-
tiously fulfilled, but uninspired, assignment would permit a director to follow
a project dear to his or her heart, nor that Capital would inadvertently finance
another cinematic milestone on the road to Socialism.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
KOMSOMOL
The 1931 article in which Ivens discusses, alternatively defensively and des-
pairingly, his work for industrial sponsors has a conclusion that, curiously,
Grelier (1965) omits from his reprinting of the text:
The documentary must not be content to be an appeal to the emotions,
a literary exaltation before the beauty of the subject matter, but it should
provoke latent activities and reactions.
By excess of individualism and artistic spirit, Europe is refractory to
the social action of the documentary.
I therefore cannot achieve the development of my idea, of my cine-
matic ideal except in Russia, where the masses are used to these activities
every day, so as to be able to understand the social truth of the documen-
tary. (Ivens, 1931, 520) 1 145
These final lines reveal a temporary resolution of Ivens's 'inner conflict' with
respect to the industrial film, his sense of the 'artistic suicide' ahead of him if
he continued in the vein of Philips-Radio and Creosoot (Ivens, 1969, 67). The
longstanding invitation from the Mezhrabpom studio in Moscow to make a
film in the USSR seems to have been grasped as a kind of escape hatch; Komso-
mol, the film that resulted, the story of the construction of a Magnitogorsk blast
furnace and of the parallel evolution of a young Kyrgyz herdsman-turned-riv-
eter, bursts with a rough utopian exuberance that is a marked contrast to the
slick efficiency of the industrial films.2' Ivens's entire career would follow the
same pattern: his periods of struggle and survival within the bourgeois film
industries of Holland, the USA, and France would inevitably lead to yet anoth-
er pilgrimage to wherever the current horizon of socialist promise was situ-
ated at the time - the USSR in 1932, Spain in 1937, Eastern Europe in 1945,
China in 1958 and 1972, Cuba in 1961, Indochina beginning in 1965. One can
also understand this pattern as cycles of personal and professional renunci-
ation - even of shame and penance, whether public or private - and subse-
quent reparative refocusing. Inevitably films would appear in the new settings
entirely different in structure and feeling from the others, alive with fresh new
inspiration that would then be re-integrated into subsequent work - before it
in turn would get transformed through the same pattern.
We have seen how Ivens's first Soviet trip had a formative impact on his
sense of the relation between his art and his public. The second trip would
have an even greater impact, far beyond the simple fact of providing an alter-
native to refractory Europe. The 1932 Soviet experience would introduce him
to the aesthetic of socialist realism then being confirmed in theory, practice,
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
and official sanction. The exposure to socialist realism would permanently
affect his aesthetic sensibility, stimulating important additions to those ele-
ments of Ivens's work already evolved: labour as a subject matter; analysis,
spontaneous shooting, and semi-documentary mise-en-scene as complemen-
tary constituents of a hybrid form; narrative as structure. The new additions
would be features distinctive to the Soviet tradition of socialist realism: in
terms of dramatic form, a 'personalized', semi-allegorical romanticism; in
terms of rhetorical posture, a didactic form of direct address based on a trans-
formed relationship between artist and public.
It was no accident that Mezhrabpom was Ivens's host studio and the pro-
ducer of Komsomol. Mezhrabpom, a Soviet-German film organisation, was
officially affiliated with the Workers International Relief (WIR), which was the
studio's major shareholder upon its inception in 1924.22It had supported the
workers' newsreel activities in which Ivens had been involved in Holland and
146 I handled most of the foreign links of the Soviet film industry. In Germany, for
example, its branch, Prometheus Films, had produced the great social real-
ist features of the last years of Weimar, such as Piel Jutzi's Mutter Krausens
Fahrt ins Gluck (Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness, 1929, 121) and Brecht's
and Slatan Dudow's Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wemgeh rt die Welt? (Kuhle Wampe, Or
Who Owns the World?, 1932, 71); in the US, the WIR sponsored Ivens's future
co-workers in the Workers Film and Photo League (WFPL). In the USSR itself,
Mezhrabpom's activities included the sponsorship of numerous foreign film-
makers, both communists and sympathisers, among whom refugees from the
new regime in Germany were the most prominent at the time of Ivens's pro-
ject: Jutzi, Hans Richter, Erwin Piscator, Baizs, Gustav von Wangenheim, and
other less well-known actors, technicians, and writers. Babette Gross ([1967]
1974, 168), wife of WIR head Willi Mtnzenberg, remembered that one pur-
pose of this generous liaison program was the eventual setting up of 'film cells
of proletarian art' in the capitalist West. If this is true, the Ivens sponsorship
must certainly have been their most successful venture in this direction. Of
course, the Soviets must also have hoped to absorb foreign expertise and expe-
rience at the same time.
Ivens arrived at Mezhrabpom as the Soviet film industrywas going through
a period of transition that would result in its second great period. At the time
however it looked more like a crisis than a 'turning point' or a 'crest', euphe-
misms used by Ivens in one of his dispatches home to Filmliga (Ivens, 1933a,
65). According to Leyda's (1960, 437-438) reckoning, 1932 and 1933 saw the
lowest output of significant new feature releases of any years between 1923
and 1948.
For one thing, Soviet filmmakers were not yet fully settled into the new
Tager optical sound technology that Soviet scientists had had to develop inde-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
pendently. The few first sound documentaries had been released as early as
March 1930, but it was not until the first half of 1931 that three documen-
taries appeared in which the soundtrack was not simply added as an after-
thought. Among these, of course, was Vertov's ground-breaking masterpiece
Enthusiasm in April, so advanced in its conception of sound for film that crit-
ics attacked it savagely for its 'miaowings',23 and so farsighted in its defiance
of preconceptions about the technical capabilities of sound recording (he
even took mobile recordings on location in the Donbass mines in which he
was shooting) that very little progress was built on his achievement. The first
dramatic sound films appeared in the late spring and summer of 1931 while
Ivens and Van Dongen were doing their own pioneering work on the Philips
soundtrack in Paris. These were Raizman's Zemlya zhazhdet (The Earth Thirsts,
1930, 6o) and Ekk's Putyovka v zhizn (Road to Life, 1931, 105), a Mezhrabpom
film praised by Ivens (1933a, 66) in his dispatch. Kozintsev's and Trauberg's
Odna (Alone, 1931, 90) appeared that October, and Protazanov and Yutkevich 147
would follow with their first sound film later that fall, just before Ivens's arriv-
al. During Ivens's stay itself, Pudovkin would be working on Dezertir (The
Deserter, 1933, 105), his first great sound film, also at Mezhrabpom.24 The
Soviet project, then, was to be an opportunity for Ivens to gain experience and
inspiration as a sound filmmaker.
Ivens's article speaks of the great urgency he felt in the film industry dur-
ing his Sovietvisit about the introduction of sound (1933a, 66). PraisingEnthu-
siasm and Road to Life as outstanding examples of Soviet success with the new
technology, Ivens speaks also of the progress in the radio industry being made
in conjunction with the strides in film sound, suggesting that this particular
area had in fact higher priority in terms of the USSR's immediate needs. Vertov
presumably shared this belief: Ivens in Komsomol would incorporate Enthu-
siasm's conceit of the radio as the vital link connecting various parts of the
USSR. Stuflens (2008, 118-120) has also noted the thread between Philips-Ra-
dio's iconography of radio waves and that opening Komsomol, positing the
continuity between the capitalist and communist tropes of radio communica-
tion as being the celebration of 'industrial and technological progress'.
Ivens may have profited also from Vertov's experience of shooting sound
on location in industrial sites, and of counterpointing documentary image
and sound in non-synchronous relationships. Although Komsomol lacks
Enthusiasm's extravagant flair and versatility, Ivens's achievement is a wor-
thy one, demonstrating, according to Leyda (1960, 286), 'the advantages of a
track-picture relationship that was as free as anything used in the fictional
film up to that time'. Certainly the soundtrack is much more obtrusive than
that of Philips-Radio, expanding the experimentation of the earlier film with
much more self-assurance and flamboyance, assaulting the spectator with a
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
symphony of clanging, of explosions, staccato riveting, and sirens. Very often
the soundtrack is instrumental in the narrative as well, for example, in the ear-
ly part of the film where the flute of the 'obsolescent' Asiatic society is contrast-
ed to the industrial sounds of the new revolutionary society encroaching upon
its pastoral serenity. The film's dialogue scenes are intermittent and are gen-
erally less impressive than the rest of the film. No doubt the attempt at direct
sound recording gives them the stiffness that sets them apart in a film that
functions otherwise quite fluently as a non-synchronous sound film. Ivens
(1969, 71) is quite terse about the technical problems with the still experimen-
tal equipment of the newly developed Soviet Tager system - 'the bulky prim-
itive sound equipment seemed twice as unwieldy as it would have anywhere
else' - but the problems must have been formidable indeed. The dialogue
scenes most often involve the central character Afanaseyev, a shepherd turned
Komsomol member and riveter, and usually foreground the special problems
148 of amateur performers delivering over-scripted lines.
19. Komsomol (1933). The challenges of
nonprofessional performance: Afanaseyev,
Kyrgyz shepherd-turned-Komsomol-
member-and-riveter, at the Magnitogorsk
workers' assignment office window. DVD
frame capture. O CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
For the score, Ivens recruited Hanns Eisler, the famous Berlin composer and
Communist co-worker of Brecht. Eisler profited enormously from being set
down in the bleak Magnitogorsk setting, finding folkloric melodies and instru-
ments there, as well as concrete sound motifs, all of which greatly enrich the
film's music. The score played as important a structural role as the concrete
noise soundtrack. Eisler himself described one such instance:
There is a scene in the film where a young Kyrgyz comes to Magnitogorsk
to present himself at the workers' assignment office and then leaves
filled with astonishment, crossing the city towards his lodging. This
scene gave the opportunity to mount a big orchestral number that makes
the spectator feel the importance of the incident. For the important
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
feature of Magnitogorsk is not only the blast furnace but also this: men
are changing the steppes and building a great project that, in its turn, is
changing the builders. A new type of man is thus being born in the work
process (Eisler, quoted in Grelier, 1965, 158-159).
The score climaxes in a heroic chorus, 'Ural'! set over a torch-lit procession
of Komsomol shock brigades. The sequence culminates in a first view of a
blinding river of molten steel from the new blast furnace accompanied by
showers of sparks against the night sky. It is a merging of image and sound
that sums up the mood of the entire first Five-Year Plan period.
20. Komsomol's climax is a heroic chorus,
'Ural'!, set over a torch-lit procession of
shock-brigades. DVD frame capture. ©
CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan- 149
Ivens.
The coming of sound was not the only reason for the feeling of both crisis and
adventure in the air upon Ivens's arrival. The proclamation of the first Five-
Year Plan in 1928 had profoundly altered Soviet filmmakers' conception of
their task and provided them with radically different subject matter. The ear-
lier themes of revolutionary history were replaced by subjects dealing with
socialist construction. Turksib, The General Line, and Zemlya (Earth, Dovzhen-
ko, 1930, 79) are the best known examples of this new direction undertaken in
the late twenties, but by 1932 such films were already considered transitional
films superseded by a whole generation of newer films. Ivens (1933a, 65) com-
mented on this in his dispatch. He wrote that these three transitional films
had been followed by a change in the Soviet film echoed by similar changes in
the other arts, in literature, theatre, and painting; the great directors had start-
ed treating the building of the socialist state, aiming at domestic needs rather
than at international prestige or the Western market. During the first years of
the Revolution, Ivens reflected, it could not have been expected of artists to
find an appropriate distance from the historical drama then being enacted;
however, now that the USSR was in the fifth year of its Five-Year Plan and had
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
already entered upon its second such plan, filmmakers were able to situate
themselves clearly within this work of world-historic importance and to find
their inspiration in it, working in their own way alongside the workers and
peasants, co-operatively, against almost impossible difficulties in their path.
Ivens depicted each scenario as an attempt to summarise this construction
and to develop it, each director attempting to find its correct and actual shape.
Ivens's wholehearted adoption of the official Five-Year Plan rhetoric reflects
the genuine consensus that existed in the Soviet studios during the early thir-
ties about the new subject and the complete bedazzlement of Ivens and the
other foreign communists at the experience of this consensus:
Life was effectively difficult, but we weren't desperate, far from that. The
certainty of being engaged in a decisive battle dominated. It made us
accept the most extravagant situations. Around us imperfections were
150 I everywhere: a certain wastefulness, loss of time, contradictory decisions,
administrative harassments of a well-established bureaucracy, the ina-
bility of some people, the opportunism of others, all of this added up to
hardship. What was unbelievable was that there was a wind that swept
away the insufficiencies and this wind spared no one. It was a formidable
common denominator that pushed all energies in the same direction.
Each man, each woman, at whatever level, was animated by the same will
to fight and to win the socialist wager. It was there the movement that
carried everything along. (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 95-96)
Schoots ([1995] 2000, 78) fiercely declares that Ivens and his expatriate crew
were aware of the thousands of political prisoners working on the site under
conditions of great hardship, and that during the two-month spring shoot
around the project some must have shown up visible onscreen. Ivens, pre-
occupied with the enthusiasm of the young Komsomol volunteers that sur-
rounded him, living in freezing and vermin-infested barracks and subsisting
on cabbage soup, remembered having a different take:
Dispossessed, deported with their families, [the kulaks] were assigned
the hardest work, and everyone distrusted them. By day they dug, by night
they sabotaged. [...] The kulaks marked the limit of the socialist order.
[...] For the men in Moscow, they were there to 'learn' socialism, in reality
they only thought of destroying it. (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 102)25
As with Comment Yukong diplaa les montagnes (How Yukong Moved the Moun-
tains, 1976, France, 718) 40 years later, foreign sympathisers like Ivens both
were shielded from and chose to relativise the bumps in the road to socialism.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The new subject matter had very specific formal ramifications. The imper-
sonal epics of the early years of the Plan - Turksib, Odinnadtsatyy (The Eleventh
Year, Vertov, 1928, 52), The General Line - were to be superseded by a more
direct and more intimate kind of dramaturgy, less ambiguous, less cerebral,
and less complex. Since Komsomol was among the films that embodied this
transition, Ivens felt called upon to interpret it for his Dutch constituency in
Filmliga (Ivens, 1933a, 65). The new Russian film art had done away with the
former 'poster-style' film, he explained. In such films, the masses appeared
only as masses and lacked both depth and effectiveness. The public was asking
more and more for stronger personal contact, according to Ivens's account,
and the new Russian film was responding. Its concern was to speak directly to
the difficulties of each person, one by one, to liberate individual personalities,
to help them solve problems, to help them develop their own will, and thus in
turn to have a strengthening and building effect on the masses as a whole. 'No
more from the top down, but from the bottom up', he concluded. In short, the I 151
new form implied what Ivens would later call 'personalisation', the semi-doc-
umentary dramatisation of exemplary individual characters.
Although socialist realism had unofficially been a feature of Russian cul-
ture in various forms since 1907, the year of Gorki's novel Mother, and had
been articulated as a theory as early as 1911 by Gorki, it was not until the time
of Ivens's second visit that it came to be promulgated as the official aesthetic
form of Soviet culture. The evolving political climate was one factor behind
this development. Ivens's dispatch referred to the proclamation of April 1932
by which the various influential proletarian cultural organisations such as the
Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) had been disbanded. The
disappearance of these headstrong groups, which had provoked such a cre-
ative and lively, if often strident, debate within Soviet culture throughout the
twenties, Ivens saw paradoxically as a movement towards greater freedom in
the cultural sphere.26 Late in the same year was the first plenary session of the
organisational committee of the Union of Soviet Writers, an event that made
the new aesthetic official for literature and consequently for the other arts as
well (though it was not until the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in
1934 that it was formally proclaimed). Although these developments paral-
leled in the political arena the entrenchment of Stalin as head of an increas-
ingly rigid Party bureaucracy and the imminent weeding out of the original
generation of Bolsheviks from the circles of power (the text of a congratulatory
telegram from Stalin is inserted climactically at the end of the first reel ofKom-
somol), the period of paranoia, corruption, and stagnation in the cultural are-
na did not really set in irreparably until the closingyears of the War. 27Although
the new doctrine did in effect terminate much of the rich modernist legacy of
the twenties and make the middle and late thirties a period of some tribula-
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
tion even for such artists as Dovzhenko and Pudovkin as well as the modern-
ists Vertov and Eisenstein, it did have certain positive implications as well that
expatriates like Ivens were quick to perceive and celebrate. I am speaking of
socialist realism's emphasis on the following goals for cultural work: popular
accessibility, the immediacy and functionality of an artist's contact with his
or her public, the immediate social and economic reality of Soviet society as
subject matter, and the focus on the individual as opposed to the anonymous
collective. Further features of socialist realism, increasingly the object of
objective historical study (Robin, [1986] 1992), were its decidedly non-modern-
ist embrace of a heroics and mythology built on emotional appeal (a strategy
based on an understandable assessment of a peasant and proletarian society
still struggling against mass illiteracy), and the principle of the accountability
of the artists to their lay public with the concomitant dominance by lay people
of cultural administration. That all of these principles were later debased and
152 I abused under the influence of Zhdanov and his henchmen must not colour
our perception of the immensely fertile atmosphere that greeted Ivens in the
USSR in 1932 and shaped permanently his subsequent artistic sensibility, in
fact making of him the major ambassador, interpreter, and practitioner of the
progressive elements of socialist realism in the Western cinema.21
Such was the atmosphere prevailing in the Soviet studios upon the arrival
of Ivens, that he automatically accepted the subject of socialist construction
for his film and became involved in the stepped-up urgency felt in late 1931
and 1932 by many filmmakers who wanted to finish their work in time for the
anticipated completion of the first Five-Year Plan in late 1932. In search of the
specific aspect of socialist construction suitable for his film, Ivens first visited
the construction site of the new Moscow subway, then locales of the chemical
industry, coal-mining, and agriculture, all without finding his subject. In con-
sultation with Pudovkin, Ivens finally hit upon the construction of new blast
furnaces at Magnitogorsk in the Urals by brigades of Komsomol as a topic of
suitable symbolic importance and visual potential, and enlisted Iosif Sklyut,
Pudovkin's young directing student at the State Cinema School in Moscow,
as writer. On 23 March the team left for the location having set a 22nd October
deadline in keeping with the Five-Year Plan target date. Ivens's reminiscences
of the committed and euphoric atmosphere that surrounded the construction
and the shoot, despite the enormous hardships they encountered in living in
barracks and working as a collective, are infectious. He was very proud of the
way his film came to be considered by his crew and by the Magnitogorsk work-
ers as an essential part of the construction project and that his crew eventual-
ly received the honourific designation of udarniki or 'shock workers'. He was
also proud that like all good shock brigades the filmmakers were able to reach
their goal well ahead of the deadline (Ivens, 1969, 74).
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
When Ivens first presented a treatment to Pudovkin for his advice shortly
after his arrival at Mezhrabpom, having already narrowed his subject to the
contribution of youth to socialist construction, it had an epic scope to it, rem-
iniscent of Vertov or of the Dutch construction films. It was to be a film about
'youth in every phase of the life of the Soviet Union [...] an epic form for this
magnificent story of accomplishment' (Ivens, 1969, 68). As Stuflens (2008,
109) correctly observes the treatment anticipated the epic grandiosity of later
films about revolution from Das Lied der Strome (Song of the Rivers, 1954, DDR,
90) to Yukong. Pudovkin's advice was more than just good sense. It was a reflec-
tion of the dramaturgical simplicity and mythopoeic directness inherent in
the newly established Soviet aesthetic:
You have at least ten films in the script. No one would be able to put all
this material into one film. It would be too big for comprehension. You
must choose one specific project out of it - one that will symbolize all 1 153
that young people are doing here and that will simplify the dramatic and
pictorial problems of your film. (Ivens, 1969, 68)
We have seen that in Philips-Radio Ivens's prolonged attention to the
glass-blowers suggested that he was on the verge of a new more personal
approach to the subject matter. The new orthodoxy of socialist realism con-
firmed this direction. Ivens, having finally chosen the construction of the
giant Komsomolskaya blast furnace at Magnitogorsk as his subject, chose to
concentrate this subject in the single true story of an individual worker, thus
combining traditional documentary elements with a semi-dramatised per-
sonal plot to create a hybrid new form:
The Magnitogorsk film demanded a personal focus. We found this in
the true story of the development of one of the young workers on the
blast furnace - an eighteen-year-old Kyrgyz, named Afanaseyev. Here
was a man who symbolized a people leaping across centuries in their
social, economic and cultural development: from feudalism direct into
the first stage of socialism, jumping the phase of capitalism; from the
middle ages of the Kyrgyz tents to the blast furnaces of modern socialized
industry. Afanaseyev, illiterate and an unskilled labourer, had come to
Magnitogorsk to dig the foundation for the blast furnace. He was encour-
aged to attend a riveting class at a technical night school and subse-
quently worked as a riveter in the next stage of the construction. During
his riveting job and before the blast furnace was ready for operation he
continued night school, and learned to read and write. He became one
of the operators of the blast furnace and took advance examinations in
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
foundry and steel production. He joined the Komsomol organization in
Magnitogorsk.
This almost unbelievable advance from illiterate peasant boy to
skilled worker was the ideal focus for us. But it offered many difficulties.
In avoiding too much subtlety and too many personal angles we nec-
essarily had to omit many phases of his rapid development and had to
condense many of the obstacles and difficulties he encountered. It was
the first film I had made where one person went through the entire action
from beginning to end - so-called semi-documentary. (Ivens, 1969, 71-72)
It would not be the last. Afanaseyev's only antecedents were perhaps Nanook
(Nanook of the North, Flaherty, 1922, USA, 79), a series of Nanook spinoffs, and
Eisenstein's Marfa Lapkina in The GeneralLine. But the riveter would be a first
of a long line of similar characters who would provide dramatic focus for the
154 I themes of Ivens's career.
To emphasise that the semi-documentary dramatic structure of 'person-
alisation', which would continue to evolve throughout documentary history
until the 21st century, did have specific roots in the Soviet context explored by
Ivens in the early thirties, it is necessary to remember that Dovzhenko also was
experimenting with this strategy at the same time, approaching it, like Eisen-
stein, from the direction of fiction rather than from nonfiction like Ivens and
Flaherty. With regard to his Ivan (USSR, 83), released in November 1932 one
month after Komsomol, the Ukrainian wrote:
I am reducing the plot of my film to the minimum. The peasant lad Ivan
leaves the collective farm to join the ranks of the proletariat at a con-
struction site. He is strong, cheerful, and dexterous. Lacking skills, Ivan
is given the job of driving spikes on a railroad siding. He does well and is
invited to go back to school. He refuses. He can get by. But that same day,
Ivan discovers in a contest that strength is not enough. Even a simple
manual job requires technical know-how. So he goes to school and cracks
the books. Thus the question raised in the film is re-educating the rustic,
eliminating his anarchistic peasant habits.
With Ivan I want to make my small contribution to the great task of
depicting in our art a composite type of young man during our industri-
al revolution. I deliberately selected a simple plot without any heroes.
In fact, Ivan is hardly a leading character. Instead, he is led; he has his
mistakes pointed out to him; he is transferred to the machine shop and
sent to school. He is led by the proletariat, which has achieved political
consciousness and a high level of technical knowledge and so can absorb
and re-educate the peasantry. [...]
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The film is completely lacking in dramatic conflict. I am deliberately
discarding the entire arsenal of effects used to insure the audience's
attention and enthusiasm. I am making a clear and simple picture that
will resemble its clear and simple heroes. Hence the simplicity of the
formal composition, which does without fussy long shots, choppy mon-
tage, and foreshortening or kaleidoscopic effects. (Dovzhenko, quoted in
Carynnyk, 1973, xxii-xxiii)
Ivens, for his part, praised Ivan at great length in his second dispatch to Film-
liga and proudly mentioned in an interview about the same time Dovzhenko's
reciprocal praise for Komsomol (Ivens, 1933b, 194; Hulsker, 1933, 148). In his
article, Ivens recognised the transition in Dovzhenko's career from Zvenigora
(1928, 109) andArsenal (1929, 90), with their interest in the Civil War period, to
Earth with its subject of peasant collectivisation as symbolic of a new tendency
in Soviet films.29 Ivan he locates as an extension of Dovzhenko's development I 155
in this direction, the subject being 'the shaping of new progressive and active
people in the big socialist centres of industry' and the hero Ivan being repre-
sentative of the great numbers of unskilled peasant labour attracted to such
centres. Ivens notes also the absence of 'dramatic tensions' and the skill with
which Dovzhenko shows the effect of Ivan's surroundings on him as part of
the socialist production collective. In the same article, Ivens praises in almost
identical terms yet another film in release that fall, Fridrikh Ermler's and Ser-
gei Yutkevich's Vstrechnyy (Counterplan aka Shame, 1932, USSR, 115), a story of
struggles to meet production quotas in a Leningrad factory. At the end of the
article, Ivens sums up the achievement of the two films in terms of 'show[ing]
the new Socialist view of life in a positive manner'.
Predictably, those aspects of Ivan and Counterplan praised by Ivens are
remarkably similar to elements of Komsomol. The Komsomol member Afana-
seyev serves as a real yet symbolic and exemplary hero, defined precisely in
social and behavioural terms yet clearly representative of a certain collective
evolution. To use Dovzhenko's expression, he is a 'composite' hero. Obvious-
ly his membership in one of the Soviet nationalities is strategic, its significa-
tion carefully determined. Wegner (1965) sees the impressive scene near the
beginning of Komsomol where Afanaseyev is playing his flute amid the wav-
ing steppe grasses, undisturbed by the nearby dynamiting of the blast furnace
site, as having profound implications, not only in terms of the traditional 'old
and new' theme of Soviet culture, but also in terms of the Asian people's rela-
tionship with the Soviets, their continued impassivity. He quotes Ivens:
I wanted to show that there are men who are not touched by these great
changes, while others are building entirely new lives. The whole film
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
unfolds along this contrapuntal line. I believe that one has to show
enthusiasm within the totality of its meaning, and that it is a decisive
force. But one must also show that not everyone has been affected by it,
because that makes the optimism of the greater part of humanity more
heroic, and it is precisely with this building up of contrast that the artist
has to work. (Wegner, 1965, 72)
The most successful scenes in these terms are those at the beginning where
the herdsman re-enacts his initial introduction to modern technology. The
scenes where he plays his flute and where he wanders through the booming
construction site marveling at all the hardware and traffic have considerable
dramatic power. Once the rather rapid transition to skilled worker is made
this aspect of the film becomes less imposing, perhaps because of the disap-
pearance of the element of contrast. Ivens (1969, 72) recognised the relatively
156 I weaker impact of the latter part of the Afanaseyev story and attributed it to
his own decision to avoid intricate psychological shading with his untrained
actors. It seems also likely that Ivens, who had after all made only one dramat-
ic film previously, still needed more experience in integrating a nonfictional
dramatic story with the more familiar expository approach, especially with the
still comparatively inflexible pre-direct technology.
Whatever the roughness of the element of 'personalisation' in the film, its
unprecedented presence was a landmark both in Ivens's career and in docu-
mentary film history as a whole. Ivens was conscious of the historical moment
of what he had done, as well as its controversial implications:
A human contact with the audience can't be reached anymore by way of
the documentary film in its old and partly still present form. The latest
documentaries - including Komsomol - I too have tried to do this - are
a combination and inter-weaving of dramatic scenes and exposition.
(Ivens, 1933a, 65)
In my Russian film, I have tried to give the human element its proper
place by introducing acted, dramatic scenes. By doing this I have entered
a field which many will regard as dangerous, the borderline between doc-
umentary and acted film. It leaves me indifferent if one calls it an artisti-
cally unsound method.
I am firmly convinced that now is the time to increase the value of
the documentary film by using human episodes. More of the spectator's
interest would be kept by employing scenes drawn from the real prob-
lems of mankind.
To me the film is that which grows up between the screen and the
onlooker. [...]
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
You know that it is in Russia that I have had the chance to bring my ideas
into practice. (Hulsker 1933, 148)
When Ivens speaks of criticism of Komsomol, he is not speaking hypothetical-
ly: upon the film's release in Moscow for the Five-Year Plan celebrations, there
was apparently a very vocal opposition to the semi-documentary methods that
Ivens had introduced into the film. This applied of course to the Afanaseyev
story, but also to Ivens's strategy of reconstructing non-dramatic scenes wher-
ever the original had not been filmed or could not for some reason. The most
salient example of the latter was the triumphant night procession sequence at
the climax of the film that Ivens unapologetically admitted to having restaged.
The terms of a still current debate within the documentary field are already
fully elaborated in Ivens's recollection of the controversy:
The critical discussion also questioned the correctness of including I 157
re-enactments of scenes in a straight documentary film. People from
the camera-eye school of Vertov defended the orthodox stand that a
documentary may only film events that are actually happening before the
witnessing camera. The opposite stand was that it was perfectly valid to
stage or re-enact events that have happened before in order to deepen the
content of the film and even to assemble otherwise unrelated events or
invent events certain to happen in the future.
I could not agree with the Vertov approach to this big question of
documentary truth. (Ivens 1969, 75)
Ivens goes on to explain that it was necessary to stage the 'storm night' because
of the uncinematic arrangement of the trucks and the lighting during the
actual volunteer night shifts:
If we had been content to shoot only what we happened to find, such an
episode of great integrity and enthusiasm would have appeared far from
intense and dramatic on the screen. So I felt free to stage a 'storm night'
for filming purposes in order to emphasize its real meaning and to com-
municate the healthy enthusiasm and solidarity of these young people.
This enabled us to take all the close-ups and medium shots of the faces
we wanted, to direct the movement of the trucks and of the torches. So we
were able to get just what we wanted instead of a couple of trucks haphaz-
ardly filmed on the road.
The distinction between letting the event dominate the filming and
the attempt to film an event with maximum expressiveness is the differ-
ence between orthodox documentary (which today is represented by the
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
newsreel) and the newer, broader form of documentary film. (Ivens 1969,
76)
If such an argument did shock and anger Vertov, who must certainly have
seen his realm invaded by the 'perfumed veil of kisses [...] and prestidigita-
tion'30 of the dramatic film (Vertov 1972, 94), he himself in his own film the
following year, Three Songs About Lenin, resorted to variations of the same
strategies used in Komsomol, certain semi-documentary tendencies toward
mise-en-scene in his treatment of his literacy-hungry Uzbek women, and the
direct-sound monologues of his decorated workers. Vertov's defence of Three
Songs would be based on many of the same general tenets of socialist real-
ism evoked or practiced by Ivens: simplicity of form, directness of emotional
appeal, the importance of human behaviour and emotions as subject matter,
the use of popular and folkloric materials, and the reworking of modernist
158 I interests within a more accessible format (Vertov 1972, 164-184). Nonetheless
the debate around Komsomol prevented the filming of a few of the scripted
scenes (Stufkens, 2008, 111-112).
In the light of Ivens's final warning in the interview cited above that it
is possible to go too far in the area of dramatisation in the documentary,
his emphasis on the importance of such vague and subjective criteria as
'authenticity' and the director's 'integrity' in the evaluation of a given film's
ethical or aesthetic validity would be somewhat disconcerting were it not so
disarming in its utter sincerity (Hulsker, 1933). His ultimate criterion in this
debate about a film's ethical-aesthetic integrity was the nature of the expe-
riential relationship among artist, subject, and spectator - 'the film is that
which grows up between the screen and the onlooker' (Hulsker, 1933, 148)
- rather than any subjective and unverifiable judgment about phenomeno-
logical veracity in the art of filmmaking. Ivens could not have known that not
all subsequent film propagandists employing his methods would justify his
faith in their integrity.
The general narrative elements of Komsomol are as carefully determined
in their structure and signification as the persona of Afanaseyev.3' Each scene
and image is open to quite accessible semi-allegorical or even hieroglyphic
readings. For example, in the labour allocation scene, Afanaseyev's arrival is
carefully matched by the arrival of a female Komsomol member volunteering
from Moscow, and a skilled smelter worker straight from Dneprostroy, the
prestige construction project of the twenties. Male/female, skilled/unskilled,
party/non-party, Russian/non-Russian, Moscow/provinces - the three charac-
ters together could form a symmetrical pattern on a monumental frieze, so
carefully are the details chosen. Presumably what Ivens means with regard to
the poster-style dramatics having been left behind is that the poster types are
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
retained but are humanised and fleshed out in a way that remains credible
without detracting from the carefully coded instructional function.
The overall shape of the film is equally determined by this signifying prin-
ciple. Ivens's phrase 'in the positive manner' concisely conveys the socialist
realist insistence on showing the workings of socialism in terms of its long-
range ideal dynamic. What is in question is not the naturalism that might be
erroneously inferred from the emphasis on the subject of everyday work, but
in fact an intense romanticism; and Soviet proponents of the new aesthetic
practice, like Anatoly Lunacharsky ([193311971, 57), did not hesitate to use the
word 'romanticism'. According to such proponents, individual works must
contain a glimpse of utopia. They must contain the shape of the revolution-
ary transformation of society, a vision of the historical totality of the process
of which the immediate subject is only a single momentary aspect. In other
words, as Brecht's ([1953-1954] 1972, 227, my emphasis) text on socialist real-
ism phrased it, 'Realist artists emphasize the moment of becoming and pass- | 159
ing; in all their work, they think historically'.
This implies not only Komsomol's 'up' ending, with the torchlight proces-
sion of singing shock brigadiers and the sun rising upon the finished blast
furnace. The contour of the entire social process must also be revealed, along-
side the growth of the individual hero. The absence of dramatic conflict men-
tioned by Dovzhenko is a key aspect of this romantic rhythm. Although Earth
and Counterplan had both used the device of saboteurs to permit some kind
of traditional dramatic conflict, the too exaggerated use of sabotage as a for-
mulaic device could compromise the 'positive manner' of the realism. What
emerges accordingly, with Ivan and Komsomol, is a form resembling a kind of
linear crescendo, in which the race to fill quotas or meet a deadline provides
the dramatic momentum; conflict is present only in the passive form of the
elements waiting to be molded into the shape of the future.32
The straightforwardly didactic stance of socialist realism was a big step
beyond the suggestive ambiguity of Philips-Radio. Ivens's partial assumption
in Komsomol of an openly direct address is no doubt as profound a formal
change brought about by his Soviet immersion as the new 'personalisation': a
change in his relation as an artist to his public. With Komsomol, the evolution
from the avant-garde lyricist to the professional publicist to the militant prop-
agandist was considerably advanced, the evolution from first-person medita-
tion or third-person narrative to the rhetorical posture of direct exhortation.
Wegner (1965, 46) believes all previous developments in Ivens's career lead
up to this decisive breakthrough into the militant documentary; for him, this
is the fundamental pattern for the rest of Ivens's work, for that long series of
occasions on which Ivens, professional militant filmmaker, would immerse
himself temporarily in a given society, ally himself with a certain progressive
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
faction within the society, and address an agitational film to its constituency.
Ivens was careful to emphasise that the intended public for Komsomol was not
his traditional Western European avant-garde audience, but the Soviet public.
As he expressed it in an interview, his goal was 'to excite the enthusiasm of the
young people who work for the second Five-Year Plan' (Hulsker, 1933, 148).
The way in which the film crew was integrated with the Komsomolskaya
project as a whole was a model for the new artist-public relationship that this
film inaugurates in Ivens's career. The bourgeois isolation of the artist from
society was replaced by an active collaborative process - workers and artists
saw each other as part of the whole collective effort. The daily meetings of the
film crew to discuss the next day's shooting would invariably involve an input
from the community of workers on the site. The filmmakers were doing more
than observing the project; they were entering into it: 'It was the first time in
my life that I felt integrated with my work, a part of my environment. Our film
160 crew was not an isolated strange group temporarily attached to a big industrial
project, but part of the project' (Ivens, 1969, 72).
A further dimension of this new relationship, emphasised by Wegner
(1965,44-45), is Ivens's concurrent development of his skill in working in large
heterogeneous collectives, each member with a specific function. It must have
demanded no little diplomatic prowess for this group of foreigners, plus the
local workers, the cameraman Alexander Shelenkov, the writer Iosif Sklyut,
not to mention a Komsomol coordinator named Andreyev, to arrive at such a
coherent film in such a short time, a prowess indispensable for an artist whose
method must embody collective ideals as well as promulgate them. Wegner's
(1965, 44-45) further insight was that the primitive frontier conditions under
which the crew was working were good preparation for the future. The practice
of regularly consulting rushes during a shoot would be a luxury not often pos-
sible during Ivens's career.
One formal ramification of the new artist-public relationship is direct film-
ic address. In Komsomol, Ivens's use of direct address - that is, presentational
visual or verbal structures appealing to and acknowledging the position of the
spectator in the filmic discourse - are confined, strictly speaking, to certain
passages only: most notably a brief introductory compilation sequence show-
ing strikes and demonstrations in the West, mostly Germany, culminating in a
giant parade in Red Square. This passage, narrated by an emphatic voice-over,
serves as a visualisation of the film's dedication: 'to the youth of the capitalist
world' (it is also the first extant sample of Ivens's talent as an editor of archival
material). Magnitogorsk is introduced in the following scenes with the help
of animated maps, a pixilated sequence showing a model locomotive facto-
ry, and the climactic message from Stalin, all serving to situate the project in
relation to the Five Year Plan as a whole and enlisting the spectator's involve-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
ment in this cause. The outcome is not only what Stufkens (2008, 122) calls the
film's 'hybridity' ('the film tries to be many things at once'), but also a direct
unmediated appeal to the spectator, the first of Ivens's career. Most emphatic
in the voice-over, direct address appears elsewhere in Komsomol intra-dieget-
ically - that is, within the narrative framework - as in a scene where an ora-
tor exhorts a crowd of workers, or in another when a woman worker, who has
just learned to read, reads aloud for the spectator the inscriptions on the sides
of railway cars. The intrusion of the final chorus functions in a similar way,
serving as an on-screen collective voice delivering a final musical summons
to the audience. Ivens's choice of direct address is of course inextricable from
the film's appropriation of radiophonic iconography and structures. The full
implications of this radicalisation of filmic form and artist-public relation-
ship will be discussed below in the analysis of those films made upon Ivens's
return to Europe where this change is most systematically pursued: Nieuwe
Gronden and Borinage. 161
The rest of Komsomol, set within this shell of direct address, relies primar-
ily on the modes of representational or indirect address, combining an exposi-
tory narration of the construction project with the intermittent dramatic core,
the Afanaseyev story. The expository elements contain most of the features
of Ivens's style and iconography of WY/ Bouwen. A notable exception is that
the usual flavour of unmediated spontaneity is less visible than usual. This
is probably due to the inevitable restrictions of a foreign setting, the appar-
ent omnipresence of the writer and the Komsomol representative (no doubt a
two-edged sword), the greater reliance on narrative mise-en-scene inherent in
the spirit of socialist realism, and the tight economy of raw materials: 'There
was not much raw film available and therefore we had to conserve the limited
amount we had. We had to plan for the utmost efficiency in shooting' (Ivens,
1969, 71).
Otherwise the full array of Ivens's dynamic perspectives are there; he
ranges effortlessly between stunning vistas of the landscape being reshaped
and intimate close-up details of a worker and his or her tools, all the while
maintaining a full sense of the connection between the two perspectives.
There is little room for the kind of unconnected abstract impressions used
in Philips-Radio. The standard approach to a group of workers in one area of
the site is to present a high-angle long-shot pan of the group and thence to
proceed by means of extended low-angle medium-shots of individual workers,
directing their efforts to the direction of the camera as often as not. This angle,
tending to backdrop a figure with a dramatic sky or half-completed building,
has the effect of investing the figure with an aura of strength and heroism. Afa-
naseyev is seen a number of times in this way as he progresses from unskilled
earth-mover to trained literate riveter. Groups also tend to be romanticised
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
by the mise-en-scene, silhouetted on the horizon as in WjBouwen and Zuid-
erzee, or moving with uncanny unison in the performance of some collective
job. Several times we see a human chain of women passing bricks one by one
along a scaffolding or into the interior of the half-finished furnace, alternating
close views of the individual members with an overview of the entire mech-
anism, preserving in the editing the rhythm of the steady movement of the
bricks from hand to hand, concluding naturally with a view of the bricks arriv-
ing at their destination and being laid. This perfect image of the synchronisa-
tion of collective effort would be chosen by Ivens regularly throughout the rest
of his career.
As in Zuiderzee, Ivens is fascinated with cranes, bulldozers, and other
earth-moving equipment and the dramatic force that this machinery can have
on the screen. This tendency is not the only vestige of the modernist Ivens.
There are also from time to time passages reminiscent of the earlier penchant
162 for picking out movements and shapes which will transform the screen into
abstract dynamic patterns, huge masses moving across the frame. One shot
for example accents patterns of shadow and light moving across the cab of a
crane. In addition, there are also the odd multilayered crowd compositions
that hark back to an earlier era with their Potemkin feeling. But in general the
modernist traces are of secondary importance.
In Zuiderzee, the elements of water, earth, and sky provided the icono-
graphic backdrop for Ivens's heroic vision of labour; here he adds the possi-
bilities of the flames of the ovens, or clouds of smoke and steam, to frame the
groups he chooses to watch, adding the fourth and final element to his cos-
mology. The riveters also seem to have a privileged meaning in the film's ico-
nography. The job of a riveter straddling a scaffolding high against the sky is
the essential heroic act of the film, not the least because of the special impli-
cations of riveting for a documentary experimenting with the possibilities of
sound. It is Afanaseyev's evolution that Ivens portrays as being symbolic of the
revolution surrounding him. A large number of small narrative units centre on
riveting and the various phases involved in the job, each one treated sequen-
tially. The off-the-job life of the workers is also of vital importance to the sub-
ject. Punctuating the film are informal scenes of workers lunching, and in this
film of course the scenes in which workers are learning to read and write have
a special resonance: the quality of life is high despite the effort, and people are
changing as well as landscapes.
One very engaging sequence was shot in the Siberian mining centre of
Kuzbass, 2300 kilometres away from Magnitogorsk, during a two week visit by
the crew at the end of the shoot, the point being to link the heroic riveters of
the construction site with the sweating underground coal miners in an enor-
mous chain of production, each link being as vital as the next. When the river
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
of molten steel finally flows from the finished furnace at the climax of the film
there is thus a real sense of the network of human and material resources that
has produced it, and of the society that will benefit from it.
The Soviets were delighted with their guest's homage to their revolution.
Komsomol was chosen as one of ten films to be shown during the celebrations
marking the early completion of the first Five-Year Plan. Upon its premiere in
January 1933 in Moscow, it reportedly received wide circulation throughout
the USSR, and some limited exposure among Ivens's still overlapping cine-
club and political constituencies in Western Europe - not without predictable
attempts to censor (Stufkens, 2008, 123). Dutch critics were interested in, and
predisposed to like, this new venture for their native son, but their verdicts
were decidedly and symptomatically mixed (Stufkens, 2008, 124-125). Komso-
mol's honeymoon with Soviet exhibitors was shortlived: Schoots ([1995] 2000,
81) cites Soviet film historian Sergei Drobachenko to the effect that, unbe-
knownst to Ivens, the inclusion in the film of lyrics by constructivist playwright I 163
Sergei Tretyakov, a victim of the Moscow purges in 1937, led to the shelving of
Komsomol at that time.
NlEUWE GRONDEN
Ivens's penultimate project before the start of his long exile from the Nether-
lands in 1934 was a new sound version of the Dutch national epic, Zuiderzee,
which had been definitively finished only the year before. The new universal
acceptance of sound technology was obviously one important reason for the
new version: Regen had been sonorised by Van Dongen in 1932 while Ivens was
in the USSR, and Borinage would get its sound version - in Russian as we have
seen - the following year in Moscow. It was not only technology however that
made Zuiderzee seem outdated in its silent version.
The new version, to be called Nieuwe Gronden (The New Earth) was com-
pleted more or less concurrently with the final work on Borinage. It was thus
only natural that the abrupt disjuncture in Ivens's filmic practice symbolised
by Borinage should dictate that the older silent version of Zuiderzee should
be reworked according to the new mode of discourse. Zuiderzee contained
basic contradictions that were no longer tolerable. It was no longer possible
for Ivens to affirm this vision of an epic universe devoid of class conflict in
which the rational, goal-directed effort of workers was rewarded with victory.
He could no longer affirm the strength and dignity of working people while
repressing any question of the societal context that frustrated and exploited
that strength. The epic combat is reformulated: the struggle against nature of
Zuiderzee becomes the class struggle of Nieuwe Gronden. Films using an indi-
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
rect, narrative form to recount for passive audiences the victories of labour
would have to be replaced by films that assaulted and accused these audienc-
es, which addressed them directly, exploding the myths of worker-society uni-
ty with the violent clash of images with images and with words.
Once again the parallel between the work of Ivens up to and including
Zuiderzee and that of Grierson in England, comes into play. The two were the
major documentarists in Western Europe who, reacting against the exotic and
apolitical tradition of Flaherty and inspired by the work of the Soviets, particu-
larly Vertov and Turin, were attempting to incorporate the ideology and the
images of the working class into a medium that had ignored and disenfran-
chised that class. Both the British and the Dutch traditions were based on the
same fundamental contradictions, the incompatibility of a worker-centred
ideology with the interests of the state and corporate film sponsors. Ivens had
visited England in May 1930 during his work on Philips-Radio during which
164 I time he had visited the Kodak factories at Elfort on CAPI business and had
brief contact with the fledgling British documentary movement. Grierson's
work, however, is totally absent as an explicit term of reference in Ivens's work,
despite the remarkable affinity of Drifters (John Grierson, 1929, 49) and Gran-
ton Trawler (Edgar Anstey, 1934, 11) with Zuiderzee. If any influence was exert-
ed it was probably in the other direction (Ivens, 1969, 93). At the time of Nieuwe
Gronden, the two movements diverged: Grierson would continue to contain
the contradictions within his work for the rest of his career, insisting all the
while on making a virtue of the necessity of working within the system. Ivens
would move back and forth in the next half-century, depending on the possi-
bilities within the various political climates in which he would find himself,
more often outside than in (though his work for the authorities in the US dur-
ing the war and in the Soviet-bloc countries during the Cold War parallels Gri-
erson's reliance on state sponsorship, and at one point during the war Ivens
would accept a commission from Grierson's state film agency in Canada). But
there would never be any question that such temporary re-absorptions were a
matter of survival and livelihood. The two divergent trajectories can be said to
epitomise those of the social-democratic or liberal tradition and the Commu-
nist Party respectively over the next generations.
Nieuwe Gronden previewed all of the major formal innovations that
Borinage would pioneer, with the major exception of that film's socialist real-
ism-inspired dramatisation - Nieuwe Gronden incorporated new dramatised
footage but not individualised characterisation - and for the same reason
its experiments in subject-generated activism. Otherwise, Borinage's skilful
use of its intertitles as a kind of interpretative and expository direct address
grew out of Nieuwe Gronden's spoken and musical commentary, but Nieuwe
Gronden's status a masterful milestone in the evolution of the compilation
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
mode would only be nodded to by Borinage. Moreover, the mood of defiance
in the soundtrack of Nieuwe Gronden's coda and the view of hunger and unem-
ployment marches on the image-track of this final movement endow the entire
film with the kind of 'ideal dynamic' that Ivens refined in Borinage, the heroic
contour implying the inevitability of resistance and final victory.
In any case, it is easy to see howNieuwe Gronden's energetic assumption of
these new formal possibilities explored by Borinage resulted in it quickly and
totally eclipsing Zuiderzee in the public eye. There is also the consideration
that the montage coda of the film, with its emphasis on the world context, pro-
vided easier access to international audiences than the limited Dutch setting
of the earlier version.
As I have suggested, it was not Ivens's changing aesthetic goals alone
that dictated the reworking of Zuiderzee, but also the rapidly changing polit-
ical and economic situation as well. Ivens's new formal discoveries of the
Borinage- Nieuwe Gronden moment were hastened and confirmed by the prag- | 165
matic requirements of the immediate political conjuncture. The last image of
Zuiderzee had been the sight of foam receding from the newly drained land.
With that stirring symbol, it seemed obvious that a sequel would be necessary
to show the eventual harvests on the newly created fields, consistent with the
step-by-step logic of the film as a whole, as indeed Van Dongen's 1933 'record-
film' for the Dutch government set about to do. However, the actual sequel
to the closing of the dike had confounded expectations. The army of 10,000
workers who had worked for ten years on the project had been thrown into
unemployment after the completion of the drainage. The forecasts for the new
harvests had been fulfilled but as just one more unsalable surplus glutting the
paralysed markets of the world. The children that Ivens had depicted watch-
ing their fathers at work would not have access to the fruits of this labour after
all. The new version of Zuiderzee would have to express the unexpectedly tragic
ending of a national epic.
The first task undertaken by Ivens and Van Dongen was to reduce the origi-
nal runningtime of Zuiderzee to approximately one-third (6oo metres, two reels
or about 22 minutes) before the updated new material could be added. This
meant that the original deliberate pace and step-by-step exposition of the orig-
inal film had to be sacrificed. The slow accumulation of details in sequential
order was sharply compressed and whole stages of the process were omitted,
as well as certain details from other phases. The more impressive sequences
of Zuiderzee such as the conduit and rock-moving sequences and the sequence
in which the long willow coils are carried into the sea were retained and situ-
ated prominently, but in order to function as symbolic suggestions of the var-
ious stages of the project rather than to provide precise information. When
it came to the climactic closing sequence of which the filmmakers had been
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
so proud, this was also greatly abridged, though the triple dynamic of land,
water, and human perspectives was retained. Van Dongen remembers some
of the members of the group being sorry to see their masterpiece shortened
for popular consumption, but the editing process was not entirely destruc-
tive (Van Dongen Durant, interview with author, February 1976). The short-
er version is somewhat more forceful cinematically than the original in that
there is a sharper impression of the movement of groups of workers than of
the mechanical details of each stage of the work. Furthermore, at each stage
of the project the editors were forced to choose the most powerful, typical, and
expressive shots.
This version of Zuiderzee then became the departure point for the new
film. An additional reel bringing the running time up to about 30 minutes
covered first of all the settlement, preparation, and cultivation of the newly
drained land, highlighted by long graceful aerial sweeps over the new fields or
166 along the new canals. One sequence constructed in the Zuiderzee style follows
a group of workers installing power lines and poles on the new land (including
a view of one worker lunching on top of a pole) and another treats the exca-
vation of the new canals with blasting and still more cranes. There follows as
well a short sequence scanning the new buildings on the drained land, giving
Ivens yet another chance to include footage of bricklayers and roofers at work
on new barns, footage that harks back to the very beginning of the whole pro-
ject in construction films of five years earlier. A final sequence dealing with
ploughing, harrowing and sowing the new land is then introduced by more
aerial scans and characterised by the usual Ivens alternation between close-
ups and epic vistas of horizons being transformed.
It is when the camera turns to the harvesting, by means of an elegant
low-level track through the ripened crops on a mechanical harvester and then
a close-up of grain pouring into a trough, that Ivens springs the famous about-
face on the public. He suddenly confronts them with the utter futility and
waste of the preceding decade of labour and hope. As the grain pours across
the screen, the sounds of a stock market floor are gradually superimposed
onto the soundtrack, ushering in the montage coda aurally first of all. Then
follows Ivens's denunciation of the system that has precipitated the interna-
tional economic crisis and his revelation of the horrors of starvation and waste
that culminated in the dumping of the grain that 10,000 men had laboured ten
years to produce. Ivens details the structural transformation of the film that
occurs at this point:
The continuity of The New Earth follows that used in telling a joke.
Three-quarters of the story is told in an elaborate build-up to what seems
to be a foregone conclusion and then in the last quarter you pull a switch
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
not hinted at in the build-up. We show a tremendous engineering work
that conquered the sea, that is going to bring happiness and prosperity to
everyone concerned and then we say, 'But...'. (Ivens, 1969, 95)
21. Nieuwe Gronden (1933). Pastoral
harvest imagery precedes Ivens's 'famous
about-face' enacting the catastrophe of -
the Depression and capitalism. Frame
enlargement, courtesy coll. EFJI, Nijmegen
© CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
167
Up until this point, the universe of the film had been completely purposeful
and rational: perseverance and strength are rewarded with new land and a
plentiful harvest. This discourse of rationality and coherence is then punctured
and the discourse of denunciation, irony, and declamation is introduced. This
point, the moment of the 'didactic switch', can be seen symbolically as the
actual point of the radical disjuncture in Ivens's career, the point where the
indirect narrative mode is replaced by a discourse employing direct address
and embodying structurally in itself a challenge to the system that had made
the former discourse impossible.
The intensifying stock market noise introduced during the harvest vis-
uals ushers in a collage of expository newspaper headlines detailing hunger
marches and the international wheat crisis. There then follows a return to the
idyllic view of a field of waving grain now transformed by the intervening mon-
tage into an image of devastating irony. This is replaced by long silhouetted
files of unemployed workers, intercut with flashbacks to similar images from
happier days of the same files then carrying the coils for the dike construc-
tion. The next movement of the coda includes American newsreel footage of
hunger marchers in New York, demonstrators in London, and strikers again
in the US. The harvest motif then returns, this time intercut with close-ups of
hungry children from Borinage and with fields of cranes, once engaged in fre-
netic choreography but now idle. The newsreel images of crops being poured
and burned continue, with the images of the children repeated." The mon-
tage becomes more and more chaotic as continuing repetition of the children
and harvest motifs are alternated with newsreel images of the Ku Klux Klan
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
and the American Farm Board President's famous pig eating surplus wheat,
jobless crowds, and clouds of smoke. The final images are low-angle close-ups
of workers carrying off sacks of grain to be dumped into the sea, the central
image of the song accompanying this last movement of the montage:
22. Nieuwe Gronden (1933). Dramatised
shots accompany the bitter Brechtian song
lyric, 'Throw half the harvest into the water,
throw it in my boy. What a winter it will be'.
DVD frame capture. © CAPI Films, Paris,
and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
168
I would like to be in a country where
The wind from the sea ripples over the wheat.
In this land offertile promise they ask for
Workmen to throw the wheat into the sea.
There is too much grain in the fields -
Bread seems to be a gift of the devil.
One bagful brings too small a price.
Throw half the harvest into the water,
Throw it in my boy.
What a winter it will be. (Ivens, 1969, 98)
This Brechtian ballad by Julian Ahrendt, sung in a way that expresses its ironic
bitterness of tone to the fullest, provides a stunning climax to the film, match-
ing as it does the alternation of idyllic images and ironic reversals. The final
images of the grain and the sea give an overall imagistic coherence to the film,
underlining the final irony that the sea, the adversary of the workers during
the first two reels of the film, should eventually claim the produce of the lands
wrested from it: the image of men throwing grain into the sea echoes visually
the image of men enthusiastically throwing earth and stones into the sea.
The use of the song as a summation of the film (in much the same way that
Eisler's 'Ural' chorus had worked for Komsomol) is not the only structural use
of sound in the film, but rather the climax to a film which in its entirety can
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
be seen as the first fully realised structural combination of sound, music, and
voice-over narration of Ivens's career. Although this is Ivens's third sound film
(not counting the sonorised Regen) it is still quite early in the development of
the sound documentary: the GPO film unit was not to acquire a sound studio
until early in 1934, the year of both Pett and Pott: A Fairy Story of the Suburbs
(Cavalcanti, 29) and Song of Ceylon, the two British pioneers in the field, and
Cavalcanti's breakthrough experiments with documentary sound are still two
years off. Compared to the relatively modest attempts at background sound
effects and commentary in Philips-Radio and the more developed use of sound
in Komsomol, the Nieuwe Gronden soundtrack is considerably more sophisti-
cated and complex. Very often, for example, an ironic relationship between
image and sound is explored in the film, with the same effect that the iron-
ic image juxtapositions had in Borinage: the shouts of the hunger marchers
are superimposed over the idyllic harvest images early on in the coda, and
then when the image track arrives at the hunger marchers their sounds have I 169
been replaced by the voices of the agri-bosses crying, 'We are smothering in
wheat'! Over the faces of the Borinage children are heard the voices of stock
market speculators announcing the price of wheat. The commentator's voice
often plays a similar role: over early images of the wheat harvests, the narra-
tor 'sticks a pin', as Ivens puts it, in the presumed happy ending of the film
- 'but the grain is not for food, but for speculation. There is too much grain
and not enough work'. A variation of this relationship follows when the com-
mentator quotes the American Farm Board president: 'One active useful pig
eats as much wheat as a family of five. Give the wheat to the pigs. Wheat is too
cheap'. Then the image obeys the narrator's command and the pig is shown.
Throughout the earlier part of the film, the shortened version of Zuiderzee, the
sound effects are somewhat less aggressive, but no less masterful. Now graft-
ed onto the familiar images of the struggle between man and the sea are the
surging sounds of the motors of the cranes, the rush of water fighting against
the encroaching dike, and the sound of the plane during the aerial shots.
The voice-over has much the same discreet role until during the harvesting
sequences the narrator starts firing off the statistics of the rich harvest in a
tone of mounting excitement, this setting up the bubble that is about to be
burst. Ivens himself narrated the Dutch version.
A more enduring impression in an era when overlaid documentary
soundtracks are more of a cliche than a novelty is created by the score. For the
score, Ivens solicited once more the help of Hanns Eisler who had done the
music for Komsomol and who had been in exile since Hitler's coming to pow-
er the previous year. For Nieuwe Gronden, Eisler reworked many of the motifs
from his famous score for Kuhle Wampe, done just before Komsomol, in many
cases synchronising them very precisely to the continuity of the new film and
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
in some cases influencing the shape of the editing with his music. The goal of
using music in the same dynamic way as the sound effects and commentary,
asynchronously and structurally, was clearly an important one for the partner-
ship. Ivens had explained to an interviewer in 1933 that the music for Nieuwe
Gronden would constitute a dynamic factor in the completed film in contrast
to Regen where the music was solely an accompaniment and where the score
formed a self-contained composition (Hulsker, 1933, 148).
The director and composer were quite proud of their accomplishment in
providing an almost independent dramatic function to the music. Each of the
three or four themes does have a very distinct emotional timbre to it, although
the overall impression from Eisler's very particular combination of atonality,
tension, and unresolved melodiousness is tragic and plaintive. Even the most
exuberant passages of the Zuiderzee portion of the film seem to forecast the
tragedy of the last reel. In this regard, Eisler saw his score as having a specific
170 I ideological function in support of the theme of the film. He later commented
in connection with the music for the conduit sequence:
The pressure and difficulty of their working conditions is transformed
into solidarity by the music. To achieve this, the music could not confine
itself to reproducing the 'mood' of the scene, a mood of gloom and great
effort. This very mood had to be transcended. The score tried to make
the incident meaningful by an austere and solemn theme. Although
the rhythmical beat of the music synchronized with the work rhythm of
the incident on the screen, the melody was rhythmically quite free and,
strongly contrasting with the accompaniment, pointed beyond the con-
straint represented on the screen. (Eisler, 1947, 47)
Similarly, at another point in the climactic closing sequence, the score's
rhythm is patently faster than that of the cutting, creating a feeling of urgen-
cy and tension. At other times however, the synchronisation between score
and image is somewhat more literal than Eisler suggests in his discussion. At
one point, for example, a series of arpeggios are in exact synchrony with first a
series of small stones being dropped and then with big ones, and, at another,
a 'hurry-up' gesture (in the rock-moving sequence) is matched by an appropri-
ate melodic twirl. The reason for this possible discrepancy between theory and
practice is not clear: Van Dongen's sound editing may have been less dominat-
ed by theoretical formulations than Eisler's post-facto conversations.
In sum, however, Van Dongen's and Eisler's achievement, with its com-
bination of suggestive counterpoint and literal synchronisation, is com-
manding. There are also times of carefully calculated discretion when the
soundtrack yields to a stretch of silence or of pure sound effects which gain
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
thereby in their impact. In general, there are few better examples of the cre-
ative collaboration of filmmaker and musician being brought to the full sup-
port of a film's conception in this way.
The premiere ofNieuwe Gronden took place in Paris's Cinema des Champs-
Elysdes in December 1933 and replayed the equally prestigious Salle Pleyel in
early 1934 before a group called 'Architecture aujourd'hui'. Ivens's by now
habitual battles with censors all over Europe inevitably ensued with the result
in France at least that the film was distributed without the montage coda (not
withoutIvens [1969, 99] being enormously flattered after being told by a'sweet
little old lady' censor that his film showed 'trop de rdalite').
The reaction to the film was generally warm wherever it was shown in its
entirety. Despite the somewhat stereotyped vilification of American society in
the montage sequence, Ku Klux Klan and all, the American reaction to the film
would be the most enthusiastic, primarily among the politically sympathetic
film communities on the East and West Coasts. Otis Ferguson (1936) in The 171
New Republic would give the film a glowing rave, calling it 'more exciting than
rapid fiction and twice as beautiful'.34 The film would be voted the second best
foreign film seen in New York in 1936 by the National Board of Review. A 1938
review in The Magazine ofArt would sum up the enthusiasm with which Ivens's
mastery of his new mode of filmic discourse was greeted in American left-lib-
eral and artistic circles:
[The film] is cast in a form as direct and terse as a social reform tract.
Like the tract, New Earth also is an expression of indignation, but without
the impersonal, generalized character of this form. The model for such
a film form did not exist for Ivens to turn to. It was a new type of docu-
mentary, broader than any filmmaker outside the Soviet Union had con-
ceived it - namely the theme documentary. Although Western European
documentarists had graduated from the travelogue to impressionist
reportage, beyond that they had not traveled far, not further than the
abrupt economic conclusion of Grierson's Drifters. The subject of New
Earth, the shattering contradictions between the worlds of production
and consumption, involved Ivens in the discovery of new film grammar
and vocabulary. (Leyda, Meyers, and Stebbins, 1938, 41)
The generosity of the American response was probably responsible for Ivens's
and Van Dongen's gaining a foothold in the American film community in 1936
and their decision to settle there for almost a decade. But first we must come
back to the Low Countries and consider the last film Ivens produced out of
Europe for more than a decade.
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
BORINAGEV
The highly productive period between Ivens's first visit to the USSR and his
final stay there in 1934-1936 involved such radical steps forward between one
phase of the rapidly maturing artist's career and the next that it is difficult to
isolate a single one of those steps as an especially important one. Each film
from the period is so distinct and engaged in such a unique problematic that
it is difficult to point to a single one as overshadowing the others in their sig-
nificance. The masterpieces from this period - Zuiderzee, Nieuwe Gronden, and
Borinage - as well as the rich but uneven lesser works, such as Philips-Radio
and Komsomol, crowd upon each other so closely that it is not easy to isolate a
single breakthrough.
Nevertheless, Wegner (1965, 41) identifies Komsomol as the key film, that
is particularly formative in the transition of the poet to the militant. Wegner is
172 I right insofar as Ivens's immersion in the economic struggles of the Five Year
Plans and the ideological struggles of the socialist realism period did give him
an enthusiasm and an aesthetic model that would shape most of his succeed-
ing films in some way or other - the personal, emotional appeal, the narrative
form, the didactic orientation, and the frequently direct mode of address of
socialist realism. Even more important, however, is the first film to test that
enthusiasm and that model in the considerably more perilous pre-revolution-
ary context that was to be the backdrop for most of Ivens's career. This film
is Borinage, seen by Ivens (1969, 87) and by his Dutch biographer-critic Han
Meyer (1970, 33) as the real point of disjuncture of his career. Where Komso-
mol today seems in many ways firmly rooted in (if not limited by) its histori-
cal context, a kind of historical artifact, Borinage, along with the two earlier
Dutch films I have called masterpieces, Zuiderzee and Nieuwe Gronden, are art-
works of continuing eloquence and resilience.36 Borinage testifies to a creative
struggle of enduring significance and to the still exemplary intervention of an
artist into a specific social problematic. Moreover, it continues to be a spare,
unmannered artistic utterance of profound emotional and political authen-
ticity. Ivens (1969, 79) gave his reminiscences of the shooting of Borinage spe-
cial emphasis in Camera a decade or so later, providing a record of the major
risks, innovations, and discoveries provoked by this film that has proven to be
a reliable one. Earlier notes for the memoirs stated the film's place as a mile-
stone in the career even more definitively than the final version:
Great turning point in my work - (Big switch in form, content and meth-
od), because in Industrial Symphony and Creosote I started to become
slick. All tricks of filmmaking I had mastered. 1. Technical proficiency
- BUT - No way of using what I'd found in Russia - feeling of what the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
hell it's all about. Stress complete participation, absorption in lives, fight
against mine-owners; very simple style, away from fancy camera move-
ments, fancy lights, no payment - lived on money earned, from commer-
cial jobs.
This happens to all artists - artisans excellent style, their [work] con-
tinues same style all life. This is the graveyard of artists and writers. But
must choose - make clean break; Huxley on Goya's later life and works -
Desastres de Guerra. (Ivens, n.d. [c.1943], notes for Camera, JIA)
Ivens's sense of Borinage as a clean break is accurate: seen in the context of the
preceding films, its proposal of a new form and a new praxis is a bold one. The
artist's relationship to his subject and his method in Zuiderzee and Komsomol
seems utterly unproblematical in comparison, less than hazardous, and even,
in the case of the latter film, complacent. Borinage is a film that makes Ivens's
reference to Goya seem not in the least immodest. I 173
Interestingly enough, Ivens returned from the USSR the second time with
as few ideas about his future work as the first time when the call from Philips
had been waiting for him. Now, however, Ivens was ready to turn down indus-
trial commissions and was apparently able to do so because his income from
previous projects permitted him to select carefully (Ivens, 1969, 81). We have
seen that just previous to his departure for the second Soviet trip Ivens was
already full of the impossibility of continuing to pursue his interests in West-
ern Europe, of the futility of attempting to make films that were both com-
missions and fulfilments of the artist's role as 'representative of the masses'.
It is not at all certain what changed his mind and persuaded him to return to
try once again, perhaps only the strength of family and personal ties and the
fact that Zuiderzee was still unfinished. It is also conceivable, if Gross's ([1967]
1974) account is to be credited, that Mezhrabpom, the studio controlled by
WIR, may have placed special emphasis on preparing its expatriate guests for
re-absorption back into capitalist society.
In any case, when the opportunity to shootBorinage did present itself, Ivens
leapt at it with the energy and purpose that we have already seen he habitually
applied to projects not initiated by himself. The project was to be about the
Belgian coal-mining district, the Borinage, and was to be a collaboration with
the Belgian documentarist Henri Storck. Storck had at that time directed a
number of short documentaries on indigenous Belgian subjects, which Ivens
(1969, 85) described as 'pleasant and sensitive'. He had done so within the
context of a Belgian avant-garde community similar in many respects to that
of Filmliga in Holland, with the difference that the Club de l'dcran in Brussels
was somewhat more politicised than its Amsterdam counterpart, many of its
members being active Socialists. Storck had also contributed to a few fictional
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
films at that time, notably Jean Vigo's Zero de conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933,
France, 41). The attribution of responsibilities respectively to the various col-
laborators (including the French camera operator Franois Rents who did
some of the shooting) is difficult. Ivens seems to have worked together with
Storck as closely and as instinctively as he would with his later collaborators.
Ivens (1969, 85) describes their division of responsibilities thus: 'We agreed
to share the duties of story and photography, while I took responsibility for
the whole production'. As for the editing, it seems that Storck and Ferno, with
whom Storck was subsequently to develop a long personal and professional
association, were responsible jointly for most of the work in Brussels, in occa-
sional consultation with Ivens whose other interests called him elsewhere
after the shooting. In any case, the success of Ivens's collaboration with Storck
confirms Ivens's extraordinary flexibility as a freelance artist, as a filmmaker
who could be parachuted into unfamiliar cultural and political situations and
174 I seemingly profit from such a challenge.
Labour struggle had been endemic in the Borinage for several genera-
tions. Ivens (1969, 83) would proudly remember that Karl Marx, Emile Zola,
and Vincent van Gogh had all preceded him in pointing out the extraordinary
poverty and militancy of the miners in this area.37 The Borins were also notable
for their thriving musical, literary, and artistic proletarian culture. The previ-
ous year a long series of wage cutbacks had finally provoked a massive strike of
100,000 miners all over Belgium. When this larger action petered out, most of
the Borin miners had held out and some who returned were locked out. Mean-
while, the traditional Socialist leadership of the unions was being challenged
by the Communists because of the vacillation of the former, and the WIR was
active in bringing relief to the most destitute of the strikers and their families.
One WIR doctor, Paul Hennebert, was active in the Monobloc, the company
housing-estate of a shut-down mine in Levant de Mons, where the company
had cut off power and water to force out locked-out miners. Hennebert was
one of the initiators of the film and would be depicted in one especially stir-
ring sequence visiting a striker's family. In July 1933, Hennebert published a
WIR-sponsored inquiry entitled Comment on creve defaim au Levant de Mons?
(How One Dies from Hunger at the Levant de Mons?), which Hogenkamp (1979,
11) has shown would serve Ivens and Storck as the preliminary 'treatment' or
'script' for the subsequent documentary film. Two other initiators of the proj-
ect were lawyers with the Belgian section of the International Red Aid (MOPR),
also affiliated with the Communist Party, and adherents of the Brussels Club
de l'ecran, Jean Fonteyne and Albert Van Ommeslaghe. They had already
made a film, in 16mm, on the demonstrations marking the first anniversary of
the death of a worker from police violence in July 1932. They showed the film
to Storck and invited him to make a longer, more ambitious film on the same
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
subject, focused on the Monobloc, where the conditions due to the continuing
evictions were the worst. These three men and other local leaders would play
an instrumental creative and liaison role during the filming.
Storck, feeling that his middle-class background was a liability, discussed
the project in Paris with Louis Aragon and Vladimir Pozner (who was to figure
largely in Ivens's career in the next two decades), members of the Association
des ecrivains et artistes revolutionnaires (AEAR), as well as with Bunuel, who
had just finished shooting Las Hurdes. This association and its parallel Bel-
gian one had apparently replaced Filmliga, dissolved in 1931 (though the pub-
lication continued), as the locus of Ivens's institutional support. The body set
up to produce Borinage, Education par l'image, was affiliated with the AEAR,
and also included executive members of the Club de l'dcran and the WIR law-
yers. Meanwhile, Storck soon persuaded Ivens to co-direct. The producers
quickly raised a starting budget, about 10,000 francs, upon the promise of a
theatre owner to run the film for four weeks, and ultimately secured another I 175
20,000 francs from an elderly capitalist who was repenting of a lifetime of class
exploitation.38 The filmmakers proceeded immediately to the area, Storck in
early and Ivens in mid-September, and started filming the evictions in an
atmosphere exacerbated by lingering stalemates, deteriorating living condi-
tions, and declining morale.
The film's function would be to call attention to the desperate conditions
in the area and to stimulate European public support for the miners' cause.
For Ivens, this function was ideological:
Our job was to penetrate the deeper guilt of an economic situation which
permits such terrible circumstances - and we had to do this without
slogans and big words. [...] I wanted the spectators of the finished film
to want to do more than send these workers money. This film required a
fighting point of view, it became a weapon, not just an interesting story
about something that had happened. (Ivens, 1969, 87, 89).
The conception of film as weapon had not yet had much mileage in Ivens's
public rhetoric up to this point but an interview appearing at the same time as
the Borinage premiere extended this new conception of his work:
Cinematic expression being one of the best means of effectively helping
the working class in Its struggle and its vital demands, we have found
therein an opportunity that we had been searching for a long time, to
participate directly in this struggle and to draw from it an authentic doc-
ument, composed of real and verifiable facts.
The frightful poverty of the Borinage miners, the repression
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
unleashed upon the miners in revolt against their crushing exploitation
seemed to us to underline quite specifically the economic anarchy of the
capitalist system (Grelier, 1965, 144-145)"
This explicit linking of the Borinage events to their global context, the capital-
ist crisis, Storck (quoted in Hogenkamp 1979, 12) retroactively considered to
have been Ivens's most important contribution to the film. The directness of
this commitment was a long way from the anonymity of Ivens's CPH film work,
the reportorial objectivity of WUBouwen and Zuiderzee, or the covertly sugges-
tive ambiguity of Philips-Radio. Here was the point at which Ivens's practice
finally 'caught up' with his political theory. The witness to the social dynamic
became a participant. The Komsomol project had offered Ivens, a foreigner, a
similar opportunity for social intervention, but it was only on home ground,
within and in opposition to capitalist society that the crucial setting for this
176 I role could be found. In the future this would be a model often returned to,
an alliance with a cause or a community struggling against the larger frame-
work of established order. Ivens's anecdotes of the hardships shared among
crew and workers, of their ingenious efforts for keeping one step ahead of the
police, of the risks taken in common, provide some of the most memorable
pages of Ivens's autobiographies (Ivens, 1969, 90-93; Ivens and Destanque,
1982, 114-120). The exhilaration stimulated by this relationship of artist and
community exudes from every frame of Borinage as well.
The socialist realist model provided by Komsomol is a determining influ-
ence on the film although it has been significantly adapted to fit the context of
the film: the extreme haste of the ten-day shoot, the lack of adequate prepara-
tions and orientation, the severe budgetary limitations, the police harassment,
and the urgent short-term agitational priority of the project as conceived by its
producers. Because of all these factors, the model of the Afanaseyev story is
reproduced less coherently and continuously in Borinage. Except for an intro-
ductory montage sequence somewhat in the manner of the Komsomol prelude,
and a capsule summary of the background to the Borinage events also using
stock shots, the core of the film is largely a dramatic semi-documentary nar-
rative as in Komsomol.40 However, instead of a single dramatic focus extend-
ed throughout, Borinage is a series of short dramatic vignettes, each dealing
with a certain aspect of the situation or with an event that had taken place.
Although these are shorter and more scattered than the Afanaseyev story, they
attempt the same kind of personalisation and specificity as in the Soviet mod-
el, short of the quasi-fictive continuous identification sought in that film by
the development of the chief character. Though the Borinage vignettes are no
less overdetermined in their didactic content than the Afanaseyev story, they
are somewhat more successful in retaining the rough atmosphere of natural-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
23. Borinage (1934). Ivens's collaboration
with the teenaged miner and his mother
expanded the scene's narrative logic
towards accusation. DVD frame capture.
© Fonds Henri Storck/CAPI Films, Paris,
and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
ism and spontaneity that the Soviet film's over-scripted romanticism had pre-
vented.
The Borinage vignettes are built upon the same basically narrative syn-
tagm that Ivens had employed in various degrees from the very first. One typi-
cal vignette follows a teenaged miner named Delplanck4' home from work and
reveals the hardships of his family situation, his widowed mother and younger
siblings subsisting in the most stringent conditions, as can be seen in the fol-
lowing shot list:
TABLE I - SHOT LIST FOR 'TEENAGED MINER' SEQUENCE42
The English subtitles to the original silent film's Dutch/French intertitles, provided by
the 2008 DVD restoration, are reproduced on the right; the time code figures and shot
length calculations are likewise taken from this version of the film.
Shot DVD time Description Text
No. code (shot
length)
1 09:12 (6 sec.) Workers leaving the coal
mine, approaching cam-
era. Long shot.
2 09:18 (4 sec.) Tracking shot of young
miner walking along the
row of homes of the coal
mine workers, long shot
view from behind.
1 177
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
3 09:22 (7 sec.) Continuation: tracking
shot of young miner walk-
ing, closer view from side/
front.
4 09:29(8 sec.) The young miner heads for
the square decorated with
a big church, rear diagonal
long shot.
5 09:37 (9 sec.) Long shot panning left, he Intertitle - 09:46 - This
crosses square to enter a fifteen-year-old miner
worker's home. doesn't work above ground
level, but in the damp,
deep corridors of the mine
to earn an extra 5 francs
for his widowed mother.
This way he receives a
weekly salary of 73.50
francs five days a week,
eight hours a day.
6 09:56 (5 sec.) Interior. He hands his
salary over to his seated
mother. Medium shot
against curtained window.
7 10:01 (5 sec.) Close-up of the coins,
panning.
8 10:06 (3 sec.) Close-up of young miner,
speaking.
9 10:09 (2 sec.) Close-up of the money,
continuation of 7.
10 10:11 (2 sec.) Close-up of the young
miner.
11 10:13 (1 sec.) The mother counts his Intertitle - 10:14 - Twenty
money and divides it francs a week for lodging
up. Shot/countershot, paid to the mining compa-
medium close, lit from ny. Fifty francs to sustain a
side through curtained family of four for a week.
window.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
12
10:20 (7 sec.)
Continuing, same shot of
mother counting money.
Subtitle - Above ground, he
had a daily salary of 12.70
francs
Intertitle - 10:27 - The
utilities have not been
paid. There is no water, no
electricity. The inhabitants
drink stagnant water from
the cistern or the flooded
basement.
13 10:34 (4 sec.) The mother goes out into
the yard with a bucket,
long view.
14 10:38 (4 sec.) She draws water from the
cistern, close-up.
15 10:42 (3 sec.) Extreme close-up of the
dirty water in the bucket.
16 10:45 (7 sec.) Four children come out
of the house into the yard
towards camera, two older
sisters carrying infants.
Long to medium shot.
17 10:52 (3 sec.) Close-up of an electric
ceiling socket without a
bulb, covered in flies.
18 10:55 (8 sec.) The cellar, artificial spot
light. Young miner comes
down stairs bearing bucket
and candle.
19 11:03 (4 sec.) Closer view, he fetches a
bucket of terrouille (coal
dust mud).
20 11:07 (1 sec.) Upstairs, two-shot, the
mother burns terrouille in
a Louvain stove.
1 179
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
180 I
21 11:08 (1 sec.) Close-up of the burning Intertitle - 11:09 - For
stove. fuel they use the mud that
remains after washing
coal, which only burns
when mixed with wood.
Since there is no money
for wood, shutters, fences,
and floorboards are used
as fuel.
22 11:19 (3 sec.) Close-up of the window.
23 11:22 (4 sec.) The mother looks after the
fire, continuation of 21.
24 11:26 (3 sec.) The mother heating water
in a pot on the stove, medi-
um.
25 11:29 (5 sec.) Daughter asleep on the
table in front of window,
medium long.
26 11:34 (7 sec.) The mother puts a child
to bed, long-shot rear view
through bedroom door-
way, harsh artificial light.
27 11:41 (5 sec.) The toddler in its bed, high
angle, medium close.
28 11:46-11:48 (2 Closer view of another
sec.) baby in its rocking cradle.
This traditional mise-en-scene using short shots and shot/countershot con-
structions serves to give a vivid dramatic specificity to the two figures and obvi-
ously required the kind of director-subject interaction that had drawn Vertov's
criticism in Moscow. One can clearly visualise the widow and her son going
over the scene with the crew, obliging them by moving into the sunlight by
the window to count the money, and posing for the close-ups in order to facili-
tate the takes. The repeated close-up emphasis - on the wage transaction, and
then on the socket, the water, and the sleeping child - serves to expand the
purely narrative logic of the mise-en-scene to its rhetorical and expository func-
tion. The effect of the shots is, as Ivens puts it, accusatory.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The visual quality of this and the other similar scenes is striking for its
bareness. The simple directness of the mise-en-scene is reinforced by an avoid-
ance of complex compositions and of romantic lighting effects, a refutation
of both the baroque decorativeness of Ivens's avant-garde films and the heroic
mythologisation ofKomsomol and Zuiderzee. The adoption of this new simplic-
ity was a crucial turning point in Ivens's aesthetic development. He remem-
bered it in this way in Camera:
During this work in the Borinage our film aesthetics underwent consider-
able revision. The approach used in Philips-Radio had to be dumped over-
board. The urgency in which this film was made kept our camera angles
severe and orthodox. Or one might say, unorthodox, because super-slick-
ness and photographic affectation were becoming the orthodoxy of the
European documentary film. This return to simplicity was naturally a
stylistic revolution for me. It was right because I felt it necessary to resist 181
communicating personal pity for these people - what had to be stressed
was the harshness of their situation without being sentimental or pity-
ing. Every sequence should say I ACCUSE - accusing the social system
which caused such misery and hardship.
Our job was to penetrate the deeper guilt of an economic situation
which permits such terrible circumstances - and we had to do this
without slogans and big words. Critics have said that the absence of
'interesting' photography in Borinage can be explained by the poor and
primitive equipment that was used. This is not the explanation. The style
of Borinage was chosen deliberately and was determined by the decency
and the unrelieved plight of the people around us. We felt it would be
insulting to people in such extreme hardship to use any style of photogra-
phy that would prevent the direct, honest communication of their pain to
the spectator. Perhaps every sincere artist who has seen the Borinage has
come away from it a different person. (Ivens, 1969, 87)
Ivens goes on to explain how this 'aesthetic revolution' led to specific tech-
niques to counteract the 'danger of aesthetic pleasure':
During the filming of Borinage, we sometimes had to destroy a certain
unwelcome superficial beauty that would occur when we did not want it.
When the clean-cut shadow of the barracks window fell on the dirty rags
and dishes of a table the pleasant effect of the shadow actually destroyed
the effect of dirtiness we wanted, so we broke the edges of the shadow.
Our aim was to prevent agreeable photographic effects distracting the
audience from the unpleasant truths we were showing.
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
We often encountered this danger of aesthetic pleasures, lights and
shadows, symmetry or balanced compositions that would undermine
our purpose for a moment. In the cramped and filthy interiors of the
Borinage, an agreeable aesthetic value might prevent a spectator from
saying to himself, 'This is dirty - this smells bad - this is not a place for
human beings to live'. Without this sort of precaution there was always a
danger that these tiny dilapidated barracks (sometimes covered with ivy)
might look picturesque instead of appalling. There have also been cases
in the history of the documentary when photographers became so fasci-
nated by dirt that the result was the dirt looked interesting and strange,
not something repellent to the cinema audience.
The filmmaker must be indignant and angry about the waste of peo-
ple before he can find the right camera angle on the dirt and on the truth.
I saw enough in the Borinage to encourage me to want to make more
than a sentimental film about the miners. (Ivens, 1969, 88)
At this point, Ivens (1969, 88) footnotes the negative example of Grierson's
1935 HousingProblems (UK, 16) (which he says 'fell into the error of exotic dirt.
You could not smell those London slums') and the positive examples of Chap-
lin, Lorentz's FightforLife (1940, USA, 69) and Storck's Les Maisons de la misere
(1937, Belgium, 20) in which this problem is overcome.43 Storck's memory of
the project does confirm that the pair were seriously concerned with this prob-
lem:
We were no longer thinking of the cinema nor of its framings. We were
dominated by the irrepressible need to give the cruel facts that reality was
throwing in our faces an image as stripped down, as naked, as sincere
as possible. All aesthetics appeared to us indecent. Our camera was no
longer anything but a cry of revolt. (Storck, 1963, 94-99)
This aesthetic position must be situated within the context of a concurrent
debate responding to the post-Expressionist German aesthetic movement of
New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). This movement Ivens had first encoun-
tered in the 1920s, thanks to the evident echoes of, and affinities with, this
modernist photographic trend in both Brug and Regen, with their aestheticisa-
tion of objects and surfaces of the urban every-day (Krull was also associated
with the movement).44 As European avant-gardes veered increasingly political
in the 1930s, New Objectivity was often accused by critics from the Left of the
same sentimentalisation and aestheticisation of poverty that the filmmakers
were so intent on avoiding in Borinage. Walter Benjamin was a leader in rec-
ognising the elements of aesthetic compromise in the pseudo-progressive
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
posturings of New Objectivity documentary realism. Benjamin focused his
criticism upon the delusions of the left-wing intelligentsia who were the pre-
dominant producers and consumers of this aesthetic trend:
[This intelligentsia's] political significance was exhausted by the transpo-
sition of revolutionary reflexes, insofar as they arose in the bourgeoisie,
into objects of distraction, of amusement, which can be supplied for
consumption. [...]
This left-wing radicalism is precisely the attitude to which there is no
longer in general any corresponding political action. [...] For from the
beginning all it has in mind is to enjoy itself in negativistic quiet. The
metamorphosis of political struggle from a compulsory decision into
an object of pleasure, from a means of production into an article of con-
sumption - that is this literature's latest hit. [...] Constipation and melan-
choly have always gone together. (Benjamin, [1931] 1974, 28-31)41 I 183
With reference to photography itself, another lecture by Benjamin given in
Paris three months after the Brussels premiere of Borinage is more explicit in
its echo of the thinking that Ivens and Storck had been involved in so recently:
For we are confronted with the fact of which there has been no shortage
of proof in Germany over the last decade - that the bourgeois apparatus
of production and publication is capable of assimilating, indeed of
propagating, an astonishing amount of revolutionary themes without
ever seriously putting into question its own existence or that of the class
which owns it. [... New Objectivity photography] has succeeded in turning
abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way,
into an object of enjoyment. For if it is an economic function of pho-
tography to supply the masses, by modish processing, with matter which
previously eluded mass consumption - spring, famous people, foreign
countries - then one of its political functions is to renovate the world as
it is from the inside, i.e. by modish techniques. (Benjamin, [1934] 1973,
95)46
The same proposition was enunciated in less analytic terms at about the same
time from within the workers' photography movement, also sponsored by the
WIR:
The workers' world is invisible to the bourgeoisie, and unfortunately to
most proletarians also. If the bourgeoisie depicts proletarians and their
world of suffering, it is only to provide a contrast, a dark background to
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
set off the glories of bourgeois 'culture', 'humanity', 'arts and sciences',
and so forth, so that sensitive folk can enjoy a feeling of sympathy and
'compassion' or else take pride in the consciousness of their own superi-
ority. Our photographers must tear down this facade. We must proclaim
proletarian reality in all its disgusting ugliness, with its indictment of
society and its demand for revenge. We will have no veils, no retouching,
no aestheticism; we must present things as they are, in a hard merciless
light. We must take photographs wherever proletarian life is at its hard-
est and the bourgeoisie at its most corrupt; and we shall increase the
fighting power of our class insofar as our pictures show class conscious-
ness, mass consciousness, discipline, solidarity, a spirit of aggression
and revenge.
Photography is a weapon; so is technology, so is art! Our world-view
is militant Marxism, not mere academic wisdom. And we worker-pho-
tographers have an important sector of the front to hold; we are the eye of
the working class, and it is we who must teach our fellow-workers how to
see. (Hoernle, [1930] 1978, 47)
Ivens's and Storck's strategies and rhetoric, then, must be seen as shaped by
this lively international consensus about aesthetics and politics, of which the
foregoing citations are typical. In fact, two German adherents of the workers
photography movement were on location with the filmmakers in the Borinage,
took many photographs that, having the advantage of being instantly avail-
able, were used in political organisation during the actual shoot, and were
subsequently published in the Socialist illustrated press in Belgium. Such
photography was widely disseminated in this manner throughout Western
Europe. Hogenkamp (1979, 16) is not wrong in concluding that radical docu-
mentary photography was one or more steps in advance of film in its evolution
at this point.
Aware of the ideological problematic that Benjamin and the proletarian
photographers were pointing out in another context, Ivens and Storck availed
themselves of several strategies beyond the tactic (elaborated above) of strip-
ping down the image to its bare denotative essential. One of these strategies,
as can be seen in the scene detailed above, is to apply in the images and in the
exposition a rigorous material analysis to the dramatic vignettes. The 'Teen-
aged Miner' sequence is oriented almost entirely towards revealing the simple
physical details of the family's living conditions. The mother and her children
are not simply aesthetic subjects but concrete individuals who consume water
and fuel every day and pay 20 francs a week rent. It is part of Ivens's genius
that he can continually translate such prosaic details of the quotidian, a pail
of stagnant water or a bulbless socket, into a vivid social document. Similar
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
sequences to this one employ the same keen materialist eye, for example, a
vignette in which an unemployed miner must take a daily four-hour bicycle
trip to get a loaf of bread for his family from his parents-in-law. The account
includes point-of-view travelling shots of bakery windows lining his route, the
inaccessible goods clearly visible. This sequence was one of several recon-
structed from cases documented in Comment on creve de faim au Levant de
Mons. Still another sequence demonstrates the desperation of the fuel situa-
tion by showing grim elderly women and children picking up bad coal from the
huge mounds. In such cinematic discourse one can clearly see the ancestor of
Ivens's and Marceline Loridan's measurement of the Chinese Cultural Revo-
lution in the same material terms 40 years later. They would tirelessly ask their
subjects their wages, rent payments, food prices, and fuel and water sources,
transforming this prosaic detail into a cinematic tour de force of Yukong.
While such sequences in Borinage underline the desperate means of mere
survival resorted to by the miners, other sequences adapt another aspect of I 185
socialist realism in their attempt to avoid the trap of 'negativistic quiet', name-
ly, what has already been pointed out in Komsomol as 'the ideal dynamic' of
socialist realist dramaturgy. In other words, Ivens and Storck are careful to
provide as highlights of the film instances of exemplary positive action taken
by the miners in order to fight back. In fact, the conditions of their poverty are
given less stress than the means of resistance by which the miners attempt to
change their situation. One vignette shows how a family and its neighbours
foil an eviction by literally sitting down on the family's furniture to prevent
the bailiffs from taking it. Two other vignettes along this line depict the rules
by which strikers are able to hold illegal meetings right under the noses of
the police, and a climactic spontaneous demonstration. There is even a short
sequence in which a negative individual model of resistance - begging in the
street - is contrasted explicitly for being counterproductive. The positioning
of the demonstration vignette as the film's climax gives the entire film the
same 'ideal' shape that the individual segments aimed for; the formulation of
a long-term political strategy has priority over the mere revelation of the work-
ers' poverty. The purpose of this shape was, Ivens declared at the time,
To show, to give to the workers this certitude that a strike is never lost,
that even a provisional defeat is only a stage of the struggle and that the
struggle continues on the base of workers united for precise goals. It's at
this period that I began to feel deeply the unity that must exist between
the artist and man. (Ivens, quoted in Grelier, 1965, 76)
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
24. Borinage (1934). The film's climactic, "' -
catalytic demonstration gave it an 'ideal'
shape, an assurance to workers that 'a
strike is never lost'. DVD frame capture.
© Fonds Henri Storck/CAPI Films, Paris,
and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
One of Benjamin's remarks about New Objectivity photography points to anoth-
er strategy employed by Ivens and Storck to avoid 'the danger of aesthetic pleas-
186 ure': 'What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such
a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness
and confer upon it a revolutionary use-value' (Benjamin, [1934] 1973, 95). The
lengthy texts supplied by the filmmakers were at first read above the projection,
and only later integrated as intertitles (Storck wryly recollected that they were
often longer than the images); they must be seen as a kind of 'caption' designed
to inject a 'revolutionary use-value' into them (Storck, interview with author,
January 1976). Ivens's former inclination in Brug towards the 'sufficiency of the
object' or his tendency in Philips-Radio to treat people as aesthetic surfaces are
completely reversed in Borinage by the rescue of the image by the text. Brecht's
([1931] 1964) concept of the 'literarization' of the image is also relevant to this
makeshift 'commentary' on a project unable to afford sound.
Ivens's and Storck's 'captions' take several different directions during the
course of the film. Where the mise-en-scene is already engaged in demonstrat-
ing, in pointing out the abuses of the situation, as in the emphatic close-up
structures of the 'Teenaged Miner' vignette detailed above, the commentary
explicitly underlines the points already being made visually, for example, by
repeating over an image of a stripped window the information that the family
must use the window shutters for fuel. Or else it provides details not elaborat-
ed visually such as the proportion of the widow's income spent on rent. Else-
where the text goes even further and offers an interpretation of an image: the
introductory newsreel montage of Depression and strike footage concludes
on an accusatory note - 'Anarchy of the economic system'; the incident of the
foiled eviction concludes, 'The solidarity of the miners has prevented the evic-
tion - at least temporarily'. The finale of the film, a climactic reprise of a dozen
or so of the central images of the film does not permit any ambiguity to linger
in the spectator's mind:
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The proletariat knows that the contradictions and poverty in the
Borinage, as in all of Belgium, as in the whole world, are the fruits of cap-
italism and that humanity will only be saved from disorder and from the
exploitation of man by man by the dictatorship of the proletariat for the
coming of socialism.
Ivens's sense of Borinage as a turning point is thus correct in this sense: it con-
tains the first systematic use of 'revolutionary use-value' 'captions' in an Ivens
film. There is now imposed upon the indirect address, visual diegesis of the
image-track, a textual diegesis on a whole new level, so much so that the Bel-
gian Socialist paper LePeuple called the film a lecture accompanied by projec-
tions (Storck, interview with author, January 1976). Ivens had arrived at the
model of the classical sound documentary with its resource of direct address
and verbal diegesis, yet had done so, ironically, in a silent film. This model
offered Ivens for the first time the possibility of direct intervention in a social 187
problematic and the possibility of addressing his public without equivoca-
tion or compromise, as well as, as Nichols (1976, 38) has pointed out, with the
'advantage of analytic precision'.
A third strategy of the film that raises it above 'the danger of aesthetic
pleasure' is one first tentatively glimpsed in WUBouwen and confirmed with
exuberance by Ivens in Magnitogorsk: the participation of a film's subjects
in the process of its production. This strategy has results in Borinage that
are so strikingly innovative and prophetic that Ivens becomes an important
early precursor of direct cinema (Marsolais, 1974, 66). The film's affinity
to direct cinema goes beyond the feeling of naturalism and unrehearsed
spontaneity in certain scenes shot in the streets of the town with Ivens's
little Kinamo camera. In the Belgian setting, the active participation of the
subjects in the filmmaking process is directly related to the active menace
of police and management harassment, as well as budgetary and technical
limitations. The film simply would not have been made without the local
leaders and organisers nor without the miners and their families taking on
a direct role in the filmmaking, providing initiative, resources, support, and
crew members. More important perhaps was their very real creative input.
In scenes such as the episode in which the eviction is prevented by group
effort, or in which the miners in the street act out for the camera the way
they spontaneously hold forbidden meetings, the role of the filmmakers
is almost reduced to that of technical resource-people, since the idea, the
dramatisation, and the performances all come from local initiative. The
wording of Ivens's (quoted in Hogenkamp, 1979, 12) description of the film-
ing of one striker's lack of shelter for his family keynotes this aspect of the
film: 'I arranged with C. to take a film this morning of his wretched circum-
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
stances. He agreed, as he knows that with this film we join in the fight in
which he takes part daily'.
The catalytic effect this participatory process had on the morale and
solidarity of the strikers is not incidental to the question here but of its very
essence - from Vertov to Challenge for Change, the Sandinistas and Anand Pat-
wardhan to Wapikoni and the other innumerable community digital projects
of the 21St century, film history has been dogged by the utopian dream of com-
munity use of film as an instrument of change (Baker, Waugh, and Winton,
2011; Ramirez, 1984; Bernier, 2014; Dyer, 2014). Borinage takes a step towards
this dream. Ivens's analogous example, cited in a 1953 conversation about
Borinage, of a Soviet director discovering that steel production was accelerat-
ed during factory filming seems trivial by comparison (Ivens, [195311965, 49).
The final scene of the film is the most dramatic expression of this potential of
film as social catalyst. At first, like several other scenes in the film, the scene
188 was to be a re-enactment by original participants of a demonstration that had
taken place at Wasmes, the communist stronghold, to mark the fiftieth anni-
versary of Marx's death earlier that year (Ivens, 1969, 91-92). For Ivens also, it
was to have the additional excitement of a practical application of the subjec-
tive camera experiments he had pursued since the very beginning - the cam-
era was to be a participant in the march, not only symbolically but literally, in
a number of handheld camera movements that would suggest the movements
of a marcher. Moreover the energy of these movements was stepped up by the
necessity of passing the Kinamo from hand to hand to avoid its confiscation by
the police. Many of the Workers Film and Photo League demonstration films
of the same period included similar experimentation, for example National
Hunger March (Sam Brody et al., 1931, USA, 11) (Campbell, 1978, 146-148).
In any case, the re-enactment went beyond being merely that, and the recon-
structed march became a spontaneous demonstration in its own right with
workers and their families coming out of their homes to salute the gilt-framed
portrait of Marx at the head and to join in with the marchers. The sequence
ended with an unfilmed beating for all by the police that was more than com-
pensated for by the new feeling of solidarity generated by the event, and the
genre of the demonstration film was set in motion (Waugh, 1999).
Such scenes are characterised by a certain dramatic and visual simplici-
ty, even primitiveness at moments, but they succeed remarkably in commu-
nicating the fervour of the participants who are collectively refusing to accept
their powerlessness and poverty, and are demonstrating their tactics of resis-
tance. It is important that Storck and Ivens should have incorporated in their
film the solutions already entered upon by the subjects and reflected the level
of consciousness already in existence in the Borinage rather than imposing
ready-made solutions from outside. Because of their pioneering success in
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
subject-generated documentary, Benjamin ([1936] 1969, 232) attaches con-
siderable importance to this very film, praising it along with Three SongsAbout
Lenin as an example of the cinema's potential, a forecast of that utopian situa-
tion in which 'the distinction between author and public [loses] its character',
a realisation of 'modern man's legitimate claim to be reproduced'.
A final means resorted to by Ivens and Storck for ensuring the 'revolution-
ary use-value' of their film is the compilation mode. A brief montage sequence,
similar to that in Komsomol, introduces the film by setting the world political
context in focus. This succession of images includes closed-down factories,
immobile cranes, strikers, and US police riots, plus the ubiquitous Depression
iconography of burning coffee and wheat and the spilling of milk. Such juxta-
positional rhetoric is not confined only to these montage tropes; throughout
the film the contrast of two disparate images is used to surmount the inad-
equacy of the single image - e.g. wealthy church construction/starving chil-
dren. This approach reflects both Ivens's and Storck's previous experience I 189
with newsreel stock footage. In 1932, Storck had made a short compilation of
1928 newsreel clips entitled Histoire du soldat inconnu, denouncing the arms
race through ironic juxtaposition. This paralleled Ivens's experiments in the
same vein. The humorous touch in some of the Borinage contrasts may have
been Storck's as much as Ivens's, such as the juxtaposition of a miner's hovel
with an official-looking Institute of Hygiene. At any rate, such juxtapositions
were in the air, perhaps hanging over from the surrealist currents of the twen-
ties: Bunuel's Las Hurdes, shot earlier that same year by Ivens's Zuiderzee col-
laborator Eli Lotar had a similar attitude to churches, and both A propos de
Nice and the American WFPL's Bonus March echoed Storck's armaments and
anti-clerical conceits (Campbell, 1978, 148-149). Ivens (1969, 97) also men-
tions Shub as an inspiration for his montage experiments.48
Despite the fact that most of Storck and Ivens's archival images were
already quite familiar to the European leftist public - Brecht's and Dudow's
trainload of young socialist athletes in Kuhle Wampe have a lengthy conver-
sation about the relevance of burning coffee to their own political situation
- their compilation has the simple but eloquent effect of connecting the Bori-
nage event to the general world context, of emphasising how such events never
occur in isolation. The wheat and milk shots are repeated later in the conclud-
ing peroration already mentioned. This time however they have accrued a
certain new resonance in the course of the film and their juxtaposition to the
Borinage's huge unused coal stockpiles (terrils) create a new level of meaning.
These terrils automatically recall the preceding views of aged women scroung-
ing for scraps and pregnant women shivering from exposure and thus become
one more devastating visual symbol of an economic and social system gone
mad. A critic who saw Borinage and Nieuwe Gronden in the US recognised the
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
significance of the use of montage to Ivens's new level of filmic discourse. For
him Ivens was
a man who profoundly understands the art of realistic montage. For it is
clear that sheer 'true to nature' presentation, 'naked reality', does not in
itself contain the compelling force of proof: the emotional appeal inher-
ent in facts has to be brought out. We are not mere onlookers, we want to
change the world! The manner in which the arrow is poised and let loose
will determine whether the spectator is to remain neutral or to be pro-
foundly stirred. (Wolf [Ben Maddow], 1935, 9)
Ivens's accession to a new level of filmic discourse was not unproblematical. If
for Nichols (1976, 38), the direct mode of address poses 'the perennial risk of
dogmatism', for Ivens and Storck in 1933 it created risks that were much less
190 theoretical, risks of censorship and limited distribution. Certainly in terms of
the direction of Ivens's own career, the new explicitness had immediate ram-
ifications. For one thing, the inevitable rupture with the avant-garde constitu-
ency was finally consummated. According to Camera, the predominant Dutch
reactions to the film were 'Joris Ivens is now becoming a propagandist', and
'as his social concerns go up, his artistic standards go down' (Ivens, 1969, 93).
An Amsterdam paper stated, not without some truth, that Ivens's popularity in
his own country was then virtually exhausted and that with Borinage 'our only
cinematic artist of truly great appeal bids adieu to his country and to his peo-
ple' (GroeneAmsterdammer 1934).
The success of Borinage in reaching its intended audience was also threat-
ened by the new explicit level of discourse. If a film can be judged according to
Benjamin's criterion of 'revolutionary use-value', the film met with such bar-
riers to its distribution after its March 1934 debut as to hold up this value to
question. Dutch, Belgian, French, and some local American censors objected
to a picture of Lenin visible in the background of one sequence, and, in the
case of the last-named, to the exposed genitals of a worker's small son during
Dr. Hennebert's examination (Storck, interview with author, January 1976).
Apparently, however, this official reaction did not prevent the distribution
of the film to limited audiences through political organisations such as the
WIR in France, or the Association of Friends of the Soviet Union in Holland.49
The film's chilly reception by its Socialist-dominated Belgian sponsors and
intended primary audience must be seen in the light not only of traditional
Socialist-Communist rivalry among the miners' unions of the Borinage, but of
their bitter enmity on the global scale during this pre-Popular Front, ultra-left
period of the Communist Party's evolution. In short, the two or three explicit
Marxist-Leninist references in the film do not seem to have been designed to
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
reach a wide constituency. Pierre Vermeylen, one of the WIR lawyers, asked
the filmmakers for a few strategic cuts, including the sequence of the sponta-
neous demonstration around Marx's portrait and the sequence with the Lenin
portrait that the censors had also objected to. Storck was anxious for the film
to receive Belgian distribution in the powerful Socialist exhibition network or
in the Cindac theatre chain that specialised in newsreels and was thus willing
to compromise by accommodating Vermeylen, who as a Communist himself
was certainly not acting for sectarian reasons. But Ivens (1969, 192) was intran-
sigent and a systematic mass distribution of the film was forestalled. However,
within the limited alternative networks, the demand for the film was steady in
Belgium throughout the thirties, and Ivens reported that some adjustments
to the labour situation in Belgium resulted from a labour leader's having seen
the film. In the Netherlands, where the producers had not even dared to sub-
mit the film to the censors, the film reached only the Filmliga audience and
some pro-communist clubs, such as the Association of Friends of the Soviet I 191
Union. Dutch-language critics were mixed with regard to this latest effort of
the native son: whereas L.J. Jordaan reliably declared Borinage 'a work of stat-
ure! ...more stirring, warmer, more vigorous than Ivens's work thus far', an
influential Flemish critic Maurice Roelants intensified the rhetoric of redbait-
ing that was gathering around the 'dogmatic' and 'demagogic' filmmaker (De
Groene Amsterdammer 17 March 1934, Forum 1934, both quoted in Stufkens,
2008, 189). Only in Switzerland was there a commercial distribution deal
(Stufkens, 2008, 186).
As for Ivens's collaborator, Storck regretted the Dutchman's inflexibility,
not the least because he found himself branded as a communist and out of
work for some time thereafter (Storck, interview with author, January 1976). A
long letter written to Ivens after the completion of the film expressed several
reservations about the events that had taken place.5o Storck felt that the film
should have been about the entire situation, not just the dismissed workers,
and that the filmmakers should have been better informed about the subject
before starting rather than doing their research behind the cameras. Above
all he expressed reservations about the explicitness of the film's analysis: the
spectators he said should have been permitted to come to their own conclu-
sions. The film should have been an instrument of propaganda, not propa-
ganda itself.
Ivens's first experiment with radical film praxis in the capitalist West had
thus inevitably collided with the major litmus test, distribution; the collision
would be enacted again. It may have been the blockage of mass distribution
in the West that encouraged Ivens to undertake a Soviet sound version during
his third Soviet visit of 1934-1936, or simply the obsolescence of silent film,
which must surely have added to the film's distribution problems. In any case,
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
as Hogenkamp states, Dutch exhibitors of the film had unwittingly suggested
the new version by adding the last reel of Komsomol to their print of Borinage
in order to provide an edifying contrast for their public. The new Soviet version
of Borinage was produced at Ivens's and Van Dongen's old studio, Mezhrab-
pom, towards the start of their extended final visit to Moscow, from June 1934
to June 1936.1 The Mezhrabpom version is based on a frame of Soviet-shot
material: a preface shot by Ivens showing the visit of a Belgian workers' dele-
gation to the construction site of the Moscow metro in which the two groups
of workers compare their lives, and a concluding sequence, not by Ivens, on a
new miners' village of Gorlovka in the Donbass region of the Ukraine. This epi-
logue provides a strong contrast with the Belgian film (slightly altered) in that
it shows workers moving out of hovels into decent housing, instead of vice ver-
sa. The happy Ukrainian miners eat a cake shaped like the abandoned hovels.
Both Soviet sequences are stiff and uninspired, perhaps because of the sound
192 I technology, but without the suggestive austerity of the Belgian segments.
Stufken indicates that this version not surprisingly incorporated 'communist'
material that had not been included in the silent original such as
Speeches of three communist leaders - including Joseph Jacquemotte and
Henri de Boeck - the membership book of the Secours ouvrier internation-
al [WIR], the demonstration of Les Disciples de LiebnechtLenin, the unem-
ployment benefit coupon book, the occupation of a factory and a new copy
of [striker] Fdlicien Buize's rental contract. (Stuflkens, 2008, 186)
The editing link between the face of a Borin woman and her Soviet counter-
part is impressive, however, and suggests that the talents of the editors, Ivens
and Van Dongen together with American expatriate and Eisenstein acolyte
Jay Leyda, were being challenged creatively by the exercise despite the loss of
freshness otherwise. The entire work is held together by an unrestrained com-
mentary that duplicates Ivens's terse narrative images and by a vigorous score
by Hans Hauska. This version was widely viewed in the USSR, and accompa-
nied Ivens in 1936 to New York, and was eventually deposited in the new Muse-
um of Modern Art film collection. Raves followed by American critics across
the ideological divide: Borinage was praised by the New York Times (Febru-
ary 1937, quoted in Stufkens, 2008, 189) for its 'strong, dark' echoes of Van
Gogh, and not surprisingly the communist-affiliated New Theatre was adula-
tory about Ivens's editing skill and success in moving beyond merely showing
'reality' (Wolf [Ben Maddow], 1935). But the Soviet version was superseded in
turn by a 1960 sound version by Storck with a commentary based on the orig-
inal titles, and once more of course in 2008 by the definitive restored silent
version assembled by Stuflens for the DVD box set.52
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The major film project other than Borinage that occupied the two of them
during this period was a film to be produced by Gustav von Wangenheim, one
of the many Mezhrabpom expatriates. This film was to be called Bortsy (The
Struggle, 1936, 95) and was intended to use the story of Georgi Dimitrov, a
Bulgarian communist accused by the Nazis of the Reichstag arson, as a mod-
el of German resistance against fascism. Ivens was apparently less involved
in the project than Van Dongen, who was assistant director and editor (and
had assumed more and more responsibilities in the partnership in her role
as the stationary one who looked after the shop while Ivens was on his tours).
Ivens, however, did work for a few months on the project, researching, assem-
bling documents on Dimitrov and his Leipzig trial and other material, and did
some interviews. There was also talk in the air about a film on aeronautics and
another on 'internationalism' in the USSR. It is unclear why nothing came of
these various projects, aside from the possible factor of an illness that lasted
several months. Piscator was the only one of Mezhrabpom's illustrious stable I 193
of expatriates who brought a major film to fruition, Vosstanie rybakov (Revolt of
the Fishermen, 1934, 89) - it seems it was no easier bringing a film through the
various stages of studio production in Moscow than it was to produce a dissi-
dent independent film in the West.
In any case, by 1936, the short period during which the foreigners had
been welcome contributors to the Soviet film industry was drawing to a close,
replaced by one of increasing frustration and danger (Schoots, [1995] 2000,
105-108). The WIR, sponsor of many of the expatriates in the USSR, was closed
down by the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party in 1934, and
Mezhrabpom met the same fate, although productions initiated at this stu-
dio apparently continued to trickle into release as late as 1938. Gross's ([1967]
1974, 297) account of this period in Moscow describes growing elements of
paranoia within the expatriate community. Leyda's (1960, 338) account is
more temperate but equally suggestive. Unwilling to assume Soviet citizen-
ship, as a new regulation required, Leyda, himself a Mezhrabpom guest, was
to leave shortly after Ivens and Van Dongen. The renaissance of the Soviet film
that was to follow the socialist realist breakthrough Chapaev (Sergei and Geor-
gi Vasilyev, 1934, 95) had no apparent need of foreign inspiration.
THE RADICALISATION OF THE POET 1929-1936
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Courtesy coil. FFJI, Nijmnegen
CHAPTER 3
Anti-Fascist Solidarity
Documentary
Men cannot act in front of the camera in the presence of death.
- The Spanish Earth
THE SPANISH EARTH 1 195
In July 1936 when General Franco launched his revolt against the Spanish
Republic, Joris Ivens, the 38-year-old Dutch avant-gardist-turned-militant,
was in Hollywood showing his films to film industry progressives - in fact
1200 of them packed into the Filmarte Theatre (James, 2005, 469)! One year
later, Ivens was in Hollywood again, this time officiating at the world premiere
of The Spanish Earth (1937, USA) before a glittering cross section of the same
community. A hasty, spontaneous response to the Spanish plight, directed by
a Dutchman who spent only a few months in the US, this iconic 53-minute
solidarity documentary was also the prototypical cultural product of the Amer-
ican left in the era of the Popular Front, a time when the left was closer to the
American mainstream than at any time previously or since.
Spanish Earth represents also the convergence of two basic traditions
of radical filmmaking in the West, of which Ivens was the chief pioneer and
standard-bearer throughout his 75-year career. It is the definitive model for
the 'international solidarity' genre, in which militants from the First and Sec-
ond Worlds used film to champion each new front of revolutionary struggle,
and of which the El Salvador and Nicaragua films of the 1980s and the Arab
Spring films of the 21St century are subsequent chapters.
It is also the model for the more utopian genre in which the construction
of each new emerging revolutionary society is celebrated and offered for inspi-
ration for those still struggling under capitalism, a genre for which Nicaragua
and Zimbabwe offered stimuli toward the end of Ivens's life, as I undertook this
book. As I was finishing it dozens of other less-state-dominated and more com-
munity-based sites of experimentation with democracy offered other kinds of
sparks, ranging from the epic of national resistance to globalisation The Take
26. The 400 Million (1938): Ivens
w - thelping cameraman John Ferno
change the magazine on their
large camera, near Tai'erzhuang,
with hand camera running
nearby (another crew member,
or the Guomindang censor?).
Production photo, courtesy coll.
EFJI, Nijmegen © EFJI, Nijmegen.
(Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, 2004, Canada/Argentina, 87) to manifestos of local
empowerment, green (The Garden [Scott Hamilton Kennedy, 2008, USA, 80])
and creative (Art/Violence [Mariam Abu-Khaled, 2013, Palestine/USA, 75]).
Spanish Earth, finally, has a central place within the evolution of the docu-
mentary form, aside from its strategic ideological position. It defines prototyp-
ically the formal and technical challenges of the 30-year heyday of the classical
sound documentary, 1930 to 1960, in particular its first decade. It confronts,
with still exemplary resourcefulness, the problems of sound and narration;
the temptation to imitate the model of Hollywood fiction with mise-en-scene,
individual characterisation, and narrative line; the catch-22's of distribution,
accessibility, and ideology; the possibilities of compilation and historical
reconstruction, and of improvisation and spontaneity. This list sounds so con-
temporary it sounds as if my film production students might have drafted it.
Joris Ivens disembarked in February 1936 in New York for what was to
become a decade of work in the United States, the second decade of his career.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
He was entering a political context strikingly different from the familiar ones
of Western Europe and the USSR, where his output that we have traced in
Chapters 1 and 2 included avant-garde film poems (Regen [Rain, 1929, Nether-
lands, 16]), epics of collective labour in both his native Holland (Zuiderzeew-
erken [Zuiderzee, 1930-1933, 40-52]) and the USSR (Pesn ogeroyakh [Komsomol,
1933, 50]), industrial commissions (Philips-Radio [1931, Netherlands, 36]), and
militant denunciations of the capitalist system (Misere au Borinage [Borinage,
1934, Belgium, 34] and Nieuwe Gronden [New Earth, 1933, Netherlands, 30]).
The left intellectual milieu to which Ivens and his longtime co-worker-ed-
itor-girlfriend Helen Van Dongen attached themselves upon their arrival (she
arrived in July 1936) was deeply concerned by the build-up to war already evi-
dent in Ethiopia, China, Germany, and soon, Spain. Their first months in
the US found them toying with projects around domestic social and political
issues like race in Harlem or healthcare in Detroit, as well as a few feature film
adaptation ideas ranging from Pygmalion to the Belgian folk classic TillEulen- |197
spiegel (which he would wait another two decades to make). He even made a
short called The Russian School in New York (1936, USA) for the Soviet distribu-
tor Amkino, which did not survive (Jansen, 2002). But it would be the growing
international crisis that would soon command his attention. Ivens had made
his previous political films during a period when the international socialist
movement had been oriented toward militant class struggle. Borinage and
Nieuwe Gronden had reflected this orientation with their uncompromising
political postures and their confrontational rhetoric and form. In the US, the
militant newsreel work of the Workers Film and Photo League (WFPL) had
matched this tendency in Ivens's work.
The militant era and the WFPL, however, were both on their last legs at
the time of Ivens's arrival. The Nazis had eradicated the Workers International
Relief (WIR), the Berlin-based, Comintern-sponsored parent body for radical
cultural groups throughout the capitalist West. But the main reason for the
about-face of mid-decade was an official change of policy promulgated by the
Communist International at its 1935 World Congress and obediently followed
by all the national parties including the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The
crucial political struggle of the day was to be not socialism vs. capitalism, but
democracy vs. fascism. CPUSA chief Earl Browder declared that democracy in
the United States was to be preserved by a vigorous defence of civil liberties,
increasingly menaced by fascist reaction at home and abroad. The earlier view
of Roosevelt as warmonger and of the New Deal as incipient fascism yielded
to a new image of Roosevelt as champion of democratic rights and of the state
as potential ally of progressive forces. Communists were to be ready to par-
ticipate in joint action within popular fronts with the Socialist parties, civil
libertarians, liberal intellectuals, and even clergymen. American Commu-
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
nists thus allied themselves enthusiastically with the social programs of the
New Deal.' As for Ivens, his US tour was part of this new political orientation:
Schoots reveals that he continued to report to and be paid by Mezhrabpom
during his tour,2 and that his assignment was not only to brush up on Ameri-
can film techniques but also to stimulate independent film production and if
possible to make a film (Ivens, letter to Shumyatsky 24 September 1936, quot-
ed in Schoots, [1995] 2000, 11o). The mission was accomplished.
Leftist cultural strategy in the West inevitably followed the political plat-
form. Militant vanguardism symbolised by the WFPL and the John Reed
Clubs of proletarian culture was replaced by efforts by left cultural workers
to express themselves within the mainstream of American culture. They were
largely successful: the last half of the decade saw the left achieve its point of
maximum impact within American culture and a close interaction between
the cultural and political spheres. The influx of leftist intellectuals and artists
198 I from Europe, most of whom were political refugees from fascism (unlike Ivens
- yet), stimulated this interaction, and the active involvement of the state in
the cultural domain sustained it. The Federal Arts project of the Works Pro-
gress Administration was launched in the fall of 1935 and the same year saw
the Farm Security Administration of the Resettlement Administration move
into the field of still photography. The New Deal would expand into motion
pictures the following year and enlist the talents of hundreds of leftist artists,
including Ivens himself, before the decade was out.
The documentary movement was another dominant influence on Ivens's
American cultural context. This movement shaped not only all the arts dur-
ing this period, even modern dance, but also the humanities and the social
sciences, and the fields of journalism, education, and, yes, advertising. At the
centre of this current was the work of still photographers, such as Dorothea
Lange, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White, who began photograph-
ing the economic crisis in the first years of the decade. The infusion of state
sponsorship into the documentary movement after 1935 ensured that still
photographs of the ravages of the Depression would become its most recog-
nisable artistic legacy, but they do not represent its full scope. Photographers
and filmmakers, especially those on the left, spread out from providing local
evidence of hunger, unemployment, and police repression, as the first WFPL
images did, to shaping encyclopedic manifestos in which the entire politi-
co-economic and cultural system would be analysed, challenged, and some-
times celebrated. All of this Frontier Film's Native Land (Leo Hurwitz and Paul
Strand, 1942, USA, 8o) finally did when it was belatedly released in 1942 and
Ivens set out to do in his never-completed New Frontiers (1940). Stott (1973) is
still the most comprehensive overview of the documentary movement.
At first, the left documentary constituency thrived mostly on imports. Sovi-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
et documentaries, for example, were continuously on view in New York and
other large centres throughout the thirties - Vertov's Tripesni o Lenine (Three
Songs About Lenin, 62) was a hit in 1934. British films were also prestigious and
popular, beginning with Grierson'sDrifters (1929, 49), which appeared in New
York in 1930.
The first documentaries by American directors to play theatrically in New
York, outside of the WFPL agitprop milieu, appeared in 1934: Louis de Rochem-
ont's unsuccessful Cry of the World (1932, USA, 65) and Flaherty's Man ofAran
(1934, 77), produced under Grierson's British wing. However, the appearance
of Time-Life's commercial newsreel, The March of Time, the following February
(1935), injecting dramatic and interpretive elements into the traditional news-
reel, precipitated a floodtide of new documentary work in the US. The non-the-
atrical showing of Ivens's films in the spring of 1936 added to the momentum.
By this time, interest in documentary was so high that the work of the obscure
Dutchman was praised rapturously, not only in leftist periodicals but in the lib- 1 199
eral media as well. The National Board of Review Magazine's discovery of Nieu-
we Gronden led to the introduction of the nonfiction category to its influential
annual ratings. Ivens's cross-country campus tour, organised by an WFPL off-
shoot, the New Film Alliance, is a good index of the scale of the documentary
movement in 1936. It extended, as I said at the outset, as far as Hollywood.
The Rockefeller Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art were impor-
tant institutional props to the growing movement. The latter sponsored the
official Washington premiere of Pare Lorentz's New Deal-funded The Plow
That Broke the Plains (25) in May 1936, presenting a program that also includ-
ed five European documentaries. White House staff, diplomats, and members
of the Supreme Court all showed up. Buoyed by this sendoff, Plow went on to
16,ooo first-run showings and raves in every newspaper. The New York World's
Fair in 1939 became the showcase for this first phase of the documentary
movement, with Ivens's work much in evidence.
The strong popular foundation of documentary culture was essential to
Ivens and other leftist filmmakers. Unquestionably a mass phenomenon,
its artifacts ranged from Warner Brothers' IAm a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
(Mervyn LeRoy, 1932, 92) to Life magazine (founded in 1936). For socialists in
the era of the Popular Front, mandated to enter the politico-cultural main-
stream after years of marginality, to seek out allies among 'unpoliticized'
classes and groups, and to combat fascism on a mass footing, here was a vehi-
cle for their aims. For socialist filmmakers still too distrustful of monopoly
capitalism and the entertainment industry to attempt an infiltration of Holly-
wood, the independent documentary seemed to offer a cultural strategy that
was as clear as black and white.
What was less clear at mid-decade was the direction that the socialist doc-
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
umentary of the future would take. Members of the WFPL were sharply divid-
ed as to whether they should take advantage of the gathering stream of the
documentary movement, as shown by the box-office success of The March of
Time, or whether they should stick to their original 'workers' newsreel' mis-
sion, with its marginal base and confrontational aesthetics.
Leo Hurwitz, a chief architect of the decade, as early as 1934 established
three priorities for radical filmmakers,3 which ultimately became part of a new
consensus during Ivens's first years in the US:
1. Mass access for radicalfilm work through commercial or theatrical distri-
bution. Leftists were greatly encouraged by the work of their colleagues
in Hollywood who had contributed to such 'progressive' films as Fritz
Lang's Fury (1936, 92) and the Warner Brothers biopics such as The Story
ofLouis Pasteur (William Dieterle, 1935, 86). The New Film Alliance,
Ivens's hosts, sponsored symposia on The March of Time and on progres-
200 sive commercial features from pre-Hitler Germany such as Mddchen in
Uniform (Girls in Uniform, Leontine Sagan and Carl Froelich, 1931, 87)
and Kameradschaft (Comradeship, G.W. Pabst, 1931, 93). Ivens (n.d. [c.
late 1930s], lecture notes, JIA) repeatedly praised such films on his tour
and stressed the importance of 'combining our work with the mass
movement', and, as he would put it a few years later, of 'break[ing] into
commercial distribution [in order to] recover the social function of doc-
umentary'. Significantly, while in Hollywood Ivens contributed to the
making of the WFPL-style militant short fiction about unions and scabs,
Millions of Us (Jack Smith and Tina Taylor, American Labor Productions,
1936, 20), and for her part Van Dongen stayed behind in the dream facto-
ry to study narrative editing. Where an earlier generation of documenta-
rists, including both Ivens and the WFPL, had assimilated the technical
and aesthetic strategies of the European and Soviet avant-gardes, the
generation of the Popular Front was looking west.
2. The development of new 'synthetic'film forms. Hurwitz ([1934] 1979, 91)
argued that the form of the earlier workers' newsreels had simply been an
economic and technical necessity, not an ideological or aesthetic choice
per se, and that these forms must now give way to sophisticated hybrid
forms including 'recreative analysis and reconstruction of an internally
related visual event', or, in other words, mise-en-scene. He stressed the
professionalism of the required new filmmakers who would replace the
earlier amateur and artisanal cadres. This position was anathema to Hur-
witz's opponents, who invoked Soviet authority and the name of Vertov,
conveniently overlooking that reconstruction or mise-en-scene had long
since taken a central place in the master's work. Ivens's films, screened
repeatedly for the New York radicals upon his arrival, unambiguously
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
bolstered the Hurwitz side with their rich mix of actuality, compilation,
mise-en-scene, narrative, and even scripting (in his Soviet film Komsomol).
'We must learn', he argued in a manifesto of the early forties, 'to think of
documentary as requiring a wide variety of styles - all for the purpose of
maximum expressiveness and conviction' (Ivens, 1942, 299). The hybrid
films brought out in this milieu alongside Spanish Earth also built direct-
ly on the model. Herbert Kline, the director, who acknowledged Ivens's
support of his project (cited in Campbell 1982, 166), was responsible for
the first of them, Heart of Spain (1937, 30), which followed Spanish Earth
into release by only a month. This film would follow Hurwitz's model as
closely as Ivens did, blending proto-direct 'spontaneous' material mostly
on medical relief, with capsule mise-en-scene personalisations.
3. More profound political analysis. For Hurwitz ([1934] 1977) the early WFPL
newsreels of strikes and demonstrations had been too 'fractional, atom-
ic, and incomplete' for adequate political analysis. The new 'synthetic' 201
forms would facilitate more 'inclusive and implicative comment', and
could 'reveal best the meaning of the event'. This 'meaning' was to be a
deeper, materialist analysis of the class struggle within capitalist society,
and the forward movement of the working class, in both world-historic
and individual terms, not just in the local and collective terms that the
workers' agitprop newsreels had seemed to emphasise. Once again, Ivens
found himself on Hurwitz's side of the debate. Earlier films, he stated
in a lecture on his tour, including his own, were 'just seeing things, not
understanding'. Art must have a 'definite point of view', and must express
this without 'aestheticism' or sentimentality. 'The difference between
newsreel and the documentary film', he later explained, is that 'the news-
reel tells us where-when-what; the documentary film tells us why, and the
relationships between events', thus providing historic perspective. The
new 'deeper approach', in particular the tactic of introducing identifi-
able characters into nonfiction filmmaking (which Ivens began calling
'personalisation' soon after his immersion in the US milieu), is capable
of 'penetrating and interpreting the facts; achieving a real interrelation
between the particular and the general' (Ivens, 1969, 209, 211).
The debate among leftist filmmakers was accompanied by organisational
changes. Nykino, a new film production outfit, had been formed by Hurwitz
and his allies as early as the fall of 1934, in order to put into practice the new
priorities. The East Coast radicals were thus already set on a path closely par-
allel to that traced by the films Ivens showed in New York in 1936, that is, the
evolution from agitational newsreel work to more systematic and ambitious
explorations of new outlets, new forms, and deeper analysis. Ivens's effect,
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
then, was one of reinforcement of the direction already chosen and tentative-
ly tested, or, as Hurwitz (1975,4) would put it, 'a very important stimulus and
source of encouragement'. Another Nykino leader described it as 'a turning
point [...] a shot in the arm [...] assistance from a recognized filmmaker who
confirmed the theories of Nykino' (Lerner, quoted in Campbell, 1982, 189).
Ivens's Soviet credentials - he was fresh from almost two years with the Soviet
film industry - added in no small way to the impact of this encouragement.
Ivens officially cemented his affiliation with the Nykino tendency in the
spring of 1937 when that group inaugurated yet another production company,
fully professional this time, to accomplish their goals: Frontier Films. Though
in Spain at the time, Ivens joined the dazzling array of American artists and
intellectuals who signed up as founding members of the Frontier production
staff, board of directors, or advisory board. The Popular Front line was doing
all right: both the West Coast and the East Coast were well represented, from
202 Hollywood star Melvyn Douglas to Broadway playwright Lillian Hellman, from
liberals to fellow travellers to party members. Ivens had clearly aligned himself
with the winning side. In fact, he had anticipated the Frontier Films approach
the previous fall when he had enlisted many of the same luminaries to provide
mainstream support - both moral and financial - for his first American film,
Spanish Earth.
As soon as it first became apparent that the Franco rebellion posed a seri-
ous threat, Ivens had got together this group of leftist artists and intellectu-
als who were to become the producing body for a Spanish film.4 Their idea
was to bolster American support for the Republican cause by means of a short,
quickly made compilation of newsreel material. This would explain the issues
to the American public and counter the already skilful Franquist propagan-
da. They called themselves Contemporary Historians, Inc., and had as their
spokespeople the Pulitzer poet Archibald MacLeish and the novelist John Dos
Passos, both well-known fellow travellers. The functioning producer was to be
Herman Shumlin, Hellman's Broadway producer, with Hellman and Dorothy
Parker rounding out this core group. Van Dongen was to put together the film.
It soon became clear, however, that not enough good footage was available
and that even the shots at hand were of limited use since they were taken from
the Franco side - burning churches and the like - and were expensive and dif-
ficult to pry out of the notoriously reactionary newsreel companies. The group
then decided to finish the project as quickly and cheaply as possible, which
Van Dongen did using a Dos Passos commentary and relying on Soviet footage
of the front. This feature-length work, called Spain in Flames (65), was hurried-
ly released in February 1937. Meanwhile, the producers decided to put most of
their hopes on a film of greater scope to be shot from scratch on Spanish soil,
personally underwriting a budget of $18,ooo. Ivens would direct.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
As the autumn progressed, the need for the film became more and more
urgent: the left press began denouncing the German and Italian interventions
and the Western democracies began nervously discussing neutrality. By the
time Ivens arrived in Paris in the first bitter January of the war, a tentative sce-
nario in his pocket, he had already been preceded by the first of the Interna-
tional Brigades, and by a growing stream of Western artists, intellectuals, and
activists, including filmmakers from the USSR and England.
In Valencia, suddenly the new Republican capital because of the pre-
sumed imminence of the fall of Madrid, Ivens and Ferno got right to work,
joined by Dos Passos for several days in April. They soon concluded, however,
that their script was unworkable in the worsening situation. Drafted by Ivens
together with Hellman and MacLeish, it had emphasised the background to
the war and a diachronic conception of the Spanish revolution, calling for con-
siderable dramatisation. The Republicans they consulted urged them instead
to head straight for Madrid to find their subject in the action on the frontline. I 203
As the film's commentary would later make clear, 'Men cannot act in front of
the camera in the presence of death'.
The abandoned script merits a brief look, however, as an indicator of
where American radical documentarists saw themselves heading in 1936.
Based largely on dramatised narrative and semi-fictional characterisation, its
only American precursors would have been the films of Flaherty, some scat-
tered WFPL shorts, and Paul Strand's anomalous Mexican Redes (The Wave,
1936, 65), completed but not yet released at this point. The more likely model
was the Soviet socialist realist semidocumentary epic, of which Ivens's own
Komsomol was an important prototype. The Spanish Earth script followed the
chronology of a village's political growth over a period of six or seven years,
from the fall of the monarchy until the fictional retaking of the village from
Franquist forces during the present conflict. A single peasant family was to be
featured, particularly their young son, whose evolution would be emblematic
of the Spanish peasantry's maturation during those years. The village would
be a diagrammatic cross section of Spanish society as a whole, and various
melodramatic or allegorical touches would highlight the various social forc-
es in play: there were to be representative fascists, militarists, landowners,
clergy, intelligentsia, even German interventionists and the ex-king! Ivens was
clearly intending to expand his first experiments along these lines in Komso-
mol and Borinage. The script called for some elements of newsreel reportage
to be worked in as well.
The final version of Spanish Earth turned out to be much more complex for-
mally than the original outline called for, an improvised hybrid of many filmic
modes, but certain elements of the outline remained. The most important of
these was the notion of a village as a microcosm of the Spanish revolution. The
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
chosen village, Fuentiduena de Tajo, was ideal in this and every other respect.
Its location on the Madrid-Valencia lifeline was symbolically apt, a link between
village revolution and war effort. It was also visually stunning, set near the Tagus
River amid a rolling landscape, and accessible to Madrid. Politically too, the
village was ideal: the community had reclaimed a former hunting preserve of
aristocrats, now fled, and had begun irrigating their new land. The filmmakers
could thus keep their original theme of agrarian reform as well as hints of the
original dramatic conflict between landowners and peasantry.
As for the original cloak-and-dagger plot about the young villager, Ivens
and his collaborators attempted to telescope it into a simple narrative idea
involving Julian, a peasant who has joined the Republican army. Even this
scaled-down role was only partly realised since Julian disappeared in the
frontline confusion after his village sequences had been filmed. Julian, an
indistinctive-looking youth, appeared in only four scenes of the final film,
204 stretched out by the editor to a maximum: a brief moment on the Madrid front
where he is seen writing a letter home, the text provided in an insert and read
by the commentator; a scene where he is seen hitching a ride back home on
leave to Fuentiduena, with a flashback reminder of the letter; next, his reunion
first with his mother and then with his whole family; and finally, a sequence
where he drills the village boys in an open space. The footage was insufficient
even for these scenes, so that the commentator must ensure our recognition
of Julian by repeating his name and fleshing out the details of the narrative.
The reunion scene would be the biggest challenge to editor Van Dongen. She
was to improvise with covering close-ups of villagers apparently shot for other
uses, and ingeniously fabricate a fictional mini-scene from unrelated mate-
rial, where Julian's small brother runs to fetch their father from the fields
upon his arrival. The family thus shown in this sentimental but effective scene
would be largely synthetic. After Julian's disappearance, a symbolic close-up
of an anonymous soldier was taken for the defiant finale of the film.
27. The Spanish Earth (1937). Julian drilling
the Fuentiduena boys: 'personalisation'
was a challenge on the front and the
exemplary peasant soldier became a hybrid
construction. DVD frame capture. © CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens. -
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
But this forced postponement of Ivens's dream of 'personalisation' did
not stand in the way of other efforts to heighten the personal quality of the
film. At every point in Spanish Earth, the filmmakers would intervene in the
post-production to make individual figures come alive dramatically: through
the commentary, as when a briefly seen Republican officer is identified by
name and then laconically eulogised when it is disclosed that he was killed
after the filming; or through complex editing procedures, as when a miniature
story of two boys killed in the bombing of Madrid is chillingly wrought out of
non-continuous shots and a synthetic flash-frame detonation; or through lin-
gering close-ups of anonymous bystanders and onlookers, some of whom are
even dramatised through first-person commentary. Several years later, Ivens
(1969, 212) would conclude that such vignettes, 'hasty and attempted iden-
tities now and then walking through a documentary', had fallen short of his
goal of continuous 'personalisation', and that his next project on the Sino-Jap-
anese front, The 400 Million (1939, USA, 53), had been no less frustrating. It I 205
would not be until Ivens's third American film, Power and the Land (1940, 33)
that the relative luxury of peacetime filmmaking would allow him to experi-
ment with fixed characters developed consistently throughout an entire film
- in this case, a wholesome American farm family.
'Personalisation' was not the only aspect of the Fuentiduena shooting that
imitated Hollywood narrative. Using their heavy tripod-based Debrie camera,
Ivens and Ferno developed a kind of documentary 'mise-en-scene', a collab-
orative shooting style 'staging' 'real' actors in 'real' settings that eventually
made up about two-fifths of the finished film. Ivens's mise-en-scene was an
even more aggressive intervention in the events being filmed than Flaherty's
collaboration with his subjects. Ivens matter-of-factly used the vocabulary of
studio filmmaking such as 'retake' and 'covering shot'; on location, he set
up shot/countershot constructions with his peasant subjects that aimed at
the spatiotemporal continuity of studio fiction of the period, complete with
complementary angles of a single action and insert close-ups of detail. This
approach enabled not only a clear chronological summary of the Fuenti-
duena irrigation work as it progressed before the camera - Ivens's emblem
of the Spanish revolution - but also the balanced and lyrical, even romantic,
framings and movements that idealised the workers and their relationship to
the Spanish earth.
Ivens was of course not alone in 'setting up' his subjects: the other major
documentarists of the period, from Basil Wright to Pare Lorentz, all used vari-
ations of the same method. It is this element that looks most dated to our cind-
ma vd'ritd-trained eyes. For Richard Leacock (quoted in Campbell, 1982, 413),
narrative mise-en-scene led to the 'dark ages of the documentary' and for 1970s
modernist critics like Vlada Petric (1973, 460-462), mise-en-scene meant the
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
28. Irrigating the countiyside: using
their heavy tripod-based camera, the
filmmakers' documentaiy 'mise-en-scene'
enabled romantic framings that idealised -.
the workers and their relationship to the
Spanish earth. DVD frame capture. © CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
abandonment of the concept of film as 'a genuine visual art which draws its
content from those kinesthetic qualities only cinema can bring to life'.
206 Ivens, however, did not often have to answer to such ahistoric criticism at
the time. The interventionist orthodoxy of the late thirties was no less univer-
sal than the direct cinema or 'verite' orthodoxy has been intermittently since
the 196os. Filmmakers and critics of the late thirties agreed on the need for
a dramatisation of the factual, its 'vivification', as some put it. Ivens's mise-
en-scene, undertaken in collaboration with the subjects was partly a reaction
to the impersonality of the newsreels and the other journalistic media. 'Was
I making a film or just newsreel shots'? Ivens (1969, 82) would ask of Spanish
Earth. Truth was not a function of phenomenological scruple, but of political
principle. Truth was not to be found on the surface of reality, but in deeper
social, economic, and historical structures. The aesthetic of naturalist spon-
taneity in film was to be distrusted as much as 'spontaneism' in the arena of
political strategy. The generation of filmmakers who developed mise-en-scene
as a documentary mode believed, like their cousins the socialist realists, that
their work had the purpose not only of reflecting the world but also of acting
upon it, to change it. This was true even for liberals and social democrats like
Lorentz and Grierson who did not subscribe to Marxist ideals. Ivens's (1942,
299) primary question was not whether he had shown the 'truth' but whether
'the truth has been made convincing enough to make people want to change
or emulate the situation shown to them on the screen'. This is not to say that
documentary mise-en-scene would have appeared to thirties spectators in the
same way as fictional narrative cinema. An overwhelming network of 'docu-
mentary' codes prevented it from doing so, from non-synchronous sound to
non-made-up faces, to specific marketing approaches, to the replacement of
'psychological' typing by 'social' typing.
Mise-en-scene, however, a luxury affordable in the calm of Fuentiduena,
was rarely possible on the front lines. In Madrid, the filmmakers attached
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
themselves to the communist-affiliated Fifth Regiment in the Casa de Velas-
quez. Here they shot the siege of the city from the point of view both of its
defenders in the frontline suburbs and of the air raid shelters within the city
itself. By the time of the key battle of Brihuega (Guadalajara) in March, Ernest
Hemingway, a recent convert to the Republican cause, had replaced Dos Pas-
sos as the production's guide and literary mentor. At Brihuega, buoyed by an
important contingent of the International Brigades, the Republicans won a
major victory against a twelve-to-one firepower disadvantage and prevented
the besieged capital from being cut off. The battle's additional political sig-
nificance was the incontrovertible proof it offered that organised Italian units
were taking part: Italian casualties and their letters home are shown in a par-
ticularly moving scene of Spanish Earth (a scene that would lead to a fruitless
screening at the League of Nations). Brihuega features prominently in the last
half of the final version of Ivens's film. The battle material, from both Madrid
and Brihuega, as well as from one other village that the filmmakers shot under I 207
bombardment, Morata de Tajuna,5 has a style whose spontaneity is diametri-
cally opposite to the orderly, lyrical mise-en-scene of Fuentiduena.
The 'spontaneous' mode, relying primarily on the crew's two small
hand-cameras, is notable for the unrehearsed flexibility and mobility required
to cover the soldiers and civilian victims who could not 'act before the cam-
era'. This proto-direct mode, as Ivens had not foreseen while scriptwriting in
New York, would make up more than half of the finished film. With this style,
the camera operator, rather than rearranging an event in front of the lens, fol-
lows it spontaneously - the storming of a building, a run-for-cover during an
air-raid, the evacuation of children, panic in the streets of the bombed-out vil-
lage. The principles of spatio-temporal continuity were left for the editor to
find in the cans: it was too dangerous for the operator to think about retakes
and reverse shots. 'Spontaneous' shooting provided spectators with its own
distinctive documentary codes, distinct from those of mise-en-scene material
which was often present in the same film, as in Spanish Earth, or even the same
sequence: unmotivated and random detail of behaviour or atmosphere, the
flouting of taboos on out-of-focus material, looking at the camera, illegibili-
ty, etc. The mystique of 'life-caught-unawares' was still an essential element
of the documentary sensibility despite the universal acceptance of mise-en-
scene. Because of this mystique, 'spontaneous' elements often had the great-
est impact on spectators, or at least on reviewers: the reviews of the day never
failed to mention a woman seen wiping her eye amid the rubble of her village.
The great affect of 'spontaneous' material such as this in Spanish Earth would
confirm Ivens's reputation as a major inheritor of Vertov and a precursor of
direct cinema.
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
29. The Spanish Earth (1937): the
'spontaneous' mode and the still essential
mystique of 'life-caught-unawares'.
Reviewers always mentioned this bombing
victim wiping her eye. DVD frame capture.
© CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
It was in Madrid also that Ivens shot some material in a third cine-
matographic mode that constitutes only a fraction of the finished film but
208 deserves brief mention nonetheless. What I am referring to is static, controlled
images of public events, taken with a heavy, stationary camera. I call this the
'newsreel' mode because its repertory is identical to that of the newsreel com-
panies of the period - ceremonious long shots of files of dignitaries, cheering
crowds, military parades, or beauty contests. Though Ivens and other leftists
and liberals usually avoided 'newsreel' shooting, as much out of distaste for cli-
chds and superficiality as from any ideological scruple, the opportunity to use
a borrowed newsreel sound truck to record a People's Army rally was one that
Ivens could not refuse. Newsreel-style cinematography was the only means by
which thirties documentarists could attempt synchronous sound on location
- 20 years would pass before technology would catch up, in the television age,
with the aspiration to hear as well as to see 'life-caught-unawares'. In any case,
the rally scene of Spanish Earth featured the stirring oratory of La Pasionaria
and other Republican leaders (re-recorded the following day in a more con-
trolled studio setting, with some redubbed in New York because of technical
problems), and, for this reason, as well as for its skilful editorial compression,
would avoid the pitfalls of the mode. It was up to Riefenstahl and the Nazis to
elevate to a new art form the 'newsreel' cliches of orators intercut with cheer-
ing crowds. The only phase of Ivens's career to depend on this mode was his
Cold War exile in Eastern Europe, where he presided over several official rally
films of the fading Stalin era.
Spanish Earth, then, unexpectedly became a cinematic hybrid in the
uncontrollable laboratory of war and revolution. In this, as a compendium of
different filmic modes, it was typical of most documentaries of the late thir-
ties. Other national traditions were varying the hybrid model according to
local factors. Grierson's British directors tended to use mise-en-scene more
than Ivens, even resorting to studio work on occasion; Henri Cartier-Bres-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
30. The Spanish Earth (1937): the 'newsreel'
mode. A static, controlled image of a public
event, the People's Army rally featuring the
Republican heroine La Pasionaria thanks
to a borrowed newsreel sound truck. DVD
frame capture. © CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
son's cinematography for Frontier Films' second Spanish project, The Fight
forLife (Lorentz, 1940, USA, 69), was predictably more 'spontaneous' than any
other comparable film. However, the general trend was towards greater and 209
greater use of mise-en-scene. In this respect, Ivens's evolution paralleled the
work of almost every documentarist of the period. Wherever circumstanc-
es and resources permitted - which was not always the case as the build-up
towards world war continued - documentarists almost unanimously built up
the mise-en-scene components of their hybrid works, experimenting more and
more with characterisation, narrative vocabulary, and even scripting. Writ-
ers became standard crew members, not only for commentaries, but to pro-
vide plots, continuity, and dialogue. During the forties, this mode became the
basic component of most documentaries, rivalled only by the compilation
mode for which the War had created a special market, and the dominance of
mise-en-scene would continue right up until the explosion of direct cinema in
the late fifties.
Meanwhile Van Dongen had begun assembling the consignments of
rushes in New York as they arrived from Spain, wiring the filmmakers when-
ever she thought that a given topic was now well covered or that another was
weak. Ivens left Spain at the end of April and Ferno wound up the shoot in
May, whereupon Van Dongen began the edit in earnest, shaping images shot
according to each of the three modes outlined above according to the methods
of narrative continuity that she had perfected in her recent Hollywood appren-
ticeship. Individual sequences began emerging - the Fuentiduefna irrigation
project, civilians under bombardment, the Madrid and Brihuega fronts - each
built strictly with the sequential and temporal logic of short fictive units. Obvi-
ously, the 'spontaneous' rushes presented the most challenge since they had
not been shot for the editor. But she responded with ingenuity, building up
to each split-second bomb impact with systematic precision, and then having
the clearing smoke reveal the rubble and the panic, or following each Repub-
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
lican artillery shot with an image denoting an ontarget hit. Part of her skill
was in picking out visual motifs to assure a narrative fluidity; images of chil-
dren in a bombed out street, or a repeated glimpse of an ambulance or an artil-
lery shell, for example, would underline an implied continuity. Sometimes a
minor but identifiable bystander would function as a hinge for a continuity:
her choice to cut at the point when a background figure in the People's Army
rally blows his nose has drawn the admiration of at least one critic. Seldom
before had the principles of fictional narrative editing been so skilfully and
unobtrusively adapted for the purposes of nonfiction. The abandonment of
the modernist-derived editing strategies of the young Ivens in his avant-garde
days - for example, unsettling contrasts in scale, angle, and movement direc-
tion, or ironic or dialectical idea-cutting, often Soviet-inspired - was a price
that Ivens and Van Dongen were willing to pay to achieve the Popular Front
goal of speaking the narrative film language of the people.
210 Within the emerging film as a whole, Van Dongen alternated short scenes
of the military struggle and the social revolution, interweaving the themes
of the combat in Madrid and Brihuega with the progress of the Fuentiduena
irrigators. Two stunning scenes depicting the bombardment of civilians were
placed at a climactic point about two-thirds of the way through the 52 min-
utes, so that the concluding movement, the victorious battle interpolated with
the completion of the irrigation system, seems like a defiant riposte of the
people against their oppressors. A coda alternates single shots of water rush-
ing through the new irrigation trough and images of a lone rifleman firing, so
that the two themes, defence and revolution, are summarised and fused, two
dimensions of a single struggle. This montage finale would be widely echoed,
though not necessarily imitated. Heart of Spain, edited in an adjacent room,
would substitute a similar fusion of the clenched fists of the blood donor and
of the Republican salute for Ivens's images of irrigation.
The alternating pattern of civilian and military struggles was therefore not
just an effective editing device but a crucial ideological statement. In counter-
ing images of victimisation with images of resistance and revolution, Span-
ish Earth articulates a world view that sees people as agents of history, not its
casualties. The final word is given, not to the airborne mercenaries and their
bombs, but to the people rooted in the central symbol of the film, the earth.
And in alternating the military resistance with the civilian struggle, Spanish
Earth equates them, merges them into the ideological concept of the peo-
ple's war. Ivens would return again and again to this visual and ideological
construct as he continued to chronicle the people's struggles of the century
from China and the USSR to Cuba and Vietnam, each time echoing the Span-
ish Earth equation of peasants in their fields and soldiers on the frontlines, of
hoes and guns.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Ivens and Van Dongen brought to the soundtrack of SpanishEarth the same
embrace of popular narrative film language as was evident in the shooting and
editing, and the same creative resourcefulness in integrating it to their polit-
ical task. The modernist virtuosity and clamorous experimentation of Ivens's
early sound documentaries yielded to the subdued purposefulness of the Pop-
ular Front. The sound effects were innovative to the extent that Van Dongen
experimented with more convincing laboratory synthesis (on-location sound
effects were still primitive) and varied the newsreel cliche of wall-to-wall noise
with moments of well-chosen silence and subtle transitions. However, the
sound effects functioned essentially as support for the narrative thrust of the
film, heightening the especially powerful scenes such as the bombardment
episodes, injecting dramatic and informational energy into scenes that were
less interesting visually, such as the long-shot Brihuega ones, and in general
providing 'realistic' background texture to each of the films' narrative lines.
Continuing the Popular Front practice of lining up prestigious contribu- 211
tors, Ivens recruited two of the best-known East Coast composers to handle
the music: Marc Blitzstein, the in-house composer of the New York left, and
Virgil Thomson, who had been widely acclaimed for his brilliant folk score
for Plow. Blitzstein and Thomson, pressed by the filmmakers' tight schedule,
compiled Spanish folk music, both instrumental and choral, for the score.
This choice reflected not only their haste but also the influence of the doc-
umentary movement on musical taste of the late thirties and the impact of
Plow. The filmmakers fit the music to the images with discretion and sensitiv-
ity, with expressive pauses that contrast sharply with the 'wall-to-wall' tenden-
cies of the period, even of 'prestige' films like Triumph des Willens (Triumph
of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl, 1935, Germany, 120) and Man ofAran. The tedi-
ous over-synchronisation that is also noticeable in these two films was like-
wise avoided, with general atmospheric matching being the guiding principle
instead: sprightly dance rhythms accompany the villagers at work in the field
and a soft dirge-like choral piece follows the village bombardment with just
the right understated elegiac touch.
It was the commentary, however, that attracted more attention than any of
the other soundtracks, and not only because of its star author. Hemingway's
text is a high point in the benighted history of an art form of dubious legiti-
macy, the documentary commentary, and unusually prophetic in its anticipa-
tion of future developments in documentary sound. What was most striking
to contemporary spectators was its personal quality. Ivens, Van Dongen, and
Hellman made a last-minute decision to replace Orson Welles's slick reading
with a less professional recording by Hemingway himself. This voice, with its
frank, low-key roughness, added to the text's aura of personal involvement.
It was a striking contrast to the oily, authoritarian voice-of-God for which The
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
March of Time was famous and which most documentaries imitated. Instead
of an anonymous voice, the commentator became a vivid character on his own
terms, a subjective witness of the events of the film, a participant. Though this
function of the narrator was already common in Popular Front print journal-
ism, Hemingway's contribution to Spanish Earth set off a trend in documenta-
ry film that would last throughout World War II, with filmmakers as different
as Flaherty, John Huston, and Humphrey Jennings benefiting from his exam-
ple. It was an effective substitute for the still impossible ideal of using sound
to make subjects come alive on location.
Hemingway's text had other innovative aspects too: its obliqueness, its var-
iations in tone, its detail and immediacy, its multiplicity of postures towards
the spectator, its ability to be at times dramatic and at times lyrical or reflec-
tive without being overbearing. Most remarkable, perhaps, was its restraint.
Ivens and Hemingway concentrated on 'let[ting] the film speak for itself',
212 on avoiding words that would duplicate the image-continuity, on providing
'sharp little guiding arrows' of text, 'springboards', often at the beginning of
a scene, to invite the audience's involvement (Ivens, 1969, 128). The commen-
tary's role as information and exposition was secondary. Not surprisingly, it
is in the strongly narrative mise-en-scene passages set in Fuentiduena that the
commentary intervenes least, and in the extreme long-shot accounts of artil-
lery and infantry combat where it is, of necessity, most present, and, arguably,
most effective. Hemingway's text was ultimately laid over only one-fifth of the
image-track. This was an all-time record for conciseness in the classical docu-
mentary (during the war, Frank Capra's Why We Fight films would sometimes
approach four-fifths and the Canadian National Film Board films did so regu-
larly), but Ivens's record was often rivalled by some of his more visually orient-
ed contemporary documentarists.
A careful look at the commentary in Spanish Earth, as well as in most films
by the 'art' documentarists of the day, undermines a prevailing myth of how
sound operated in the classical documentary. This myth depicts the classical
sound documentary as an 'illustrated lecture', a film whose dominant diegesis
was a direct-address commentary to which images played a mere supporting
role.6 Trained within the silent avant-garde cinema, Ivens and Van Dongen had
nothing but contempt for this 'illustration' approach, and usually succeed-
ed in avoiding it, commissioning commentaries only after an autonomous
image-continuity had been established and then reducing them ferociously.
Most of the British directors in the Grierson stable did the same, as did Fla-
herty, Lorentz, and Vertov. Jennings and Riefenstahl did away with the com-
mentary almost completely. Van Dongen had her own simple test of silencing
the soundtrack to test the visual sufficiency of a given film. Spanish Earth
must be seen as a highlight of a whole tradition of experiments in sound-im-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
age structures that fought against the voice-of-God tedium of the newsreels
(and the later wartime compilation films) in search of creative alternatives for
the still new audio-visual art form. Our sense of documentary history must
be revised to accommodate this tradition, just as the dream-factory assem-
bly-line model of Hollywood history has long since been shaped to account
for the Capras, the Welleses, and the Fords as well as against-the-grain insti-
tutional resistance.
Hemingway's commentary was delivered live at a June preview of Span-
ish Earth, in silent rough-cut, at the Second National Congress of American
Writers, a grouping of leftist and liberal writers. Hemingway (1963, 533-534)
declared to the assembly that 'Spain is the first real battlefield in an evil and
international conflict that is certain to recur elsewhere', something presuma-
bly most of those present already knew. In order to ensure that the film would
reach those who did not already know this, a massive publicity campaign got
underway. That same month, a major coup saw Life magazine (12 June 1937) I 213
run a series of stills from the film along with Robert Capa's soon-to-be immor-
tal action shot of the falling Republican soldier. In July, a White House preview
led to a plug in Eleanor Roosevelt's column, the impossible dream of all Pop-
ular Front filmmakers. Immediately thereafter, Ivens and Hemingway arrived
in Los Angeles for huge sell-out premieres and private fund-raising screen-
ings within Hollywood's progressive circles, where $20,000 was collected for
Republican medical relief.
The glitter and the publicity photos with Joan Crawford were not for the
sake of vanity. The West Coast connections were deemed essential to the film-
makers' hopes for commercial distribution. Political documentaries had nev-
er received distribution by the 'majors' up to this point, but the overwhelming
feeling was that a breakthrough was imminent, thanks to Lorentz's obstinate
and successful campaign the previous year to distribute Plow through inde-
pendent exhibitors. But the fanfare was deceptive. Variety summed up Ivens's
predicament on 21 July:
This can make money where any picture can make money but it won't
make it there. It won't make it there because it won't get in there. It will
have to depend as it did here in its world premiere, on lecture halls which
are wired for sound and can gross enough in one performance to justify a
week's build-up. (Scully, 1937)
Nothing is new under the sun. The filmmakers resigned themselves to the
traditional marginalised distribution that political, documentary, and Soviet
films had always relied on. The premiere had taken place in July in the Span-
ish pavilion of the Paris International Exposition of 1937. There, with felic-
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
itous synchrony, it competed for space with that other iconic testimony to
the great collective trauma of the war, Picasso's new mural Guernica. Shortly
thereafter a Los Angeles preview attracted 6000 viewers (Stuflens, 2008, 212).
But the US opening was 20 August at New York's 55th Street Playhouse. This
art house, managed by Herman G. Weinberg, functioned as a showplace for
prestige foreign features, including much of Renoir's work and most non-So-
viet documentaries that achieved a New York airing: Heart of Spain played
immediately before and after the Spanish Earth run respectively, the latter on
a double bill with Renoir's Les Bas-fonds (The Lower Depths, 1936, France, 95).
While this art house was one level above the usual Soviet purgatory downtown,
Ivens's disappointment was profound, and record-breaking capacity crowds
scarcely consoled him. However, the film's small leftist distributor, Garrison
Films, still tried to repeat Plow's success. The ads played up the Hemingway
name so much that Spanish Earth was often called a Hemingway film, a pres-
214 I tige-oriented tactic that was buoyed by the film's inclusion in the National
Board of Review 'ten best' list for 1937. Audiences more interested in enter-
tainment were assured how undocumentary the film was: it was 'The Picture
with a Punch', and a 'Dramatic Story of Life and People in a Wartorn Village
in Spain'. Further publicity resulted from short-lived censorship squabbles in
Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. A review in the liberal The Nation (20 Novem-
ber 1937), appearing during the film's third New York month, while acknowl-
edging the bind of independent distribution, optimistically reported that
Ivens was making progress and announced that more than 800 theatres across
the U. S. had been signed up. The real figure was closer to 300. In other words,
the film made an enviable splash in the art house political circuit, but a mere
ripple in the commercial sea. Ivens would not achieve his breakthrough until
his own New Deal-sponsored film, Power, in 1940.
Looking back at his most famous film for Cinema politique (Raverat et al.,
1978) from the vantage point of the late seventies, Ivens felt that he could iden-
tify a certain impact that Spanish Earth had exerted on its own period:
Of course you must not think that you are going to change the world
with a film; all the same, there have been examples in history of films
that have helped the revolution, like the Soviet films at the beginning of
the October Revolution. In my own life, I saw the influence of Spanish
Earth. [...] It really provided information about a problem that spectators
were not very familiar with, and it helped the anti-fascist movement
enormously [...] directly even. People gave money for the International
Brigades. There are militant films that have enormous power, and that is
linked to the moment at which they are shown.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Ivens's estimation is not unreasonable. Although his film along with the other
Spain films in circulation like Heart of Spain, had no impact on the League of
Nations or Western governments, they were part of the expanding cultural and
political movement of the Popular Front period, providing an impetus while it
was still growing in influence and expanding its base.
As part of this movement, Spanish Earth reflected many of its cultural and
ideological tactics that were not directly related to the Spanish subject. The
agrarian theme, for example, with its basic icons of bread, earth, and water,
was central to the Depression imagination. Ivens's climactic image of water
rushing through a new irrigation trough had already appeared in King Vidor's
Our Daily Bread (1934, USA, 8o) and Vertov's Three Songs About Lenin; impov-
erished migrant workers and sharecroppers had been the focus of countless
photographic essays and books, as well as Lorentz's first two films. The Fuen-
tiduena peasants were thus recognisable, universal, as were Hemingway's
vague references to the 'they' who 'held us back'. Yet Ivens's socialist real- | 215
ist-tinted vision of the cheerful collective work of his villagers lacks the plain-
tive, almost defeatist feeling of most American or Western European agrarian
imagery. The primitive irrigation project of Spanish Earth will seemingly feed
an entire besieged capital. What is more, the collective, non-hierarchical initi-
ative of the peasants is behind this success, not the expertise of the New Deal
agronomists who dispense their advice on crop rotation upon the helpless
denizens of Lorentz's films from on high.
All the same, Ivens's refusal of socialist realist dogmatism in his vision
of collective work has a certain Popular Front ring to it. There is a clear divi-
sion of responsibilities among the workers, and the Mayor displays a kind of
leadership, even delivering a subtitled speech announcing the project. Ivens
carefully avoids all possible innuendos of collectivisation, forced or otherwise;
authority springs, spontaneously, out of an implied tradition of folk common
sense. Though the Fuentiduena scenes establish a full catalogue of the mate-
rial terms of the village collective, with impeccable Marxist attention to the
forces of production? - with even a close-up of the union stamp on the bread
distributed by the smiling village bakers - they do so in a way that lets the sig-
nals of tradition, exoticism, and patience, conventionally attached to the peas-
ant icon in Western culture, overshadow the signals of revolutionary change.
Discretion is the distinguishing feature of this vision of the agrarian revolu-
tion taking place in the Spanish countryside during the Popular Front.
Another theme emerges in Spanish Earth for virtually the first time in
Ivens's career since his juvenilia: the family. This theme revolves primarily
around Julian's homecoming sequence, but it is also notable elsewhere: in the
images of two distraught mothers, one trying to load her children on an evac-
uation truck in besieged Madrid, the other in the bombed village inconsolably
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
bewailing her slaughtered children and in a young soldier's good-bye to his
wife and child before the final battle, elevated by Hemingway into a symbol of
the strength, courage, and tragedy of the family unit at war: 'They say the old
good-byes that sound the same in any language. She says she'll wait. He says
that he'll come back. Take care of the kid, he says. I will, she says, but knows
she can't. They both know that when they move you out in trucks, it's to a bat-
tle'. Compared to later American populist-agrarian films like Flaherty's The
Land (1942, 43), Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940, 129), or Renoir's The South-
erner (1945, 92), the family accent in Spanish Earth is decidedly minor. Never-
theless, it clearly points to Popular Front strategy of recuperating the values of
mainstream culture (and as we have seen, Ivens's party advisers urged him to
play it up): idealised families were highly visible in Frontier Films productions
as well.
Spanish Earth, the first of the major anti-fascist films with wide distribu-
216 tion, initiated a preoccupation with military imagery that would dominate the
screens of the next decade, and does so in a specifically Popular Front man-
ner. Beyond Ivens's respectful treatment of soldiering as work, not surprising
in the vision of a filmmaker who had romanticised the construction of North
Sea dikes and Soviet blast furnaces, his emphasis is on the humanity of the
Republican troops. The soldiers are presented as little men, non-profession-
als. Shots showing 'unsoldierly' signals - untidiness, awkward drilling, grins
at the camera - are present throughout. In one sequence about life in camp,
the emphasis is on everyday non-military activities such as getting haircuts,
eating, reading newspapers; the implication is that the stake of the war is the
quality of everyday life. In the parade scenes, there is more interest in the raw-
ness of recruits eagerly joining up than in the precision of seasoned troops,
more interest in small irregular groups than in the symmetrical formations
of Riefenstahl's films. The Nazi ballets of banners and boots have nothing in
common with the 'human' scale and detail of Ivens's People's Army.
At the same time, Ivens's attitude towards the Communist Party, its par-
ticipation in the Republican government, and its leadership of the People's
Army follows the usual Popular Front practice of 'self-censorship'. Specific
political affiliations, whether of Ivens's subjects, his hosts, or of Ivens him-
self, were not a topic for discussion. A film courting mass distribution and
Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as following the CPUSA line, declined of necessity
to identify the lineup of Communist speakers during the People's Army rally
scene: for example, Communists La Pasionaria, Jos Diaz, and others appear
as 'the wife of a poor miner in Asturias', a 'member of Parliament', etc. Explicit
political labels complicated the broad-based popular coalitions that were the
mainstay of the Popular Front, as well as the effectiveness of Republican prop-
aganda within the Western democracies. The existence of the International
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Brigades, composed primarily of Western leftists, passes unmentioned. Other
important gaps in Ivens's coverage of the war are conspicuous: Soviet aid to
the Republicans; the question of the Church, a major focus of pro-Franquist
propaganda; the identification of the enemy - the Italians and the Moroccan
mercenaries are discussed in surprisingly respectful or pitying terms, but
the Spanish classes who supported Franco's insurrection are omitted, as is
the name of Franco, and even the word 'fascist' (other than in one excerpt-
ed speech); and finally, acknowledgement of the political struggle going on
within the Republican camp at the time, which would later come to a head in
the Communist-Anarchist showdown in Barcelona near the end of the war.
Although this latter decision to underline Loyalist unity is hardly surpris-
ing, there are works, Andre Malraux's novel L'Espoir (1937), for example, that
reflect the diversity within the Republican ranks in a positive way (unlike the
2012 TV movie Hemingway & Gellhorn, which depicts Comintern agents in fur
hats prowling and growling menacingly around the Spanish landscape in a 217
huge black sedan, 'disappearing' sympathetic and handsome young friends
of the eponymous couple).
Of course, all of Ivens's elisions can be justified in terms of dodging
domestic red-baiters, religious groups, and censors (who had the habit of cut-
ting hostile references to 'friendly' powers such as Italy), but they are also part
of a systematic effort to depict the war as a simple non-ideological struggle of
'little people' against 'rebels' and invaders. The stakes of the war came across
as 'democratic' in a very loose sense, rather than those of class struggle. Ivens
was perfectly consistent with CPUSA policy, which preferred in the late thir-
ties to call its ideology 'Americanism', stressing 'democracy' and 'civil liber-
ties' rather than class allegiance, and soliciting the support of non-left allies.
Ivens's carefully constructed image of the Spanish war and civil revolu-
tion succeeded on that level without a doubt. The New York Times was persuad-
ed after seeing the film that the 'Spanish people are fighting, not for broad
principles of Muscovite Marxism, but for the right to the productivity of a
land denied them through years of absentee landlordship' (McManus, 1937).
Spanish Earth was the first film to formulate the concept of the people's war,
a concept that would gain considerably in currency over the next generations
of world history, and to insert this concept into mainstream public discourse.
The film also quickly acquired 'classic' status as the memory of the Spanish
Civil War faded: while the Mannheim Festival poll of 1964 classed it as one of
the best twelve documentaries of all time (Vernon, 2011), and at the height of
the New Left the Swedish authors Leif Furhammar and Folke Isaksson ([1968]
1971, 114) defined it as not only Ivens's most important film but also one of
the best of its kind ever made, tastes would change and by the 21t century
Spanish Earth would no longer be on the lists. Of course, Ivens and his collab-
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
orators were not shooting for immortality, and the price they paid for their
achievement in its contemporary context - the soft-pedalling of specific rad-
ical programs and identity, the adoption of popular filmic forms - is fiercely
debated even to this day. But it was a price that the filmmakers of the Popular
Front paid in full conscience.
What of Spain? How successful were the filmmakers in their short-term
pragmatic objectives? The commercial success of their film in its art-house,
political circuit was not only a likely contributor to a slight Gallup upswing
in US pro-Republican sentiment (Van Hensbergen, 2005, 106, quoted in
Stufkens, 2008, 214), but also responsible for quickly accumulating the funds
to buy eighteen ambulances, which were sent to Madrid for assembly and
deployment. The premiere of an unauthorised French version, Terre d'Es-
pagne, produced under Jean Renoir's supervision with additional commen-
tary and an increased emphasis on the agrarian theme (Stuflens, 2008, 214),
218 took place seven months after New York, and it played elsewhere in the Euro-
pean democracies, heightening anti-fascist alarm as the continent geared for
war. As the situation became increasingly hopeless in Spain (for ambulances
save lives, not wars), Hemingway presided over a special launch of the Spanish
version in May 1938 in Barcelona, where a real air raid temporarily interrupted
Van Dongen's synthetic ones. The film was revived in New York in February
1939, just in time for the final triumph of Franco. Its next revival came upon
the death of Franco in 1975, throughout Europe and nowhere more eagerly
than in Spain, a monument to the struggles two generations earlier of the Pop-
ular Fronts of both the Old World and the New, inspiration and instruction for
the struggles that were still ahead.
THE 400 MILLION
The Marco Polo Bridge incident in Manchuria in July 1937 was the pretext for
the Japanese to resume their invasion of China just as Ivens and his collabo-
rators were finishing Spanish Earth. Soon, the Western media and the US left
were as preoccupied with the renewed aggression in Asia as they had been the
preceding year with Spain, though the newsreel companies were not as ready
to connect the two conflicts as leftist analysis, and were much more accus-
tomed to treating catastrophes visited upon Asian millions than the bomb-
ings of white European civilians.8
As the editing for both Spanish Earth and Heart of Spain came to an end,
another team of filmmakers from Frontier Films was editing a film that sud-
denly seemed much more current - China Strikes Back (Harry Dunham, 37).
This film premiered in October 1937 one month after the Guomindang (Kuo-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
mintang)9 had reluctantly agreed to form a United Front with the Red Army
to fight the invaders. China Strikes Back had undergone as many last-minute
changes as feasible to include the rapid developments in the Chinese defence
strategy; because of its topicality it fared extremely well in the theatres, satu-
rating the New York market and becoming a major title in the documentary
'boom' of late 1937. At the same time, American interest in China had been
stimulated by an influx of new journalism dealing with the Communist-con-
trolled areas of northwestern China - namely Agnes Smedley's (1938) writing
on the subject and Edgar Snow's 1937 book Red Star over China and publicity
lecture tour of the same year accompanied by a 16mm film of Yanan (Yenan).
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's well-timed box-office and prestige hit, The Good Earth
(Sydney Franklin, 138), premiering February 1937, also contributed to the phe-
nomenon.
It is not surprising that discussions about a new film on China by Joris
Ivens began even before Spanish Earth had settled into its distribution pattern, I 219
nor that the discussions involved the same group of New York intellectuals as
had formed Contemporary Historians, Inc. The group recruited some impor-
tant new blood, namely Dudley Nichols, then at the peak of his career as John
Ford's favourite screenwriter. Another important recruit was Luise Rainer, the
expatriate German actress and veteran of Max Reinhardt's Berlin theatrical
troupe; Rainer was then riding the short-lived crest of her fame as the 1936
Academy Award Best Actress and star of The Good Earth, and, not incidentally,
solidly linked to the New York radical intelligentsia by virtue of her marriage
to playwright-screenwriter Clifford Odets. Rainer's role in The Good Earth
endeared her to the Chinese-American community (it brought her second
Oscar during the final preparations for 400 Million) and enabled her to secure
the financial backing for the film from Chinese-American businesspeople in
New York, instead of from the producers themselves. Her help turned out to
be essential since one major underwriter, K.C. Li, a leading New York import
merchant, was a strong supporter of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-chek) and did not
see eye-to-eye with the producers on the political situation in China. Another
Hollywood supporter was Frank Tuttle, a prolific director of Bing Crosby hits
among other accomplishments and member of Tinseltown's CPUSA network,
who had hosted Ivens the previous year, and would now act as film industry
point man, ensuring that the negative would be developed at his studio, Par-
amount.'0 Herman Shumlin continued to function as producer, and Hellman
and MacLeish continued to be mainstays of the support group, which re-in-
corporated under the name of History Today, Inc.
The group considered that another fuller film on the Chinese defence was
needed for several reasons. China Strikes Back, for one thing, rapidly became
dated, not only because of the United Front between Jiang and the Commu-
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
nists, but because of the lightning Japanese advance throughout the fall: by
the end of September both Beijing (Peking) and Tianjin (Tientsin) had fallen,
by November Shanghai and Tai-yuan, and in December, as the film prepara-
tions drew to an end, it was the turn of Nanjing (Nanking), the capital through-
out the thirties. Each new reverse came after brutal, widely publicised sieges
and bombardments.
China Strikes Back, furthermore, was only 23 minutes long. It was thought
that a less superficial, medium-length or feature film would attract more atten-
tion, deal more thoroughly with the situation, rally more support for the Chi-
nese defenders, and reinforce the growing agitation against US isolationism.
One particular reason that China Strikes Back was outmoded was that it had
been centred around footage secretly taken in 'Soviet China' in late 1936 or
early 1937; since 'Soviet China' and the Red Army had now become the 'Special
Administrative District' and the Eighth Route Army, integrated with the forces
220 of the former arch-enemy, the Guomindang, a new orientation was needed.
The target for the film, once again, was western public opinion and relief
support. Though the newsreels were not unsympathetic to the Chinese, and
though the US neutrality policy did not prevent the sale of arms to China in
this undeclared war, public opinion and the sentiment in Congress were both
strongly opposed to intervention and even to proposed sanctions against
Japan. In October 1937, 40% of the American public considered themselves
neutral, according to one poll, and 63% of China supporters were against an
embargo of war materials for Japan, despite Roosevelt's pronouncement of
his support for a 'quarantine' against the aggressor nation the same month."
The US left was conducting a major campaign in support of sanctions against
Japan, an issue not broached by China Strikes Back; it was therefore an impor-
tant theme of 40o Million with its images of US scrap metal bound for Japanese
munitions factories. Garrison Films was to distribute another film originating
in the US left early in 1938, specifically on the subject of the proposed boycott,
entitled Stop Japan. Ivens's (1969, 141) more general aim was 'to tell Ameri-
ca about a China which they had never before been told about truthfully and
completely," a China that was certain to include the 'Special Administrative
District' nonetheless.
The projected outlay for the film was $50,000, more than double the
budget for Spanish Earth. Ivens had now had full exposure to wartime filmmak-
ing conditions, had encountered enough Hollywood amusement at his minis-
cule Spanish budget, and was tired of having to comb desperately through his
rushes for useable material even to the extent of having to repeat shots. He was
ready to make the next film at the professional level. This also meant increas-
ing his crew. In addition to hiring Ferno once again, he arranged for another
assistant, Robert Capa, the now-famous photographer whom they had met in
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Spain. Capa was not only another 'big name' lending his name to the project
(officially he would be covering the war for Life, who could partly cover expens-
es). A third crew member with miscellaneous duties was considered a neces-
sity after Spain, where the assistance of first Dos Passos and then Hemingway,
and other Americans and Spaniards, had been invaluable in making logistical
arrangements (Ivens, 1969, 142). Spain had convinced Ivens of the importance
of having a writer on location as well, a conviction also connected to the mode
of mise-en-scene, and Nichols was to accompany the crew in this capacity. The
period of the shoot was indeterminate but the crew was apparently ready to
stay longer than they had in Spain, though not so long as the seven months
they eventually took. Arrangements were made for Paramount to develop the
rushes in Hollywood and to provide some advice on subtropical filming. Fre-
dric March was to be the commentator, another Academy Award winner, who
would bring to the film the prestige of the leading man to Garbo, Hepburn,
Shearer, Sidney, and, most recently, Gaynor and Lombard. Yet despite the 221
numerous 'big name' Hollywood connections and the increased aura of pro-
fessionalism surrounding the project, contacts with the Frontier Films milieu
were still strong: WFPL stalwart Ben Maddow would be credited as 'assistant',
a credit referring to a supportive role in the editing and narration, and Garri-
son would distribute.
In November 1937, Ivens made a trip to Europe to recruit Fernhout and
Capa for the project. This time Ferno would receive equal billing, though
there is no evidence that his role was substantially different from what it was
on Spanish Earth nor that he participated in the editing of the film. Hankou,
the current Chinese capital, was much further than Madrid from the sourc-
es of supply, so the technical preparations were especially thorough - extra
equipment was purchased in addition to the two men's hand-cameras and
Ferno's large Debrie. One result was that the crew was perhaps over-equipped
and would have to be accompanied by, in addition to the censor and censor-
ship assistant imposed by the Guomindang, a business manager, a personal
assistant, a servant, and, on frequent occasions, a file of as many as 24 'coolies'
(Ivens, 1969, 16o). One apparently typical shooting excursion on the Shandong
front would involve a truck and only six porters (Grelier, 1965, 151). This factor
was to contribute no doubt to the problems of immobility and official inter-
ference that would plague the project in China, of which the filmmakers had
not yet had a taste. In New York, Ivens discovered that K.C. Li was attempting
to stall the project and therefore had to undertake further last-minute fund-
raising activities. In California, just before boarding his Pan-American China
Clipper flight, he encountered a further reversal: Dudley Nichols backed out of
the trip to China, but agreed to continue as writer.
After a long calamitous trip, which is documented vividly in the dia-
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
ry excerpts in Camera, Ivens arrived in Hong Kong on 8 February. There he
secured additional supplies with the help of an experienced Dutch expatriate
and visited Soong Ching-ling (Madame Sun Yixian [Sun Yat-sen]), who was
spearheading the campaign to raise support for China in the West. She pro-
vided him with an orientation to China somewhat different from that which
her brothers-in-law Jiang and Kong, the Guomindang leaders, would later pro-
vide, and agreed to be filmed on the filmmakers' passage back out of China.
The filmmakers' China headquarters was to be Hankou (Hankou and Guang-
dong [Canton] were to fall in October, shortly after the crew had filmed the
bombardment of this latter city and had returned to the US).
Ivens's frustrating seven months in China, as recorded in his notes, dia-
ries, and correspondence, involved 'one hundred times more difficulties' than
in Spain (Ivens, draft letter to Shumlin, n.d. [c. winter 1938-1939], JIA). Not
only did the Guomindang interference, bureaucracy, and censorship cause
222 disruption and delays and seriously affect the shape and content of final film,
but they also prevented him from realising a major professional and political
goal, a pilgrimage to Shanxi (Shensi) province, where most of the Communist
areas were. Everywhere in China, Ivens remembers seeing streams of young
people moving north to Yanan but was prevented from following them and
thus from linking the military struggle to social revolution as he had in Spain
(Devarrieux, 1978a, 108). Instead of the exhilarating record of political inspi-
ration and high morale found in the Spanish accounts, the China documents
reveal anger and disappointment.
As Leyda (1972, 115) recounts, the Guomindang seemed more afraid of
leftist filmmakers than they were of the Japanese and successfully prevent-
ed Ivens from even meeting the dynamic Hankou community of filmmakers,
many of whom had similar political sympathies. Although Ivens attributed the
interference to the routine Guomindang supervision of all foreign film pro-
duction in China, and provides innumerable anecdotes of his hosts' apparent
misunderstanding of the project, it seems highly unlikely that the Jiangs and
their representatives would not have been more aware of what was at stake
than they let on. Both Leyda (1972, 110-112) and Dorothy Jones (1955, 40) pro-
vide lengthy accounts of the Chinese diplomatic service's detailed and effec-
tive monitoring of Western film projects involving China. They must certainly
have been aware of China Strikes Back and must have smarted at that film's
homage to their rivals in the northwest. They surely could not have been una-
ware that Ivens was affiliated with the community that had sponsored that
film and had vilified the Guomindang continuously throughout the thirties.
The Guomindang's conveyed impression that the Ivens group were 'third-rate
artists' unworthy of official sponsorship, has, in retrospect, the air of a ploy
(Ivens, 1969, 152-153).3 For once, Ivens's official diplomatic and Hollywood
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
connections may have been a hindrance and actually prevented him and his
huge retinue from slipping in and out of Shanxi unnoticed, the way the author
of the prized footage in China Strikes Back, Harry Dunham, had done.'4 In any
case, in preventing Ivens from filming the Communist areas and the Eighth
Route Army, the Guomindang did win a major propaganda battle. As for win-
ning the war, it is another question: another detail of the episode, also ele-
vated now to the status of legend, is that Ivens slipped his hand camera and
some stock to Wu Yinxian, a member of the Eighth Route Army, told the Guo-
mindang he had dropped them in the river, and thus participated vicariously
in some of the first film shot in the revolutionary state, entitled Yanan and the
Eighth Route Army (Yuan Muzhi, 1939). He eventually returned to find his old
Kinamo enshrined in the Museum of the Revolution in Beijing (Leyda, 1964,
71).
In the meantime, however, the Guomindang interference ensured that
the Communists make only a minor, unacknowledged appearance in the final I 223
film, and that Ivens's style and subject matter as they were evolving in Spanish
Earth were radically affected, as my analysis will demonstrate. The crew had
to spend their first six weeks in Hankou before being allowed to head for the
combat zone (in Spain the initial delay had been only three days), their crew
by now infiltrated with Guomindang spies. They then spent much of the first
half of April filming on the Shandong front, where they managed to witness
and film aspects of the only Chinese victory in 1938, Tai'erzhuang, which com-
prises the final climactic sequence of 400 Million. After returning to Hankou
via Zhengzhou, they devoted May to fruitless attempts to get close to the Com-
munists in Shanxi. This not unamusing episode landed the group in Lanzhou
on the Mongolian border because they had requested to shoot near the Great
Wall in the belief that this would take them into Shanxi. Outsmarted once
again, they saw another distant portion of the very long Great Wall, but used
this occasion profitably to film the site of the supply route to the USSR. The
film's dust-storm sequence was also shot in this desert region. At this point
the remarkable exchange of telegrams with Hankou took place in which Mad-
ame Jiang encouraged the filmmakers to return to Hankou to 'take advantage
of the June weather' (Ivens, 1969, 175). Finally the group succeeded in reach-
ing Xi'an, on the edge of the Special District they were so anxious to reach, but
to no avail. Here, trailed night and day by detectives, they met Agnes Smed-
ley, and by accident, Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden.15 Further delays
resulted when Ivens contracted the mumps. Upon their return to Hankou,
the Guomindang, now having confirmed their suspicions that what Ivens was
really interested in was Shanxi, tightened the clamps even more, and hence-
forth prevented the processing of any shot before a 16mm duplication of it
had been developed in Hong Kong and approved officially. During this last vis-
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
it to Hankou, the group's only official contact with the Communists occurred:
without permission they filmed a meeting of the National Military Council at
which an Eighth Route Army delegation was present and a brief portrait of
Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai) resulted.16 The final phase of the shoot was in Quang-
dong, where the crew, filming from a high hotel that the Japanese command
were sparing for their eventual headquarters, took the material on civilian
bombardment required for the film. They then returned to Hong Kong to film
Soong Ching-ling and made a hasty retreat to Hollywood in September. There
the rushes had been developed and the cutting had already been commenced
by Van Dongen.
The whole project moved to New York after a month or so, followed by
Nichols, who had to abandon his Hollywood work to finish the commentary.
The dramatic voice-track was post-synchronised with Chinese-American
actors in New York. Advance previews began taking place as early as Novem-
224 I ber, though the final sound-editing lasted well into February 1939, with dis-
tribution problems causing further delays and disappointment. Ivens was
reportedly at one point ready to destroy everything (Zalzman, 1963, 66-67).7
The film was released by Garrison on 7 March, the producers having failed
once again to find a mainstream distributor, though this time the shock did
not overwhelm the already low morale. As with the Spanish film, the world sit-
uation tended once again to upstage the premiere: attention had once again
returned to Europe. Herbert Kline's and Hanns Burger's film Crisis (1939,
USA, 95) on Czechoslovakia opened at the same time, and, of course, Hitler
chose the same month to take over whatever parts of Czechoslovakia had not
been absorbed the previous autumn following Munich.
Ivens's conception of the project evolved continuously during this tor-
tuous itinerary and it is relevant to this study to analyse the various stages of
the evolution. During the enforced idleness of the Pacific fight, Ivens applied
himself energetically to the planning of the film, hoping all the while that the
Chinese situation would permit the kind of heightened personalisation of the
documentary form that had eluded him in Spain, 'the logical development of
the documentary' (Ivens, 1969, 211).
Once more, Ivens was armed with a story outline by Hellman and
MacLeish, aided this time by their Nationalist backer K.C. Li, that would prove
as impracticable in the field as their earlier version of Spanish Earth had been.
Later in Hankou, Ivens summarised the original outline in his notes:
Central figure young man. new China. cotton mill, cotton purchased by
Japs. for Chinese mill, necessary road building. also girl...road is symbol
of New China, struggle with Japanese buyers. building road coincides
with invasion. war approaching village. air raid on road and bridges.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
mobilization of village, defence of villager and troops. boy-girl. New Chi-
na. New spirit of construction. Jap. danger. road symbol. war fight. (hand-
written note, 23 April 1938, JIA)
The echoes in this sketch of the original Spanish project, not only the exem-
plary focus on village and road, but the chronological symbolic narrative that
would require considerable fictionalisation, are surprising considering that
History Today could hardly have been under the impression that it would be
any easier in China to execute such a conception than it had been in Spain,
regardless of whatever commercial advantages would accrue from the addi-
tion of 'boy-girl' elements. Isherwood ([1939] 1972, 54) reports hearing from
the filmmakers on 9 March of plans 'to make a film about the life of a child-sol-
dier, a little red devil, in one of the mobile units of the Eighth Route Army'. It is
likely that the filmmakers, even at this early date, had an official film concep-
tion and a slightly different private one. I 225
Ivens's Hankou note (written after he had returned from the Shandong
front) indicates why he was coming to the conclusion that such an outline was
not feasible:
too much accent on reconstruction and history - could be done in Hol-
lywood, needs focus on war, concentration of all forces for war. Show
new China in organization of resistance, uniting of all classes, history of
aggression. (handwritten note, 23 April 1938, JIA)
All the same, he had not completely abandoned narrative elements involving
personal characterisation, despite the hardships of the front and the virtual
impossibility of undertaking this kind of filmmaking in these circumstances:
We try to get some more story or personal angle on the development of
the battle from General Zhu. Many military people do not think in those
terms. Too dry or too cagey. Our liaison and censorman, General Du, does
his utmost to stop us getting close to the officers or men. (Ivens, [1938]
1969, 16o)
Thus the inherent difficulties in filming combat at close range were com-
pounded by the officers' interference, with the result that the battle material,
as with Spanish Earth, would lack definition: at least one reviewer found the
Tai'erzhuang battle sequence very flat compared to newsreel coverage while
another (Nugent, 1939) even complained that battle coverage was missing.
At first, unsure of the quality, if any, of this Tai'erzhuang material, Ivens
([1938] 1969, 16o) did not know whether it would be a separate sequence or fit
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
into the main continuity. Eventually, to compensate partly for the difficulties
at the front, Ivens evolved a'triptych structure' idea, of which the final part still
clung to the idea of a personal narrative:
First a broad general section to say that the Japanese did not begin today,
that the War is part of a plan which has been in the shaping process for
over thirty years - hundreds of years if you like - and was specifically for-
mulated in 1927 in the Tanaka Memorandum. This is our political and
economic background of this historic period. The central panel of the
triptych will be the war itself and the battle of Tai'erzhuang and future
battles. Out of that must come the third section, a personal story of a
young Chinese defending his country. (Ivens, [1938] 1969, 170)
This idea is visible in the final film except that the final two panels are com-
226 bined; the third panel of 400 Million is devoted to the battle of Tai'erzhuang
and at the same time focused around an apparently fictional exemplary narra-
tor-protagonist, Sergeant Wang. The other two panels have also been reshaped,
with the first one treating the historical China (historical background and the
Japanese aggression), and the second one treating 'modern' China (united
resistance and national construction). However, it is clear from the somewhat
peripheral and contrived role of Sergeant Wang as internal narrator, function-
ing primarily as a narrative device without achieving any real definition as a
character, that the circumstances continued to mediate drastically as late as
April between Ivens's increasingly realistic conceptions and the rushes he was
continuing to shoot daily.
I have already suggested that another essential element in the original
conception of the film was to add to the views of the Eighth Route Army and
the new Soviet zones of Shanxi that had been the basis of China Strikes Back. A
number of the fictional characters considered in the early stages of the project
were to encounter or to be part of this milieu. A journal entry from the Pacific
flight sets forward this element that Ivens, leaving the Shandong front, would
have to attempt soon or never:
It is good to think about the coming work. Guerilla warfare, one of the
most important things. Maybe follow the activities of a guerilla general
with the camera for three months... When the people produce their own
commanders from among themselves, out of their own ranks, then they
are good. I saw Lister and Campesino leading divisions of the People's
Army in Spain. Great people. I'll find them in China too. (Ivens, [1938]
1969, 144-145)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The vagueness of this entry, possibly written with non-communist backers or
censors in mind, does not conceal the specificity of the intent - the guerillas
in which Ivens was interested acted in the northwest. On 15 May, while in the
remote Lanzhou area, in a desperate attempt to be permitted to move beyond
Zhou to the northwest district, Ivens drew up and presented to the Guomin-
dang official, Colonel Huang, an outline for a strongly narrative episode
including dramatic characters to be shot there and featuring the Great Wall
and Madame Jiang. The sincerity of this proposal is questionable, followed
as they are by an assurance that Americans were very interested in the Eighth
Route Army, and possibly formulated at the time when Ivens thought that a
visit to the Wall would automatically bring him among the guerillas.
However, Ivens probably no longer believed that such an admittedly melo-
dramatic emphasis was feasible or desirable. This treatment may simply have
been an attempt to mollify his guides, who were exerting a 'terrific pressure
[...] to get a full script of our film' (Ivens, 1969, 174). Notes written three days I 227
previously to this, in Dutch significantly, are in obvious despair at the constant
surveillance, and possibly at the news that theywere being taken towards Mon-
golia. They suggest the splitting up of the group, and recommend the shoot-
ing of more straight documentary material because of the impossibility of the
original story and the futility of looking for an actor in Xi'an while under sur-
veillance. The notes go on to hope that later on there might be contact with the
guerillas, since a story without them would have no sense, and to express, reas-
suringly, just a glimmer of 'mad inspiration' in the landscape (Ivens, [1938]
1969, 173).
Yet another detailed formulation of a film outline for work in the Com-
munist areas, dated 15 May, possibly written as notes for Ferno in the event
that he would able to detach himself from the excursion, has almost com-
pletely dropped the narrative, personalised orientation. Complete with stu-
dent groups moving on foot towards Yanan, an encounter with Mao playing
basketball with students and soldiers, re-enacted material on guerillas sabo-
taging a railroad, and much soldier-peasant interaction, it documents Ivens's
emphases and strategies in the shooting of the hybrid style of this period, as
well as the ideological, formal, and topical accents he was hoping for at this
time. This 'Plan for Shooting Film of 8th Army' concludes:
Emphasize in the pictures the important and excellent relation and close
contact between army and population - Also the new and human disci-
pline during the service, the warm and comradely relation in contrast
to the other armies and schools. film in Y not too much. We need most
material of the 8th Route Army. Make only minimum of re-enacted scenes.
(handwritten notes, Xi'an, 15 May 1938, JIA)
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
If this scenario was submitted to Col Huang, as seems to have been the case,
it may have been a last-minute gesture of suicidal defiance. In any case, it too
had no effect, except that echoes are visible in the final film. Of interest, how-
ever, beyond its technical instructions, and its emphasis on preconceptions
of the western audience, whether over the Great Wall or missionaries, is the
caution Ivens advises on ideological and aesthetic grounds with regard to the
personal narrative line and mise-en-scene. There is stress throughout on group
activities and the specification that the images of young heroes and brave girls
should not be 'portraits' of individuals but of groups at work. Undoubtedly,
the de-emphasis on re-enactment in this proposal has been influenced by a
reaction against the Guomindang insistence on mise-en-scene throughout;
probably this outline if filmed would have resulted in a mix comparable to that
of Spanish Earth with the 'spontaneous' mode greatly enriched by the intimacy
of living and working within small groups for extended periods.
228 In terms of specific content, the 'plan' is clearly designed to complement
Dunham's material in China Strikes Back in the same way that the Spanish films
had avoided overlapping each other's scope. The spontaneous flavour would
have added a personal resonance to Dunham's footage, which was elegant,
but formal and impersonal. The actual combat footage would have corrected
Dunham's inability to photograph any military activity beyond manoeuvres.
Ivens's emphasis on the civilian constituency of the army and their interaction
would have filled out Dunham's meager coverage of the district as a function-
ing social order rather than a military stronghold.'8 As with Spain, the military
aspects were of no importance to Ivens without their social correlatives. It is
tempting to speculate about the cinematic qualities and inestimable histori-
cal relevance of this film that was never to be made. A letter drafted to Shumlin
after the completion of 400 Million summarised Ivens's view of the Chinese
experience. He bitterly complained that he had been prevented from making
a film with a 'story' in China and had had to turn to a 'straight documentary
film'. His unrealised goal, he said, had been to prove to himself and to others
where the new documentary film was to go, but instead he had been forced
to give up his 'original conception and styles'. Most angry about the censors
and spies, he listed scenes that he had been prevented from filming, includ-
ing images of a blind mother. Hinting about possible damage done to his own
career by the episode, Ivens closed by affirming his conviction that the nar-
rative idea, though still theoretical, is 'ten times right' (Ivens, draft letter to
Shumlin, n.d. [c. winter 1938-1939], JIA).
Looking back after the completion of Power, Ivens was less bitter about
the failure of the project of personalisation in China. He still hoped, howev-
er, that the goal had been partially achieved insofar as 'after seeing the film
you could think you know one or two Chinese; you could like them or dislike
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
them' (Ivens, 1969, 212). Ivens was presumably referring not only to Sergeant
Wang, but also to the portraits of the Guomindang leaders (clearly in the 'dis-
like' category), to the even more fleeting encounters with Soong Ching-ling, to
the historian and writer, Guo Moruo, who speaks at a public ceremony in one
sequence, and to a few other minor dignitaries, some anonymous. Perhaps
more memorable for Ivens was a couple depicted searching for their belong-
ings in the ruins of their house near Tai'erzhuang, too distant from a cam-
era that is understandably discreet, but decidedly discernible as 'characters'.
Towards the end of the post-production, Ivens made an attempt to step up the
personal quality of this short scene by adding to the commentary the names
of the husband, Li Bo, and of the village, plus the judicious revelation not pro-
vided by the image that the husband had first searched for his hammer but
that the wife had tried to uncover her grinding-stones. The random concrete-
ness of this revelation adds greatly to the personal effect of this scene. The
vignette method that had been Ivens's last resort in Spain, then, served him 229
in China as well. One reviewer declared that the personal vignettes were the
highlight of the film and that they should have been extended, a prescription
with which Ivens would have been in complete agreement. The Li Bo episode
for this reviewer 'dwarfed' the entire battle scene:
Ivens does his best war correspondence with portraiture. The faces of
China unite the soundtrack. They tell the whole story of the war. He could
have made it a better film, I think, and made a more potent brew from the
bitter caldron of war, had he studied those faces longer. (Nugent, 1939)
31. The 400 Million (1939): vignette of Li Bo 1
family searching for their belongings in the
ruins of their house, accenting the personal
quality of the film. DVD frame capture.
© CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
It would only be another film on China 35 years later that would permit the
detailed portraits Ivens was seeking.
The final structure of the 'straight' documentary that Ivens made 'against
his will', when all was said and done, was not dissimilar in very general terms
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
to that of Spanish Earth. The same propaganda structure of idyll-threat-re-
sistance is still present, though in modulated form. An initial exposition of
the Chinese historical, geographical, and cultural context, extolling Chinese
contributions to human society, leads into the presentation of the history of
Japanese aggression and the current attack. Next, a long series of sequenc-
es detailing the unification of the country and its modernisation under the
Guomindang's 'New Life' Program follows, and finally the climactic battle
of Tai'erzhuang that shows the people triumphing over the aggressor. As
in Spanish Earth, there are two vivid atrocity sequences showing syntheti-
cally edited civilian bombardment. One is located at the beginning of the
film, as a kind of prologue, apparently a late addition to the film to enliven
the original beginning's lyrical exploration of Chinese landscape and cul-
ture. The second bombing sequence, placed near the end, purports to show
Japanese revenge for the Tai'erzhuang defeat, coming between the victory
230 I and an exultant torchlight celebration that concludes the film. This latter
placement was apparently intended to qualify the euphoria inherent in the
victory and in the overall structure of the last movement of the film. As in
Spanish Earth, there is also a basic alternating rhythm of positive and nega-
tive sequences, aggression and resistance, denunciation and affirmations of
calm and endurance.
With 400 Million, Ivens continues the same basic hybrid mix of cine-
matographic modes that characterised Spanish Earth, though there are sig-
nificant inflections arising from the shooting situation. The proto-direct
'spontaneous' mode, which had dominated Spanish Earth in proportion to its
running time and spectator impact, is significantly reduced in this film. Two
anecdotes from Camera suggest the reason for this:
We are waiting for a refugee train. We have often seen them, but haven't
filmed one yet. But one doesn't come in today. It is the old lesson: film
a certain thing the moment we see it even if the light conditions are not
exactly right. The censors also try to stop us when we attempt anything
spontaneous and then we discuss away the freshness. Discussions with
censors and light metres are dangerous. (Ivens, [1938] 1969, 171)
The other anecdote describes a spontaneous demonstration that the group
came across by accident in Xi'an, a kind of spontaneous musical street-theatre
organised by four students:
The whole market place was alive. The elementary latent force in these
people - found all over China - was being brought to life by these stu-
dents. It was a great manifestation. But we were not allowed to film it
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
because it would give the impression that the Chinese mass was dirty and
not well organized! We argued with the censor. No luck. [...]
The next morning about seven o'clock our Chinese company hurried
us out because they had arranged something terrific for us. On the great
square, without anything typically Chinese, they had lined up about
10,000 people. All nicely arranged. Children with children, men with
men, bicycles with bicycles. Four shiny loudspeakers and forty students
instead of yesterday's four were facing the crowd. 'Here's your chance',
they said. (Ivens, 1969, 176)
These anecdotes suggest several reasons for the suppression of the 'spontane-
ous' mode in 40oMillion at the instance of the censors. The Chinese insistence
on the propaganda value of images of organisation and modernisation is not
incomprehensible. In fact, it seems even very contemporary in its instinctive
understanding of the complicity of the code of the 'exotic' in China's historic I 231
colonial humiliation, a code that Ivens's ([1938] 1969, 173) innocent phrase
'typically Chinese' hints may be more residually present in the project than
his disavowals of 'tourist' attitudes elsewhere would suggest.'9 It is clear at the
same time that the class identification of the Guomindang hosts was threat-
ened by the filmmakers' interest in the proletariat and the peasantry (natural
subjects for the 'spontaneous' mode in their presumably widespread media
innocence), a threat not necessarily related to the Chinese elite's conscious
fear of the filmmakers' communist sympathies.
The existence of purely cultural factors in the Guomindang's repudiation
of the 'spontaneous' mode cannot be discounted, nor is it easy to confirm.
Ivens was not the first nor the last of Western filmmakers to encounter in Chi-
na what was to western thinking an incomprehensible aesthetic of photogra-
phy, or to imply that purely cultural variants were responsible.20
Over the last generation, there has been a consensus within the disci-
pline of film studies about the ideological pitfalls of Euro-American cine-
matic depictions of the postcolonial 'other' (Rony, 1996). This includes the
specific perils, both ethical and aesthetic, posed to roving artists filming in
'exotic' locations, even paradoxically those most well-intentioned projects
that are produced 'in solidarity' with postcolonial peoples. These liabilities
of the foreign filmmaker's gaze, ranging from 'unthinking Eurocentrism'
to paternalism, exploitation, and cultural damage, are of course sometimes
balanced by a potential for a Bakhtinian cultural interaction, mutually
enriching, and an opening of a space for transnational knowledge (Richards,
2006, 55-64). The solidarity genre exemplified by Ivens's Chinese work (his
final 1988 project Une histoire de vent [A Tale of the Wind, France, 78] is less
typical of the genre than his earlier three initiatives of the 1930s, the 1950s,
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
and the 1970s, all more explicitly political) calls for a nuanced reflection on
this potential paradox and balance.
Ivens provides a third anecdote that illuminates the problem from yet a
different perspective:
About a hundred badly wounded soldiers arrive at the station. [...]
We decide to film this in detail. I asked Jack [the business assistant]
to try and have the bearers and wounded not look too obviously at the
camera. He doesn't respond in his usual manner and I can see that the
directions he gives are vague. I worry because the picture will not give
the audience the feeling of naturalness so I ask him to be more to the
point with the bearers. He refuses and runs away. John and I continue the
picture as best we can. And I use the only Chinese words I know: Bu Yao
Kan - Don't look at the camera. Works all right, but it is a little mechanical.
232 I Later, on the way home, I find Jack and have a long talk with him.
In a way he is right. He says, 'I couldn't yell at my own people. They
have fought so hard and they are so badly wounded. I have too much
respect for them, and therefore I am silent. Directing them to look or not
to look would be cruel. I would like to help them in some way'.
There it is! But our way of helping is to make a good film. To move
people by its professional quality so they will feel and understand that
the wounded soldier needs a good stretcher for his very life. John, Capa
and I have the same respect as Jack for the wounded Chinese; but we
cannot allow it to influence us when we are doing our work. (Ivens,
[193811969, 168-169)
The cultural dynamic is displaced in Ivens's analysis by the ethical, the politi-
cal, and the aesthetic, but it is still present. Ivens is asking his subjects to pose
but in a different way from the posing preferred by the Guomindang in the
street-theatre incident. The codes of the 'spontaneous' mode called into ques-
tion in the incident with Jack, 'professional quality' and 'the feeling of natural-
ness', are not 'natural' in the least but culturally determined and as dependent
on artificial conventions of representation as the variation of the 'newsreel'
mode preferred by the Guomindang and not a few occidental filmmakers and
governments. The Chinese elite's visual culture, rather than being 'the first
stage of camera culture', as Sontag (1978, 71) might have inferred, may, iron-
ically, simply be a variation of Ivens's own camera culture based on related
styles of 'posing' and conceptions of 'the feeling of naturalness'. After all, in
the sequence treating Guomindang government, military, and ladies' council
meetings, a perfect familiarity with Ivens's code of 'naturalness' is displayed.
As late as 1963, Hugh Baddeley in The Technique ofDocumentary Film Pro-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
duction makes explicit the code of representation that Ivens was assuming
unquestioningly 25 years earlier:
One of the documentary producer's greatest problems is to make the
ordinary people that he films appear natural on the screen. They should
look as though they are unaware that a camera is anywhere in the vicinity.
[...] Most people are capable of appearing perfectly natural in front of a
camera while they are doing their normal job on some everyday action.
But they must be given clear instruction. Their instinct is to look at the
camera - which is exactly what they should never do. As soon as a charac-
ter is seen glancing, even momentarily, at the lens, all the illusion of nat-
uralness is gone. The camera should be the unseen eye and the audience
should have the impression that they are observing the natural world
without a mechanical barrier intervening between them and it. (Baddeley,
1963, 99-100, emphasis mine) I 233
Baddeley adds details of camera placements, ruses, and long-focus lenses that
can aid in creating 'the illusion of naturalness'. It is surprising that more docu-
mentarists of the thirties did not attempt to challenge these codes, since it was
very much the fashion for still photographers to incorporate their subjects'
camera-conscious posing into their work, and especially since a small num-
ber of filmmakers as diverse as Vertov (both Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa
[Enthusiasm: The Donbass Symphony, 1931, USSR, 67] and Three Songs About
Lenin), the GPO unit (Housing Problems [Arthur Elton and E.H. Anstey, 1935,
UK, 13]) and Flaherty (Land) do the same (Vertov and the GPO were encour-
aged to do so by the primitive mechanics of direct sound recording). In the last
named of these films, one character who is so alienated that he does not take
note of the camera becomes the pretext for the narrator to comment upon this
unusual phenomenon with pity! It is interesting that Ivens's third and most
successful documentary filming excursion to China, in the seventies, would
be built almost entirely on his subjects' eagerness to 'pose' for the camera,
though Yukong also included, as we shall see, transitional and establishing
scenes that seem mildly jarring because they use the classical codes of illusion
that Ivens insisted on in 1938.
This curious tangle of cultural politics should not obscure the essential
fact that the perceived 'immediacy' and 'intimacy' of much of Spanish Earth's
'spontaneous' material - the scenes of the evacuation of the children, the
after-effects of the bombardments, the farewells before battle - are by and
large missing from 400 Million. Here the visual characteristics of this mode as
I have isolated them in Spanish Earth and earlier films appear only in glimps-
es: in some of the bombardment, battle, and refugee sequences, for example,
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
where trauma and other preoccupations have interrupted the dynamics of
illusionism and censorship, and an instantaneous nuance of improvisation
is legible in a foreground blurred figure or a sudden or jerky pan. The scene
derived from the incident of the wounded soldiers in the station includes a
few of these nuances. Not all of the bearers' glances at the camera have been
removed. One senses that the out-takes from this material might have provid-
ed even more 'spontaneous' nuance in the form of 'unnatural' stares, but it is
of course anachronistic to make a hindsight demand of Ivens so much in con-
tradiction of the prevailing camera culture of the day. The Li Bo vignette also
stands out for its 'spontaneous' resonance, an example of an event too poign-
ant even for the intervention of metteur-en-scene and censor, and as I have stat-
ed, even for the approach of the camera:
We accomplished a lot of fine work in Tai'erzhuang today. Three hundred
234 I and fifty refugees have returned to the places where their houses once
stood. Out of three thousand that once lived there, we filmed the first to
come back, a man and his wife. They paid no attention to the camera,
they paid no attention to anyone except themselves. They remained close
together. The man finds a hammer and the woman a small millstone
and shows it to her husband. They will have to start all over again, staying
close together. (Ivens, [1938] 1969, 164)
It is no accident that virtually all of the 'spontaneous' moments in 400 Million
have some calamity as their pretext.
With the reduction of the 'spontaneous' mode, the mise-en-scene mode has
correspondingly grown to dominate the 400 Million text. This increase of mise-
en-scene in the film was not the only subject of Ivens's bitter complaints: an
even more serious complaint was that the filmmakers themselves were not
often enough the metteurs-en-scene. Ivens's conception of his hybrid style from
this period put the emphasis on balance - neither 'naturalism' nor 're-enact-
ment' should dominate (Ivens, 1940, 35). That he had intended to increase
the proportion of the latter in the Chinese film is clear from the various early
treatments that have already been discussed and from the expanded crew and
the plan for an accompanying writer. However, instead of the customary inter-
action of filmmakers with subjects that he was counting on, the sponsors and
censors attempted to impose their own conception of mise-en-scene interac-
tion onto the situation. For example, Ivens approached the filming of the site
of the famous Jiang kidnapping2' by stationing two children looking up at the
inscriptions on the site. Their censor replaced the children with three 'stiff'
soldiers, which the filmmakers refused to shoot, rejecting a change of content
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
rather than a change of principle (Ivens, 1969, 176). Elsewhere Ivens used an
identical tactic of animating an object by having subjects look at it within the
frame, usually a poster or a map. Another aspect of the problem around the
kidnapping site is used elsewhere as well: on other occasions Ivens used mise-
en-scene involving children as a means of ensuring a flavour of naturalism, for
example a shot of a group of children running quickly towards the camera, a
frequent device in Ivens's work. Shots such as this, where Ivens had a relative
amount of control over the mise-en-scene stand clearly apart from those affect-
ed by the Guomindang meddling.
The Ivens mise-en-scene material stands out either because of a clearly
visible interaction based on the shared and consensual understanding of the
process, as in the brief encounter with Soong, or because the customary Ivens
visual style or iconography is recognisable. Some of the most elegant sequenc-
es of the film belong in this latter category: a view of a field-telephone operator
on duty at the base of a blossoming fruit tree introduced by a slow pan down I 235
from the mass of flowers, a shot that dazzled reviewers; or a precisely articu-
lated sequence of recruits doing Taiji (Tai-chi) warm-up exercises in a sunny
courtyard, established by a symmetrically composed long-shot pan and then
detailed at medium range; some shots treating the country's mobile inland
cottage industries, in which shoemaking is studied as carefully as work in any
previous film, with concise pans from the object to the worker's face and vice
versa; or, a whole narrative sequence depicting a group of peasants in a rice
field being summoned to battle and picking up their hidden weapons to fall
into formation. This latter sequence, also held up for praise in the reviews, is
a unit of twelve shots, including the customarily scrupulous continuity and
intricate pan reframings.
In contrast, the three formal Guomindang meeting sequences appear stiff
and inauthentic. Though Ivens halfheartedly claimed that such scenes had
never before been filmed, reviewers were unimpressed: one critic found the
Guomindang 'neither cinematic nor illuminating' (Nugent, 1939). Ivens and
Van Dongen solved the problem of the stiffness of the Guomindang-orches-
trated Xi'an demonstration in the editing - they intercut it with the encounter
with Soong.
With regard to the actual combat material, Ivens used mise-en-scene as
well, partly because he was almost always relatively far from the heat of bat-
tle, unlike in Spain. At one point, his diary describes a fairly productive day
of shooting on the front in the vocabulary of the studio: 'Today we took 585
feet of film, about eighteen set-ups. Practically no retakes. You can't do many
retakes at the front' - details for which 'spontaneous' shooting would hardly
be conducive. The following day, 'the battery fired twelve shots especially for
us' and the crew learned the key phrase, already mentioned, 'Don't look at the
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
camera'. On the day after the battle (8 April), the entry notes with relief that the
filmmakers can use their large camera again (the normal equipment for mise-
en-scene) because the danger is past (Ivens, [1938] 1969, 160-164).
In short, mise-en-scene had become the dominant mode in Ivens's hybrid
form of documentary. Though he assured an interviewer for The Herald-Trib-
une that the film included 'no staging', it is clear that he meant outright
fabrication of events through scripting and actors, rather than the border
regions between fiction and non-interventionist 'spontaneous' shooting that
comprised the bulk of his work on this project (Barnes, 1939). As he himself
described this mode in a pencil note during the filming, it is 'halfway between
Hollywood and newsreel'.
The reader will already have observed the similarities between the
Guomindang style of mise-en-scene, with its ceremonial stiffness and
self-consciousness, and the mode I have defined as the 'newsreel' mode.
236 I Nevertheless, there are several sequences that stand out by themselves as
corresponding precisely to this mode as it appeared in Spanish Earth, a high-
er proportion, not surprisingly, than in the Spanish film. The Guomindang's
reliance on public ceremony and the trappings of power for their legitima-
cy is reflected in three major such sequences in the film: a public ceremo-
ny commemorating the sacrifice of the unknown soldier, featuring youthful
orators, addresses by literary and military dignitaries and mass pageantry;
the aforementioned street rally in Xi'an, a scene that occupies more atten-
tion in the film with its processions and chorus lines than Ivens implies in
Camera and which drew the note at the rough-cut stage, 'danger of repeti-
tion' (Ivens, outline, 15 December 1939, JIA); and the final torchlight demon-
stration to celebrate Tai'erzhuang. The mode is discernible elsewhere in the
film in various other processions and troop parades, in arrivals of officials at
meetings of various sorts (a favourite cliche of the newsreel companies), and
in an arms-display procession as competent and uninspired as any tank-pa-
rade in film history. Much of this material recapitulates the shot/counter-
shot structures of performers and spectators as they are used in Triumph of
the Will and the 'rally' sequence of Spanish Earth. Since Ivens did not have
synchronous sound recording equipment, the 'newsreel' sequences struc-
tured around oratory were all post-dubbed.22
Three additional modes make a limited appearance in 400 Million. Absent
in Spanish Earth, the 'compilation' mode is conspicuously important in the
following film. Several sequences, most importantly the initial synthetic bom-
bardment sequence, rely extensively on newsreel library shots. The filmmakers
undoubtedly found this necessary because they had managed to film only the
Quangdong bombardment, yet the theme of civilian bombardment was fun-
damental to anti-Japanese propaganda. Ivens (1969, 209) himself mentions
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
that he uses a famous newsreel shot of a baby in the middle of a bombed rail-
way station in this sequence." Some reviewers complained about the recourse
to compilation: one recognised that 'a few thriller shots from the newsreels
have been cut into the continuity', adding that 'The March of Time did a better
job of showing the China that Japan decided to crush', and that 'the newsreels
have been able to show more of the war' (Winsten, 1939); a second said that
the shots of the bombardment of Shanghai and of the decimation of Tai'er-
zhuang were 'not unfamiliar to those who stay to see the newsreels' (Barnes,
1939b), a sentiment echoed by two others (Variety 1939; Cameron, 1939); a
final one protested the 'overenthusiasm for old newsreel shots' (Time 1939).
The first of these is the most perceptive. The word 'thriller' accurately reflects
the use to which Ivens put most of the stock shots, the heightening of the
intensity of certain 'action' scenes, risking both the danger of overkill that he
had carefully avoided in Spanish Earth, and, at the other end of the spectrum,
the danger of not being able to beat the newsreels at their own game. The edi- | 237
tors blended the borrowed shots seamlessly into the continuity, as the same
critic mentioned, so that the compilation material does not stand apart as a
discrete mode as it had in, say, Borinage, Nieuwe Gronden, and in the Frontier
production People of the Cumberland (Elia Kazan, Jay Leyda [as Eugene Hill],
Sidney Meyers [as Robert Stebbins], and Bill Watts, 1937, 18), where the visible
juxtaposition of actuality and archival shots created such dialectics as here/
elsewhere, then/now, and workers/bosses. The only explicit articulations of
the compilation made in 400 Million are the use of a stock shot of Sun Yixian
from the days of the founding of the Chinese republic, a shot that functions
within the historical exposition within the film, and a few minor ones in the
chronology of Japanese aggression, including the one of Hirohito on horse-
back that appeared in every film of the period. Otherwise, the archival material
is imperceptible within the overall texture of the film, undoubtedly because
that texture is complex and hybrid in itself. However, the practice of welding
archival shots into a fluid exposition was profitable training for both Ivens and
Van Dongen, who would be employed for much of the imminent war as direc-
tor and editor for American compilation propaganda films.
Note must also be made of a fifth mode - animation - that had been visible
in Ivens's work since the beginning, albeit on a minor scale, for example the
diagrams and maps recounting the progress of the dikes in Nieuwe Gronden.
On two significant occasions, animated maps carry the diegetic function of
40o Million, presumably filling lacunae in the available footage. One illustrates
the chronology of Japanese aggression in the Far East and the other demon-
strates the tactics of guerilla warfare over a map of China. These sequences
anticipate a basic method of the wartime films, as does some similar material
in China Strikes Back, though the work appears somewhat less dramatic than
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
the later animations by the Capra group, who, after all, would have the Disney
studios at their command.
Finally, a component discussed previously because of its subordinate pres-
ence in Spanish Earth here deserves separate but brief comment - landscape.
At a few points this particular mode or sensibility is given the diegetic func-
tion, or at least a significant role in it, with effective results. Early in the film,
lyrical visual meditations on huge funerary monuments serve as the ground
for the commentary's homage to Chinese history and culture, and an equal-
ly suggestive evocation of a dust storm functions in similar symbolic terms
as the commentator describes the ravaging of modern China. The undoubted
inspiration of such passages may be the fact that the censors did not interfere
with mere landscape cinematography, but it seems that the new landscape
struck a responsive chord in Ivens the erstwhile and future lyricist as well:
238 I Here the green foothills, the villages, and the trees don't seem very differ-
ent from other places. It is the same grass, the same telephone poles that
everyone knows. But still the sum of all these things is different. It is this
unexpected something that makes the landscape Chinese. Something
unexpected about a heavy stone or a tree bending in a strange direction.
Or a curious combination of colours. I lean out of the window and soak
myself in it. (Ivens, [1938] 1969, 173)
Despite this clear anticipation of the stunning natural beauty of Histoire 50
years later, not all spectators were impressed by the landscape components.
One reviewer (Lorentz, 1939) complained of the irrelevance of the landscape
digressions and another (Nugent, 1939) objected to the symbolic exposition
that the filmmakers imposed upon them. Later in the film, the landscape
articulations seem less distinct as a mode and more interconnected with the
other modes of the film, that is, less engaged in the 'exotic' code: the hills, riv-
ers, and rice fields are settings for resistance; the same elegant pans as earlier
this time decry the desolation of a social environment by the enemy; and this
time the traditional statuary frowns upon real corpses.
In summary, then, the components of 400 Million's hybrid form are not
radically dissimilar to those used in Spanish Earth, but the proportional rea-
lignment of these components is profound. The heir of both Flaherty and Ver-
tov has been forced to suppress almost entirely the legacy of Vertov. Though
the shooting ratio of seven-to-one might suggest a higher proportion of 'spon-
taneous' material, this is not the case.24 At the front on 13 April, Ivens esti-
mated that up to that point, about 30% of the shooting had been with the
hand-cameras, a figure that can be taken roughly as the proportion of 'sponta-
neous' shooting; this figure is higher than the final proportion for 'spontane-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
ous' material, reflecting front conditions that encouraged more 'spontaneous'
cinematography than normal.
Furthermore, this time, the filmmakers were less successful than with
Spanish Earth in uniting these disparate cinematographic modes in a fluid
narrative and expository continuity. Amid the praise for the film, which was
not lacking, were observations, mostly 'commiserative not critical', as one
critic put it, that the film was 'superficial and gap-toothed', 'episodic', 'sketchy
and unresolved', 'less fluent' in its narrative than the previous film', somewhat
diffuse and episodic', and lacking in 'unity' (Nugent, 1939)." Spanish Earth
had achieved its compelling structural impact through the simple narrative
momentum of its component parts and their ensemble; this had been rein-
forced by the simplicity of its major expository proposition, the link between
village and war effort, itself given narrative dimensions through both the
Julian story and the symbolic role of the road. 400 Million lacks such strong
structural principles, narrative or otherwise. The only purely narrative mate- | 239
rial was the climactic battle sequence that lacked a real battle, and scattered
individual scenes.
In addition, the geographical reference must have been so bewildering to
lay spectators as to be unintelligible (this factor has ideological dimensions
that will be analysed shortly); one consequence of this is that the landscape
does not serve as a unifying setting as the simple coordinates of village-road-
river-bridge did in the Spanish film. Finally, a baffling array of information is
transmitted, both visually and verbally: cultural and political history, infor-
mation about modernisation that covers road building and education, and
both conventional and guerilla defence. Yet, since Ivens was unwilling to let
the commentary bear the full weight of this informative function and since
the visuals themselves cannot support it, the film sags under the weight of
its encyclopedic mission. The critics were quite perceptive of these structur-
al problems, perhaps because they had all seen many more documentaries
between the release of the two films. Variety (1939) expressed it in terms of
product classification - the film was an unprecedented mixture of marketing
categories, 'newsreel, travelog, and educational'. The New York Times's critic
put it more sympathetically: 'Had he simplified his story, admitted the impos-
sibility of saying everything and trying to show everything, Mr. Ivens para-
doxically might have said and shown a great deal more than The 400 Million'
(Nugent, 1939).
Yet such reviews told Ivens nothing he did not already know. His innu-
merable plans for personal stories as a focus for the film had been designed
to get around just these problems. Van Dongen struggled valiantly to solve
them as well, but the material resisted her ever-increasing skills. The mise-
en-scene sequences, particularly the more Ivensian ones, display the same
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
graceful classical continuity that characterised those parts of the previous
film. The Guomindang mise-en-scene did not materialise quite so gracefully
on the screen, though the editing is functional throughout and occasionally
inspired. Frequently, quite disparate images are linked successfully through
some kinetic or graphic principle discovered by Van Dongen in the rushes: for
example, a shot of running children is matched with a procession of youths
through a directional echo. The same principle smoothly effects several other
transitions in the absence of Ivens's concise bridging shots of Spanish Earth.
Yet the most accomplished editor could not ease the radical and jarring shifts
in action, geography, and tone that the outline seemed to require, and the nar-
rative impulse that might have compensated was not present.
As for the soundtrack for 400 Million, this was undertaken with the enterpris-
ing spirit of Ivens's and Van Dongen's work since Philips-Radio. On this occa-
240 I sion, they undoubtedly sensed that a particularly effective soundtrack might
in some way compensate for the disappointment they felt in the images. The
soundtrack that resulted was unusually complicated for the period and includ-
ed from four to five tracks, of which two alone were sound-effects tracks, and
many different voices on the commentary track beyond that of the commen-
tator. Van Dongen innovated a recording system based on colour-coded re-re-
cording logs for the purpose.
The writing of the commentary was in itself complicated. Ivens was still
resisting the non-stop, voice-of-God tradition of the newsreels, though some
tactical retreats had to be made, among which was the increase (more than
doubling of the Spanish Earth ratio) of the proportional running time of the
commentary to 43%. Dudley Nichols's overlong and redundant text had to
be pared down to even this length, a reduction of about one-half, as well as
drastically revised in consultation with Hemingway and Maddow. A tactful let-
ter from Ivens to Nichols gallantly accepted responsibility for the initial fail-
ure, but Ivens was clearly frustrated by the scriptwriter's cancellation of his
on-location collaboration and at not having had a writer in China despite the
conviction that this was now indispensable. Among the deletions was some
political analysis such as several detailed references to European fascism.26
The final version of the text, as Ivens admits, is much more 'descriptive
and explanatory' than the commentary for Spanish Earth, however, it also
retains the broad range of interpretive functions that Hemingway's text had
assumed (Ivens, 1969, 180). Among these, Nichols's original tendency to
provide a symbolic gloss for the images is preserved, for example focusing
on landscape tropes in the images, for example, the superimposition of the
remark, 'China is robbed', over an image of a bare tree buffeted in the wind. At
the same time, important additions were made, most significantly heighten-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
ing the commentary's personal component. For example, the Li Bo episode is
fleshed out and another brief encounter with a dazed refugee wounded by the
Japanese is amplified by his personal point of view (the 'grenade' that wound-
ed him becomes 'a thing with a tail shaped like a fish'). Most substantially, the
filmmakers sharpened and personalised the character of Sergeant Wang, the
internal narrator for the Tai'erzhuang episode. In the first Nichols version, he
had been merely 'one of the ten thousand who marched on Tai'erzhuang', but
in the final version, he not only has a name, but has become a southerner who
comments on the different landscape and agriculture of the northern battle
region and inflects the script with his point of view. 'Our flag was on the wall
again - Tai'erzhuang was ours', became 'I saw the flag on the walls - we had
taken back Tai'erzhuang'.
Nevertheless, these additions could not compensate for the loss of the
quality of personal eyewitness testimony Hemingway had achieved in the pre-
vious film. Ivens himself might have injected that quality into the film; but, if I 241
this occurred to him, he did not depart from his habitual avoidance of appear-
ing in his own work despite the numerous precedents for this in the documen-
tary movement as a whole.27 As for the narrator's voice, March's conscientious
delivery, praised dutifully by every reviewer, perhaps made up in star quali-
ty for the lack of personal elements. In short, Nichols and March may have
understood the importance Ivens was attaching to the subjectivity of the com-
mentary when he provided a note explaining his conception, but they were
powerless to comply: 'You must trust him from the first word he says. You like
him. He is asking Goya questions' (Ivens, pencil note on 'Sound picture out-
line', 20 December 1938, JIA).
An experiment in Spanish Earth expanded in 400 Million was that film's
multiplicity of voices within the text. Sergeant Wang, though still somewhat
wooden in his final effect as a character, represents an important stage in a
gradual proliferation of internal narrators in comparable experiments in doc-
umentary films. He and Spanish Earth's Julian were ancestors of a tribe that
would become quite visible in the forties, a period in which such challenges
to conventional narrators were frequent and imaginative even in mainstream
documentary. In 400 Million, in addition to the Sergeant Wang narrative, there
are a number of shorter scenes where the commentator likewise assumes
dramatic voices, a dialogue between artillery soldiers finding their range, for
example, or the instructions of a guerilla officer. On another occasion, more
obtrusively, actors' voices create a soundtrack dramatisation of an enemy gen-
eral and a radio announcer, soon a racist cliche of wartime filmmaking: over
images of Japanese coastal shelling, the general's voice enunciates the enemy
strategy, 'If the Chinese cowards resist, we will bomb their cities', and the oily-
voiced announcer replies in his broadly caricatured accent ('very sweet', Ivens
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
recommended in a note on the decoupage), 'Good evening friends in Ameri-
ca. Today in Nanjing, the Chinese women welcomed our Japanese army with
flowers'.
The effect is heavy irony, for the 'flowers' in question are visualised as artil-
lery explosions. The virtue of discretion was perhaps another lesson of Spanish
Earth that would be reconsidered the following year, but it was not entirely
forgotten. An additional such sequence, even more rhetorical, cut from the
original Nichols version, called for a Japanese general's gold-braided sleeve
jabbing at a map of Tai'erzhuang, and a voice, intercut with the drone of
bombers, hysterically demanding vengeance for the Japanese setback in such
terms as
More terror! (drone, full volume)
Kill a thousand at a time! (drone)
242 I What did we learn from Spain?
From Italy!
From Germany!
Destroy Democracy! (drone)
Such devices may have been developed in response to the perception after a
preliminary projection for Hellman and Shumlin that the producers, though
'warm and polite', had been expecting 'more excitement and plot action'
(Ivens, letter to Nichols, 27 February 1939, JIA).
Less dramatised voices in greater numbers appear less jarringly within
several 'newsreel' sequences as vocal coefficient for silently filmed public ora-
tory. The long central sequence about united resistance in modern China has
as many as eighteen individual dubbed voices accompanying figures as they
appear on the screen, including those of the Jiangs and the anonymous Zhou
Enlai. Several are paraphrased in English by the commentator, most memora-
bly the celebrated poet-scholar Guo Moruo at the ceremony in honour of the
unknown soldier whose remark is relayed: 'In the old days people said, "Do
not use good iron for nails or good sons for soldiers". In these times the best
sons become soldiers'.
The multiple textures of the voice-tracks may have contributed to the
widespread reaction that the film was sketchy or episodic. Lorentz ([19391
1975, 165), for one, laid the blame squarely on the commentary. In the eyes of
this authority on documentary coherence, the commentary was 'confusing',
and 'meander[ed]' from 'newsreel interpretation to symbolism to first person
narration', and thus 'did not have a concise and straight design'. A more accu-
rate and supportive assessment would be that the voice-tracks did not solve
the film's basic structural problem, but did constitute nonetheless a valiant
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
and partly successful endeavour to heighten visually weak portions of the film
and to enrich in general its sound-image relationships.
For the score, Ivens turned to his old friend and collaborator, Hanns
Eisler, then a political refugee in the US and an ideal candidate to write an
anti-fascist score. Ivens was not alone in his high regard for his friend's work.
Eisler would soon be immersed in Rockefeller-funded 'theoretical and prac-
tical investigations' in the field of film music.28 However, Eisler's research
and his composing practice did not, brilliant as they were, represent future
trends at least as far as documentary was concerned. The era when independ-
ent musicians were commissioned to compose scores for documentary films
and were engaged in theoretical debates about the relationship of music and
image were numbered, at least in the US.29 Musical strategies using concrete
sound and the collage of reworked popular sources, pioneered by Plow, or
scores based on folk themes, would gain the upper hand among more creative
documentaries during the 20 years before the arrival of direct cinema - and I 243
would even buoy up several of Ivens's lyrical essay films thereafter. The pres-
tige non-objective scores approved of by Eisler's co-author and fellow refugee
Theodor Adorno30 would cede to a progressive minority of films during this
period building on the example of Plow, of which the Jennings's sound-collag-
es are the most famous. The non-objective score simply did not correspond to
the other formal and cultural goals of the Popular Front period.
Ivens and Eisler agreed that the function of music should be 'strength-
ened' (verstdrken), and that the combination of Western and Chinese musi-
cal elements seemed an intriguing possibility for 400 Million (Wegner, 1965,
89).31 As Eisler put it, Ivens had a 'progressive and cooperative attitude' and
their working relationship was indeed so close that several sequences were cut
to Eisler's music, for example the first bombardment sequence and the dust-
storm sequence; on the other hand, the sequence with the children required
that the music be cut to fit it. Eisler employed a method in his composition
that he claimed he had used only once before:
After a careful analysis of picture details, a musical form was suggested
which gave me the opportunity to change the character of the music
without interrupting its flow and logic: the 'theme and variation' form, a
method similar in principle to that used by Thomson and Aaron Copland
in their scores of the same period. (Eisler, 1947, 8)
For Eisler this method was diametrically opposed to the predominant Holly-
wood method, the 'leitmotif' method (which he professed to 'detest'), and by
which he meant the system that assigns individual characters or themes a dis-
tinctive musical 'motif' layered mechanically over their appearances (Eisler,
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
1947, 10, 18). In documentary, this method became extremely popular during
the war; in the Capra series, for example, scenes dealing with religion would
be accompanied by 'religious music', whereas references to France would
usually get an echo of 'The Marseillaise' (Bohn, 1968, 18o).32 For 400 Million,
Eisler's 'theme and variations' method meant that a single theme and its var-
iations would 'bring together' sequences dispersed throughout the film with
different subjects but with comparable tonal qualities (Ivens, 'List of Sequenc-
es for Music', typescript, 8 January 1939, JIA);33 Eisler (1947, 35) describes this
method, also pejoratively, wherein 'waterfalls rustle and sheep bleat' in Com-
posing for the Films. There are blunt programmatic tendencies in the scores
for both Man of Aran and Triumph of the Will. For 400 Million, Ivens suggested
that the dust-storm music be thin, shrill, without nuances and rendered with
the Chinese instrument, the pipa; 'reconstruction' music was to be energetic,
not so shrill, and lyrical in the middle; 'refugee' music was to be driving and
244 I sad, 'thin at the end', yet 'warm'. Eisler followed the suggestions more or less
closely, though many passages, due to their very 'non-objectivity' in interac-
tion with the commentary, are open to a 'programmatic' reading, particular-
ly some of the battle music and the 'dust-storm' theme. In the editing of the
music, several of the tactics anticipated in Spanish Earth were applied even
more systematically, for example the isolation of a single instrument, violin
at one point, to make it stand out as an exceptional element,34 the play with
silence and the withholding or anticipation of the music, modulations of tem-
po (Ivens, handwritten note, 20 December 1938, JIA), and the 'dovetailing' of
music and concrete sound similar to that attempted in the previous film, in
this case the dissolve of sound effects into music.
The problem of potential 'misreading' of non-objective elements of the
score is symptomatic of Eisler's and other 'intellectual' approaches to film
music of the period. The mainstream audiences aimed at, in keeping with
Popular Front policy, would seldom have the training to listen to such ele-
ments according to conventional musical codes, that is, either as unobtru-
sive 'background' (in fact this means 'not hearing') or programmatically.
Eventually such music, atonal, 'cold', and 'intellectual' acquired codes of
its own for the mainstream audience, not unrelated to the stigma of 'seri-
ous' or 'educational' documentary already acquired by this time; postwar
generations of schoolchildren would learn to associate such music with this
stigma.35 It is undoubtedly for this reason that alternative approaches, such
as Jennings', began to seem fresher and more promising during the forties
- those that extended, reworked, or 'alienated'36 already accessible musi-
cal codes. Lorentz's use of jazz in Fight for Life fits into the first or second
of these categories, Thomson's devastating use of the hymn tune over The
River's (Lorentz, 1938, USA, 31) sharecropping scene into the last - as did,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
32. The 400 Million (1939): Dubbed or
paraphrased voices heighten the personal
drama, e.g. poet-scholar Guo Moruo
declaiming 'In the old days people said,
"Do not use good iron for nails or good
sons for soldiers". In these times the best
sons become soldiers'. DVD frame capture.
© CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
II
of course, Vertov's pioneering 'alienation' of liturgical and Czarist patriotic
music in Enthusiasm.
The greater success of the Chinese-inspired elements in the score for 400 245
Million must also be seen in this light. These elements, a plaintive, unadorned
vocal piece over the episode of the refugee's grenade wound, and the pipa
solo over the dust-storm sequence, were particularly striking because they
appealed to and extended already accessible codes, particularly the code of the
'exotic'. Admittedly, the musical codes denoting the mysterious (and treacher-
ous) Orient were among most ignominious in American film culture: Capra's
composers, for example, predictably attached the same menacing 'Oriental'
music to virtually every reference to Japan in the Why We Fight series. In 400
Million, however, the Chinese musical elements derive also from 'travelogue'
codes, wherein authentic indigenous music functions as part of the documen-
tary text, as it does in The Song of Ceylon (Wright, 1935, UK, 38) and most of the
films on the Spanish Civil War. These elements are introduced with discretion
and restraint (no gongs!), held for appropriate durations, and juxtaposed with
other audio-visual elements in non-cliched relationships. Therefore, they ulti-
mately subvert and dignify the 'exotic' codes that they initially propose. Eis-
ler's score, in sum, though it was considered worthy of a separate rave review
in The New Masses by the music critic (Sebastian, 1939), was an achievement
whose success was as mixed as that of the film as a whole.
As for the sound-effects track, the configuration is even more elaborate
than in Spanish Earth, with the tendency throughout towards heightened nat-
uralism. Careful studio synthesis and the additional track unobtrusively sup-
port the codes of illusion with planes that drone, crowds that cheer, and shells
that explode. The classical repertory of synthetic sounds pioneered by Ivens
and Van Dongen in the early thirties and as late as Spanish Earth is now fully
established (Rotha, 1952, 167).
The late release of 400 Million in March 1939, a point when the basic con-
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
tours of the war less than six months away were clear enough, permitted the
filmmakers an explicitness in their geopolitical analysis that the earlier Pop-
ular Front films had not ventured. Compared to the evasiveness of the earlier
films, Nichols's preface does indeed seem bold - it is the first major film to use
the vocabulary and themes of the next six years, the terms of 'democracy' vs.
fascism and the Axis:
The war in the Far East is no isolated conflict between China and Japan.
[...] On one side, the Japanese military machine, ally of the Rome-Berlin
axis, brutal and merciless. On the other side, just as in Europe, the peace-
ful masses of humanity - victims of fascist attack.
Europe and Asia have become the western and eastern front of the
same assault on democracy.
246 I Ivens's editorial juxtaposition of Nazi planes and Italian dead in Spanish Earth
had been one of the first cinematic denunciations of the Rome-Berlin axis: his
condemnation of a Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis the following year was even more
prophetic and clear.
All the same, the film is characterised by many of the same elisions, ten-
sions, and ambiguities as in earlier films, primarily concerning the inter-
nal political situation in China and the American stakes in the war. Much of
this can be traced to the filmmakers' initial conception of their audience as
mainstream uncommitted Americans who might be persuaded to support an
anti-Japanese embargo and contribute to the Chinese defence. However, by
the spring of 1939 these specific goals were less urgent, having already been
largely achieved: by June 1938, 84% of the American public were now opposed
to continued export of military materials to Japan; that December saw the
finalisation of a major US loan to China; by the time of the film's release, the
movement for sanctions was overwhelming, with Roosevelt endeavouring to
do away with legislative hindrances to direct support for the Allies and moving
towards the abrogation of the US commercial treaty with Japan in July (Dallek,
1979, 194). The filmmakers even decided that it was no longer necessary to
retain the word 'quarantine' in the commentary, with its implicit invocation
of Roosevelt to legitimise the sanctions campaign.
However, the original 1937 Popular Front orientation can be seen in many
other emphases of the film. One such emphasis is the theme of China's cultur-
al heritage, first mentioned in the preface: 'On one side - China - which has
enriched the world for 4000 years with its treasures of art and wisdom. [...] Chi-
na was forced into this war to protect its national independence, its freedom
and its precious culture'. A theme that does not have an equivalent in Span-
ish Earth except for one perfunctory scene, the idea of cultural preservation
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
becomes prominent in 40o Million. This was perhaps felt to be a safe emphasis
for liberal American audiences, nervous about the Communists and embar-
rassed by the Guomindang - or in case the plight of 'one-fifth of the world's
population' in itself was not enough to justify intervention! The last version of
the commentary even adds to the accent on China's philosophical and artistic
legacy in Nichols's original text, inserting, for example, a reference to ancient
'artists who could paint the wind'.37 This emphasis was undoubtedly due in
part to the censors' greater willingness to let the filmmakers shoot innocuous
cultural monuments than any other subject, the cultural theme thus serving
to mask the film's significant lacunae for both filmmakers and censors. Yet,
despite these considerations, the 'cultural' theme does function structurally
in relation to the other important theme of modernisation. The images often
stress the adaptation of ancient traditions to the challenges of contemporary
society and the war, for example, in the mise-en-scene sequence where ancient
Taiji Movements become a military drill. I 247
The 'cultural theme' must also be seen as part of a system of appeals to the
preconceptions of the American public, a system that underlines the image
of China as the exotic, unknowable 'Other', but at the same time interprets
China in American terms, to imply that American values and way of life are
threatened by the Japanese aggression. The appeals to American terms are
explicit. Sun becomes 'the Washington of their republic'; women college stu-
dents become 'co-eds just like in America'; soldiers even look like 'football
players'. To implicate the American spectator even more in the war, a graphic
scene shows scrap metal being loaded for Japan in San Francisco (though the
suggestion that it may include 'the Ford you sold last year' was dropped from
the final version), and a brief 'newsreel' scene depicts a fundraising parade in
New York, where contributions to the Chinese defence are gathered in a huge
Chinese flag. Above all, the US media image of the Jiangs is perpetuated in
the film, with their westernised aura and their individual charisma accented
at close but respectful range.38 A final appeal, added at the last minute over
the penultimate sequence, the second bombardment scene, makes a direct
appeal to Americans to abandon their neutrality: 'These are not easy things to
look at. But as Americans, we had to see them'.
The spotlight on the Jiangs and the Guomindang in 400 Million is a chief
difference between this film and its influential predecessor China Strikes Back.
This difference was of course largely a matter of circumstances rather than
choice; indeed it is easy to understand the filmmakers' great disappointment
at having to replace their intended images of a people's war and a social revo-
lution by images of ministerial and military councils, political hierarchy, and
shot/countershot sequences of platform orators addressing uniform masses.
As if the images were not enough, the commentary repeatedly reminds the
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
spectator that the country is united under the Generalissimo, or that all mili-
tary responsibility rests on him. The Guomindang propaganda rally in Xi'an,
stiffly organised by the project's censors and reluctantly filmed by Ivens, must
have seemed a painfully symbolic contrast to the dynamic aura of the group
meetings recorded by Dunham in Yanan and included in the earlier film.39
Likewise, instead of the people's guerilla army that Dunham had featured
and that Ivens had wanted to capture even more thoroughly, 400 Million con-
centrated on the Guomindang's conventional army and conventional warfare.
Instead of Dunham's images of soldiers interacting with the peasants, the
beneficiaries of their campaign, the soldiers of the second film operate more
or less in a political void, with their columns of new armored vehicles and
tanks that are not seen in battle and their uniforms that are curiously tidy. The
commentary's assertion that the soldiers know what they are fighting for is
nowhere confirmed in visual terms as similar assertions were in Spanish Earth
248 I and China Strikes Back. To replace the guerilla units that Ivens was prevented
from reaching, mise-en-scene was used with regular units to evoke a guerilla
crossing of the Yellow River and militia fighters being summoned from their
plowing; but such scenes, as effective as they are on their own terms, do not
have the thoroughness, the concrete sense of actuality, nor the ideological
aptness that Ivens had at one time hoped for. Only Ivens's presence at Tai'er-
zhuang, the sole Chinese victory in 1938, permitted him to salvage his military
theme with its images of Chinese confidence and effectiveness, and of Japa-
nese defeat. The only actual combat seen is the successful light arms ambush
of a distant Japanese patrol during the build-up to Tai'erzhuang; the patrol
is seen scattering from the extreme high-angle vantage-point of the Chinese
column that Ivens was accompanying along a mountain trail (shots recycled
50 years later in Histoire). The actual battle itself had to be merely implied in
the images and narrated on the soundtrack. There is undoubtedly an implied
comment on the waging of the war under Jiang's united command in the
manner of the film's presentation of Zhu De (Chu Teh), the commander of the
Eighth Route Army: a brief subtitled stock shot provides a glimpse of the man
and the commentator describes him as 'a general whose headquarters are on
the field of battle', before going on to the continued treatment of the generals
whose headquarters are in Hankou boardrooms.
The overwhelming control of the shooting of the film by the Guomindang
and the obstruction of Ivens's plans for Shanxi shooting obviously dictated a
downplaying of the role of the Communists in the United Front, but the extent
of the invisibility of the Communist partners goes even beyond what can be
accounted for by this. The film demonstrates the same systematic 'self-censor-
ship' as was evidenced in Spanish Earth and the Frontier films. The filmmak-
ers permitted a single explicit reference to the Communists, a mention of the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
'former Red Army' in the 'Military Council' sequence (in which it would also
be possible for a sharp-sighted spectator to pick out a hammer and sickle ban-
ner in the background alongside the Guomindang flag). Otherwise, allusions
are vague and oblique. In the same sequence, a pensive Zhou Enlai is shown
in close-up discussing military strategy, but not identified. At a sequence
devoted to the National People's Council, the Communist representatives are
shown arriving but they are identified only as 'delegates from the northwest',
and guerilla warfare is described as being used especially in the northwest
without further details. Another significant omission is the issue of Soviet
aid - the 2ooo-mile road to the northwest is described as the 'lifeline' of Chi-
na, but the destination of the lifeline is elided. Finally, the text also elides the
political affiliation of Soong Ching-ling, whose relationship to the Commu-
nists was warm (though ultimately ambiguous), but whom Camera describes
as believing in a 'socialist future for her country': she is described simply as a
brave woman typifying the spirit of the nation, a description that, along with 249
the intercutting of her portrait into the lifeless Xi'an political rally, must surely
be read as a vengeful veiled taunt at her archrival younger sister Soong Mei-
ling (Madame Jiang).
33. The 400 Million (1939): strategic
elisions around the political affiliation
of communist ally Soong Ching-ling
(left), described simply as a brave woman
typifying the spirit of the nation. DVD
frame capture. © CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
All of these discreet references constitute a subtext for the specialists in the
audience, the informed spectators who would be able to identify Zhou and
would know Zhu's and Soong's reputations. Ordinary American spectators
however, would not recognise these figures or realise that the 'Special Admin-
istrative District' and 'the northwest' were code words for what had been Sovi-
et China until the formation of the United Front. And it was even less likely
that they would recognise the 'March of the Volunteers' heard in the film, a
film song well known in China for its leftish aura and defiance of Japanese
occupation (and eventually as the National Anthem of the People's Repub-
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
lic) (Stufkens, personal communication, 2014). For initiated spectators, the
intended message of a united China was overridingly, even simplistically
clear. The need for political analysis of the basis of that unity was felt to be
secondary. Ivens's filmic practice at this point of his career is still definitely
shaped by his fear of red-baiting and its possible consequences for theatrical
distribution, and by the Popular Front strategy of consolidating a mainstream
base through appeals to the non-partisan ideals of 'democracy', 'American-
ism', and 'anti-fascism'. It is not surprising that his confident prophecy of
an early draft was omitted from the film's final version despite its seemingly
innocuous vagueness: 'A democratic republic is coming after the war' (Ivens,
400 Million commentary, early draft, JIA).
The image of Chinese unity as presented in 400 Million is much more
monolithic than that in China Strikes Back, where Communist-Guomindang
tensions had been elided only at the last minute in support of the newly estab-
250 I lished United Front, and where the tension is still legible in the structure of
the film and the dichotomy in visual quality between the sections dealing with
the two factions. Ivens, on the other hand, presents the United Front as based
on a popular consensus and a commonality of interest among all Chinese,
minimising regional differences and completely passing over ideological
ones. It is an image of an entire society united under the banner portraits of
Sun and Jiang, a strong visual motif throughout the film. An earlier inclination
at least to acknowledge the tensions within China had been abandoned by the
final version. Ivens's early suggestion to Nichols that the commentator 'must
mention much interior troubles - not yet united' (Ivens, pencil note on undat-
ed final decoupage, 'Tabulation of Shots and Footage', 6, JIA) was not pursued
nor was the even more specific early idea to admit 'difficulties: inertia of gov't
apparatus and pro-Jap elements and Trotskyites' (Ivens, handwritten note, 26
November 1938, JIA). Other references to the varying political elements that
had recently formed the anti-Japanese alliance were retained right until the
next-to-last version of the commentary and were likely even recorded by March
before being dropped: a reference to Guo Moruo's political past as a dissident
in exile, a general comment that 'The idea of resistance has united all prov-
inces, all the different parties of China', and a significant detail added to the
presentation of the Guomindang general Chen Cheng - 'side by side with his
former opponent'. The only hint of previous disunity is an oblique statement
that the founder Sun knew that before his ideas would be accepted among the
people, there would be 'years of quarreling and even civil war'.
This deceptive impression of monolithic unity is bolstered by the film's
structure and geographic reference. Whereas China Strikes Back had clearly set
Shanxi, the Communist province, apart from the rest of China, Ivens elides for
the most part any sense of regional and political-cultural disparity, other than
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
a few commentary references to the wheat-growing north and the rice-growing
south. He effects this elision by moving back and forth between the areas with-
in or adjacent to Shanxi and the rest of China, not only without acknowledg-
ment but as if to imply full geographic integration. For example, the military
council involving the Eighth Route Army is shown and their guerilla tactics
are described: what follows is by implication a dramatisation of these tactics
(which of course Ivens was not permitted to film), the mise-en-scene sequence
depicting farmers leaving fields for militia duty. The fields, however, are rice
fields and the material was apparently filmed near Hankou on the Yangzi
(Yangtze) in central China. The volunteers are shown assembling, and once
again there is a sudden, unacknowledged geographical leap with the recruits
suddenly appearing in similar formation in Xi'an on the edge of Shanxi, then
at drill in the vicinity, and then at manoeuvres back down near Hankou. This
blurring of geographical and consequently political distinctions is typical of
the film as a whole. I 251
The effect is reinforced by the editing between sequences through which
the filmmakers were clearly intent on unifying a film that was scattered and
episodic. The directional and kinetic bonds between sequences are often at
the expense of expository clarity. The most striking example is the already men-
tioned subversive intercutting of the Xi'an demonstration and the encounter
with Soong, in virtual political exile in Hong Kong, an elision of about 1,000
geographical miles and an even greater political distance.
One reviewer's reaction to the film is symptomatic of a further possi-
ble ideological problem with the film: the final victory procession remind-
ed Herman G. Weinberg (1939) of images from Frank Capra's Lost Horizon
(1937, USA, 97), presumably the prologue scenes of frenzied Asiatic mobs
from which Ronald Colman and his little band of whites barely escape.
Indeed it is certainly questionable whether Ivens's images of Guomindang
modernisation and self-reliance are sufficient to offset others of the film's
images that reinforce western visual stereotypes of China, namely the news-
reel-based civilian bombardment sequences at the start and the conclusion
of the film. Weinberg's reaction and the impression of yet another reviewer
(Barnes, 1939b) that it was a film of throngs instead of individuals suggest
that spectators tended to view such images as an extension of the newsreel
conventions of China: suffering hordes and patient starving millions, victim-
ised by warlords, bandits, famines, floods, and earthquakes, sorely in need
of Western colonial intervention, missionaries, and relief. Western specta-
tors had surely been immunised against the newsreel overkill use of such
images and Spanish Earth had recognised this immunisation in avoiding
conventional atrocity images. The throngs of traumatised refugees simply
fit too easily into the established patterns of perceiving China in the West:
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
there was far more pathos in the Li Bo episode with its two solitary figures
searching the ruins and its slow understated pans over other isolated victims
of the battle - a donkey, two ducks, and a small boy, watched over, through
the intervention of the editor, by an angry demon statue. The title of the film
itself, and the expression spoken in the commentary 'one-fifth of humanity',
were also common phrases, if not cliches, in the popular journalism of the
day and had lost their power to impress.
In the balance, despite the overwhelming obstacles that prevented the
realisation of the intended film, despite the filmmakers' perceived need
to Americanise, simplify, and sanitise the Chinese political situation, and
despite the film's ultimately ambiguous stance regarding western precon-
ceptions of China, 400 Million does succeed in taking certain significant
steps forward in terms of the complex political-cultural conjuncture in
which it intervened. Throughout the film, there are sequences, such as the Li
252 I Bo episode, that mediate and interrupt the dominant exposition, sequenc-
es showing resistance in individual and authentic terms to counter 'throng'
cliches, or providing a material analysis of Chinese society to counter past
travelogue and newsreel views. One example is the sequence where shoe
manufacture in the interior cottage industries is shown in close-up detail
and linked in visual terms to the construction of new roads and the war
effort.40 In addition, an anti-colonial text is present in the film, which, while
discreet, is legible all the same. En route to China, Ivens's ([1939] 1969, 145-
149) impressions of Hawaii and Hong Kong heightened his sensitivity to the
colonialist overtones of the Chinese war. Though the articulation of these
overtones in the commentary appears mild ('She is robbed by Japan and by
the western powers without resistance' - the word 'colonial' is deleted from
an earlier version), this must be seen as forthright in its context, considering
the fact that the 'democracies' whose intervention was being solicited were
all major colonialist powers whose concessions in Shanghai had as yet been
unaffected by the Japanese occupation. The appeals for Western support of
the united Chinese defence, visualised in terms of its own self-reliance and
its capacity for victory over the invader through its own power rather than a
Western rescue, must also be seen in this light. All the same, Ivens's sym-
bolic gesture of passing his camera onto the Red Army so that cinematic
self-reliance would also become a part of the defence against Japan, must
ultimately be seen as the most significant anti-colonial statement within, or
rather beyond, the text of 400 Million.
Ivens's evaluation of this film in his letter to Shumlin stressed his work's
continuing ultimate relevance, despite the insurmountable problems he
had encountered. 400 Million seems consistent with this stress only in terms
of its submission to the Popular Front strategy of 'self-censorship' within
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
mainstream anti-fascist alliances. At the same time, 400 Million through its
elisions, structural flaws, subtexts, and overstatements, foregrounds the con-
tradictions of this strategy more than any other Popular Front film. The follow-
ing August, only five months after the film's release, the Nazi-Soviet pact was
to bring those contradictions into even sharper focus.
Meanwhile, the commercial career of the film was a disappointment
to Ivens and the History Today group, though their hopes had not been as
high as with Spanish Earth, almost two years earlier. The overshadowing of
the release by the events taking place in Europe was reflected in the distri-
bution arrangements. Herbert Kline's Crisis, a well-timed chronicle of the
disintegration of Czechoslovakia following Munich, not only appeared the
same week, but secured the prestigious art house where Spanish Earth had
premiered, the Fifty-fifth Street Playhouse, leaving the Ivens film to share the
double bill at the Cameo, the customary ghetto showcase for Soviet and left
films, with an obscure Soviet feature, Bogataya Nevesta (The Country Bride, I 253
Ivan Pyryev, 1937, 98).4 Crisis also got the better of the comparisons that the
reviewers were inevitably prompted to make - even the New Masses review-
er (R.T. 1932) found 400 Million 'not half so brilliant as Crisis', in its con-
tent-oriented coverage.
Despite a top-price Hollywood premiere the same month, followed by a
party at Miriam Hopkins's,42 Ivens seemed further than ever from his goal
of mass distribution. Variety reported that the audience was composed pri-
marily of Chinese and sympathisers. The New York showplace soon shifted
downtown to be closer to this audience (to the small rooftop Roosevelt at Sec-
ond Avenue and Houston). At the Los Angeles press conference, Ivens brave-
ly repeated his conviction that the documentary should be a part of regular
theatre fare (Motion Picture Herald 1939), and right after the outbreak of war
in Europe he optimistically wrote that he had reached two million specta-
tors (Stufkens, 2008, 250). But by this time, it was already clear that the film's
most important distribution was on the non-theatrical circuit, as had usually
been the case with Frontier and other political films for the previous decade.
Marginal theatrical distribution prevailed in Europe also, because of censor
problems that had been surprisingly absent in the US. In France, G.L. George
prepared a French version for an encouraging July premiere through Cind-Lib-
ertd, but censors delayed the release there as well as in London until after the
outbreak of war, at which point the Pacific arena held little interest for audi-
ences faced with more pressing preoccupations closer to home.43
Though it had been the extraordinary topicality of Spanish Earth and Chi-
na Strikes Back that had apparently guaranteed their theatrical splash, this
logic now appeared vulnerable; it now seemed that semi-journalistic topical-
ity was an inadequate means of securing reliable commercial distribution for
ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY DOCUMENTARY
independent filmmakers, simply because the world situation was capable
of changing so rapidly that even newsreels could scarcely keep apace, not to
mention documentaries. It was a lesson that few political filmmakers realised
or could afford to realise throughout the ensuing war when the principle of
topicality would continuously guarantee a prominent place for documenta-
ries on Allied theatre screens.
254 I
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
-~ WAVLER N&STM
34. OurRussian Front (1941): first-run lobby card of smiling partisans,
playing up Oscar-winning narrator rather than the co-directors. original
in colour.
CHAPTER4
Projects of the Forties
Good art needs time but also haste.
-Joris Ivens,1942
All of Ivens's compromises on The 400 Million (1939, USA, 53) had been una- | 257
vailing - he had not made the film he had wanted to make on the subject he
wished to address and the film he had made had failed to reach the right audi-
ence at the right moment. His despair is masked by the cheerful tone describ-
ing the ending of the film in Camera (Ivens, 1969, 180-183). Next time, he wrote
his producer, he would work under conditions that must have seemed ideal:
the 'money sure', 'preparation on the spot', a collective including a writer and
a producer with a stepped-up function, in a 'non-war country', the opportunity
all the while to uphold 'discipline and serving of Cause No. 1', and, perhaps
most importantly, the opportunity to prove his still untested conviction that
the 'story' form was the future of the documentary (Ivens, draft letter to Shum-
lin, n.d. [c. winter 1938-1939], JIA).
Joris Ivens's next film, Power and the Land (1940, USA, 33), miraculously,
would fulfil all of these conditions, and one more, no less significant in his
opinion - Power would provide him with an opportunity to reach one of the
widest audiences of his entire career, finally 'to break into commercial distri-
bution'. The film itself, an anomalous island of peaceful Ohio sunshine in the
American decade of Ivens's career devoted almost entirely to war, attracted
less critical attention than other Ivens's films at the moment of its release, and
since then it has attracted only sporadic attention from film historians. Nev-
ertheless, Jean Benoit-Lvy (1946, 92), the French documentarist who saw the
film only after the War, called it 'one of Ivens's finest works', and R.M. Barsam
(1973, 88, 99), an American historian of documentary, has called it '[Ivens] at
his best', a combination of 'poetry, politics and photography into a statement
of uncommon beauty and strength', 'a wonderfully evocative piece of Ameri-
cana', 'a classic film document that is too often overlooked'.
Powerwas also a project that would bring Ivens's career into contact for the
35. Action Stations (1942): Ivens on board the Port Arthur off Halifax.
Cinematographer Osmond Borradaile lower left, corvette captain/interior
decorator/Nazi-chaser in sunglasses in background. Production still,
courtesy coll. EFJI, Nijmegen © EFJI, Nijmegen.
first and only time with his eminent American contemporary, Pare Lorentz,
who was to function - creatively and supportively - along with his Washing-
ton official sponsors, in the producer role that Ivens felt Shumlin had mis-
handled. Unburdened with fundraising and distribution, free to pursue the
unrealised ambitions of half a decade, Ivens's Power must be seen as a labora-
tory in which his ideas could be tested as the Spanish and Chinese theatres of
war had not permitted. Yet as a commissioned film, Powerwould involve Ivens
in ideological contradictions of the sort that he had not faced since Philips-Ra-
dio (1931, Netherlands, 36) - despite the fact that New Deal propaganda was
much more consistent with the current vision of 'Cause No. 1' than industrial
publicity had been almost ten years earlier.
Two factors dominated the context of the American left documentary
movement as it moved into the new decade. One was overtly political. The
Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 instigated a turnabout in the Communist Par-
ty line on the European war, and this led in turn to considerable disarray in the
American left milieu. A virtual blackout by American left filmmakers on the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
international situation resulted immediately and lasted right up until the inva-
sion of the USSR in the summer of 1941. The CPUSA came out in opposition
to conscription, and to any participation in the war, including the Lend-Lease
agreements and all aid to Britain. Roosevelt, the erstwhile honorary member
of the American Writers' Congress of 1937, where Ivens and Hemingway had
first presented The Spanish Earth (1937, USA, 53), was now vilified for attempt-
ing to enmesh the US in an 'imperialist' war. When Lights Out in Europe (USA,
66), a documentary on the early phases of the war by Kline and Hammid, final-
ly appeared in April 1940, it received confused and hostile notices in the leftist
press (New Masses 1940). Ivens, of course, did not join the stream of intellectu-
als defecting from the left, among them some of his former co-workers such as
Archibald MacLeish,' and if he experienced any discomfiture as a result of the
policy reversal, he never expressed it, even during the occupation of the Neth-
erlands in May 1940. This moment of abrupt turnabout, of renunciation even,
was becoming a pattern that would span Ivens's entire career, and the art- | 259
ist-activist who had thrived through the radical shift from the avant-garde to
militant internationalism and then to the Popular Front liberal mainstream,
must have taken the shift to pacifist neutrality, bolstered by party unanimity,
in stride. Although Power was initiated just before the Pact, Ivens's projects
during the two years between the Hitler-Stalin agreement and its inevitable
blitzkrieg repudiation by Hitler must nonetheless be seen in the light of this
extraordinary meander of political history.
The other determining factor was primarily economic. The abrupt aboli-
tion of US national public sponsorship for documentary soon after the Power
wrap in the late spring of 1940 did not sound the death knell of the American
social documentary, but rather it left the field to the foundation and corporate
sponsors. The Rockefeller Foundation's early involvement in the documenta-
ry movement has already been noted. Its lead was followed by the Carnegie
Corporation, which provided a grant for The City (Willard Van Dyke and Ralph
Steiner, 1939, 43), the essay on urban planning by ex-WFPL members that had
been the hit of the World's Fair. But before we attend to Ivens's misadventure
with foundation funding for his documentary work, we must follow him along
the road to Ohio and examine Power.
The formidable commercial and critical success of ThePlow ThatBroke the
Plains (Lorentz, 1936, 25) and The River (Lorentz, 1938, 31) had led to the cre-
ation of the US Film Service in September 1938 with the newly famous Lorentz
enshrined as its director. The Film Service was mandated to
coordinate the activities of the several departments and agencies which
relate to the production or distribution of motion picture films, and to
produce films in conjunction with other Federal agencies at the direction
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
and with the approval of the Executive Director of the National Emergen-
cy Council. (Roosevelt, letter to Agriculture Secretary Wallace, quoted in
Snyder, 1968, 205)
Two agencies within the Department of Agriculture were the first to contract
Lorentz and the Service for specific film enterprises: the Rural Electrification
Administration (REA), which proposed Power in early 1939, and the Agricul-
tural Adjustment Administration, which proposed later that same spring a
three-reeler dramatising their agricultural conservation programme, a project
that became Flaherty's The Land (1942, 43) and was undertaken that autumn
at the same time as Power.
The REA project was initiated by Arch Mersey and Marion Ramsey in the
following terms:
260 Problem: Our problem can be posed in the following manner: The REA
program delivers a supply of cheap and abundant energy to the farm that
the farmer is technically, physically, and psychologically unable to utilize
in a manner that will greatly improve his standard of living.
We believe an imaginatively produced, emotionally affecting film por-
trayal of the possibilities that are even now coming true is, if widely dis-
tributed, ideally suited to the job of making Americans conscious of the
challenge and opportunity. The River and Face ofBritain do the job as we
want to see it done again - in terms of the electrification of agriculture, a
bulwark of democracy. (letter fragment, quoted in Snyder, 1968, 121)
The parallels to Ivens's own conception of documentary during this period are
striking: 'emotionally affecting', 'widely distributed', and even the concluding
invocation of 'democracy', a key word of the Popular Front as well as of the
domestic and foreign policy of the New Deal. The eagerness with which Ivens
became involved is not surprising.
The sponsoring agencies both expected that Lorentz himself would be
directing the two films, delivering, they undoubtedly hoped, prestigious
sequels to the previous films. Lorentz had no such intention, fully immersed
simultaneously in two ongoing projects, Ecce Homo (1939), and Fight for Life
(1940, 39). Instead, Lorentz used his new authority as Film Service director to
hire the two most prestigious documentarists in the US (aside from himself)
to direct two quintessentially American projects under his supervision, one,
an expatriate Dutchman, and the other an American who had worked only in
exile (Flaherty).
Ivens received Lorentz's invitation shortly after the premiere of 400 Mil-
lion while he was preparing to leave for a July visit to Europe to supervise the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
French release of the film. Despite the mixed success of the Chinese film, he
was at the peak of his prestige in the US. Reviewers who had formerly referred
to him as a Dutch filmmaker now assumed readers' familiarity with his name
and with Spanish Earth. In June he had been elected president of the Associa-
tion of American Documentary Film Producers, a body that included virtual-
ly every documentarist working in the US (including and even dominated by
those on the left, of course).2 The Association's chief function, other than gen-
eral promotion and information, was the coordination of the hugely success-
ful fall offensive in documentary at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
Ivens accepted Lorentz's offer and in June undertook preliminary work on
the film treatment while still in Hollywood. Ivens's collaborators at this point
were Edwin Locke, a veteran of Roy Stryker's famous documentary photogra-
phy unit of the Farm Services Administration, hired by Lorentz as a writer, and
Charles Walker, a researcher who had already begun the script outline in May
prior to Ivens's involvement, based on REA pamphlets, documentation, stills, 261
and Lorentz's original idea-outline. This idea, worked out with and approved
by the REA, called for a chronology of two days on a typical farm, one with-
out electricity, which would show the farm family members hard at work with
old-fashioned tools, and the second day with electricity, showing how power
and new appliances make farm work feasible. This chronological framework
was reportedly based on an old silent film Dusk to Dawn (Vidor, 1922, USA, 60)
(Snyder, 1968, 123). Ivens did not hesitate to accept enthusiastically this sche-
ma, which bore resemblance in any case to his own ideas and to the social-
ist realist pattern he had used in Pesn o geroyakh (Komsomol, 1933, USSR, 50).
Upon his return from Europe, he spent the summer refining the idea and par-
ticipating with Locke and Walker in the choice of the farm. One refinement
of the basic conception that came from Ivens was the expansion of an inter-
lude between the two days that would show the farmers deciding together and
effecting the change themselves.
Ivens (1969, 187) viewed the project as an opportunity for a 'mental rest
after two strenuous assignments in Spain and China'. It allowed him the rel-
ative luxury of a well-equipped project to be undertaken at a leisurely pace. It
was also an opportunity to participate in a general trend in the US radical film
community toward domestic subjects and away from the anti-fascist subjects
of 1937 and 1938. Except for the continuing work of Kline and Julien Bryan in
the European hot spots, the US left film community in 1939 was preoccupied
with work on the home front: Frontier Films' People of the Cumberland (Kazan,
Meyers, Leyda, and Watts, 1937, 18), Native Land (Hurwitz and Strand, 1942,
80), White Flood (Meyers and Maddow, 1940, 15), their first scientific film, and
The History and Romance of Transportation (Maddow, 1939, 6), a commission
for the World's Fair; Van Dyke's City, another World's Fair project; and the US
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
Film Service's other work, which was to provide employment for an assort-
ment of WFPL veterans including Irving Lerner. The March of Time's The Ram-
parts We Watch (de Rochemont, 1940, 99) was the mainstream equivalent of
the renewed interest in domestic subjects. The trend was confirmed by the
23 August announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact, an event that jolted the left
in the US as elsewhere. Ivens has never spoken of his personal response to
the abrupt reversal of Communist policy that suddenly transformed the val-
iant anti-fascist struggle into yet another war among imperialist powers, and
replaced the campaign for US intervention by one for continued isolation, nor
of the traumatic and long-lasting, even lethal, effect this had on the US left
and its Popular Front base. It was a fortuitous accident that he was engaged
in a domestic project at the time that would not be affected by the policy shift.
Meanwhile, Ivens personally engaged the project's camera operator,
Arthur Ornitz, a 20-year old offspring of the Los Angeles radical film commu-
262 nity, whom he had met during his Hollywood visits. Ornitz had worked on
various 16mm and underground projects on the West Coast, had organised
sharecroppers on an unfinished film project for the Steinbeck committee in
the South, and had contributed some agricultural shots to Ecce Homo.3
Ivens's working relationship with Ferno had by this time ended, perhaps
because of ideological differences and because of Ferno's wish to branch out
into directing on his own, also in North America, but their separation appears
to have been amicable.4 Lorentz himself would have had no objection to Orni-
tz, nor to Ivens for that matter, on ideological grounds since he had frequently
worked closely and successfully with WFPL veterans on his earlier projects:
his openness to collaboration with leftists does not indicate any ideological
kinship on his part, rather the openness and non-sectarian atmosphere with-
in the documentary movement as a whole during the late thirties.5 The final
crucial collaborator on the project was Van Dongen, who joined only during
the editing phase because of her own active career as independent filmmaker
and educational film consultant.
Ivens (1969, 187-189) provides a valuable description of the long process
by which he, Locke, and Ornitz finally chose the Parkinson farm near St. Clairs-
ville, Ohio, in midsummer after an arduous search for the right location and
subjects. They looked for a farm with just the right combination of typicality,
and a 'real but interesting' family who were willing to undergo the changeover
to electricity. The aesthetic and ideological principles that shaped the narra-
tive elements of previous Ivens films, including those planned but never real-
ised, are immediately recognisable. The fact that these principles were shared
by the sponsors is an indication of how much Ivens's socialist realist aesthetic
of personalised didacticism had filtered into the US mainstream by 1939. Nei-
ther of Lorentz's two previous films had participated in this model, but the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
two projects that occupied him during the shooting of Power both drew heav-
ily from it: Ecce Homo, never finished, was to dramatise the life and itinerary
of an unemployed family man, and Fight forLife depicted a doctor involved in
maternal health care in the Chicago slums. The only divergence of the Lorentz
projects from the Ivens model, a divergence typical of many liberal documen-
tary books and articles, was their emphasis on the direness of the problem
without bringing in the positive element of a solution, of the subjects engaged
in change. Power, as conceived by Lorentz and the REA, had no such liability,
since the intention was to show the public an affirmative model to be imitated,
a typical family making use of the government program to bring in the wires,
rather than just to decry the deprivation of the majority of US farms. Thus the
family sought by the filmmakers would have more in common with the robust
and rosy families of socialist realism that with the gaunt, impassive agrarian
heroes of the FSA and other US documentary currents. The emaciated share-
croppers were already becoming clichs (when they appear in Flaherty's Land, I 263
they seem outdated and derivative) and were already prompting reactive cur-
rents.6 Ivens's portrait of the Parkinsons would exude confidence and affec-
tion, rather than the denunciation and pity of his American predecessors.?
The filmmakers' search was for a farm
[without] a definite atmosphere like a southern farm, [...] an ordinary
farm with no particular aspect. I didn't want a farm that would be typi-
cally north, or California, or New England. But I did want a sort of rolling
country. [...] I was looking for a farm not too poor and not too rich, prefer-
ably one worked by the family living on it. (Ivens, 1969, 187-188)
This latter detail presumably satisfied the New Deal vision of small individual
farmers working cooperatively. To show tenant farmers, as most earlier docu-
mentary works had done, would not provide an exemplary model in the same
way, though the trend of the period might have been more accurately reflected
by such a choice - the growing presence of tenant farmers who had lost their
holdings to big agri-landlords was a phenomenon that Flaherty emphasised
strongly in Land. The filmmakers found, however, that model families on roll-
ing farms are much rarer than they had anticipated. After encountering farm
after farm that was 'too big or too broken down, or else with a hopelessly dis-
agreeable old couple in charge' (Locke, quoted in MacCann, 1973, 103), the
team actually set in motion the backup solution of manufacturing a synthet-
ic family, a possibility not unheard of in either Ivens's work nor in socialist
realism. This also ran into a snag, so the crew returned to the Parkinsons who
had earlier appeared promising except for the fact that their farm was already
electrified.8
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
The Parkinson situation had to undergo some cosmetic changes. The
crew removed 'one or two items of equipment', buried certain cables, and had
to 'shoot around' other evidence of electrification for the 'before' part of the
film. Parkinson's mules were considered unsuitable, despite the Democratic
affiliation of the project, so a team of horses was hired for the shoot. The Par-
kinsons agreed to submit to several months of inconvenience in exchange for
improvements to their electrical installations, including better barn lighting,
and modern plumbing in their house and barn. The electric range that stars
in the second part of the film and the electric milking machine that was cut in
the editing were not, however, part of the deal. The family later estimated that
they had gained $900 worth of equipment (Snyder, 1968, 124).
A preliminary script was settled in July. The shooting began immedi-
ately after the Parkinson deal was finalised, even before the shooting script
was ready one week later, since haying could not wait. By 30 August, a 'final',
264 I detailed 'picture script' was ready, based on some shooting that had already
taken place and including various modifications of the original script to
accommodate aspects of the farm (Power and the Land, 'R.E.A. Picture Script',
typescript, 30 August 1939, JIA). These accommodations varied from increased
emphasis on the barn and milk-cooling technology - since the farm was pri-
marily a dairy operation, to a heightening of the lyrical elements inspired inev-
itably by Ivens's and Ornitz's confrontation with the actual landscape, with
the result that the hardship of non-electrified work would not appear quite so
gruelling as the REA had wanted to imply. Ornitz (personal communication,
1980) remembers that some misty early morning images of horses at pasture
required three successive dawn excursions to the fields.
Ivens's experiences with the writer in adapting the script on location
proved to be as stimulating and useful as he had expected. In fact, in his manu-
al of documentary technique written shortly after the shooting of Power (Ivens,
1940), he declared that it was now a necessity for a writer to be present during
the shoot. The writer, he stated, had an important role in the 'first clash of fact
with the concept written into the script'. 'The writer's work', he added, 'is not
done until the film is done'. It consists of
shaping the constant change of reality into the dramatic structure of the
growing work, and becoming interested and involved in social, political,
and even seasonal changes in the environment. [...] With the director and
cameraman usually dog-tired at the end of the day, prevented from think-
ing creatively, the writer is depended upon to be their spur, to broaden
the film's subject, in drama and detail, while they are all away from the
specificity of the camera. (Ivens, 1940, 33-34, 36)9
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The evolution of the script clearly testifies to a close collaboration of this
nature between Ivens and Locke, particularly in the formulation of long
semi-fictional sequences relating to the Parkinson's eight-year-old son, a nat-
ural 'ham' who became one centre of interest in the film. Several long semi-fic-
tional sequences called for Bip to drive into town with the dairy driver where
he would see a model creamery, tease a cow being mechanically milked, pick
up groceries for his mother, and encounter a barn fire on the way home. The
latter incident was to have a whole sequence built around it, showing neigh-
bours coming to the rescue and thus highlighting the cooperative nature of
farming as well as the high risk on non-electrified farms. The sequence also
included a traditional Ivensian bucket brigade and an assortment of minor
details concerning Bip such as his getting too close to the flames. Itwas linked
precisely to the subsequent sequence wherein the owner of the destroyed barn
is seen as one of the instigators of the actions the farmers take collectively to
setup the electrification cooperative. Of these sequences, outlined in detail in I 265
the 30 August script, the barn fire was actually shot, as well as at least part of
the first sequence. Though the two scenes were temporarily shelved (the mate-
rial would end up in two spinoff shorts, as we shall see), they represent the
kind of creative teamwork that Ivens had considered necessary for heighten-
ing the film's personalisation in the field.
Many other smaller-scale touches along the same lines, however, were
retained, for example their rewriting of the Bip character to accommodate
the dreamy poetic personality that stubbornly refused to show the interest in
mechanical things that the earlier versions had called for. The team impro-
vised a sequence in which Bip teases his father with a sunflower while he is
cutting corn, one of the more spontaneous and behaviourally naturalistic
scenes in the film. Correspondingly, when the two elder sons turned out to
be less interesting than had been anticipated, they were reduced to virtu-
al background figures: the filmmakers jettisoned an earlier conception for a
scene dramatising rural emigration, calling for a discontented older son being
rough with the livestock or gate, and being discovered by his father pouring
over a map to the East. Similarly, when the filmmakers noticed the paterfa-
milias's strong pride in the sharpness of his tools, they added short 'before'
and 'after' sequences showing tool-grinding with and without electricity; com-
parable narrative details reflect the mother's origins as a schoolteacher and
greatly enrich the portrayal of women's work as it was conceived in the prelim-
inary version. On the other hand, the filmmakers decided not to use an earlier
version's sequence showing the family and neighbours ceremoniously bury-
ing their obsolete kerosene lamps at the end of the film; they apparently con-
cluded that a single shot showing Hazel Parkinson putting a kerosene lamp
away in a cupboard rang truer to traditional farm frugality than a night-time
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
lamp-burying ceremony comparable to the conclusions of Komsomol and 400
Million. A meal scene also was expanded from the first script's conception, the
filmmakers apparently recognising the simple power of a silent meal domi-
nated by mechanical gestures and unselfconscious fatigue.
A further prescription of Ivens in his manual, that the writer avoid the
temptation on location 'to cast aside his literary qualities relying entirely on
the strong visuals around him', is apparently a warning about the necessity
of preserving a certain thematic and conceptual coherence in the narrative
elements of a documentary (Ivens, 1940, 34). This prescription was clearly
applied to Power whose simple narrative flow is in abrupt contrast to the epi-
sodic disunity for which 400 Million had been criticised.
The shooting lasted most of the autumn and was not yet finished by the
REA deadline of 14 November. Although the shoot was pursued at a much
more leisurely pace than Ivens was used to, allowing for the luxury of seeing
266 rushes on an ongoing basis for the first time since leaving Holland, the pro-
duction was no freer of complications than any other documentary, despite
the absence of fascist bombers and Guomindang censors.
One complication involved Ornitz's contribution as operator. Lorentz
and the REA were unhappy with some of the first rushes when they arrived,
as was Ivens himself reportedly, and the blame was attributed to Ornitz (Sny-
der, 1968, 126).10 However, since Ornitz's work is among the most impressive
of the film, including the playful 'sunflower' episode between father and son
in the cornfield and the lyrical early morning pasture material, it seems likely
that Lorentz's displeasure also stemmed from evidence that the filmmakers
were adding to the original outline. Perhaps the barn-fire sequence was at the
root of the problem - it had been shot at great expense, and was a near dis-
aster (Snyder, 1968, 125)." The REA reportedly were 'shocked' by the scene,'2
and the only reference to the fire hazard in the final film is a shot in one of the
barn sequences of a lantern swinging menacingly. In any case, Lorentz imme-
diately dispatched Floyd Crosby to take over as cameraman, to 'reshoot the
unsatisfactory footage and to confine shooting to the original outline' (Snyder,
1968, 126). Crosby, also a member of the Los Angeles political film commu-
nity and former president of the anti-fascist Motion Picture Guild, had bet-
ter professional credentials than Ornitz; he had previously shot with Flaherty
and Murnau on Tahiti, and had since worked for Lorentz as contributing cin-
ematographer for three projects. It was he who had originally recommended
Ivens to Lorentz (Lorentz, personal communication, 14 November 1980), and
would photograph Land for Flaherty. At the moment of his arrival, Crosby was
the most experienced American cinematographer in the kind of documentary
mise-en-scene that the project entailed. After some initial snags, including the
near loss of Crosby's first batch of rushes, the prospects for the film imme-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
diately improved. Crosby got the credit for getting the film back on the right
track, though his work, primarily the final interiors that required complex
artificial lighting, may have amounted to only about 15% of the total material
according to Ornitz's reckoning (personal communication, 1980).3
By October, Lorentz was confident enough in the film's progress and still
busy with FightforLife, so that he transferred the supervision of Power to Tom-
my Atkins, a Washington staff member of the Film Service. Atkins wrote Ivens
on location praising the team for the work finished up to that point and 'asked
him now to concentrate on shooting material that would be in direct contrast
to the electrification of the farm' (Snyder, 1968, 126). This latter specification
apparently entailed exact correlations between details in both parts of the
film, and this parallelism is indeed evident in the finished film. In November,
however, as the deadline passed, Washington got nervous again, especially as
the film threatened to go over-budget. The REA officials had been anxious all
along after it became apparent that Lorentz was not directing the project - | 267
Lorentz had forestalled this inevitability as long as possible by discreetly sug-
gesting that Ivens stay away from Washington. In any case, part of the delay
was clearly caused by the REA slowness in installing the necessary equipment
for the 'after' section of the film (Snyder, 1968, 127-128).
At this point, there was also concern over who would be writing the com-
mentary. Lorentz made an unsuccessful overture to John Steinbeck, who had
helped with FightforLife (Snyder, 1968, 104). Lorentz then resolved to write the
commentary himself, by which means he would also be able to ensure that the
film was finished according to its original conception. He communicated this
decision in a letter to Ivens on 20 November, which also contained a politely
veiled threat to stick to the outline:
It is obligatory for me to translate the wishes of these government
departments who wish films made [...] but one point we must be clear on;
while I am perfectly willing to agree that you might make a very exciting
documentary film from the material you have, unless that film is specifi-
cally enough like the original outline approved by the men who gave me
the money and who trust me to see that such a picture is made, I feel it
would be an unfortunate thing for both of us. (Lorentz, letter to Ivens, 20
November 1939, JIA)'4
Lorentz also insisted that the film would be more easily distributed if kept to its
original three-reel length, instead of the larger, more personalised version of
five reels that it was shaping up to be. Not surprisingly, Lorentz and the spon-
sors had their way after the late-November wrap-up. The major scenes depart-
ing from the original outline were set aside for the moment, and, throughout
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
the film, individual shots and shot-series were dropped to compress the film
even further." The casualties included the tracking shots of the rolling coun-
tryside that Ivens had envisaged from the very beginning.
The painful necessity of the cuts forcefully reminded Ivens that the film-
maker's relationship with the producer was as important in its way as the cre-
ative on-location relationship with the writer that Ivens had put so much store
in. Accordingly, this and other lessons about sponsorship found their way
into Ivens's manual. There he insisted that the sponsor should have complete
confidence in the director, to obviate the misunderstandings that physical
distance can induce. He added that full discussions between filmmaker and
sponsor are necessary before the acceptance of the commission, so that the
filmmaker can understand the sponsor's own 'needs and aims'. He stressed
that sponsors' 'secrets about the subject' can have a destructive effect, if they
arise mid-project (Ivens, 1940). Though these references are probably most
268 directly provoked by New Frontiers (1940), the ultimate negative example of
sponsor-director relations as we shall see, there may also be implications here
about his relationship with Lorentz. It seems unlikely that Ivens would have
counted on almost doubling the length of Power if he had not been encour-
aged to believe that this might be possible. In any case the discussion also
implies a certain nostalgia for what then seemed the ideal filmmaker-sponsor
relations of 400 Million, where 'there is no fundamental disagreement with the
sponsor [since] the filmmaker is part of the sponsoring body', and of Borinage,
where, instead of restraining the film's political theme, 'the real sponsor, the
Belgian Mine Workers Union, was constantly pushing Storck and myself deep-
er into the material, asking us to give more reality since the aim of the film was
to better bad conditions' (Ivens. 1969, 215).
That Ivens's memory would tend to romanticise slightly the actual condi-
tions of these two earlier projects, especially 400 Million, in the heat of his dis-
appointments of the forties is understandable. In any case, the Ivens-Lorentz
tension had never come to a head. Lorentz remained a warm supporter of Ivens
and recommended him in April to direct a film for the Federal Theatre Project.
But the FTP was a New Deal agency that was soon to become a scapegoat for the
Congressional axe as surely as the US Film Service itself (Snyder, 1968, 127).
The editing and recording of the commentary and music and the re-re-
cording phases were all supervised by Van Dongen during the spring and sum-
mer of 1940. Ivens had by this time left for work on his next project. This was a
common arrangement during this the final period of their collaboration, their
joint system and division of responsibilities having been refined to a routine,
and concern over proper credits not being a feature of their relationship at the
time.16 Bureaucratic details delayed the premiere until October in Ohio and
December elsewhere.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
It is perhaps no accident that Power, the most successful of Ivens's three
major American films in reaching a mass audience, also has the simplest
structure. Rotha (1952, 318) does not hesitate to make this connection: '[Ivens]
recognized that a dialectical and controversial onslaught could not possibly
convince the audience for which it was intended'.
The final version of Power is a significant restructuring of the basic
idyll-resistance propaganda formula of the two anti-fascist films. Power's
opening 'before' movement in effect combines idyll and threat in being
both pastoral and severe, informed by struggle, as the commentary more
often than the images reminds the spectator. The solution appears halfway
through the film, initiated by the discussion and then the founding meeting
of the farmers' cooperative; it is then pursued in scenes showing the elec-
trical installations, and in conclusion the 'after' movement that shows the
new life on the electrified farm. The 'resistance' movement is thus much
more substantial than the 'solutions' in the other New Deal films such as I 269
Plow, River, City, and Land, in which the solutions were hastily envisaged or
proposed in utopian terms rather than actually realised in terms of ongoing
everyday living as in Cumberland and Spanish Earth. The New Deal films 'are
more imaginative in the problem sections than in the solution sections', as
one assessment of Lorentz's work puts it, the solutions often seeming an
afterthought (Snyder, 1968, 191). In Spanish Earth, Cumberland, and Power,
the solution sections receive the major structural weight, in the first two,
interwoven with the entire continuity of the film, in the last one, occupying
at least the last half of the film. Some critics did, however, notice utopian
overtones in Power, wondering for example how the family was ever going to
pay for all those new appliances (Winsten, 1940),7 but this rather literal res-
ervation hardly takes into consideration the substantial weight the film plac-
es on the farmers' discussions, initiatives, and decisive struggle for change.
This adapted socialist realist model accents the process of change rather
than the gleaming appliance awaiting the participants in the last shots. The
impression of struggle in Power is reinforced by Ivens's habitual fascination
with the actual process and mechanics of work. Like Spanish Earth, Nieuwe
Gronden (New Earth, 1933, Netherlands, 30), and Komsomol, it is a film filled
literally with images of sweat, of strenuous work rather than of passive wait-
ing for the imposition of a TVA dam or a model greenbelt city.
Another structuring principle of the film is chronology, not only the dia-
chronic logic of the 'before-after' pattern, but also the 'dawn to dusk' logic
of both 'before' and 'after' sections (followed most precisely in the former
one). This approach to structuring expository material in documentary was
not new. It is traceable in the central structure of most of the city films of the
late silent period and would reemerge as the structuring framework of a num-
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
ber of World War II propaganda films also, especially British, including Lon-
don Can Take It! (Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt, 1940, 9) and certain of
Jennings's other works. The day presented by Ivens is a highly synthetic one,
crammed with all of the farm activities between a single morning and night,
even incorporating several seasonal changes within the day.
The 'dawn to dusk' format allowed Ivens to incorporate his lyrical appreci-
ations of the landscape into the narrative continuity. The landscape interludes
function at each different time of the day as devices to establish atmosphere
and location for the work at hand. The various visual motifs, which otherwise
endow the film with an elegant image symmetry, function in the same way.
Light, both natural and artificial, is one of these. Ivens was undoubtedly cel-
ebrating his release from the pervading grayness of 400 Million. Each modu-
lation of light in the course of the day functions denotatively in terms of the
action it frames and is captured sensuously by the camera at the same time,
270 from the dawn mistiness, to the noon blaze, to the evening blackness that sets
off the bobbing spots of the men's lanterns as they walk to the barn for the
evening chores. This sensitivity to the gradations of light recalls Regen (Rain,
1929, Netherlands, 16) more than any other of Ivens's previous films. Artifi-
cial light also provides a recurring visual motif quite obviously related to the
exposition of the film. The lanterns of the barn and the kerosene lamps of the
household are quite literally foregrounded throughout the 'before' movement,
often used as framing devices for the characters and most explicitly whenever
they are gathered around the dining table. The lamps frequently gave Ivens the
pretext for decorative interior lighting effects. They are integral to several key
scenes of the exposition as well: a scene showing daughter Ruth cleaning all of
the lamps as part of her daily routine, and the shot of Hazel putting away her
lamp now that she has turned on the bright ceiling fixture. A less important
but related visual motif is built around the opening and closing of doors and
gates in the barn and house, which often alter the lighting quality of a shot,
36. Power and the Land (1940): the
Parkinsons mother and sons, laundress
and harvesters, complained about the
takes required to dramatise with perfect
synchronisation their respective farm ..
chores. DVD frame capture. © CAPI Films, I L
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
sometimes quite radically, transforming the darkness of the barn interior to a
brilliant rectangle of day. Such motifs give the film a flawless visual coherence.
The parallelism implied by the 'before-after' pattern and suggested in the
Film Service correspondence is the other dominant structural principle of the
film. It too is basic to the film's expository argument, a narrative pattern that
is explicitly didactic. Each farm task is shown before and after electrification,
from milk-cooling to plumbing, the latter shown with a discretion only slightly
less euphemistic than the Production Code would have allowed. The network
of parallel images gives the film a mirror-like symmetry and a more leisurely,
decorative rhythm than the climactic crescendos of the earlier films.
The result of Ivens's long-awaited chance to experiment fully with a nar-
rative personalised form of documentary, Power relies almost exclusively
on the mise-en-scene mode, for the first time since Branding (Breakers, 1929,
Netherlands, 42). The elements of the 'spontaneous' mode that dominated
Spanish Earth and the 'newsreel' mode that was unusually prominent in 400 I 271
Million have both disappeared almost entirely from Power. It is true that there
are undeniable elements of improvisation in three of the better sequences of
the film: the 'sour milk' sequence, where the father shows some unrehearsed
reactions to the dairy's rejection of his improperly cooled milk; the 'sunflow-
er' sequence and the 'shower' sequence, where the father and Bip appear in a
playful mood once again, this time in connection with the delights of running
water. However, the improvisation occurs within the framework of a strictly
controlled mise-en-scene, the last even requiring artificial lighting.
Within the mise-en-scene mode, the degrees of fictionalisation and cam-
era-subject interaction vary widely. The bulk of the film is committed to the
collaborative re-enactment by the family of their habitual daily activities for
the benefit of the camera. One member recalled having been asked to milk
a cow five times (Snyder, 1968, 125); Ivens (1969, 191) as a result of this not
completely successful tactic recommended afterwards in his manual that doc-
umentary directors should never ask their subjects to do anything so unnat-
ural as to milk an already milked cow. Ivens gives elaborate advice along the
same lines on how to adapt studio-style mise-en-scene to the special needs of
the inherently impatient, inexperienced actor:
I came to believe it is best to have as few retakes as possible. Repetition
seems to have a deadening effect on the non-actor. If rehearsals are
necessary, time must be allowed between rehearsals and shooting. Use
yourself or anybody as stand-ins during the setting up of the camera and
lights to keep the non-actor from exhaustion or self-consciousness. On
the other hand, if the period of filming a re-enactment is short or very
rushed, there can be less care in humouring him, and a greater depend-
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
ence on the camera's ability to break up the action into useful close-ups.
[ ... ]
The director and the cameraman must sometimes invent dramas or
interludes ('What good is all this fooling with the lights'?) to render the
length of time needed for light and camera adjustments tolerable to the
non-actor. I don't believe in long conferences before takes, while the
non-actor waits. (Ivens, 1969, 218-219)
Furthermore, as already cited in Chapter 3, there is the customary emphasis
on close observation of the action to be filmed, to permit establishing, insert,
and covering shots and to avoid retakes (Ivens, 1969, 219). Occasionally, the
directorial intervention was as basic as the simple relocation of an action: for
example, Ruth's lamp-trimming sequence takes place on a sunny verandah,
perhaps at Ivens's request. As already intimated, some of the more extreme
272 I uses of mise-en-scene involving detailed scripting of the sequence were ulti-
mately cut, with the 'Sour Milk' sequence being the notable exception.
The shooting technique for much of the mise-en-scene material in Power,
then, differed little from that used by studio filmmakers on location except for
the absence of dialogue and direct sound recording. Each scene was planned
shot-by-shot beforehand on paper, with camera positions, sometimes illus-
trated by sketches, lighting instructions, and descriptions of the actions of
the subjects all mapped out in detail - even whether a particular character is
wearing a hat. One sequence even indicated a dolly movement, planned per-
haps in a moment of technological euphoria akin to that felt in the Philips
factory, but this does not appear in the final film and was probably never shot;
the only tracking shots are the more readily improvised ones from the top of
farm vehicles. Most setups were uncomplicated ones suitable for the light Bell
and Howell used for the project, a camera particularly common in location
shooting.
The shooting scripts also included instructions for transitional shots of
the sort that are common in Spanish Earth but notably absent from 400 Mil-
lion: 'I always note at the beginning of a sequence and at the end of its last shot
the sequence to follow. This ensures the fluid continuity which a documenta-
ry film must have' (Ivens, 1969, 201). Accordingly, bridging shots in which a
background figure becomes the foreground figure of the following sequence
are common. Similarly, many of the pan shots involve intricate reframing,
for example a shot in which Hazel pumps water in one room and carries the
water into another room where she pours it into a tub, framed by the doorway.
Also present are compositions in depth in which foreground and background
actions simultaneously depict different stages and materials of the same pro-
cess, as in the 'milk-cooling' sequence. Mise-en-scene setups also permitted
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
the studied aestheticism of several artificially lit shots, for example, a medium
close-up of Hazel sewing, sharing the frame with an ornate kerosene lamp,
a shot full of painterly overtones. The many parallel relationships between
shots would also have relied on carefully deliberate setups, as would a number
of points of view that become familiar through their repetition - for example,
one that presents a figure moving across the yard from house to barn toward
or away from the camera on a diagonal grid.
The shooting script also contained some interesting instructions for
shooting characters in a less rigidly controlled setting. For the 'cooperative
meeting' sequence, the shooting script provides for the continuing lamp
motif, for a transitional link to the previous shot, and for foci of attention for
the operator, with emphasis on the static portrait shots that are especially
available from a captive audience:
To meeting in schoolhouse. Twenty to thirty farmers, four or five women, I 273
Bill Parkinson and Bip, owner of barn we saw burning serving as tran-
sition. Shot at dusk, lighted by oil lamps spotting a few faces here and
there. Chairman at teacher's desk; oil lamp on face. After establishing
size and nature of meeting, work is mainly in close-ups. Expressions
which lend themselves to dialogue device. Those who are enthusiastically
for the cooperative; those who are stubbornly but not violently, against;
those who ask questions, want to understand, and are forming their
judgments. A dry humorous remark comes in twice during the meeting.
(Ivens, 'R.E.A. Picture Script', 30 August 1939, JIA)
For the most part, scenes are constructed as they were in the Fuentiduena
line of Spanish Earth. Long-shot establishing material locates the setting for a
scene, and the characters appear, usually in long shot, before the action begins.
The action itself is broken up, usually into a medium view and then close-ups of
the details of the action, frequently inflected by a pan to the face of the subject
at work. Attention is given to the materials and chronology of the work, with a
didactic emphasis on its end product and functionality. Characters interacting
with each other are habitually dealt with in medium two-shot arrangements.
Very often the closing of a sequence is symmetrical, a summation evoking the
original establishing shot, or else a transitional shot. The pace is deliberate
and, even, like the rhythm of farm work itself, always obedient to the princi-
ples of space-time continuity. Once, during the corn-cutting sequence, the
camera's agitated apprehensions of the work contribute to the building up of
a stylised rhythmic effect, in this case one that imitates the rhythm of this fast
heavy work, imitated itself by the 'sing-song' effect of the commentary. Even in
sequences of the film that are purely expository in their motivation, such as an
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
explanation of the sources of the electrical power in urban generators, the film-
ic structure is still simple classical narrative continuity.
What is remarkable about Power in relation to the previous works by Ivens
and to other contemporary works, is not the extent to which its mise-en-scene
approximates that of the classical narrative cinema - Lorentz's Fight for Life
went even further in this direction, employing Hollywood sets and professional
actors, and Cumberland even included a gangland murder visualised in 'noir'
style and narrated by a posthumous narrator, both films remaining fully with-
in the perceived bounds of documentary! Rather, Power is remarkable for the
unity and simplicity with which it fulfils its narrative project. The hybrid form
pioneered by Ivens and Lorentz and their British contemporaries dominated
most documentaries at the time of the outbreak of war: Cumberland, for exam-
ple, alongside its 'film noir' sequence, included compilation sequences, spon-
taneous material, scripted dialogue using direct sound, and several scenes
274 I intercutting mise-en-scene with 'spontaneous' footage, a mix very similar to
Spanish Earth. Ivens's instinct was suddenly to draw back from the eclecticism
that he himself had legitimised: Power interrupts its narrative continuum on
one occasion only, when at the end of the 'before' movement, a voice-over expo-
sition with diagrams and an animated map provides the history and rationale of
the REA electrification program.'8 Otherwise movements that might be consid-
ered digressions, such as a landscape trope, or the series of close-up portraits
in the farmers' meeting, all blend smoothly into the narrative flow, perhaps in
deliberate contrast to the much criticised episodic quality of 400 Million.
As we have seen, the Power production served as a kind of laboratory to test
Ivens's conviction that personalisation was the logical development of the
documentary, a conviction that had been evolving over the previous decade
but which war, poverty, and haste had always prevented from being fully
applied in the realm of practice. During the classical period, Ivens's concep-
tion of personalisation was expressed most systematically, and most compre-
hensively, in Power. The conception embraced all three levels of cinematic
practice, production, text, and consumption: it involved, on the level of pro-
duction, close work with non-professional actors whose lives and struggles
would be expressed in the film; on the level of text, it implied the articulation
of those lives and struggles in terms of continuous characters developed in a
narrative framework; on the level of consumption, it implied that spectators
would become involved in a process of identification with the characters and
would be solicited to apply the insight gained thereby to their own lives and
social situation.'9 Power is a virtual manifesto of the possibilities of personal-
isation within the classical, non-synchronous sound documentary tradition
and a far-reaching encounter with the technical, aesthetic, ethical, and politi-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
cal problems entailed by these possibilities, the apex and synthesis of a tradi-
tion that had been gradually accumulating over the decade.20
Ivens's insistence after the Chinese film on having an adequately sized
crew on location was largely in order to free himself as director to work per-
sonally with the non-professional actors who were to dominate his future
work. It was not accidental that Komsomol, Misere au Borinage (Borinage, 1934,
Belgium, 34), and Spanish Earth had all had writers and/or cinematographers
and/or co-directors as part of the crew and that these films had been his most
highly personalised up to this point. In China, he himself had often served as
assistant operator or focus-puller. In Ohio, aided not only by operator and writ-
er, but also by an assistant, production manager, and photographer, Ivens was
free to concentrate on building the relationship of intimate observation, trust,
and cooperation between artists and subjects that he saw as being necessary
for the personalised documentary. He brought the same spirit of intense study
that he had formerly applied to bridge spans, and later to the materials and I 275
processes of work, to the behavioural patterns of these characters living their
daily lives. There is a new emphasis on a director's psychological knowledge of
his or her subjects (Ivens, 1969, 191).
Often, Ivens's approach to his subjects did not involve the full complici-
ty on their part that was otherwise fundamental to their working relationship
and to methodologies of later direct cineastes. For example, Ivens describes
manipulations useful in getting 'fresh' and spontaneous 'performances' from
his characters. One of these was to explain a scene beforehand individually
to each participant so that there should be an element of surprise in the final
rendition (Ivens, 1969, 191). He borrowed other tactics from Pudovkin such as
the trick used in the 'sour milk' scene where the Parkinsons' milk is returned
from the dairy with a rejection slip.2' The Parkinsons had already rehearsed the
scene, but Ivens introduced an element of surprise by means of an authentic
letter from the dairy instead of the blank prop as planned. The strategy worked:
the father is clearly caught off guard and, captured by a long-focus lens that
allowed him to forget the fiction, his reaction is spontaneous as he reads the
note, impassively puts it into his overall pocket, and grimly walks away.22
Ivens's prescription that instructions to non-professional actors be not
too specific appears borne out by the film itself: occasionally a scene appears
to suffer for not following this prescription. For example, Hazel appears sew-
ing in a scene showing the harmful effect of kerosene light when used for
homework and sewing; she moves the lamp closer and, as if to relieve the sore-
ness, touches her eyes, a gesture that appears too self-conscious to ring true.
It seems that Bip works best of the three major characters simply because his
extrovert-ish personality required less coaching on the part of the director.
Yet, even this character has a trace of a literary overlay, suggesting the patron-
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
isation of children found in most adult artists, or perhaps the inspiration of
that other populist iconographer of Depression and wartime American child-
hood, Norman Rockwell. But the overlay is situated primarily on the level of
the commentary.
Ivens did make some attempts to create an understanding of the film-
making process with his subjects in order to maximise their cooperation. He
describes taking the father to a James Cagney gangster film in the St. Clairs-
ville theatre to show him the principle of varying shot-range (Ivens, 1969, 192).
Ivens's attempts in this direction however did not take him so far as the Fla-
hertian principle of showing the characters the rushes during the shoot. Ivens
was convinced that this would inhibit their spontaneity and encourage them
to 'act'. Kline ([1942] 1979, 151) shared Ivens's viewpoint. He spoke of 'prevent-
ing real-life characters from acting falsely by imitating their favourite actors',
but saw that rehearsing could be effective. By and large, the portraits of the
276 I three Parkinsons are warm, detailed, and authentic, particularly in those fore-
grounded scenes where the characters are shown at their familiar daily work.
Ivens had indeed succeeded in 'employ[ing] his imagination to manipulate
the real, personal characteristics of the new actors', and had proven that 'a
real person, acting to play himself, will be more expressive if his actions are
based on his real characteristics' (Ivens, 1969, 191). Still the Parkinsons had
no formal input into the conception or development of the film. Power, obvi-
ously, was a commission where the filmmakers and the sponsors were still in
full creative control of the project. Ivens would not move closer to the more
contemporary democratic ideal of subjects-centred documentary, so prophet-
ically suggested by Borinage, until Indonesia Calling (1946, Australia, 22).
It is difficult to evaluate whether Power justified the ambitious hopes that
Ivens had nourished for the role of personalisation in documentary. Certainly
the film's popular success would tend to confirm that Ivens was correct in link-
ing personalisation with the goal of commercial distribution. The range of the
reactions in the daily press suggests that audiences did strongly identify with
the Parkinson family as he conceived them. No doubt, his decision to concen-
trate on three characters only in such a short film, leaving the older brothers
and sister as one-dimensional background figures, was partly responsible for
this success, ensuring as it did maximum 'colour' for the three main characters.
It must also be acknowledged, however, that there is not unlimited poten-
tial for personalisation in a publicity film commissioned to show Americans
the positive role model of a family successfully electrifying their farm. The
length of the film - the sponsors insisted on limiting it to 33 minutes - makes
this especially true. Henri Storck was able to provide a much richer texture to
his characterisations in a film on a similar topic, Boerensymfonie (La Sympho-
niepaysanne, 1944, Belgium, 115), due to a non-didactic orientation and above
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
all its two-hour length (though one could not argue that Storck's portraits are
any less idealised because of their greater density). The vicious circle thus
engaged did not then seem so obvious as it does in retrospect: personalisation
was a means of consolidating mass distribution but the short-film format that
seemed a prerequisite for mass distribution did not permit the full explora-
tion of the possibilities of personalisation. Some of the feature-length World
War II documentaries, chiefly British, would succeed in breaking out of this
circle (Camera, written during the War, is full of admiring if not envious ref-
erences to the British wartime features), but with Power and with Ivens's later
Action Stations (1943, Canada, 50) the contradiction seemed insurmountable.
Ivens's proposed additions, detailed above, would have fleshed out the
characterisations and relationships considerably. Furthermore, certain of the
proposed scenes, such as the barn-burning, Bip's adventures with the dairy
truck driver and model creamery, and a neighbourhood meal, would have
deepened the family's rapport with the social environment beyond the family I 277
context. The fact that virtually the whole film is limited to this context, except
for the collective corn harvest and the community meeting, meant that the
characters were portrayed in terms of family structures that Ivens knew better.
He had thought since Komsomol that psychological portraits had been beyond
the domain of the documentary, requiring professional actors, and had aimed
at social portraits instead (Ivens, 1969, 158). His portraits in Power succeed
most where they are a function of the family's existence as a working econom-
ic unit; where they touch upon relationships that are purely interpersonal and
familial they are less sure. This latter vulnerability was likely compounded by
the expatriate director's lack of exposure to American domestic life. Can we
hypothesise that most expatriate filmmakers in any culture have been more
perceptive at social and public themes than at domestic and private ones?
Hazel's portrait is a case in point. Of the three major characters of the film,
she seems to be the stiffest, and it is probable that a reviewer's complaint of
'camera consciousness' referred to her (Meltzer, 1940). It may be that her rela-
tive awkwardness in comparison to her husband and son may be due solely to
the selective editorial compression of her appearances. Several details of the
women's work - Hazel and Ruth in the vegetable garden, grocery shopping,
etc., were omitted or never realised. For all of the film's careful observation
of women's work, a preponderance of Hazel's reaction shots were retained
in the final trimming, for example at the cooperative meeting or during the
meals, and a disproportionate number of action shots cut. Ivens's relative lack
of experience in directing women characters and in dealing with the domestic
sphere is also a factor. His only previous foray into male-female relations in
Branding had been uneven to say the least; and otherwise, his images of mar-
riage had not gone much beyond the family scenes of Borinage where family
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
relations were considerably in the background. Ivens's best images of women
up to this point had not been in relation to men or family structures but within
collective working units in the public sphere, as with the Fuentiduena women
during their laundry by the village pump. It is not surprising that Hazel seems
most alive at her own heavy work - and Ivens does not spare us the impression
of its heaviness - than in relation to her husband and son. Her Rockwellian
reaction-shot appeal for her husband's approval in the penultimate shot of
the film, as he inspects the roast magically prepared in her new range, under-
cuts the conclusion to a film that had until that moment resisted the most
blatant resources of sentimentality. The implication that connubial bliss inev-
itably follows electrification is one that neither the REA nor Ivens intended.
37. Power and the Land (1940): Mise-en-
278 I scene of laundry and lamp-cleaning,
artificially lit: women's labour was another
Ivens signature trope. DVD frame capture.
© CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
Ivens's conception of personalisation, in summary, is quite similar to the
notion of the 'social type' advanced by Richard Dyer (1979, 54), which he
defines as a 'collective representation',23 a mode of representation that does
not dissolve concrete social distinctions into psychologistic ones (whether
these be individualised or social/stereotypical), but 'emphasizes such distinc-
tions as the basis of collective identity and the heart of the historical struggle'
(Dyer, 1977, 39) and as 'a collective norm of role behaviour formed and used
by the group'. All of the emphases that Ivens placed upon his characters corre-
spond to elements of Dyer's category: economic and class (or collective) iden-
tification, typicality, social relations, the dynamic of action, struggle or change
- all elements that, significantly, correspond to the basic tenets of socialist
realism that had inspired Ivens' initial moves in this direction. Like Ivens,
Dyer sees the social type as a basic raw material for the socio-political praxis
of the cinema, rather than the archetype or mythic type drawn by Flaherty or
by Storck in his Symphonie paysanne, in which characters' static relations with
natural elements and cycles are foregrounded, or the stereotype, a shorthand
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
staple of the imminent flood of wartime propaganda from both sides (Storck's
choice of type was admittedly prudent during the Occupation).
At least three critics ascribed the missing elements in the portrait of the
Parkinsons, not to an inadequate running time nor the constricting familial
setting, but to the absence of direct sound. Rotha (1952, 319) complained that
the film lacked the direct recorded sound and speech of FightforLife and Mil-
ton Meltzer (1940) knew the specific reason for the film's shortcomings:
The farm family has a name all right but no personality. [...] The Stephen
Vincent Bendt commentary sounds like fake farmers' talk that would
embarrass the family if they should hear it. [...] If the farmers' own talk
could have been recorded together with the natural sounds in the barns
and fields it would have been more effective.
The New Masses' Daniel Todd (1941) echoed these sentiments, correctly I 279
prophesying that 'the next step in the development of documentaries will be
to permit the soundtrack to pick up what people actually say'. These three pro-
vocative suggestions must now be expanded into a systematic analysis of the
element of sound in Power.
Rotha's (1952, 319) estimation of Power as the culmination of the silent
observational style of documentary might have been amplified by the paral-
lel judgment that its soundtrack represents the culmination of the tradition
of the 'creative commentary' style of the classical sound documentary. It has
been noted that the two anti-fascist films moved beyond the standard com-
mentary soundtrack towards a more complex use of sound, incorporating dra-
matic voices, musical narrative, simulated direct sound, internal narration,
and multi-track sound effects; and that this expansion of the possibilities of
non-synchronous sound seemed almost in compensation for moments lack-
ing in visual intensity. Because of its forced reliance on the 'newsreel' mode,
400 Million in particular had strained towards future trends in the most inno-
vative sound films of the forties. In contrast, Power picked its sound form from
the poetic commentary of the decade that had just finished, summing up the
aesthetic possibilities of a form that most creative documentarists were leav-
ing behind. Lorentz had used the form with finesse in his two early films, for
example, but had abandoned it in favour of naturalistic dialogue and an inter-
nal narrator in FightforLife. Most British directors also, spurred by the task of
war propaganda and morale almost three years before their American coun-
terparts, led brilliantly by Jennings, were soon experimenting confidently with
multiple voices and narrative concrete sound, even occasionally with impro-
vised synchronous dialogue on location, ingeniously circumventing the still
critical inadequacy of non-studio sound technology.
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
No doubt the essential conservativeness of Power's commentary cannot be
attributed to Ivens directly, but rather to the taste of the REA and the still for-
midable reputation of Lorentz's earlier work. Another factor must be Bendt's
literary formation (Lorentz had predictably engaged a Pulitzer laureate!). His
prominence and his anti-fascist convictions presumably made him acceptable
to Ivens, and his interest in American folklore, history, and national idioms
made him a natural inheritor of the Whitmanesque aspirations of Lorentz's
two earlier commentaries. However, Bendt did not have even the benefit of
Dudley Nichols's exposure to, and basic understanding of, the visual nature of
the film medium. The commentary turned out to be talkative, overwritten, and
literary. Bendt's background as a librettist furthermore disposed him to con-
tinue the experimentation with choral or poetic speech that had characterised
not only Lorentz's work, and City, but many European films as well, including
Storck's Les Maisons de la misere (The Houses ofMisery, 1937, Belgium, 30), with
280 its choral recitative by Maurice Jaubert, and the GPO's Night Mail (Harry Watt
and Basil Wright, 1936, UK, 25), with its poem by Auden, major films all follow-
ing Cavalcanti's prescriptions in experimenting with non-synchronous speech.
By 1940 however, the style had changed, and Bendt's folksy recitative
inspired by Ivens's dynamic corn-cutting sequence caused 'consternation'
among its audiences, according to one critic (Todd, 1941), and struck many
reviewers as a false note, a 'not so successful' imitation of Lorentz (Winsten,
1940), and 'studied lyricism [that was] out of key' (Rotha, 1952, 318):
The knives are cutting
The load piles high
The sun beats down
From the August sky
We built our freedom and
Strength this way
From Mississippi to Ioway [sic].
Elsewhere the stylisation is not so exaggerated, but the self-consciousness of
the 'folk idiom' still grates somewhat: 'Seven people make a big wash, but it's
got to be done every week. You can't leave your men folk dirty... they might get
used to it'.
Bendt reluctantly agreed to an overhaul of his text and to its drastic com-
pression: he dropped obvious redundancies ('the family sits at the table');
unnecessary information ('205 acres'); literary flourishes; and some of the
more excessive lapses into folk opera (including a bizarre conversation
between Hazel and her obsolescent icebox - 'It's all right, Auntie. We'll keep
you too. We're grateful. Once you were just as new'.).
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Other folksy Rockwellian touches were kept with a certain degree of dis-
crimination, including a much needed note of humour in an anecdote about a
Missourian who taught her electric wringer-washer to shell peas, and a prayer-
like meditation on the family meal whose populist pieties its intended audi-
ence apparently found 'effective' (Snyder, 1968, 130):
Bless this food to this family. They have earned it, not by easy tasks, but
with their strength and their toil. They are wise in the ways of the earth.
They are a united family. Now they are tired at the end of the day, but they
are friendly with each other, glad to see each others' faces. They may not
say very much but they have the word 'Home' in their hearts. The things
we cherish most in America are here at this table. While we foster and
maintain them it shall be well with us all.
For all the abridgments and undeniable fine touches, the film consolidated 281
the trend, suggested by 400 Million, for Ivens's commentaries to expand their
relative length and their diegetic role in the films. The commentary for Power
was 43% of the running time, a proportion identical to that for 400 Million but
double that for Spanish Earth, as we have seen.
All the same, the relation of commentary and image is still relatively com-
plex, aiming for a personal casual style, its self-conscious stylisation notwith-
standing. It employs some of the tactics of the earlier commentaries: direct
address, soliciting participation of the viewer; implied dramatic dialogue and
monologues (the chicks under the new incubator: 'Come on fellows, we've
got an electric momma now'!); succinct resumes of the film's themes; back-
ground information not visualised; off-screen verbal images complementing
in a contrapuntal way what is onscreen (over a chilly, dark early morning kitch-
en scene: 'they know on an August morning how hot the stove is going to be by
noon'). In many instances, the relation of the narration to the images is quite
oblique, allowing the mise-en-scene to provide the dominant diegesis, never
overlaying a literal description of what is occurring on the screen and seldom
fulfilling a purely expository function. In fact, the filmmakers' careful exci-
sions left some short scenes completely without commentary, for example,
scenes showing the men sawing firewood. This is of course further evidence
that too reductive a model of soundtrack diegesis for the classical sound doc-
umentary is insufficient (Nichols, 1976).
For the recording of the commentary, the filmmakers wanted a voice cor-
responding to their 'easy going, deliberately casual' conception of the com-
mentary, a 'voice which sounded like someone from the country [...] not too
intellectual [...] more or less unrehearsed' (Ivens, 1969, 196), in other words,
profiting from the success of Hemingway's voice in Spanish Earth and avoid-
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
ing March's earnest professionalism in 400 Million. Yet because of the stylisa-
tion and deceptively complex metrical quality of Bendt's text, Ivens listened
to 45 radio actors before deciding on William P. Adams, a veteran theatre and
radio player. The score was commissioned from Douglas Moore, Bendt's col-
laborator on his two highly successful folk operas of the late thirties, known
chiefly for his programme music on national themes and his background in
characteristic American idioms.24 According to Snyder, the film was cut before
being shown to Bendt and Moore, a practice contrary to Ivens's prescription
in Camera, written shortly after the completion of the film, that composers
should be shown unedited rushes. The collaboration between Moore and
Bendt was less well coordinated than usual and did not partake of the same
'dovetailing' or 'contrapuntal' inspirations that were the ideals of the peri-
od. Moore recalled that both writer and composer were attracted to the same
high points in the script with the result that the voice and music sometimes
282 reached a climax at the same time, at which point, the music was 'discreetly
turned down'. Moore (quoted in Snyder, 1968, 130) claimed that this was the
fate of part of the music he liked best, during the mealtime invocation. For
other scenes, the pair worked better together, as in the corn-cutting sequence,
where Moore's dynamic music inspired Bendt's recitative. Moore's music was
scored by Henry Brant, another Lorentz veteran and folk idiom devotee who
performed Moore's flute theme for the 'sunflower' sequence on a ten-cent toy
flute (Ivens, interview with author, February 1976).
Ivens's and Lorentz's tactic of choosing a composer known for his folk
interests paid off. The music was considerably more accessible than Eisler's
intellectual score for 400 Million had been, and this time it was Variety (1940)
rather than The New Masses that praised it. Moore was less interested in creat-
ing structural relations with his music than Eisler; frequently, his themes are
frankly synchronous and programmatic. Ivens (1969, 222-223) remembered,
The music did not have any complicated function. [...] In the music for
Power and the Land when the boy is happy, the theme is happy. We have a
nice flute. When the sun comes up in the picture we have the traditional
sunrise music. I wanted it that way. It was also the best way for Moore to
compose. He is not an experimental composer.
Ivens (1969, 222) also contrasted the role of the score to that of Eisler's score in
400 Million, which has a 'broadening' function. This new musical directness
and simplicity - occasionally unobtrusiveness - corresponds to Ivens's use of
a more unified narrative structure and emotional appeal than previously, his
interest in reaching a mass audience, and, in general terms, the distance he
had come since his avant-garde period. It no doubt also signifies Lorentz's
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
influence, and Ivens's willingness to learn from the success of Lorentz's folk-
based scores in Plow and River, which made a genuine impression on the thir-
ties critical and lay public rather than inspiring brief statements of respect
as had Eisler's. Though Moore's accomplishment does not stand up in retro-
spect to Thomson's music for Lorentz, it is still a creditable accomplishment,
and was creatively used in the editing (in contrast to the indiscriminate wall-
to-wall scoring for Power's companion film, Flaherty's Land). Quite simply, the
score was a discreet contribution to the integrated aesthetic effect that sparked
tributes such as Rotha (1952, 318-319), who considered the film Ivens's best
next to Nieuwe Gronden, 'unique in American documentary', and 'intimate':
'[Ivens's] affectionate approach to people made the picture intensely human.
It was undoubtedly for this reason that Power became one of the few American
documentaries to achieve wide theatrical distribution'.
Rotha notwithstanding, there is seldom any direct correlation between a I 283
film's intense humanity and its chances of wide theatrical distribution. The
correlation between a film's form and its audience was perhaps clearer. It was
reported, for example, that Lorentz's River was 'over the heads' of rural audi-
ences in the South, the people the film was about (Stoney, quoted in MacCann,
1973, 84). There seemed little doubt that the simple narrative form of Pow-
er was largely responsible for the film's success in reaching a mass audience.
Upon the film's premiere in St. Clairsville in October 1940, Variety's (1940)
benediction may have been faintly begrudging, but it was respectful: 'it is
interestingly done and will never have a need in the world for the REA'. By that
point, however, the mass market distribution deal had already been finalised.
RKO, the distributor for the film, saw considerable promise in this follow-up
to the success of the other Lorentz films. The momentum set off by Plow was
still picking up - Paramount had distributed River; City, the hit of the World's
Fair, was being distributed as part of commercial double features; and Colum-
bia had picked up Fight for Life. Furthermore, the Department of Agriculture
was to provide the prints free to interested exhibitors. A report by Mary Losey
([1940] 1979, 191) mentioned 100 prints of the film being shipped by RKO for
first commercial showings in as many as 5000 theatres, and the momentum
was to continue. The Department of Agriculture would claim that six million
viewers in the non-commercial circuit alone saw the film and as late as 1961
the film was shown to 25,532 spectators.25 The pattern of mixed theatrical and
non-theatrical distribution was probably more significant than Ivens realised
in the flush of the excitement of the RKO deal.
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
38. Bip Goes to Town (1941): out takes _ -
from Power and the Land recycled in a
follow-up short about a farmboy's wonder,
here before an electric industrial cream
separator. DVD) frame capture. © CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
The non-theatrical circuit was the distribution site for Power's two short
284 spinoff films, assembled by original assistant editor Lora Hays with Ivens's
long-distance supervision in 1941 after he had moved on to his next project,
and passionately rediscovered and re-circulated in the 21st century by Califor-
nia scholar Ephraim Smith. Both Bip Goes to Town (9) and Worst of Farm Dis-
asters (6) include the stunning footage that had become the unseen stuff of
legend in Ivens scholarship for sixty years, footage that clearly connotes the
inspiration that comes from unscripted documentary challenges. Bip's excur-
sion along with the friendly milk truck driver to a modern electrified creamery
and dairy farm as well as the neighbouring town, presumably shot in its pol-
ished mise-en-scene by Crosby, corroborates the boy's cinematic 'naturalness.'
The film's wide-eyed wonder at the advanced technology at the plant and the
factory farm with their telekinetic milk cans on conveyor belts and four-noz-
zled electric milking machines echoes both Philips-Radio and Komsomol in its
whimsy and lyrical adulation of technology (not to mention Marfa in Eisen-
stein's Staroye i novoye [The General Line, 1929, USSR, 121], though Bip does
not match the Soviet peasant woman's total baptism in cream spurting from
the cream separator, merely tasting some on his finger). Bip becomes a rein-
carnation of Afanaseyev, a hitherto missing link in Ivens's chain of child and
childlike mediators between audience and advanced technology that would
be extended with Pierwsze lata (The First Years, 1949, Bulgaria/Czechoslova-
kia/Poland, 99) and L'Italia non e un paese povero (Italy Is Not a Poor Country,
1960, Italy, 112) and recycled as well in their own way in the final China films.
Bip also include sensuous point-of-view tracking shots of the Ohio rural land-
scape, probably those that Ivens had regretted being cut from Power. 'Disas-
ter' refers to barn fires, and the one that the filmmakers had orchestrated to
show the dangers of non-electrified farms as well as the cooperative energies
of farm communities is a dramatic night-time spectacle indeed. The scene
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
was presumably shot by Ornitz with obvious spontaneity and inspiration, and
its intensity helps explain why the Washington producers were getting nerv-
ous about scenes not provided in the script. Bip has the better sound track,
complete with more childlike flute by Moore and a dramatised voice-over by
Bip (though unaccountably spoken by an actor with a changed teenaged voice
that doesn't match Bip's prepubescent innocence), whereas Worst is content
with a routine and unmodulated newsreel voice-over for its propaganda mes-
sage about electrification. Given the two short films' invisibility in the histori-
cal account for so long it is unlikely that they received much theatrical or even
parallel exposure in the 1940s.
39. Worst ofFarm Disasters (1941): Ivens's
dramatic fire footage veered too far from
the script to be included in Power. DVD
frame capture. © CAPI Films, Paris, and 285
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Back in 1940, it was a moot question whether Ivens's sudden commercial
success with Power as a propagandist for the very government whose neutral-
ity he had challenged in his two previous films had entailed any sacrifice of
personal interests or ideological convictions. With the regard to the former,
Power is ideally amenable to auteurist reading, and has been described as "'an
impression of actuality" which the author has drawn from his subconscious
and filtered across his temperament' (Benoit-Ldvy, 1946, 92). Whether or not
an analysis need be pursued as far as Ivens's subconscious,26 it is undeniable
that there is a very clear thematic continuity between this film and the two
anti-fascist films, particularly Spanish Earth, and the films of the earlier peri-
ods as well. Power continues Ivens's idealised portrait of an agricultural pop-
ulation whose struggle on the land is the crucial stake for society as a whole.
And this down-to-earth populism does not preclude the poetry of the natural
elements: electricity is articulated visually in the film as a means for this pop-
ulation to harness the natural forces of earth, water, and fire, just as the peas-
ants of Spanish Earth and the construction workers of Nieuwe Gronden did in
their own context. Ivens treats the natural backdrop to the Parkinsons' labour
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
with the same lyrical intensity as the backdrop of the earlier films - the land-
scape sensibility of this film is, if anything, even more luxuriously inscribed in
the leisure of peacetime and financial security than in the anti-fascist films.
Even the electrical wiring skims the rolling landscape in harmony with the
natural order.
As for the ideological price entailed by government sponsorship and com-
mercial distribution, this seems no more evident in Power than in the inde-
pendent and marginally distributed films by Ivens and Frontier Films of the
same period. The film displays the same recourse to patriotic imagery and
rhetoric that most Popular Front domestic films like Native Land rely on: the
new electrical poles are called 'liberty trees' and links are made to 'revolution-
ary days' (which does not mean 1917 as it did in Borinage!). Also visible is the
pro-government sentiment that is present in Cumberland and Native Land,
though this is less explicit, paradoxically, than in the two independent films.
286 Perhaps in deference to the ongoing Congressional debate over the US Film
Service's involvement in Democratic propaganda, the farmers' discussion of
the government's role, moving from suspicion to acceptance, was dropped at
the last minute:
- Oh, one of those government things [the REA], Well...
- Now, Fred, I'm as independent as you are. But who's the government?
It's you and me and the rest of us, working together. That's what we've
got it for.
Furthermore, like the other Ivens and Frontier films, the film includes a thin
network of allusions and code words, more discreet this time, that would have
provided enough ideological inferences for initiated viewers. An early undat-
ed statement of possible themes for the REA film, apparently drawn up with
Ivens's participation, placed gentle emphasis on the need for change and on
the tradition of cooperation expressed in the rhetoric of Americanism:
We failed [to keep pace in rural electrification] because our free insti-
tutions were of such nature that they would not and could not without
change permit the continued development of talent and a will for making
things that are unquestionably an American heritage. Our free institu-
tions were not always of this nature. They became such. Change was nec-
essary. More was needed. More is now needed fast. Blame, if any, is not
ours alone. (Ivens n.d., unattributed typescript, JIA)
The document goes on to allude to the traditional farm spirit of cooperation
and the gap between rural and urban standards. In the film itself, the talk of
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
changing institutions has disappeared, but the emphasis on cooperatives is
still present. Rotha (1952, 318) picked out the code word immediately: 'Ivens
inserted a corn-cutting sequence [...] which hymned neighbourly cooperation
(read cooperative)'. Another suggestive remark to ensure that spectators would
not lose the point is that 'One man can't change that alone'.27 Ivens's originally
intended theme of criticism of the private utilities companies also surfaces in
a few oblique references: over a scene featuring Hazel's knuckles vigorously
scrubbing a garment on a washboard, the spectator is told that 'here on the
farm, where it is needed most, electricity is hard to get. Power companies want
a profit... seems wrong somehow'. Similar allusions remained in the 'meet-
ing' scene after several more explicit ones had already been cut: 'But the pow-
er company says... You can see their lines go cross-country. See 'em in the sky.
But they don't bring the power down to the farm. Says it costs too much - Say a
lot of things... Power company won't do it. But I hear there's a new kind of pow-
er. Government'. Ironically, it was this cooperation theme that Ivens recalls I 287
one REA official wanting to emphasise more, but the restrictions on length
prevented Ivens from including the additional material he had filmed that
already provided this emphasis, namely the collective fire-fighting sequence
(Ivens, 1969, 195).
In summary, though an implied text of social criticism was present for
those disposed to excavate it, the overall tone of the film is positive and concil-
iatory, differing from other Popular Front films only in its almost total absence
of ambiguous forces of villainy: even the image of pigs consuming milk, an
image of criminal waste that inspired angry denunciation in Nieuwe Gronden,
becomes in Power only faintly tragic and even mildly comic. Ultimately, Power
seemed to imply that mass distribution and state sponsorship were no more
a factor than Popular Front policies in restricting the bounds of substantive
comment and radical discourse (Ornitz, personal communication, November
1980).
The mass access that greeted Power in late 1940 hid the fact that history
had once again bypassed Ivens. As Jacobs (1979, 183) remarks, the late New
Deal films as they were released in the forties seemed more like reminders of
the themes of the thirties than works of current relevance. This remark applies
to not only Land, never released upon its completion for this very reason,
and Native Land, which even the CPUSA declined to help distribute in 1942,
because the theme of domestic struggle was not appropriate during a time of
united war effort (Hurwitz, quoted in Campbell 1978, 366), but also most oth-
er films on domestic subjects that appeared during the months of 1940 and
1941 prior to the US entry into the war. Though Power received Honourable
Mention in the annual National Board of Review ranking in 1940, there were
surprising demurrers among critics, of whom several found the film inferior
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
to Ivens's earlier work (Todd, 1941; Meltzer, 1940). The left, having abandoned
their honeymoon with the New Deal after the strategic about-face of August
1939, was uncharacteristically cold, with The New Masses reminding readers
that the REA had been completely forgotten in the military build-up that was
pushing the US unwillingly towards war.
A more serious omen for the future of the mass-distributed documentary,
however, was the fatal challenge to the whole concept of public film sponsor-
ship posed by the Republican-dominated Congress in July 1940 when it abol-
ished the US Film Service, less than two years after its inauguration, and three
months before Power's premiere. The release arrangements were carried out
by the REA itself after Lorentz's resignation, so that this film itself was not
directly affected. There may be some truth to Snyder's (1968, 169) implication
that a more speedy completion of Power might have forestalled this political
288 coup by anti-New Deal politicians, but the abolition of public film sponsor-
ship was actually in line with the ideological tide of the post-war era that was
in sight even in the months before Pearl Harbour. A similar fate would befall
state-sponsored filmmaking in England in the early fifties, leaving Canada as
the only major non-socialist country engaged in what had seemed, a decade
earlier, the wave of the future.
The abolition of the Film Service not only weakened the production base
for documentaries on domestic themes, and suddenly demonstrated the gen-
eral precariousness of commercial distribution as an outlet for documentary,
it also left the field of sponsorship to the private foundations, corporations,
and the military. The new patrons, as Ivens was to find out shortly, were con-
siderably more temperamental as sponsors than distant government bureau-
crats, and more ideologically sensitive than the idealists of the New Deal still
enthroned in Washington. Ivens's subsequent enterprise with a foundation
sponsor was to prove abortive, so that only one of his projects over the next
five years, the National Film Board's Action Stations, achieved the commercial
distribution that Power had appeared to confirm as a coming trend. It was no
accident that that one project was a state-sponsored film oriented towards
the war effort. Throughout the rest of the war, only the war propaganda films
received mainstream distribution, so that when the war ended, documentary
once again would be forced to revert to its earlier marginal status of political
and art house distribution, independent financing, and sporadic critical pres-
tige.
Ivens's next sponsor, the Sloan Foundation, had been a relative latecom-
er to the documentary film business towards the beginning of the War. This
body was a foundation for economic research set up by the General Motors
tycoon Alfred P. Sloan under the directorship of his brother Harold. For the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
purpose of film production, the Foundation affiliated with New York Univer-
sity's Educational Film Institute, with which Van Dongen was involved. The
first Sloan project was a film about automation entitled The Machine: Mas-
ter or Slave? (Walter Niebuhr, 1941, 14), which was, according to Willard Van
Dyke (interview with author, 1975), a 'dreadful didactic lecture accompanied
by photographs'.28 The Foundation then hired a Harvard economist, Spencer
Pollard, to oversee a proposed series of films dramatising economic subjects
and principles. Three such films were undertaken early in 1940 and complet-
ed quickly, and a fourth, New Frontiers, of which Ivens was designated director,
was launched shortly thereafter.
The first of the new films was Valley Town: A Study of Machines and Men
(1940, 28), by Nykino co-founder Van Dyke, a new treatment of the automa-
tion theme that had been unsuccessfully handled in the first Sloan effort.
The subject was approached through focusing on the human consequences
of automation in a Pennsylvania steel town. The other two films in the first I 289
group continued the Depression interest in Appalachia but reflected a new
emphasis on child education as a solution to that area's pressing problems:
And So They Live (1940, 24), an indictment of an outdated school in a back-
ward mountain community (Barsam, 1973, 113), co-directed by Julian Roff-
man, an WFPL veteran, and Ferno, making his independent entry into the US
documentary movements; and The Children Must Learn (1940, 13), also by Van
Dyke, an account of an experiment in education in the Kentucky mountains.
All three films involved important contributions by veterans of Frontier Films
and other radical groups, including Irving Lerner, editor of Valley Town, Ben
Maddow, its co-writer (along with Van Dyke and Pollard), and Marc Blitzstein,
its composer.
Valley Town turned out to attract the most attention of the three films, not
only from critics and public, but from the sponsor as well. If Harold Sloan had
any suspicions about having hired a hotbed of radicals, these suspicions did
not come to the surface until he saw Valley Town in the spring of 1940 when
Ivens had already begun filming for New Frontiers. According to Van Dyke's
recollection, Sloan centred his distrust on a folk singer who appears in the
film, whose voice he considered untrained, and who, in his opinion, made a
veiled reference to the USSR in her song: 'far away from here there's a place'. At
this point, he fired Pollard, forced Van Dyke to change the ending of the film,
and cancelled Ivens's project. Using the war as an excuse, he maintained that
the new international situation was now a more urgent topic.
New Frontiers was based on a conception of US history as a continuous
conquest of new frontiers, geographical, technical, and social, an idea coming
from Sloan himself. If geographical frontiers no longer existed, the social ones
had come to the fore. Ivens accepted the commission not only because of the
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
generosity of the contract and its relative freedom to develop his conception
of the personalised documentary, but also because of a thematic continuity
with his most recent work. The emphasis in Power had also, at least in theory,
been on the necessity for change in American society and institutions in order
to adapt to the contemporary age. It was also, of course, a domestic subject,
much in demand among communists after August 1939!
Ivens embarked on his research for New Frontiers, with university assis-
tants compiling charts and files on the evolution of American frontiers and
social problems. Ivens chose the Denver area for the setting, undoubtedly for
the quality of its landscape, and hired Floyd Crosby as camera operator - their
second project together. The outline proposed a semi-documentary narrative
idea much more complex than Power and involving two main characters. One
of the characters was left over from Power, the idea of having one of the elder
Parkinson sons preparing in disillusionment to leave the farm for the city
290 I seeking work and a future. The other character would be a young New York
intellectual who has abandoned his fiancee and his technical institute also to
look for work and new horizons. This concept had the same didactic symmetry
and symbolic signification as the stories of Julian and of the Parkinson family,
but interwove two narrative lines both based on mise-en-scene. A crucial differ-
ence was that these characters were to be more properly fictional, not based
on 'found' subjects who corresponded to the needs of the film.
The story was to make concrete use of the region chosen, emphasising its
past history as a mining region through the exploration of ghost towns and
contrasting this with images of renovation focused in a new uranium mine.
The opening images were to stress the desolation of the landscape, the desert
and rock and wind. In one of the two sequences actually shot, the two men
met, one on a hill and the other in a valley, and discussed their respective
hopes for happiness, extending their voices through cupped hands. This styl-
ised non-naturalistic touch in the narrative seems to represent what might
have become a surreal or fantastic orientation to the story. However, this new
direction in Ivens's career would be pursued only intermittently over the next
half-century.29
The project was abruptly cancelled by telegram after the shooting of two
sequences. It seems, however, that even before Pollard's dismissal, there was a
disagreement between the filmmakers and the sponsors. A letter from Pollard
complained that Ivens's conception was much broader than the one proposed
by the institute:
All of our pictures except the Frontier picture must say that the specific
remedies they suggest depend for their effectiveness upon the return of a
fairly well-maintained prosperity. They do not say how this prosperity can
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
come about nor on what it could be based. I had thought of the Frontier
picture as filling this gap for all our films completed before it appears.
[...] This means that the film would pose the problem of unemployment as
the location of the country's frontier....
It seems to me that the outline which you and Mr. Rosenfelt worked
out constitutes a different picture from the one I have been thinking of.
Your outline speaks about a better life for Americans and how new social
services can help bring it about. It looks to the longer run and to the
higher goal but is somewhat vaguer and less urgent than a film about the
frontier of unemployment would be. (Pollard, letter to Ivens, 24 March
1940, quoted in Ivens, 235, emphasis Ivens)30
The intended subject of the project was economic symptoms, but Ivens had
wanted to explore causes and solutions in a profound and comprehensive way.
Ideological tensions had clearly been beneath the surface from the start. I 291
In any case, Ivens extricated himself from the project with a minimum of
financial loss. In a lawsuit, he recovered his own expenses and 90% of the pro-
posed salaries for himself and his crew, bitterly reminded that work with pri-
vate sponsors has its own particular problems. He touched upon these in the
informal manual he was shortly to write (Ivens, 1969, 216), where he focused
on the sanitising impact that the gas company sponsorship had had on the
British GPO Unit's films like HousingProblems (Arthur Elton and E.H. Anstey,
1935, 13).
The Sloan fiasco was also a reminder of more general ideological currents
in the wind. The balance that allowed the open presence of leftists in cultur-
al fields throughout the thirties was becoming increasingly delicate. As early
as 1938 the first of many House Un-American Activities Committees (HUAC)
under Representative Martin Dies began harassing communists and sympa-
thisers, and ferreting out leftist influence in unions and the arts. By 1939, a
deathblow had been dealt to the Federal Theater Project and the whole WPA
program was endangered.31 Joined by grand juries in 1940, the anti-commu-
nist initiatives continued; Dies arrived in Hollywood that year and subpoe-
naed Fredric March and his wife, as well as other Hollywood progressives, and
came close to destroying their careers (Caute, 1978, 617). The US entry into
the war would temporarily restrain the HUAC momentum. But the Dies har-
assment turned out to be only mild hints of what lay in store for virtually every
American whose name ever appeared in the credits of an Ivens film.32 Even
during the war years, Ivens's career ran into snags for which concrete ideo-
logical motivation cannot be discounted, from the refusal by the Netherlands
government-in-exile of his proffered services in 194133 to his dismissal from
the US Army Signal Corps in 1944.
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
Ivens soon got involved in another project after the New Frontiers can-
cellation. This was to be about Bolivia and was drawn up with a Hollywood
colleague, the Communist scriptwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, later one of
HUAC's favourite targets, whose credits included three George Cukor films,
Philadelphia Story (1940, 112), A Woman's Face (1941, 106), and Keeper of the
Flame (1942, too), an anti-fascist political melodrama. Stewart was president
of Hollywood's Anti-Nazi League that had suddenly become the League for
Democratic Action the previous year. The intended producer was the Rocke-
feller Committee on Latin American Affairs in collaboration with the Bolivian
government:
The purpose of the film was to show the people of Bolivia to the United
States in such a way as to promote better economic and cultural relations
and to counteract the popular misconceptions which the United States
292 I may have about the people of your country. (Ivens, letter to the Bolivian
Minister, 19 January 1941, quoted in Ivens, 1969, 236)
In taking up this project, Ivens and Stewart were very much in step with the
currents of the period between the outbreak of war and Pearl Harbour. In
addition to the embargo on pro-war sentiment among the left, which encour-
aged interest in the Western Hemisphere, there were larger factors at play.
With links to Europe cut off, both Hollywood and the State Department were
becoming interested in Latin America. The former, in order to replace lost
European markets, imported Carmen Miranda and stepped up productions
in Latin America; the latter appointed Nelson Rockefeller in August 1940 as
Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs with the idea of countering Nazi prop-
aganda and to promote the idea of joint defence plans. The State Department
was particularly worried about pro-Nazi sentiment in Argentina and Bolivia
and was startled at a narrowly thwarted Nazi coup in Uruguay in June 1940
(Guerrant, 1950, 149).
The Rockefeller Committee was greatly interested in film. In addition to
its sponsorship of a Disney goodwill tour in 1941 (which led to the 1943 mixed
animation-actuality features Saludos Amigos (Wilfred Jackson et al., 1942, 42)
and The Three Caballeros (Norman Ferguson et al., 1945, 71), the Committee
also supported several documentary projects. Of these, Van Dyke's The Bridge
(1942, 30), a study of South American economic and communications rela-
tions with the US, was the most notable one brought to completion; produced
by the Foreign Policy Association, the film was also supported by the ever-pres-
ent Sloan Foundation. The left was somewhat skeptical about the sudden
interest in Latin America. The New Masses intoned that 'if the Good Neighbour
Policy didn't exist, Hollywood would have to invent it [...] it's only logical that
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
the Americas be given a good going over' (Ryan, 1941, 28). All the same, leftists
joined the trend. The left press drew attention to the rivalry of foreign powers
for Bolivia's mineral resources and of miners' strikes the previous fall (Baker,
1941). One prestigious project on the left concerned Mexico: Kline's and Ham-
mid's The Forgotten Village (1941, 67), a semi-fictional documentary scripted
by John Steinbeck about medical care in a remote Mexican village. Ivens's
Bolivian initiative then was a reasonable one, a relatively safe enterprise for a
filmmaker whose ideological credentials had just cost him several months of
wasted energy and whose expertise in anti-fascist warfare was for the moment
unmarketable.
The project was to be filmed on location, the letter continued, and based,
not surprisingly, on Ivens's concept of personalized documentary:
The film could narrow down to a few people, for instance, I could show
a young Bolivian engineer who studied and received his degree in the I 293
United States.
Coming back to his native country he works in the mines. Through his
studies he is of course well aware of the inadequacy of the technique and
he tries to apply the new methods he has learned and he develops new
technological improvements for the exploitation of the mine. We can
show him during this work and with his family, interweaving the dramat-
ic development of the story during his working hours as well as at home.
Parallel to this part of the story will be developed the necessity of hemi-
spheric collaboration between the American republics.
The focusing down on one individual and his family offers oppor-
tunities to portray the life of the Bolivian family in a sympathetic and
personal way. I have used this method in my work and find that it carries
more conviction and makes the story richer than the exclusive use of the
kaleidoscopic and generalized method. (Ivens, letter to the Bolivian min-
ister, 19 January 1941, quoted in Ivens, 1969, 236-237)
The film was also to make extensive use of the Bolivian setting, including Lake
Titicaca (which was also visited by Donald Duck in Saludos) and of the Bolivi-
an cultural heritage: the Tiahuanaco ruins were to be featured and the open-
ing of the film was to be based on 'an old Inca legend to show Bolivia as the
cradle of the Inca civilization and its historic background' (Ivens, letter to the
Bolivian minister, 19 January 1941, quoted in Ivens, 1969, 236-237). The angle
that Ivens hoped would work with the State Department was the stress on the
importance of Latin American resources for 'hemispheric defence'. Ivens also
emphasised to the Bolivian embassy that his method involved adjusting his
film outline in keeping with the location and people of the proposed setting.
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
However both proposed sponsors wanted to see a more detailed outline and
the correspondence continued into 1941 to no avail. The Ivens project may
simply have lost out in competitive bidding: Julien Bryan, the author of the
anti-fascist Siege (1940, 1o) just after the outbreak of war, succeeded in getting
a commission from the Rockefeller Office that same year to produce a series
of 20 documentary shorts to acquaint US audiences with South America. This
included a comprehensive film on the entire region and films on specific coun-
tries including Bolivia, and a later Bolivian project on the Aymara Indians, The
High Plain, Bolivia (1943, 20), co-directed with Jules Bucher (Rotha, 1952, 326).
Would the Office have commissioned an additional, possibly redundant pro-
ject with such an ambitious series already under way? However, it is not possi-
ble to discount ideological factors either in the failure of the project. Bryan's
left-liberalism and American citizenship would have been considerably more
palatable to the State Department than Ivens's and Stewart's well known polit-
294 I ical affiliation and Ivens's expatriate status.
These two demoralising and wasteful brushes with official and corporate
sponsorship did not deter Ivens from continuing to work with such sponsors
throughout the rest of the war - with very low returns: the opportunities for
independent documentary production had all but dried up during those years.
Ivens's remaining efforts would be devoted to working with government agen-
cies, and, towards the end of the war, with the Hollywood studios - with even
less success.
In 1942, during a period of desperation and indebtedness, he made one
further attempt at a private commission, a publicity film for the J. Walter
Thompson agency on behalf of their client, Shell Oil. The commission, accept-
ed following three months of unemployment, was undertaken and completed
quickly during six weeks in Shell's San Francisco labs, according to a strict-
ly controlled, pre-written scenario. Ivens (interview with author, 1978) would
disavow the film, OilforAladdin's Lamp (1941, USA, 21), inasmuch as he con-
tributed neither to the script nor the editing. Nevertheless the film does bear
evidence of his personal visual style, all the more so since he was able to hire
Floyd Crosby as camera operator for their third and final collaboration. A pub-
licity document promoting the company's petroleum derivatives, mostly the
plastics and substitutes of various kinds that had suddenly taken on strategic
wartime importance, the film is strangely reminiscent of Philips-Radio with
its fields of whirling machinery and its scenes of technicians and chemists
posing over their tubes and vats in respectful low-angle medium-shot. The
visual energy of the film testifies that Ivens did not approach even this project
half-heartedly and perhaps even enjoyed the immersion in the machine-film
aesthetics rekindled by the script.34 A 1940 update of Aladdin with such war-
time references as the military application of petroleum by-products excised
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
would circulate as an orphan film on the internet in the 21st century, but
Ivens's and Crosby's flair is still unmistakable (notwithstanding sexist silli-
ness around Shell materials in a cone-shaped bra clinging to a glamorous and
magically stripped housewife).
40. OilforAladdin's Lamp (1941): A wartime
commission from Shell included echoes
of Philips-Radio machine aesthetics as
well as a dramatic discovery of petroleum
byproducts in brassieres. Youtube frame
capture. © Shell/CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
295
Meanwhile, Los Angeles had gradually become Ivens's home base and he
became integrated into the Hollywood left community, which was absorbing
increasing numbers of East Coast radicals, and the overlapping community of
European expatriates that included past and future co-workers Eisler, Brecht,
Renoir, Pozner, and Salka Viertel.35
Soon after Pearl Harbour, Ivens had the opportunity to engage formally in
an activity that he had always pursued informally, teaching, frequently taken
up by independent filmmakers, then as now, when their projects were in the
wings. The University of Southern California hired him as an instructor in the
Cinema Section of its Faculty of Arts and Science. Ivens thus systematizsed
the apprentice relationship of his earlier work with Van Dongen and Ferno.
His biweekly lectures were on the principles of documentary film and the rela-
tions between film and the other arts. His lecture notes include references to
his compatriot, the landscapist and satirist, Bruegel, as well as to Holbein,
Durer, and the frequently invoked Goya. He also taught a practical course in
16mm production.
It may have been this opportunity for self-evaluation as well as the forced
idleness of part-time employment that triggered the undertaking of his auto-
biography at this time, written together with Leyda, his old friend from the
USSR and New York. Parts of this work were later published in TheaterArts in
1946 at the point when it became clear that the intended publisher, Harcourt,
was no longer interested, probably because of the ideological fallout of the
Indonesian episode (Leyda, interview with author, December 1975). The full
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
publication of the work was delayed until Leyda resurrected it in East Berlin in
1969 under the title of The Camera andI.
Ivens would return later in the war to USC as his career continued to move
through stops and starts. His later teaching focused on the history of the doc-
umentary in England, USSR, Canada, and the US, the only societies, accord-
ing to his notes, that understood the role of documentary in the anti-fascist
struggle. He passed on his convictions to his students about the new personal-
ised documentary style, based on work with non-professional actors, but also
emphasised the need not to be bound by traditional techniques and the need
for new styles and possibilities. In the Soviet part of the survey, given special
emphasis, he evoked the work of Vertov, Shub, Eisenstein, and Pudovkin, and
blamed the relative underdevelopment of the American documentary on the
Hollywood monopoly - his comparison was perhaps justified by the evidence
of renewed Soviet vigour in the stream of newsreel features about the Russian
296 I defence arriving on American screens throughout the war. Another theme was
derived from his convictions about the role of artists in the ongoing struggle,
the importance of the 'clarity' and 'personal quality' they could add to the pub-
lic perception of the war effort. Such ideas were continuously being discussed
and refined by radical artists engaged in the united war effort. As the war pro-
gressed, among the practical exercises tackled in Ivens's courses was the mak-
ing of air-raid shelter films.36 In the meantime, the dark summer of 1941 had
brought him into direct contact with the vigour of Soviet documentary.
OUR RUSSIAN FRONT
The German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 was the event that finally drew
Ivens and his fellow communists back into the centre of the international
combat. Once again, for the third time in five years, Ivens initiated a film to
urge the US out of its isolation, entitled OurRussian Front (1941, 38).
Roosevelt's initial reaction to the invasion had been guarded, but as
the early part of the summer progressed, US support for the Soviets became
increasingly clear and Roosevelt began moving towards expanding Lend-
Lease eligibility to include the Soviets. Public opinion, however, was not
strongly in support of US aid, particularly among Catholics, and pro-isolation-
ist sentiment was still strong.37 Nevertheless, short Soviet newsreels began
appearing in August to reinforce growing American interest in the eastern
front. As the Soviets suffered serious reverses in late August and September,
and as Leningrad appeared on the verge of surrender, the idea of a feature or
medium-length film to bolster American public support for aid to the USSR
became increasingly urgent.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Together with Artkino, the official US distributor of Soviet films, Ivens
set up the project, gathering together a large supply of Soviet newsreels and
recruiting three influential Hollywood directors for consultation: Lewis Mile-
stone, a stalwart of the Hollywood liberal left who later became one of the
'Unfriendly Nineteen' in 1947; and Anatole Litvak and William Wyler, both lib-
erals who would soon become involved in the Hollywood war effort as direc-
tors of The Battle ofRussia (1944, 83) and Memphis Belle (1944, 45), respectively.
Ivens and Milestone then went ahead with the project in Hollywood, officially
designated as co-directors. Milestone's co-billing seems to have been for the
usual tactical reasons rather than in recognition of a principal role, since he
was primarily involved in consultation in the conception phase and in the
verification of the finished product (Ivens, interview with author, February
1976). This tactic was to work: the film was commonly considered a Milestone
work and even The New Masses would refer to the film as a Hollywood product
(Davidson, 1942, 29).38 297
The film was to be entirely compilation: the Soviet material proved to be
astonishingly rich in view of the State Department's original expectation of a
Soviet defeat within three months (Dallek, 1979, 278). The material had been
taken at the front and behind the lines, and emphasised military prepared-
ness, civilian support, and industrial production. It had been shot by Soviet
directors who had all been mobilised in the earliest days of the war, including
Roman Karmen who had once helped fix Ivens's camera on the Spanish front
(Ivens, quoted in Aranda 1975, 119).
Around the Soviet material, the plan was to add an American framework
introducing the film and promoting US aid. Originally this was to have includ-
ed footage of the visit of the Secretary of Commerce, Harry Hopkins, to Mos-
cow in July to assure Stalin of US sympathy. As events overtook the progress
on the film, the introduction was updated to depict the September visit of
Roosevelt's deputy, Averell Harriman, and the British Minister of Supply, Lord
Beaverbrook, when the schedule for one billion dollars worth of Lend-Lease
aid to the Soviets had been worked out (Dallek, 1979, 295). The prologue of
the film was finalised to include Harriman's speech reporting his visit and
his estimate of the Soviet effort, together with a voice-only recording of Roo-
sevelt's speech on the same occasion: 'We have in amazement witnessed the
Russian oppose the Nazi war, oppose that war machine for four long months
and more. The epic stand of Britain, of China, of Russia receive the full sup-
port of the free peoples of the Americas'.
As the situation continued to change, an early plan to include a drama-
tisation of the actual invasion and the insertion of Molotov's famous speech
informing Soviets of the invasion was abandoned since it was no longer cur-
rent.
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
As the film neared readiness, events overtook it in a far more drastic man-
ner with the US entry into the War in December. The filmmakers went back
to the Moviola and added some more last-minute revisions to the prologue as
well as a montage peroration evoking the three Allies, the three flags super-
imposed, and describing the War, accurately now, as 'the United States' war'
and 'the world's fight against Hitler'. The film was ready for release on 11 Feb-
ruary, with the premiere under the auspices of the Russian War Relief. It thus
became the first American film of the war effort, only two months after Pearl
Harbour, and a general model for many of the series to follow.
For the soundtrack for Front, the filmmakers were joined by other Holly-
wood liberals recruited by Ivens for the purpose. The commentary was writ-
ten by Elliot Paul, a novelist responsible for the Mickey Finn series, a book
on the Spanish Civil War, several screenplays (including one co-authored with
Stewart), and a later co-writing credit for the English version of a subsequent
298 | Russian film on the Soviet war effort, Razgrom nemetskikh voysk pod Moskvoy
(Moscow Strikes Back, Ilya Kopalin and Leonid Varlamov, 1942, 55). The text
was recorded by Walter Huston, who was evidently intended to bring pres-
tige to the film but who also brought considerable talent: Huston went on to
become a major figure in the Second Front movement, narrating most of the
Capra films for the US Army, and starring in Hollywood's two major pro-Sovi-
et films of the war period, Mission to Moscow (Michael Curtiz, 1943, 124) and
Milestone's film of a Lillian Hellman script, The North Star (1943, 108).
The compilation form had been chosen for Front primarily because of the
extreme urgency of the project, as with Spain in Flames five years earlier. The
difference was that the footage available was of high quality and obviously
sympathetic, and, what is more, taken largely in a style familiar to Ivens, and
thus easily edited. Not only did the footage pursue the same theme that Ivens
had pioneered in Spain, the essential link between the civilian front and the
military front, but it employed the same personalised dramatic approach for
all but the most inaccessible combat images. The common parentage of the
two approaches was vividly apparent. The Soviet newsreel material was full of
short narrative vignettes, shot for the most part with documentary mise-en-
scene, showing Soviet citizens and soldiers at close quarters doing their part
for the national defence. The narrative sequences varied in length from a few
shots to an episode of several minutes complete with synchronised sound.
Ivens incorporated these sequences whole into the film, retaining for the most
part their original narrative shape.
Only one of the longer sequences with direct sound was retained, a scene
showing a decorated pilot, Lieutenant Taleikin, telling his 'old-fashioned
Russian mother' and his 'girlfriend' about an exploit in which he rammed an
enemy bomber. The sequence is marred not so much by the 'newsreel' stiff-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
ness of the set-up and the delivery of the dialogue, but by the intrusive over-
stated commentary, which is not content to paraphrase the Russian speech of
the pilot and his mother but insists as well on redundant descriptions of the
scene. All the same the palpable vitality of the characters, deepened by direct
sound despite their stiffness, makes this a highlight of the film. Another such
sequence, not used, depicted the reading of an unfinished letter of a soldier as
he is buried in his native village with his family and fiancee present. Only the
funeral sequence was retained, probably for reasons of length, and the soldier
is not given the concrete identity present in the original material.
41. OurRussian Front (1941): a rare synch-
sound 'personalised' sequence showing
pilot Lieutenant Taleikin telling his 'old-
fashioned Russian mother' and 'girlfriend'
about his exploits. DVD frame capture.
© Fastforward Music/CAPI Films, Paris, 299
and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Some of the more successful of the non-synchronous narrative episodes cen-
tre on civil defence in the villages. The rural exteriors give the mise-en-scene
a characteristic vividness. One such sequence shows boys patrolling a wheat
field on the lookout for enemy planes and paratroopers, walking through a
field as if engaged in games, and then mounting a lookout platform. Anoth-
er shows a whole village's reaction to an air raid, followed by a successful
anti-aircraft skirmish, all shown in terms of conventional principles of spa-
tial-temporal continuity. This and a number of other extended episodes
appear to have been synthesised by the American editors beyond the basic
small-unit editing that was already present in the footage. It is unlikely that
the civil defence drill and the air battle were intended as contiguous events.
But they function effectively in that order nonetheless: the alarm is sounded
by means of a bell; boys ride off the workhorses to the woods and others drive
off the dairy cows; peasants mount and receive rifles before galloping off in
pursuit of possible enemy paratroopers; others are shown on the lookout for
planes that inevitably arrive, intercut synthetically with the other images;
an anti-aircraft battery emerges lyrically from its sunflower camouflage and
joins in shot/countershot combat with its prey; the plane falls and its wreck-
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
age is surrounded by curious but impassive villagers. Another narrative epi-
sode based on intricate parallel cutting depicts a blood bank operation in
somewhat more personalised terms, linking women behind the lines with
soldiers on the front. However, the compilers were not completely successful
in giving the Soviet material a personalised dimension. An early draft of the
script called for the soundtrack identification of each of the figures in indi-
vidual terms, but this strategy was dropped. In the final version, only Lieuten-
ant Taleikin remains identified, probably on the assumption that a stream
of Slavic names would not clarify the dramatic thrust of the film for Ameri-
can spectators. Much of the footage dealing with the industrial contribution
to the war effort is less personal than the rural material and undoubtedly
required more intervention on the part of Ivens and his editor, Marcel Cra-
venne (another European exile in Hollywood). Much of the industrial materi-
al is connected on thematic and purely kinetic principles rather than strictly
300 I in terms of narrative or identifiable characters.
In summary, the basic principle that informs the editing of Front, Ivens's
first full compilation film (if one doesn't count the V\VC exercises of more
than a decade earlier), is one that sounds less novel in the age of post-direct
cinema than it was at the time: the structuring of compilation filmmaking
around available resources. In other words, the film is shaped by what is visi-
ble in the raw materials rather than an independently conceived scenario to be
illustrated. Leyda (1964, 63-64) traces this principle to Shub's pioneering films
and credits Van Dongen with developing it in much of Ivens's work, despite
the fact that she was not formally involved with Front. We have already seen
that this principle dominated the approach for editing Ivens's two anti-fascist
films, both shot without any filmmaker consultation of the rushes during the
shoot, and that Van Dongen had strong opinions on the 'illustrated scenar-
io' approach. In any case, the editor of Front was more fortunate than others
because the bulk of the narrative material was pre-edited in a form more or
less suitable for the present version, and the rest of the material was richly
amenable to compilation treatment. When the Capra-Litvak compilation The
Battle ofRussia (1943, USA, 83) was later criticised for the poverty of its imag-
es, it is likely that the 'illustrated scenario' method was at fault as much as the
scarcity of raw material (Bohn, 1968, 105).
Soviet newsreels and frontline feature coverage were plentiful in North
America and justly famous for their visual quality and for the daring of their
operators. In the National Film Board's Women are Warriors (Jane Marsh,
1942, Canada, 14), where British, Soviet, and Canadian actuality footage is
arranged in three distinct units, it is the Soviet images that stand out for their
dynamic quality (as well as for the active non-auxiliary role of women in the
war effort). Most of the Soviet material had been conceived for domestic civil-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
ian morale purposes first and for military training second, if at all; the reverse,
significantly, was true of the later Capra films. But this civilian morale goal was
perfectly compatible with Ivens's purpose of encouraging US public support
of the besieged ally, since the same personal, populist-oriented, images of the
courage of ordinary individuals, would serve either function.
The US public image of the Soviets was not, however, after two decades of
anti-Bolshevik propaganda, automatically disposed to Ivens's message, and a
special delicacy of approach was necessary. This can be seen, for example, in a
scene showing Stalin's celebrated 'scorched earth' speech to the Soviet people.
The address is shown being appreciated by a large, synthetic audience, listen-
ing attentively; the ensemble is depicted in impressive pans, and then broken
up into medium and close-up views of small groups in profile that catch stern
expressions and hardened faces. As the speech progresses, Stalin's directives
are vividly illustrated on the screen, as if the listeners are responding even as
he speaks, the voice continuing off-screen: I 301
Show no fear in the fight. In case of forced retreat of the army units, all
rolling stock must be evacuated; the enemy must not be left with a sin-
gle railway car, not a pound of grain nor a gallon of fuel. What cannot
be withdrawn must be destroyed. Guerilla units must be formed. Blow
up roads and bridges. Cut the telephone and telegraph wires. Set fire
to forests, stores and transports. Leave nothing but scorched earth. In
occupied regions, the enemy and his accomplices must be hounded at
every step. This war is not an ordinary war. It is a war of the entire Russian
people. Not only to eliminate the danger hanging over our heads, but to
aid all European peoples groaning under the yoke of fascism. In this war
of liberation, we shall not be alone.
As the speech concludes thus, the images of flames and resistance recede and
the image-track returns to the view of the crowd of listeners. The weight given
here as elsewhere in the film is not on the monolithic Soviet leadership, but
on a spontaneous upsurge of popular patriotism and sacrifice. Other images
of the Soviet brass were in fact deleted from earlier versions. This de-emphasis
of the Soviet leadership, in sharp contrast to US treatment of, say, Churchill, is
undoubtedly in deference to the US public's distrust of Stalin; it was well-con-
sidered in view of the later controversy provoked by Warner Brothers' unques-
tioning hagiography of Stalin in Mission to Moscow.
Other gestures to placate American skepticism are more explicit. The
choice of Huston, with his all-American Lincolnesque aura is one. The spot-
lights on Roosevelt and Harriman are others, with the latter's credentials and
credibility underlined: 'not a foreign dreamer with his head in the clouds, he is
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
W.A. Harriman, American executive and business man, chairman of the board
of directors of the Union Pacific railroad'.
Though it is questionable whether such credentials would actually inspire
trust in the core of Ivens's traditional audience, they presumably spoke to the
mainstream constituency addressed in the first winter of the US involvement
of the war. Furthermore, the excerpts of Harriman's speech accent visual evi-
dence, what he himself witnessed in Moscow of Russian preparedness and
determination. The commentary adds to the assurances by underlining the
film's own veracity on several occasions. The civilian corpses shown briefly
in the prologue were not 'prearranged', and the record is admittedly 'incom-
plete' because of the impossibility of 'peacetime photography'. The film's rep-
etition of the customary Soviet 'nationalities' theme can also be seen in this
light. The Ukrainian nationality of one village defender is accented, perhaps
as an appeal to US minorities. By the same token, a vignette involving an Esto-
302 I nian captain was dropped from an earlier version, wisely so, since the memory
of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States was still fresh. This latter omis-
sion is actually part of a larger pattern of ideological discretion in the film,
with which the reader is already familiar in other forms. The old Popular Front
policy of 'self-censorship' becomes translated in Front into an avoidance of
any discussion of socialism or any reference to the ideological principles at
stake in the invasion of the USSR. The villages depicted may or may not be
collective farms - the question is avoided. Furthermore, not surprisingly, the
question of religion (one of Capra's favourite themes was to depict the war as
a defence of freedom of religion) is not raised. Undoubtedly the filmmakers
wanted to avoid the trouble that Roosevelt had got into on this issue when he
had attempted to justify the Lend-Lease program to his Catholic constituents
in terms of Soviet freedom of worship (Dallek, 1979, 297).
In the depiction of the enemy, the filmmakers show the same ideologi-
cal finesse, profiting from the earlier lessons of Spanish Earth and 400 Million.
The parade of Axis leaders that would soon be familiar in the Capra series ('if
you ever meet them, don't hesitate') is totally missing in Front (Bohn, 1968,
145). Aside from a few references to Hitler on the soundtrack, Ivens does
not dwell on the diabolical treachery of the enemy (as Capra would do), but
instead treats the invaders in a manner reminiscent of Spanish Earth with its
begrudging respect for the Moroccan mercenaries and its pity for the Italian
dead. Front shows a group of pathetic German prisoners, described in classic
internationalist terms as 'pawns on one side of the chess game', as 'men and
boys who will have time to think it over, think of the words their Ftihrer said,
the promises he made, the homes they have burnt, the wheat they have tram-
pled, and the hunger and grief they have sown'.
The Nazi dead are also shown, but without comment and with consider-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
able restraint. One short personal vignette is shown of a Nazi deserter com-
ing over to the Red Army lines with the aid of a 'passport' dropped from the
air - abridged from the much longer, more dramatised version available from
Artkino. And, as in Spanish Earth, when an enemy pilot is shot down, the rhe-
torical point is made with equal restraint: as a crowd of villages stand numbly
around their wrecked trophy, the commentator states 'They don't cheer. They
don't sing. There's a man in that junk heap somewhere'. The overall discre-
tion of the film is partly due to the intended civilian status of its audience
(Capra may have been right in assuming that his military audience should not
be encouraged to feel sorry for their enemies). But it is also characteristic of
Ivens's distinctive conception of war propaganda as a medium primarily for
paying tribute to the positive social dimensions of civilian war effort, a con-
ception that would be extended through Action Stations and Know YourEneniy:
Japan.
303
42. OurRussian Front (1941): short personal
vignette using compiled Soviet footage of
Nazi deserters passing over to the Russian
side. DVD frame capture. © Fastforward
Music/CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
The earlier discussions of the speeches by Stalin, Roosevelt, and Harriman,
as well as the Taleikin synchronous episode, will already have suggested to
the reader that the Front soundtrack continues the movement away from
one-dimensional commentary form and towards complex sound-image rela-
tions begun in Spanish Earth. This continuation does not match the dramatic
advance of Ivens's more leisurely Canadian project the following year, but nei-
ther is it a retrenchment, despite the fact that both the compilation mode and
the haste of the project must have discouraged experimentation. In addition
to the insertion of 'quoted' speeches, which function partly as internal narra-
tion, especiallywith Stalin, and Ivens's first use of synchronous dialogue since
Komsonol, the commentary itself stands up as a creative use of the form that
was already declaiming oppressively over American movie screens. Paul was
clearly influenced by Spanish Earth in his tendency towards intimacy, personal
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
touches, and understatement. The Capra series, on the other hand, would dis-
play more the influence of the stentorian narrators of The March of Time and
the newsreels, persuading more by authority than by suggestion. Paul's text
shows an unusual lyrical strain that is not often encountered in wartime rheto-
ric. It is notable also for its folksy colloquial affectations, including a reference
to 'women drivers' during a scene where women are instructed to replace their
husbands on tractors, and frequent address to the characters on the screen:
'Hurry, hurry with the harvest. The Nazis are coming. This land will be lost for
a while. Scorched earth. One day, two days in which to show the wife the ropes'.
Paul was of course anticipating an even greater use of informal language,
soon grossly exaggerated, by commentators as the war progressed (Griffith,
1952b, 353-354). There are also moments of unfettered sentimentality, such
as this somewhat rhetorical lullaby version of the traditional 'child-as-victim'
formula:
304 I
The girl scouts too young to fight in the women's battalions take care of
the kids, the sons of the soldiers. They try to make up for them somehow
what the Nazis take away. Eat kid, tuck it in while you can. You've got
friends, kid, all the way across the ocean. Sleep kid, you don't know what
war is. Sleep. The girls spend the evening making toys to make the kids
laugh, to give the kids a chance to be kids while they can. Sleep kid. Peo-
ple over here will help you.
This kind of rhetoric, not ineffective here, is common in Capra, but is more
typical of contemporary British films with their comparable stress on civilian
morale (though the British writers were more skilful at understatement) and
of the later American films addressed primarily at the civilian audience, such
as John Ford's Battle of Midway (1942, 18) - where Jane Darwell's best Ma Joad
voice entreats the onscreen figures to 'Get that boy to a hospital'! Along similar
lines, the device in Spanish Earth, bywhich the spectator is encouraged to iden-
tify with an onscreen figure only to be informed that the figure is now dead, is
used twice in Paul's commentary. It must be noted that similar sentimental
stresses are also common in the most sophisticated dramatic films dealing
with the war effort as well, such as MGM's Mrs. Miniver (William Wyler, 1942,
134), with interesting exceptions coming from those films made by Europe-
an refugees like Brecht and Renoir. Seldom, however, are the 'women-and-
children-as-victims' tropes so directly connected with civilian war effort as in
Front; not even Ivens's girl scouts and farm boys are exempt from their active
roles in defending the homeland.
Admittedly, Paul's commentary contributes to the contemporary tenden-
cy towards what T.W. Bohn (1968, 161) politely calls 'narrative oversaturation'.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
It amounts to 65% of the running time, an arguably unnecessary proportion
in view of the eloquence of the images, but one that is recommended as an
acceptable maximum for documentary as late as 1963 by Baddeley (1963, 158).
(It was also the average proportion for the Capra series [Bohn, 1968, 159]). One
can imagine Ivens exhaustedly yielding to the fashion of the period after years
of resistance and restraint.39 Perhaps one contributing factor to the escalation
of the commentary was its informational role, which, while secondary to its
rhetorical role, was still judged vital because of American ignorance of the
USSR, as opposed to its relative familiarity with the British ally. Accordingly,
the voice-over transmits a considerable amount of factual material, germane
both to the film's cross-section of the war effort and to an overview of Soviet
society as a whole.
Related to the proportional expansion of the commentary is perhaps yet
another artistic compromise on the soundtrack: the first use of almost con-
tinuous music in Ivens's career. It may have been a stronger fear of silence in I 305
Hollywood than in intellectual New York, or simply the haste in which the film
was executed, that led Ivens to permit Dimitri Tiomkin to score the film from
beginning to end. It may be to Ivens's credit, however, that he did apparently
prevent Tiomkin from using the leitmotif method that inspired Eisler's rage
and was enthroned in Tiomkin's scores for the Capra series; it is more likely
also to the credit of the fine raw materials that Tiomkin had at his disposal as
arranger, symphonic themes by Dmitri Shostakovich. The score also includes
frequent passages by male chorus and other Russian choral folk material
whose successful appeal to the 'exotic' code was reasonably fresh in 1942 but
would become a cliche before war's end.
It is sometimes stated that Front, the first American compilation film of
the war, was the specific pattern for the more famous Capra series that fol-
lowed (Wegner, 1965, 104). This is somewhat misleading, since Ivens's per-
sonalised, morale-oriented approach has little in common with Capra's films
other than their common use of compilation. It has already been suggested
that Capra's directors used a different method of construction to Ivens's, the
'illustrated scenario' approach, in which the editor's task is to search for imag-
es to demonstrate a certain expository point. The heavy reliance on animation
in the Capra films to fill in the lacunae in the exposition is a possible rami-
fication of this approach. Beyond this basic methodological difference, it is
clear that Capra had goals for his military audience that were different from
Ivens's goals of civilian persuasion and morale. Capra films are either detailed
military and political analyses of individual battles or campaigns, or general
historical surveys tracing the roots of the world conflict, focusing on diachron-
ic geopolitical patterns and individual leaders. Ivens does neither, preferring
instead to build up a more intimate rapport with the spectator and to reveal
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
the personal everyday struggle behind the lines, offering didactic models for
the spectator's own conduct. Bohn (1968, 239) indicates that Capra turned
rather to Lorentz and The March of Time for his models. But since neither of
these sources are exclusively or primarily of the compilation mode, the two
Canadian series, Canada Carries On and The World in Action, must be added
to the list of probable inspirations. Both had already been in commercial dis-
tribution in the US at the point of Capra's debut with the Signal Corps, since
April 1940 and January 1942 respectively. Ivens's compilation approach relies
much more on his own individual priority of personalisation than any of the
contemporary compilation projects. To compare the use of identical Soviet
shots in Our Russian Front and Jane Marsh's Women are Warriors of the Can-
ada Carries On series is telling: Marsh uses the shots as part of a mosaic-style
collage; Ivens retains the narrative shape of the vignettes as received from the
Soviet filmmakers. In this respect, he is perhaps more akin to the British con-
306 I temporaries than to Capra. The British, although they placed less emphasis
on compilation than Front, were very close to Ivens and the Soviets in their use
of re-enactment, mise-en-scene, and personalisation. No doubt their emphasis
on civilian morale in the face of imminent invasion and massive civilian bom-
bardment led them to use methods chosen by the Soviets and Ivens for similar
reasons.
Ivens would resume his individual approach to compilation under Capra's
supervision in the US Army Signal Corps later in the war, but the possibilities
of personalised compilation must remain a subject of speculation since Know
YourEnemy:Japan was to be another of the growing number of unfinished pro-
jects.
The Front premiere in February occasioned reviews that varied from
unqualified raves (Barnes, 1942; Davidson, 1942) to mixed accounts criticis-
ing the film's crowded canvas and uninspired commentary, but recommend-
ing it for its 'heartening account of what the Russian people, all of them, are
doing right now to win the war and for its capturing the urgency of this urgent
moment' (T.S., 1942).
The images of civilian contributions to the war effort seemed to make
the most impact. The film failed to make as large a public impression as the
Capra films when they were belatedly released, or acquire the prestige of the
British films that had already been appearing and receiving American awards.
All the same, Front lasted a modest commercial run of about six weeks at the
Rialto on Times Square before moving to second-run houses. Appearing so
early after Pearl Harbour, it gave a significant boost to the Second Front move-
ment, whose aim was to cement the US-Soviet 'marriage of convenience' into
a closer bond and to promote the opening of a western front to ease pressure
on Russia. An important focus of left organising during the war, the Second
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Front movement gathered steam throughout the rest of 1942 and 1943 with
Ivens one of its visible spearheads. In October of that year he was the featured
first speaker at a Second Front rally at Carnegie Hall - Chaplin was the last. He
repeated in his speech the basic theme of the film, the popular dimension of
the war, added some remarks on an increasingly important topic for him, the
role of artists in such a struggle, and referred to the desolation wreaked upon
Rotterdam and his homeland (his address included an account of his recent
film project on the Canadian Navy and one of his more intriguing dictums,
that good art needs time but also haste [Ivens, notes for Second Front Artists
Rally, October 1942, JIA]).
At its height, the pro-Soviet current thus initiated had considerable
breadth and energy. A large and lively constituency was attracted to Soviet
feature films, both new and revived, and to American productions of Soviet
plays, such as Konstantin Simonov's The Russian People.40 Soviet-made fea-
ture-length compilations on the war also played regularly throughout this 307
period. One of these on the Stalingrad turning point, Gorod, kotoryy ostanovil
Gitlera: Geroicheskiy Stalingrad (The City That Stopped Hitler: The Heroic Stalin-
grad, Leonid Varlamov, 1943, 78), received a major release through Paramount
in the fall of 1943. Americans also were not long in producing their own views
of the eastern front. The American leftist photographer-journalist team, Mar-
garet Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell, visited the USSR together in 1942
and brought out their joint books on what they had seen that same year,All Out
on the Road to Smolensk and Moscow under Fire. Life magazine followed with
its special Russia issue in 1943. The Office of War Information and the Capra
Unit both contributed important compilation documentaries, respectively
Russians at War, Van Dongen's film that was notable for its continuation of
the personalised approach and for the first views of villages liberated from the
Nazis, and Litvak's The Battle ofRussia, distributed by Fox later the same year
with a large commercial impact.
Hollywood followed suit with several dramatic films offering a sympa-
thetic treatment of the new ally: Mission to Moscow, Song of Russia (Gregory
Ratoff and Laslo Benedek, 1943, 107), North Star, and Days of Glory (Jacques
Tourneur, 1944, 86), all of which included contributions from leftist sympa-
thisers or liberals (who were later to face the consequences before HUAC). Mis-
sion provoked a controversy over its credulous handling of Stalin's purge trials
and the Soviet-Nazi Pact, and revealed the continuing ideological divisions
unhealed by the pro-Soviet current: 66 prominent Americans denounced the
film and 266 others rushed to its defence in angry, well-publicised statements
(Jacobs, quoted in Manvell, 1976, 199).4 In November 1943, Ivens participated
in another rally, this time a Congress of American-Soviet Friendship, in which
he contributed to a panel discussion on the role of the arts in the US and the
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
USSR in wartime. However, by the time the Italian campaign and the Norman-
dy invasion brought an end to the Second Front movement and the post-war
Big Three conferences began to gather momentum, American uneasiness
about Soviet aims in Eastern Europe was already visible enough that for all
intents and purposes the Cold War had begun.
ACTIONSTATIONS
In December 1941, shortly after the US entry into the war, with the Front pre-
miere still two months away, Ivens correctly foresaw the expanded govern-
ment involvement in film propaganda and information and attempted to sign
on. A letter to his old collaborator Archibald MacLeish outlines a proposal for
a series of films on a theme that he had already developed three times: popular
308 I involvement in the war effort (Ivens, memorandum to Archibald MacLeish,
n.d. [c. December 1941], quoted in Ivens, 1969, 238). MacLeish was coordina-
tor of the Office of Facts and Figures that had been set up in October to inform
the public about the defence organisation (MacCann, 1973, 126). Ivens was
evidently assuming that the united war effort would heal any antagonisms
lingering as a result of MacLeish's break with the left following the Pact, as
indeed it would in general. But Ivens's gesture was futile for other reasons:
the Office of Facts and Figures was soon merged with the Office of War Infor-
mation (OWI), Domestic Branch, and the proposal apparently became lost in
the chaos of competing government film agencies that characterised the first
year after Pearl Harbour, and possibly in the Congressional wrangling over the
agencies and their personnel.42 As all the competing non-military agencies for
domestic information gradually concentrated by 1943 in the Bureau of Motion
Pictures of the Domestic Branch of the OWI, centred in New York, it became
clear that the opportunity for Ivens, now California-based, had passed. In any
case, he had already associated himself with the Hollywood-based US Army
Signal Corps under Capra. Van Dongen, however, was to direct two films for
the OWI and many other veterans of the New York radical film milieu of the
thirties were employed there as well. 4
Ivens's unrealised proposal to MacLeish is relevant to this study since it
testifies to Ivens's evolving conception of the needs of domestic morale doc-
umentary along the lines he had already sketched in the three previous 'peo-
ple's war' films. The difference was, of course, that the three earlier films were
designed to solicit public involvement in a war situation: subsequent films
would have to assume that involvement as a departure point. Ivens offered
MacLeish three suggestions. One was entitled 'Film Reports'. A second enti-
tled 'A Day in the United States', was patently inspired by a Soviet documen-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
tary, Den novogo mira (A Day in Soviet Russia, Roman Karmen and Mikhail
Slutsky, 1941, 56), made during the Pact years employing 97 operators sta-
tioned all around the USSR on a single day, 24 August 1940. (Based on an idea
by Gorky, the film was released in October 1941 in an American version narrat-
ed by Quentin Reynolds.) Ivens's third idea was an alternative means of show-
ing civilian contributions to the war effort along the role-model lines of Front,
an idea more in keeping with his own evolution and preoccupation with the
personalisation of the documentary form. Entitled 'Letters to the President',
the third proposal outlined twelve short films of one or two reels, each concen-
trating on an individual and his/her role in the war effort. Each vignette would
be in the form of a letter to the President: 'These people will send their film
letter to the White House introducing themselves on the film and telling their
story, how their life is integrated with and affected by the war efforts' (Ivens,
1969, 238). The twelve figures were carefully selected to represent different
geographical regions and economic strata. Some reflected Ivens's previous I 309
work and exposure to American society: a refugee from Holland, a farmer in
Ohio, a housewife and her family, a secretary in the Department of Agricul-
ture, a composer, a roving cinematographer. Others catered to a less populist
vision of the war effort, particularly an admiral, and a famous poet, Carl Sand-
burg, subjects analogous to the Guomindang figureheads he had featured in
400 Million. Military figures filling out the list reflected Ivens's longstanding
and frustrated efforts to portray an ordinary soldier since Spanish Earth. One
of these figures, a sailor on convoy duty to England, was to emerge in compos-
ite form, as Leyda points out, in his imminent project for the National Film
Board of Canada, as would the endeavours to achieve a form that is 'human
and subjective, away from the impersonal third-person commentator' (Ivens,
1969, 238).
Ivens's disappointment at the failure of his proposal was short-lived. After
the premiere of Front and the hasty completion of the Shell Oil commission,
Ivens's luck began to change and he was courted by both John Grierson, Com-
missioner of the NFB, and Capra, then embarking on the Why We Fight series.
Grierson's offer came first and Ivens accepted immediately. But, before leav-
ing for Ottawa, he made arrangements with Capra to join his unit upon his
return.
Action Stations unexpectedly turned out to be Ivens's best opportunity to
develop a wartime morale-film version of his personalised documentary mod-
el. Front, a low-budget compilation film, conceived and delivered in haste, and
dominated by the shape of the preexisting materials and the original pre-Pearl
Harbour intentions, had obviously not given him this opportunity. Although
Action Stations was to reflect the restraint of public sponsorship just as Pow-
er had done, as well as the specificities of the Canadian context, it deserves
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
re-evaluation as a fresh and original accomplishment with a clear place in
Ivens' oeuvre and in the chronology of wartime filmmaking.
During the months after Pearl Harbour, the NFB was at the peak of its
institutional energy and international prestige. A new series of monthly films
for international commercial distribution, The World inAction, bowed in Janu-
ary 1942, building on the impetus of the NFB's first series Canada Carries On,
which had been appearing in theatres and the non-theatrical circuits through-
out Canada and the US for almost two years, achieving recognition in the first
Academy Award for a documentary short at the end of 1941 (Churchill's Island,
Stuart Legg, 1941, 21). It was during Grierson's trip to Hollywood to receive the
award that he probably began his overtures to Ivens. His policy of inviting for-
eign filmmakers to join the Board, particularly British, had been continuing
uninterruptedly since the formation of the Board at the outbreak of war. From
the US he had recruited Roger Barlow (Van Dyke's operator), Ferno, Irving
310 I Jacoby, and the expatriate Roffman. Ivens was the most prestigious guest film-
maker lured to Ottawa. His role would be not only to make an instalment in
the Canada Carries On series but also to function within the informal appren-
ticeship program whereby foreign expertise was passed on to Canadians, to
improve the quality of the product, and to maintain morale and inspiration.
This function was increasingly important at this point since the Board's early
emphasis on compilation was gradually yielding to a commitment to actuality
filmmaking.
Ivens's topic was to be the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), a service that had
grown dramatically in the two and a half years of war prior to the US entry and
which had a crucial role in convoying supply and troop ships across the Atlan-
tic - the film's commentary proudly charts the Navy's expansion in the previ-
ous three years and the number of submarines sunk each year, boasting that
nearly one-half of the Atlantic convoys were escorted by the Canadian navy.
The specific focus of the film idea was a typical vessel, one of the new Cor-
vettes, the fast light escort and anti-submarine ships being built for convoy
duty. The working title was the name of the representative ship to be used in
the film, Corvette PortArthur. Though the topic was officially designated by the
Board, it undoubtedly originated in Ivens's proposal to MacLeish, perhaps
during Grierson's visit in California.
The NFB functioned in those years as a tightly knit studio system, with
little room for individualistic prestige directors. The fact that Action Stations
listed credits was highly unusual at the time. It was also unusual for Grierson
to give his directors, even his guest directors, as much leeway, resources, and
independence as Ivens enjoyed. Ivens was largely responsible for the concep-
tion of the film and its development in response to the specific local situation
and in consultation with the eminent novelist, Morley Callaghan (possibly
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
hired because the NFB assumed that an Ivens collaboration with the Canadi-
an Hemingway, as he was known, would produce another Spanish Earth). The
conception differed strikingly from the average film of the Canada Carries On
series, and in general from the NFB product as a whole. Grierson's support of
this unusual latitude, which Ivens, it seems, may not have been aware of, was
a tribute to an artist whom Grierson himself had greatly admired at the out-
set of his career and whose influence during that time he had acknowledged.
However, this special relationship - or rather non-relationship, since Grier-
son did not supervise the project in any direct way and their communications
were for the most part telegrams between Ottawa and the Halifax location
- may not have had the morale-building and tutorial effect that was intend-
ed. Working almost exclusively with immigrant filmmakers like himself - as
operator, Osmond Borradaile, a Briton who had shot Flaherty's Elephant Boy
(1937, UK, 8o) and Powell and Pressburger's Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941, UK,
104),44 and, as assistants, the French exile Francois Villiers and Ivens's USC I 311
student John Norwood - Ivens certainly did not make a major contribution to
training Canadian cinematographers. It has also been suggested that Ivens's
individualist experience did not predispose him to the anonymous collective
style of Canadian filmmaking then evolving at the NFB (Evans, 1984). Grier-
son, himself, for all his solicitude, appears to have considered him somewhat
a romantic, and probably was suspicious of his orientation towards personal-
ised mise-en-scene. Grierson may also have had reservations about his political
beliefs, though he would certainly have cleared Ivens with Ottawa before final-
ising the contract.45 Ivens was not the only filmmaker taken on by the NFB in
those years whose politics were somewhat to the left of Grierson's pragmatic
social democratic idealism, but he was the best known.46
From the outset, Ivens's conception of the film was very clear. Using the
method of Power, living at close quarters with their subjects, the Corvette
crew, the filmmakers would produce a dramatic account of their lives and
duties, concentrating on a small number of individualised sailors and on a
few narrative engagements with enemy submarine. The primary goal was not
to convince the public of the justness of the fight, as with Front and the two
earlier anti-fascist films, but to show Canadians how their offspring were con-
tributing to the global war effort and thus to build civilian morale and bolster
the war effort. As informal notes early in the project indicate, the reaction of
the 'people at home' was to be 'That is my boy', and of other servicemen 'I
could be that sailor' (Ivens, notes for Action Stations, JIA). More general aims
were to contribute to the NFB's general mandate of 'interpreting Canada to
Canadians',47 of promoting 'unity of Canada', as another note spells it out.
This was an important task in a period of serious internal divisions along
linguistic lines over the issue of conscription, lingering British colonialism
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
(the commodore depicted in the film wears a monocle and speaks impecca-
ble Oxbridge), and growing American hegemony (ironically, the film would be
distributed domestically through American-owned distribution monopolies).
A further secondary aim would be to promote enlistment: though the com-
mentary claims that the Navy had a long waiting list, the romantic, exciting
view of navy life in the film must certainly been seen in this light, especially
as concerns the French version. The only reference to the grave split between
Quebec and the rest of the country over conscription and the war, very much
on the minds of the NFB, is extremely discreet: as the camera scans the faces
of new recruits, the commentator detects the descendants of men who sailed
with both Frobisher and Cartier (another instalment of Canada Carries On
made the same year, Quebec, Path of Conquest [F.R. Crawley, 11], appeals to
French-Canadians on the basis of Nazi designs on the St. Lawrence and to the
plight of the country 'whose mother tongue is their own'). The two characters
312 I that Ivens planned to fulfil these goals were not much different from those
realised in Power or those projected for 400 Million and New Frontiers, except
for greater complexity. They were to be emblematically different in origins and
experience, one a young recruit from the prairies and the other an older more
seasoned sailor (a 'peppery type'). They were to be exemplary and didactic but
defined in enough detail to solicit a strong audience identification. The young
Manitoban was to be shown in his home town, in love, relating to his parents,
later in a training sequence, and then arriving in Halifax where he would see
the sea for the first time. The film would then follow his career as a sailor on
the Corvette: on his first voyage he sees submarine action and takes a prisoner;
he then goes home on a nine-month agricultural leave to help with the harvest
(an important detail in terms of the film's recruitment orientation); finally he
embarks on the Corvette run that was to dominate the climactic second half of
the film. The older sailor would be there as balance and would provide orien-
tation to the recruit that would fulfil an informative function within the film.
Notes made shortly after Ivens' arrival in Ottawa for the narrative line
sketch the following elements:
- catch submarine
- relation to prairie family parents
- agricultural leave (request granted)
- Possibly (second) corvette sacrifice act
- shipbuilding
- tattooing - crowded living quarters - intimacy, discomfort
- barracks Winnipeg land training. (Ivens, handwritten notes forAction
Stations, n.d., Ottawa, JIA)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Notes for Callaghan made about the same time include prescriptions based on
Ivens' long experience of working with writers with little film experience. Tak-
en together they seem like a summarisation of his personalisation approach:
- short story technique
- identification
- no symbols, human beings, typical
- characteristic
- not peacetime story in wartime
- in each sequence things must happen
- things that happen make a good sequence
- visual detail repetition
Another list of visual details, more precise now, drawn up during and after the
early stages of discussion in Ottawa, the trip down-river, and the first period of
immersion in the on-deck atmosphere in Halifax, are presumably those that, I 313
according to his suggestions to Callaghan, might be repeated:
- hand reading
- St. Lawrence River
- Tattooing-emblem on gun shield
- play with three nutshells
- Fog
- Running, fast movements
- signaling, arms flags light
- homesickness
- types of ratings Unity of Canada
- Baby
- nice girls
- Bar
- 2 sailors and 1 girl in middle
- John from New Yorker
- Stills of family
- boats in battle
- stills in chimney
- toys
- children books
- log book
- signals
- charts
- pictures of girls on wall dancing
- sailor throwing depth charges himself
- tender love scene
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
- reception of mother wife children on shore
- control room map-pins
- smoke
- water ship faster, more movement, also ship zigzagging
- swimming raft
The list continues for seventeen handwritten pages of similar miscellaneous
images, a vivid demonstration of how the filmmaker, now an experienced
artist whose last half-dozen works had parachuted him into unfamiliar situ-
ations, assimilates immediately the visual, dramatic, and political qualities of
a new environment. Remarkably, of the list of visual details, almost all would
appear in the final 43-minute version of the film, except for those pertaining to
the 'nice girls' and the 'homesickness/family on shore' subplots.
Ivens apparently intended these two sentimental subplots to act in some
314 I kind of dialectical relation to the 'action-on-deck' elements of the narrative. In
fact the early treatments suggest that Ivens's model was the kind of complex
feature-length semi-documentary narrative, at which the British had been
excelling almost since the beginning of the war. The Oscar-winning Targetfor
Tonight (1941, 48), Harry Watt's narrative of a routine raid over Germany, had
been the most recent and best known. Ivens soon discovered that the NFB had
neither the facilities nor the distribution guarantees for films of this compre-
hensiveness. Accordingly, a later semi-final typed version, drawn up apparent-
ly with Callaghan's participation, has completely downscaled the 'back-home'
subplot and has reduced the 'love-interest' to the presence of women in a cafe
who listen to the two sailors' stories of their voyages. The sailors' stories were
to become a flashback framework for the whole film, with the young Manito-
ban and his elder alternating as internal narrators, the young man showing
childish pride in 'his' new ship, the PortArthur, and the older one being more
worldly-wise. The flashback framework would apparently allow Ivens to keep a
strong but simpler narrative shape, with fewer characters and settings but the
same opportunities for personaliation.
Although at least some of the flashback framework and the scenes con-
centrating on the two exemplary sailors were apparently shot, since camera
notes exist for the cafe scene, the final version otherwise reveals little of these
two basic elements of the original versions. Ivens simply had to concede that
resources did not exist on location in Halifax for even this reduced degree of
mise-en-scene personalisation - yet another 'clash between concept and reali-
ty' that Ivens (1969, 213) now came to expect routinely.
However, large enough narrative elements of the Corvette's voyages
appear in the final version, as well as fragments of the characterisations that
Ivens must not have felt completely downcast. In fact, with these elements in
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
a continuity comprised also of compilation material, 'spontaneous' currents,
several direct-sound sequences, even a fully fictional scripted submarine cap-
ture, plus the obligatory expository interludes, Action Stations became a ren-
dition of the hybrid form that Spanish Earth and 400 Million had pioneered.
The final 43-minute version of the film retained the simplified triptych
shape that some of the earlier treatments had hinted at. However each move-
ment has its own thematic and stylistic particularity rather than constituting
a phase in a continuous narrative as originally plotted. The first movement
provides the basic military and political background to the subject of the con-
voys. It includes a summation of the geopolitical importance of the RCN's role
in the war effort through compilation sequences linking the Corvettes to Sovi-
et, Chinese, and North African fronts. A history of the RCN conveyed through
superimposed charts is also part of this movement. A second longer move-
ment depicts everyday aspects of the voyage of the Port Arthur amid a gigantic
convoy to Britain. This includes lengthy direct-sound sequences of departure I 315
ceremonies and 'spontaneous' passages dealing with life on board, which in
retrospect are among the most durable elements of the film: sailors exercis-
ing on deck in the sunlight, sunbathing, dancing, doing deck chores, artil-
lery training, etc., all set against impressively lyrical views of the sea, day and
night, fog and sunlight. A final third movement is more linear and narrative,
frequently building up and resolving elements of suspense. It follows the Port
Arthur through three engagements with enemy U-boats and narrow escapes
from both a North Atlantic storm and a fog. This last movement, interpolat-
ed with the previous one to a certain extent, gives the film its overall climatic
structure: the last engagement is a successful capture and scuttling of a Ger-
man submarine that serves as a rousing conclusion to the film.
The three movements are complexly and subtly linked, like their anteced-
ents in Spanish Earth.48 The juxtaposition and, to some extent interpolation of
expository passages with 'spontaneous' interludes and the more intense nar-
rative mise-en-scene combat sequences give the film a rich and dynamic texture
that not many films of its format, genre, and period achieve.
Undoubtedly the reason for the high visual quality of both the 'spontane-
ous' and the mise-en-scene footage in Action Stations was the reasonable pace
and supportive production situation of the project. Ivens and his crew enjoyed
six weeks on board the Corvette, out of a total four-month shoot, and thus had
leisurely opportunity to study their environment and their subjects; an inti-
macy with both is an asset to the two modes. The shipboard environment, per-
haps because of its limited space, is fully exploited in both modes, allowing
Ivens a wealth of angular compositions and movement and depth within the
frame that had perhaps not been visible since Nieuwe Gronden, where similar
opportunities for the leisurely study of a dynamic environment had present-
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
ed themselves. Some of the living quarters down below, depicting the 'rough
democracy of the fo'c'sle', as the commentary says, are unusually complex in
their use of artificial lighting, depth, and interior framing in such a cramped
location.
43.Action Stations (1943): homosocial
intimacy, 'rough democracy', and mise-
en-scene in the cramped below-deck living
quarters. DVD frame capture. © National
Film Board of Canada/CAPI Films, Paris,
and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
316
On deck, the sailors' work was approached, not surprisingly, with particular
sensitivity and usually the results are dynamic and concise: one interesting
pan, which may represent an endeavour to go beyond classical 'synthetic' edit-
ing, covers at medium-close range sailors practicing the firing of 'ash-can'
depth charges, a particularly athletic task, and then catches without a cut the
explosion of the charge on the distant surface of the ocean. The crew's close-
ness to the sailors over the weeks of the shoot is also visible in the unusual
intimacy of the 'spontaneous' images, where the figures seem to have grown
used to the presence of the camera. It is visible in the mise-en-scene passages
as well, where the collaboration between the filmmakers and subjects seems
to have been quite unselfconscious and at close range.
A list of additional shots requesting extra material from Borradaile, pre-
sumably after a preliminary viewing of the rushes and the input of the com-
mentary writer, illustrates the attentiveness with which Ivens approached the
mise-en-scene of the film, his insistence on an intimacy with the subjects, and
a typical means by which Ivens would guarantee the cooperation of non-pro-
fessional subjects:
a number of ratings with hammocks returning from leave and board-
ing a corvette going over the gangplank, pref. sun or, if not, dull - also
corvette on jetty: m.s. of same. faces of sailors passing through frame as
they go up gangplank, about 8 people. 3. corvette on jetty, slow pan shot.
Camera low. In B.G. sky and parts of corvette, faces (c.u.) of sailors. Best
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
way to take this is during an instruction on the corvette around a lifeboat
or depth charge or gun - They have to have natural expression on their
faces. Pictures should show close-ups - of them of their face one after
another, very slow pan so that the commentator has time to say: 'This is
so-and-so, a year ago he was a farmer in Manitoba, his brother is in the
Air Force'. Preferable fine sunlight. Shot has to have strong quality and
show different type of people serving in the RCN. (Ivens, handwritten
notes for Action Stations, n.d., Ottawa, JIA)
The instructions also contain, incidentally, a capsule formulation of the aes-
thetic of illusionism ('natural expression') and an indication of Ivens's mind-
fulness of the Canadian unity theme.
The shipboard cinematography posed several unforeseen purely techni-
cal problems that Ivens, with his background in camera mechanics, was inter-
ested in solving. To eliminate the vibrations on board when the ship was going I 317
full speed, the camera mechanism was sometimes speeded up high above nor-
mal, and a gyroscopic tripod was used to counteract the jitterbugging effect'.
The situation also dictated special lens choices: telephotos were required for
the great distance between ships in the convoy, while for the unusually short
distances on-board and below-deck, the artificial spaciousness implied by
wide-angle lenses had to be counteracted by the special placement of props.
Furthermore, in order to ensure enough depth of focus and to permit shoot-
ing against the light, lenses coated in the Hollywood manner were used (Ivens,
interview with author, April 1978; technical notes for Action Stations, JIA).
I have stated that fragments of the proposed characterisations are retained
in the final version of the film. One of these fragments is a brief appearance of
the cafe scene, which has been reduced to the conventional wartime 'sealed
lips' message through a wall poster; another is the retention of the voice-over
internal narration during the final submarine encounter, though this voice is
not clearly linked to any specific character. As for the two exemplary characters,
they are so greatly reduced as to be scarcely visible: one sailor, 'Machine-Gun-
ner Joe' is glimpsed enough during the action and identified early enough
by the commentary for him to emerge somewhat distinctly as a recognisable
character, particularly at the point of the submarine encounter where he is
seen shirtless, boyishly gripping his machine gun, and firing across the bow of
the crippled vessel. However, on a single viewing of the film, it is not clear that
this character is also the one connected to a tattoo motif seen several times, an
image of a panther in pursuit of a U-boat. As for the rating from Winnipeg, he
has virtually disappeared, though a few individual close and medium shots of
a sensitive young sailor alone on watch duty may be vestiges of the earlier idea.
There is no scripted dialogue retained in the film.
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
44. Action Stations (1943): The 'submarine -
capture' sequence, the most substantial
dramatic element kept from Ivens's
original treatments, complete with heroic
captain and scowling stock Nazi. DVD
frame capture. © National Film Board of
Canada/CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
The NFB editors who completed the project after Ivens had supervised a rough
assemblage were either not aware that these fragments were part of an orig-
318 inal precise characterisation, or decided against exploiting the potential for
an approach that was relatively rare up to that time in Ottawa. There had been
at least two precedents for previous Canadian work on this model, a 1939
work on an unemployed Nova Scotian, The Case of Charlie Gordon (1939, 16),
by Ivens's producer at the NFB, Stuart Legg (which in fact predates the stu-
dio's founding), and a series of three films for the Canadian Army following
one man from his induction through his officer training to preparations for
the European front. The last of these, 13 Platoon, was by the NFB's other vet-
eran of the US left documentary milieu, Julian Roffman. These experiments,
however, were exceptional during the NFB's early years: at least one NFB pro-
ducer remembers Grierson strongly objecting to personalised re-enactment
elements in a project as being 'phony' (Glover, interview with author, Decem-
ber 1980). Grierson appears to have yielded later to the growing trend since
more films along this line would be produced before the end of the war, for
example Alexis Tremblay Habitant (Jane Marsh, 1943, 37) and A Man and His
Job (Alastair Taylor, 1943, 17). Between the war's end and the development of
the direct cinema approach (whose local variant was called 'candid eye' in the
late fifties), the personalised model would be the dominant one at the NFB.
The 'submarine capture' sequence was the most substantial dramatic ele-
ment kept from the original treatments. In fact, the scene comes closest to
Hollywood scripted narrative fiction of any of Ivens's work of this period. Sail-
ors were recruited to play the part of German sailors on the submarine to be
boarded by the Canadians; some of them, particularly the first mate who has
set off the explosive to scuttle the vessel, even scowl in close-up in the best
manner of Hollywood's stock Nazis. Nevertheless, despite these stock respons-
es - a fist fight between the Canadian captain and this officer, the suspense
device of a ticking time bomb, and the captain's last-minute leap to safety -
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
the sequence must have retained a clear documentary aura for its spectators
for two reasons. In the absence of synchronous dialogue, first-person narra-
tion continues on the soundtrack, which assumes an agitated 'sports-cast-
ing' function taken much further than similar effects in the aerial dogfight
sequence of Front: 'We swing to pick up our men. Some of the Germans seem
afraid to jump. The Nazis still want trouble. AND HE GOT IT!... There she goes
with another Nazi who hung on too long'!
The other factor is the presence of several 'spontaneous' shots even in this
mise-en-scene sequence: the excited celebration of the sailors after the sinking
of the submarine is conveyed in fast cutting, a flash pan, and a jerky camera
movement. As if to compensate for the reduction of the intended narrative
lines and for the minimisation of the two exemplary characters, other oppor-
tunities for a less detailed but still exploitable personalisation emerged in the
'clash between concept and reality', which Ivens eagerly seized. One member
of the Corvette crew who attracts a certain amount of individual attention is I 319
the captain. Initially introduced by the commentator in relation to the Canadi-
an unity line as an interior decorator from Victoria (other crew members come
from Toronto, Edmonton, and elsewhere), the figure reappears frequently
afterwards so that his role becomes the most visible in the film - it is he who
finally oversees the capture of the submarine in the last action scene, person-
ally subdues the villainous Nazi first mate and has just enough time to dive
before the scuttled craft sinks and explodes. One possibly apocryphal report
has it that Grierson learned of the captain's background in amateur theatrics
and secured permission to shoot aboard the Port Arthur by promising him a
major role in the film (Evans, 1984).
Ultimately, however, the captain from Victoria remains slightly flat
despite his theatrical experience, and the most striking personalisation effect
may be located, paradoxically, in the 'newsreel' type sequences using synchro-
nous sound, the most extensive of any that Ivens had directed up to this point.
Though the two long sequences, filmed in direct sound, the commodore's
briefing of the convoy's captains at a pre-departure meeting, and the vice-ad-
miral's inspection of the Corvette, are slightly more fluid than the 'newsreel'
sequences in Spanish Earth and Front, it is primarily the quality of the sound
that is responsible for the vivid, personalised impact of these scenes. I am
referring to both the expressive, unrehearsed voice quality of the officers'
exchanges in both scenes, and to the prominent use of ambient sound, includ-
ing much coughing and chair-shuffling, and even a series of 'I begyour pardon
- I can't hear' interjections, which were apparently deliberately retained (since
the interjections appear written in the decoupage of the film). The decision to
retain these explicit cues of 'spontaneous' sound-recording, probably as indi-
ces of authenticity, was well-advised: Capra later found that his military audi-
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
ence was highly critical of scenes that stood out as dubbed or 'faked' in the
studio (Bohn, 1968, 208).
In any case, the speeches of the various officers and commanders who
address each other and the sailors make them stand out to a contemporary
spectator at least, as the most fully individuated personalities of the film. The
demands of the reviewers of Power for the addition of live voices were by all
appearances borne out by this limited experiment, despite the fact that the
speeches actually say very little in terms of content. The voices' rich aura of
military decorum and protocol, incidentally, gives Ivens's perception of the
RCN an implied auditory class analysis, as well as a comic overtone, that
were perhaps not unintended. The voices of the sailors themselves are not
caught synchronously: however, the rowdy navy chorus that surfaces on the
soundtrack twice, other instrumental musical offerings by the sailors (particu-
larly the accompaniment to an infectious on-deck jig scene), and the actor's
320 I rendition of Machine-Gunner Joe's excitable internal narration, all suggest
where Ivens's particular sympathies lie within this auditory class analysis.
Other aspects of the soundtrack in Action Stations deserve comment. Nor-
mally the Canada Carries On and The World in Action series were notorious-
ly conservative in their reliance on the voice-of-god narrator and expository,
direct-address commentary. It was undoubtedly Ivens's special privileges as
guest director that allowed him to experiment so fully with costly synchro-
nous sound. It was likewise true of his use of several other sound innovations,
including internal narration, current in the forties in the work of documen-
tarists trying to escape the constraints of 'the impersonal third-person com-
mentator', as Ivens (1969, 238) had put it in his proposal to MacLeish. The
commentary, written by Allan Field, an ex-journalist who was the staff super-
visor of the newsreel division, made good use of the multiple-voice approach
and delivered a text that occupied a relatively low 47% of the soundtrack. This
figure is the result not only of the lengthy synchronous sound sequences, but
also of the fact that Ivens's image-track frequently fulfils much of the narra-
tive and expository function. Occasionally, a sequence unfolds with little or
no narration, told entirely by images, music or concrete sound. The effects-
track is relatively ornate, with the whole range of shipboard noises of activi-
ty, weaponry, engines, and navigational instruments at its disposal, including
background shouts, alerts, and commands. The night-time encounter with a
submarine is told almost entirely on the effects-track, since there is no com-
mentary and the visuals are limited to flashes against a black sky, illuminating
the horizons and the convoy for an instant at a time. The sound of the radar
scanner builds narrative suspense elsewhere as well, but another function of
this aural stress on the new technology is clearly public relations for the RCN.
As a film by a prestigious foreign director,Action Stations was to have a spe-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
cially composed score, and Louis Applebaum, the promising in-house com-
poser, was assigned the job. This was the first major score of what turned out
to be an important career and in retrospect can be seen as being auspicious.
Complete with the de rigueur phrase of 'O Canada' at a triumphant moment,
the score works effectively in the 'illustrative', 'non-experimental', 'un-com-
plicated' manner of Moore's score for Power, skilfully incorporating a sailor's
chorus and the songs and instrumental music of their shipboard leisure activ-
ities (Ivens, 1969, 222).49 A high moment in the score occurs when a particu-
larly lyrical seascape passage complete with leaping flying fish celebrates the
lifting of a dangerous fog and the music offers just the correct amount of exhil-
arating support for this mood statement. Not all the instalments of the Cana-
da Carries On series benefited from Applebaum's discretion and care.
As a morale and recruitment film, Action Stations was not designed to
include any political analysis of the conflict for which Canadians were being
asked to sacrifice, other than the vague implications in the introduction about 321
the fronts around the globe. The ideological and political stakes of the war
are all assumed, avoided, or left to other NFB films to deal with, and instead
the mechanics and the emotions of the war receive priority attention. Later in
1943, Ivens was to speak to a Writers' Congress organised by the Hollywood
Writers' Mobilisation and the University of California on the requirements of
the morale film. Quoting a Soviet authority on the subject, Sergei Kournakoff
(1942), he described three kinds of morale:
The first kind is the fatalistic attitude which can be expressed thus: 'Well
it's war. There's nothing we can do about it. Let's make the best of it'. Our
superfatalistic Moslem troopers used to say simply Kismet.
The second type of morale is being developed among the more
advanced peoples [sic]. It is of the kind called 'football team spirit' on the
campus and 'esprit de corps' on the parade ground, and is based mainly
on a desire to show the so-and-so's the stuff we're made of.
The third kind of morale is rooted in a deep understanding of the
values for which the contest is being waged and on a personal and direct
link between those values and the individual fighter. (Ivens, 1944, 76)
Action Stations clearly belongs to the second category. Others of the NFB house
directors would attempt to tackle the third as the war progressed. Action Sta-
tions is unlike all three of the previous anti-fascist films in its concentration
on the military struggle exclusively, without reference to an accompanying
social context or goal. This reflects in no small way the fact that this is the first
of the war films not designed to promote intervention by neutral America in
an international conflict; it also reflects the primary Canadian motivation for
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
initially entering the war, loyalty to the Mother Country, rather than self-de-
fence. When Ivens himself would attempt in the subsequent project for Capra
(already undertaken at the time of his October address) to instil analysis of
political values into the text of the morale film, he would discover that there
was perhaps less priority among the Allies on this level of morale than he
imagined.
Because of his special status, Ivens was encouraged by Grierson to make a
film that was exceptionally long (five reels, 43 minutes) for the Canada Carries
On series. However the series' monthly instalments were distributed through-
out the US by Paramount and throughout Canada by Columbia and were con-
sequently locked into the two-reel format. For this 35mm commercial release
then, Action Stations was routinely reduced to half its length by NFB editors
and released as Corvette Port Arthur in 1943. The vicious circle of Power was
repeating itself, though this time, presumably, Ivens knew well in advance. As
322 I a newsreel short, Corvette Port Arthur did not attract any special attention as
an Ivens film and, as was customary, was probably not even credited to Ivens.50
The original five-reel version of Ivens's film, entitledAction Stations, supervised
by him to the rough assembly stage, would only have been available non-theat-
rically in 16mm throughout Canada and the Allies after six months of theatri-
cal release, according to standard procedure. This release also did not attract
any special attention; the film in this format would have reached the NFB's
huge non-theatrical industrial, rural, and trade-union circuits, which by 1945
included in Canada alone monthly audiences of 250,000, 300,000 and 100,000
respectively, an astonishingly significant audience in terms of the Canadian
wartime population of scarcely more than ten million. The growing non-the-
atrical circuits in the US would also have had access to the film.
NFB veterans recall some tension with Ivens over the necessity of releas-
ing theatrically a shortened version of the film - Ivens may have had the illu-
sion that he could persuade the Board to change a distribution policy over
which they had little control. It is likely also that in his eagerness for theatrical
distribution, he underestimated the relevance of such a large non-theatrical
audience to his political goals. It is also recalled that Ivens seemed to have
what NFB regulars considered a European disdain for 16mm and the possibil-
ities for alternative distribution by this means (Glover, interview with author,
December 1980). The largely rural population dispersement and the Ameri-
can monopoly over theatrical distribution in Canada had necessitated the
development of such a system, a situation similar to the one faced by Grierson
in the UK in the thirties. It is possible that Ivens's continuous globetrotting
had desensitised him to the complexities of the distribution situation in the
societies he visited. In any case, his Frontier Films contemporaries have been
reproached for the same shortsightedness in stressing features designed for
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
theatres rather than exploiting alternative formats (Campbell, 1978, 409). The
alternative network in Canada had been given a special stimulus by its gov-
ernment sponsorship: it would not really be until after the war that an educa-
tional film boom based on 16mm technology would become entrenched as a
commercial reality in the US. In the meantime, Ivens reached with Action Sta-
tions a mixed theatrical and non-theatrical audience in much the same terms
as his previous state-sponsored film, Power.
Upon his return to Hollywood, Ivens's friends, grouped within the Hol-
lywood Writers' Mobilization Committee, organised a special screening of
Action Stations in the spring of 1943 as part of their ongoing discussions about
the morale film and the role of artists in the war effort. Otherwise, Action Sta-
tions, like too many of the fine documentaries of the NFB, continued its dis-
creet career in the undeserved obscurity of the non-theatrical, 'documentary
short' niche. Once revived only in connection with Ivens or NFB retrospectives,
it is of considerable interest beyond its connection to those two themes none- | 323
theless and is now the only Ivens film streamable free in a legitimate version
on the Internet. Rotha (1952, 319) dismissed the film as 'barely recognizable
as Ivens's work', a perception repeated by James (1968, 88), but Wegner (1965,
1o8) praises it as a 'true Ivens film'. The truth for this studio product by a guest
director lies somewhere between these two extremes.
KNOW YOUR ENEMY:JAPAN
Upon the completion of Action Stations Ivens returned to Los Angeles and
resumed his teaching at USC and his involvement with the Hollywood left
milieu, namely the Hollywood Writers' Mobilization, the nexus of what later
became the 'Hollywood Ten'. He appeared on a Writers' Mobilization panel
in the summer of 1944 along with Kline and Vincent Sheean to discuss three
mining films as a 'vehicle for craft analysis': Black Fury (Michael Curtiz, 1935,
USA, 94), How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941, USA, 118), and Coalfor
Canada (NFB, 1944, Canada, 9) (notes, programmes, and clippings re: Holly-
wood Writers' Mobilization seminars, 1944, JIA). He also continued working
on his memoirs with Leyda, and by the summer had joined the Special Servic-
es Division of the Capra Unit of the US Army Signal Corps, as arranged before
his Canadian project. Appropriately, one of his earliest activities for this out-
fit was to draft a script for a film entitled Know Your Ally: Canada which was
undertaken as far as the shooting stage in collaboration with Ivens's NFB col-
league Allan Field but apparently never released (WinnipegFree Press 1943).
Ivens's film for Capra, Know Your Enemy Japan, was to be part of the third
series of this increasingly prestigious unit, following the Why We Fight films
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
and the Know Your Ally films. The purpose of the final series was to inform
US soldiers about the enemy soldiers they were fighting, based on the prem-
ise that cultural and political understanding of individual opponents was an
important military advantage as well as an inherent goal of a democratic army.
There was also the unspoken premise that US soldiers would shortly be occu-
pying the homelands of the Axis nations and would put this kind of orienta-
tion to practical use.
Ivens was to direct, Sergeant Carl Foreman, a leftist Hollywood scriptwrit-
er who had enlisted into the Capra Unit, was to collaborate on the writing, and
Van Dongen was to edit. It is doubtful that Ivens felt at ease in the unit from
the beginning. Though Capra, like Grierson, had attempted to attract noted
documentarists, and had secured Flaherty's participation for a brief unhappy
period, the unit was composed primarily of recruits from the studios, and no
outspoken leftist, other than Ivens and Foreman, appears to have been a part.
324 I It has already been pointed out that leftists were more inclined to gravitate
towards the OWI. Furthermore, Ivens was the only civilian director in the out-
fit, although many composers and editors were also civilians, a possible addi-
tional factor in the eventual fiasco.
The film was to be a compilation film like Front, but an essential differ-
ence was that the unit rather than the director had ultimate creative and edito-
rial control and was in constant contact with the filmmakers providing them
with ideas and elements in the outline to be covered. That is, as has already
been noted, unit filmmakers were required to search out archival material
to correspond to a preconceived line rather than to derive the shape of their
film from available material. Furthermore, as a government project this sce-
nario was considerably more rigid than the independent Front project. Bohn
describes some of the problems of this method as they appeared early in the
work of the Capra unit:
The script of each film was written primarily by Eric Knight, once one of
Hollywood's highest paid and intelligent writers. At first, detailed scripts
and shot listings were prepared, but the task of finding shots in film
archives to illustrate these scripts proved extremely difficult. Thereafter,
just basic story outlines were constructed, making the job of locating
specific shots less difficult.
While the scripts were written in Hollywood, most of the film from
which shots were to be selected was located in New York and Washing-
ton, D.C. The distance created difficulties as the script writers wrote
without detailed information on what film was available. Hence, argu-
ments arose between the writers, who wrote with the assumption that
shots were available or could be created to illustrate their scripts, and
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
the researchers, whose task it was to find shots to illustrate the scripts.
(Bohn, 1968, 105)
As a result of such problems, the Ivens team began planning long anima-
tion sequences to illustrate some of the scenario's themes of social analysis,
sequences even more complex than those that had been a staple of the Capra
films up to that point. Also in preparation for the film, Ivens interviewed rep-
resentatives of the intended audience, the Armed Forces, to find out the extent
of their awareness of Japanese society, and was discouraged from the outset by
the ignorance and misinformation he encountered. The task of going through
all available Japanese footage, including 120 captured features plus documen-
taries, military, and travel films - Van Dongen gives the figure of 500 films -
was formidable (Van Dongen, interview with author, 1976). Ivens remembers
continuing this exhausting process twelve hours a day with Van Dongen for
several months: Van Dongen herself worked with the material for a year or I 325
more.51
Three extant treatments for the film dating 16 August, 26 August, and 23
November 1943 do confirm that the filmmakers were working from pre-estab-
lished themes for which they were seeking appropriate images.52 The first two
treatments seem to be elaborations by Ivens and Foreman of a basic outline
provided by the Capra Unit. They indicate basic themes to be covered using
the same approach that Capra had used in his earliest diachronic films; that
is, background chronologies of Japanese imperialism and social formation
leading to an affirmation of the Allies' determination to defeat Japan. By the
November version, a more precise emphasis has emerged. Continuing with
the historical and military background, the filmmakers have now given new
weight to the sociological analysis - of the composition and interests of the
cliques manipulating the Emperor and enslaving the Japanese people, and of
the actual conditions of life of the latter.
In fact, an identifiably Ivensian approach has emerged with regard to the
conditions of life of the Japanese people. This version attempts to personalise
the hitherto undifferentiated masses by presenting portraits of representative
individuals: Mrs. Kawakami, a 50-year-old peasant woman, tubercular and
undernourished, enslaved by society and her husband; her husband, little bet-
ter off, who made $16 last year; the Kawakami son Kenji; a factory worker, Mr.
Sato, who works a seven-day 98-hour week, the unions having long since been
smashed, and who will probably die of tuberculosis before his 43rd birthday;
his daughter Kosube, sold to a cotton mill for three years where she makes
21 cents a day for her father; and so on. These characters were to be depicted
by the use of archival material from fictional and documentary film, possibly
the only attempt in film history to create fictional individual characterisations
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
in a compilation film.53 Moreover this daunting task does seem to have been
in hand by the time of the November version, since shots are specified along
each unit of the exposition. A less ambitious attempt at personalisation is also
attempted as regards the villains - the chief members of the military cliques,
whom the commentary labels the 'rogues gallery'. Each is presented and iden-
tified, with Tojo being branded as 'Public Enemy Number One... the Japanese
Adolf' and appropriate introductions for a dozen or so of his cohort.
45. Know YourEnemy:Japan (1945): 'the
limits of compilation editing'. A compiled,
sequence showing Japanese women
receiving ashes of their dead was slated
for deletion by Ivens before his dismissal,
because 'it was so moving... their feelings
were of great integrity and profoundness'.
326 DVD frame capture. Public domain.
Ivens's notes for an animated sequence depict Japanese society as a mono-
lithic architectural structure. Tojo is shown being supported by three pillars
representing the militarists, politicians, and monopolists; below, the hard-
working peasants are shown having 'nothing for themselves, poor land, poor
ways of working, poor resources', alongside the soldiers, 'cannon fodder', and
the urban workers. Each group was to be visualised as a layer of bending peo-
ple, not so much bowing as in the stereotypes, but bending over beneath the
load of the structure. The Emperor, depicted on top, is linked to the religious
hierarchy. The filmmakers, then, were approaching an implicitly socialist per-
ception of Japanese society or at the least an explicitly populist one, sharply
dissident from the prevailing wartime image in the West of the Japanese as an
undifferentiated mob of fanatic, congenitally treacherous automatons. The
NFB equivalent of Know Your Enemy:Japan, called The Mask ofNippon (Marga-
ret Palmer, 1942, 21), 'describes the creed behind the fanatic barbarity of the
Japanese militarists', and informs its spectators that 'the soldiers of Nippon
are gruesome little men [... whose] double character will be [their] undoing'.54
The November outline was evidently the approximate shape of a four-hour
preliminary version prepared by Ivens, Foreman, and Van Dongen and sent on
approval to Washington.
At that point the film was taken out of their hands and a 62-minute ver-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
sion of the film was completed but never released. Both Ivens and Van Dongen
would emphatically disavow this version as bearing no relation to their earli-
er work. This final unreleased version dropped the personalisation approach
and restored the racist angle of most anti-Japanese propaganda of the period:
it played up atrocity footage, and accented isolated aspects of Japanese his-
tory, like the persecution of the Christians during the seventeenth century or
the alleged contemporary selling of young women into prostitution, illustrat-
ed by a scene in a fictional excerpt. The intended socio-analytical animation
sequences are nowhere in sight. The Disney sequences in their stead depict
the globe being smothered variously by a black dragon, an octopus, and pro-
liferating pagodas.55
Van Dongen (1976) describes their severance from the project as a 'dis-
continuation' because of a 'policy shift'. But Ivens would recall less euphe-
mistically being called into Capra's office four weeks after the completion
of the preliminary version and being fired in a forthright manner. Capra was I 327
embarrassed and blamed it on the higher-ups (interview with author, 1978).
There seems to be no basis in fact for the version repeated several times that
Ivens was given the opportunity to continue the film along a different track but
refused to compromise.56
The most commonly held theory and most plausible explanation for the
discontinuation of the film was the US State Department's gradual evolution
of its policy towards post-war Japan. Now that victory was in sight towards the
end of 1943, the Allies had the option of either the retention of the Emperor in
a kind of Western-leaning constitutional democracy (an option opposed by the
Soviets and by Ivens), or the more laissez-faire approach implicitly proposed by
Ivens's film that would permit a fundamental reorganisation of Japanese soci-
ety, along the lines of German denazification, involving war crimes trials for the
Emperor as well as those more directly commanding the Japanese war effort.
There is evidence that by the end of 1943 the former option was being chosen,
and it is reasonable to assume that this would have brought a halt to a US Army
film that even implicitly endorsed the alternative. A letter written in November
1943 by Joseph Grew, the State Department's leading Japan authority, who as
former ambassador had opposed any US firmness with Japan in the years lead-
ing up to Pearl Harbour, declared that the US should not blame the Emperor
for Japanese militarism, and expressed his desire to see the Emperor remain as
the basis of a 'healthy structure in future' (Kolko, 1968, 544). The US did in fact
follow this line and unilaterally imposed it on the Allies in the various confer-
ences planning the post-war world. For Ivens and the left, as well as for others
of the Allies, this was anathema: 'we always thought that Hitler in a sense had
imitated the Emperor of Japan, that Hitlerism in fact even had roots in Japan,
in Bushido culture and in the military worship of Japan' (Hitchens, 1972, 207).
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
The disaster of Ivens's last American film may not be attributable whol-
ly to this single point of State Department policy. The film's position on the
Emperor, as revealed in the November version, is not fully explicit: Hirohito is
cast more as a puppet of the fascist military cliques or a symbol of the system
than as an individual war criminal like Tojo.57 In any case, the toll of official
interference and indecision in the military film sector is already well known as
concerns the career of John Huston (Barnouw, 1974, 162-163), and the histo-
ry of another film, The Battle of China (Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, 1944,
65), also demonstrates the typical problems faced by Armed Forces documen-
tarists in the last phases of the war. One and a half years in the making, The
Battle of China was forced to omit any reference to the Communist armies, and
to balance accounts it omitted more than passing reference to Jiang Jieshi.
The resulting incomplete assessment of the total Chinese situation was also
judged to be impolitic: the film was not seen by the general public and was
328 I ultimately withdrawn from circulation to the armed forces. Similarly, Yourfob
in Germany (Frank Capra, 1945, USA, 13), prepared for the Normandy land-
ings, was also withdrawn due to a policy change (Griffith, 1952b, 351, 355).
Another aspect of the project which may have been linked to the fiasco is
more artistic or theoretical, having to do with the basic principles of compila-
tion filmmaking. Though compilationists had been reversing enemy footage
against its originators consistently since 1940, the contradictions and prob-
lems of this were by no means resolved. Leyda, who was working with Ivens
on Camera during the Japanese project, is very skeptical about what potential
existed for reversing very strong fascist propaganda and states that this factor
was an important one in the impasse reached by Know Your Enemy:Japan:
After more than a year under the direction of Joris Ivens, they found that
the materials could not be shaped into what they wanted to say about this
enemy. Perhaps the enemy films (chiefly fictional) which had been confis-
cated in California and Hawaii were too limited in their coverage of Japa-
nese life, or perhaps the enemy's material resisted being turned against
them; the project was not completed for release. (Leyda, 1964, 59)
Leyda goes on to conjecture that this inherent problem was compounded by
the tendency, discussed above, for the US Army writers to use the 'illustrated
scenario' method, though the November version suggests that this particu-
lar problem was within sight of being solved - the personalised portraits, for
example, are all accompanied by notations for specified newsreel and fiction-
al shots.
A further complication was undoubtedly that Ivens's personalisation
approach, designed to solicit identification, had an arguable relevance to
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
anti-enemy propaganda aimed for armed forces orientation. It is conceivable
that Washington might have perceived Ivens's portraits of Mrs. Kawakami and
the rest as being too sympathetic and not conducive to a combat mentality
on the viewer's part. Ivens was aware of the problem of being too sympathet-
ic to the enemy. In a later interview he discussed the concrete example of a
sequence that raises these questions:
You see, it is easier when you capture a machine gun from the enemy and
you load it again and shoot the enemy - that's easy. But the film is much
more difficult... you cannot do those things falsely, against real human
feeling.
Shall I tell you a little example of it? I got the Japanese footage...
When a Japanese soldier dies he goes straight to heaven because he dies
in the service of the Emperor... So when the soldier is killed, the Japa-
nese send the bones down there, they send the packages with the ashes I 329
to their country, to Japan. Of course, then they make a big memorial
demonstration over there - they call the widows, relatives, sisters, and
they receive the package in an impressive ceremony. But of course, we
knew from the information we got that these were frequently not all the
ashes of the man that was said, the name on the box. It was just plain
ashes, or maybe of some other people who burned, and that was not too
fair for the family. Then I started to use this material, to say - look, there's
a scandal, first to claim that the dead soldier goes to heaven when he dies
for the Emperor, then even to collect anonymous bones in a box and say
that it is of this man and give it ceremony.
And then when we came to the editing, and we showed when the
mothers, the sisters, the wives, when we showed the ashes of what they
think was their husband, their brother, or their son, they were moved,
terribly moved. And it was so moving that I left out the whole sequence. It
went out. Because you couldn't do it. Because that picture, it was such a
honest, straight people they were - they were fooled but still their feelings
were of great integrity and profoundness. So... there are those limits to
compilation editing, you see... (Hitchens, 1972, 209)
These considerations did not deter the final editors of the film from eventu-
ally using the ceremonial footage in the 1945 version of Know Your Enemy:
Japan. The feelings of great integrity and profoundness described by Ivens are
extremely visible on the screen, though the commentators unsuccessfully try
to persuade the viewer that the women mourners are accepting their ashes
without sorrow because 'if you are Japanese, you believe it is an honour to die
in battle'.
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
Ultimately the question may be personal and political. Certainly Ivens's
earlier compilation experience had involved successfully turning footage
against its originators - in the militant Dutch newsreel groups, on the Borinage
project - but in these cases the context was class conflict rather than national
conflict. Despite the CPUSA'a enthusiastic Popular Front support of the war
effort, Ivens may have felt a profound - although perhaps unconscious - dis-
inclination to depart from the deeper socialist vision of the enemy soldier as
victim of a class system that existed across national boundaries. It has already
been seen on several occasions that the portrayal of the enemy is an extremely
minor and ambivalent theme in Ivens's work. It may be that Ivens's irrepress-
ible instinct towards an art that seeks out the everyday human implications
of war and the social values at stake did not permit him to succeed wholly in a
project designed to reinforce combat mentality.
Finally, the shadow of ideological discrimination over Ivens's exit from the
330 I American film milieu must also be acknowledged even if it cannot be verified.
The ideological climate was rapidly changing during Ivens's last year in the US.
The Los Angeles Writers' Congress of October 1943, at which Ivens had given
his address on the morale film, boasted a welcoming message from the Pres-
ident and was supported by the mainstream of the American cultural estab-
lishment: among those present were Oscar Hammerstein, Carl Sandburg,
Darryl Zanuck, and James Wong Howe in addition to assorted left luminaries
from Howard E. Koch (Casablanca) to Leo Hurwitz.58 But this represented the
farthest point reached in the left's recovery from the disarray of the Pact years
and its effort to broaden its base throughout American culture. At the same
time, the Congress was being virulently attacked in the Hearst Press, in Wash-
ington, and, closer to home, by the California State Legislature's Fact-Finding
Committee on Un-American Activities, headed by State Senator Jack Tenney.
Tenney had a special obsession with the Screen Writers' Guild, an active par-
ticipant in the Congress, and with the Hollywood Writers' Mobilization and
the University of California, the two sponsors of the Congress (Ceplair and
Englund, 1980, 158).
The roots of the eventual blacklist were already visible during the war
years. Although many leftists had ended up in the relative sanctuaries of the
OWI or certain studios, others were not so fortunate. Francisco Aranda has
described the purges that took place at the Museum of Modern Art during the
war years, victimising Luis Bunuel among others (Aranda, 1975, 125). Paul
Strand was reportedly unable to get government work because of an apparent
blacklist (Campbell, 1978, 247). Hurwitz seems to have suffered most: he saw
his two OWI films cancelled just prior to the mix because he lacked security
clearance: Bridge of Men, about goods convoys to the USSR, and another film
about the relationship of sports to military training. Two others of his pro-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
ductions were reportedly cancelled before production (Hurwitz, round table
on 'Radical Films of the Thirties and Forties', US Conference for an Alterna-
tive Cinema, Bard College, 16 June 1979). The impression of a highly charged
political atmosphere beneath the consensus is reinforced by Capra's humor-
ous anecdote of his scraps with the Office of Internal Security because of his
interest in Soviet newsreels (Barnouw, 1974, 157). It is well within the realm of
possibility that the Army decided against accepting a contribution from a film-
maker who was not only a civilian alien but a likely communist.
As the Red Army pursued the Germans through Poland, the ambiguities
around Soviet expansionist policy began to be noticed, and Ivens's own per-
sonal status with the State Department must have become no less ambiguous.
US intelligence would later keep Ivens out of Indonesia in 1945 (Hughes, 2010),
rather than Dutch recalcitrance, and the US refusal to re-admit him afterwards,
based on the pretext of his ambiguous marital status, has an obvious politi-
cal motivation (Ferno, interview with Erik Barnouw, 17 February 1974). In any I 331
case, upon his dismissal by Capra, a dismissal that presumably included Van
Dongen (who officially became Mrs. Ivens in 1944), Ivens requested that he be
parachuted into Yugoslavia with film equipment to record the partisan strug-
gle against the then retreating Axis armies (Ivens, interview with author, Feb-
ruary 1976). Ivens may have been inspired by the Soviet operators who were
doing exactly that during this period, but it is unlikely that his request was
seriously considered (Barnouw, 1974, 154). Aside from the US suspicion of the
ideological affiliations of both Ivens and Tito, who had set up a provisional
government in Bosnia in November 1943, the Americans considered Yugosla-
via within the British sphere of influence partly because the US had thoroughly
discredited itself by supporting a Yugoslav Quisling faction earlier in the war
(Kolko, 1968, 133-138).
Embarrassed by the abrupt termination of the project, Capra and Ivens's
other friends in Hollywood attempted to find work for him elsewhere in the
studios. The first offer came from his USC film studies colleague Lester Cow-
an, the producer for Fox's The Story of G.I.Joe, a film treatment of the adven-
tures of a US war correspondent in the Italian campaign, to be directed by
William Wellman, a director who had been associated with various social and
liberal projects during the war such as the anti-lynching The Ox-Bow Incident
(1943, 75). Ivens joined the production as a consultant and writer. The Story of
G.I. Joe was part of a series of films that appeared at the end of the war attempt-
ing to provide a more realistic image of war than the earlier more romantic
morale-oriented treatments. Others were Ford's They Were Expendable (1945,
135), Raoul Walsh's Objective Burma (1945, 142), and Milestone's A Walk in the
Sun (1946, 117). Though Ivens's war experience had of course no connection
to the Italian setting of the film, it was thought that, as one of sixteen writers
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
on the project, he could add to the documentary authenticity of the combat
scenes, which were, incidentally, to feature real combat veterans. Zalzman
claims that several scenes suggested by Ivens surfaced in the final version of
the film. The Story ofG.I.Joe, released only after war's end, was duly praised for
its 'starkly realistic' documentary quality and appeared on The New York Times
'ten best' list for 1945 (Pryor, 1945). Ivens received no credit for the film.
Another Cowan project that involved Ivens during 1944 was less success-
ful. Ivens was invited to work on developing a Greta Garbo comeback vehicle
called Woman of the Sea together with Salka Viertel, a Hollywood expatriate
who was known as a Garbo intimate, and Pozner. The latter, an old friend since
Borinage, a Paris comrade from the Association des erivains et artistes revo-
lutionnaires as well as key future collaborator during the Cold War, had been
a figure in the post-Revolution Soviet literary renaissance as member of the
Serapion brotherhood, a soldier in the French army at the time of the French
332 I surrender, and the author of a novel on the Fall of France, The Edge of the Sword
(1942), before joining the expatriate community in Hollywood.
Woman of the Sea was to be an anti-fascist melodrama set in the Norwegian
Merchant Marine, to be shot in Canada aboard a Norwegian vessel. Ivens was
to direct the exterior on-location scenes and another director would handle
the dialogue interiors. Ivens was providing visual input as the two writers (col-
laborators also on a Brecht script, Silent Witness, 1945) were drawing up the
shooting script. Garbo finally refused the project, bowing to the advice of the
Swedish Embassy that participation in the film would violate Swedish neutral-
ity, and of course to her own fabled reluctance to reappear on the screen after
three years of retirement. This refusal came at a point when the script was
two thirds written, the remaining third having only been sketched; Garbo was
unmoved by a last-ditch plea by Ivens and Pozner not to sacrifice her stature
with the world's freedom-loving millions (Ivens and Pozner, letter to Garbo,
JIA, quoted in Ivens, 1969, 240-242).
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of this ill-fated project, abandoned
immediately upon the disappearance of the intended star, was the working
relationship formed with Pozner, and with one other important future collab-
orator and consort, Marion Michelle. Ivens met this American cinematogra-
pher, a native of Chicago and veteran of the WFPL, while she was an employee
of the OWI, monitoring war content in Hollywood films. Together they filmed
a 16mm exercise on board a Norwegian ship in San Francisco, testing visual
ideas for the film that was never to be realised. Meanwhile in 1944, another
career-shifting opportunity that did finally culminate in a key film in Ivens's
oeuvre, also gestated in haste, arose.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
INDONESIA CALLING
Indonesia Calling, the film that became a transitional moment for Ivens, his
bridge between two different historical periods, is also a symbolic turning
point in documentary film history. 1946 was the year when documentaries
left the theatres, abandoning all the inroads made by independent political
film during the Popular Front and the War, and settling into the proliferating
16mm educational market. It was the year when Ivens's small-scale contextual
activism went against the grain of the predominant current of grandiose inter-
national projects cut off from documentary's street-level roots. It was the year
when the left in the West prophetically held on to the 'third world' struggles as
the last viable front as it edged in disarray towards the catastrophe of the Cold
War era.
Joris Ivens may have been established as the prototypical filmmaker of
the anti-fascist struggle with Spanish Earth in 1937, but the war against Hitler 333
provided him mostly with a series of lost opportunities and disappointments.
During the entire four-year period of the US involvement in the war that had
now come to a close, Ivens had finished only a single film - the Canadian
Action Stations. The setback around Know Your Enemy:Japan, ultimately polit-
ical in nature and a foretaste of blacklists to come, was the final humiliation
of Ivens's eight-year career in the United States. It is not surprising, then, that
when a big opportunity finally came in the fall of 1944, Ivens did not hesitate to
leave everything behind and move to the other side of the globe.
The amphibious Allied landing in Netherlands New Guinea in May 1944
had first raised the question of the future of the Netherlands East Indies. The
Dutch government-in-exile, who had high-handedly refused Ivens's service
three years previously (presumably because of his Communist affiliation) was
now re-established by the progressive liberation of Holland after D-Day and
began plotting the post-war course for its pre-war Empire. This government
suddenly offered Ivens the most prestigious, well-funded and powerful film
position he had ever held, as government Film Commissioner for the Neth-
erlands East Indies, a Grierson-type position for a population approaching
eighty million. Ivens was at first curious that the Dutch would not have ideo-
logical reservations about this appointment, but they responded with a tone
of reconciliation, speaking of the changes in the global situation due to the
Soviet alliance and the advent of socialism in Eastern Europe (Ivens, interview
with author, February 1976). In retrospect he would later view this gesture as
an opportunistic tactic for ensuring progressives' support for a return to pre-
war Dutch colonialism. Ivens eagerly seized the opportunity, suppressing his
skepticism and accepting the Dutch profession of adherence to the principles
of the Atlantic Charter with regard to their Southeast Asian subjects, most
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
importantly the principle of self-determination. In a well-publicised New York
press conference held to announce the appointment on 17 October 1944, both
Ivens and his employers stressed the democratic bent of the post-war plans
for the liberated colonies. The press release mentioned the 'liberation and the
building of future Indonesia with Dutch and Indonesian working on a foot-
ing of complete equality' (Netherlands East Indies Information Service, press
release, 17 October 1944, quoted in Ivens, 1969, 242-243).
Ivens and Van Dongen, who had been appointed Deputy Commission-
er, were filled with enthusiasm for the new project, which was to be lavishly
equipped and financed. Ivens was quoted as saying 'I'm not much of a desk
man, you know... I'm really a film man and I'll get into the harness as soon as I
can' (Weiler, 1944). The project, however, involved somewhat more deskwork
than this implied. The Commissioners were to undertake simultaneously sev-
eral film and administrative projects. This included most immediately a front-
334 line film chronicle of the liberation of Indonesia from island to island, for
which Ivens had already begun to assemble portable equipment and for which
he had ensured the cooperation of the Capra Unit and the film units of the US
Navy, Air Force, and Marines as well (press release, 17 October 1944, JIA). In
addition to a feature on the liberation and construction of the new Indonesia
personally directed by Ivens, the frontline unit would take 16mm footage to be
projected locally 'to stimulate the daily fight against the Japanese'. Other units
would make war report films and documentaries on the vital part played by the
Dutch Army, Navy, and Air Force in the overall picture of the United Nations
fighting in the Pacific.
The long-term goal of the project was a whole network of educational
films that would be instrumental in bringing 'political maturity to the Indo-
nesians in one generation' (Rotha, 1952, 319). The concept's closest mod-
el was perhaps the National Film Board of Canada; it also paralleled other
emerging post-war models such as a post-Liberation French unit that had just
been organised under the directorship of Jean Painlevd, the various United
Nations projects already underway, or perhaps most specifically, in its combi-
nation of democratic rhetoric and colonialist subterfuge, the African projects
to be developed by the British Crown Film Unit in the late forties and early
fifties. The NFB model was particularly important, Ivens told the press con-
ference, for its achievement in balancing institutional support and 'stimula-
tion' for artists without 'dominating' them (Motion Picture Herald 1944). Ivens
was planning a staff of 25 to 40 cinematographers at the outset and hoped
to import others from the Netherlands, including Ferno, and to borrow still
others from Ottawa. One idea was to instruct Indonesian filmmakers in the
operation of the portable hand camera. Still motivated by the Popular Front
goal of changing systems from within, Ivens displayed all of the eagerness of
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
an artist who had been kept from his materials for almost two years. At the
moment in 1944, Ivens seemed to be at the head of what would be a dominant
post-war trend in documentary: an official, institutional effort on the part of
the filmmakers within the mainstream to address global social needs using
official and private sponsorship to the fullest extent, with a 'wider collective
purpose', as Rotha (1952, 214), this trend's eventual most representative prac-
titioner and most articulate apologist, would express it. Radicals had entered
the mainstream during the late thirties (e.g. Lorentz's US Film Service) and
during the war (the Office of War Information attracted many veterans of the
WFPL and Frontier Film, as we have seen), and it seemed as the war came to an
end that this trend could continue.
At the end of the year, Ivens flew to Australia, where the Dutch East Indies
government had located during the War, and immediately took up his duties;
Van Dongen stayed in New York to continue the purchase of equipment and
the collection of film material for the educational film program. In Brisbane 335
and Sydney, Ivens, waiting for the Liberation to commence, began the plan-
ning of the study films to be shot as part of the educational project together
with the group assembled for this purpose: Catherine Duncan, an Australi-
an poet and radio actress who had been recruited from the left intellectual
circles of Melbourne; Don Fraser, recruited from the NFB; Marion Michelle,
the Chicago-born left-wing camerawoman who at this time stepped into Van
Dongen's important shoes as Ivens's partner on and off the set, joining him in
Australia six months after his arrival; plus assorted Indonesians in exile and
Australian academics. Projected titles in the educational film series were How
We Learn, How We Work, and other treatments of culture and science.
Meanwhile in New York, Van Dongen was compiling materials for the edu-
cational film packages. In October 1945, Film News reported that Tarakan and
Balikpapan (two coastal towns in Dutch-held eastern Borneo - the Republi-
can strongholds were mostly on Java and Sumatra) were already the scenes of
resumed education with a program prepared by the Government's Education
Department and that during the first year 20 educational film programs were
to be prepared, each consisting of:
1) a 2o-minute film the main theme of which will be a section of the history
of the Second World War and the victory of the democratic way of life
2) a 10-minute film concentrating on some special aspect of the theme of
the main film
3) a 10-minute film or travelogue dealing with human interest aspects treat-
ed in the main film. (Van Dongen, 1945, 24)
At the point of this publication, Van Dongen's film selections had been
approved and she was on the point of negotiating their purchase.
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
In actual fact, the Allies applied the principles of the Atlantic Charter
and the 'democratic way of life' very selectively as the Axis troops were driven
back. Despite Roosevelt's distaste for the European regimes in Southeast Asia,
Americans were much more preoccupied with China and Japan and tended
to adopt a laissez-faire attitude to the return of the former colonial powers to
Indonesia, Malaya, and Indochina. This was particularly true in the case of
Indochina where the anti-Japanese independence movement was left-dom-
inated. In Indonesia, however, where the independence movement led by
Achmed Sukarno and Mohammed Hatta had no explicitly left orientation and
had in fact collaborated with the Japanese, the US tacitly supported the Repub-
licans, especially since Sukarno seemed flexible on the question of non-Dutch
foreign 'interests' (Kolko, 1968, 448).
Furthermore, the Indonesian archipelago had not been liberated by island-
to-island fighting as envisaged the previous year, but by the Japanese surren-
336 I der on 14 August, at which point the Dutch asked the Japanese to keep control
of the colonies until they could send in troops. The Japanese did not prevent
the Indonesian Republicans from declaring independence on 17 August and
control began slipping from the Japanese to Sukarno before the British and
Allied troops could arrive to accept the Japanese surrender towards the end
of September. As the Dutch moved to re-impose 'order' on Java, the headquar-
ters of the Republicans, they were frustrated by the British, who refused to
help (Palmer, 1962, 46); they were also defied by the Indonesian crews of the
eighteen ships of the Dutch colonial navy stationed in Brisbane, who, having
succeeded in forming their first union during the War, went on strike to stop
the ships from leaving Australia to join the blockade. They were supported on
24 September by Brisbane union seamen and dockworkers who announced a
ban on ships carrying Dutch arms to Indonesia, and by Chinese, Indian, and
some Dutch sailors (Grant, 1962, 154; Lockwood, 1982; Hughes, 2009).
Brisbane had been the wartime headquarters not only for the Dutch East
Indies government-in-exile, but also for about 600 Indonesian political activ-
ists, internees who had been evacuated from their New Guinea concentration
camps by the Dutch lest they help the Japanese, only to face internment in
Australia, temporarily. These anti-colonial nationalists included many mem-
bers of the Indonesian Communist Party, and their wartime organising among
Indonesian expatriates had borne fruit. Although neither Labour Prime Min-
ister Chifley nor the Australian Council of Trade Unions officially supported
the ban, both did so tacitly, and Chifley and union officials spoke out individ-
ually in support of the nationalists. The Dutch were not deterred from institut-
ing a blockade and bombardment of the Republican strongholds.
Ivens by this time was already relating more to the Indonesian exiles than
his compatriots in Australia and was becoming increasingly disturbed that
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
the Dutch were not taking him to Indonesia as promised, especially since the
'liberation' of Indonesia now appeared to be from rather than by the Dutch.
His work was also being undermined by an already existing, Australia-based
Dutch East Indies Film and Photo Unit and by hostile Australian and Dutch
intelligence operators. Did Ivens also have an inkling that the Allied command
in Southeast Asia under General MacArthur had no intention of allowing this
'most dangerous' 'Soviet agent' into the former Dutch colony, thanks to vig-
ilant FBI tracking (Hughes, 2009)? In early October, the Australian ship, The
Esperance Bay, left Sydney carrying 1400 Indonesian exiles back to Republi-
can-held ports with an Australian official aboard to guarantee that the passen-
gers would not fall into Dutch hands. Early in November, strong Republican
resistance to the Dutch and the occupying British troops broke out in Sura-
baya in southern Java.
Ivens could no longer countenance remaining on the side of the colonial
army. In anger, he held a well-publicised press conference on 21 November to 337
denounce the Dutch policies and to resign. He of course already had the hang
of radical renunciations but this was the most dramatic and public to date. A
statement, drawn up to maximise the impact of the resignation, declared that
the Dutch had broken their share of the contract by refusing to respect the
contractual principle of complete equality for Dutch and Indonesians in the
future Indonesia and their permission to allow Ivens to film the restoration
of democratic government in that country. The statement, wired to New York,
and sent dutifully by Van Dongen to every major magazine and newspaper film
critic in the US, Canada, South America, and Europe, concluded with explicit
criticism of the Dutch actions in Indonesia, a reference to the flouted princi-
ples of the Atlantic Charter, and a ringing manifesto:
I have not and will not do any film work that would be against my princi-
ples and convictions. [...] There is a road to freedom for all peoples in the
world. The documentary film should record and assist the progress along
this road. (Ivens, telegraphed statement, 21 November 1945, JIA, quoted
in Ivens, 1969, 243-244)
The publicity was effective and the event was covered in newspapers around
the world, and reportedly on the front page of The New York Times59 (Ivens,
1970, 157). Statements of support were forthcoming from many of Ivens's
former Hollywood co-workers, including Milestone, Renoir, and Nichols.
The Dutch replied that Ivens was no longer Film Commissioner since he had
'refused to make a film on the liberation of the Dutch East Indies' (Nether-
lands East Indies Information Service press release, n.d. [c. November 1945],
JIA), attempted unsuccessfully to have him deported from Australia, and
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
would continue to dog him around passport legalities over the next fifteen
years. His shocked compatriots considered him a traitor, John Ferno, who
originally had been part of the Netherlands East India plans, was almost as
negative about the new developments (Schoots, [1995] 2000, 203), and even
the Dutch Communist Party withheld its support (Ivens, 1970, 157). Mean-
while, a Sydney newspaper reported the day after the press conference that
Ivens had admitted that he knew of a film being made about the developments
but that he did not know who was making it (unattributed clipping, The Sydney
Sun, 22 November 1945, JIA).
Ivens's and Michelle's informal documentation on the ongoing develop-
ments on the Brisbane and Sydney waterfronts may have taken off sporadi-
cally as early as August but only became part of a systematic film project with
the Esperance Bay filming on 13 October. Recent evidence confirms Ivens's
involvement with the activity while still under contract with the colonial boss-
338 I es (Hughes, 2009). In any event, the filming, hampered by lack of stock, equip-
ment, and financing lasted until the completion of the film about one year
later. The pair eventually invited Duncan, who had resigned from the Dutch
film unit before Ivens, to look at the rushes to see if she could detect anything
promising. Recognising something that Ivens, Michelle, and the Indonesians
had perhaps not, an authentically Australian subject ('There was a country
there [in the rushes]'!), Duncan enthusiastically joined the group as a writ-
er (Michelle and Duncan, 1960, 89). At this point, the group was using a bor-
rowed, defective, hand-wound Kinamo portable camera, identical to the one
with which Ivens had started his career as a young Dutch avant-gardist in the
late twenties. For two sequences to be shot in synchronous sound, they rented
a newsreel sound truck. Attempts were made to enlist professional cinematog-
raphers on the project, including John Heyer, the future head of the Austral-
ian National Film Board (who mistakenly shot a ship full of Indians thinking
they were Indonesians, and saw his precious footage used in a scene showing
Indian sailors joining the boycott). Michelle shot the rest of the film herself,
with some help from Ivens. Since Eastman Kodak refused to sell the group
stock, claiming post-war restrictions, they had to use material scrounged from
wartime supplies that was not verifiable (Michelle, interview with author, Feb-
ruary 1976), as well as leftover ends supplied by British director Harry Watt,
then shooting the promising new national 'epic' The Overlanders (1946, UK,
91) (Hughes, 2009).
The major problem during the shooting was harassment by local author-
ities, police and journalists, despite the widespread government and union
sympathy for the project. Duncan and Michelle have many anecdotes of the lit-
erally clandestine, guerilla tactics necessary for the filming, partly due also to
the lingering wartime security regulations in all the harbours. The filmmakers
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
often had to resort to the tactics Ivens had learned thirteen years earlier during
the shooting of Borinage on behalf of striking Belgian coal miners. One scene
where Australian strikers are lounging around a street corner, pretending to
play cards before springing into action, is in particular reminiscent of almost
identical shots from Borinage in which strikers idly play cards in small groups
along a street waiting for the signal to rush together to hold an illegal meeting.
46.Jndonesia Calling: Union solidarity
and oratory, changing Australian
politics. Frame enlargement. Courtesy
John Hughes. © CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
339
The atmosphere for Michelle and Duncan, despite the danger - and despite
initial animosity which quickly transformed to a lifelong friendship - was one
of 'adventure' (Michelle, interview with author, February 1976). Most of the
events of the strike and boycott were at first recorded spontaneously, but as
the film began to take shape, a few events that had taken place at night were
re-enacted, and, after the editing had begun, some additional covering and
establishing shots were taken. By this time, the Australian Waterfront Union,
whose leaders had led the local participation in the boycott, came to the res-
cue of the film and assumed lab costs. Financing for the film was also secretly
obtained from an Australian communist businessman Fred Wong (Hughes,
2009), and the union made available some boats for the filming of some of
the most spectacular material in the film: a sequence about an unsuccessful
attempt by strikers in a small tug to persuade Dutch troops crowding a liner to
lay down their arms; a more successful attempt also with a loudspeaker and a
small boat to persuade an Indian crew, which the Dutch had sneaked through
the embargo with arms for Indonesia, to turn back their ship (the union craft
broke down and the camera boat had to tow it back to shore); and finally some
enchanting travelling shots of Indonesian patriots on board a ship, with the
Sydney harbour backdrop gliding past, dreaming, according to the commen-
tary, of their besieged homeland. Australian researchers have recently con-
firmed the extent to which the small and clandestine operation served as a
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
rallying point for Australia's emerging documentary culture: the shoot bene-
fited from secret contributions by John Heyer, considered a founder of nation-
al documentary; Watt and Axel Poignant, his cinematographer on Overlanders;
Ralph Foster, the Commissioner of the new Australian National Film Board as
well as his successor Stanley Hawes (both of whom were NFB veterans and the
latter probably acquainted with Ivens in Ottawa), as well as members of the
Melbourne's communist-affiliated New Theatre group. Despite these unoffi-
cial contributions, unacknowledged because of fears of political fallout, and
the union's support, the filmmakers were still short of funds, and when it
came to the sound recording they were required to choose music in the pub-
lic domain. Accordingly, the soundtrack was based with surprising success on
the repetition of a single cut called 'Mulberry March'. During the editing Ivens
became seriously ill with asthma and practically had to supervise the sound
recording from his bed. This weakened him so much that Michelle had to do
340 the negative cutting on her own while Ivens recuperated.
47. Indonesia Calling: exiles dreaming
of their homeland as they glide through
Sydney harbour, one of a defiant film's
most lyrical moments. Frame enlargement.
Courtesy John Hughes. © CAPI Films, Paris,
and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
From the form of the final version of the film, it is clear that this film, per-
haps more than any other in Ivens's career, achieved its shape in the editing.
Duncan's anecdote about the dubious sound engineer professing to be able to
make Ben Hur in his back yard if anything could be made of such pitiful rushes
is perfectly plausible (Michelle and Duncan, 1960, 89). It is a hybrid film made
up of isolated documents, some of limited visual self-sufficiency. They are
strung together chronologically and adhered with additional covering mate-
rial, an establishing landscape from time to time - for example a bird's eye
pan of the idle harbour and embargoed ships that Michelle shot while hiding
behind some rocks (Michelle, interview with author, February 1976) - and the
several stiffly reconstituted scenes of demonstrations and rallies. An expos-
itory scene giving some historical and economic background resorts to the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
means Capra had fallen back on to fill in the gaps of Why We Fight - anima-
tion. Ivens, however, used the rudimentary animation technique of accelerat-
ed on-camera drawing, to good effect, within the narrative framework.
The direct sound sequences, filmed in static, frontal 'newsreel' style, con-
sist of two ceremonial events at which speeches are given by representatives of
the Indonesian nationalists and their supporters. These sequences function
less as elements in the narration or exposition than as punctuation devices
celebrating the solidarity of the Australian unions and other groups with the
Indonesian protagonists. Other 'newsreel'-type sequences are briefer and less
important, except for a climactic parade scene in which a long file of repre-
sentatives of the five nationalities appearing in the film - Indonesians, Indi-
ans, Chinese, Dutch, and Australians - stride briskly toward the camera four
abreast over Sydney's strikingly cinematic harbour bridge. Even the compi-
lation principle is represented: the film opens with a 'quote' from an Octo-
ber 1945 newsreel depicting the departure of the Esperance Bay. The extreme I 341
eclecticism of this mix, dominated by documentary mise-en-scene (including
reconstitution and other forms of collaboration with the subjects), and incor-
porating less 'candid' or improvised material than most other Ivens films,
comes not from any intentional aesthetic outlined at the start but clearly from
the reliable aesthetic principles of contingency and availability that Ivens and
Van Dongen had proven both as compilationists and as radicals. The shooting
ratio of the film is surely the lowest of Ivens's career, approximately 1.1 to 1,
judging from Duncan's memory that the 22-minute film was derived from 25
minutes of footage (Michelle and Duncan, 1963, 71).
All of these diverse elements are held tightly together by a commentary
that, for virtually the first time in Ivens's career, carries most of the diegetic
weight, providing the film with a strong and coherent narrative shape. This
role was essential, not only because of the extreme diversity of visual elements,
but also because of the undeniable sparseness of some of the images (though
surprisingly few), and because the essential narrative idea, an embargo, is one
of inactivity. Images of a deserted port or workers on a sit-down strike have not
often been successfully handled in a medium based on movement; though the
harbourscapes are classical images of the Dutch lyricist in Ivens, the idleness
of the cranes are decidedly atypical.
The commentary provides a simple chronology of the events, from the
newsreel flashback of the Esperance Bay, to the escalating boycott, to the cli-
mactic episode in which the Indian crew are persuaded to mutiny and turn
back their cargo of arms. This latter episode includes an effective moment of
narrative suspense orchestrated by the voice-over: as the ship recedes fromview
after the pursuit of the embargo-breaking arms ship, the voice-over announc-
es 'They're gone!', followed by a well-timed pause before reconstituted images
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
show the Indian seamen returning. The commentary is the most prominent of
Ivens's career up to this point: the proportion of the running time occupied by
future film star Peter Finch's reading is a high 77%, which exceeds the corre-
sponding figures from even the seven Why We Fight films, though it is roughly
comparable to most of the wartime National Film Board of Canada produc-
tions. As might be expected, however, the commentary does not consist exclu-
sively of voice-of-god narration as with so many of the Capra and NFB films.
In addition to the two synchronous 'newsreel' sequences with their platform
oratory and patriotic cheers, the filmmakers vary the soundtrack diegesis in
every possible way: indirect speech, post-dubbed live music with narrative
content (a ballet-concert of traditional Indonesian music, featuring Sardjono,
crew member and former intern, as the ornately costumed court dancer), two
scenes where dramatic voices are post-dubbed (the two sea-borne pursuit
scenes), several scenes where dramatic voices are assumed by the narrator,
342 I others where the narration becomes a present-tense sportscasting-type text,
and two scenes in which the dubbed voices of blockaded independence-fight-
ers broadcast to their compatriots in Australia (whence the title), not to men-
tion moments of straightforward narration and exposition. It is a very dense,
urbane, and variegated verbal diegesis, with enduring impact.
The durability of Indonesia Calling, however, is not only a function of its
textual achievement, its surprising strength as documentary narrative, or its
summative expression of the formal possibilities of the hybrid form of classi-
cal documentary in a zero-budget activist context at the end of the war. It must
also be seen as a milestone in Ivens's career, in the embryonic histories of the
Australian and Indonesian national cinemas, and, most important, in docu-
mentary and political film history as a whole because of its political relation
to its historical context. In this regard the anecdotal parallel made earlier with
Borinage must be extended, since the way in which these two films are both
underground is emblematic of their unique stature as examples of contextual
filmmaking.
Most of the other political documentaries of Ivens's career and of film his-
tory up to this point had been initiated as films from the exterior. Borinage and
Indonesia Calling were admittedly made by filmmakers who came from else-
where, but they were initiated and animated by the interior political dynam-
ic of each conjuncture. Both films bore a subject-centred, activist orientation
towards their context and for this reason had to be clandestine. The Indone-
sian nationalists and the Australian union activists and intellectual sympa-
thisers functioned as leaders in much the same way as the Borin militants
had; the filmmakers were technical resource-people responsible to their sub-
jects, not independent 'artists' in the traditional sense, that is, with their sub-
jects responsible to them. Both films not only 'record' a political process, they
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
are also part of that process, affecting it in a catalytic manner, 'assisting' it, as
Ivens had put it in his press conference. The analogy of documentary method-
ology to the social sciences, for example to the 'participant observation' and
'case study' approaches of anthropology and sociology, loses its pertinence;
instead artistic practice more precisely parallels political rather than scientific
practice.60
I have expressed Ivens's two achievements and the concept of contextu-
al filmmaking in idealised terms of course, but the concept does accurately
describe both Borinage and Indonesia Calling all the same, with allowance for
the considerable difference in their two contexts. For example, Ivens and his
colleagues' immersion of a few months in the Borin milieu is hardly compara-
ble to the year and a half that Ivens and his crew devoted to the evolving Aus-
tralian situation, nor to the immersion periods of Barbara Kopple in Harlan
County, USA (1977, USA, 104), to cite a 1970s example of political contextual
filmmaking, nor, for that matter, to that of non-political contextual filmmak- 343
ers of the classical period such as Flaherty and Storck.6'
Another difference was that Borinage, unlike Indonesia Calling, had not
been an isolated gesture in the conjuncture of the early thirties; it was very
much a part of an international movement, an expression of the militant pro-
letarian phase of international Communism before the advent of the Popular
Front. The American left filmmakers, and workers' film movements in oth-
er countries, still being unearthed by film historians, were equally motivated
by the ideal of the contextual, political use of documentary on a local level.
Examples like Strand's Mexican Redes (The Wave, 1936, 65), or WFPL director
Nancy Naumberg's Sheriffed (1934) had important affinities with Borinage as
examples of contextual filmmaking, as Naumberg's description of her contin-
uous consultation and collaboration with her subjects, farmers' union mili-
tants, made clear (Naumberg, quoted in Kennedy, 1935, 11). What is more,
such films shared an integrated and dynamic international constituency that
expanded as the Popular Front came to the fore. But in the long run, such prec-
edents would not become part of a systematic process towards resolving the
contradictions of the model: Naumberg's defence, for example, reveals how
the model's emphasis on local input and non-professional film cadres had not
yet overcome financial and technical limitations. Cumberland, a manifesto of
labour militancy and popular education in the Appalachians, would be the
only Frontier Films production on a domestic subject to bypass those limita-
tions without losing sight of the contextual ideal.
As the thirties continued, most of the inspiration for the contextual ide-
al was drained off by the demands of the international situation and by the
aspiration toward mass distribution. Power, however, can be seen as another
intermediate step, with its emphasis on the immersion of the filmmakers in
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
the context (after three weeks in the St. Clairsville, Ohio hotel, the crew had
moved right in with their farm family subjects, the Parkinsons, for the rest
of the shoot), Ivens's involvement of the subjects in the filmmaking process,
and his insistence on flexibility in the face of the reality of the situation. This
scrupulousness was significant in an atmosphere charged, as the documen-
tary movement wound down, with heightened consciousness of the potential
for exploitation within the documentary project: Strand (quoted in Jacobs,
1979, 121) had declared that it was 'exploitation of people, however pictur-
esque, indifferent and interesting to us they may appear, merely to make use
of them as material', and the documentary book on share-croppers, You Have
Seen Their Faces (1937), by Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell, was
roundly denounced by Walker Evans (quoted in Stott, 1973, 222) for 'prof-
it-making'. Power, however, for all its integrity, was a Department of Agricul-
ture commission that could only go so far; as Ivens said to the camera operator
344 Ornitz, who had wanted to organise the Ohio farmers between takes (accord-
ing to a story that may be apocryphal but is symbolically true), they were there
to make a film not start the Revolution (Van Dyke, interview with author,
December 1975).
Indonesia Calling must, then, have been an exhilarating experience for
Ivens, after years of 'desk' work, discouragement, and detachment from the
roots of his experience as a political filmmaker. It was a return to the harness
in a sense that he had not foreseen at the moment of his 1944 press confer-
ence, a second return to the 'social function of the documentary', as he had
earlier described the films of his politicisation period (Ivens, 1940, 42).
The echoes of Borinage and the whole proletarian period are palpable not
only in the subterfuges and clandestinity, but also in the filmic style of Indone-
sia Calling - the low priority on technical aesthetic finesse, the loose episodic
structure, the visual stress on groups of subjects as opposed to individuals,
its simple, direct declamatory address, its defiant jubilant ending, the fore-
grounding of filmed demonstrations. Ivens must have felt a sense of a return.
It is probably an accident that he discovered Mao Zedong's 1942 Yan'an dis-
cussion of art while in Australia in 1945 and he would not necessarily have
been tempted to try a mechanical application of aesthetic principles derived
from a peasant and proletarian revolution to the Sydney milieu (Ivens, inter-
view with author, April 1978); nevertheless he must have felt that Indonesia
Calling vindicated in a modest way Mao's ideal of the people as the source,
material, and ultimate end of art. He probably could not have foretold, howev-
er, that Indonesia Calling would not be part of an international movement like
Borinage, but a single anomalous gesture in the West of the post-war decades.
The film was shown in Sydney cinemas and elsewhere in Australia begin-
ning in September 1946, where it had an important impact and gave the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
fledgling Australian cinema an important boost. It also thrilled the local Indo-
nesian audience who had not yet been expatriated to Republican Indonesia
who saw it repeatedly with a simultaneous translation by one of the activists.
The film offered Australians an alternative, less colonised model for its future
course than Watt's big-budget epic. Finch's narration was reportedly the first
that Australian audiences had ever heard rendered in an Australian accent
(Delmar, 1979, 41). Duncan's recognition of a 'country' in the rushes was
borne out: 'One thing is certain - the Australian audience saw themselves in
that film. Watching the film they realized for the first time that they and their
country had an important role to play in world affairs' (Michelle and Duncan,
1963, quoted in Delmar, 1979, 43).
More important perhaps to Ivens in the short term was the role played
by the film in the Indonesian struggle, beyond its obvious importance in
bolstering the organising efforts of the expatriates in Australia. Two copies
of the film were smuggled past the Dutch blockade (into Java via Singapore) I 345
and were shown in a 16mm dubbed Malay version with portable equipment
to many outdoors audiences (Ivens, 1970, 158). There, according to Duncan,
the film became an important arm in the Indonesian resistance, which still
at that time had several years to go; it contradicted for the blockaded Republi-
cans the Dutch broadcasts to the effect that they were completely isolated and
abandoned by the rest of the world (Michelle and Duncan, 1963, 43). Even-
tual screenings in Djakarta cinemas before Gone with the Wind no doubt had
similar effect (Hughes, 2009). Later attempts by Indonesians to lure Ivens to
the new republic to carry on his cinematic contribution were unsuccessful
(Hughes, 2009). (A final sad footnote beyond the scope of this study would pon-
der the fate of many of Indonesia Calling's stars in the CIA-backed anti-com-
munist genocide in 1965.)
In international documentary circles, the film went on to a more mod-
est career whose limits reflected the tightening Cold War atmosphere. The
Australian government had at first banned it for export, presumably to avoid
offending the Dutch, but this controversial decision had been reversed after
the full cabinet saw the film in November 1946. Thereafter the film attracted
attention because of Ivens's reputation and the publicity that had surround-
ed his resignation. The film appeared to an appreciative audience at the 1947
Edinburgh International Festival of Documentary, and was released for US
non-theatrical exhibition by Ivens's old distributor from the radical thirties,
Brandon Films, in November 1947. There must have been disappointment,
however, that the film did not make more of a splash. Richard Griffith (1952a,
319), chief spokesperson for US documentary in the post-war years, described
it as 'violently revolutionary', a bizarre but symptomatic overreaction to a
cheerful little film that scarcely goes beyond the Atlantic Charter principle
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
of self-determination unanimously endorsed by the United Nations. All the
same, Griffith's description, written in 1952, provides a hint of the ideological
environment into which Indonesia Calling was issued. The film failed to garner
an Academy Award nomination as Brandon had hoped, and Cecile Starr omit-
ted it entirely from her influential 1951 listing of 200 16mm documentaries
available for US rental ('Indonesia Calling for Academy Award Screening', press
release, Brandon Films, New York, 3 February 1948, JIA; Starr, 1951, 135-238).
I have stated that Indonesia Calling's local contextual activism was an
anomaly in the post-war documentary movement. By far the dominant trend
of the post-war 'political' documentary was, to repeat Rotha's euphemism,
'towards a wider collective purpose'. The major films, varied in the problem-
atic of official and corporate sponsorship, were too focused on global UNES-
CO-scope problems to be able to relate to local activism, too preoccupied with
escalating production values and larger crews encouraged by increasingly
346 I generous sponsors, from UNESCO to the foundations, from the NFB to Shell
Oil, to be able to reflect grass roots political realities. Ivens's own unfinished
New Frontiers had perhaps been heading in this direction with its foundation
sponsorship (the Sloan Foundation was linked to General Motors) and its
large-scale ambitious vision of American history and society as a whole. What
remains of the plans for that pre-war project clearly anticipates the encyclo-
pedic films of the post-war period, both Ivens's own within the Soviet bloc,
The First Years, an epic of reconstruction and socialisation in Poland, Czech-
oslovakia, and Bulgaria, and those in the West of which Paul Rotha's are typ-
ical, in which ambitious visions of the reconstruction of entire societies and
the solutions to global problems are expressed. If 'land' was the hallmark of
prewar documentary titles (Power and the Land [1940], The Land [1940-1942],
Native Land [1938-1942], Spanish Earth [1937], The Plow that Broke the Plains
[1936], New Earth [1934], Land Without Bread [1931]), 'world' might be seen as
the symptomatic post-war equivalent (Rotha's World of Plenty [1943, UK, 42],
The World is Rich [1947, UK, 46], and World Without End [1953, UK, 60], Sucks-
dorff's En kluven vdrld [A Divided World, 1948, Sweden, 9]). The typical post-war
films are plodding, self-righteous and self-important, not because of any spe-
cific formal or technological syndromes, but because of their rupture from the
small-scale origins of political documentary. Direct cinema would appear like
such a gust of fresh air after the mid-fifties not only because of technological
breakthroughs, but because it coincided with a return to the small-scale con-
tact with subjects and audiences that Indonesia Calling, of all documentaries
in the post-war decade, embodies almost alone. Ironically, Ivens (1969, 212)
had spoken truer than he knew in triumphantly predicting in 1945 the demise
of the 'one-man documentary'.
These conditions cannot be separated from the disarray of the left during
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
those years. The travails of prolific union documentarist Carl Marzani and his
outfit Union Films, as recently uncovered by Charles Musser (2009), bespeak
a lively scene admittedly, symptomatically overlooked by tastemakers and
historians alike as Musser complains, but one hounded by authorities and
redbaiters, like the left-wing unions it championed, and ultimately run into
the ground. But this scene was hardly more than a rump of the dynamic and
diverse worlds of the 1930s and wartime, resilient in the face of imprisonment,
silencing, and defeat. The Marzani group's output of approximately 25 pro-
gressive short campaign, labour, and travel films between 1946 and 1953, and
the three great canonical feature-length films of the American left of the post-
war decade - Strange Victory (1948, 71) and the Oscar-nominated The Quiet One
(1949, 70) by Frontier Films veterans Leo Hurwitz and Sidney Meyers respec-
tively, and Herbert Biberman's semi-documentary Salt of the Earth (1954,
94), by Ivens's old associate from the Hollywood Writers' Mobilization days
- are all the exceptions that prove the general rule of the demoralisation and 347
depletion of the ranks during the HUAC years. Significantly, the three unique
feature-length films have a theme in common with Indonesia Calling: they all
point to the postcolonial struggle as the legitimate preoccupation of the left
in the Cold War era of retrenchment (though both Ivens and Biberman situate
this affirmation within the context of traditional union movements that were
Marzani's cause as well and Hurwitz and Meyers do so in terms of the domes-
tic racial problematic). In this sense, Ivens's Das Lied der Strme (Song of the
Rivers, 1954, DDR, 90), his most important film of his Eastern European peri-
od between 1946 and 1957, belongs to this group in its prophetic association
of the anti-colonial struggles of Africa and Asia with workers' movements in
the industrialised West. All of these isolated utterances predict with uncanny
exactitude the essential significance of the 'third world' struggle for the Left in
the last decades of the twentieth century.
However, except for Indonesia Calling, the three feature films of the Amer-
ican left as well as Lied, are all comparable to the encyclopedic 'UNESCO'
films in their pursuit of high production values and their orientation towards
feature-length commercial viability. Indonesia Calling, with its low-budget
short-documentary format, was more attuned, less by design than by contin-
gency, to the realities of the post-war film distribution system. Few observers
foresaw in 1945, least of all Ivens, that the wartime fulfilment of the late-thir-
ties dream of commercial viability for documentary had been illusory, that the
wartime documentary boom had been an artificially stimulated byproduct of
the war, and that, now that the war was over, documentaries would leave the
theatres as quickly as women were leaving the factories. Eighteen theatrical
documentaries, mostly features, had been reviewed in The New York Times in
1943, fifteen in 1944, and fourteen in 1945; in 1946 the comparable figure was
PROJECTS OF THE FORTIES
four, of which all were either Soviet-bloc in origin or war-related, and in 1947,
the figure was five, of which one was British, one Soviet, one Palestinian, and
only two domestic. The theatrical market had evaporated.
The other side of the coin was that the 16mm educational film boom con-
firmed documentary in the thriving ghetto of non-theatrical marginalisation,
a boom that Marzani arguably understood and profited from better than the
feature-focused 1930s veterans. A wave of books appeared as the theoretical
justifications, operating manuals, and consumers' guides of the 16mm educa-
tional market: Rotha's revised edition of Documentary Film, declaring that the
potential for feature documentary had been 'grossly overrated' (Rotha, 1952,
216); Basil Wright's The Use of the Film, including a long discussion of the
non-commercial nature of documentary (Wright [1948] 1972, 42); Gloria Wal-
dron's The Information Film (1949), which reassuringly estimated the wartime
non-theatrical audience to have been 30 or 40 million (Waldron, 1949, 14);
348 I Cecile Starr's Ideas on Film: Handbook for the 16mm User (1951); and the Brit-
ish The Factual Film (1947) (Arts Enquiry 1947). Television, of course, with its
usurpation of the journalistic function of the newsreels and of the theatrical
documentary, would consolidate this post-war pattern, while opening anoth-
er medium to the documentarist (in theory at least). As I have stated, Ivens
(1969, 209-225) in his 1945 stock-taking was not aware of this imminent radi-
cal shift in the production-consumption framework of the documentary, and
his impending immersion in the controlled market of Eastern Europe would
delay his confrontation with the new reality in the West for another decade.
For documentary adherents in 1946-1947, the appearance of Indonesia
Calling must have seemed the harbinger of a whole new chapter in Ivens's
career, with its small-scale activist orientation and refreshing renewal of con-
tact with the roots of his artistic political mission, and its dynamic sense of
movement in the streets and on the sea. Instead, it was the closing page of a
chapter just finished. Refused re-entry to the US, soon stripped of his Dutch
travel documents, his former co-workers facing jail, unemployment, and
ostracism in the US and Canada, Ivens left behind a period in which he had
moved from the centre of the European avant-garde through the political
awakening occasioned by the crisis of capitalism in Europe to the forefront
of the anti-fascist struggle. Like Brecht, Eisler, and Pozner, Ivens migrated to
the new 'socialist' republics of Eastern Europe. There he would see himself
established as the unofficial filmmaker laureate for an entire decade, like Bre-
cht and Eisler in theatre and music. There also he would soon see, in the same
country where he himself had been a student 30years earlier, the formation of
Young Communist filmmaking clubs called Joris Ivens Leagues.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
PART II
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48. Die Windrose (1957). Hungarian film poster. Orioginal in colour.
courtesy coil. EFJI, Nijmegen
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1
CHAPTER 5
Torn Curtain:
Ivens the Cold Warrior
1946-1956
There was virtually no artistic form in the diverse Eastern European
films.
- Hans Schoots, Living Dangerously
The Iron Curtain was already christened as such in March 1946, less than I 351
a year after the end of the War. The decade or so that Ivens spent east of it,
based mostly in Prague, Warsaw, and East Berlin, was, although a frustrating
one for him personally and creatively, more productive - and artistic - than
some accounts might indicate. It is also undeniably key to his oeuvre and leg-
acy. If we need masterpieces, this period led to the production of a film that
has often received that accolade, Das Lied der Strome (also known by its official
English title Song of the Rivers [1954, DDR, 90]), and I concur. Lied synthesised
and consolidated many of Ivens's previous innovations, pushing in particular
the compilation mode to match his epic artistic ambitions and global politi-
cal ideals, as well as building prophetically on the postcolonial breakthrough
of Indonesia Calling (1946, Australia, 22). At the same time, it echoed Pierwsze
lata (The First Years, 1949, Bulgaria/Czechoslovakia/Poland, 99) and Pokoj
zdobgdzie swiat (Peace Will Win, 1951, Poland, 90) in speaking eloquently with
the traumatised voice of his post-war generation. This period was also the cru-
cible for some of Ivens's most problematical films - speaking both artistically
and politically - those in which his most ardent hopes were most catastrophi-
cally dashed, those that Ivens himself looking back from the 1980s considered
moments of repetition rather than development, films 'hav[ing] slid the most
in history' (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 243). Meanwhile, it was the interlude
when Ivens offered his final synthesis of his relationship with socialist realism
- final that is until wars and revolutions in Asia revived it in the late 1960s and
1970s. The time has come in this book to face that relationship head on. Final-
ly, it was also an interval in which a 40-something artist stepped up his involve-
ment in a focused way in producing, collaborating, and mentoring, and thus
one that complicates any auteurist presumptions about documentary film his-
tory we might still complacently be nursing.
49. Pierwsze Lata [The First Years] (1949): Ivens directing the foundry
lab sequence of the Polish episode with scriptwriter, partner and
photographer Marion Michelle seen at rear, 1948. Production still,
collection Marion Michelle (MM/EFJI) © EFJI, Nijmegen
Historically speaking, this was the period in which Ivens and his collaborators,
both external and internal, weathered the violent contradictions and ultimate-
ly fatal crisis within the Old Left during the opening salvos of the Cold War.
The historical chronology of this crisis spanned from the perfidious and para-
noid implantation of Russian dominance in Eastern Europe (the Soviets were
no doubt justifiably paranoid in the face of the nuclear arms race, sparked by
American arms-testing in the immediate post-Hiroshima years, which the
Soviets were not able to counter with their own first nuclear test until August
1949), to the emergence and consolidation of Euro-Communism in Western
Europe at the time of the Thaw. The death of Stalin in March 1953 was followed
by opposing pulls of liberalisation and retrenchment within communist socie-
ties, including the famous de-Stalinisation that finally ushered in the Thaw in
question in 1956 and the contradictory suppression of that same disavowal in
the shape of tanks rumbling through Budapest that same year. Biographically
speaking, this period culminated, just as Ivens's adventures of the 1930s had, in
exit and rupture, and in a crumbling marriage with yet another female collabo-
rator, and with artistic/political salvation on another horizon - in this case with-
in the 'progressive' cultural fronts of the West... of the South and of the Far East.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Certainly the eight films Ivens directed, produced, or had a part in during
his Cold War period are those most disavowed across the board by the Ivens
estate, and even, to a certain extent, by his foundation: this period is the only
major vector of his career not represented in any way whatsoever in the 2008
DVD box-set restoration of his oeuvre. Lied is not the only work of note and
grandeur to have emerged: another film, the troubled First Years, a transna-
tional epic of reconstruction and nation building, offered what might be con-
sidered Ivens's most carried-through rendition of his personalised model of
documentary form; and the uneven series of films, either directed, co-direct-
ed, or 'overseen' by Ivens, most like Lied caught in the potential trap of the
commissioned 'congress film' format, must be seen as creditable efforts at the
cinematic waging of peace in the era of the H-test. One of these, Peace Will Win,
made enough of an impact that it had a second life as a tool in the US anti-war
movement during the Vietnam era.
The erasure of these films, admittedly on the wrong side of history it I 353
could be argued, might be deemed an attempted rewriting of that history on
the part of Ivens's executors - perhaps even Marceline Loridan-Ivens's testa-
mentary credo - or simply a revisionist ideological statement of failed ideals.
Or it might simply reflect the insoluble encounter with issues having to do
solely with rights (most of this period's work was carried out for the East Ger-
man state-owned production company DEFA and other concerns in Prague,
Warsaw, and Moscow'). Whatever the case, the smoothing out of history and
the disavowal of a decade's artistic and political labour, however misguid-
ed or doomed or contradictory, is not an appropriate way to understand the
progress of this international artist-in-exile as he moved from middle age to
honourary elder status - nor to learn from it the valuable artistic and political
lessons that abound there. Schoots ([1995] 2000) loses all judgment in writing
about his period, as we saw in the hysterical epigraph above: about the Old Left
and its artistic trajectory, about Stalinism and its political legacy, about post-
war documentary and its artistic struggles. Ivens and his collaborators from
the US and Australia, Marion Michelle, Catherine Duncan, and Paul Robeson,
and his Eastern European collaborators - including Bela Balizs, Jerzy Bossak,
Bertolt Brecht, Alberto Cavalcanti, Hanns Eisler, Joop Huisken, Pablo Picas-
so, Gerard Philipe, Vladimir Pozner, Ivan Pyryev, Dmitri Shostakovich, and
Andrew Thorndike - were not fools or dupes, not opportunists, knaves nor
cynics - though they may have been exiles, refugees, idealists, fellow travellers,
or pragmatists, or all of the above. In any case, they deserve better of us, their
descendants, than an indiscriminate silencing - a historiographical 'iron cur-
tain' of another kind. Indeed, they deserve our honesty, analysis, and critique
- as well as our empathy and solidarity.
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
THE FIRST YEARS
Joris Ivens and Marion Michelle disembarked in London in January 1947 after
a four-week sea voyage from Sydney to encounter a world, cinematic and polit-
ical, very different from the ones they had left behind as progressive filmmak-
ers in the wartime US and in post-war Australia. Though the reconstruction
of post-war Europe had scarcely begun, the Cold War that would preside over
the final four decades of Ivens's career was already in full swing, with dire con-
sequences for his generation of left filmmakers both inside the film industry
and outside. And the hybrid form of the performed documentary that would
dominate the post-war decade up to the explosion of direct cinema after 1957,
a form to which Ivens and his contemporaries had been aspiring in the 1930s,
and to which he was about to make his next, perhaps definitive contribu-
tion, was already implanted - not unrelated of course to the enthronement of
354 socialist realism as the official communist aesthetic. The hybrid model had
been buoyed at one end of the spectrum by the successes of wartime docudra-
mas like Target for Tonight (directed by Grierson's disciple Harry Watt, 1941,
UK, 50), and the early post-war breakthroughs of neorealism at the other end,
which came to their arguably similar hybrid form from a direction opposite
to Ivens, that is, from the direction of fiction. (Roma, citta aperta [Rome, Open
City, Roberto Rossellini, 1945, Italy, 103] had taken the Cannes Film Festival
by storm in 1946 while Ivens was still in Australia and Sciuscia [Shoeshine, Vit-
torio De Sica, 1946, Italy, 93] was in its first run in Paris during his winter 1947
visit).
Schoots ([1995] 2000, 211-214) recounts how several weeks of network-
ing with Ivens's old colleagues in the Grierson circle in the UK - whom he
now considered 'old-fashioned' (politically or artistically, one is not sure) -
led to several weeks in Amsterdam. There he combined reunions with fam-
ily, friends, and former fellow activists and artists with a couple of film gigs,
public and private. The latter are very interesting in terms of the shape that
the next phase of Ivens's career would take. He enthusiastically told the crowd
who gathered to hear him at the event co-sponsored by the Holland-Indone-
sia Association that the narrowing of the gap between nonfiction and fiction
- an eventuality he had himself, in fact, been pushing towards since the ear-
ly 1930s - was intrinsic to the documentary's social political role. He cited as
exemplary a film he had just seen in London, David Lean and Noel Coward's
adultery melodrama Brief Encounter (1945, UK, 86). If this film, which Ivens
perhaps admired for its realist set of a suburban railway station (or perhaps
out of empathy arising from his own adulterous proclivities), was otherwise
incongruent with his message in its tear-jerk star discourses and glamorous
chiaroscuro style, the other film cited fit better, notable for documentary loca-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
tions, recent historical heroic narrative, and non-professional performances.
This Australian outback docudrama The Overlanders (1946, UK, 91), directed
by the now transplanted Watt and shot by Osmond Borradaile, Ivens's for-
mer collaborator on Action Stations (1943, Canada, 50), Ivens and Michelle
had almost certainly seen in Sydney before their departure. However, what
he showed to this gathering was neither of these two films nor oddly enough
Indonesia Calling, though this film's career had hardly begun. Rather, what he
showed was parts of the national epic Zuiderzeewerken (Zuiderzee, 1930-1933,
40-52), sure to warm the hearts of war-exhausted Dutch spectators, alongside
a fresh-from-the-lab item just acquired in London, Land ofPromise (1946, 67),
by another of Grierson's proteges, Paul Rotha. This now-unwatchable yet epit-
omous sponsored work about the challenges of housing in the post-war UK
laid out, apparently unbeknownst to the pair fresh off the boat, all the traps
lying in wait for documentarists during the last decade of the classical docu-
mentary, from the lures of sponsor compromise to overwritten commentary to 355
hokey and contrived performances in the name of narrowing the fiction/non-
fiction gap. Ivens, already apparently learning to negotiate his public profile in
the shadow of the Cold War, as Schoots no doubt correctly surmises, saved the
Indonesia Calling screenings for groups of CPH members and artists.
But London and Amsterdam were in fact only stops on the road to Prague.
With the Netherlands East India gesture, Ivens had burnt his bridges to the
world of corporate or state-sponsored documentary in the West, seemingly
the prevailing employment niche for his generation of documentarists, from
Grierson to Flaherty to Rotha, and had accepted a state-sponsored project
in Eastern Europe. At that time, the Czech government was still a Commu-
nist-supported coalition, but the offer to develop a documentary on the new
Czechoslovakia had come to Ivens through his old American distributor, fel-
low communist Tom Brandon, and through an old friend Lubomir Linhard. He
had known the latter as a young film critic in Moscow in 1932 but Linhard was
now a 'Party man', director of the Czech state film agency in charge of resus-
citating the national cinema (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 231). At the outset,
the film was to be based on the just-published book on the post-war recon-
struction of the resurrected middle-European nation, Bright Passage (Maurice
Hindus, 1947). Linhard welcomed the duo and quickly accompanied them on
a tour of Eastern European capitals, their films under their arms (Yugloslavia's
new strongman Marshal Tito reportedly liked Indonesia Calling), and along
the way they expanded the project to include not only Yugoslavia, but also Bul-
garia and Poland (but not Hungary, despite the wishes of another old friend
Balizs). The idea according to Ivens, as Schoots ([1995] 2000, 214) sarcastical-
ly cites him, was a 'contribution to building of socialism in Eastern Europe'.2
Joined by Catherine Duncan, the talented Australian writer who had been
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
part of the Indonesia Calling team, the group plunged into their research on
the four Slavic nations, tweaking the working title of The Four Democracies
towards the final First Years. The three filmmakers settled on single themes
and 'tonalities' chosen to match national characteristics and priorities that
would dominate each of the four national segments: agriculture/'didactic' for
Bulgaria, youth/'lyrical' for Yugoslavia, history/'epic' for Czechoslovakia and
industrialisation/'dramatic' for Poland (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 232). The
four states were committed to funding the production undertaken within their
own borders respectively, plus 25% percent of the integrated total budget. By
July the group was on location in a remote Bulgarian village, Radilova, and a
year later all four episodes had been filmed, with only the editing, commen-
tary writing, and post-production remaining.
Easier said than done. Ivens, Michelle, and Duncan fulfilled their part of
the bargain, in collaboration with local filmmakers in each locality, deliver-
356 I ing high quality, fervent, state-of-the-art narrative essays about their chosen
themes. But things were moving quickly on the political horizon: in February
1948, after the group had moved on from their Czech shoot to the final Pol-
ish stage, the notorious pro-Soviet putsch took place in Prague with the Com-
munists seizing full power; four months later the Stalin-Tito tension erupted
in the excommunication of the Yugloslavs from the happy socialist family.
With the compilation now automatically reduced to three episodes instead of
four (and the narrative of youth brigades enthusiastically building a railway
through Bosnian mountains literally disappeared3), no wonder the cultural
party bureaucrats who were providing the filmmakers with their infrastruc-
ture and support network were skittish. The expatriates camped out in a villa
in Prague that summer for what stretched out to a year and a half to finish the
film. The provisional rough cut was soon ready, but the Bulgarians developed
second thoughts about whether the filmmaker's lyrical agrarian parable of
drought and socialist irrigation really matched the positive and fully 'modern-
ised' national outlook. The filmmakers spent a month during the summer of
1949 in Sofia persuading the Bulgarian authorities to accept an array of addi-
tional shots of 'modern' development to be interspersed with the original epi-
sode and then carrying them out. The premiere finally took place in Prague in
December, and the film was then shown triumphantly in Paris three months
later at an Ivens mini-retrospective at the Salle Pleyel to an adoring overflow
audience of communists and cinephiles. The glow was short-lived, for within
two weeks, notice came that the Bulgarians were pulling out, and the Czechs
followed shortly thereafter (in both countries the project's initial sponsors
had moved on, leaving the project as, in Ivens's words, 'an orphan with a great
future, but the time of the future has not come yet' (Ivens, letter to Michelle, 6
February 1951, quoted in Schoots, [1995] 2000, 227) or even worse 'an illegiti-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
mate child [...] treated with complete negligence' (Ivens, 1969, 246). The Poles
didn't bother to officially pull out; rather, they simply reportedly did not both-
er to show the film. Prints were called back from the international distribution
plan that was already underway, from as far afield as India, and it seemed that
more than three full years of Ivens's life now needed to be written off, along
with what was perhaps the most ambitious film of his career up to that point.
First Years, that is the extant 99-minute triptych - the episodes featuring Bul-
garia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, in that order - may have not been seen by
anyone but Ivens fans and scholars for over six decades. Nevertheless, this film
deserves better, and has perhaps even improved with age. This elegant and
fastidious work of propaganda and solidarity clearly shows on the screen and
the soundtrack the intelligence, generosity, passion, and commitment - and
deliberately paced research and accomplished (if not academic) journeywork,
both technical and interpersonal - invested in it by the three expatriates and 357
their indigenous crews in the three countries.4
Each episode unfolds in the style chosen to match its national subject and
in a carefully balanced sensibility to discursively match the compendium's
overall geopolitical mission. The 'lyrical' Bulgarian narrative ('smotheringly'
so, according to one critic), marries the agrarian heroics of The Spanish Earth
(1937, USA, 53) with the archetypal though quirky character development of
Power and the Land (1940, USA, 33). The episode follows an extended family,
complete with craggy patriarch, pregnant daughter-in-law, and naughty pre-
pubescent male scion through a drought-ravished tobacco harvest towards
salvation in mechanical, collective modernisation, and gigantic power dams
merging with subterranean springs. The Czech episode, labelled as the 'prac-
tical' one by Duncan, also displayed competing agendas: it deftly combines a
spin on the previous year's putsch ('[Bourgeois politicians] were making plans
for an old-time betrayal... We understood when the anti-planners [opponents
of five-year plan] provoked a political crisis, it was their last attempt to restore
the old order... Our people [workers militias] came from the factories, from
the fields, and workshops. From the Tatra to the Bohemian forest, we came
out to defend the Republic'.), situating it as a vocal peasant-worker move-
ment arising out of six centuries of popular resistance to hierarchical and
foreign authority. It incorporated an imaginatively told national history com-
piled from period engravings and paintings, and ended with a 'personalised'
twentieth-century history of the Bata shoe empire and its failure to support
the Revolution. The Polish episode, having to confront total devastation from
war and invasion, a society even more broken down than the other two host
nations, is delivered suitably in what was conceived of as 'epic' mode. 'Epic' to
be sure, but perhaps 'allegorical' and 'melodramatic' might have been added
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
50. Pierwsze Lata [The First Years] (1949):
the Bulgarian episode. Sofia commissars
disliked the outsiders' lyricisation of
peasant culture, but this scene of an
engineer showing off the new hydro
dam to village boys passed muster. DVD
frame capture. © CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
51. The Czech episode took even more
political finesse: what stands out is its use
of medieval manuscripts, e.g. of Bohemian
martyr Jan Hus. DVD frame capture. © CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
358 1
jt I
52. The Polish episode: socialist realism
imagines grieving widow Jadwiga turning
her life around on her first visit to the new
blast furnace. DVD frame capture. © CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
as qualifiers: the parabolic gist of its black-garbed female protagonist's recov-
ery through participation in collective industrial reconstruction in the newly
annexed Polish Silesia couches an individual drama of traumatic healing that
in fact has real affect.
Yet distinct as they are, the three episodes all show the ineradicable
stamp of the socialist realist heritage. The official aesthetic doctrine was in
the immediate post-war years at the nadir of its contradictory history - Sovi-
et 'propaganda tsar' Andrei Zhdanov5 was tightening his grip on the cultural
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
interregnum spanning the relative relaxation occasioned by the fervour of the
'Great Patriotic War' (for example Malakhov kurgan [The Last Hill, Iosif Kheifits
and Aleksandr Zarkhi, 1944, 86] and the post-Stalin springtime Thaw, with its
inevitable modulations developed by a new generation of relatively unscarred
filmmakers (Letyat zhuravli [Cranes Are Flying, Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957, 97]).
Ivens was on board, in theory, as evidenced by his 1949 denunciation of cap-
italist cinemas as 'decadent, cynical, sexual, cosmopolitan', such that they
'lower the morale of the masses' (quoted in Schoots, [1995] 2000, 226) and of
Carol Reed's new Orson Welles-starring hit The Third Man (1949, UK, 104) for
its degeneration; and in practice, as evidenced by the new film.
The three episodes of First Years all show the familiar ascending are of
both history and narrative, inhabited by characters and societies who alike
affirm their revolutionary destiny, all against a backdrop of heroic socialist
labour and world-historic collective production. From Ivens's interviews and
speeches about his documentary practice after 1934 and especially during the 359
height of the Cold War up until the 20th Party Congress in 1956,6 one can dis-
till certain key phrases and tropes that animate his objectives and practice.
Together they provide a working definition of socialist realism that matches
that that emerged from what Rdgine Robin ([1986] 1992) calls the 'creative
cauldron' of the Soviet debates about realism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ivens
had first implemented this aesthetic in Magnitogorsk in 1932 when he made
Pesn o geroyakh (Komsomol, 1933, 50), at the height of the debates leading up
to the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers of 1934 where the loose and open
consensus around the ideals and pragmatics of realism became official. These
tropes would become the centre of his drive towards establishing personalised
characterisation within the documentary lexicon:
1. necessity of a hero, individual (personalisation) but clearly situated with-
in collectivity
2. organic unity between life, the film, and the director
3. recognizability to audience, accessibility
4. working-class roots and perspectives
5. authenticity, reality, living men, not staying on the surface, but
6. simple person, everyday life, real life, connecting to milieu, to his work,
'typical', but
7. trusting in happy future, transforms his surroundings, transformed by
his surroundings, 'revolutionary romanticism'
8. must be audacious and challenge censorship, and show 'national'
heroes, create understanding between peoples: peace
9. and specifically in relation to film [as opposed to the literature empha-
sized by the Congress]: words and image
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
(a) 'choosing' subjects (dramatization), casting for expression of feelings
but not psychology and not 'performance';
(b) must find proper style for creating men living, not cheap or symbolic
types -just like in the fiction film;
(c) montage for placing our hero in his milieu. (Robin, [1986] 1992)
The tension between revolutionary romanticism and the requirement of
'typicality'/everyday realism entailed what Robin ([1986] 1992) has called an
'impossible aesthetics'. But it could also be argued that this tension was not
only the liability that it turned out to be for Ivens and many an aspiring artist,
but also an artistic challenge - the challenge to wrangle intuitively the lega-
cy of other populist genres of didactic narrative in Western culture, from the
saint's life to the theatrical melodrama, from the poster to Brechtian agitprop.
For Duncan (1950) the key word was 'positive': the filmmakers focused on
360 finding a positive angle and making it a political lesson; it was possible to crit-
icise everything, but the obligatory challenge was to be upbeat. (Ivens would,
a few years later, ask Michelle and Duncan [1963] to toe the line when they
produced a French radio play about Breton village life that diverged too much
from the formula.) This obligation is, of course, the transhistorical marker of
all solidarity image-making (Waugh, 2008) - including New Left/New Social
Movement activist documentary (solidarity, advocacy, and social issue genres)
to this day - and perhaps it is only the intensity and Cold War flavour of the
iconography that evokes the pall of Zhdanov.
The Bulgarian episode is the sunniest, thanks literally to the Black Sea
summer climate and to a Balkans-folkloric motif of the colourful old-timer
who can hear the aquifer gurgling under the villagers' parched fields - what
might later have been called magic realism. This colourful material was clearly
more interesting for the filmmakers than the dam construction whose friend-
ly engineer gives guided tours to runaway village boys, an element apparently
imposed by the Sofia bureaucrats onto the final version.
The Czech episode had its original concept of using puppets promoting
the new Five-Year Plan deleted (too close to appropriation of Jiri Trnka-style
animation and the national pride already associated with it). Instead the no
doubt required task of linking the consolidating new regime to centuries of
peasants' and workers' resistance led to this episode being the least person-
alised, even after the narrative gets around to the model shoe artisan and his
family who will benefit from Soviet-imposed economic planning. Still the his-
torical discourse is fresh with the medieval manuscripts played up effectively,
the two-dimensional hieratic figures set up as the ancestors of the peasants
and workers who assemble beneath the statue of pre-Reformation nation-
al hero Jan Hus, literally and metaphorically, to celebrate their 1948 victory.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Duncan was proud to have had a part in innovating this cinematic rendering
of flat, still archival graphics for a historiographical purpose, an innovation
not really acknowledged at the time, but her pride was not misplaced. One
critic of the day said Ivens and company were not Luciano Emmer (the Italian
leader in art documentary in the post-war era, now forgotten), but, in fact, the
cinematography of the graphics is fluid and expressive, and the narrative edit-
ing dynamic.
The Polish segment is the darkest, and not only because of the dour mien
and black costume of the heroine, Jadwiga, the middle-class piano teacher
who has lost her engineer husband and daughter at the hands of Nazi firing
squads and bombers respectively, who attends the war crime trials and then
leaves the bombed-out capital, vividly portrayed in aerial shots, to make a new
life in the western regions. That the filmmakers chose to represent the intel-
ligentsia is as interesting as it is cryptic, given that the Nazis and the Soviets
between them had almost wholly liquidated this class. But Jadwiga's self-re- I 361
demption in the industrial workplace is telling, and the setting of the steel
mill, of course, allowed Ivens a familiar set for modernist pyrotechnics a la
Komsomol. Even The Monthly Film Bulletin's (1950) hostile and anonymous
Cold War reviewer recognised the artist's hand in the visually robust depic-
tion of the blast furnace setting. Jadwiga's redemption is finally indicated, in
true socialist realist shorthand, in her participation in surpassed industrial
quotas, her tentative re-embrace of piano music, and a concluding smile that
recalled Hazel's upon the first use of her electric oven but with possibly more
historical materialist momentousness.
As mentioned, the first and third segments offered the filmmakers the
most opportunity for the development of the practice of personalisation.
Jadwiga's character is perhaps Ivens's most fleshed out of the entire classi-
cal era (despite the linguistic impasse between citizen actress and crew). One
assumes that Michelle's input was decisive in the development of this char-
acter's performance and that of her crane-operator gal pal (and in other pro-
to-feminist touches throughout First Years). Production notes reveal both the
tight professional scheduling and how focused and fastidious the casting pro-
cess was, motivated both by socialist realism's 'representativeness' and psy-
chological nuance. Jadwiga's boss in the steelworks lab, for example, was to
be chosen with great care and on time!:
5/48: 'Casting requirements. One personal [sic] director. A friendly man
of about 50 years. Fatherly. A man with authority, prestige. A little gray. To
be found among leading people in Bobrik or Pokaj. The little man in the
personnel office in Bobrik is no good, neither his assistant.
Mr. Kias, personal director in Pokaj is no good, not fatherly, a little
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
too young. But Mr. Kias can help you find the right person in Pokaj
among the leading factory people, or maybe in a labour union or town
office in New Bobrik or Bytim. The man should be capable to act and to
speak a few lines. (see script.) Also should have no failure in his speak-
ing. [...] Candidates for the part of personnel director to be shown to me
between 12-1 on Wednesday. (Ivens, production notes, JIA)
As for the soundtrack, Duncan's commentary, building on her brilliant con-
tribution to Indonesia Calling, is both writerly and cinematic throughout,
well-measured and rarely overblown, clearly reflecting study of her mentor's
Spanish Earth in terms of both terse poetry and sound-image dialectic/coun-
terpoint: if voice-over commentaries had to exist in the three decades of the
classical documentary it was good they included passages like the proto-fem-
inist indirect discourse of 'Go ahead and grumble. What was good enough for
362 I mother isn't good enough for me. Catch me going back to the river'! (ascribed
to women at Czech laundry machines that have now replaced riverbank wash-
ing by hand, thanks to the new economic plan). A small degree of synch-sound
dialogue in the original languages is featured, most notably in the final Pol-
ish segment, carefully shot with synch-sound in certain key reconstructed
sets (even this modest effort no doubt monopolised the state film technical
resources), and the only moment that grates in the English version comes
when the crane-operator in the blast furnace has her first-person thoughts
chirpily voice-overed in a cockney accent.
As indicated, First Years circulated very little among audiences in the host
countries or elsewhere, other than in the special premieres in Prague and Par-
is and Ivens retrospectives thereafter (the London reviewer must have seen it
in Paris). Nevertheless, the modicum of critical response received helps sit-
uate the filmmakers' accomplishments. Project collaborators Duncan and
Stanley Harrison (co-narrator of the English version) both published insider
accounts that were not surprisingly highly laudatory, timed for the expected
premieres and offering readers insights into the long-term research, contex-
tual and participatory process behind the film. French reviewers were most
responsive and, again, not surprisingly, ecstatic: Pierre Michaud (1953a,
1953b, 1953c) acknowledged the work's propagandist spirit, but praised its
psychological penetration and its humanity, as well as the effect of making
an individual in each case the symbol of a general national problem. Georges
Sadoul (195oa, 1950b), emerging dean of Paris' left-wing critics and historian,
in two articles in the PCF-friendly Lettresfrancaises, called Ivens 'one of the
greatest living cineastes, who dominates, along with Flaherty, the history of
the documentary', thereby cementing a long-term personal friendship - and
soon an artistic collaboration (see La Seine a rencontre Paris [The Seine Meets
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Paris, 1957, France, 32] below). His new film is 'perhaps with Zuiderzee Joris
Ivens's most perfect film, by its sensitivity, its poetry, its humanity'. The Brit-
ish Monthly Film Bulletin (1950), no less caught up in the escalating ideologi-
cal polarisation that even cultural magazines could not escape, provided an
antidote to the praise, characterising the work as '1% film and 99% propagan-
da' and as both 'spiritual surrender [...] to the Party Line', and 'hollow rheto-
ric'. The anonymous reviewer called the commentary 'naively pretentious' and
compared the whole 'fatiguing' experience to looking at recruiting posters for
one and a half hours. In short, 'the change of emotional climate and address
seems to have divested [Ivens] of his personality as a filmmaker'. Still, admi-
rable qualities were evident in the last section: 'humanity in the figure of the
woman' and 'cinematic strength' in the foundry sequence. The debate that
could have emerged among such critical voices was of course moot, as the film
became a casualty less of ideological stress than of the timid ressentiment of
cultural bureaucracies. | 363
No doubt one of the hindrances to reading the film 6o years after its star-
crossed premiere is the vagueness of the line between solidarity documentary
and the subgenre we might call the interloper parachute commission. Ivens's
group was sensitive to their contradictory status as foreigners airlifted into
unfamiliar cultural and political territory - but this had been true of almost
all of Ivens's projects since Misere au Borinage (Borinage, 1934, Belgium, 34)
and arguably defines the entire career of the 'Flying Dutchman' - their com-
mitment to mentoring local artisans and crews must have seemed as simply
the latest version of the usual delicate balance of sponsorship, intervention,
and deference. Nevertheless, Ivens's ultimate patrons, the Russians, whom
the commentary treats with partial truth as liberators, were also imperialists
no less than the Netherlands East Indies government that Ivens had signed on
with and then repudiated so recently. Was his decision to try to negotiate the
ambiguity and promote socialist ideals in this overdetermined context oppor-
tunist and wilfully blinded, as Schoots would have it, or simply, as Michelle
would put it much later 'terribly naive'? Or something else? Was the good-
faith effort to develop further the nonfiction-fiction hybrid of the personalised
documentary, in the rearguard of an occupying army, too vulnerable to co-op-
tation by the imposed smiling and hieratic two-dimensionality of 'recruit-
ing poster' rhetoric to allow deeper documentary analysis and dramaturgy a
chance? 'Humanity' was discerned as a feature of the film by the above-cited
three critics at opposite ends of the Cold War ideological spectrum. The term
was flexible/extensible enough to operate as code for both socialist realist pro-
grammatics and begrudging acknowledgment of the promise for rounded
realist characterisation within the new hybrid format. In each case it disavows
or complicates the film's reading then as now as stereotypical propagandist
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
fodder for the Soviet machine, which overwhelmed the response of my test
audience of Eastern European-diaspora friends in 2011. At mid-century, Sta-
linist culturecrats of the three host countries did not give critics and audienc-
es the chance to negotiate these readings for themselves.
PEACE WILL WIN, FREUNDSCHAFT SIEGT, PEACE TOUR
Upon the ill-fated release of First Years, journalists and critics offered news of
Ivens's upcoming projects in Holland - one on music and another in a Dutch
fishing village, another hybrid - as well as plans to go to Java in 1947 and a bit
later to settle in France, but none of these plans were to come to pass. Instead,
Ivens's roots and networks in Poland were becoming more substantial, given
the relative success of his collaboration with Polish filmmakers on the First
364 I Years shoot and his intermittent teaching over two years beginning in 1948
at the new national film academy in Lodz (a lively oasis of relative liberalism
and creative ferment, where his future co-director on Peace Will Win, Jerzy
Bossak [1910-1989], was also teaching). Soon his new attachment would be
consolidated by an apartment and a new wife and occasional collaborator, the
Polish former resistance fighter and poet-translator Ewa Fiszer (1926-2000;
almost 30 years his junior, wed in 1951).7 Accordingly, he followed the path
of least resistance and accepted a 'congress film' commission from the state
documentary studio in Warsaw and then in quick succession three more sim-
ilar assignments based in East Germany. The first three of these led to what
are undeniably 'minor' films but perhaps it was the frustration of having to
plod through three bread-and-butter projects with complicated collaborative
arrangements that somehow led to the inspiration of the fourth one, the mag-
istral Lied.
Peace Will Win was to be the official film of the Second International Peace
Congress, a Cold War-era gathering organised by the Soviet-backed Interna-
tional Peace Council, to be held in November 1950 in Sheffield, England, a
stronghold of the British Communist Party. The Clement Atlee Labour gov-
ernment (deeply implicated in the nuclear arms race, despite its socialist pre-
tensions) claimed to be all for freedom of speech and assembly but, in fact,
took a dim view of what it saw as a propaganda event being convened by a for-
eign superpower under its nose and denied visas to many of the international
delegates. The organisers were forced to reconvene the assembly in Warsaw,
presided over by the French Nobel-winning scientist Jean Frddric Joliot-Cu-
rie, President of the Council, and convening its international array of Commu-
nist Party superstars in tow, from the South American writers Pablo Neruda
and Jorge Amado, to Soviet cultural luminaries Dmitri Shostakovitch, Vsevo-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
lod Pudovkin, Alexander Fadeyev, and Ilya Ehrenburg. The event and the film,
co-directed with Jerzy Szelubski (aka Bossak), a Lodz colleague who had sev-
eral documentary shorts under his belt, took on a special urgency because of
the outbreak of the Korean War that same summer. The Soviets, who had been
out-manoeuvred in the United Nations, seized on the UN-led and US-dominat-
ed intervention as a major focus of their arms-race propaganda, so Ivens and
Szelubski's film has the conflict as its moral and rhetorical focus point.
After a compilation-based prologue detailing with appropriate outrage
the global nuclear arms race and then the Sheffield fiasco, the 90-minute
black-and-white documentary sticks relatively close to topic, with impas-
sioned demonstrations, speeches, and low-key committee meetings all brim-
ming with cheerful delegates. The itch to move outside the claustrophobic
congress site is relieved periodically however: whether in street views of the
city rebuilding in parallel to the congress organisation, or in endless smiling,
garlanded arrivals and departures, or most notably in a stunning scene where 365
African-American delegates silently tour the site of the Warsaw ghetto, and the
soundtrack for once halts its clatter and matches their reverent response with
its own silence.'
53. Pokojzdobedzieswiat [Peace Will Win]
(1951): in a stunning scene standing apart
from the endlessly arriving, cheerful -
delegates, African-American delegates
silently tour the site of the Warsaw ghetto.
DVD frame capture. © CAPI Films, Paris,
and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
A similar moment, with perhaps less affect because of its almost campy antic-
ipation of Lodz student Andrzej Wajda's Czlowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble,
1977, Poland, 165), produced a quarter century later, shows foreign delegates
marching out onto the scaffolding outside the congress centre to meet on
the job the bricklayers who are rebuilding Warsaw, only to have one cheerful
Stakhanovite trouper show up moments later in suit and tie as a congress del-
egate. Much of the film is constructed in the static 'newsreel' mode that Ivens
had first attempted to emulate in his Popular Front films of the late thirties.
Another echo of the Popular Front work is a speech by Pak Den-Ai, the North
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
Korean delegate and 1950 Stalin Peace Prize laureate - in Russian, interestingly
- which sets off the first of two atrocity interludes in classic Spanish Earth style,
denouncing aerial bombardment and its victimisation of innocent lives. Con-
spicuously noteworthy is a vehement denunciation of the Allies' use of napalm
against civilians, and the film occupies an ominous place in documentary his-
tory for that reason alone. On-site sound recording was a still awkward docu-
mentary technology in 1950, especially away from the high-tech panaceas of
Paris and New York, though Ivens was very happy to access all of the resources
of the embryonic Polish film industry and placed two cameras on the podium
in order to provide cover. Peace Will Win's undeniable static quality is seeming-
ly anchored both in the filmmakers' reliance on such synch-sound 'newsreel'
set-ups for the speeches and in the potentially stultifying effect of any closely
monitored, politically charged commission. This was even more of a danger
in the 'congress film' subgenre that had theretofore produced one illustrious
366 predecessor, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl, 1935, Ger-
many, 120) and has otherwise been relegated then as well as now to the trash
bins of documentaiy history.9 Still, the co-filmmakers, despite the sometimes
awkwardness of their collaboration (purportedly linguistic), invested much
creative energy in their thankless task: one flourish they were proud of was
the sound edit of Beethoven's Fifth laid over Pak's speech, fading dramati-
cally into an emotional ovation for the diminutive white-kimonoed woman.
This is not to say that the other oratory was ineffective. In a film that is basi-
cally about people talking to each other, many memorable talkers and much
eloquent rhetoric are transmitted, from the legendary 'Red Dean' of Canter-
bury Hewlett Johnson,o to anti-colonialist figures from the emerging 'third
world'," such as Guinean unionist and future president Sekou Tourd along-
side his peers from Syria to Vietnam, who more than hold their own amid the
Nobel prizewinners (and take the stage of world documentary for possibly the
first time - post Indonesia Calling, that is). The simple discourse of peace must
54. Pokojzdobedzieswiat [Peace Will Win]
(1951): the filmmakers raised oratory by
Pak Den-Ai, the North Korean delegate,
above the static 'newsreel' mode. Even
The New York Times was struck by her
'passionate utterances'. DVD frame
capture. © CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
be taken at face value in a post-war decade that saw the planet's first graze with
nuclear annihilation and the birth of the 'Ban the Bomb' movement: the voic-
es are often stirring, all the more since the line-up includes many women and
people of colour dislodging the usual stuffy white-men-in-suits stereotype. In
moments such as Soviet novelist Ilya Ehrenburg's declamation, Peace Will Win
transcends the paranoid and cynical bureaucratic posturing of the Cold War:
An enormous weight has fallen on our shoulders. It's not our own destiny
that we're thinking of now. Upon us weighs the responsibility for all of
the children of London, the children of Moscow, of Paris and Beijing, the
children who play among the skyscrapers of New York and those who play
among the ruins of Korea. Upon us weighs the responsibility for all those
who are in love, for all the books of the world, for all the cities, for all the
gardens. War is not the midwife of history, it's the maker of angels that
destroys the flower of humanity. I am for peace, not only with the America I 367
of Paul Robeson and Howard Fast, but also for peace with the America of
Mr. Truman and [US Secretary of State] Mr. Acheson.
It is not surprising that the film saw a second career during the Vietnam War,
minus its topical compilation prelude, but nothing is known of this revival
except the existence of the 16mm prints.'2
Unlike First Years, Peace Will Win can be said to have had a modest career,
both in theatres and in progressive non-theatrical spaces, in English in the US
and the Commonwealth (with a version in English by aforementioned Com-
munist novelist and author of the 1951 novel Spartacus Howard Fast [Greli-
er, 1965]), and in French as well as in Polish, German, Russian, Chinese, and
other bloc languages (Lacazette, 1951). In the US it was distributed thanks to
Artkino, the left-wing outfit who had handled Soviet and radical films in the
US progressive network since the 1930s. Two New York City reviewers greet-
ed its January 1952 premiere with reviews that predictably toed the US Cold
War line while offering refreshingly open-minded insights. In the face of this
'propaganda', The Herald Tribune's Joe Pihodna (1952) tempered his hostile
boredom with the concessions that the 'candid and illuminating' shots of the
speakers held his attention and that Ivens's newsreel shots were 'surprising-
ly good'. His counterpart at The New York Times, Howard Thompson ([1951]
1970), shared Pihodna's reserves about a film in which 'plenty is said and little
done' but also his strong impression of Pak, 'whose passionate utterances are
underlined with a shrewd montage of bombers, obviously American, and the
bloody, fly-covered corpses of Korean children'. However, Thompson located
Ivens's real accomplishment 'in his camera's concentration on faces, not only
on the rostrum but in the hall itself', and was also struck by the scene of the
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
African Americans viewing the ghetto rubble. French critics were predictably
more adulatory while back in Poland, Jerzy Toeplitz (1951, quoted in Schoots
[1995] 2000, 234) referred to 'a complete artistic triumph'. While Toeplitz may
have slightly overstated things in deference to his Lodz colleague, we should
not forget that this film was an accomplished entry in an under-examined
documentary cycle of this period whose commitment to continuance of the
human species and the planet was no less fervent than the eco-political cycle
of the twenty-first century.'3
Looking back in the last decade of his life, Ivens was not proud of this com-
mission, something neither to hide nor boast of (Ivens and Destanque, 1982,
234), and even at the time confided to Michelle (1951, quoted in Schoots, [1995]
2000, 234) that it was 'not a wonderful film'. These perspectives may be under-
standable on both counts, but resourceful and effe ctive journeywork on a com-
mission tightrope does not require shame and Ivens had known this for decades.
368 I The next two works in the congress film cycle do not hold up as well.
Hard on the heels of the victory of peace, came the triumph of friendship. In
June 1951, still editing Peace Will Win, Ivens came to Berlin to launch what
would become an intermittent five-year, five-film relationship with the East
German state film enterprise DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft),'4 all
the while keeping one foot in Warsaw, where he had a flat and, after Octo-
ber, a wife. His new topic was the International Festival for Youth and Stu-
dents, which was to unfold over two weeks in August in East Berlin, with 66
countries participating. What attracted Ivens in this ambitious co-produc-
tion between DEFA and Mosfilm? Its sponsorship by the party offices in Ber-
lin and Moscow? The opportunity to co-direct with Ivan Pyryev, director the
previous year of the 'Magicolour' musical Kubanskie kazaki (Cossacks of the
Kuban, 114), one of the few Soviet popular hits of the Zhdanov period? The
unprecedentedly massive deployment of resources that would be at his com-
mand (24 operators, twelve German and twelve Russian, each with a journal-
ist assigned to him to seek out good images [Grelier, 1965], a 6oo-member
crew from set designers to drivers installed in as many as 30 offices, a fleet
of more than 20 vehicles, a crane [!] and even a medical base [Jordan, 1999,
90]? Perhaps it was simply the chance to work. Period. Offers were not com-
ing in, fantasies of filming in Western Europe notwithstanding, and Ivens
had always been open, positive, and pragmatic about commissions. Still, it
is small wonder that Ivens remembered an 'enormous machine', feeling that
he was 'losing touch with reality', and being reduced to the role of 'produc-
tion management' (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 237).
And then there was the 100 kilometres of Agfa colour stock. Did Ivens the
technical university graduate see the chance to make his first film in colour as
an offer he couldn't refuse, the last of his generation to take up the challenge?
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Not only Pyryev, but most of Ivens's major contemporaries in fiction in the
West had recently broken into colour,'5 but documentary was understandably
harder to push into the fray. Kodachrome 16mm had existed since the 1930s,
the most important colour format for amateur filmmaking and small-scale
documentary work, but mainstream A-level colour work was still in the experi-
mental phase because of the lag in the production of sensitive enough stocks.
Case in point: the National Film Board of Canada's big colour breakthrough
Royaljourney (David Bairstow, 54) surfaced a year before the Freundschaft siegt
(Friendship Triumphs, 1952, USSR/DDR, too) shoot in 1951, a full-blown 'news-
reel' monstrosity that shares Freundschaft's propensity for capturing a lot of
costumery and hand-waving, deploying the omnipresent Princess Elizabeth
rather than the determining absence of Joseph Stalin (visible only on huge
posters proceeding through street demonstrations), both films charming with
their ambitious fawning, stiffness, and 'innocence'.
Resisting his production manager demotion, Ivens developed ambitious I 369
plans to humanise the event with very Ivensian individual narratives around
the congress participants, to curb the Riefenstahl temptation through a mate-
rialist grasp of the lives and socio-cultural contexts affected. This plan, a tri-
al run for Lied, a template more successfully realised the second time round,
involved a Julian-like episode around a Breton fisher youth who would end up
writing home from Berlin about the congress diet, thereby exploring the logis-
tics of feeding such a mass. This would leave the 23 other crews free to cover
other aspects of the preparations for the event, including a few other personal-
ised vignettes and aspects of local conditions and travel to Berlin, which were
to take up almost half the running time of the 95-minute film. If the stress
of being tied down by colour technology and Cominform bureaucracy wasn't
enough, pure grandiosity got the better of Ivens and Pyryev, and the three-
month edit in Moscow, devoted ultimately to 55 hours of footage over which
they had had little control, could not fix the messy web of superficiality, com-
promise, and complicity. If hostile Western cold warriors had undertaken to
imagine their ultimate stereotype of Stalinist propaganda, this film would be
it: with almost no trace of Ivens's hoped-for personal vignettes, Freundschaft is
rooted in deliriously pastoral, socialist realist landscapes from the delegates'
homelands (including the Agfa-hued national costumes) and boarding and
disembarking from planes and trains, frantic bricklaying, waving, torch-bear-
ing, running, folk dancing, rallying, clapping, chanting, marching, and hand-
shaking, doves flying, all under choral music and an alternately soothing and
frenzied voice-over.
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
55. Freundschaft siegt (1952): happy
delegates and the 'triumph of logistics over
art, an unappetising banquet of largesse in
image, music and text'. DVD frame capture.
Original in colour. © DEFA-Stiftung/CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
The mosaic is interrupted a few times by strident newsreel interludes about
West German and capitalist warmongering: West German 'fascism is rearing
370 its ugly head, armed with the most modern American weapons', unemploy-
ment and poverty prevails, and 'the flags of the new democratic Germany are
now flying here. But they do not fly over all of Berlin, because the capital of our
fatherland is divided. In the East, the German people rule, in West Berlin it is
the American occupiers'. The climax of the film is a visual and aural acknowl-
edgement of Stalin, 'der beste Freund derJugend', otherwise represented only
in posters, and in a final coda of 30,000 voices intoning the dictator's name -
as if to ward off (or welcome?) Uncle Joe's death less than a year after the film's
premiere in April 1952.16 The presence of the younger generation of political
leadership may be more significant however than the frozen icon of the musta-
chioed figurehead, and recurring dynamic oratory by future Euro-Communist
leader Enrico Berlinguer is symptomatically prominent. Moreover, accord-
ing to Jordan (1999, 92), Ivens exceptionally 'retained the deeper things': for
example when a British woman who lost her brother in Korea meets a Korean
man on a Berlin street, the Korean touches her gently and a smile ensues: 'the
camera stays with these two people who are speaking, and [Ivens] recognizes
a scene in it'. Otherwise, it may well be to Ivens's credit that his Triumph of the
Will is far from Riefenstahl's hermetically sealed, steel-clad choreography, but
rather a chaotic kaleidoscope of movement and colour with very little of the
screen time devoted to the actual on-the-verge-of-anarchy proceedings in the
new Walter-Ulbricht-Stadium. In short, if Peace Will Win in comparison was
'all talk and no action', with the saving graces of eloquence, ideas, principles,
ideals, and passions, Freundschaft offered mostly action and almost no talk,
and moreover according to Ivens's DEFA colleague Jordan (1999, 90) the 'aes-
thetics of their era', the 'triumph of logistics over art, an unappetizing ban-
quet of largesse in image, music, and text'. Largesse indeed! The parade of
national delegations all flaunting local costume and dance moves, especially
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
from the emerging 'third world' from Trinidad to Vietnam, and the prophet-
ic denunciation of 'Drink Coca-Cola!' imperialism that surfaces as a motif,
themselves constitute a stirring time capsule that more than vindicates the
2015 restoration.
56. Freundschaft siegt (1952): Ivens
'retained the deeper things' in this scene
of a British woman who lost her brother
in Korea meeting a Korean man in Berlin.
DVD frame capture. Original in colour.
© DEFA- Stiftung/CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
371
And if Peace Will Win and Freundschaft were indeed Ivens's negative Triumph
of the Will, one might wryly wonder whether his next assignment, WyscigPokd-
ju Warszawa-Berlin-Praga (Peace Tour 1952, 1952, Poland/DDR, 53) was his
counter-Olympia (Riefenstahl, 1938, 239). His second colour film, also a multi-
ple-camera co-production, this time between DEFA and Warsaw, Peace Tour is
basically a reportage of a bicycle race in the spring of 1952 between the three
Soviet-bloc capitals, undertaken according to Schoots ([1995] 2000, 240) in
order to remain closer to 'home'. If much of the film is taken up with shots of
the racers, from a vehicle tracking ahead of them or behind them, or bird's-eye
views (larded with observational footage of cyclists at ease or of spectators),
much of the discourse is around the three reconstructing societies en route,
with special attention to proud images of the 'new Warsaw' (again, lots of brick-
laying). Both sports community and political community are accented, along
with the obligatory peace theme: 'from here to the Pacific Ocean, we have no
borders: people don't think of war but of a peaceful life'. All leads up to a cere-
monial climax in the same East Berlin stadium that Ivens by now knew all too
well. Ivens recruited Fiszer to write the commentary, which Schoots ([1995]
2000, 240) terms a futile attempt to involve her in his work since the marriage
was in perennial crisis throughout the decade it was to last. The final result
apparently met the producers' objectives since Ivens carried on at DEFA, but
Ivens confided in Michelle (1952, quoted in Schoots ([1995] 2000, 240) that the
outcome was 'a light film without any sophistication' and even Grelier (1965,
94) finds the 45-minute work 'a little laborious'.17 The 2015 DVD restoration
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
by DEFA Foundation however offers a handsome reminder of its enthusiasm
and the intensity of its discourses around world peace. Indeed the film bears
useful comparison with the exactly contemporaneous Canadian stop-motion
peace fable Neighbours (1952, 9), by Ivens's friend at the National Film Board,
Norman McLaren, not only in their shared declamation of the word peace in
many world languages, but also in their vivid registration of the still unhealed
trauma of war.
57. WyscigPokoju Warszawa-Berlin-Praga
[Peace Tour 1952] (1952): 'a light film
without any sophistication' but a vivid
registration of the still unhealed trauma of
war. DVD frame capture. Original in colour.
© DEFA- Stiftung/CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
372I
In fact, looking at the first four quite different 'Cold War films' in their totality,
one can perceive a common dynamic: in all, cheerfully utopian internation-
al communities are shaped by a deep structure of not only communist poli-
tics but also the processing of the trauma of wartime violation, partition, and
reconstruction, sealed with Euro-Communist critical adulation. One can dis-
miss such films as delusional and paranoid Kremlin-style blustering, brink-
manship, and bombast, salted with the desperate search for legitimacy by the
Warsaw Pact regimes, especially East Germany; discourses of the kind that my
and subsequent generations in the West were trained to block. But is a scarred
generation's desire for peace ever cynical? After all, General MacArthur had
advocated nuclear deployment in Korea and given the filmmakers a key rhe-
torical tool that they didn't need to fabricate. Ivens's letters and diaries, uncov-
ered by Schoots ([1995] 2000), brim with both cinematic ideas and the fear of
war. Rebounding from the humiliation of First Years, harnessing the positive
energy as well as the 'straitjacket' (Taylor, 1973, 93) of socialist realism, and
the positive energy of young people coming to him for training at Lodz as well
as performing enthusiasm for his camera in East Berlin, Ivens responded to
the challenge with his traditional resourcefulness. After the sad ending to First
Years, little was made of these ideas and they must be seen as a dress rehearsal
for a major work around the corner.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
LIED DER STROME
1952 was a busy year with never a dull moment for the 53-year-old Ivens. Janu-
ary had seen the New York premiere of Peace Will Win (not that the US author-
ities would have let Ivens attend), April saw the premiere of Freundschaft in
Berlin, while the Peace Tour shoot soon wrapped up, including footage of May-
day celebrations, and entered post-production. The next month Ivens was
invited to Berlin for discussions with DEFA about a major documentary on the
Third World Congress of the Soviet-backed World Federation of Trade Unions
(WFTU) scheduled to take place in Vienna in October of 1953. Meanwhile,
according to Schoots ([1995] 2000, 241), lots of more personal film ideas were
in the air - in Poland (about the fishery and coastal industry, about the Vis-
tula River), in the DDR (about German unity), even in Italy (a trip there at the
end of the year included discussions with CPI counterparts about Calabrian
workers, and then with the 33-year-old Gillo Pontecorvo, Peace Will Win and 373
Freundschaft contributor and Italian Resistance veteran, about another river
documentary, on the Po). An idea for a documentary on the relationship of
Dutch and Italian painting in the 16th to 17th century also emerged. But none of
these possibilities went anywhere except for the 'river' concept and the Vienna
commission, which were soon to fuse in creative alchemy.
In the DDR political and economic unrest led to a congress in July of
Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, Socialist Unity Party), the
DDR's ruling party, which ominously opted for increased Sovietisation of the
satellite state, and increased state control not only of the cinema but also of
the economy, which led directly to the following year's June 16 workers' upris-
ing, three months after the death of Stalin. Ivens's Dutch and Italian pro-
jects notwithstanding, and despite his consciousness of a 'relative freedom'
that entailed 'some restrictions' on his self-expression, Ivens (interview with
author, April 1978) recalled 'sincere enthusiasm' for his Eastern European
work. He remained positive about commissions, feeling 'that as an artist you
have to think more than the other people, higher than the other people who
order the film'. His utterances of the time revealed him wholly on board with
the socialist realist project as a whole, which he praised in 1951 in the Fed-
eration's French publication, Mouvement syndical mondial (Lacazette, 1951)
in relation to the positive experience of teaching working-class filmmakers
in Poland. Still, he felt apprehensive about becoming the 'Congress man', of
playing the court photographer role (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 234) and at
first resisted the Vienna project that would soon become Lied. Offers from
both DEFA and the WFTU were too appealing to refuse however, especially
when the WFTU General Secretary Louis Saillant and Committee President
Guiseppe Di Vittorio quickly accepted his counterproposal. Ivens's pitch was
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
to use the Congress as a pretext to create a grass-roots epic about work, work-
ers, and union organising around the planet, emphasising what would soon
become known as the 'third world' and crystallising in thematic narratives
around six of the world's great rivers. A climactic final movement would cen-
tre on a seventh symbolic river, the movement of the revolutionary working
classes, but the Federation downplayed this angle. The actual reporting of the
congress would only take 20 minutes of a feature-length project.
For their part DEFA seemed to realise the limitations of the 'giant machine'
approach that had made everyone unhappy (except the cheering onscreen
'youth') with Freundschaft, and offered a scaled-down project with less infra-
structure: only two rooms, one telephone and a car, and above all the congenial
Hans Wegner (1919-1984) as production head. An intimate and very productive
working relationship would evolve with Wegner, as well as Ivens's first biogra-
phy in 1965. Moreover, two of Ivens's close friends were 'high-ranking appa-
374 ratchiks', and appropriate lubrication was anticipated and no doubt delivered
(Jordan, 1999). The fourth congress film soon began to feel like the first major
Ivens-initiated project since First Years, with the theme of work and union
organising assuming a positive energy beyond the reactive, top-down declam-
atory thrust of Peace Will Win, Freundschaft, and Peace Tour. By June 1953 (iron-
ically a few weeks before the uprising), a one-year contract with DEFA finalised
the project that would take up the next year and a half of his life. The gathering
momentum would result in 'the most personal film I made in the East', 'the
most lyrical of my entire career' (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 242), 'one of the
largest productions in the history of the documentary cinema' (Bakker, 1999,
41) and by majority agreement then and now (except for Schoots of course)
the one unambiguous artistic achievement of this period. If nothing else,
Lied might be considered one of the lovingly luminous swan songs of black-
and-white 35mm documentary monumentality on the eve of the 'less-is-more'
direct cinema explosion and 16mm.
This time, even though Ivens was involved directly in the cinematography
in the DDR only, his role involved much more than 'production manager', and
can be termed 'creative producer/orchestrator' alongside his official credit of
'director'. The original Freundschaft concept of grass-roots narrative and the-
matic threads contributing to a master exposition was finally taken seriously
and now developed and implemented as fully as possible. Ivens and Wegner
assembled a team of local filmmakers from around the world, many of whom
Ivens knew from his travels and leftist networking over the years. Each received
general instructions to film local preparations for the congress, especially sin-
gle delegates in local contexts, 'where he works, what he does, how he lives,
etc.' before and after Vienna (Leyda, 1964, 74).18 On the level of micro-artis-
tic practice, Ivens would integrate archival images with these on-site mate-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
rials. His talents as a compilationist, demonstrated in Borinage and Nieuwe
Gronden, as well as in the World War II American projects, would be tested and
confirmed here on a whole new scale.
At DEFA a multinational team was set up (DEFA documentary institu-
tions seemed packed with expatriates and migrants like Ivens himself, as if
the Ulbricht regime could not trust German communists to carry out such
important work). The roster of principal collaborators was headed by Vladimir
Pozner, Ivens's old friend from Moscow, Paris, and Los Angeles, collaborator
on the script undertaken that summer, and writer of the commentary once the
shape of the final film was clear (in the official credits Ivens shared top-billing
authorship credit with Pozner, though not the directing credit). Also on board
were assistant directors Joop Huisken (1901-1979), Ivens's compatriot and
the erstwhile CAPI salesperson and collaborator on Regen (Rain, 1929, Nether-
lands, 16) and Zuiderzee who had emerged from a Nazi Stalag to become one of
the leading DDR documentarists, viewed by his colleague Jordan as an exem- 375
plar of political and artistic accountability to worker subjects but who now
accepted a backseat role to his old mentor; and the Frenchman Robert Men-
goz (aka Robert Mdndgoz, born 1926, who had just finished a documentary
short on the Paris Commune). As cinematographers Frenchman Sacha Vierny,
who would shortly collaborate with Resnais and Marker, and elder East Ger-
man Erich Nitzschmann, who had worked with Riefenstahl on Olympia, first
came to Ivens's mind 30 years later, while the Ivens Foundation website men-
tions two additional cameramen Anatoly Koloschin and Maximilian Scheer,
presumably Soviet and East German respectively; finally Ella Ensink (1897-
1968), a veteran of the Weimar and Nazi periods of German cinema, quietly
marshaled the editing process and would continue working with Ivens/Pozner
on Mein Kind (My Child, Vladimir Pozner and Alfons Machalz, 1955, DDR, 22)
and Die Windrose (The Windrose, Cavalcanti et al., 1957, DDR, 110).
This seasoned and prestigious team was in place, but it may have been
the anonymous contributors in the field who stole the show. New visual mate-
rial from six continents was at the centre of the 75 hours of rushes, alongside
abundant archival material from both western and Soviet-bloc archives, plus
recycled images from Ivens's Dutch productions, as well as from Borinage, The
400 Million (1939, USA, 53), Indonesia Calling, and even First Years and Peace
Will Win. Judging from the final selection and production documents, the
rushes submitted from the cinematographers in the field were from Austral-
ia, Austria, Brazil, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Sweden,
the UK, and US; the still colonial areas of Algeria, French West Africa (Cam-
eroon'9), Nigeria, and Sudan; the recently 'liberated' India, Indonesia, and
Egypt; the Soviet-sphere countries of China, DDR, Poland, USSR, North Korea
(post-armistice [Panmunjong]) and Vietnam (pre-Dien Bien Phu); and with
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
lesser presence - i.e. only a shot or two each - from Cuba, Czechoslovakia,
Greece, Iran, Mongolia, Romania, and Spain. Most of these jurisdictions had
communist parties with a strong underground presence (South Africa, US)
or legitimate visibility within the public sphere (India, the Euro-Communist
zone, the Soviet sphere). Cold war security precautions in the non-bloc coun-
tries have ensured that the exactness of the sources and even the distinction
between archival and original imagery cannot often be verified. (The foregoing
list, minus those jurisdictions possibly relying exclusively on archival materi-
als [Nigeria?20], probably constitute the 32 designated source countries.) Lit-
tle is known about the production of the footage from the field except what
is on the screen, but over the years the filmmakers let out anecdotal tidbits
alongside the predictable allusions to funding problems, customs challenges,
and clandestine shipping of rushes: amateur union cameramen were the con-
tributors from Australia whereas professionals produced the images in both
376 I China and Japan; prison shots were obtained clandestinely from pre-revolu-
tionary Cuba21; the Soviet material was very 'pink', with uniform and 'boring'
urban shots from Berlin to Vladivostok, and this selection thus emphasised
Ivens's usual last resort, never boring schoolchildren; the two American cam-
eramen had some of their footage destroyed; the Iranian contribution was
strong but understandably only shows figures' backs22 (Ivens, interview with
author, April 1978).
The final Lied - epic yet lyrical, materialist yet affecting, outraged but
optimistic, vividly cinematic but with a fine-tuned and efficient deployment
of the spoken word, anchored in the local but envisaging the global - shows
Ivens inspired once again and in control. The 93-minute feature, more sym-
phonic than song-like in its encyclopedic scope and complex structure, inter-
polates a meandering essayistic safari along the six selected world rivers - in
order, the Mississippi, Ganges, Nile, Yangtze, Volga, and Amazon - with the-
matic excursuses first celebrating labour (the Marxian theme of the human
transformation of nature), then exposing capitalist exploitation and misery,
next a movement of approximately a half hour on the Congress itself, tracing
local preparations for it around the world, the gathering in Vienna, and the
follow-up back home. Then come short extrapolations of the motifs of bread
and the land, the arms race and capitalism, seguing into a utopian glimpse
of socialism in practice in China and the Soviet sphere. Finally the struggles
of the workers' movements against war, hunger, and state/police oppression
progress to the triumphant surge forward of the workers' movements, the sev-
enth river as originally pitched by Ivens.
Three of the most developed clusters from the field cinematographers
were from Africa: striking but somewhat stiff mise-en-scenes of union drives,
workers' oratory, and the election of congress delegates in Cameroon and
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Algeria (Cameroonian fieldworkers are summoned to their organising meet-
ing by drums!), and urban and rural shots of labour and police harassment in
Egypt, focusing on irrigation, agriculture, and the cotton industry, as well as
foreign militarisation.23
58. Das Lied der Strome (1954):
incorporating unique footage by African
cinematographers in the field, such as
raise-en-scenes of agricultural union drives.
© DEFA-Stiftung/CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
377
The India segments are also strong and well developed, including rallies,
meetings, and demonstrations (most from West Bengal, where the state com-
munist party was poised to take electoral power), as well as shots of famine
and brutal manual labour (barefoot rickshaw-pullers and elderly women car-
rying punishing headloads of stones), all deploying the moral outrage that is a
characteristic of local left discourses following the Great Famine and Partition
of the 1940s.
Intercutting archival footage and the new material surprisingly seamless-
ly, Ivens revisits most of his familiar motifs, from the analysis and celebration
of manual work to the exploration, both lyrical and metaphorical, of the ele-
ments, especially water, not surprisingly, and earth. River iconography has, of
course, an almost archetypal resonance in 2o"-century documentary. While
Musser (2002) sees echoes in Ivens's river motif of Pudovkin and the Filmliga
adventure around Mat (Mother, 1926, USSR, 90) 25 years earlier, Ivens's meta-
phorical figuration of rivers also references Vertov and Ivens's own 1930s work
on both sides of the Atlantic. With regard to the rivers as vehicles of history,
Jordan (1999, 104) helpfully connects Lied to another major trend at DEFA,
where a cycle of historical compilation films emerged shortly afterwards,
modelled to no small extent on Ivens's and Pozner's film. These projects were
responding to the imperatives of denazification and socialist construction
of course but also no doubt to the frustration engendered by repeated futile
efforts to second-guess the ever-tightening ship of state on touchy contem-
porary domestic political agendas, especially post-June 16. The year of Lied's
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
release, Ivens reportedly had a supervisory hand in the Thorndikes' Du and
mancherKamerad (You and Many a Comrade, 1956, 11o), which Jordan (1999,
96) considers among the most successful and affecting of these historiograph-
ical efforts in the way it 'discovered the internal force of archive material'.
Indeed, Lied should not be considered in isolation from its complex intertext.
Ivens's old friend Leyda (191o-1988)24 was the first to situate Lied as a
masterwork of the editor's art, specifically of compilation, and he was right
on both the macro and micro level. Nine elegant aqueous-motif interludes
mortar the movements of the film together. Within the movements, the ever
tactful Leyda (1964, 77) praises Ivens's and Ensink's ability to produce spon-
taneity in even 'over-polished Soviet footage and the arranged Chinese shots',
and their ability to bring 'maximum clarity' out of the amateur footage. Not
surprisingly, rather than the fluid narrative and expository passages that are
the architecture of the film, invariably connecting local detail to larger plan,
378 it is easy to note the moments of virtuosity or even flamboyance. Leyda (1964,
77), for example, praises the skilful orchestration of the Mississippi's flooding
of its banks as if in angry response to the racial violence on its shore.23 One
transition that stunned me the first and every subsequent time I've seen the
film comes in the Amazon movement where a rainforest tribesman kindling
fire with his 'primitive' bow device produces the mushroom cloud of a nuclear
blast (perhaps the Soviet H-bomb test that had rocked the world as Ivens and
Pozner were working on the script in 1953), a miraculously concise denunci-
ation of the misuse of human productive technology that then segues into a
critique of post-Korea arms-race geopolitics.
59. Das Lied der Strome (1954): an eloquent edit in
the Amazon movement, from a rainforest tribesman
kindling fire to the mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast.
DVD frame capture. DVD frame capture. O DEFA-
Stiftung/CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
For Leyda (1964, 144), in short, '[a] chance to re-see his Song of the Rivers rein-
forced my admiration for it as a textbook of documentary idea, of cutting and
selection, of reconciling breadth and detail, and of compilation'.
The editing cannot be considered apart from the voice-over commentary
of course, and Pozner's brilliance is soon evident in this respect, officially join-
ing the line of talented writers from Hemingway to Duncan who had honoured
Ivens's work since the 1930s with their creative counterpoint. Grelier (1965,
34) and Jordan (1999, 94) are among those who have praised Pozner's restraint
and imagination: the former admires the priority given to the images, and
points specifically to the Indian footage of porters, while the latter praises
the way Pozner allows spectators to create their own narrative, to join him in
questioning images in an abstract rhetorical way, 'general' and 'planetary':
'Pozner's commentary registers the swings, connections, and meanings of
the images and sequences, and develops a new concept for the combining of
image with text'. Nevertheless Jordan (personal communication, 2015) modu- 379
lated the enthusiasm years later by observing that the raw material for Pozner
to process diminishes in interest as the film advances. For his part, Pozner
was rightly proud of how evocatively he was able to explain through a simple
question the relatively abstract Marxian concept of surplus value over footage
of South African gold miners: 'In one year, a miner extracts 900 grams of gold.
Where do the 800 grams of gold go that he extracts but does not keep? If we
have the possibility in a film to explain what surplus value is, and moreover
even more important things from Marx, in a way understood by millions, we
must do it. Of course, it's not a question of showing it in a primitive way but in
a simple form' (Ivens, [1955] 1965).
In the coffee-table book that accompanied the release of the film Pozner
elegantly describes the extent to which he had drawn inspiration for his short-
hand commentary poetry from banners:
I wanted it to be short, simple, and very repetitious. I had found my model
while watching films of workers' demonstrations, meeting, strikes, while
reading what the workers themselves had written on the flags and ban-
deroles the police were trying to wrest from them, what they had written
on the walls of slums, on the entrances of struck factories and also on
the huge streamers in Red Square in Moscow, in Tienanmen Square in
Beijing, in Constitution Square in Warsaw, and Marx-Engels Square in
Berlin. I had Japanese posters translated, Romanian banners, Burmese
streamers, Mongolian slogans, and discovered without surprise the uni-
versal language of the workers. 'Wir fordern Lohnerhohung', Austria said,
and the echo came from Cosa Rica: 'Luchamos para una alza de salarios'.
'Libdrez Henri Martin', France was demanding and Cuba 'Para la libertad
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
6o. Das Lied der Strome (1954): a Bombay
demonstration. Commentary writer Pozner
drew inspiration for his commentary from
the universal poetry of workers' protest
signs. The visible fragment of the Marathi-
language placard demands "accept it!"
[a wage hike? a contract?]. DVD frame
capture. © DEFA-Stiftung/CAPI Films,
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Lk
de Lazaro Pena'. 'We are hungry', Algiers said, 'Our children are hungry',
Bombay said. 'We want work', Dublin said, 'We want a better life', Djakarta
380 said, and to all of them Toronto responded: 'Justice'. Thus from demand to
demand the commentary wrote itself. (Ivens and Pozner, 1957, 19)
Critics would often single out Pozner's work for praise: the politically una-
ligned Image et son's (1964, 9) admiration was based specifically on its alterna-
tion of tone, 'dry, tender, satirical, etc.'.
As for the second layer on the soundtrack, the music, much was made
at the time of the contribution of Paul Robeson (1898-1976) to the film. The
55-year-old performer delivers verses of the theme song over each of the river
movements, and then does so again in the finale, backed by chorus. The narra-
tive of the marooned and passportless Red Scare martyr recording it a capello
in his brother's Harlem parsonage made the rounds,26 and the performance
with orchestral accompaniment added retroactively in East Berlin is indeed
charismatic as well as a propaganda coup. However, Brecht's lyrics seem to
have been badly translated by Robeson's American colleague, metrically awk-
ward, and what is worse not fully audible in existing DVD versions of the film.
The original German version featured famous Brechtian singer Ernst Busch,
which presumably works better. As for Shostakovich's anthem-like song and
accompanying score, it is catchily populist and melodious, larded out with
recycled motifs from the already canonical wartime Eighth Symphony (1943)
and his 1949 Zhdanovian oratorio Song of the Forests. Admittedly overbearing
in spots, it allows lots of breathers and lives up to its task of monumentality
despite its unfortunate, but perhaps symptomatic, echoes of the Protestant
hymn tune 'Beneath the Cross of Jesus'.
Lied bowed in East Berlin's Babylon theatre on 17 September 1954, with
the full DDR political hierarchy present, in Vienna a month later, and at the
Karlovy Vary festival later in the fall. The self-congratulatory reports of mass
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
audiences reached thereafter presume systematic union screenings and non-
theatrical circulation in left political organisations around the world (such as
the Realist Film Association in Melbourne, where it was screened in January
and March, 1956). But such reports unfortunately paper over uphill battles
faced by the filmmakers in theatrical distribution channels - as usual. Jordan
(1999) reveals that Lied was not distributed theatrically in the DDR after the
premiere, but is not clear whether this was due to bureaucratic inertia or the
ambiguous political shift towards the film industry that he locates earlier in
1954 (it was seemingly nothing personal around Ivens, for he remained the
most honoured filmmaker in the DDR over the next decade, with several retro-
spectives beginning in 1956 and many other honours); two years later, a repeat
of the same distribution debacle happened to Huisken's important film Chi-
na - Land zwishchen Gestern und Morgen (China, Land between Yesterday and
Tomorrow, 1956, 72). At least the silence did not go unnoticed by civil society:
the Academy of Arts, of which Ivens was a corresponding member, protested I 381
'it is the most humiliating incident in our documentary film history. This lack
of appreciation for Joris Ivens's Lied, one of the most important works in the
history of the international documentary film' (Jordan, 1999).
Things were no better in the West: the UK and France were both brutal in
their censorship, both presumably because of anti-colonial discourses. The
former trimmed one-third of the running time of the film, and the latter's list
of required cuts took up eight pages single-spaced, leading to an all-too-famil-
iar tone in Pozner's letter to his colleague:
There remained the sentences we had to delete. We started to fade them
out, once, twice, three times, but the truth doesn't let itself be rubbed
out, facts are a stubborn thing, we lowered the speaker's voice, but one
still heard it afterwards, only a whisper was left, but more revealing than
a shout. Thus, we were forced, death in our hearts, to scrape the emul-
sion. The print was wounded: it's the first casualty of the great battle just
beginning to show the film, to get the film seen. (Pozner, letter to Ivens,
1955, JIA)
In the US the film was never shown in any format, and Robeson (1958) was
only able to see it at a Canadian screening, presumably in a Toronto left organ-
isation (where he performed in 1956). The 1978 Berkeley screening during
Ivens's and Loridan's tour of Comment Yukong diplaca les montagnes (How
YukongMoved the Mountains, 1976, France, 718) was likely the first ever screen-
ing in that country.
Such problems did not hamper an unsurprisingly polarised critical recep-
tion upon Lied's release. Paris's left-leaning Esprit was the most extravagant,
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
praising the film's collective provenance and thereby comparing the film to
medieval cathedrals, and citing Battleship Potemkin as a work worthy of com-
parison. The critic specifically mentioned the filmmakers' ability to sustain
the film's opening 'souffle' due to its strong editing and 'formal audacity'
(Legotien, 1955). The Dutch centrist newspaper de Volkskrant echoed Ivens's
current disfavour with the country's regime, arguing that Ivens had paid for
his communist allegiance with his artistic abilities, but in terms that are not
wholly unfavourable: 'primitively exciting' and 'naively brutal' (de Volkskrant
1954).
As political cinema, Lied tends to have a rough ride with post-New Left
viewers in the West who take on the task of providing a final retroactive judg-
ment. Even Ivens's sympathetic ex-East German ex-colleague Jordan (1999,
94) offered a fatal diagnosis: 'the motive for the film and its progressive cre-
dentials are outdated'. Yet 'outdatedness' - ephemerality - it can be argued
382 I are a characteristic by definition of any committed film, as I argued long ago,
and the core of any 'aesthetics of political use-value,' 'the common fund of our
activist legacy' (Waugh, 1999, 175):
Instead of meeting the criteria of durability, abstraction, ambiguity, indi-
vidualism, uniqueness, formal complexity, deconstructed or redistrib-
uted signifiers, novelty and so on, all in a packageable format, political
documentaries provide us with disposability, ephemerality, topicality,
directness, immediacy, instrumentality, didacticism, collective or anon-
ymous authorship, unconventional formats, non-availability, and ulti-
mately non-evaluability. (Waugh, [1984] 2011, 13)
Schoots's opinion is another case in point, basically a refutation of Marxism
tout court and shooting the messenger:
Although Song of the Rivers can be seen as an attempt to go beyond the
standard congress film, it remained a product of centralist thinking, forc-
ing a pluralistic global reality into a simplistic framework that reduced
workers to extras in a single global movement. A telling metaphor in the
film is a field of waving grain, visually echoed in the following shot of a
mass of workers. (Schoots, [1995] 2000, 244)
Jordan (1999, 94) echoes this critique with the term 'oversimplification of the
world' but seemingly contradicts it in proposing aptly that 'Ivens's achieve-
ments are to present the view of a coherent world'. Yes, the virtue and the lia-
bility of ambitiously offering a Marxist analysis of 'a pluralistic global reality'
(Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 242) - all six rivers, not just one - is by defini-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
tion coherence or simplification, depending on what side you're on. I prefer
Pozner's formulation of simplicity, and to me the beautiful metaphor of waving
grain is about unity and coherence, artistic insight into common stakes across
cultural and geographical boundaries, rather than centralist and simplistic
reductiveness. In the post-war world a desperately urgent need to understand
the planet as an integrated system was felt by all, and organisations like UNE-
SCO and projects like Edward Steichen's USAID-sponsored international pho-
to exhibition, The Family ofMan (1955), all registered this need. Ivens should
not be faulted anachronistically for his ambitious plan to do likewise, nor for
seeking principles of coherence beyond the ideologically charged banality of
'humanity', 'family', or 'man'. It is surely Ivens's great contribution to link
workers in France to workers in Vietnam in a single cinematic enunciation,
in fact literally showing them embracing, while maintaining a strong sense
of cultural and social particularity even on the gestural and behavioral level
alone. Towards the end of his career when Ivens (interview with author, April I 383
1978) would frankly remember his frustration during the Cold War years with
the trap of his congress commissions, he ruefully acknowledged the crucial
role of resistance, of negation, in his work, and ventured 'I'm a guerilla. I'm
at my best when I'm in opposition'. But in fact his filmography would reveal
that Ivens's talents as an oppositional guerilla filmmaker saw their stiffest test
not in the capitalist west but east of the Curtain, and in the unlikely site of this
gargantuan congress film, in this particular contribution of vision and coor-
dination, not even behind the camera but in the facilitation of other guerilla
filmmakers around the world.
It is all too easy to dismiss dogmatic Cold War ideological discourse rath-
er than considering empathetically its artistic vehicle in its historical context,
on its own terms, within its own generic conventions. Lied is a work of artistic
advocacy negotiating a classical Marxist worldview, accepted as a given, and
creatively grappling with the agenda of applying it to a radically transformed
world, to engage with a politics of the future. It intervenes, not only within
static and hegemonic top-down Stalinist and Russian production, but also
within the ferment that characterised cinematic cultures within the Eastern
Bloc, whether within the Lodz film school in Poland, at DEFA, or in the Leip-
zig documentary festival constituencies beginning in 1955 - and international
cinematic cultures as well. Ivens's 'evo[cation of] the dream of a socialist uto-
pia' (Musser, 2002, 111) is articulated not so much in the stodgy 'pink' Volga
scenes, but in the images and sounds of the global South, fully caught up in an
entire generation's anti-colonial struggle still ongoing 60 years later. The ico-
nography of what would emerge as 'third world' politics at Bandung two years
later, images of struggle from Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, fleshes
out Ivens's grass-roots anti-colonial concept, prophetic and dynamic artistic
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
and political vision. Surely in an era when even the national communist par-
ties of the imperial powers were having trouble sorting out the contradictions
of racism and colonialism (Smith, 2008), for Ivens and Pozner to apply a lucid
class analysis to colonialism and to bring to life onscreen the bodies, voices,
and comings together of workers from Cameroon, Algeria, Egypt, India, Italy,
and the rest is surely a cinematic achievement that is incontrovertibly unique.
Musser (2002) correctly emphasises the film's intertext of Family of Man
and of Ivens's own previous work here recycled, which he rightly declares
makes the film intensely personal. But it is important to keep in view other
post-war Cold War documentaries and hybrids, both those that rank with Lied
as progressive documents of struggle against imperialism and racism, such
as its companion pro-subaltern masterpieces Strange Victory (Leo Hurwitz,
1948, 71), The Quiet One (Sidney Meyers, 1948, 65), and Salt of the Earth (Her-
bert Biberman, 1954, 94) as well as the union documentaries of Carl Marza-
384 I ni (Musser, 2009) - to mention only American films of the same decade - but
also parallel works that don't measure up to their high standard. Take a film
by Paul Rotha for example, a UNESCO-sponsored feature documentary with
a similarly aspiring title but evoking prayer rather than song, World Without
End (1953, UK, 6o), with ambitions similar to Lied's and almost exactly con-
temporaneous to it. By this time Grierson's disciple had become head of
another state documentary unit, the BBC documentary film department, and
he emphasises the 'universality' and 'humanity' of his Mexican and Thai sub-
jects alike, the gospel of cute children that are nevertheless 'crawling with lice'
with a traditionally miserabilist message of 'love your neighbour'. This vivid
but unwitting demonstration of the political insufficiency of top-down struc-
tures of 'development' and 'aid' offers no artistic dynamic of agency much less
empowerment, no struggle or contradiction.
One final point might be a vindication of Ivens's original 'seventh river'
concept. I have explored in 'Joris Ivens and the Legacy of Committed Docu-
mentary' (Waugh, [1999] 2011) the trope of the demonstration, both onscreen
and off, as a convergence of artistic politics and the real-world politics of street
theatre. But I was not able at that time for reasons of availability to include
Lied in my transhistorical corpus, surely the fiber-demonstration film to end
all demonstration films with its triumphantly climactic montage of workers'
demonstrations on every continent. Lied's spectacular peroration exemplifies
my 1999 analysis:
[Although] the demonstration is first and foremost about local space and
its indexical recording [... it is] not only a cinematic trope but a political
resource of great transformative power [...] not only documents of collec-
tive actions of public defiance, but also performative engagements with
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
those collective actions, active interventions by filmmakers and conse-
quently by spectators into the political worlds of the films. [...] A demon-
stration has [...] to do, by definition, with public space, with territory,
since the demonstration occupies the streets where the state stages its
authority. The demonstration shows its force and commits ritual speech
acts that perform territorial possession and liberation. [...] The filmic act
both performs and represents the demonstration. [...] The film process
infinitely extends the discursive space of the original demonstration: the
original speech act not only proliferates through this magnification but
is also changed qualitatively. [...] The demonstration stops being a short-
hand record of dissent, and becomes [...] a subject-centred cinematic
performance of political action. [...] 'Staging' [a demonstration] acquires
the innuendo of street theatre, of political performance, and by exten-
sion, since theatre is transformed into the real, of performativity in the
public political sphere. (Waugh, [1999] 2011, 275-276) 1 385
In contrast with my 1999 transhistorical sample of representations of sin-
gle-event demonstration, Ivens extends this transformation with Lied's mon-
tage structure, qualitatively again, cumulatively and dialectically, to perform a
transhistorical and global demonstration as the peroration of this film, a glob-
al act of defiance, the seventh river of his original concept. Perhaps Ivens was
referring to this when he looked back on the film as 'romantic become dialec-
tic' (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 242).
On what other counts can Lied's engagement with other future politics be
faulted? The film's proto-feminist credentials are admittedly somewhat less
impressive than those for the American Salt of the Earth, which scooped Lied
both by six months and by its cross-pollination of anti-racist and anti-patriar-
chal discourses. A woman worker does not surface in Lied's opening hymn to
labour until the six-minute mark, yet there is no need to dwell on this surpris-
ing gap when we have the stirring examples of First Years, Mein Kind, and Win-
drose to compensate, thanks no doubt to the women collaborators on all these
works either as scriptwriters, producers, or directors. Let us touch then on
another urgent issue: perhaps an even more conspicuous ideological shortfall
around Ivens's longstanding celebratory engagement with the Soviet program
of development, applying the Marxian gospel of the mastery of nature in terms
of the industrialisation of natural resources, hydroelectric dams, blast furnac-
es, etc. While such critique can admittedly be anachronistic, the contradic-
tions are in fact visually and thematically embedded in the film in a way that
they were not a generation earlier in the Five-Year Plan Komsomol, and seep
out from its clear thematics of harmony with nature and of the control/own-
ership of development of the natural world (more than one critic felt the pro-
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
logue was stronger than the rest of the film). Wall Street or public/collective
ownership? the film asks, but shows little corresponding sustainable vision of
the latter. The iconography of the mushroom cloud emerging from the Ama-
zon shatters the coherence of the film's discourses of development. Left doc-
umentary would not desist from equating smokestacks and dams with utopia
- either in the west or in the 'third world' - for at least another generation, but
thanks to Ivens this equation was clearly showing its wear and tear in 1954.
In retrospect, another ideological dynamic, this time a silence, is striking.
This film, developed during the months of mourning for Stalin, premiered a
mere sixteen months after his death in the vassal state that would soon lead
the resistance to Khrushchev's legendary de-Stalinisation campaign begun in
February 1956. Yet the late leader is noticeable for the absence of all verbal
or visual reference to him in either English or longer German version (except
for mention of Stalingrad, a World War II turning point of great strategic and
386 I symbolic value that can of course refer obliquely to its namesake, but not nec-
essarily). Lenin is mentioned in the lyrics of the verse about the Volga ('Lenin
showed the way'), but otherwise the only other identifiable political leader
depicted is Mao Zedong, shown greeting a female peasant, in a likely archival
shot. If one can discern political shifts in minuscule nuances, can it be that
Lied offers a first cinematic taste of Thaw? That Ivens and Pozner, quietly and
in their byzantine and oblique way are scooping Khrushchev? On an even more
global scale, can one discern also the post-war 'crisis' in the left brought to the
surface by the Cold War that I evoked in the introduction to this chapter? Can
the climactic synthetic surge forward of the ending be seen as a disavowal or
refusal of that very crisis, and its triumphalism its very symptom?
MEIN KIND, DIEABENTEUER DES TILL EULENSPIEGEL, DIE WINDROSE
Before following Ivens as he moved westward, southward, and eastward to the
next productive episode in his career, in Western Europe and in the emerg-
ing global south, let us consider three final DEFA films, undertaken at 'arm's
length' and intermittently, more or less simultaneously, throughout 1955
and 1956, his last two years behind the Curtain. These include two fine and
under-recognised works both commissioned by the East Berlin-based, Sovi-
et-front International Democratic Women's Federation (IDFF), both narrated
by typically well-honed Pozner commentary and introduced/narrated by the
veteran Brechtian actress, the charismatic Helene Weigel:
- Mein Kind (My Child, co-dir. Vladimir Pozner and Alfons Machalz, 1956);
and
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
- Die Windrose (The Windrose, coordinator Alberto Cavalcanti,27 individual
episodes directed by Alex Viany [Brazil], Sergei Gerasimov [USSR], Yan-
nick Bellon [France], Gillo Pontecorvo [Italy], and Wu Guoying [China],
1957).
Both projects assigned Ivens the official credit of 'artistic supervisor', but were
reportedly 'inspired' and 'produced' respectively by Ivens, and thirdly
- one unprecedentedly ambitious fiction feature Die Abenteuer des Till
Eulenspiegel (LesAventures de TillL'Espiegle/Bold Adventure, 1956, go,
directed by and starring the French film star and fellow-traveller heart-
throb Grard Philipe, co-produced by DEFA and the French Productions
Ariane, Ivens's contribution described variously as artistic supervisor or
production coordinator 'for DEFA').
Windrose is the most durable and interesting of the three works, applying I 387
Lied's grass-roots contributors concept to short fiction, more formally, and
producing a coherent anthology of five excellent and distinct women-centred
mini-narratives from five countries and three continents. It is anyone's guess
as to why this film is almost never shown or revived (outside of one or two of
the most thorough Ivens retrospectives). This is all the more curious since
Windrose brings together more big names than any other Ivens work - and not
only stars Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, who both perform luminously
in the French entry - namely Cavalcanti, for whom this is the first of two major
German projects around this time, one on each side of the Curtain, as well as
future stellar directors Bellon, Gerasimov, and Pontecorvo, plus prestigious
scriptwriters Jorge Amado and Franco Solinas. Even the work's proto-feminist
and proto-'third world' credentials alone, not to mention its unique glimpse
of Great Leap Forward-era Chinese fiction, should have guaranteed this work
a constant circulation, but it is apparently the curse of socialist realism and
no doubt of more official East German idiocracy - and dare we say executorial
myopia? - that has kept Windrose from its rightful place in the canon. Not that
socialist realism in these five late incarnations is an overwhelming liability,
for the freshness, creativity, and technical accomplishment of their interpre-
tations of the formula, obligatory oratory tropes, and moderately happy end-
ings notwithstanding, vindicate Ivens's and Cavalcanti's mentorial trust in
the five sets of young directors and scriptwriters. Hanlon (2012) rightly opines
that the audacity to critique, however circuitously, gender roles in socialist
countries, is further evidence of the Thaw.
Ivens oversaw a complex selection and pre-production process: the
detailed commissions called for short fiction projects each with a different
theme, in the national style and language, with scripts to be approved by the
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
national IDFF committee. The films were to be produced autonomously on
the national level without interference from Berlin, though Berlin meetings
took place before the concept was finalised with delegates either invited by the
Berliners or pre-selected by the host committees: Ivens was already close to
Pontecorvo and knew French scriptwriter Henry Magnan, Bellon's husband,
while Cavalcanti likely had a hand in the Brazilian selection. Eyebrows were
apparently raised when the Chinese committee sent Wu Guoying (b. 1921),
a film educator at the Beijing Film Academy as well as painter and poet, as
if recruiting woman directors for this women's project had not occurred to
the Berliners. Further meetings considered the final scripts. Not surprisingly
the whole process did not go without a hitch: Brazilian authorities allowed the
export of the film only after half a year of negotiations (famous scriptwriter
Amado was then in exile in Eastern Europe and had appeared in Freundschaft);
Magnan's and Bellon's script was not at first acceptable to the national French
388 I committee; the Tuscan factory to be used as location for the Italian project,
partly idle, was withheld at the last minute. But in the end all five films arrived,
all too long and necessitating Cavalcanti's diplomatic streamlining: the Soviet
film in particular was twice the requested length of two and a half reels. The
two supervisors organised the preface together and Pozner provided a voice-
over commentary that both cohered and translated.
The five films offer a politically charged tour of women's issues as under-
stood by the international communist movement of the day, echoing Salt of
the Earth in this respect. The French film is unique in developing a theme
of intellectual rather than physical work and is joined by the Soviet film in
desisting from the other films' automatic link of gender politics with materni-
ty - though not with romance of course! Even so, Dennis Hanlon (2012) cites
insider Thomas Heimann's (1996) view of the proto-feminist theme as the
thin edge of the post-Stalinist wedge:
Heimann argues that the makers of this film took advantage of the aper-
tures opened in DEFA production by the Thaw that took place after Sta-
lin's death in a way few others did; according to Heimann, the inclusion
of episodes critiquing the status of women in putatively socialist states
would have been unthinkable before this Thaw, giving further evidence
that the film was a fortuitous product of the Thaw following the 20th Con-
gress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956.
The goal of rendering each narrative in national style is well realised. The
technically superb Soviet entry, Nadezhda, the closest to the musical genre
among the five shorts, is admittedly a bit 'pink' (to use Ivens's descriptor for
the Soviet footage in Lied), but even here with its focus on the Khrushchev era's
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
61. Die Windrose (1957): Brazilian episode,
cinema novo-style. Fieldworker Ana crosses
the parched sertdo and helps a fellow
passenger give birth in the back of their
truck. Frame enlargement courtesy DEFA-
Stiftung. © DEFA-Stiftung/Joop Huisken,
Robert Menegoz.
62. Die Windrose (1957): Magnan's and
Bellon's French episode 'Un matin comme
les autres', harnesses star power (Simone
Signoret and Yves Montand) to offer
socialist realism inside a 1930s poetic
realist aesthetic. Frame enlargement 89
courtesy DEFA Stiftung. © DEFA-Stiftung/
Joop Huisken, Robert Menegoz.
63. Die Windrose (1957): Italian episode.
Pontecorvo's and Solinas's 'Giovanna', a
fiction of striking women textile workers
torn between solidarity and maternal duty,
gracefully deploys neorealist aesthetics.
Frame enlargement courtesy DEFA
Stiftung. © DEFA-Stiftung/Joop Huisken,
Robert Menegoz.
'new lands' program and romantic teen conjugality, a slight whiff of thaw can
arguably be inferred, and in retrospect the resemblance to Cranes Are Flying
(in production at approximately the same time and premiering seven months
later) is striking. As for the Chinese entry that concludes the anthology, the
misty frontality of its political aesthetics is unmistakable in the very prolific
age of Bai mao nu (The White-Haired Girl, Choui Khoua and Bin Wang, 1950,
111) - the dramatic crisis is a storm that threatens the new village coopera-
tive at harvest-time, not human failing, though the challenge of illiteracy,
slow-to-awaken elders, and recalcitrant husbands are also on the scene. But
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
it too is charmingly fresh with its exploration of hieratic non-naturalistic Chi-
nese realism and its interrogation of patriarchal hurdles to collective agricul-
tural productivity. As for the other three short fictions, what is remarkable is
the way they too, like the Soviet and Chinese filmmakers, apply national cin-
ematic aesthetics to their distinct heroines and plots, while adhering to the
coherence of the IDFF mandate and template: Viany's and Amado's cinema
novo-style tale of Ana follows an agricultural day labourer travelling across the
parched sertdo from Bahia to Sio Paulo in a ramshackle and crowded truck
that happens to be a macrocosm of Brazilian society, complete with a pres-
cient sexual harassment anecdote and a fellow passenger who gives birth en
route; Pontecorvo's and Solinas's Giovanna, a fiction of striking women tex-
tile workers torn between collective solidarity and maternal duty, shows the
graceful deployment of neorealist aesthetics; Magnan's and Bellon's Un matin
comme les autres, a narrative of a school teacher (Signoret) whose politically
390 I motivated dismissal is rescinded thanks to pressure from her cute pupils and
cute proletarian crooner boyfriend (Montand), updates a 1930s poetic realist
aesthetic in a straightforward on-location narrative that shows Bellon's previ-
ous documentary experience and her anticipation of New Wave naturalism.
Almost nothing is known of the circulation of this omnibus film, but judging
from the DEFA track record it was probably not extensive. Nevertheless judg-
ing from the appearance of a television set in the preface and the TV-friendly
voice-over, one presumes that small-screen distribution was part of the plan.
Mein Kind is an essayistic short extension of the anti-war themes of Peace
Will Win and Lied through the proto-feminist lens of universal 'motherhood',
a kind of offshoot of Windrose. The work was assembled while Ivens was off on
his wild Till Eulenspiegel chase in Western Europe by trusty comrade Pozner
along with Alfons Machalz, Ivens's young archival research assistant on Lied,
whom Ivens had sent off to finish his 'theoretical' education but who had now
resurfaced.
Ivens was most involved in the initial conception of the film. Upon one of
his periodic returns from TillEulenspiegel activities, Ivens found Windrose well
underway with the assemblage of the five national productions under Caval-
canti's wing. According to Machalz, disagreement ensued about whether the
documentary mortar between the five fictional episodes, advocated by Ivens,
was necessary. He was outvoted,
but Joris did not let go of this documentary section. A few days before
he had to leave - I had just been in a meeting with Hans Wegner - Joris
came in and said: 'We should make two films, without any extra costs. Die
Windrose and a documentary film about mothers and children'. It would
be a film that spoke to mothers all over the world. Then he took one of
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
his usual scrawls out of his pocket and read his idea out loud: 'A child
is born. Everywhere in the world children are born. They are raised with
difficulty and sacrifices. Their mothers protect them from pain and dan-
ger and raise them to become honest, peaceful people. But one day war
comes and takes their children away. In the future, women and children
should be spared from this fate'. These words, written on the back of a
menu of a restaurant, was our shooting script until the end of the film.
(Machalz, 1999, 110)
Ivens approved of Machalz and Pozner as the directorial team, and the for-
mer assembled archival materials from socialist countries while the latter,
like Ivens a Euro-Communist commuter, did the same in Paris. Machalz and
Pozner, who had already developed a basic text for the commentary, did not
always see eye to eye on what the often unreachable Ivens would do in the face
of their artistic problems, such as the lack of covering shots or the choice of 391
music. With regard to the latter, Pozner prepared a score of Bach and Mozart,
which Machalz thought killed the film and changed to Beethoven's Piano
Concerto No. 5, supplemented by Bach's Air on the G String. Stubborn Pozner
asked for composer Eisler's input, but the veteran Ivens collaborator agreed
with the younger man, and suggested an additional children's song to boot.
This simple, but spellbinding, score and another poetically barebones, inter-
rogatory commentary from Pozner, linking gesture and thought, was a good fit
for the associative collage of shots of mothers and children from many differ-
ent cultures, north and south. These shots, blending universal 'madonna and
child' iconicity with the documentary grain of local conditions and cultures,
are soon threatened editorially by Spanish Earth-style violence, both its media
representations (are the images of television in both these DDR productions
a first in Ivens's filmography, not to mention the conventional documentary
canon?) and its traumatic geopolitical enactment. Notable a half-century later
are images of breastfeeding much franker than would have even been think-
able in the Eisenhower 'free world' and images of boys at play with toy guns
and bullying girls that are unusually prophetic in their linking of violence to
the culture of education and childrearing. As compilation, the work is master-
ful, and Spanish Earth shots are unsurprisingly prominent alongside striking
material from Latin America and Southeast Asia in particular. The film's inter-
cultural iconography was consonant with DEFA filmmakers' outward-looking
sensibility beginning in the mid-fifties, and Marion Michelle, still in the pic-
ture, shot the beautiful images of harvesters rocking their infants mid-field in
Syria.
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
64. Mein Kind (1955): Marion Michelle -
contributed a Syrian harvester rocking
her infant - intercultural iconography
consonant with DEFA's outward-looking
sensibility of the mid-1950s. DVD frame
capture. © DEFA-Stiftung.
65. Mein Kind (1955): European madonna
and child emerging from bomb shelter.
Mothers from many cultures, north and
south, choose a 'new path' away from
392 geopolitical violence. DVD frame capture.
© DEFA Stiftung.
By the time the film was finished, 'Ivens had [still] not seen a metre of it', but
the filmmakers phoned their mentor in Paris and persuaded him to let 'artis-
tic direction Joris Ivens' be in the credits, where it turned up climactically as
the final big-name credit, trumping the normal 'directed by'. Ivens finally saw
Mein Kind in December 1955 and liked it. So did juries at festivals in Mann-
heim in May 1956 and in Montevideo the following year (though the directors
were not allowed to travel to these events). East Berlin cultural bureaucrats
were less enthusiastic about this unique production of their studio, 'the most
poetic film in the history of the DEFA documentary film' according to its co-di-
rector. They denied it the national award it was thought to deserve, consigning
it to 'closed screening' purgatory in the country (Machalz, 1999, 112), though
some international distribution reportedly ensued (Jordan, 1999). But even its
restricted availability had an impact on Machalz's generation of young DEFA
filmmakers who were eager to emerge away from the shadow of either Ivens or
Huisken (Machalz, 1999). The reported reason for the chill was that the film's
pacifist credo was too strong for the volatile post-Stalin, nuclear-arms-race
context, especially for the most hardline of the Warsaw Pact countries in the
Budapest aftermath.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Of the three last Cold War films, Ivens's creative energies were invested
most directly, extensively, and concretely in Till Eulenspiegel, ironically the
least successful (to describe this disaster tactfully). This role, together with his
ambiguous final credit makes it all the more paradoxical that it is the most
inaccessible of the extant films Ivens touched (I could not see it for decades,
still languishing in co-production hades, perhaps the star's only vehicle not
available on DVD until its very limited release in 2009).
According to Sadoul, both Ivens and the French screen idol had inde-
pendently around 1952 developed the idea of bringing the legend of Flemish
national hero Till Eulenspiegel to the screen, but there is also evidence Ivens
had first considered of developing a Eulenspiegel biopic in the thirties. Eulen-
spiegel was a figure of late medieval folklore, a Low German prankster who had
been appropriated by nineteenth-century Belgian novelist Charles de Coster
as a fictional hero of the Low Countries' revolt against the Spanish occupation
and Inquisition in the 17" century, an anti-authoritarian proto-guerilla and | 393
subversive prankster. It was Philipe's industry clout that made the idea a real
possibility, and the actor, who had recorded the French commentary for Peace
Will Win, was now caught up in the career move of a first directorial project,
commissioning treatments and scripts based on the original novel. Unable
to obtain French financing for an expensive costume drama with on-location
shooting (in Sweden to guarantee the required frozen lakes), Philipe turned to
Sadoul, who engineered the meeting of the minds of the aspiring fiction direc-
tor and the documentarist. The cinematic collaboration began concretely with
Philipe screening all of Ivens's films at the Cindmatheque franaise (together
with his wife Anne, who also had an interest in the story due to her Belgian
roots), and then meeting Ivens and the Sadouls at a Paris bistro, apparently
in late 1953 or 1954. The discussion continued in the spring of 1954 in Berlin.
Ivens's clout at DEFA allowed him to persevere through the bureaucracy and
obtain a co-production agreement with the French private concern, a ground-
breaking East-West collaboration at the time and perhaps a hint of political
shifts in the wind. Ivens's rationale was that the communist state had a stake
in financing this politically sympathetic project by a socialist friend in the
West, unable to find a chance in his own country. The propaganda stakes in
a collaboration with a major Western film star were clearly also evident to the
East German authorities and film bureaucrats. Paris's other communist film
scholar Lon Moussinac opined that Ivens would not have taken this on with-
out Philipe, who participated in every phase including post-production, and
that Philipe, for his part, saw Ivens's support as essential to the enterprise, and
that Ivens's promotion of the project gave it its main thrust.
Ivens's notes on the project script for DEFA showed the continuing alert-
ness of his political convictions: although playing up the hero's familial bonds
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
(for the purpose of narrative identification?), he elaborated the historical and
political dimensions of the project and at the same time emphasised the need
to maintain the context of popular struggle for this tale, to see more clearly
the power of the Spanish occupiers and the class betrayal by the nobles and
monks, to strengthen the relations between the people and a hero whose
conception had initially drawn too much on typecasting along the lines of
Philipe's most popular role, Fanfan la Tulipe, a romantic peasant swashbuck-
ler. The shooting scripts are also full of Ivens notations about script changes,
camera set-ups and compositions. The final film has not fully registered this
input: Till, innocent playful wastrel who can't hold a job, followed Quixote-like
by a mute baker's apprentice on a donkey, sees his guerilla father burned at
the stake and his mother killed, conducts a campaign of tricks against the
Spanish forces, with the farcical component played up and his mystical side
omitted, pursues the assassin and saves William of Orange in the process, and
394 then finally, the boy become a man, humbly returns to his village and his girl-
friend Nele.
66. LesAventures de Till l'Espiegle (1956):
Co-director/star Gerard Philipe as a
trickster defying the imperialists. Feeling
'more at home with "real" people than with-
actors', Ivens became 'supervisor for DEFA' -
on his only fiction feature. DVD frame
capture. original in colour. © TF1/DEFA-
Stiftung.
Challenges arose almost immediately as the production began, with the
socialist approach of 'over planning' clashing with more efficient French
film-industry methods (Ivens, interview with author, April 1978). Inter-
personal divergences and artistic tensions soon also surfaced, due to the
ill-defined collaboration and what Ivens described as Philipe's increasing
authoritarianism as the pre-production and the shoot advanced through
the winter of 1955-1956. It eventually wrapped up with more exteriors in
the DDR and interiors in a Nice studio mid-year 1956 (Ivens, interview
with author, April 1978):
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Nothing is more illusory than this kind of relationship where each one
believes himself obligated to be either too much or not enough himself.
Grard Philipe was undertaking his first directing job, he felt completely
capable of doing so and thought sincerely that I could help him. But during
the shoot he became not so much haughty as authoritarian. It was regret-
table but clear. This badly shared joint power created a climate of tension
and all I could do was withdraw. The respect and friendship we had for
each other allowed us to avoid the trap of misunderstanding. We decided to
delimit our functions: he was responsible for the directing, myself the pro-
duction organization in relation to DEFA. (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 244)
To his CPF friends at the time, Ivens (quoted in Schoots, [1995] 2000, 247) had
elaborated further:
My escapade with TillEulenspiegel in the fiction film area was interesting, I 395
but I believe that it is a question of temperament, or whatever you call it.
I feel more at home with 'real' people than with actors. Documentaries
give me more scope as a visual artist, more discipline in the form and
more freedom as far as the content of my work is concerned.
Schoots describes the dynamic more bluntly: Ivens was inexperienced with
professional actors and was subsequently 'squeezed out' by Philipe, leaving
his position 'that of supervisor for DEFA'. The biographer twists this curious
episode in film history into an object lesson on Ivens's skills and blind spots:
in his view Ivens's forte was 'visual improvisation' skills, and that his dogged
pursuit of 'docudrama' since the thirties 'was not one of his strong points':
His theories about storylines and amateur actors were actually a put-up
job [...] adopted [...] during the discussions in the Mezhrabpom Studio
in 1931 and a filmmaker was expected to have a theory. [...] When further
interpretation of the facts was needed, he could always fall back on his
ideology. (Schoots, [1995] 2000, 247)
While it is true that Ivens's only encounter with large-scale industrial fiction
had a once-burned-twice-shy impact on this career trajectory, it had nothing
to do with the traps and delusions of socialist realism.
Upon the November 1956 release of the film in a chic Paris neighbourhood,
the critical censure was unanimous: most conspicuously, 'young Turk' critic
and aspiring director Francois Truffaut, clearly identified the project with the
'cinema de papa' he was committed to dismantling, both in the political and
the artistic sense, and named it the worst film of the year. The premiere coin-
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
cided with the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, and the reviewer
for Le Monde ascribed the flop in part to this timing, the film's story of guerilla
peasants opposing an invading army losing its charm and the comedy falling
flat in the geopolitical context. In his view, a structural disunity and authorial
timidity were also to blame: the badly constructed film was 'nothing but a bril-
liant mosaic' (de Baroncelli, 1956). First-run audiences more or less agreed
with the critics, though Ivens remembered that Philipe's traditional fan base
in the second-run suburbs as well as audiences in the DDR, where it opened
the following January, prevented a total commercial catastrophe (Ivens, inter-
view with author, April 1978). The unfortunate outcome no doubt cement-
ed Ivens's growing resolve to leave behind both DEFA and his days as a film
bureaucrat and 'coordinator'. In any case, the star-crossed timing of the Till
Eulenspiegel release had unfortunate consequences for his relationship with
Philipe. Schoots ([1995] 2000, 248) provides a dramatic narrative of uproar
396 I in the Paris streets, demonstrations on the left and right, the PCF defence
of the Soviet suppression of 'Hungarian fascists' that led to demonstrators'
attacks on the office of L'Humanitd and three people dead, Ivens's acceptance
of the events as a 'historical necessity', and then the gradual loss of Philipe's
friendship.
The following month Ivens and Fiszer travelled to Beijing for a symbolic
reboot for his artistic and political career alike, symptomatically missing the
premiere of Windrose and the Berlin premiere of Till Eulenspiegel. The Mos-
cow-Beijing rift was already in the cards, hence the symbolic valence of Ivens's
return to China, and although Ivens continued to be lionised in the DDR until
the Prague crisis twelve years later, he would never again work in Eastern
Europe. The invitation and the travel plans had no doubt been arranged well
before Budapest, but Schoots ([1995] 2000, 249) is right that the symbolism
tells of an irreparable and growing tear in the Curtain.
A conclusion to Ivens's productive and busy, frustrating and interrupted
Cold War chapter, the full decade between the docking of the 'Flying Dutch-
man' in London and his landing in Beijing, can at best be provisional, pend-
ing the much needed recirculation of his two feature documentaries and two
medium-length films as well as several minor and 'supervised' works within
cinematic and political cultural networks. The work from behind the Curtain
must be incorporated into the ongoing conversation about the legacy of this
artist from which they have been excluded - even and perhaps most egregious-
ly at the time Ivens produced it.
This conversation must not only include this crucial segment in the full
assessment of the artist's heritage and address the ineradicable status of party
line advocacy, journeywork, mentorship, and the commission in documenta-
ry/film history, which as researchers from Nichols (1980, 1999, 2001) to Hage-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
ner (2007) have long since demonstrated, can no longer be understood and
taught as a canon of texts but must be seen as a history of practices, institu-
tions, and receptions. Throughout his career, Ivens embraced the commission
as part of his political and aesthetic gospel of labour, of everyday productivity;
late in his career he disputed the facileness of his Cuban friend Santiago Alva-
rez's distinction between 'free films' and 'command films' (Ivens, interview
with author, April 1978).
The conversation must also, most importantly, situate this period - a pro-
lific and varied one after all, however pockmarked, interrupted, and frustrat-
ing it was - in relation to the history of the Left, old and new. In all of these
projects the place of socialist realism is fundamental, understood in its broad
historical presence not only as a narrow and dogmatic template imposed from
above, the 'cynically conformist utopianism' (Stollery, 2006) that has been too
easily and contemptuously dismissed or ignored for 80 years, but also as a set
of narrative and affective practices encoded dynamically and transculturally - I 397
often ethically, passionately, idealistically, and imaginatively:
I have understood better that the greatest reward for a filmmaker is not
in the applause of an enthusiastic audience who simply recognizes the
beauty of a film, but in the certitude that he has exalted confidence in
humanity, the love of life, and has given to the spectator the desire to
struggle to make triumph his aspirations towards a better reality. [...] For
the artist must not only believe in beauty, but must, first and above all,
have a perspective, see man in his environment, in his becoming, think
the future and help him to release it. (Ivens, quoted in Lacazette, 1951,
29)
The procession of nonfictional and semi-fictional characters who populate
Ivens's work of this period, the representation of their objective everyday
labour and their subjective aspirations, in many cases their language and voic-
es and in others simply their faces - from Jadwiga to Jeannine, from Pak Den-
ai to Paul Robeson, must be encountered on their own terms as distillations
of this idealism, as semi-fictional constructions, fantasmatic projections, and
historical agents. This hybrid aesthetic of 'personalisation' at its least inspired
maywell be caught up in what Robin ([1986] 1992) depicts as socialist realism's
often tense monologism. But it functioned also as a constraint similar to any
other generic, cultural, economic, or institutional discipline, and in this case
is inextricable from the undeniable but unrecognised artistic and political fer-
vour, inventiveness, impact, and contradictory achievement of this current,
which I hope I have demonstrated through my textual analysis. I am speaking
especially of the reinvigoration in the Cold War context of the left's political
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
aesthetics, less that of class - though the classic discourses and iconographies
of union organisation remains first and foremost, and ever urgent in the con-
text of the CIA assault on unions around the world - than of the emerging and
prophetic agenda of gender and anti-colonial/anti-racist struggle.
Even if some of the Cold War work was repetitive and lacked development
(as Ivens himself allowed 30 years later [Ivens and Destanque, 1982], and he
was only partially right); even if the films were not allowed to fulfil their organ-
ic process of interacting with audiences; even if their visions come close at
times to CIA caricature; even if Ivens's commitment to socialist realism and its
hybrid documentary forms that enable 'personalized' historical agents rooted
firmly in their collective spaces to change the world onscreen seemed compro-
mised by his 'naively' trusting relationship to the Soviet occupiers - despite
his sustained collaboration with local subjects, artists, and students through-
out the period; even if his nuanced and negotiated relationship with what we
398 I might call cinematic subcultures and civil society in Czechoslovakia, Poland,
and above all in the DDR were too often stymied by refractory, paranoid, and
inevitably xenophobic apparatchiks who budgeted their contributions with
one hand and hampered their distribution with the other; even if the collective
nature of Ivens's work with a transnational and transgenerational network of
committed artists can be problematised, if only in terms of linguistic and oth-
er barriers to Ivens's ideal of contextual, grass-roots, 'guerrilla' documentary;
even if the Cold War Ivens has too often been consigned to oblivion... Even
in the light of this litany of 'even if's', these nine cinematic texts with their
rhythm of defiance and eventual victory, their encyclopedia of global critique,
and their canvases of everyday sweat and heroism, stand themselves as a testi-
mony and legacy, all the more vibrant for their shortfalls and contradictions.
Queer theory's achievement of productively overturning the legacy and
affect of shame might serve us as a template for considering productively the
legacy of Cold War Ivens and the Old Left in general: what Sedgwick (2003,
65) calls the 'powerfully productive and powerfully social metaphoric possi-
bilities' of shame. The shame that occupies the middle ground between and
informs my New Left generation's combination of amnesia and denial on the
one side, and of oedipal repudiation on the other, must be used creatively. The
Cold War and the Stalin era required two to tango: the United Fruit Company,
Senator McCarthy, the Marshall Plan, and Eisenhower's famous 'military-in-
dustrial complex' lined up against the Cominform and a disempowered Old
Left who, like Ivens, publicly tolerated Budapest as 'a historical necessity'. The
2002 American tour of the triumphant, first posthumous Ivens retrospective
'Cinema without Borders' was organised by a New York outfit called 'Red Dia-
per Productions'. Spearheaded by Wanda Bershen, who is like so many baby
boomer New Yorkers the offspring of CPUSA members or sympathisers of the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Cold War era - who affectionately think of themselves swaddled in diapers
the colour of the communist flag - the retrospective was one of the few Ivens
ventures to showcase Lied just as the Foundation and the estate were seem-
ing to orchestrate, either actively or by default, the erasure of the Cold War
era from memory and cinematic history (however 'Cinema without Borders'
significantly did not include any Yukong item among its sixteen selections).
The shame of communist infamy and the shame of infant excretion had been
confronted in one blow.
We are all red diaper babies and Uncle Joe is part of our legacy. Lied is
not only part of our Old Left ancestry but also part of our human selves in the
savagery and paranoia, blind obedience and conformity, amnesia and deni-
al - and of course personality cultism - that Stalin cultivated and stood for
and that the epic film obliquely conjures up. We have not fully processed this
shame. After Yukong and the death of Mao, Ivens would begin to do his part
in his own process of claiming the decade in Eastern Europe. Slightly defen- 399
sive but proudly unashamed, he acknowledged that the structure of the party
in Eastern Europe was 'topheavy' and that the Revolution didn't come from
underneath but was imposed from above. 'If I'd had a chance to leave in 1954
I would have', he said (Ivens, interview with author, April 1978). The contra-
dictions of the Cold War era must be kept at the forefront of our historical
research, and in our shame we must distinguish between the historical public
persona and his private and artistic negotiations with his political conscience.
Not signing petitions like Philipe (and Simone Signoret's pupils in Windrose)
- or rather only those in support of the Hollywood Ten - Ivens voted both with
his feet and with his camera. The 21St-century global left has yet to conduct
its truth and reconciliation commission about its legacy of Stalin, but Ivens's
Cold War camera and its output onscreen is a good 'Exhibit A' for starting this
process.
TORN CURTAIN: IVENS THE COLD WARRIOR 1946-1956
a 3
a
at
4'
-7--v
Ai - f
67. Iettres de Chine [Before (Early) Sprmngj(1958): original poster captures
Ivens's second Chinese film's pastoral flair. Original in colour. Courtesy
coil. ILFJ, Nijmnegen.
CHAPTER 6
The 'Poet' Reborn?
1956-1965
Where is the fist, Joris?
-Karl Gass, 1957, DDR
Several chapters of this book commence with Joris Ivens's arrival in a city, 401
whether New York City (Chapter 3), Prague (Chapter 5), Hanoi (Chapter 7), or
Beijing (Chapter 8). A new place allowed Ivens to pursue a new phase in his
career, where his work would move from renunciation to embrace, where it
would take on the artistic character and political sensibility of the new set-
ting - its space, its time, its culture, its governance and undercurrents of
resistance, and its people. This chapter begins with an arrival in Paris in 1956.
Although the 58-year-old Ivens had frequented Paris regularly since his adoles-
cence, it was this moment when Ivens finally put down roots in the metropolis
that would host, nourish, and 'brand' him for the next 34 years of his life.' Of
course Ivens continued to be the 'Flying Dutchman' - as he loved to be called
and which critics always found charming and exotic - and if anything his fre-
netic schedule of visits, teaching gigs, festivals, and productions around the
planet intensified as he moved through the 1950s and 6os. But there is a sense
that the aging exile was on some level also seeking moorings and, although he
maintained his expatriate identity, here on the rive gauche he found an apart-
ment, a new spouse, and collaborator with whom he would remain for the rest
of his career. He also found an artistic and political milieu that would anchor
his productions throughout his final prolific, jet-setting decades, by far the
longest chapter of his career rooted in any one place.
This chapter covers the next nine or so years of Ivens's career, inaugurated
by the migration from East to West, a phase that might be characterised, how-
ever reductively and interestedly, as his 'lyrical essay film' period. Between his
1956 exit from the Soviet bloc and his 1965 return to wartime solidarity/activist
work brought on by his immersion in Vietnam, Ivens would make twelve short
and medium-length documentaries, major and minor. Though they were pro-
duced in seven different countries, north and south (Cuba, Chile, China, Mali,
68....a Valparaiso (1962): Ivens dramatising everyday life in the dance
club sequence (The Seven Mirrors). Local intern Sergio Bravo seen
foreground by tripod, French operator Georges Strouvd on right
(obscured). Production still ( EFJI, Nijmegen.
Italy, and Holland, as well as of course France), his Paris base provided his pri-
mary audience, critical and collaborative constituency, the requisite material
infrastructure, and its thematic continuity.
It is important not to overstate this continuity, for the twelve films of this
period vary widely. They thematise rural and urban labour and social life, post-
colonial transformation, struggle with the elements and with internation-
al capitalism; and formally speaking they hybridise lyrical nature/landscape
modes, 'third world' solidarity discourses, pedagogical exercises, socialist
realist-shaped didactic dramatisation, and the travelogue and city film genres
(but not one major mode of the day, 'direct cinema' - and more of that later).
Yet this entire corpus can be grouped loosely, but usefully, under the rubric of
'essay', arguably the presiding framework for the most exciting developments
in French documentary as a whole during the 1950s and 196os, benefiting
as Lagny (1999) and others have pointed out from a conducive funding and
exhibition infrastructure unique to France as well as a critical constituency
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
energised by fresh winds and new waves. Ivens's alignment with this form and
the diversity of his projects themselves testify to the creative stimulus that the
restless filmmaker found in his new spaces, networks, and resources (or lack
of resources), his recharging of artistic and personal batteries after the nega-
tivity of the East that had spanned from the undistributed Pierwsze lata (The
First Years, 1949, Bulgaria/Czechoslovakia/Poland, 99) to the mixed box-office
record of Die Abenteuer des Till Eulenspiegel (Les Aventures de Till L'Espiegle/
Bold Adventure, Philipe, 1956, DDR/France, 90). In particular, he put behind
him his experience of the bureaucracy of the East Berlin film industry, where
his pigeonholing as a producer and hands-off administrator had increasingly
frustrated the artist (his message to film students in the two socialist societ-
ies he would soon be encountering, China and Cuba, would include warnings
away from bureaucratic filmmaking [Cine cubano 1962]). Their non-canonical
status notwithstanding, all of the twelve individual films could stand alone for
their merit as part of any historical selection of documentaries of this period, 403
though their under-recognition by metropolitan taste-makers is neither sur-
prising nor uninteresting. The dozen or so 'lyrical essays' have much in com-
mon with the European and specifically French context in which they were
produced. In fact, this series of evocative and personal documentary essays,
most often deriving their inspiration from the travelogue genre, should be
seen as part of a last prolific wave of French documentary before the techno-
logical revolution of the technical and aesthetic revolution that is variously
called cinema verite and direct cinema.2
One of the best known of this last climactic wave of the classical documen-
tary in France is the film made by Ivens's future collaborator Chris Marker
who was moving east just as Ivens migrated west, Lettre de Sibdrie (Letterfrom
Siberia, 1957, 62), but Alain Resnais's Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955,
32) and Toute la mimoire du monde (All the World's Memory, 1956, 21), Georg-
es Franju's Hotel des invalides (1951, 23), Agnes Varda's L'Opdra-mouffe (1958,
16), and Jean Rouch'sLesMaitresfous (The Mad Masters, 1955, 36) are also part
of the canon (these last two films also look forward to the period of direct/
verite that would soon impede on the 'lyrical essay' phase).
These films were almost all silently filmed explorations of various land-
scapes, natural or architectural, usually using travelogue conventions. A char-
acteristic structural feature of these films was the commentary, a suggestively
poetic voice-over narration that enriched the images with its allusions and
overtones of intimacy and subjectivity rather than confine it with literal expli-
cations as mainstream English-language commentaries usually did at the
time. Marker himself was at the centre of this lyrical-travelogue-essay wave,
writing the best commentaries for the film essays of Resnais and Ivens, as well
as of his own. His film impressions of visits to Beijing, Japan, Siberia, Isra-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
el, and Cuba set the pattern. His excursion into the realm of African art with
Resnais, Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Die Too, 1950-1953, 30), Resnais's
tours of the National Library and Auschwitz, and Rouch's ethnographically
inspired films of West African life are variations of this pattern, as Franois
Reichenbach's American excursions are its most successful box office rein-
carnation and Gualtiero Jacopetti's Mondo cane (1962, Italy, 108) is its inevita-
ble commercial and ethical debasement. It was a period of great maturity and
inventiveness not matched anywhere in the English-speaking world, where
documentarists were often too involved in straining against the restrictions of
non-sync, non-portable technology to be able, like their French contemporar-
ies, to work creatively within the limits of the traditional hardware.
Politically speaking, the shift from Cold War rhetoric to rive gauche lyri-
cism cannot be seen as a defection (though defections were of course in the
air in Paris, with Rudolf Nureyev grand jete-ing to 'freedom' at Orly Airport in
404 I 1961): DEFA had tried in vain to persuade Ivens to stay with a more stable and
luxurious living arrangement than the hotel he had used as his headquarters,
and he maintained his close relation throughout this entire period with his
old studio and friends in the capital, holding court annually at the Leipzig
festival and definitively parting ways only in 1968. Schoots's ([1995] 2000)
inference that his Soviet bloc patrons dispatched him to instigate revolution
in the fermenting trouble spots of the Western Hemisphere strains belief: I
doubt that the philistine politbureaus of Berlin and Moscow saw documenta-
ry film as the cutting edge of ideological transformation (as the Khrushchev
Thaw hardened into the Brezhnev re-freeze) and no doubt passively presumed
that Ivens's services could be equally valuable in East and West, perhaps as
some minor kind of celluloid Picasso or Neruda. An important factor in this
respect is that Ivens deliberately avoided explicit political themes in many of
the works of this period, not because of a conversion to Western liberal indi-
vidualism, and not only to avoid the censorship that had scarred his Cold War
productions (and would scar a few of these 'apolitical' lyrical essays as well). It
was also about avoiding legal problems as a vulnerable immigrant in France
(no sensitive Algeria themes, only safe Cuban ones!) or as a foreign guest in
Chile (no explicit oppositional statements that might embarrass his hosts,
who were aligned, after all, with the communist party that was poised to win
the next election, or the one thereafter!).
In more personal terms, Ivens (interview with author, April 1978) would
later claim that he had never felt as if he was working in his own society in the
post-war decade and would always have wanted to return home to the capital-
ist west if the harassment by the Dutch passport office had not prevented work
opportunities from arising. He was still close to Michelle, who, with her US
passport, had preceded him to Paris, and others of his friends and collabora-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
tors from Pozner to Sadoul were also based there, all close to PCF culture and
politics, not to mention the networks of progressive film stars grouped around
the Philipes and the Signoret-Montand couple whom Ivens had got to know a
few years earlier with Die Windrose (The Windrose, Cavalcanti et al., 1957, DDR,
110).3 Post-war screenings and retrospectives in France had often been greeted
with full-house adulation, sparking a major consecration in a Cahiers du cin-
ma serial profile (Michaut, 1953a, 1953b, 1953c), and during the first decade of
Ivens's settlement in Paris fully two monographs on his work were published
within Paris's rich cinephile culture (Zalzman, 1963; Grelier, 1965); no doubt
the temptation to be a prophet with honour in his own country was a strong
one. That said, it was not easy to immigrate to France, even with the Dutch
authorities easing off on their harassment campaign. Ivens's friend Philipe
did much to get his collaborator the necessary working papers (Ivens, interview
with author, April 1978), notwithstanding their unspoken disagreement about
Budapest. Schoots ([1995] 2000) goes into great detail on how Ivens's marital I 405
status always seemed to parallel his political/civic instability. The details he
provides of the deterioration of Ivens's relationship with Fiszer are as vivid as
they are sad, though this long-distance phase, punctuated by the visits of the
complex and unhappy Polish writer to Paris, Beijing, Havana, and Santiago con-
tinued into the 1960s (Marceline Loridan, Ivens's final conjugal collaborator,
was demonstrably on the scene by 1963). Nevertheless Schoots ([1995] 2000) is
right to imply that the pattern of shifting women along with shifting country of
residence had been a well-established reflex for almost three decades of Ivens's
career. Ultimately, the migration was not only a characteristic renunciation but
also a pursuit of the job market and a combination of the final performance of
a desire that had been harboured for some time and no doubt the path of least
resistance - not an ideological gesture in the strict sense.
Cold War critics saw things differently however, and saw the turn towards
lyricism as a welcome return to Ivens's 'apolitical' poetic roots after a decade of
communist propaganda. If Cynthia Grenier (1958) set the tone for this reading,
it surfaced in French criticism as well (Mardore, 1958), and in fact it has persist-
ed in Ivens scholarship more than half a century later. Grenier's tirade, an early
pronouncement by a future right-wing scribe, is worth quoting at length:
One feels that Ivens's career is to some extent an illustration of the debil-
itating effect that abstract conceptual thinking can sometimes have on
artistic creation. Essentially ideas, per se, cannot make a work of art. [...]
Ivens did adopt an ideology, with all its political principles. It was Marx-
ism-Leninism, as it happened. [...] If we compare any one of his social
realist documentaries, whether made for the US Department of Agricul-
ture or for the Iron Curtain countries (leaving aside the obvious political
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
considerations), we find the worn cliches of liberal or Communist con-
ceptual thinking. There are none of the concrete minutiae that char-
acterize the true artistic vocation. [...] Ivens's concern with the human
condition undoubtedly gave him a driving force, a desire to make films in
the hope of ameliorating man's social lot. But in so doing, he by-passed
his own very great gift for much of the time, and lent his name and tal-
ents to much easy propaganda, often unworthy of his intelligence. [...]
Apart from Song of the Rivers, with its often arrant dishonesty, the rest of
his social realist pictures - The 400 Million, Spanish Earth, The Power and
the Land, The Russian Front [sic], Indonesia Calling, The First Years - are all
competent documentaries, with occasional passages of lyricism. But they
are no more than competent; and from a man who has one of the greatest
camera-eyes in the world, this is scarcely enough. [...] The Seine Meets Par-
is seems to make a turning-point in his career; but it cannot be assumed
406 I that his 'social realist' period is over. This is the story of a man who may
seem to have confused ideas with art, and whose personal talents as a
filmmaker did not really suit the ideas he had chosen for himself. 'Five
ideas can swallow a man', wrote e.e. cummings. Fortunately, Joris Ivens
really had one idea, and in The Seine Meets Paris is proof that he escaped
being swallowed. (Grenier, 1958, 207)
Ivens (quoted in Schoots, 2000, 254) angrily and frequently refuted such sim-
plistic and willful misunderstanding however:
It is not so that Ivens has two guises: the leftist and the esthete. Some
people say that only the purely esthetic films are artistic; the rest are not
art. Others see me exclusively as a militant filmmaker. Both are incorrect.
When I made The Seine Meets Paris, my views were just as left wing as they
were when making political films. With political films I have often been
just as rigorous about finding the best artistic form.
Ivens was right. The films from this period may well be mostly short, poet-
ic essays, full of humour and warmth, sentimentality and whimsy - and yes
lyricism. But there is also the ever-present base of political analysis beneath
the surface of the lyricism, articulated with varying degrees of explicitness.
...A Valparaiso (1963, France/Chile, 27) uses its engaging confrontation with
the hilly topography of this Chilean port city as an entry point for an essay on
its historical and political topography. Pour le Mistral (For the Mistral, 1965,
France, 33), for example, Ivens's essay on the landscapes, winds, and elemen-
tal struggles of Provence, just happens to explore shantytowns of North Afri-
can immigrant workers and to record how difficult it is to carry water by hand
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
to the workers' homes. However much the new personal tone of such films was
an abrupt turnabout from the cold, official quality of some of the less inspired
commissions of the Eastern Bloc period, the binary of poetics and politics is
as deeply problematical as Grenier's (1958) absurdly prescriptive Cold War
premises about art and lyrical minutiae, and we shall come back frequently in
this chapter to this issue.
We will be discussing the twelve films as markers of this period chronolog-
ically: first the inaugural film La Seine a rencontrd Paris (The Seine Meets Paris,
1957, France, 32), the sentimental city film that ritualised the arrival of the
exile; next the China films; then the two commissions by state agencies in Italy
and Mali respectively; next two further clusters of 'South' solidarity and teach-
ing films from Cuba and Chile respectively; and finally the two final Europe-
an 'place' essays Mistral and Rotterdam Europoort (1966, Netherlands, 20). But
first we must come back to the notion of the essay film itself to establish more
thoroughly the historical and theoretical framework for my use of this catego- 407
ry to describe this period. Over the last decades, essay cinema has become a
major new conceptual tool for both historicising and understanding certain
tendencies in nonfiction cinema. The bountiful literature in English, French,
and German that has appeared since the 1990s forms somewhat of a con-
sensus, albeit slightly strained, on the criteria for and characteristics of this
hybrid, as well as on the canon of essayistes who have emerged in film and vid-
eo since World War II.
Basically, the newly 'discovered' genre - at least 'newly discovered' by
English-language criticism - is considered to bring together elements of art
cinema, experimental cinema, and documentary. However, there are some
disagreements, and some general problems and lacunae in the ongoing
and very lively conversation about essay cinema. Most critics agree that the
essay film presumes and flaunts its literary heritage, which dates back to the
late Renaissance in French (Montaigne) and in English (Bacon), and even
earlier, and echoes the forebears with its short format as well as its aspira-
tion to 'stylistic flourish' and 'eloquence'. Like its literary forebears the
essay film articulates authorial subjectivity in an encounter with the exter-
nal world, intervenes in the public domain, and shares a thought process
in which ideas are developed, problems are tackled, questions are asked -
though judgments or conclusions may be deferred. The 'first person' mode
is thereby habitually present, even often through an authorial corporeal
presence, and the autobiography, the diary, and various tropes of self-reflex-
ivity are recurring elements. Extrapolating on the notion of 'sharing', some
also emphasise the artist's relationship with the reader, analysing her or
his 'interpellation' or inclusion through the filmic structure, what Rascaroli
(2009, 15) calls a 'spectatorial pact'. In this sense, this taxonomy of the essay
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
can be seen to anticipate Nichols's (1994) proposed mode of the performa-
tive mode of documentary.
Formally speaking, the keyword is 'hybridity', and the literature identifies
discursive or textual density that produce plurivocality, indeterminacy, or frag-
mentariness, typically playing with a 'complex temporality' (Renov, 2004,182).
In short, the expository, narrative, or didactic coherence of the classical Grier-
sonian or Flahertian models is supplanted, and the later '[pseudo-] objective'
observational logic of direct cinema in its 'fly on the wall' mode is forestalled.
Some critics delve into the ear-eye, sound-image dialectic that is characteristic
of the essay cinema, especially its recurring voice-over trope, which is the site
of much of the form's literariness and which Rascaroli (2009, 15) moreover
argues usually incorporates a 'strong [first person] enunciator'. There is no
agreement within the literature whether such typical documentary tropes as
collage, performance, interviews, and direct cinema idioms in general can be
408 I part of the essay repertory. There is even less agreement whether the essay film
inherently presumes a political vantage point, let alone one that can be called
nonconformist, minority or 'accented', oppositional or 'counter-author-
ity', or a distribution or exhibition practice that is innovative or alternative.
While most critics in their role as cultural arbiter disclaim prescriptiveness
as counter to the inclusive and improvisational sensibility of their essayistic
object, when it comes to canon-formation and taste-making the tone of the
essay debates is often more exclusive than inclusive, a culture-centric triage
that confuses description with evaluation, and shrinks from the catholic and
promiscuous eclecticism that I myself thrive on.
This contradictory enterprise of closing doors rather than opening win-
dows can be sensed in the canons that have emerged from the literature,
which all incidentally favour the post-World War II periodisation that is most
common: typical of English-language critics in particular is the heavy empha-
sis on five European Union artists, the rive gauche Parisians Alain Resnais
and Jean-Luc Godard, and of course most universally Chris Marker, Ivens's
frequent collaborator, plus the West Germans Harun Farocki and Alexan-
der Kluge. A second rung of artists, invoked less unanimously, opens up the
circle of the elect to Italians, Britons, and Americans as well as women and
queers and even a person of colour: Duras, Fellini, Franju, Gorin, Herzog, Jar-
man, Keiller, Pasolini, Rainer, Trinh, Varda, and Welles. My irony about the
canonisation process is not to deny that this unanimity has spot-lit meritori-
ous geniuses of the medium but rather to interrogate the narrow limits of its
scope, the familiar crowd, 'usual suspects' of the art cinema calling out for
graduate student dissertation production. Ivens shows his face only in a larg-
er third rung of artists who surface only a couple of times in the literature4
and then only with his testamentary and arguably atypical work Une histoire
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
de vent (A Tale of the Wind, 1988, France, 78), rather than any of the titles from
the period under discussion - much less obvious essay candidates from earli-
er periods from Philips-Radio (1931, Netherlands, 36) to Mein Kind (My Child,
Vladimir Pozner and Alfons Machalz, 1955, DDR, 22). This gap is a symptom
of much more than the apparent tendency of lazy critical cabals to stay within
familiar territory and favour those approaching the hybrid from the art cine-
ma or experimental side of the equation rather than from the documentary
side (it is only on the fourth rung, gathering those who are mentioned by only
one contributor to the literature, that filmmakers who made their mark on the
nonfiction side of the three-pronged spectrum make their appearance in sig-
nificant numbers within the network).5
Also to be challenged is the ostentatious political bias in most though not
all of the literature. Such a bias in this subfield requires a fundamental dis-
connect: the five EU immortals all belong to the European radical left (even
Resnais did so throughout the fifties and sixties, though he perhaps has a soft- I 409
er image than his four fellows), but you'd never know it from the literature in
general, excepting a few nuances and references. Can we really discuss Marker
and his generation of rive gauche collaborators in the 1950s and 1960s with-
out situating them explicitly in relation to engag iconographies and discours-
es, to PCF Cold War activism?6 Can we do justice to the nine-years-younger
Godard without reference to his revolt against the PCF - from further on the
left? Many of the bountiful analyses that concentrate on formal and discursive
aspects of these works overlook explicit ideological claims and alliances. Cor-
rigan's (2011, 53) treatment of Godard's Deux ou trois choses queje sais d'elle
(Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1966, France, 87) as
an epistemological project about ideas and knowing [...] the ironic aware-
ness that modern knowledge is shaped and frustrated by fragmented
and reified subjects within a landscape of acquisition, enumeration, and
accumulation [...] explicitly about the difficulty of trying to express one-
self and to think through this modern, always mediated, world
rather than as a materialist dissection of sex work as figure and as social prac-
tice within this urban environment of 'accumulation', is a flagrant case in point.
This bias alone might explain why Ivens is unaccountably excluded from the
essay canon, but of course generational factors (he is 30 years older than Marker
and the essay is apparently no country for old men) and dynamics of the market-
place and distribution also bear on the situation. Plurivocality and indetermina-
cy notwithstanding, a Marxist perspective and a materialist questioning are, in
fact, at the core of the eclectic and diverse transcultural essay heritage, as Paul
Arthur (2005) at least allows, almost alone within the essay literature.
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
The essay film subfield has another intrinsic problem however, and that
arises from its periodisation, and the basic tunnel vision of the experts in
relation to the unexplored richnesses of film history. I have no problem with
accepting the essay phenomenon as belonging historically to a post-war sen-
sibility and infrastructure, provided discussion of the form's so-called pre-
cursors in the silent period and the first two decades of the classical sound
documentary reflect the richness and diversity of the proto-essayists who
paved the way. The post-war essay cannot be understood textually only, with-
out reference to the historical span of each constituent element, of art cine-
ma and experimental cinema of course, but most importantly of the history of
documentary. Documentary's three decades of struggle with subjectivity and
authorial voice through a double-system sound-image set-up (finally appeased
and sidelined by synch-sound direct cinema in 1960) bears directly on the
essay's evolution. Other than Ivens, and in addition to the interwar filmmak-
410 I ers who are evoked here and there as precursors who anticipate certain later
essayistic tendencies - Christensen, Eisenstein, Jennings, Richter, Ruttmann,
Vertov, and Vigo - where are the other obvious forebears from Shub to Dudow
to Wright, as well as quite a lineup of Ivens collaborators including Storck,
Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Stuart Legg, and the authorial collective that formed
Workers Film and Photo League and later Frontier Films?
Of course my argument is premised on a more open and inclusive sense
of filmic taxonomy, the sense that not all of the above characteristics must be
present fully in every essay film. For example, a range of degrees of first-per-
son enunciations is possible within the essayistic landscape - and this applies
especially to Ivens. And why should subjectivity not also incorporate a range
of emotions, including political emotions from outrage to mourning, epis-
temological stances from doubt to certainty to dogmatism, and discourses
articulating analytic theses about capitalism and the world? Ivens's sensibility
was perhaps more conservative, less heart-on-sleeve than his junior, Marker,
less inclined to speak in the first person except implicitly, more inclined to
facilitate collective and collaborative modes of subjectivity, and less inclined
to nurture the postmodern stances of indeterminacy and doubt in his essay
films. But his basic hesitation to embrace postmodern ambivalence is com-
plicated by his being solidly in step, as usual, with the other tendencies of the
day, with the hybrid experimentalism of the essay style - the trying out of alter-
native modes from diary to aestheticism to dramatisation to the literary com-
mentary that reached its furthest point in this period with Mistral (and later
with Histoire) - and by his exploratory spatial analysis of the post-war, postco-
lonial world.
One final point arises from the occasional discussion in the literature on
direct cinema and whether or not the use of the emergent idiom of on-loca-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
tion mobile or handheld camera and synch-sound disqualifies a film for an
essay label (for example Chronique d'un dtd, Rouch's excursion into handheld
synch-sound territory, is excluded as an example of interactive direct cinema
by Corrigan [2011, 163] from belonging to the category). Part of the excitement
around documentary in Paris during the post-war years was purely technolog-
ical. In sync with all the excitement about the essay in the rive gauche milieu,
Ivens's friends and fellow essayists Rouch and Marker both participated in
the euphoric scouting of the possibilities for the new lightweight equipment.
Ivens was skeptical of this euphoria, as we shall explore (astonishingly, Ivens
would not direct a 16mm film until Demain a Nanguila [Nanguila Tomorrow,
Mali/France, 50] in 1960, although the medium had been on his radar since
at least the Dutch East Indies project). His distrust arose partly from what
had always been Ivens's instinctive formal conservatism, his preference for
reaching audiences through the fully understood language of a given period
over innovative effects which might have startled his public or drawn atten- 411
tion away from his subject itself. His friend Sadoul, however, inadvertently
revealed the complexity of the muddy waters, as we shall see, by acclaiming
Ivens's first film of the period La Seine as 'cinema vdritd' and as strides forward
in the footsteps of Vertov. In general, the essay cycles stood aside from this
technological push, preferring to innovate within the non-synch classical idi-
oms, and Ivens and Marker, LeJoliMai (The Lovely Month ofMay, 1963, France,
165) aside, were exemplary of this trend.
LA SEINE A RENCONTRE PARIS
Before settling in Paris and tackling his new film on the Seine, Ivens visited
Beijing with Fiszer at the very end of 1956 for a few months. Here the film-
maker finally was able to accept a longstanding invitation from his Chinese
friends, eighteen years after his first Chinese film and seven years after the
Revolution, and Fiszer translated a poem by Mao into Polish for the occasion.
A deal was made for Ivens to come back soon in order to teach and develop
some short film projects, and the pair soon returned to Europe and plunged
into the new documentary that had already been percolating.
La Seine is the prizewinning 'lyrical' essay that re-established Ivens on
the Western scene - as we have seen from the Sight and Sound poisoned rave
(Grenier, 1958) - and consolidated his Paris foothold. Its development and
production were a triumph of networking within a conducive time and place.
Since 1938, Ivens had nurtured his friendship with the influential Parisian
communist film critic and historian, Georges Sadoul (who also had a Polish
wife), and who in turn offered extravagant evaluations of Ivens's work for his
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
left-wing French readers, especially of Das Lied der Strme (Song of the Rivers,
1954, DDR, 90) (Sadoul 1963). The 53-year-old Sadoul was behind the basic
idea for La Seine, inspired by captions he had written for Parisian photos by
Henri Cartier-Bresson and not surprisingly by Ivens's own work on rivers in
Lied itself. Ivens requested the chance to develop the stalled treatment, and
the two of them fleshed it out in long walks on the riverbank where they discov-
ered they were both observing the same aspects of urban life along the famous
river:
As soon as the production was confirmed, I went back to the riverbanks,
but with Joris Ivens. And I found with him the same communion as earli-
er with Henri Cartier-Bresson, for our reportages for Regards. No need to
squeeze his elbow when a child appeared, playing at the end of a barge,
or a boss's dog, ceremoniously walked by a servant. He noticed them
412 I the same second as me, and we had together the same thoughts. [...] In
agreement with Ivens, I therefore established what Vertov called, not a
script, but a 'shooting plan' established by a 'kinok-scout'. My work did
not take the form of a mimeographed manuscript, with indications of
dolly shots or close-ups, but a sheet of paper, in the format of a 'metro'
map, that followed the curve of the Seine, with all the bridges of Paris.
And arrows from a hundred spots pointed to handwritten notes, consti-
tuting a little guide for the 'stroller of the two banks'. And they said for
example 'pont Royal, secretaries' lunch; pont Neuf, students who come to
dance and play music; pont Saint-Michel, lovers from the Quartier latin;
pont de Bercy, wine barrels and tanker boats; Quai de la Gare, long tubes
that suck up grain from the barges; pont d'Austerlitz, scrap metal, the
blowtorches that cut it up, the sound of clanging on the paving stones,
etc.' [...] I would have liked to follow the film shoot. But 1957 was a year of
travel for me. I wasn't able to be present at more than eight or ten hours
of his work, to learn how he was applying the 'cine-eye' method (or if you
like, 'cinema vdritd'). (Sadoul, 1963, 14)
Meanwhile, three PCF-affiliated arts personalities had come together to form
a new production company, Garance Film: the stage and screen actor Roger
Pigaut; his girlfriend the expatriate American actress and HUAC refugee Bet-
sy Blair; and the movie star/balladeer Serge Reggiani. Garance was following
in the footsteps of other production companies, such as Argos Films, famous
since 1949 for bold, high quality ventures within the thriving state-support-
ed short-film 'art et essai' industry like Resnais's Nuit et brouillard. Argos
and Garance were the tip of the iceberg, as Lagny (1999) tells us: about 3000
short films targeting subsidised theatrical slots were made during the 1950s,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
of which 16o were about Paris alone! (Argos's inevitable hookup with Ivens
would be for another city film Valparaiso a few years later). The production
of La Seine, then, was taken on by this promising new outfit, and the produc-
er trio would remain involved in Ivens's work throughout this period: Pigaut
would co-produce Ivens's two Cuban films as well as narrate Nanguila, Val-
paraiso, and Mistral, while Reggiani would offer movie-star clout as narrator of
three films, La Seine plus Pueblo armado (An Armed People, 1961, Cuba/France,
35) and Le Ciel, la terre (The Threatening Sky, 1966, France, 28). The other key
participant recruited from French left-wing culture was the already canonical
poet and scriptwriter, 57-year-old Jacques Prvert. Prdvert's commentary-po-
em would be dashed off in two days in August during a Riviera vacation, after
he was shown the rough cut, and this high profile participation by a former
collaborator of Renoir and Carne - as well as of Reggiani - gave an additional
luster to the project. It would also lay over the film - some would say 'over-
whelm it with' - a distinctive melancholy and populist sensibility that many 413
critics would recognise as an echo of the great 'poetic realist' feature films of
the 1930s with which Prvert had been associated.?
Sadoul thus left the project in capable hands, and the shoot took place
over six weeks in the spring and summer of 1957. Cinematographer Andre
Dumaitre came on board, fresh from having shot a short documentary on the
Paris Commune with Ivens's Lied collaborator Robert Mdndgoz (young cam-
eraman Philippe Brun was recruited later for some additional shooting). Bra-
zilian-born composer Philippe-Grard soon joined the team and his status as
favourite composer for Yves Montand (and Edith Piaf!)8 must have reassured
Garance about the work's box office potential. The documentary's topic was,
in fact, well in line with Ivens's traditional themes, no stranger either to the
city film genre (Regen [Rain, 1929, Netherlands, 16], Peace Will Win), to films
about bodies of water (Zuiderzeewerken [Zuiderzee, 1930-1933, 40-52]) or to riv-
er films in particular. Lied, whose influence Sadoul (1963, 13) acknowledged,
had crystallised its social themes around six major world rivers of course; even
earlier in the decade Ivens had been developing an Italian project around
the Po; later a film would appear on the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta, Rotter-
dam, the last film in the lyrical essay cycle. Ivens soon decided that La Seine's
structure would be built around the geographical and chronological progres-
sion through the city from southeast to northwest on its way to the Atlantic,
employing furthermore the classic city film narrative arc of dawn-to-dusk. The
production plan involved four basic episodes: the countryside; entering Paris;
the heart of the city, including the 'beaux quartiers'; and finally the movement
past the Renault factory as the river leaves the city towards the sea (the auto-
mobile plant did not end up in the film from what I can see) (Lagny, 1999). The
end result would be much less orderly than this plan of course, with its even-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
tual narrative meandering, associative logic and spatial bearings that were
relaxed to say the least (including the frequent violations of the axis rule that
are arguably intrinsic to the river film).
Two aspects of the project must have seemed refreshing to Ivens. First
the relatively comfortable budget that would allow a shooting ratio of as much
as ten to one (Stufkens, 2008, 323) and the relatively improvisational, observa-
tional style thus entailed: one recalls that for Indonesia Calling (1946, Austral-
ia, 22), the ratio had been as low as one-to-one, and that the classical 16mm
observational direct films of the following decade, by Wiseman for example,
often capitalised on a seventy-to-one ratio. So Ivens was a long way from hav-
ing the freedom to jettison his more economical approach of collaborative
mise-en-scene. Secondly, the small-crew production scale not only left behind
the huge bureaucracy he had come to know in the Cold War films, but was also
intrinsic to this more spontaneous style. For both Ivens and many critics, it
414 I harked back to his artisanal 19205 'lyrical' style of Regen, now redeployed as
a kind of celebratory embrace of his new yet familiar home. The affectionate
subjectivity of this embrace is at the core of its essayistic fabric, though there
may well be nary an 'I-word' or self-reflexive authorial moment in this film. As
far as Ivens (quoted in Zalzman, 1963, 89) was concerned, 'I love Paris. Unfor-
gettable years of my development unfolded here. It is a little bit my city'.
The resonances of the emergent hybrid 'lyricism' Ivens would effect
in La Seine had much broader implications than his own individual personal
aesthetic and career trajectory. It tapped a zeitgeist, and the name of Ivens's
old acquaintance Vertov must now be brought back on this account to flesh
out this claim. The Soviet pioneer had died in relative obscurity three years ear-
lier in 1954, but the timing of his death hard on the heels of his nemesis Stalin
is suggestive. The revival of interest in Vertov's work began immediately in the
USSR and soon thereafter even in the Eastern Bloc (Berliners translated and
published part of Nikolai Abramov's book on Vertov in 1960 - a trial balloon
two years before it saw the light of day in Moscow!). Hicks (2007, 131) provides
a vivid account of the rediscovery of the Vertov legacy by Soviet filmmakers
and critics/historians of the fifties, both his synch-sound film innovations and
his 'life-caught-unawares' style. The persistent stewardship of Vertov's wid-
ow Elizaveta Svilova was key of course, but more important were the trickles
of thaw slowly manifesting at the same time. A frequent visitor to Moscow,
Sadoul was already sharing in this excitement as he developed La Seine with
Ivens; thereafter he would carry out several research trips to the USSR, and
his enthusiasm in turn had an explicit and profound impact on Rouch and
Morin as they were beginning to develop their famous and paradigm-shifting
Chronique d'un dtd at the end of 1959. Sadoul, who soon began the publication
of his Vertov findings in Cahiers du cinma and elsewhere, was probably single-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
handedly responsible for sparking the Vertov publication boom that Paris saw
over the following decade.9
It is not far-fetched, then, to concur with Sadoul about La Seine as
an homage to Dziga Vertov's 'life-caught-unawares' aesthetic, a revival of the
kino-eye sensibility and exploration of the cinma vdrite doctrine (Sadoul,
1963; Morin, [1960] 2003). Ivens's tactic of spontaneously, directly, and mate-
rially observing public social and economic life, and his film's non-interactive
close following of the everyday as it unfolded on the banks of the Parisian river,
were a clear ricochet of the Vertov revival.
Zeitgeists are amorphous, but the film seems to signal the culture's
not unrelated continued emergence from the trauma of hot and cold war, and
a generational need for positive energy that Ivens was clearly tuned into:
I wanted with these lyrical images to show that one could avoid the sen-
timental cliche. Life is beautiful. It sure is. My social films allow me to I 415
affirm this. Certain critics have written that this film marked a regression.
[...] They didn't understand. [...] Lyricism today has more than ever its
raison d'etre. It has not become banal or old-fashioned. We need a roman-
tic reaction against the excess of these 'films noirs' that we've abused so
much in the last twenty years.'0 We must show young people that they
have good reasons to believe in life, despite the dark childhood that we
gave them with the war. We have to tell them, as in La Seine, that the world
is full of beauty, that love is marvelous, that it is important, that it is made
for them and that they should love each other. (Zalzman, 1963, 90)
Ivens's affirmative yet materialist people-watching was perhaps registering
emerging social values of contingency, spontaneity, emotion, and authentic-
ity that were percolating around the West, from which he had been partially
isolated for a decade, values expressed by the post-war generation everywhere
from the proliferating New Wave cinemas (especially in France) to the Ameri-
can Beat phenomenon. Ivens's echo of the infectious energy of the social and
aesthetic transformations of the Soviet 1920s and his anticipation of those
that would be facilitated by the new direct technology within the next years are
both part of this broader picture. But of course Ivens was far from a newcomer
to the territory, in fact returning to an earlier on-the-ground spirit of spontane-
ity that years of bureaucracy and war had worn down: he, and those critics who
knew his origins, saw echoes of both his original documentary avant-gardism
and his original communist-humanist themes of human labour and collec-
tive struggle with the natural elements. If it could be argued that during the
Cold War decade Ivens had humanised socialist realism with behavioural and
sensory detail, now he was consciousness-raising the emerging direct cinema
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
with his never-abandoned social aesthetic of labour, struggle, and class con-
sciousness.
That the images would be often taken by a camera hidden in a shack on a
public works barge, or on land in a baby carriage or delivery truck (Stuflens,
2008, 323), to avoid interrupting 'natural' behaviours through intrusive cine-
matography bears comment. One manifestation of the rediscovery of Vertov,
according to Hicks (2007), had been the sudden interest in hidden camera
observation on the part of post-Stalin-era documentarists (one can empathise
with their interest in 'natural' rather than prescribed behaviour, but the omi-
nous overtones of the hidden camera could hardly have escaped everyone for
too long). Elsewhere too, on an international scale, on the cusp of direct cin-
ema, there was a momentary flurry of experimentation with this technique:
this did not mean that zoom lenses or even telephotos were suddenly being
deployed, for only expensive prototypes were available at the time and low-
416 I tech Ivens was certainly not using them (nor did they surface more than spar-
ingly in work by his contemporaries before the early 196os), but his recourse
to traditional long focal length lenses was adequate to the purpose. It is useful
to see La Seine in this context, as a fresh exploration of a mid-fifties license to
observe life-caught-unawares, a second wind perhaps for the famous British
'mass observation' current of the 1930s as well as for the pioneering Soviet
avant-gardists.
One cannot help but be amazed by the synchrony represented by several
other canonical documentaries made or released in 1957 that in their way all
made use of a hidden or discreet camera to record social life on the street,
endeavouring to access directly the 'truth' of human behaviour through push-
ing to its limits the available still-preliminary technological infrastructure in
this transitional moment: On the Bowery (Lionel Rogosin, 1956, USA, 65), Skid
Row (Allan King, 1956, Canada, 37), Les Raquetteurs (Gilles Groulx and Michel
Brault, 1958, Quebec, 15), Nice Time (Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta, 1957,
UK, 17), Every Day Except Christmas (Lindsay Anderson, 1957, UK, 37) as well
as Varda's aforementioned L'Opera-Mouffe." These films reflect an interna-
tional (i.e. Euro-American) impulse to shoot on the streets, to maintain the
discretion of the camera either through camera placement or shieldings of
various kinds. A thematic thread of this work in this transitional moment is
social abjection, the marginal underbelly of capitalist society - even by cheer-
ful, sentimental Ivens. All of these films blend observational material with the
classical tropes of documentaire organisd - as Sadoul (1963, 17) described the
mise-en-scene idiom that Ivens had developed in the 1930s, in fact recycling the
very term Ivens had originated to describe his work in The Spanish Earth (1937,
USA, 53) - ranging from Rogosin's real-life social actors dramatising their
own lives, Varda's professional actors and King's studio-based interviews with
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
real social actors to Anderson's very-Ivens-style workplace mise-en-scene and
the Quebeckers' almost-newsreel-style public ceremonial and musical per-
formances. All of these directors were a whole quarter-century younger than
Ivens, or more, and this generational dynamic, in addition to his isolation in
the post-war decade within cinematic cultures where cutting-edge technolo-
gies were simply not affordable or accessible, suggests, at least in part, why his
aesthetics of the direct were palpably more conservative than theirs.
The hidden camera had never been a major strategy for Ivens, but it seems
he saw it in 1957 as an extension of the present but discreet, non-intervening
camera that he had always endorsed for his 'spontaneous' mode:
I used certain technical means of cinma vrite. But in any case I've always
personally sought the truth. Basically, cinma vrite is not entirely a new
school: it corresponds today to the desire we once felt - Flaherty, Vertov,
myself and others - to have a living camera, that could go and come like 417
someone without being noticed. That doesn't mean that we did, in our
experiments, the same thing: first cindma verite has sound; and in any
case young people have an extra advantage over us: their camera can be
totally silent; silence is very important - even if one sees the camera one
doesn't know exactly at what moment one is being filmed. (Ivens, 1966a,
19-20)12
On the banks of the Seine the further step of hiding his camera would some-
how seem instrumental and indispensable for capturing some of the film's
most memorable images. Lying in wait for hours hidden on his barge along-
side the little square where Sadoul and he had noticed clochards,'3 often side
by side with playing children, finally yielded him exactly those images and led
to a complex and dynamic scene that many reviewers referenced as the most
memorable (not acknowledging that editing alone had constructed the pro-
pinquity of the kinetic youthful innocence of noisy pre-teen girls playing cir-
cle games and the static despair of the pensive solitary old man, of apparently
Maghrebian origin, feeding the sparrows). Like this theme of implied memory
and regret, many such scenes had to do with melodrama and emotion, espe-
cially of a conjugal nature interestingly (a theme that can hardly be said to
have been Ivens's preoccupation in the first three decades of his career). For
example, the above vignette is anticipated by an earlier one of a solitary old
man staring over the river, and several shots of indigent older men defined pri-
marily by their solitude (read loneliness) and briefly echoing the more indul-
gent tropes of skid row abjection of King, Rogosin, Varda, and the Londoners.
Much more common in La Seine are the vignettes of fulfilled conjugality that
are nevertheless not all of the spooning-on-the-shore variety (which are admit-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
tedly legion): from glimpses of a gallant consort re-hammering the heel of his
girlfriend's broken pump and a young woman playfully slapping the face of
her fresh boyfriend to a scene around a canvas-seamstress gesticulating in a
vain attempt to save face in a marital argument she knows she has lost in her
waterside workplace.
69. La Seine a rencontre Paris (1957): hidden
camera observation catches a seamstress
performing a marital argument in her
waterside workplace. DVD frame capture.
© CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
418
However, the hidden camera moment did not last long in Euro-American
non-theatrical documentary (other than the sensationalist more commer-
cial variants that ranged from Jacopetti to Reichenbach). An unspoken con-
sensus seems to have emerged before too long to move past it, no doubt with
the gradually dawning realisation that the ethically ambiguous boundary
between voyeurism or spying and respectful, insider observation was too easi-
ly crossed. (Did the legendary MIPE-TV conference in Lyons in 1963, for which
Ivens wrote the above comments, mark the turning point in this attitude? It
certainly marked the point at which the Europeans abandoned the too ambig-
uous and misleading term verite to the Americans who were already using it
promiscuously.) Armed with increasingly versatile cameras, documentarists
would learn other methods of minimising the disruptive potential of subjects
responding to a public camera, and more importantly many learned how to
capitalise on such interactions, to integrate interactivity into a new collabora-
tive aesthetics and ethics of direct cinema. Or, to reanimate my theorisation
of Ivens's passage from Zuiderzee to Misere au Borinage (Borinage, 1934, Bel-
gium, 34) and Nieuwe Gronden (New Earth, 1933, Netherlands, 30) two decades
later, to integrate indirect address of narrative and exposition with the direct
address of spectatorial interpellation and enlistment. Rouch seems to have
been one herald in the 1950s of the latter, alternative practice of presentation-
al and performance-based idioms, even in Les Mahtresfous, which appeared
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
to as much controversy as acclaim as Ivens was premiering La Seine in 1957.
But Ivens seemingly was too entrenched in his three-decades-old 'don't look
at the camera' practice/rule to work through this for now... In La Seine, several
shots that are cut at the very moment the subject is on the verge of noticing the
camera reinforces this impression of a mature artist hesitating to change the
rules of his game - although there is one lovely shot of a boy, surrounded by
his playmates, looking right into the lens in extreme close-up with excitement
that a bicycle has been fished out of the river by a frogman. One can speculate
what kind of a conversation that the retention of that shot required in the edit-
ing room!
At the same time as La Seine can be seen as a tentative harbinger of vrit,
the film must also be considered an extension of Ivens's commitment to
developing well-tested approaches, specifically the collaborative mise-en-scene
technique that he had developed independently in the 1930s - and even argu-
ably as early as Regen and De Brug (The Bridge, 1928, Netherlands, 16). As we 419
have repeatedly seen, this technique - equivalent to what Ivens and Sadoul
were calling documentaire organisd - enabled Ivens to closely and authentical-
ly record everyday life close up, enabled the intense, studied concentration
required to represent manual labour and its practitioners, from the collective
effort of earth-moving and construction to children's play. Moreover, as we
have also seen, mise-en-scene also permitted Ivens to construct vivid charac-
ters and extrapolate narrative vignettes. He had taken this approach as far as
possible with current technology in the direction of neorealism in First Years,
but now was scaling back his ambitions to coincide with the new artisanal
style. The 20 or so narrative vignettes in La Seine are sometimes as short as two
shots; others are more fleshed-out narrative threads whose motifs are inter-
woven through longer, more complex passages - for example a Sunday painter
obsessively but indecisively attacking his canvas, reappears three times. These
portraits were effective, notwithstanding their conciseness, judging from one
reviewer's account: 'Each character seen or glimpsed for a few seconds stops
being a stranger to become almost a friend' (Philipe, 1958). The non-profes-
sional dramatisation techniques behind many of the vignettes remind us
that Ivens had not rushed wholeheartedly all the way into the new spirit of the
direct. At Lyons in 1963 he would sum up his reservations about cinma verite,
and hijack the meaning of the term to apply to his own political aesthetic:
In our discussions, we can say anything at all about such a label, that the
important thing is to make good films, and these generalities interrupt
discussions with a certain demagogy. But tomorrow when we take off
again with our cameras, it will still all the same be the truth that counts
for us. Thus the questions appear: what truth? Seen by whom, expressed
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
for whom? Will it be the whole truth or just a part of the truth? Which
part? Ultimately this truth will be put in the service of what? This said,
with the possibilities of a fast observation and a great suppleness in
movements, one runs the danger of staying only at the surface of the
truth, of caressing reality instead of penetrating it, and of contenting
oneself with showing it without true force, audacity and creative power.
[...] In the course of a shoot, one finds oneself facing multiple traps: one
can, for example, confuse the global truth [d'ensemble] with authentic
detail. This authenticity finds itself formidably reinforced by the new
technique of cinema vrite. [...] To speak of cinema vrite in the first sense
of the word, there must exist a freedom of expression, not only in the
cinema halls, but also on television. (Ivens, 1963)
In this holding on to mise-en-scene, ironically, Ivens was also in step with Ver-
420 I tov, who used collaborative techniques to a far greater extent than many of
his new 1950s and 196os apostles realised - though Sadoul (1963, 18) him-
self perceptively recognised that he 'did not always refuse reconstitution and
never the organization of documentary'. La Seine's prefatory caveat 'No actors
appear in this film, only men, women and children who love the Seine' can
thus be seen in this light as somewhat disingenuous. When Schoots ([19951
2000, 252) gleefully reports that Ivens registered some critics' estimation of
his work as 'old-fashioned', one wonders whether his reliance on dramatisa-
tion was an important factor in this judgment.
Like the river itself, the finished La Seine is fluid, inexorable, majestic,
vibrant with underwater eddies and kinetic tension. The experience of watch-
ing it with the sound turned off is completely different from watching the final
sound version, with its commentary and score that can dominate the experi-
ence for the susceptible viewer. Speaking purely cinematically, the documen-
tary offers a rich visual canvas of Paris social life, all from the point of view of
the river's paved banks, from its many bridges and, most importantly, from
the water's surface. I use the word 'canvas' advisedly, for painterly elements
are richly present, with a Brueghel influence documented in Ivens's shooting
notes (Stufkens, 2008, 327) and surfacing in the layered social busy-ness and
multiple narratives on the screen throughout. Yet the cinematic quality dom-
inates, for the viewer is literally swept along by an indulgent, even excessive
momentum of river-borne travellings - from bow, stern, and sides of moving
vessels - often complicated by swivels, panoramic sub-movements and coun-
ter-movements, punctuated by the visual refrain of the filmmaker's wake and
compounded within the frame with Ivens's traditional, well-studied behav-
ioural choreographies of labour and play. Thus, much complex kinetic exhila-
ration informs the new energy of proto-verite observation that we have already
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
discussed. The purely physical impact and affect of this style no doubt shaped
the critical vocabulary that greeted the film: phrases like 'one fluid movement'
and 'one loving gesture' (Bertina, 1959), and vocabulary like 'incantation'
appear in every review. This kinetic affect is at the core of the film's subjec-
tive sensibility and the essayistic status that more than one reviewer mat-
ter-of-factly declared (Mardore, 1958).
The Paris Ivens discovered was a rich and diverse mosaic. If he substan-
tiated the cinematic cliche that the banks of the Seine are the playground of
the idle classes, both the idle rich and the idle poor, he also documented all
those in between who repair to this long aquatic parkland and spatio-econom-
ic artery for sustenance, sociality, and decompression. Predictably, he also
affirmed the Seine as a transportation hub not only for river traffic but also for
the buzzing trains and automobiles that move along its shores, and as a work-
place - for metal scrap operations, for the importation of wine, grain, and tim-
ber, for freight handling and boat management, for salvage, for tourism, for 421
art production, even for the fashion industry - though many of the less glam-
orous industries seem pushed to the outskirts, including a vestigial peniche
subculture reminiscent ofLAtalante (Jean Vigo, 1934, 89). Importantly, contin-
uing the proto-feminist thread of his work, he also vividly recorded domestic
labour and child care along its banks. The mosaic is diverse not only in terms
of class and generation, but also in terms of race, ethnicity, and even sexual
orientation (as Lagny [1999] pointed out'4), all animated with the rhythms of
leisure and work, eating and sleeping, running and dancing, the erotic and the
agonistic - even overtones of birth and mortality. Aside from an early glimpse
of decrepit housing and another glimpse toward the end of the film of a post-
war housing project, its squareness softened by the dusk and its illuminated
windows, Ivens and Sadoul did not take in the urban transformations that
were beginning to be felt in post-war Paris, urban renewal and demolitions,
high-rise construction projects, suburban housing estates soon notorious for
alienation and violence - transformations such as Godard would critique less
than a decade later in his own essay on the city Deux ou trois choses. Perhaps
the Seine theme did not allow his elders to do so. On the other hand, what La
Seine shares with Deux ou trois choses is the reflection on sex, though much
more discreetly on Ivens's part of course: his camera's no doubt unavoidable
attention to lovers is not only our adulterer's slant on the city of afternoon mis-
tresses (one shot includes Fiszer, solitary and sunlit, crouching over a newspa-
per on the bank), it also both accentuates the hoary Parisian stereotype (three
stills illustrating one film magazine review [Mardore, 1958] were of couples or
erotic in nature), it also addresses, with some self-reflexivity, the benign prob-
lematic of voyeurism (a vignette with an eager photographer soon reveals his
unaware subject, an attractive woman sunning on the banks).
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
70. La Seine a rencontre Paris (1957):
self-reflexively addressing the benign
problematic of voyeurism. DVD frame
capture. ( CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Other archetypes are also in play, if only discreetly, for example the syndrome
422 of tourism, deftly satirised in one shot, or more profoundly the presumptuous
narcissism of imperial metropoles that seem uninflected by the critique that
Resnais and Marker brought to bear on the city several times in the same dec-
ade. It would take more confidence from Ivens, the immigrant, to let loose his
critical eye on the culture that had, after all, most recently traumatically cen-
sored his magnum opus Lied, and he would do so hardly less gently a decade
later in Mistral.
Ivens was right to insist however, that this thematic delicacy does not
mean that La Seine is 'completely apolitical' (Schoots, [1995] 2000, 252-253),
but rather that the politics takes a different shape than the Cold War rhet-
oric of previous years. La Seine offers a gentler politics of the everyday, of
labour, migration, and cultural shifts, and of subtler observations of con-
nections brought out by the perceptive editing. For example, strenuous adult
earth-moving is imitated by the little girl with her hands in the sand barge,
accenting the class-based transmission of manual labour; or the pink collar
workers' midday sandwiches and fruit along the banks and the clochards' sim-
ple crusts are suddenly trumped by the tourist industry with its regimented
tourist crowds receiving expensive hors d'oeuvres from uniformed waiters on
the bateau-mouche. This all transpires in the shadow of the same Eiffel Tower
that the viewer is also subjected to thrice (Notre-Dame gets even more lavish
treatment, a whole mini-sequence and then two out-of-order shots later). This
issue is complex: certain passages of the film may well echo the experience
the tourists no doubt had on the bateau-mouche, and La Seine may seem to
be not all that far from the Family of Man iconography that was touring the
world at that very moment, entrenched in its ideological opposition to Lied
as Musser (2002) has pointed out. At the same time, can we see Ivens's avoid-
ance of crisis analysis and overstated embrace of the sentimental everyday, of
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
sunlit community and commensality, as expressing an awkwardness around
his place within Humanite culture? And around his relation to a national com-
munist party in disarray, shamefacedly supporting both colonialism and the
Hungarian intervention and grappling with its electoral decline in the face of
de Gaulle's imminent Fifth Republic the following year?
If La Seine's placid political complexity is anchored in the slight discord-
ance between the surface aesthetic of 'life-caught-unawares' spontaneity and
the mise-en-scene material, both modes are sutured by the practices of narra-
tive editing practices and by parallel intercutting that to my mind undermine
the ontological integrity of the moments of observational 'truth' of both styles
of cinematic apprehension. For example, the first dejected old man caught in
low angle through a long focal length lens is given a fictive point of view shot
by the editor, a spot of floating debris that he is watching poignantly, and sud-
denly the perceptual authenticity of this moment is undermined, locked into
an explanatory denouement. As for the 'organized' threads, a three-shot scene I 423
with Pierre Balmain haute couture models may be the clincher of them all,
seeming to accentuate the artifice of the mannequins' performances in con-
trast to the naturalist behaviour all around. One could even read it as humor-
ously self-reflexive in its equally organised topper of a solitary fisherman
pulling in his catch just as the haute couture group leaves the scene - the fish is
patently dead, and this shot is the only hint in an entire film that the absurdist
masculine pastime of riverbank fishing that it seems excessively devoted to
offers some material dividend!
Turn on the sound and La Seine is another film, its dynamic visual tapes-
try of truth altered further and arguably suborned. For one thing, the lack of
direct sound and the imposition of studio-produced synthetic sound effects
that could have been produced in the 1930s mediate our sense of Ivens's
vdrite discoveries, especially for retroactive viewers spoiled by post-1960 direct
sound recording. But it is the score by Philippe-Grard (also an immigrant)
that especially lulls the film's observational sharpness. His experiments with
folk melodies and amateur instruments are in tune with the film's documen-
tary vocation, granted, but they are also too caught up in the potential pictur-
esqueness of riverbank life, reinforcing the populist politics and aesthetics
that are always hovering around the film and smoothing over its gentle con-
tradictions.
The other even more determining factor that mediates visual integrity is
the commentary, elegant and elegiac for some, hackneyed for others, intoned
lugubriously by Reggiani, but completely transformative of the film, especially
for native francophones who are not reading subtitles (and who read Prdvert
throughout their schooling). The poet's allusive, personal poem endows the
film with the literariness intrinsic to the essay mode, as well as its most explic-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
it layer of first-person subjectivity, in complementary harmony - or even tense
rivalry, according to some analysts - with Ivens's own. It layers on both the
anthropomorphisation of the Seine as a volatile female personage ('Risky,
dangerous, tumultuous, and dreamy all at once. That's the way she is, malice,
caress, romance, tenderness, caprice, bitchiness, idleness') and its metamor-
phisation as an individual life flow in the shadow of the grave:
And then, when below the Pont Neuf the dying day's wind blows out my
candle, when I withdraw from the business of life, when I'm finally at
ease in the grand palace of those at rest, at Bagneux, at Pere Lachaise, I
shall smile and say to myself, once upon a time there was the Seine, once
upon a time there was love, there once was misfortune and another time
forgetfulness. Once upon a time there was the Seine, and once upon a
time there was life.
424 I
Ivens, sentenced to work forever in his second, third, fourth, fifth, and even
sixth language, had worked closely in productive counterpoint with writers
almost since the dawn of sound. If there is a clear consensus that his collabo-
ration with Hemingway in Spanish Earth formed the first apogee of his career,
the lyrical essay period offered one collaboration after another in an absolute
roll of similar quality, from the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, to the Italian
Alberto Moravia, to the prizewinning Dutch poet Gerrit Kouwenaar.'s Prdvert's
script on the Seine was the first and arguably the most conspicuous of the liter-
ary collaborators who shaped this period's work and clinched its essay status.
He would come back for an encore a fewyears later in the Chilean shortLePetit
Chapiteau (1963, 6). Whether 'rivalry' or 'productive tension' is the most appli-
cable notion to describe Ivens's relationship with his writer collaborators of
this period is a matter no doubt for subjective interpretation - remembering,
of course, that for Ivens, an inveterate collaborator, a generous and trusting
co-worker, collaboration was an act with artistic, pedagogical, economic, and,
yes, political valence.
After the Paris premiere of La Seine in November 1957, attended by Ivens
fans and a star-studded Humanitd assembly - Montand and Signoret and oth-
ers - the film went to Cannes the following May and triumphed, tying with a
now-forgotten French fiction LaJoconde: Histoire d'une obsession (Henri Gru-
el, 20) for the short film 'Grand prix'. It then went on to five other important
Western festivals, London, Bergamo, Cork, San Francisco, and Oberhausen
(winning first prizes at the latter two). This public and official validation of
the personal and artistic choices Ivens had made and the essayistic direction
he was now embracing was a commercial certification as well as ideologi-
cal, of the kind we saw included above in Sight and Sound. Doors would be
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
opened to producers, festivals, and distributors around the world over the
next decade.
The critical reception of the film, on both right and left, was the most
enthusiastic Ivens had received since Spanish Earth. On the left, Sadoul (1958)
maintained his first-person hyperbole, his upfront conflict of interest notwith-
standing, 'Joris Ivens shows himself to be a great poet of Paris, a great painter
of Paris' while Anne Philipe (1958), Gdrard's wife, was more discreet with hers:
'Yes, all that is familiar to us. But when Ivens sees them they are no longer
fugitive images they are images as beautiful as a poem of Appollinaire; beau-
tiful by themselves and by what they express, that's to say of a perfect beauty'.
Liberation, with no conflict of interest, maintained the almost hyperbolic tone:
'There are magical encounters. Yesterday, that of the Dutch painter van Gogh
and Provence. Today that of the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and the Seine in
Paris. The result: the most beautiful French short film of the year. The most
beautiful cinematic poem ever written on Paris. A masterpiece' (Dubreuilh, I 425
1957). Even Dutch critics came on board: 'The film is one fluid movement of
images that captures everyone observed by Ivens on the banks of the Seine in
one loving gesture, they are the workers, the clochards, the lovers, the lonely,
the children, the fishermen. Ivens does not only show us his love for Paris but
also his undisturbed artistry' (Bertina, 1959). By the mid-sixties Grelier (1965,
too) was speaking a kind of consensus in his definitive monograph: 'one of the
most accomplished of Joris Ivens's films, even one of the greatest documenta-
ry films of contemporary cinema'.
La Seine's critical reception was not unanimous, however, and dissent was
not long in coming. One influential Parisian critic would, a few years later, tax
the film with confusion, 'the ddji-vu', and 'worn out tricks' (Porcile, 1965), but
these were by implication attributable to Prdvert as much as to Ivens. Mean-
while more than one critic, even amidst the raves, echoed the Grenier theme
of a shift away from the political:
Here is a kind of postface to Chant desfleuves, but here there is no anger,
no polemics, nothing but an incantation, a glorification of a river that
seems to bring only happiness and forgetfulness. This halt by Ivens is
meaningful (at the evening of one's life, does one feel the need to rest?)
but disturbing also, for the combative vigour of this great militant of
truth seems to fade as soon as he no longer has weapons in his hands.
(Mardore, 1958)
Ivens's East Berlin friends were even more startled by their renegade friend at
a 1960 Leipzig Festival screening (nine months before the erection of the Ber-
lin Wall), according to one insider account:
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
Andrew Thorndike immediately placed Ivens on the other side of the bar-
ricades: 'The poetry is beautiful, but nowadays the political and historical
moment are in the foreground. And that does not happen in La Seine'.
Gunter Klein, former studio-director and president of the festival, plays
the different 'Ivenses' off one another: 'Song of the Rivers is profound,
and La Seine [...] is just a babbling brook according to so many people; it
is very beautiful, but it is no river'. Karl Gass asked, simply: 'Where is the
fist, Joris'? (Jordan, 1999, too)
And it is hard not to be sympathetic with their perplexity in the face of their
friend's very complex orchestration of his materials and his political challeng-
es in his new context.
Like many popular hits that strike an immediate chord, La Seine was per-
haps doomed to age less well than other Ivens films: for me its outsider senti-
426 I mentality sometimes grates, the haute-couture product placement makes me
also want to ask the fist question,'6 the observational engagement sometimes
lapses into prettiness, and the populist score delivers one too many cloying
repeats. Parisian film historian Lagny (1999) agrees with Porcile (1965) and
positions the film closer to 'stereotypes' and 'cliches' than 1958 audiences,
reviewers, and festival juries might have had enough distance to recognise. La
Seine is dangerously close, she argues, to the dominant mode of expression
in the 1950s French documentary: for example, its recycling of iconography
from the famous Paris photographers Doisneau as well as Cartier-Bresson,
and from the 'poetic realist' cinema of the 1930s.7 Such reserves are under-
standable, perhaps because of the filmmaker's eagerness to please his new
homeland constituency, his film's unrestrained indulgence in comfortable
emotions and iconographies, butLa Seine is nonetheless an immensely affect-
ing and evocative work. If the consensus has shown a few cracks over the dec-
ades, it is more a reflection of volatility of the canon and the market than of
the intrinsic qualities of this deeply felt, sharply observed work of re-entry and
transition.
CHINA: SECOND EPISODE
Two China films represent the next instalment in the long series of travel
essays/lyrical documentaries that take up this period of Ivens's life. The film-
maker relocated to Beijing soon after the La Seine premiere. As usual, Ivens
managed to be in the right place at the right time, and he began his work there
amidst the fallout from Chairman Mao's January 1958 declaration of the Great
Leap Forward. This promised teaching gig, inextricable from this political
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
context, would last intermittently for a year (but Ivens, of course, came home
for the 1958 summer festival season and his triumph at Cannes). Of the two
China films, Lettres de Chine (Before Spring, 1958, 38)1 shall retain our atten-
tion, a lyrical essay whose full-colour pastoral beauty almost distracts from
the tumult underway. Six Hundred Million With You (1958, 12), a short, static,
and raw teaching exercise about a Beijing demonstration against the Western
superpowers' interference in the Middle East, is seldom given more than pass-
ing reference in Ivens literature. Nevertheless, this cinematic reminder to the
historian that the world was once more on the brink of war thanks to the Suez
crisis and its aftermath, shot in luminous black-and-white 35mm, looks much
better than 50 years of dismissals would have led us to believe (symptomatic of
several of the traps of our discipline).
71. Six Hundred Million With You (1958): 427
placard from a Beijing protest against
Western interference in the Middle East
pioneers 'global south' solidarity. DVD
frame capture. © CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
I shall come back in Chapter 8 for further textual and political analysis of the
1950s China work in conjunction with Ivens's later China episodes in the
1970s and 1980s, since its position as a document of the Leap engages com-
parison and continuity with the later work embroiled, as that work is, in the
Cultural Revolution. Suffice it to make a few general points here.
Before Spring continues many of the basic tendencies of La Seine, a return
to the classical images Ivens relied on in the thirties, a continuing essayiste
edging around the periphery of the experimentation in the direct cinema that
was beginning to take documentary culture and practice in the Western Hem-
isphere by storm, and the enrichment of the new fashion for social observa-
tion with the older perspectives of socialist realism. But this, and many of the
other 1960s films - Carnet de viaje (TravelNotebook, 1961, Cuba/France, 34),
Pueblo, Nanguila, Valparaiso, Le Petit Chapiteau, and Ciel - must not only be
seen as integral films in their own right but also as pedagogical and techni-
cal exercises engaging with an aesthetics that is as instrumental as it is artis-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
tic. As teaching films, guided and directed for the most part by Ivens, they
may well be inevitably a conscious or unconscious initiative to instil the sen-
ior communist cineaste's aesthetic into aspiring filmmakers of these 'third
world' countries. They are also an effort to get these filmmakers to see their
own countries from fresh angles, not only just Ivens's eyes, and thus to sharp-
en their perceptions of their national environments. The cinematographer
of Before Spring, Wang Decheng, would repeat for the rest of his life the value
of the lessons he had learned alongside Ivens (Film Archive of China 1983;
Wang Decheng, 2008). One measure of Ivens's success in this series of films
is their eclecticism and variability when seen as a group, a certain index of
his openness to local cultures and geographies but also to ideas and aesthet-
ics proffered by his students, apprentices, crew, and mentees, many of whom
went on to be major figures in their respective national cinemas from China
to Chile. Teaching is political, and for Schoots ([1995] 2000, 255) to character-
428 I ise Before Spring as 'apolitical' removes politics not only from the solidarity
genre but also from the pedagogical vocation, and quite simply boggles the
mind. We shall return to Ivens's delicate orchestration around the politics
of both the development of the Chinese national film industry and the Great
Leap Forward in Chapter 8.
The Chinese and Cuban films, and to a lesser extent Ivens's films from
Mali, Italy, and Chile in different ways, must also be seen as latter-day versions
of Pesn o geroyakh (Komsomol, 1933, USSR, 50) and Spanish Earth, outsider soli-
darity testimonies by Ivens to the achievements and aspirations of a society in
transformation. We have seen how Ivens could be said to have originated this
subgenre in the 1930s, and it is certainly one he pursued more systematically
than any other filmmaker and did not abandon it during this so-called 'lyri-
cal' phase. The hallmarks of this genre, infused with the worldview and dram-
aturgical apparatus of socialist realism, are all present in these films, above
all the spirit of celebration of socialist achievement, images of new construc-
tion, of water irrigating dry land for the first time, of earth being shaped by
smiling armies, and above all, of children. Ivens himself referred to the China
films as 'an exaltation of China's future through this demonstration of spring'
(unidentified French interview). The fact that the pretext of the three-part Chi-
nese film is the arrival of spring in China's northern regions exaggerates and
enriches Ivens's already utopian discourse of solidarity.
As globetrotter, Ivens predictably outdistanced even Marker during this
period, recognising that for a European filmmaker in the era of 'peaceful
coexistence', light years distant from any apparent threshold of revolution,
one increasingly important setting for political filmmaking could be found in
what was increasing called the 'third world' in the 1960s. We have already seen
how he pioneered such a practice, as early as The 400 Million (1939, USA, 53)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
72. Lettres de Chine[Before (Early)Spring]
(1958): a Mongolian herder. This teaching
film converges socialist realist utopianism
with attention to local cultures. DVD frame
capture. Original in colour. O CAPI Films,
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
R w
o
73. Lettres de Chine (1958): emerging direct
cinema aesthetics in this attention to a
crying child and her toy, within a classical
solidarity framework. DVD frame capture.
Original in colour. O CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens. 429
and increasingly in the post-war decade in Indonesia and with his deployment
of input from within anti-colonial struggles in Peace Will Win and Lied. Later,
he also saw one Brazilian project aborted by the 1964 coup while another in
Venezuela never got off the ground. In a way, the internally colonised Mongo-
lia, the 'exotic' setting for Before Spring, aligns with this framework, as does
arguably the importance of 'undeveloped' and 'distrustful' Sicily and southern
Italy in the Italian film of the next year. The contradiction that Ivens then and
later would not openly challenge the centralist, multicultural state apparatus
centred in Han-dominated Beijing - any more than he had the multicultural
Soviet state in the 1930s or the 'new democracies' of Eastern Europe in the
post-war decade - requires at least acknowledgment here and further mention
when we return to China in Chapter 8.
Solidarity also means travel, pilgrimage, othering. Both realist and utopi-
an, this work and the other films in this trajectory are travel essays, encounters
with the exotic with all the temptations that implies. For such films, though
not necessarily directed at the Western audience in the primary instance in
these pedagogical contexts, the ultimate extension of their production is their
encounter with a western public, the last link in their realisation. For this pub-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
lie also, the filmmaker must be a foreigner like themselves so that the codes
of the exotic are fully and accessibly inscribed. Critical liabilities attach to the
many travel-inspired lyrical essays of Ivens's colleagues in the French docu-
mentary in the fifties and early sixties. Most significant is a kind of ideological
avoidance, shaped by what I would call this temptation of the exotic. Some-
times the personal subjectivity of the traveller-author served as a means of
circumventing in-depth social analysis of his or her chosen landscape, sur-
face impressions being ostensibly more reliable and less presumptuous, as
well as less difficult to convey, than any focused analysis - especially for the
non-speaker of the indigenous language. The travel essay was also used from
time to time as a means of avoiding struggles at home, commitment being
much more aesthetic and much less risky abroad. (To be fair, any serious dis-
cussion of Algeria was forestalled by French censors.) Godard touches upon
the dangers of the exotic - and is in turn touched by them - in his moody,
430 I aloof statements of a few years later on Vietnam, Loin du Vietnam (Far from
Vietnam, 1967, France, 115), and Palestine, Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere,
1976, France, 53). These liabilities of the travel-essay also threaten to entangle
Marker in his various films, despite the fact that the best of them, Lettre de
Siberie, is a spoof of the travelogue form and well aware of the limitations of
its own subjectivity.
Ivens's travel-essays are a different story, in large part because of their
locally focused pedagogical orientation, and because they were very much a
pretext for Ivens the teacher to make a contribution to small national cine-
mas struggling against what Godard would later term Mosfilm-Paramount,
the imperialist monopolies. Confronted with the 'third world', Ivens was inca-
pable of issuing a Godardian call to contemplative inaction. He would inevi-
tably plunge right into a given situation, as he did in China, Cuba, and Chile,
trustfully and openly transmitting to his world audience the enthusiasm of his
local students and associates. Never the skeptic, Ivens would pay each host
society a warm and encouraging tribute, offering his services as teacher, publi-
cist, and resource-person with complete modesty and generosity. The Cubans,
Chinese, and Chileans in particular reciprocated this trust with feelings of
great affection and indebtedness.
L'ITALIA NON EUN PA ESE POVERO
The next step on Ivens's global trajectory was Italy. What was to be his sole
realised cinematic project there, L'Italia non e un paese povero (Italy Is Not a
Poor Country, 1960, 112), was far from his only engagement with that country
and its rich and dynamic political and cinematic cultures. Indeed, Ivens had a
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
sustained relationship with Italy from the end of the war until his death - not
surprisingly since Italy was the major member country of NATO and the incip-
ient European Union, along with Ivens's adopted homeland France, where the
Moscow-linked national Communist Party was a major player in the electoral
process throughout these decades. In fact, the PCI was the largest communist
party in the West. Virgilio Tosi, General Secretary of the Federazione italiana
dei circuli del cinema (Italian Federation of Film Societies), an organisation
close to the PCI, was Ivens's first host in 1949, when a triumphant tour led
to a special personal relationship with Tosi as well as an ardent fan base in
the film club network. Such interactions built on Ivens's existing relationship
with Italian cinema, whose neorealist breakthrough he had already tuned into
with great enthusiasm and personal identification upon his departure from
Australia in 1946:
When I saw [Rossellini's Paisa] it had seemed to me that it was my own 1 431
look that found itself behind the camera. His passion for looking and
expressing was so strong that even the plot disappeared. [... In de Sica's
Bicycle Thief] everything was simple: the subject, the story, the facts. [...]
The reconstitution of life, of everyday gestures, was perfect. (Ivens and
Destanque, 1982, 248)
Ivens developed also a taste for Italian culture in general which he found warm
and spontaneous in contrast to northern Europeanfroideur:
In Italy, from the very first days relationships were easy and I felt naturally
close to people. Warm and direct, Italians accepted me as I was and not,
as often in France, as they wished I was. I had deep friendships in France
but almost always weighted down by I don't know what innuendos. In
Italy, I discovered lightness, the art of living, spontaneity, immediate
friendship, so many things that by nature I had always kept at a distance.
I made there solid relationships and lasting friendships. (Ivens and
Destanque, 1982, 248)
Ivens's participation in the September 1949 congress of Italian filmmakers
in Perugia launched close relationships in particular with the latest neoreal-
ist director sensation Giuseppe de Santis (whose Riso amaro [BitterRice, 108])
opened at the end of the month), neorealist high priest Cesare Zavattini and
the Florentine Aristo Ciruzzi as well as committed young novices who were
already forming the next generation, Pontecorvo, Solinas, Tinto Brass, and the
Taviani brothers Vittorio and Paolo (Jansen, 2002). Ivens's frequent follow-up
rounds of the cine club circuit beginning in 1951 were great successes (Jansen,
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
2002), despite the Cold War intrigues necessary to bring the prints of his works
back and forth across the border (Tosi, 2002a). In the coming years, his collab-
oration with Italian politicos and young filmmakers, especially on Peace Will
Win, Freundschaft siegt (Friendship Triumphs, 1952, USSR/DDR, too) (future
Euro-Communist kingpin Enrico Berlinguer has an onscreen cameo), Lied,
and Windrose (where one segment is directed by future prizewinning director
Pontecorvo), was to be substantial. A steady stream of projects was initiated
and developed throughout the 1950s but never brought to fruition: in 1952,
a long personalised script by Umberto Barbaro, left-wing critic and founder
of the Centro sperimentale di cinematografia, about the daily struggles of a
worker and his family; a project about the struggles of workers in Calabria late
that same year, which acquired some art historical motifs comparing 17thcen_
tury Italian and Dutch painting;'9 a collaboration with Zavattini and Pontecor-
vo about 'life in Italy' touching on the historic relationship of northern writers
432 I like Goethe and Stendhal with Italy; a concept on the North's major artery the
Po River; another on the North-South divide that had been a perennial theme
of Italian culture and politics since national unification a century earlier; a lat-
er project about the Po in collaboration with Zavattini after the success of his
recent river-film hit La Seine; and finally a project on Venice, developed in col-
laboration with future Italia collaborator Brass, who had recently been work-
ing with another of Ivens's idols Rossellini.
Venice also had a role in the origins of Italia, for it was around the time he
was on the 1959 film festival jury that the Italia project was initiated. Accord-
ing to Paolo Taviani (2002), it was he and his brother who had recommend-
ed Ivens to the legendary Enrico Mattei. This charismatic former Resistance
fighter had become the powerful CEO of the state petroleum corporation ENI,
and his centre-left nationalism (despite his Christian Democrat ties) fueled
his confrontation with the international oil cartel. Mattei was looking for
the best documentarist in the world to make a promotional film for the state
television network RAI about ENI and the prospects for domestic fossil fuel
autonomy.20 According to Ivens, Mattei had seen Nieuwe Gronden (presumably
in one of the film clubs) and loved it (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 251) and,
declaring that Ivens's communist affiliations did not matter, sent Valentino
Orsini, a Taviani collaborator, to Venice to recruit Ivens, who just happened,
as usual, to be looking for work (Taviani, 2002). After various consultations
about assurances of artistic freedom, and a check with the CPI's culture com-
missar Mario Alicata to make sure he had their blessing, Ivens succumbed to
the generous conditions and production facilities offered by Mattei. These
included an office and a solid production team: Orsini (1927-2001) who would
act as a producer, Vittorio and Paolo Taviani (b. 1929, 1931) who would work
on the script, and Brass (b. 1933) who would act as technical assistant - for all
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
four the Ivens collaboration would be a stepping stone towards their future
place as pillars of the Italian fictional cinema2' - along with the seasoned cin-
ematographer Mario Volpi and the novice Mario Dolci on camera (Ivens and
Destanque, 1982, 254).
If Ivens had any reserves, whether pragmatic, artistic, or ideological, about
working for another state enterprise after a decade of stress within the East-
ern European bureaucracy, he set them aside. Aside from the paycheck and
the lavish technical set-up, why did he accept? No doubt the persuasiveness
of his young Italian friends was a factor but as in the past his material needs
trumped any doubts he may have had: 'At the time I was terribly hard up and I
had accepted also for crassly materialist reasons. I needed to make my living
and from this point of view, it was very agreeable' (Ivens, interview with author,
April 1978). No doubt also it was the seductive lure of television that clinched
the deal, as he told his East European friend Hans Wegner (1965, 192-193): the
calculus offered the dazzling possibility of 14 million spectators in contrast 433
to the 50,000 workers that might be reached through another conventional-
ly distributed film, and even in a poor region where much smaller numbers
would access the broadcast those numbers already surpassed a conventional
film audience.
In itself, ideologically speaking, the switch from Soviet-bloc state employ-
ment to western state corporate sponsorship was not an issue. I do not disa-
gree with Stufkens's (2008, 23-24) explanation:
One can see that communism, in the form in which it has manifest-
ed itself historically, i.e. as capitalism of the state, is a kind of detour
towards capitalism. Capitalism and communism share the same
Judeo-Christian tradition as their cultural and ideological foundation. To
some degree this explains why Ivens could easily move from one side of
the Iron Curtain to the other. Ivens represented the same developments
in both East and West - a world rushing towards industrialization. Ivens
could fulfill commissions from such customers as Shell, Philips, ENI
(Italian Gas Company) and the Rotterdam Harbour Lobby, all Western
capitalist corporations, as easily as those from trade unions and commu-
nist umbrella institutions in the East and West.
Industrialisation aside, Ivens could not have known of course that this ambi-
tious first television project would turn into another distribution debacle that
seemed to echo First Years in its scale, and that he would eventually regret his
eagerness and eschew television for the rest of his career (except as a second-
ary network for his theatrical films).
By September, less than a month after Venice, Ivens was already research-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
ing and scouting locations throughout Italy, accompanied by Orsini and the
Tavianis, sometimes even in Mattei's private plane. His orientation was to
situate people, from engineers to peasants, within and around the imposing
ENI industrial infrastructure that ranged from refineries in Ravenna to nat-
ural gas wells in Lucania to offshore foraging rigs near Sicily. Not speaking
the language, Ivens deeply appreciated his collaborators' contributions and
qualities: 'spontaneity, a sense of initiative, the gift of improvisation, imagina-
tion, and above all this innate art of human relations that is perhaps the secret
of the Italian cinema's vitality' (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 255). It may have
been this 'human relations edge' that opened Ivens to the pursuit of the rela-
tional cinematic method he had begun experimenting with in La Seine, name-
ly direct cinema, which turned out to be a major feature of the new film. The
research scouting tour itself dramatically reinforced the already determined
thematic binary of the film, north and south (that other Marxist Luchino Vis-
434 conti's prodigious fiction masterpiece on the same theme, Rocco e i suoifratelli
(Rocco and His Brothers, 1960, 177), more tragic than the Dutchman's upbeat
variation, started production at exactly the same time as Italia was underway).
Once installed for several weeks in a suburban Rome hotel to produce the
script, Ivens's team was also a buffer against the unfamiliar pressures of televi-
sion production, everything from the harassment of producers checking up on
daily output to the pressure of producing three uniform 45-minute episodes
(Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 253). The script emerged as a story that could be
read like a novel, rather than as a conventional 'decoupage'. Throughout the
whole process Mattei's presence and support were invaluable, another buffer
against the RAI bureaucracy as well as against his own ENI staff. Buffers or not,
the pressure must have been daunting to turn around a long three-part film
in five major locations in less than eight months and, aside from the eventual
censorship mess, it is not surprising that Ivens never returned to television
work.
Styles, concepts, and themes gradually emerged for a film that would be
both (i) a composite of four distinct episodes, set in different regions, with-
in three main parts, and (ii) a hybrid of many styles that reflected the group's
divergent experiences and energies, including: traditional Ivensian 'organ-
ized documentary'; an essayistic voice-over commentary with the traditional
literary provenance, this time including a contribution by Italy's most famous
writer Alberto Moravia; animation, both expository and playful; dramatised
personal narratives including a dream sequence featuring a traditional Iven-
sian boy mediator character; archival compilation; expository scientific dis-
courses; poetic landscape tropes, often aerial; music and song, both diegetic
and non-diegetic; and emerging interactive idioms of direct cinema, coloured
by a pinch of Brechtian aesthetics (especially in the Lucania episode, accord-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
ing to the director's marginal script notes [JIA]). Ivens saw this complexi-
ty as a major innovation of the film and wrote Fiszer (1960, JIA) that 'This is
not an academic line, conformist [...] rather, it's bursting/hopping, like in a
circus program - and the continuity of the numbers has my own secret log-
ic as circus director. [...] This is a form and style entirely new for Italy, even
for other countries I think'. It was indeed new, but as a hybrid-composite Ita-
lia echoed earlier equally ambitious encyclopedic works like First Years and
Lied, and anticipated Ivens's future concepts for Mistral, arguably Comment
Yukongdiplaca les montagnes (How YukongMoved the Mountains, 1976, France,
718), and ultimately Histoire. This time, for once, Ivens's technological outlay
was state of the art. Moreover the proto-verite triumph of La Seine had paved
the way for further experimentation with emerging styles of direct cinema,
no doubt under the pressure of his youthful collaborators: Italia became the
first Ivens film to use the emerging interactive synch-sound interview tech-
niques along with fluid and subjective camera handling and sensitive stocks 435
(although the work continued to be in 35mm). All the same Ivens was intent
on distinguishing his new film from what he already perceived as the abuses
of the direct on television:
Discuter style. Beaucoup des interv. a la tli ou non. Nousferons un film.
[Let's discuss style. Lots of TV-style interviews or not. We are making a
film.] Interviews slow up the film. And also it is the methods of direct
reportage of TV and we should not compete with that. Find our own style
of TV interview, commentaire, dialogue, voix intirieur [commentary, dia-
logue, internal voice]. (Ivens n.d., [c.1959], notes, JIA)
The interviews in fact go against the grain of corporate sponsorship with their
unflinching exploration of poverty in the shadow of the oil derricks and refin-
ery stacks, especially in the Lucanian episode, where three major synch-sound
interview segments itching to move beyond their tripods feel remarkably
prophetic for the period. This is not to mention the dramatised journalistic
interviewing by a TV journalist performer, a typical Ivensian mediator, that
performs mostly scripted exposition throughout the film.
In general Ivens was inspired by the challenge of the new medium of tele-
vision and recognised that the first episode would determine the audience for
the entire package:
First film should be amusant, interessant, beaucoup des attraction, pas trop
d'histoire seche, pas trop de theories, de schema, pas trop de propagande ENI.
Ilfaut que le public aime le premierfilm, pour etre interesse aux 2 autres.
[amusing, interesting, lots of attraction, not too much dry history, not too
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
many theories, schemas, not too much ENI propaganda. The public must
like the first film, in order to be interested in the two other ones.] - must
get attention of audience in first 3 minutes. (Ivens n.d., [c.1959], notes,
JIA)
Still, for all of the seduction of TV and the direct, this luminous 35mm black-
and-white hybrid essay anthology retained much of the reliance on the proven
formulas and time-tested aesthetic sensibility of Ivens's previous work.
Thematically, building from the already confrontational tone of the title -
defiantly announcing the advent of Italy's much-vaunted 'economic miracle'
against the traditional stereotypes - and continuing in the vein of the 'third
world' discourses shaped in Indonesia and China despite its production in a
'developed' country, Ivens shaped Italia as another riff on the theme of the
dichotomies of the industrial urban north and the rural south - both domesti-
436 I cally and globally. The discourse around rural poverty, especially in Southern
Italy, was very visible in both sound and image, and is also said to have been a
factor in the eventual RAI censorship of the film (Ivens, interview with author,
April 1978). The first part Fuochi della val Padana (Fire in the Po Valley) would
treat the northern, industrialised riverine region that Ivens had twice attempt-
ed to develop as a documentary focus, this time exploring the extraction and
use of methane. The second part comprised two episodes spanning the north-
south divide, the first Due citta (Two Cities), devoted to the petroleum industry
in another northern region, the adjacent Adriatic ports of Venice and Raven-
na, and organised through the eyes and dreams of the above-mentioned boy,
and the second La storia di due alberi (Story of Two Trees), focusing on south-
ern Lucania in which poor peasant families depending on a single olive tree
recognise their hope for economic benefits embodied in a 'Christmas tree',
the fire-breathing metal contraption erected above natural gas outlets. It is in
this episode that the synch-sound interviews with peasant subjects left out in
the cold by Italy's post-war economic surge come together as a rather effective
undermining of the corporate discourse. Part III Appuntamento a Gela (Meet-
ing in Gela), is set in Sicily, and synthesises the north-south theme in a person-
alised marriage narrative allegorically uniting a northern oilrig worker with a
young local woman. The final three-part 'director's version' clocked in at 11o
minutes, by far the longest film Ivens had directed to date in his career, and
arguably the one where a generous budget is most visible on the screen.
The first section on methane production around the Po evokes many of
Ivens's earlier works in its celebration of technology, industrial processes,
and landscapes - from his corporate commissions like Philips-Radio to his
socialist solidarity epics like First Years. In keeping with his objective of grab-
bing and retaining the attention of the tele-spectator, it has a charged magical
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
atmosphere, accented by night-time cinematography of industrial landscapes
a la Komsomol, and livened by a festival aura, charming didactic animation
featuring dinosaurs and dynamic 3D maps, an archival interlude where the
idea of methane exploitation is traced back to the Italian resistance, and a cli-
mactic scene where everyone is doused baptismally with black gold (a hom-
age to Staroye i novoye's [The General Line, Eisenstein, 1929, USSR, 121] and
Bip Parkinson's celebrations of technology in their respective cream separator
sequences?).
74. L'Italia non e un paese povero (196o):
In 'Fire in the Po Valley,' a magical
atmosphere celebrates technology through
a child's eyes. DVD frame capture. ENI.
© CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens. 437
The two-part next section continues the lyrical night-time glorification of
machines and tubes, this time the refining, import, and consumption infra-
structure on the northeast coast, considerable local colour around the urban
setting of Venice, and a 'surreal' narrative thread. In this a boy dreams of his
industrial surroundings and flies through the air, thanks to superimposition,
giving the filmmakers the pretext for elegant point-of-view aerial glides over
the dreamlike nocturnal landscape of smokestacks and flames. The anchor-
ing of a didactic exposition in the eyes of an 'innocent' outsider can be traced
back in Ivens's oeuvre to Komsomol and would become the basic structural
trope in his city film Rotterdam: the specific figure of the exemplary prepubes-
cent boy has his ancestors in Power and the Land (1940, USA, 33) and First Years
(the kid even interviews an engineer, just like in the latter film's Bulgarian epi-
sode), not to mention of course Flaherty's Louisiana Story (1948, USA, 78) from
the beginning of the decade.22 The second episode of the second section, 'The
Two Trees', relies a little less on well-trodden paths, since it's the place of the
assemblage's clearest technical and aesthetic experimentation, most notably
with direct-cinema interview techniques (Ivens's Italian research and shoot
was happening just slightly before Richard Leacock's cinematography for Pri-
mary [Robert Drew, 1960, USA, 60] and a few months before Chronique d'un
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
ete). Their energy must have in no small way been facilitated by Ivens's young-
er Italian collaborators' gifts of sociability: the very Ivensian mise-en-scene nar-
rative of a community around its symbolic communal olive tree is larded with
interviews with the Lucanian village inhabitants, onsite in their crowded and
bare homes, in scenes that are poignantly reminiscent of Borinage, with the
cumulative effect, as in the Belgian film from almost three decades earlier, of
denouncing the extreme poverty of their lives. The local peasants are shown
as distrustful of the new technology and natural resources, but the team cer-
tainly secured their trust in the filming process. The interviews are stiff but
interactive and eloquent, addressed to the filmmaker behind the camera and
crammed with material data of lives lived, from exorbitant rent payments to
communal family meals. Especially vivid is one sequence set in Matera (Basil-
icata) in a woman's cave dwelling, wherein she feeds her extended family, sec-
onded by the knife-waving theatrics of her bread-slicing mother (-in-law?),
438 and delivers a peripatetic performance about both her inadequate accommo-
dation and her numerous young children eating from their communal bowl
on camera. The use of direct sound, however rudimentary, and its minimal
outlay of actual lip-sync takes well-disguised by cutaway editing, was no doubt
urged by Ivens's young collaborators and enabled by their social talent. It was
of course facilitated as well as by ENI equipment outlay, despite the relative-
ly early stage in the emergence of synch-sound portable equipment.23 It is
especially notable in this 35mm work, all the more within a national cinema
without any direct sound recording culture to speak of, where even the fiction
film industry scarcely ever used synch sound. One can see the film then as a
quantum leap past the single-system classicism of La Seine and Before Spring -
although this important issue has scarcely been acknowledged in the Ivens's
literature nor even in Ivens's own accounts.
75. L'Italia non e un paese povero (1960): in
the Lucania episode, corporate discourse
is undermined by pioneering synch-sound
interviews with cave-dwelling peasants
ignored by the 'Economic Miracle'. DVD
frame capture. ENI. © CAPI Films, Paris,
and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The final part of Italia, 'Meeting in Gela', takes place in Sicily. The boss had to
leave early for Rome for the editing of the earlier segments, so the Tavianis took
charge of the remaining cinematography of the script that Ivens had prepared
with them. Although the segment includes more interviewing of social actors
in the Sicilian fishing community affected by offshore prospecting, the most
notable thing about the part is the bucolic neorealist lyricism in the treatment
of this community and their lives (reminiscent of, if not explicitly citing, Vis-
conti's similar subject a decade earlier in La terra trema [The Earth Trembles,
1948, 152]). Concluding the film are the dramatised marriage narrative allego-
rising the unity of north and south, urban and rural, and, most striking from
the point of view of the scarred 21st-century planet, a euphorically prophetic
proposal of the development of nuclear energy to move beyond petroleum,
delivered through more animation and a Sicilian balladeer, a musical climax.
| 439
76. L'Italia non e un paese povero (1960): in -
the 'Two Trees' episode, serial adulterer
Ivens provides a conjugal overlay for
methane development in the South. DVD
frame capture. ENI. © CAPI Films, Paris,
and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
r6
The Tavianis' contribution ensured without a doubt the almost mystical cine-
matic sensibility of 'Meeting at Gela', infused with neorealist dramatisation,
but Ivens (letter to Fiszer, 1960, JIA) sensed their submission to his overall
scheme: 'They don't want to influence me, on the contrary they follow me like
a guide wire'. And the Tavianis' recollections confirmed both Ivens's overall
mentor role and their later departure in their own direction:
[Ivens] asked me and Vittorio to shoot the Sicilian episode while he
went back to Rome to do the editing of the first two parts. Obviously,
when you film on behalf of someone else, especially if it is somebody as
famous as Ivens, you try to work as he does. For instance, I've always been
impressed by Rossellini's Germania anno zero whose ending was half shot
by Carlo Lizzani, but still maintains the same style.
On the contrary, once we arrived in Sicily, the mythical setting of
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
some much loved films like Visconti's La terra trema and Germa's Il cam-
mino della speranza, we forgot Ivens's imprinting and got closer to fiction
cinema. When we sent our footage to Rome, we got a telegram from Ivens
saying, 'This material is great, but it's not a documentary, it is fiction
altogether'. Which was true because we had little by little moved away
from his shadow. Joris was a very important and useful figure in our lives
both personally and professionally. He taught Vittorio and me a certain
attitude towards cinema and towards life.
Once, while talking to Ivens about our future, he told us we should
opt for fiction, 'because you are definitely not documentarists'. (Paolo
Taviani, 2002, 106)
Mysticism and myth aside, one would like to reproach the Tavianis for the
hokey way that the development of petroleum in the south is cemented nar-
440 I ratively through the parallel matrimony subplot, but serial adulterer Ivens
himself had provided a similar conjugal overlay for 'Two Trees' (a betrothed
30-something peasant couple, who have already played flirt-tag around the
eponymous olive tree, grip hands and smile lustily into each other's eyes as
the methane well flames). It must be remembered that the trope of parallel
allegorical conjugality had become familiar in Ivens's Power, was then reca-
pitulated with unapologetic sentimentality in First Years and Windrose, and
would soon resurface in Nanguila, and Valparaiso.
In any case, the end result of these intense eight months of collective
effort was a highly polished and intricately sutured trilogy. But the master's
touch did not stop PROA, the production company, and RAI from getting out
their hatchets and bringing on one of the most traumatising post-production
episodes of Ivens's career. It is said that the state network objected to certain
of the film's leftist innuendos, especially in the third Sicilian section, and in
an interview in August, Ivens attributed the problems to the incompatibility of
the interview material with television standards (Autrusseau, 1960). Mattei is
said to have liked the film, proudly terming it a work of art, but the besieged
CEO was no longer around to support his star artist employee. RAI in cahoots
with PROA producer Federico Valli (credited as producer) had already come
up by March with a broadcast version that seriously truncated the film in the
director's view and was 'impossible to show'. The Lucania episode was espe-
cially disfigured, with the result according to Ivens of an 'agglomeration of
scenes and images' that the TV viewer would not understand, with 'sequenc-
es dislocated, without proportion, without any logic, relations or rhythm',
in short 'without any sense'. Episode III had fared better, with the personal
narrative remaining, but still reflected an overload of technical details and a
'limping' visual impact that would distract the viewer from the central theme.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Ivens argued, somewhat naively it seems, that ENI's public image was at stake,
futilely offered a revised continuity for the Lucania episode, and concluded
with an ultimatum that he was prepared to withdraw his name from the epi-
sode (Ivens, letter to Valli, 28 March 1960, JIA). It seems to have been a dialogue
of the deaf and, cut off from his patron and packing his bags for Mali, Ivens
sought legal advisers who negotiated the credit 'fragments from a film by Joris
Ivens' for the broadcast that finally took place in July 1960, late at night, with
Ivens already deeply ensconced in Nanguila.
Damage control was the only recourse that remained: he sent Valli the
plaintive rejoinder 'I must make other films now, at my age one is in a hurry
- the insane behaviour of Mr. F has made me lose time and moreover spoiled
my chance in 1960 to realize my greatest artistic dream "Le Mistral" (not to
mention my financial losses)' (Ivens, letter to Valli, 1960, JIA). A year later Ivens
had still not moved on, with telegrams still circulating about the 'insult' and
the last-ditch plea: 1 441
I find myself in the position of a writer who gave you a manuscript that
you didn't want to publish. It is not successful in its overall version. Now
I request, supported by a clause in my contract with you, to give me a full
copy of the film, specially developed on Kodak stock, and which I saw in
Rome at the end of my work. I am very attached to this film, because I
discovered new paths for the development of documentary film and also
for the on-site TV-interview - I would like a copy of this film in my private
collection. (Ivens, letter to Valli, September 1961, JIA)
But Ivens had perhaps learned his lesson and had already secretly looked after
this scenario, with Brass appropriating a print of his full version of the film
and sending it in a diplomatic bag to the Cindmatheque franaise for its pres-
ervation and future use in the Ivens collections... alongside First Years.
Italia belongs to that category of Ivens works that have little career out-
side of specialised posthumous screenings organised by the Ivens estate: New
York, Italy, etc. Bakker (1999) suggests the mixed impact it had 40 years after
its production, with 'some parts forceful, some obsolete' and cryptically sug-
gesting its articulation of the 'dialectic evolution of Ivens's ideology when
compared with previous works made in the early fifties in Eastern Europe'.
Ivens's other countryman Wim Verstappen (1964, 34) offered a more cinemat-
ic appreciation:
Italia: unfocused camera position, & primitively lit scenes, but also fine
work with helicopter shots, in one of which from relative cu of face until
one sees whole factory (before Lawrence ofArabia). These bird's-eye views
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
are not just an effect but are justified when a little boy dreams of flying
over Italy.
Moreover, he identifies 'like elsewhere, [Ivens's] apparent nonchalance
hiding a deliberate dramaturgy', perhaps chancing upon the filmmaker's
ambivalence about vdritd. Grelier's (1965) response is more enthusiastic, espe-
cially about the Sicilian marriage sequence shot by the Tavianis, but express-
es reserves about the dehumanising effect of the electronic score provided by
composer Gino Marinuzzi, the pioneer of electronic music and distinguished
film composer (a Renoir ex-collaborator) who rounded out the prestige pro-
ject's high-end team.
Ultimately, one can judge this anomalous and aesthetically refined work
as an honest, fervent, and inventive commission. Anomalous for both its syn-
chronisation and its being out of step with its era at the same time, Italia was
442 I undercut, as the pattern at this point in the career of our globetrotter increas-
ingly dictated, as much by the absence of authorial follow-up as by the lack of
artistic control. This does not prevent its appropriation by Tosi (2002a) and
others to the Italian national canon, both the documentary canon and the left-
wing or progressive tradition, despite its corporate provenance, if only because
of its pedagogical deployment/marshalling of its young interns. Its road-mov-
ie north-to-south homage to both vanishing and emerging landscapes, all the
while enunciating an eloquent if discreet critique of the 'economic miracle',
likewise confirms its interest beyond the museum. Historically speaking, for
all its hybridity and eclecticism, the work occupies a prophetic positioning at
a transitional moment in the emergence of direct cinema, and offers poignant
footnotes to the sagas of state television documentary in Western Europe and
America - a way to go and a way not to go. It is also an elder's contribution to
alternative canons of 'third world' and Marxist cinematic interventions in the
era of new waves and young cinemas. If today, its environmental innocence
is perhaps most disturbingly evident, however anachronistic this response
must be, its enduring power is couched in fervent humanist construction of
everyday lives and livelihoods. It is not clear if Ivens was thinking of these con-
siderations as he was observing the African village or the Cuban human geog-
raphies that were next on his agenda, but the wounds were seemingly deep
and long-lasting.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
MALI: DEMAIN ANANGUILA
The clerk resumed, 'In the agricultural sector, we need to get organized.
We have to create schools for rural practices. In this way a generation of
enlightened peasants will be born, which will rise up itself against the
routine and age-old methods. There are so many things to do, so many
things to do'.
- Seydou Badian Kouyat, Sous lorage (1957)
Nanguila usually gets short shrift in Ivens studies, partly because it is so inac-
cessible, and partly because, as a brief episode between major adventures in
Italy and Cuba, this film could seem to have been a hit-and-run assignment
that involved only five weeks on location and reportedly little participation in
the final editing.
Still, Nanguila is a handsome and ambitious 50-minute semi-documenta- I 443
ry, Ivens's first film in 16mm and fourth in colour, and a commission that he
plunged into with his usual energy and commitment. What is more, as the only
film he made on the African continent, it alone allows us to say that the 'Flying
Dutchman' made a film on every inhabited continent. Another socialist real-
ist-shaped narrative of social policy and construction experienced through the
story of an exemplary hero who embodies the future of his/her country, the
project was caught up in the excitement of the summer of independence for
seventeen sub-Saharan countries, in particular in what would be confirmed
later that year as the newly independent Republic of Mali. Echoing Ivens's feel-
ings and perceptions from earlier encounters with Indonesia, the new Eastern
European 'democracies' and revolutionary China, and anticipating those he
would utter later that year in Havana, the ever enthusiastic filmmaker spoke
to Paris journalists of 'great changes playing out in people's minds', 'the first
stammerings', and a 'great event' (Lachize, 1960) - though he was careful to
use the word 'evolution' rather than 'revolution', having noted that the locals
retained traditional chief-centered hierarchies and lacked Cuba's class con-
sciousness (Ivens, production notes, JIA).
Nanguila has recently been revived in African festivals, embraced as one
of the pioneering films of African cinema, even the first fiction film made with
national resources within the future cinematic hotbed of Mali, a country being
born even as Ivens was on its soil.24 The production company, Socite fran-
co-africaine de cinma, was an outfit of cultural cooperation, based in Paris
and Abidjan, put together by two French sisters' producer Gisele Rebillon and
scriptwriter Catherine Varlin (Winter), a Jewish former Resistance fighter and
journalist with Humanit.25 Based on the extensive networks Varlin had devel-
oped in her Humanite days with the African pro-independence activists now
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
lined up to lead the new countries, the firm organised Afrique 1960, a series of
eleven short documentaries, each devoted to one of the new nations emerging
out of French West, Central, and Equatorial Africa. The series was financed by
contributions from the new governments with the support of a French TV net-
work and Air France, and developed from Varlin script contributions. Varlin's
deal with the Fdration du Mali for a 16mm Kodachrome medium-length
film was negotiated at the initiative of Seydou Badian Kouyat, a medical doc-
tor, novelist, and newly appointed Minister of the Rural Economy in Bamako,
close to the Marxist president Modibo Keita.26 The Federation's contribution
of over 65 million African francs approximated the not insubstantial amount
of almost $270,000. Badian Kouyate (interview with author, January 2013) did
not know Ivens's films, surprisingly, but was an admirer of revolutionary Chi-
na, like Ivens, and his vision of rural renewal clearly echoes Maoist policy of
the day.27 Varlin already knew the country well, and the documentary project
444 on agricultural development was developed jointly by Badian Kouyat and her.
As producer, Rebillon 28 hired cinematographer Louis Miaille, who was already
in West Africa finishing Rouch's docufiction feature La Pyramide humaine (The
Human Pyramid, 1961, 90), and Ivens was recruited just as Italia was winding
down in March.
Newly arrived a month later, Ivens and a crewmember spotted a young
civil servant in the agricultural sector, the eighteen-year-old Moussa Sidib,
engaged in putting up a tin roof, and recruited him for liaison and logistics
as well as Bambara-French-Bambara translation. Sidib quickly became indis-
pensable mediating with participants: 'I had very enriching and instructive
contacts with the Africans, and I had to take their suggestions into account.
Sidibe, our lead actor, was a marvelous collaborator through the whole film-
ing. He organised and directed all the scenes that we filmed in Bambara'
(Baby, 1960). Ivens recognised his potential onscreen as well, offering him
first a screen test and then the role of the narrative's protagonist based on his
own name (Sidibe, 2010). Beneficiary of this mentorship, Sidibe would soon
appear in another semi-documentary short on the same theme Le Retour de
Tidman (Djibril Kouyate, 1970, Mali, 40) and be appointed Assistant Director
of Mali's new Centre national de production cindmatographique. Confirming
Ivens's legendary pedagogical knack for identifying local talent, Sidibe is now
recognised as one of the pioneers of Malian cinema.29
While the Ivens Foundation asserts that Ivens was not involved in the edit-
ing of the film, there is evidence that he participated both in the editing of
Varlin's commentary text, fine-tuning and compressing, and in the Paris stu-
dio recording of the voice tracks. There his old associate Roger Pigaut read
the commentary, and Sidibe, brought in for the occasion for the three-day ses-
sion in July, read and improvised non-sync dialogue and further commentary,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
backed up by local Malian students for additional voices. All the more reason
that this survey of the economic and personal challenges of African indepen-
dence, boy-meets-irrigation-dam (and girl) variety, must be seen both as an
Ivens utterance no less than many others of his works and as a typical collab-
oration with a local subject - with pride of place within the category of Ivens
'commissions' (rather than those films like Mistral built on Ivens's original
personal concepts, production, and research development).
Not surprisingly though, the recent recyclers of Nanguila have not always
cast this archival treasure as an Ivens work, rather see it through new eyes,
valuing the way it
shows the efforts of a newly independent African country to construct its
development on the basis of agriculture, emphasizing solidarity through
human investments. Demain a Nanguila denounces the rural exodus
following independence and inscribes the brave tendencies of the then 445
authorities to halt the negative impact of the rush of young people
towards the urban centres. The film aspires to be the mirror of socio-ed-
ucative norms, of the formation of young people in the rural milieu, and
the efforts of conflict resolution in the traditional setting. Women appear
in the film bending under the weight of multiple domestic and agricul-
tural tasks. In the background, one can see in this film [...] the architec-
tural pearls of Bamako. The Maison des artisans, the Great Market, the
train station, the National Assembly and the Vox Cinema. Through this
precursor film, we see Bamako after dark, and the rural populations' fas-
cination with the itinerant cinema, a powerful means of entertainment
and of the awakening of mass awareness. (Africine.org, 2012)
The basic outlines of these narratives and themes had been hammered out
before Ivens came on board and hit the ground running in Bamako in early
May. There in cooperation with the Fddration authorities, the director con-
ducted Ivens-style location, casting, and thematic reconnaissance around the
capital and its surrounding countryside, observing, taking notes, and shaping
the skeletal outline in concert with their new recruit Sidib. The authorities'
mark may be felt not only in the theme of the reinvigoration of traditional agri-
culture but also in the presence onscreen of an adult re-education centre, a
facility for the migrant rural youth flooding the city: street youth and movie
fan Sidibe is an inmate and returns to the Centre at the end of the film after
his visit to Nanguila. After Bamako, the filmmakers headed for their intensive
three-week shoot in Nanguila, a remote agricultural village on the banks of the
Upper Niger 6o kilometres from the capital.
Typically, the final film abounds in a lyrical apperception of the natural
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
elements of this newly discovered land, in the particular the great river waters,
and several aerial views of the village are part of the formula. In Nanguila, the
intense heat permitted shooting only in the morning and evening, but the pro-
cesses of liaison with the local community leaders, scripted scenes shot with
Sidibe, and observational scenes depicting everyday life and work, were car-
ried out with great efficiency by the crew of six European technicians and eight
Africans. Vivid documentation of both agriculture and fishing toolk place,
including the standard motifs around modernisation as a boon to local econo-
mies and a proto-feminist interest in women's labour. Ivens's fascination with
traditional work rekindled his early flair for the cinematic capture of work: a
stunning sequence showing the sowing of peanuts in the dry earth, a hand-
held high-angle close-up camera following first a single sower as he stoops to
insert one after another a seed in the soil and then tamp down the excavation
with his bare foot in a single harmonious and efficient gesture, is as simple
446 as it is typical of the film as a whole. Thereupon the camera draws back and
entire choreographed line of sowers in the same posture is shown. This is
not the only echo of Zuiderzee in the film, for the climax depicts the collective
building of an irrigation dam to harness the seasonal waters of the Niger, a
frenzied festival-like enterprise that is a symbolic test of Sidibe's commitment
to his roots and his chosen future. Sidibe's experience, mostly fictional, was
developed as a 'connective thread' to maintain the audience's attention and
'allowed [Ivens] to show the aspects of the village life that were the most strik-
ing for him' (Autrusseau, 1960).
77. Demain a Nanguila (1960): 18-year-old
Sidibe, Ivens's well-chosen exemplary
protagonist, flirts with his village
inamorata. DVD frame capture. Original in
colour. © Sofracima (Pascal Winter)/CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Ivens was especially interested in the governance of the community, the 'pal-
abres', the long village council discussions through which collective decisions
were made and carried out by elders, elaborated through much repetition
and oral performance. Following the example of Badian Kouyatd's brilliant
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
and under-rated pre-Independence novel Sous l'orage (Under the Storm, 1957),
epigraphed above, which also gives unstintingly attention to elders and their
deliberations over the traumatising social changes they are facing, the film-
makers captured the chiefs performing their own roles in these leisurely and
deliberate palabres and integrated them twice into the plot. The councils
are shown deciding together to re-admit Sidibe to the community after his
transgressive exile in the capital and later pronouncing on their communi-
ty's 'human investment' in the dam. When Ivens's East German friend Hans
Wegner (1965, 197) expressed doubts about the pacing in Nanguila, he was no
doubt befuddled by his friend's commitment to find a cinematic equivalent
of the host culture's respect for both its elders and its inherited democrat-
ic process - not to mention the culturally shaped expectations around tem-
po, narrative, and representation belonging to the intended audience, often
uninitiated to the cinema, within that culture.
447
78. Demain a Nanguila (1960): Ivens was
fascinated by the Mali village's traditional ,
governance through elders' council
meetings. DVD frame capture. Original in
colour. © Sofracima (Pascal Winter)/CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
An unexpected marriage ceremony was also filmed and likewise integrated
into the backdrop of the narrative, adding to the colourful mosaic of music
and dance woven kinetically into the film, both diegetic and laid over.30 Typical
of Ivens's films of this period, the cinematography combines the mise-en-scene
of 'documentaire organise' and handheld mobile 'reportage' with a small cam-
era to the extent that it was allowed by the 16mm colour format. Conscious of
the colonial legacy of 'lions, crocodiles and elephants, these eternal elements
of films on Africa', Ivens's shooting notes (1960, JIA) reflect his intent to avoid
the trap of the 'picturesque' and the 'exotic' and to 'show on the contrary what
people there want to know about us and what we should seek to know of them:
daily life'.
Direct synchronised sound was neither attempted nor even available,
though much non-sync wild sound was effectively made use of in the editing,
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
not only of the vivid singing and dancing that is part of everyday life, but also
of the voices of the palabres. The whole has laid over it the slightly talky com-
mentary that Ivens finalised with Varlin, not without considerable frank input
from the filmmaker into the journalist's output, critical about both form and
politics:
too involved, not written for peasant of Sudan,
too much text, too many words
not simple enough - too intellectual, spoils the effect of the image
Does not create unity of style with the music and image and sound
- everything is a bit on its own, lives its own life, without taking into
account the image and the montage
- the montage is for a film for them - the text is for the Paris public -
and with the thought what will my pals in Paris say [...] too soft on
448 I colonialism, too precious. (Ivens, notes to Varlin, 1960, JIA)
One of the soundtrack's major distinctions was a strategy not uncommon
in films from this period on the cusp of direct cinema, ranging from Robert
Frank's Pull My Daisy (1959, USA, 30) to Rouch's Moi, un noir (I, a Negro, 1958,
70): the voice of the silently filmed character retroactively performing a com-
bination of commentary and non-sync dramatic dialogue, in alternation with
the expository commentary. The latter precedent, released theatrically four
months earlier in April 1960, was immediately recognised by contemporary
critics of Nanguila (France-Soir 1960). The following is a typical back-and-
forth, both dramatic and didactic, from Pigaut's information to Sidib's spon-
taneous 'internal voice':
Sidibe: (about the Centre) They'll be well housed in this building. With
stones, it'll be solid. And cool.
Those two friends, they're keeners.
There have always been these guys who are keeners.
When the little white guys said 'one, two, jump', there they went. 'To
work, and fast...'
I don't like guys who are keeners. They are just bootlickers for the 'tou-
babs'.
Myself, I don't get keen... for anyone.
Commentator: The women of Nidndbald, the village next to the centre,
come bringing their grain to grind. The first happy surprise is over:
already for three months they know this: you can thresh your millet oth-
erwise than in the mortar.
Sidibe: That's a beautiful machine. If I go back to the village... But I don't
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
want to go back to the village... And when is it that they'll have a plough
over there? There's no way I'm going back to the bush...
Judging from Grelier's (1965, 104) reaction to the commentary track in the
early sixties, however, the alternating strategy did not save the soundtrack
from the ignominy of 'false literature' nor the film from other liabilities. Gre-
lier found the commentary too long as well, and the story guilty of too much
mediation of foreigners and scriptwriters when it could have benefited from
more improvisation on the part of Sidibe. Moreover Grelier found two black-
and-white intertextual sequences distracting, namely the opening film-with-
in-a-film at the Vox Cinema in Bamako, a black-and-white noir shoot-em-up,3'
and the newsreel shown by an itinerant cinema set up in Nanguila at the end
of the film as if to reward them for their dam-building project, a stiff but
luminous black-and-white account of the new president Keito dismounting
from his motorcade and greeting rural citizens welcoming him to their vil- 449
lage. Still Nanguila's strengths in documentary materials, landscapes, music,
and dance were clear to the critic, though he acknowledged that Africans,
not Europeans, were the film's target audience. For his part, Wegner (1965)
observed the obvious liability that the filmmakers had not really had enough
time to study local conditions. Verstappen (1964) had a cinephile take on the
film, justly praising the camerawork and the mastery of colour, and singling
out the sequence showing Sidibe hitchhiking from the capital to Nanguila for
its deft and agreeably unpredictable mise-en-scene. Schoots ([1995] 2000, 263)
provides one of his most obtuse and misinformed film appreciations: 'one of
Ivens's least successful works: too superficial and not particularly interesting
visually'.
The Malian premiere took place in 1961 at the same Vox Cinema in Bam-
ako as is featured in the film, with Badian Bouyatd and President Keito in
attendance. Whether Nanguila's 1960s local audiences agreed with the Euro-
pean critics cannot be determined, for the film's domestic circulation is not
well documented. Nevertheless, it is clear that the new republic did not follow
the Bulgarian pattern of shelving the film, for several secondary reports indi-
cate that 'in Mali the film was a big success. It went in a screening van through
the country. For many people in the villages it was the first time they could see
a film on a big screen' (European Foundation Joris Ivens n.d.). This account is
all the more plausible, given the self-reflexive excursus that shows within the
film itself a rural screening event in Nanguila, set up out of a roving cinema
truck, in apparent anticipation of how the film was intended to be used, detail-
ing the newsreel program and the villager's smiling reactions. According to
Sidibe (2010), the production led to subsidies for training film animators and
otherwise stimulated Malian cinematic production and culture: the Office
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
cindmatographique national du Mali was founded by the new government in
1962, and Sidibe's career was launched.
As for the film's prospects in France, the heavy-handed scissors of the
French censors, nervous about Algeria no doubt, excised from Varlin's com-
mentary a key synthetic reflection intended for the conclusion of the film:
'Africa is no longer in the European shopping bag. They are no longer selling it
at the market. They will no longer feed on is substance'. Without this critique,
the denouement of Sidibe's return to his friends at the institution ends up
more open-ended than intended. The film's career elsewhere is also difficult
to pin down. Other than the special screening in Paris that Sofracima organ-
ised later in 1960 (Mundell, 2005b), Sidibd (2010) and Wegner (1965, 197) refer
to its screening at the Moscow documentary festival the following summer.
Of this there is little record other than a Sadoul (1961) review, which praised
the film as 'remarkably human and deeply moving', despite an unsatisfactory
450 I commentary that was mercifully drowned by the Russian simultaneous trans-
lation. The film likely played Leipzig as well, since the East German archives
testify to its presence in that country. Otherwise the film is largely absent from
Ivens retrospectives over the years, and its revival in the 21st century on its fif-
tieth anniversary was long overdue. That such a 'minor' film, regrettably not
included in the Ivens box set, should be recycled and vindicated almost two
decades after Ivens's death augurs well for other neglected 'minor' works that
stand by for reclamation in the 21st century. Action Stations (1943, Canada, 50)
or Mein Kind or Ciel anyone?
CUBA: CARNET DE VIAJE, UN PUEBLO ARMADO
This young nation needs a brand new cinema... and it needs it quickly.
The cinema for a free people isn't a carnival sideshow. The screen is for
laughing and crying... the screen is for singing the sufferings of the past,
the struggles of yesterday, and the hopes of today. The Cuban cinema is
born... young filmmakers, young cinema, young nation... In Cuba every-
one is young.
In the fall of 1960, Ivens's next gig was a teaching-filmmaking visit to Cuba,
and this voice-over impression of the new Cuban cinema is the prologue to the
first of the two short films - Carnet and Pueblo - that resulted. The Cuban films
extended two of the major thematic currents of his career: Carnet surveyed the
accomplishments of the Revolution at the end of its second year, and Pueblo
focused on its defence against continuing external threats.
I would not like to make a claim for Ivens as a major formative influence
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
on the Cuban cinema any more than he had been on the Canadian, Indone-
sian, Polish, or Italian cinemas.32 By the fall of 1960, less than two years after
the Revolution, the Cuban cinema had already built up its own distinctive
momentum under the vigorous leadership of the Instituto cubano del arte y la
industria cinematogrdficos (ICAIC) and Alfredo Guevara, and of such already
established directors as Tomas Gutierrez Alea and Julio Garcia Espinosa. My
intent is merely to shed some light on the two lines of film history intersecting
at the point of Ivens's Cuban work - not only to flesh out this unique episode
in his career but also to suggest at the same time some of the parameters of the
exhilarating creative struggle taken up by Cuban documentarists in the early
days of the Revolution as reflected in his two films.
Although Carnet and Pueblo are very much the product of their Cuban con-
text, it is helpful first of all to locate them as 'Ivens films', as personal works
fully consistent with the evolution Ivens had been undergoing since his move
to Paris. 1 451
Ivens was in Mali when the invitation reached him in early 1960 from
Alfredo Guevara, head of the recently formed ICAIC. Ivens took the next few
months to finish his ongoing project, and headed immediately for Havana.
Once there, Ivens got to work without delay. The evening of his arrival, the
entire staff of ICAIC, already 300 strong, turned out for the lecture he had been
asked to make. The Cubans were aware of Ivens's prodigious reputation as a
political filmmaker but hardly knew his work at all: his East German epic, Lied,
a film on the world labour movement, had glimpsed a Cuban political pris-
oner and had some clandestine screenings before the Revolution, and a few
Cubans who had recently been to Europe had seen La Seine. Not untypical-
ly, the lecture was turned into a dialogue by the Cubans' impatience to get to
know their mythical visitor.
The next day, Ivens screened a copy ofLa Seine, found at the French embas-
sy, and engaged the ICAIC filmmakers in smaller sessions on the subject of
documentary theory and practice. That evening, Guevara took his guest over to
a cafe at the corner of 12th and 23rd Streets, where Fidel Castro had paused on
one of his evening rambles and was carrying on animated conversations with
50 fellow Cubans. Castro welcomed Ivens to Cuba, talked over his film proj-
ect with him, suggested a visit to the new Chaplin Cine-club which was about
to open (Ivens followed his advice and used a sequence shot there in Carnet),
evaluated the quality of a newly arrived shipment of Chinese rice, discussed
the idea of charging varying prices for seats in the Cine-club as a means of
accommodating the unmanageable crowds anticipated, suggested a second
film idea on the volunteer militia for Ivens, and sounded out Guevara on a plan
for improving the bus service to the Cine-club location during show times.
The arrangements for Ivens's filmmaking tour with a group of young ICA-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
IC filmmakers were finalised immediately and the third morning they set off
in a jeep on the tour of the island that is recounted in Carnet. Along with Ivens
were two camerapersons, two assistant operators, two assistant directors, a
business manager, and two portable 35mm cameras. This crew included Jorge
Herrera, later one of ICAIC's leading camerapersons and well known abroad
for having shot Manuel Octavio Gomez's La primera carga al machete (The First
Charge of the Machete, 1969, 84) and Humberto Sods's Cantata de Chile (1973-
1976, 119); Jorge Fraga, who went on to become a leading documentarist (La
nueva escuela [The New School, 1973, 89]) and later the programming head for
ICAIC; Jose Massip, who also went on to direct, including some prizewinning
documentaries about dance; Ramon Suarez, an operator who had directed a
few shorts under the old regime and was to shoot all of Gutierrez Alea's features
through Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968, 97)
before finally emigrating; and Alberto Roldan, an assistant director and future
452 I documentarist. The excursion was coordinated by Saul Yelin, ICAIC's Head of
International Relations. The filming was to be silent since Cuba's only sound
system at that time was being used in a major feature project already under-
way. A general outline had been drawn up for Carnet, but there was plenty of
room for improvisation.
For the second project on the People's Militia, the group waited until they
reached the mountainous Escambray region, where they were able to fol-
low a mopping-up offensive against bands of US-armed counter-revolution-
aries. After six weeks of filming (during the peak of the rainy season), the crew
returned to Havana and Ivens to Paris, the rushes under his arm, leaving Fraga
and the others to finish some shooting for both films. The material was pro-
cessed in Paris, a technically delicate matter Ivens said in a letter back to Yelin,
but only two of the shots were out of focus.
Other letters back to Havana requested additional material as the edit-
ing progressed, criticised with a firm professorial tone footage that was too
abstract, undefined, or lacking in variety and dynamism, and enthusiastical-
ly praised the rest. When the Cubans apologised for delays in returning the
required shots because of an imminent invasion, Ivens gently reminded them
of the crucial propaganda function envisioned for the two films, which were
to inform hundreds of millions of spectators of Cuba's strength. The material
was finally finished in early 1961, and Fraga came to Paris to help Ivens put
the finishing touches on the editing and the sonorisation. Harold Gramatges,
the Cuban ambassador to Paris, was persuaded to compose a score for the two
films, the one for Carnet including a large amount of Cuban folk music.
The French censors swooped down the moment Garance Films' Pigaut
tried to release the films that same year, demanding and getting the excision
of all unfriendly references to the US. Although denied a commercial distribu-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
tion license (Grelier, 1965), the films eventually reached a substantial public
in French political and cine-club circles in this censored form and among the
domestic Cuban public in their undiluted Spanish versions.
In Europe, they served alongside perhaps better-known auteur films as an
introduction to the achievements of the fledgling Revolution. In fact, Ivens,
arriving eighteen months after the Revolution in September 1960, was the
first of a procession of European and North American filmmakers who came
to Cuba to film the transformations happening. Richard Leacock shot his one-
hour 'ABC Close-up' special Yanki, No! for Robert Drew Associates later that
same year, broadcast in December.33 Marker shot his iCuba si! (1961, France,
53) the next month, the Soviet veteran Mikhail Kalatozov shot his virtuosic
docu-fiction Soy Cuba (IAm Cuba, 1964, 141) in 1962,34 and Agnes Varda shot
her Salut les Cubains (30) in January 1963. Marker's and Varda's lively films are
alike in principally addressing European audiences, for example countering
stereotypes and disinformation, and benefiting from more versatile technical 453
means with their imported equipment, especially sound recording deployed
in capturing the vitality of Cuban music. Marker's film, profiting from an
in-depth analysis and sustained observation allowed by its 53-minute length,
was also distinguished by its long interviews with Castro, its almost voyeuris-
tic fascination with the quirks of popular culture, and its update on the Bay of
Pigs invasion that took place in April 1962 - and was suppressed in France for
its trouble. Varda's shorter film, very personal and told entirely in stills, has
invaluable historical interest as a celebration of Cuban cinema, featuring then
unknown director Sara Gomez dancing for the camera.35
Ivens's films Carnet and Pueblo on the other hand reflect the sobriety,
limited means, and urgency of the still fresh revolutionary context. All of the
thematic preoccupations of the Cuban cinema in its early years, when ICA-
IC production was overwhelmingly dominated by the documentary mode,
emerge in the two films. A memorable sequence in the latter film, for example,
demonstrates the top priority of promoting the national literacy campaign: an
illiterate recruit is learning to write, a close-up catching his rough peasant's
hand firmly guided by the hand of his teacher. The early emphasis on hous-
ing and cooperatives is also reflected in one of Carnet's better sequences, an
intense before-and-after treatment of a fishing village literally transformed by
the introduction of a cooperative. The same film also echoes the early inter-
est of Cuban documentarists in experimental forms of popular democracy, an
interest that had resulted in Gutierrez Alea's film Asamblea general (General
Assembly, 1960, 14) about a 1960 mass meeting of one million Cubans in Hava-
na. Carnet contained footage of the same mass meeting as well as of the popu-
lar demonstrations that were an important political forum during the period.
Ivens's two films in general express the concomitant feelings of extreme
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
urgency and of euphoria which were prevalent in the filmmaking community
in the early years. Cuban filmmakers felt very much involved in a race against
the inevitable Bay of Pigs; they saw their films as essential to the survival of the
Revolution and exulted in this new conception of the role of the filmmaker
in Cuban society. Pueblo contains angry denunciations of US interference in
Latin America, including footage of sugar fields set ablaze by incendiary rock-
ets and close-ups of US labels on captured weapons (shots almost identical to
those in Spanish Earth 20 years earlier denouncing Nazi arms in Spain). There
is also footage of the militant anti-American demonstrations in Havana late in
1960 in which Chase Manhattan, the United Fruit Company and the others are
'buried' in a procession of symbolic coffins. The nationalisation of US com-
panies having been completed, Cubans knew retaliation would not be long in
coming.
454
79. Carnet de Viaje (1961): showing the
militant and celebratoiy anti-American t
demonstrations (Havana, 1960) in which
US corporations are 'buried' in symbolic
coffins. Frame enlargement, courtesy Eye
Film Institute. © ICAIC, Havana/CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
In this context, Ivens revealed in the 198os that he was more involved in the
defence and dissemination of the Revolution than had originally been appar-
ent (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 264-269). In addition to the work he undertook
with the young Cuban documentarists, he was engaged in training and sup-
plying guerilla filmmakers from all over Latin America, until Moscow through
Havana brought an end to such 'adventurism' in favour of electoral initiatives.
Later, Ivens spent some weeks giving emergency instruction in combat cine-
matography within the Cuban army. Ivens was fond of reminiscing about the
spirit and investment of his students in this subject, most of whom were work-
ers and peasants without any formal education. 40 trainees shared a single
camera among them, a Bolex-like Payar, and fifteen successfully graduated
the first year. Ivens provided them with 25 homemade wooden models of the
Eymo camera, weighted with lead so as to have the correct feel. The students
would stage mock battles with their fake cameras and guns, practicing their
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
combat techniques 'under fire' and afterwards telling their fellow students
what footage they had obtained. Ivens in return would enchant them with his
stories of real combat 20 years earlier on the Madrid front.
Of Ivens's two Cuban films, Carnet is the one which follows most closely
the travelogue pattern that appealed more to his French contemporaries. Lit-
erally tracking Ivens's progress around the country on his tour, the film first
shows each stage of the trip on a map sketched in front of the camera. Each
new location is used as the pretext for the exploration of yet another aspect of
the Revolution: education, culture, health care, defence, agriculture, industry,
and political organisation. Perhaps just as important in terms of the non-Cu-
ban public, each stopover also provides glimpses of the quality of life in the
abstract, the atmosphere both of normalcy and of preparedness: that Cubans
are happy and healthy, hard at work, and still fond of baseball, that children
are playing everywhere.
At each stopover, it is an exploration of the physical environment, usually I 455
an architectural one, that leads directly into the specific aspect of the Revolu-
tion to be highlighted. Panning shots of the skyline of Havana, for example,
lead into an analysis of the country's branch-plant economy before the Rev-
olution and then to a dynamic visual depiction of the act of nationalisation
itself. The posters and banners of the demonstrators are seen covering up the
signs of the US corporations; the procession of coffins announces the demise
of each corporation. Ivens intercuts all of this with shots taken from vehicles
moving through streets filled with life and energy. The viewer gets the impres-
sion of a busy, healthy society retaking possession of its own environment. A
similar procedure occurs in the Trinidad segment: a survey of the town's colo-
nial architecture leads to a recognition of the importance of the Cuban artistic
heritage and of how it must be preserved in a 'positive' way.
The sequences dealing with the marsh region of Zapata and with the fish-
ing cooperative at Manzanilla, are perhaps the most successful in tying the
physical landscape to the political landscape. In both cases, the visuals clearly
and simply pursue the basic before-and-after logic of the film. In the Zapata
sequence, the camera first moves about the marshes absorbing the landscape
and noting the penurious traditional industries of the region, finally moving
in on a new sight, a film of workers harvesting the rice which 'there had to be
a revolution to plant, yet which was so simple'. There are also some concise
but evocative glimpses of the local lumber industry with late afternoon light-
ing in a mill casting a romantic tinge on workers gathered about the saw. The
sequence concludes with the waterborne camera gliding up and down the new
canals to demonstrate the metamorphosis of a landscape in the wake of rev-
olution. Ivens always found this theme irresistible, with its potential for great
panoramas of earth-moving equipment and cranes. In the final shot, the cam-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
era eases out into open water past a tourist city being built on a platform above
the marsh, another new industry in view. The newly dredged canals remind-
ed Ivens of Holland. This reflection added to the commentary is one of the
frequent personal touches that reinforce the authenticity of this eyewitness
account and its essayistic flavour.
Ivens's cross section of the new Cuban society also includes some glimps-
es of the Cuban cinema, which add considerably to its interest for film histo-
rians. The new Chaplin Cine-club that Castro had pointed out to him at the
beginning of his visit enters the film as a symbol of the rebirth of the national
cinema. Ivens used footage of the conversion of an old movie palace into the
club in the introduction and epilogue of the film. He added the detail that it
had originally been built for the mistress of a government official under the
dictatorship of Batista and addressed a dedication to Chaplin himself, 'who
used to sing so often of liberty and justice in your films'.
456
80. Carnet de Viaje (1961): in Manzanilla,
tourist iconographies of poverty are
deflated by shots of a new architectural
transformation,'images of hope and joy'.
Frame enlargement, courtesy Eye Film
Institute. O ICAIC, Havana/CAPI Films,
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens. -
The striking Manzanilla sequence has a typical rhythm, building self-reflex-
ively on the familiar 'before and after' trope of socialist realism. First some
fine sunny footage at close range shows the village fishermen unloading their
catch. Then Ivens exposes the squalor of their customary living conditions.
Naked children roam about through a cluster of fly-ridden huts, apparently on
equal terms with the local pigs, and passively drink the milk offered to them
in front of the camera. Such scenes, once the picturesque staples of tourist
photo albums, the commentary suggests sardonically, are now becoming bad
memories. The remark has the effect of deflating the 'exotic' reading inevita-
bly imposed on the scene by a Western public's stereotypes of 'straw huts and
naked children under a tropical sky'. (Ivens later recalled how he had urged the
crew in this scene to avoid the neutral sentimental eye of observation and to
'attack reality'.) A sudden close-up of a bulldozer blade abruptly interrupts the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
scene at this point and shatters the stereotype to usher in a sequence boasting
of the new construction transforming the village, another architectural meta-
morphosis that provides an index of the Revolution's accomplishments. The
camera now confronts rows of gleaming prefabricated houses and wanders
through their interiors. Topping it all off is a final romantic vista of a new set-
tlement rising up by the sea. For Ivens, the old chronicler of revolutions, social
change must be visualised in material terms, as changes in people's everyday
lives, their work, and their living conditions -'that it is good to find your name
linked to Cuba, to images of hope and joy'.
Other reflections on the 'brand new cinema' going about its job are scat-
tered throughout the film. After repeating the slogans 'Yankee go home', and
then 'Nylon go home', the commentary adds a new one, 'Western go home'. At
another point, there is a sequence showing Ivens among ICAIC students in an
editing room demonstrating some kind of animation technique. Live-action
views of firefighters in burning cane fields are followed by animated depic- | 457
tions of them based on children's paintings. The commentary explains that
the cinema is born in the simple job of recounting just such struggles. It adds
that the cinema must show how the Revolution was not a spontaneous acci-
dent, but that it 'comes from way back, from decades of struggles', at which
point the camera moves through the editing-room group (including Gutierrez
Alea and Fraga) onto a Moviola screen where archive footage of those struggles
then appears. There are pre-revolutionary demonstrations, guerilla groups in
1958 with guitars as well as guns, a shot of Fidel and Che relaxing around a
campfire, and then one of them leading a liberation procession on horseback.
Later on in the film, we see the Puerto Rican director Oscar Torres shooting
for a film about peasant uprisings in the thirties (Realengo 18 [co-dir. Eduardo
Manet, 1962, Cuba, 6o]) on location in the colonial city of Trinidad, and the
commentary reminds us again that the Cuban cinema must remember and
retell this history.
From time to time, other landscapes as well conjure up memories of
Cuba's revolutionary past. The streets of Santiago de Cuba reveal traces of past
struggles - a plaque, for example, which points out the spot where a revolu-
tionary hero, Frank Pais, 'the soul of the underground struggle', was assassi-
nated. The Havana section of the film includes a funeral sequence in which six
million flowers, one for every Cuban, are sent out to sea in memory of Camilo
Cienfuegos, another revolutionary leader, recently dead. It is a passage that
communicates in simple but compelling terms the intense collective emotion
Ivens witnessed and participated in on this occasion.
It is clear then from this brief description of Carnet that Ivens had quickly
assimilated all of the concerns of the new Cuban cinema and had incorpo-
rated them into this work. As one of Ivens's students recalled later (Massip,
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
1960), Ivens came to Cuba not so much to make his films but to be of service
to Cubans making theirs. In addition to the subjective impressions of an out-
sider in solidarity, Carnet is a summation of Cubans' images of themselves in
1960: an open, passionate tribute to the Revolution, not an 'objective' evalu-
ation. This historical resonance and ideological commitment, together with
the personal Ivens touches and inflections throughout, give the film a con-
tinuing relevance, despite the occasional evidence of hasty shooting, of the
obvious shortage of stock, or of inexperienced camera handling. In fact, these
latter aspects of the film increase its impact and vitality in so far as they evoke
the learning situation going on behind the camera during every take.
Pueblo has for its subject popular preparations for national defence and
thus has a much more concentrated dramatic and topical focus than its com-
panion film. The urgency of the subject comes across clearly in the film, giving
it a stronger emotional force. The film was designed to inform Western audi-
458 ences of the Cuban people's mobilisation and of their unanimous determi-
nation to defend their Revolution. In the domestic market, it was intended to
reinforce this determination and aid in recruitment for the volunteer militia
like a number of ICAIC documentaries on related subjects, such as Gutierrez
Alea's Muerte al invasor (Death to the Invader, 16), a 1961 Bay of Pigs reportage.
Ivens's particular slant in his film was the genuinely popular character of the
Cuban mobilisation, the fact that the Cuban masses themselves and not just
a professional army were participating fully in it. The film commentary con-
stantly hammers home this message:
With 500 million dollars, a fleet, and rockets you can buy a government,
but you can't snuff out the will of the people. To retake these oil refiner-
ies, you'd need six million mercenaries, one for each Cuban. [...] Only a
government that fully answers the aspirations of a people can distribute
arms to it. [...] Every factory becomes a fortress, every furrow a trench.
81. Un PuebloArmado (1961): Ivens's
relationship with the brigade is reflected
in informal scenes of soldiers enjoying
downtime. Frame enlargement, courtesy
Eye Film Institute. © ICAIC, Havana/CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The recurring images of the film are just that-views of whole crowds of men and
women being issued guns or rushing out of a workplace for militia exercises.
Because of this populist inspiration and because the film crew followed a
single brigade over an extended period of time, the film has a more intimate
feel than Carnet. A series of individuals acquires a concise but vivid identity
in short close-up confrontations with the camera. The brigade itself appar-
ently grew accustomed to Ivens and the crew and began to relax in front of
the camera. There are some fine informal scenes of soldiers lunching, clown-
ing with each other, grouped under plastic tarpaulins in the pouring rain, or
boisterously strumming their guns like guitars on the back of a truck. Ivens's
relationship with the militia also meant that he was easily able to reconstruct
the lengthy combat sequences with the men, filming jungle skirmishes and
pursuits that are quite effective within the terms of the mise-en-scene used by
Ivens.
To emphasise the grass-roots bases of the Cuban mobilisation, Ivens 459
begins the film in a remote mountain village, watching the local men drill-
ing for the first time, echoing Spanish Earth. The scene is affectionately com-
ic with its inclusion of the confusion and errors of these peasants, who have
never had to march together before, and of their obvious embarrassment at
their children running alongside, imitating them and making fun. From this
point, the structure of the film is climactic, the militia appearing more and
more disciplined and formidable as the film progresses through various early
phases of the training, notably the literacy program, and then follows the sea-
soned brigade in its pursuit of counter-revolutionaries in the last part of the
film. The final note is one of confidence, even defiance, a strong 'up' ending
being a requirement of agitprop and solidarity filmmaking mastered by Ivens
decades earlier. The initial perspective of the single village steadily expands
through views of mass militia drills in large urban and industrial settings until
an entire nation, editorially synthesised, seems on the march.
The film is more than a conglomeration of marching columns, however.
Everywhere are indications of the new life that is to be defended. Aside from
the pointed reference to the literacy campaign already mentioned, there are
also hints of changing gender roles, of advances in agriculture and health care,
low-key scenes of soldiers fraternising with peasants, and once again contin-
ually recurring views of children at play. There are also pauses in the spright-
ly pace of the film for a particularly lyrical perspective of some landscape or
other, a waterfowl taking off from a jungle river or mountain mists filtering
through waving trees. Every sequence projects the insistence that life goes on
in the midst of crisis, as it had in Spanish Earth and would in Le 17eParallele
(The 17th Parallel, 1968, France, 113), and, as Ivens had just said in Paris, that it
is 'beautiful' (Zalzman, 1963, 90).
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
82. Un PuebloArmado (1961): counter-
revolutionaries re-enacting their capture
for the camera, under an off-key version of
the Marines' Hymn. Frame enlargement,
courtesy Eye Film Institute. © ICAIC,
Havana/CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
The commentary for Pueblo leaves a somewhat more overbearing impression
than Carnet does, perhaps because the visuals in the militia film are tight-
460 er and need a verbal counterpoint less. Some of the mannerisms of the late
classical documentary soundtrack seem unnecessarily distracting - drama-
tised voice-over dialogue, for instance, to liven up a few silently filmed group
scenes, ironic musical phrases (anticipating other musical 'arrangers' from
later in the sixties, from Jimi Hendrix to Emile de Antonio, an off-key Marine
Hymn is heard when the counter-revolutionaries are captured), and the some-
what excessive use of action music and percussion during the semi-drama-
tised combat scenes. The commentary itself is less personal than the other
film's reflective counterpoint. In short, too often the soundtrack appears to be
trying to compensate for the lack of sync recording rather than making a virtue
of this necessity like the other film and the best pre-verite essay/travelogues.
Otherwise Pueblo stands well among Ivens's other records of the courage of
peoples under siege.
One of the most interesting aspects of Pueblo is the light it sheds on the
problem posed for Ivens and the 'third world' as a whole by the ascendancy
of direct cinema during the early sixties. On the surface, this film has more of
a vdrite orientation than Carnet, not only because of its greater intimacy with
its subjects and the spontaneity this implies, but also because of the great-
er flexibility and mobility of its camera handling. Despite the awkwardness of
the 35mm format, the severe limitation of silent shooting, and a low shoot-
ing ratio, Ivens and his Cuban crew were clearly responding to the potential of
improvisation in the film - in the encounters with the colourful bit-part char-
acters scattered throughout, as well as with the soldiers, and in the pursuit
scenes with their opportunities for experimentation with handheld camera
and walking movements. In these latter scenes, there are a number of walk-
ing shots of considerable agility through the jungle undergrowth and frequent
use of swish pans both expressively and as editing devices. In Carnet as well,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
there is a sequence where the camera literally takes part in a folk dance, mov-
ing rhythmically through a double column of dancers.
Massip (1960) later remembered shooting a scene which puts the crew's
growing awareness of improvisation into relief. Massip recalled the exhaust-
ed men in the patrol resting around in a farmyard pump, some asleep, others
drinking or lounging around. An old peasant wandered up carrying a bundle of
squawking chickens at each end of a long pole over his shoulder. This oppor-
tunity for a colourful scene was unexpected and even unnoticed by the ICA-
IC men until they suddenly saw inspiration light up in Ivens's eyes. Ivens got
them quickly to move the camera spontaneously in medium and close range
about the old man and his indignant load as he chatted with the patrol. The
scene is short but works well with its dynamic energy and the internal contrast
between the resting soldiers, the frantic birds, and the man's vivid and nat-
ural gestures. The students thus saw their usual inclination towards careful
planning and setting up challenged by this openness to spur-of-the-moment I 461
inspiration.
For the most part, however, it must be said that the direct/verite sensibility
does not dominate the film. Most of it shows the careful precision of a director
who is watching the footage meter very carefully (though both films must have
looked much more like the real raw thing to contemporary audiences). In fact,
as we shall continue to see in this chapter, the factor of economy alone led to
cautious use of verite in the Western sense by both Ivens and most postcolo-
nial filmmakers throughout the sixties. They simply couldn't afford the large
shooting ratios that Western directors in TV and the state-subsidised National
Film Board of Canada took for granted. The most typical shots in unstructured
situations in Pueblo involve careful set-ups in which subjects pass the camera
in close-up one by one on a jungle path. Tripod shots are a staple of the film,
as are the long motorised tracks from jeeps and boats (and even a helicopter),
which Ivens found an inexpensive but expressive alternative to tripod set-ups
at this point in his career and more reliable than handheld improvisation.
There is another consideration as well in Ivens's continuing reliance on
classical shooting techniques during the sixties, his instinctive distrust of the
more flamboyant uses of vrite then becoming common. As we have seen, Ivens
had not shot in a country where his native language is spoken since 1933. The
European variants of direct cinema, more reliant on interviews and speech,
required the director's spontaneous linguistic participation in the event being
filmed rather than simply a visual observation of it. Ivens's partnership in the
late sixties with Loridan, a trained soundperson, would help him overcome
this particular handicap.
Throughout the mid-sixties, however, Ivens continued to express specifi-
cally ideological reservations about verite that are worth considering. For one
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
thing, verite quickly became associated with the auteurist cinema of individ-
ualist personal expression, clearly a second priority at that time for the 'third
world', and for the same reasons for European radical filmmaking as well.
Ivens also felt that verite encouraged filmmakers to avoid taking a political
stand. 'In vrite', he said, 'people often talk too much and the director not
enough'. It furthermore didn't require young directors to think during the
shoot and sometimes even afterwards. 'If you know how to swim', Ivens told
an interviewer on another occasion, 'it's better to swim towards something
rather than to flounder about'. As late as 1965, he would insist that only a com-
mentary 'can express the complete, responsible personal action - the involve-
ment of the author, director or commentator' (Ivens, [1965] 1969, 261).
By late 1960, Cubans were already feeling the effects of a US embargo that
was cultural as well as economic. This is one reason, no doubt, that ICAIC so
eagerly welcomed the procession of foreign filmmakers who came to Cuba
462 I in the early years to witness and to film the achievements of the Revolution.
The foreigners' contributions to the Cuban cinema varied widely. The Italians
Zavattini and Armand Gatti actively collaborated on co-productions though
the strong debt the Cubans owed to Italian neorealism more likely came from
the apprenticeship of several leading Cuban filmmakers, including Gutierrez
Alea, Garcia Espinosa, and Torres, in Rome. Moreover Italian films had been
a staple of the active cine-club circuit before the Revolution and there were
many similarities in the production contexts of post-war Italy and post-Rev-
olution Cuba. Also involved in co-productions were directors from socialist
countries such as the Soviets Roman Karmen and Kalatazov and lesser-known
figures from East Germany and Czechoslovakia.
Of all the visitors, the Cubans themselves felt particularly grateful to
Ivens and to the Dane Theodor Christensen, who, like Ivens, taught at ICAIC,
but also made a documentary on women in the militias Ellas! (34), released
in 1964. First arriving in the fall of 1960, Ivens would return twice, including
a second teaching sojourn cut short by illness in 1962. Marker would return
nine years after iCuba Si! in 1970 (La bataille des dix millions [Battle of the
Ten Million, Belgium/France/Cuba, 58]), and both of Marker's witty and per-
ceptive essays are commonly shown. But despite Marker's close interaction
with Cuban filmmakers, there was never the sense as with Christensen and
Ivens that he had come to put himself completely at the disposal of Cuban
filmmakers and that the filming of his own work was secondary to this aim.
One filmmaker referred to Ivens's role as that of a 'technical adviser' rather
than a 'theoretician' and that his influence was less as the maker of films to
be imitated than as a filmmaker whose 'conduct in the face of today's reality'
was an inspiration (Canel, [1963] 1965). The impression Ivens made seems
to have been out of all proportion to the briefness of his two visits, according
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
to an interesting 1962 round table of Cuban filmmakers on his contribution
(Cine cubano 1962).
Undoubtedly it was the period in the jeep with the seven young filmmak-
ers that was most responsible for this impression, each sequence turning out
to be a valuable lesson. One sequence with a pedagogical impact was a filmed
conversation of two militiamen guarding a bridge. The crew had come across
the pair quite by accident, an old peasant animatedly telling stories to his part-
ner, a much younger man. The final version of Pueblo retains only a few shots
from the incident, a jeep-borne track coming up to the bridge, panning as the
camera discovers and picks out the two guards, and then close-up explora-
tions of their faces as they talk. For all the brevity of the scene, the effect is one
of concentrated energy. At the time of the shoot, the crew were struck not only
by Ivens's instinctual recognition of a good scene and of 'natural actors' but
also of the way in which he was able to make the two subjects feel comfortable
and trustful with regard to the camera. Aside from absorbing the mechanics I 463
of shooting such a scene - the avoidance of a close-up lens and the provision
of good covering material - the students watched how Ivens picked out the
expressive and typical details of the men's gestures and appearances. His
additional secret for bringing out the 'natural actors' in such subjects was his
authentic respect for them, his involvement with them as human beings rath-
er than as subjects.
To this effect, Jorge Fraga remembered a heated argument between Ivens
and a peasant that he at first found shocking because of the obvious social
disadvantage of the latter. But he suddenly realised that it was rather a total
absence of paternalism and sentimentality that was responsible for Ivens's
attitude, his assumption of the peasant's equality despite social and cultural
barriers (Cine cubano, 1962). Ivens's attitude was essential to the active col-
laboration between artist and subject in his work, which the Cubans greatly
admired, a clear challenge for Havana intellectuals such as Fraga and Mas-
sip. The triumph of Ivens's approach came when he attempted to persuade
captured counter-revolutionaries to re-enact their night-time surrender for
Pueblo. The prisoners, no doubt bewildered by the Communists' generous
treatment, consented and can be seen in the film emerging from the jungle,
hands above their heads.
The ICAIC filmmakers drew another lesson from the shooting of the vil-
lage drilling sequence early in the film where the new recruits are training for
the first time. The camera enters a small neighboring house at a given moment
where the wife of one of the participants is laundering, and for a few moments
the drilling is seen from her point of view framed by her doorway and veran-
dah. Ivens decided to involve the woman more completely in the scene by the
simple twist of having the recruit hand her his shirt for washing as he was leav-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
ing. The crew were impressed with the importance of involving all elements in
a given scene in dynamic interaction to enhance its dramatic value.
(This is not to say that Ivens two Cuban films do not perceive more radical
changes in women's roles than what is implied by this anecdote. Although the
village recruits and the jungle patrol do not involve women, the scenes depict-
ing industrial and urban militia organisation have women participating fully
and the issue is emphasised on the soundtrack in a voice-over conversation
between two male militiamen: 'You know that the women in my village have
organized a brigade? My wife with a gun? I'd sure like to see that'. The narrator
concludes, 'All the same at 30 years of age, it's hard to begin [...] but a people
in revolution learn very quickly'.)
Ivens's decision to involve the woman in this simple action has another
implication. As in the earlier films in this cycle, his perpetual readiness to
intervene and recreate reality through the use of mise-en-scene went against
464 I the grain of emerging verite orthodoxies. Ivens continued to insist on this right
to reconstruct even during the period of the orthodoxy of verite, maintaining
that the classical documentarist's use of mise-en-scene was in no way outmod-
ed by the new flexibility of camera technology - which ICAIC could not afford
in any case. One of his Cuban students even praised the way Ivens reconstructs
events, when necessary, 'in the simplest way that most resembles life'. The
counter-revolutionary prisoners emerging from the jungle, for example, are
in extreme long shot just as they would have been if the actual event had been
filmed. 'If you must steal, do it neatly and tidily. Leave no traces at all', was a
remark Ivens (quoted in Li Zexiang, 1983, 121) made on the subject in 1967.
It is of course Ivens's own total confidence in the commitment of the art-
ist as the sole index of the authenticity of a film that leads him to this easi-
ly distorted position. While he was clearly right that the non-interference of
the artist is no guarantee whatsoever of the truth value of a film in itself, it
was not until the following decade that Ivens would fully implement a solu-
tion to this thorny problem. In Yukong, he consolidated the strategy of openly
displaying, using, and even celebrating the collaboration of artist and sub-
ject as a primary condition of the film. Ivens provided another insight for his
crew on Carnet when it came to filming the archetypal Cuban activity, sugar
cane cutting. Ivens convinced the ICAIC group to get involved themselves in
the action of cutting cane so that they would understand directly and subjec-
tively all aspects of this action, the totality of the physical components of the
job, including the resistance offered by the cane. Ivens urged them to discover
'the true secret of the rhythm of the mechanical action of cutting cane, the
moment at which this rhythm can be interrupted by another action, drying
one's sweat, taking a drink of water, resting'. Ivens had evidently never forgot-
ten the Soviet workers in the early thirties who had praised Zuiderzee because
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
of its scrupulous adherence to shot angles, camera placements, and editing
rhythms that authentically reflect the physical requirements of the work and
the point of view of the workers themselves.
The final essence of what Ivens reinforced in his Cuban co-workers' minds
during his visits was that the immediate, urgent task of filming the Revolution
was more important than the development of individual techniques or styles
or a foreknowledge of the classical principles of film aesthetics. He encour-
aged them to rely on their own instinctual feelings about a task, to trust in their
own innate human sympathies and interactions with their fellow Cubans in a
dialectical relation with their own clearly defined ideological aims. Perhaps
thinking of his years in the East German film industry of the pre-Thaw period,
Ivens's advice was to avoid becoming bureaucrats of the camera and to 'let
life into the studios'. This accumulation of immediate, urgent material, this
filming directly and quickly of all that was happening, he said, was the major
means of achieving a national cinema (Cine cubano, 1962). Ivens was uncanni- I 465
ly perceptive in pinpointing in this way the formula by which the Cubans were
already building one of the most dynamic of all national cinemas of the 196os.
Critical response to the Cuban films was positive if muted, though the
Positif editor would later cast a retroactive slight shadow on two of the solidar-
ity works of this period: 'it seemed to us that Lettres de Chine [Before Spring],
and Cuba peuple armd denoted a certain hesitation, a certain groping/feeling
his way along, that we had the impression of seeing there travel notes, sym-
pathetic and muddled, rather than films with the scope of the Ivens of yore'
(Thirard, 1964, 145). Today, the Cuban films are seldom revived except in
connection with Ivens retrospectives and are regrettably not included in the
official DVD package. They deserve wider exposure. Not only are they fasci-
nating documents on the early days of the Cuban Revolution; they also offer
stirring models of the kind of postcolonial film activism that Ivens almost sin-
gle-handedly pioneered a whole generation before anyone else on the Western
Left, an activism that lends solidarity and resources to local initiatives without
imposing external models or preconceptions.
CHILE: ...A VALPARAISO
Valparaiso, Ivens's next work, a 27-minute city film,36 although plugged firmly
into the sensibility of the early sixties, has held up well over the last half centu-
ry.37 The project arose from a felicitous and timely convergence: Ivens's knack
for parachuting into a new micro-society, in this case urban Chile, observing
it closely and instantly distilling its visual/cinematic essence, was energised,
enabled and grounded by the contribution of young Santiago apprentic-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
es, who welcomed their elder idol to the University of Chile's Instituto Cine
Experimental and formed his crew. Ivens's Paris infrastructure allowed him
also to consolidate the project as a viable commercial production with 'a high
artistic and technical quality' and a 'world public' (Ivens, production notes,
JIA) and all was complemented in post-production by Chris Marker's self-re-
flexively wry and writerly commentary and a strikingly effective music track.
It is arguably the most perfected and magical of the entire nine-film lyrical
essay cycle, and is alongwithRain the best of Ivens's half-dozen or so entries in
the city film subgenre (Amsterdam, Paris, Sydney, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Hanoi,
and Shanghai are his principal urban subjects), a subgenre that is at the cen-
tre of cinematic modernity and to which we will return. Moreover, the 'third
world' perspective Ivens fine-tuned in Sydney, East Berlin and Vienna, Italy,
Mali, and Cuba brought a fresh edge to the film. Though Valparaiso may not
take the artistic risks of Mistral or the political risks of the Cuban films or go as
466 I far in its indulgent quirkiness as Rotterdam - it is my personal favourite.
Ivens had met Dr. Salvador Allende in Cuba and the perennial Marxist can-
didate of Chilean electoral politics invited Ivens to come to his country and
make what would be his second and last film project below the Equator. Allen-
de's left coalition Frente de Accin Popular (FRAP) had gained almost one third
of the popular vote in the 1958 election and had high hopes for the next one in
1964. Allende had represented the historic port city of Valparaiso in Parliament
beginning in the 1930s, and when he met Ivens he was Valparaiso's senator, so
he was almost certainly involved in the preliminary conversations in Cuba about
a cinematic treatment of a unique and vibrant city that would be designated a
UNESCO World Heritage Site only four decades later (Panizza, 2011, 22). Ivens
received the formal invitation from the University while in Cuba in the fall of
1961, and his first reconnoitering visit took place the following April. His sched-
ule was filled with workshops and screenings with the students grouped around
novice filmmaker Sergio Bravo at the Centre. Busy as it was, Ivens's visit also
accommodated a reunion with his friend the poet Pablo Neruda in Valparai-
so, where he stayed a few days (a shot would be included in his eventual film
showing the soon-to-be Nobel laureate exiting his apartment on a spiral stair-
case with his dogs). Ivens fell 'in love' with this port city as he had with so many
others and resolved to return to Paris and set up co-production arrangements to
make the Valparaiso film. In September, in the middle of the Cuban missile cri-
sis, Ivens flew back to Santiago from Havana, to make the film as a teaching exer-
cise with the students he had already met, though the co-financing arrangement
with Argos Films' Anatole Dauman were finalised only a month later (bringing
on board a professional French camera operator Georges Strouvd and a similar-
ly qualified Paris editor Jean Ravel, famous now for his editing of Chronique d'un
et and LaJetee (Chris Marker, 1962, France, 28).
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The crucible of Ivens's work had thus shifted from the underfunded and
always-on-the-alert Cuban state studio to the more normalised Chilean aca-
demic framework, but his Paris-based commercial tie-in would situate the
high-production-value outcome within an international theatrical market-
place, as he noted:
aimed at a world public, commercial distribution
- the film will be an impression (far from complete or profound) of Val-
paraiso. Will be like a visit, by a visitor with an eye for beauty, the truth of
the city. Naturally the film must have a high artistic and technical quality.
(Ivens, project notes, 1962, JIA, emphasis in original)
These objectives notwithstanding, the pedagogical orientation remained a
constant through this cycle and the contributions of the Santiago interns are
well documented in production stills and in the credits (Bravo's crucial liaison I 467
and leadership role is acknowledged in the credits as 'assistd de Sergio Bravo').
The political contextwas somewhat volatile in 1962, however. Although Ivens's
Chilean students and colleagues were communists or sympathisers (Schoots
can't resist tarring Bravo and his cinematic practice fully with the brush of
Comintern skullduggery), the hopeful but tense pre-revolutionary context in
Chile required a pragmatic discretion on the part of their mentor, not dissim-
ilar to what the very different contexts of Paris, Italy, and Mali had dictated:
[Our film] will have a personal style. Not orthodox or academic. Not a
social document or a militant or revolutionary film or with a message or a
solution. Not educational. The film is not commissioned by the unions or
by the department of urbanization of the municipality of Valparaiso. On
the other hand, the University has chosen me as director and knows my
other films and my philosophy. They didn't invite Disney or Reichenbach.
Not a film where the poverty side dominates. But poverty is there to see,
to show. It's shameful, it's not tolerable. Yes, it's like that, have a good
look (Daumier).38 That is indicating things that I am not showing. A kind
of secret between the progressive public and myself towards the reality of
Valparaiso, irony or social satire enters here (Brecht: the 7 ways to tell the
truth)
- closer to Rain or Seine
- my point of view will be there, but not obvious, not underlined.
(Ivens, project notes, 1962, JIA)
The concept of 'truth' surfaces in both of the above entries, and it is clear that
Ivens is engaging not only with the early-sixties French debates around the
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
'verite' in cindma vrite but also with the perennial objective of the commit-
ted artist. That Ivens had carefully reflected politically and strategically on this
objective is confirmed by the above out-of-the-blue reference to the famous
manifesto, written in 1934 in Danish exile, by his former collaborator Bertolt
Brecht, dead in 1956:
Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write
the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the cour-
age to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness
to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manip-
ulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will
be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons.
These are formidable problems for writers living under Fascism, but
they exist also for those writers who have fled or been exiled; they exist
468 I even for writers working in countries where civil liberty prevails. (Brecht,
[193411966, 133)39
Allende had stressed to Ivens the existence of such liberty in Chile (Paniz-
za, 2011, 14), Latin America's most resilient parliamentary democracy at the
time, and Ivens clearly calculated that his most effective intervention would
be a pedagogical one in which his students could effectively go on themselves
to speak the 'truth' in a more direct, more critical way.40 He asked them
not to forget that I am a guest of your university, of your country. That is
a source of obligations and limitations. My vision will be in the film, but
not explicitly, not emphatically. Militant films, with criticisms, with solu-
tions, accusations, are up to you, the young cineastes of Chile itself. It is
not up to me to attack the current regime. (Ivens, notes, 11 November
1962, JIA, quoted in Schoots, [1995] 2000, 272)
The research phase of the project consisted of three weeks strolling around
the harbour and the upper city, where he immediately found 'an interesting
story, amazing, strange, sometimes gleaming with "attractions"'. He had no
problem developing the kind of Vertovian shooting plan that he had used in
La Seine. His cinematic 'ideas' arising out of the city's social challenges and its
unique spatial configuration, quickly fell into place: 'the continuous human
effort to master life's difficulties', discovering 'simultaneity (vertical), surprise,
poverty, kaleidoscope, anarchy, the ordinary and the extraordinary beside
each other, labyrinth (stairways)' (Ivens, project notes, 1962, JIA). The kalei-
doscope became a significant visual punctuation of the film (Olalla, 1963),
notably under the dramatic transition to colour and under the final credits,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
while the stairs along with the funiculars (hillside cable railways) became the
predominant visual motif of the city, its peoples, and its spaces. Almost every
image that would appear in the film was first part of one of Ivens's endlessly
revised lists:
ideas:
funiculars: comic, difficulty, accident, social life
- interviews
- fish seller, basket on his head
The human contract
not an encyclopedia
1) details 2) major threads 3) look for sequence themes
note: Brueghel - women eating at the window; man with 1 leg with woman;
2 children play
idea: subjects (major) 1 469
the hills, cf. the valley
the city below
the port boats - loading, - unloading
the sea
Valparaiso citizens
dream - history
nature: wind; rain; fog; clouds; night; mountain (distant); waves; landscapes
problems: prices (market); gas; electricity; water; telephone; medical servic-
es-red cross; fires; school; rain; garbage; transport. (Ivens, project notes,
1962, JIA)4'
Panizza (2011, 35) suggests that this detailed shooting plan amounted to 'hyper-
planning' but it is likely that Ivens's lesser reliance on improvisation than say
in Cuba was a response to the tight stock allowance and short timeline. All the
same he did leave some space for the spontaneous style that he referred to his
interns as 'style de reportage spontan' (Ivens, project notes, 1962, JIA).
Always ready to capitalise on a successful formula, Ivens can be said in
many ways to have produced a remake of his prizewinner La Seine in the Chil-
ean port. Like the 1957 French film, Valparaiso is an infectiously lyrical city
film full of kinetic energy, acute observation of public life, and humanist emo-
tion, accented by their respective bodies of water, yet touched with the exotic
curiosity of the expatriate and the utopian melancholy of the socialist realist.
A mix of ingredients almost identical to that in his hit of five years earlier is
present:
- Firstly the usually well-researched and scouted out-of-doors social
observation in public space took place, yet with even more proto-femi-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
nist and proto-'third-world'-ist touches than in La Seine, from shots of
banana cargos to the expos of the bloody colonial history. The 'shooting
plan' listed images, events, actions, characters, and spaces to re-find or
reconstitute in the shoot. Building on this plan, the resort to mise-en-
scene is standard throughout, most frequently reconstituting moments
and gestures observed in real life when no camera was at hand, such
as a repeated shot of a man singlehanded and doggedly carrying a bed
up the endless stairways. As in La Seine before it, Valparaiso builds on a
balance of improvised public observation and mise-en-scene or 'documen-
taire organise'. The 'organized' material, shot with large tripod-based
equipment, focused largely on collective social rituals, notably two dance
sequences reconstituted on location in clubs, one showing smart young
couples dancing the twist, then the rage in North America, and the next
the traditional national dance, the cueca, evoking its origins as a mating
470 I ritual using handkerchiefs (a critical postcolonial reading of this juxtapo-
sition is of course unavoidable). Another mise-en-scene, set in a lively and
crowded brothel barroom, is notable for a complex narrative involving a
card game, a female sex worker's sly flirtation with a male player over her
compact mirror, and the eruption of a brawl complete with daggers and a
bloody kaleidoscopic shattered mirror.
- Ivens's continued participation in the growing cultural interest in the
direct cinema aesthetics/ethics of spontaneity and everyday life can be
seen in echoes of La Seine's 'life-caught-unawares' observation, especially
of life on the hilltops' stairways and markets, in windows and balconies,
or of mothers with their children - thanks to long focal length lenses.
Handheld 35mm camerawork, impeccably steady, caught for example
the miniature circus discovered by accident during the shoot and lov-
ingly recorded performers and audience off-the-cuff. Still the Chileans
could not afford the new lightweight 16mm cameras and portable
synch-sound equipment any more than the Cubans (Panizza, 2011). As
for Ivens's exploration of the direct's engagement with new possibilities
for sound recording, this is tentative and symbolic only, localised in a
brief sequence presenting a junta' of the hilltop communities, a citizens'
forum verbalising their problems and demands. This gesture seems per-
functory at first sight. The sequence devoted to the junta' is constructed
in simulated synch sound rather than direct lip synch speech, and lasts
only 45 seconds, but was a quantum leap beyond La Seine in its embrace
of living speech as the cutting edge in documentary practice of the early
sixties. Still, for all their Parisian backing, the Ivens group couldn't go
as far as he had with the better-equipped Italia and stopped consider-
ably short of Marker's achievement the same year in Lejoli Mai with its
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
on-the-street interviews and focused, intimate extended conversations
(from Ivens's previous producer Sofracima). The junta' is briefly shown
stiffly debating hygiene and water shortages in the neighborhoods, and
the participants rail against delays on the part of both government and
the private sector, seconded by 'the workers committee'. One of the rare
explicit (albeit measured) verbal references to organised class struggle
in the film, or left accents in general, this speech together with a house-
wife's tirade about delays in accessing services interrupt the otherwise
tender resignation of the film. The original French subtitles are intended
as the primary access to this conversation, since the dialogue volume was
turned down in the mix (I assume without having been able to verify my
suspicion that the filmmakers had had to resort in the Paris lab to the old
Spanish Earth technique of dramatised post-dubbing, with local Chile-
ans, in the face of low quality or even nonexistence of wild sound records
of the proceedings). I 471
Marker's aforementioned writerly commentary, assertive but not smoth-
ering, coupled with a sentimental and populist musical soundtrack,
succeeded this time in a more equitable and dialogic - even dialectical
- balance with the image-track. Marker produced the commentary at
short notice and at lightning speed, as a favour to Ivens in their first
collaboration. In desperation upon the failure of an unacceptable first
try by an unknown party, Ivens provided the rough cut and his extensive
notes on Valparaiso and asked for help, which came back two days later
in time for the mix, 'saving my life' (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 273). A
vindication of pressure as an artistic inspiration, the result could not be
more exquisite. Perhaps the key to its success was its relative restraint:
in the 28-minute version it lays over one-third of the film's running time,
not quite the standard of discretion achieved a quarter century earlier
in Spanish Earth (one-fifth) nor in La Seine (one-sixth) and Mistral (one-
fifth), but still notable in comparison to much of Marker's other work of
the period, that ranged from almost three-quarters in Lettre de Siberie
and two-fifths in iCuba si! 42The match is perfect, a tense and resonant
visual-verbal counterpoint: Ivens's sentimentality cut by Marker's arch-
ness, his certainty qualified by Marker's interrogative doubt, his material-
ism glossed by Marker's existential meditation. Moreover, Ivens faux-naif
awe as newcomer to the urban kaleidoscope exists in unresolved tension
with what Brunsdon (2012, 223-224) would call the 'classic response of
the city wise-guy [...] the voice of the [Oliver Twist's] Artful Dodger', refer-
ring to a perennial stock character of the city film. At one point an Iven-
sian sequence on laundry, showing housewives hanging up clothing and
bedding on sunny balconies and stairways, culminates in a philosophical
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
twist that recalls Marker's LeJoliMai (whose production and release his-
tory overlapped chronologically with the Chilean film almost exactly):
So once again the cable railways, very picturesque the cable railways...
But the life of the people up above depends on them
And not everything goes up with them.
Water for example which is lacking.
And yet the wash is done and girls wear white blouses. What price the
white blouses, the clean faces when the water arrives in barrels? What
price the most simple things, bathing, cooking?
What price the desire to live? What price happiness?
At the same time, this disavowal of the picturesque is a moment when the sen-
sibilities of the two artists come together. Pigaut's uninflected voice-over read-
472 ing of the commentary jibes well with Ivens's own materialist undercutting of
Valparaiso's postcard perfection, and his stern voice is accompanied by a live-
ly effects track, featuring seagull cries and sea lion snorts along with the creak
of metallic machinery on which the funiculars depend. The music track offers
an inventive score by Chile's most famous composer and former Bravo col-
laborator, Gustavo Becerra (1925-2010). It's basically a riff on the theme song
that gives the film its title, 'Nous irons a Valparaiso', sung throatily by Paris
cabaret contralto Germaine Montero.43 This lilting children's song of sailors,
sailing ships, and the sea, composed in the post-war period by Marcel Achard,
was so famous within French popular culture that one account of the film was
entitled 'Joris Ivens gives a face to a song' (Marcabru, 1964). Montero's cap-
tivating rendition launches the film in the first minutes and then is reprised
as a finale, rounding off long after the credits have ended and the screen has
become dark.
83. ...A Valparaiso (1963): a narrative mise-
en-scene set in a brothel barroom shows a
sexworker's flirtation with a card player and
then a bloody brawl, a shattered mirror and
Ivens's abrupt switch to colour. DVD frame
capture. © Universidad de Chile/ARGOS
Films.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Like La Seine, Valparaiso is along with everything else a stylistic tour de force.
It exults in its diagonal cinematic indulgence of Valparaiso's hilly terrain,
articulated by the city's famous funiculars, just as La Seine did in Paris's riv-
er-borne horizontality, articulated by barges. The film's verticality also allows
breathtaking birds-eye views of the city and its elemental setting. Variously
kinetic and lyrical impulses are in tension with modernist play with scale
and angles and social analysis. That this amalgam is constructed through
Ivens's unmistakable 'personal style', 'vision' and 'point of view', as his pro-
ject notes for his students declared, confirms its belonging to the subjective
essay current. As in La Seine, first-person enunciations are discernible not so
much in narration but in a range of familiar personal motifs: closely watched
vignettes of children playing, their parents working strenuously to load car-
go or hang laundry; populist celebrations of the inventiveness of their strug-
gles in the face of hardship; buzzing canvases of a rich social urban space,
both familiar and unfamiliar, from markets to work and play spaces. In 473
short, they celebrate what his notes called the 'pacte humaine': 'Everything
is missing, but all the same one sleeps and wants to live'. Likewise, as with
La Seine, authorial self-referentiality underlies the literary level of the com-
mentary, confined mostly to Marker's recognisable self-reflexive wryness
(as opposed to Prdvert's 'I' statements). But recurring humorous accents in
the image-track, allowed by the film's light-hearted surreal-flavoured mood,
also participate in this articulation of subjectivity: a bourgeois lady takes her
domesticated penguin for a walk; children are so overloaded with groceries
and packages as they board the funiculars that they seem headless commut-
ers through the point of view of the oblivious ticket taker at the turnstile; a
lurking sea lion surfaces noisily in the harbour at unexpected moments. The
essayistic level also negotiates Ivens's restrained social analysis: although
the poverty that Ivens takes stock of seems relatively benign (that the level
of the Chileans' immiseration palpable on screen seems mild compared to
that in Italia or Borinage, can perhaps be accounted for by the filmmakers'
shyness about shooting interiors), the commentary draws the spectator's
attention to it by self-reflexively assuring us that 'with sun, poverty no longer
seems poverty'. All the same, alongside the heroic quotidian struggles and
such nuanced musing, social inequities are matter-of-factly evident, most
notably in the sequence where the city's elite are shown cheering on their
purebreds at the racetrack44, indifferent to the fate not only of their fellow
citizens but also even of their horses who are condemned to forced labour
as pack animals and then the abattoir as soon as their short and glamorous
career windows are closed. More succinct is the inclusion of a bold graffito
'Cuba' in one shot, a backdrop to a moment of arduous physical effort on the
stairs. Even for the non-auteurist, non-aficionado spectator, this affection-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
ately subjective mix of perception, curiosity, whimsy, and critique, as in La
Seine, constitutes the film's essayistic elan.
84. ...A Valparaiso (1963): a stylistic tour de
force exulting in the port city's funiculars,
full of breathtaking birds-eye tracking -
shots of the hilly terrain and its elemental
setting. DVD frame capture. © Universidad
de Chile/ARGOS Films.
474
To this reliable mix, Ivens added an important element of historical analy-
sis, present but underdeveloped in the Italian and Cuban projects, reinforc-
ing the posteolonial critique of the present order and exercising his already
much-demonstrated flair for compilation. The raw materials were still images
only, many supplied by Neruda from his collection: period engravings, paint-
ings, and above all a cartoon of Uncle Sam sabotaging the region's economy
through the construction of the Panama Canal a half-century earlier. These
visual documents were supplemented elsewhere by Ivens's delectation of the
city's public visual culture (popular murals, frescos, and statuary, often of the
other privileged motif of mermaids), and vernacular architecture. His always
ethnographic eye tuned into the dialectic of history and the present, old and
new, the exotic and the everyday, through the filmic image.
The overall organisation is not chronological as in La Seine and Mistral
(dawn-to-dusk and seasonal, respectively), but rather loosely geographical, a
movement up from the port towards the hilltops, with many a segue, distrac-
tion, and digression along the way of course (the ascending movement would
seem not completely dissimilar to that pursued in Mistral with its mountain-
top climax - and, as Verstappen [1964] noted, in Brug as well). This coherence,
however, is fractured by a formal innovation two-thirds of the way through
the film, startling viewers just at the moment they are least expecting it - the
switch from black and white to colour. This device would soon become a hall-
mark of 196os New Wave aesthetics, from Godard and Anderson to Wexler
and Lefebvre, but in 1962 it had been visible chiefly in two other French essay
documentaries on the festival and art film circuit - interestingly also from
Argos - both from the 1950s, Resnais's Nuit et brouillard and Marker's Let-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
tre de Siberie.41 Resnais's Holocaust essay on history and memory is famous
for confronting the lush colour images of an abandoned, grassy present-day
Auschwitz with black-and-white archival footage of the genocide, but studies
on Marker seldom acknowledge his less provocative but equally interesting
use of a black-and-white hypothetical documentary-within-a-documentary, in
the conditional tense, within his self-reflexive Eastmancolour travelogue.
Ivens's abrupt modulation from classical black and white to the same
lurid stock is a different operation altogether from those of his rive gauche
friends. Here the switch specifically performs Ivens's perennial thematics
of the elements, an auteur motif now reaching clich status in the abundant
French critical literature that was accumulating around him. Approaching its
subject at first from the sea through moody and misty manoeuvres at dawn,
amid vessels and workers, the film ascends the slopes of the city's famous
hills, propelled by the funiculars. But far from losing its engagement with the
element of water, Ivens shifts from sea water as the city's maritime economic 475
infrastructure to fresh water as the precious life-giving commodity so hard to
access in the poor hilltop neighborhoods, as spelled out in the above excerpt
from the commentary. The film now also confronts air and fire and earth, all
elaborated as profoundly social rather than as abstract poetic elements (for
example the wind may be pure and fresh but damages the lungs of the chil-
dren of the poor, sentenced to play on the windy hilltops). Both the editorial
structure and the commentary's guiding arrows enforce this elemental the-
matic. The sudden brawl in the dramatised bar-brothel scene in black and
white leads to a smashed mirror, and the screen is abruptly covered by bright
red blood, the sanguine humour becoming a nontraditional fourth element
in the exegesis. Again eschewing elemental abstraction, Ivens sets up blood
as the element of history, namely the port's violent colonial past, told com-
pellingly like a sudden 'dream' through a compilation of vivid archival images
(as he conceived of the historical segue in his notes, cited above). However,
the colour sequences soon revert from historical analysis back to the pres-
ent-day social-lyrical, allowing a re-vision of familiar images, as the funicular
cars are revealed to be brightly painted in blue and yellow and the earlier ten-
der themes of social continuity, work and play, family and marriage, are now
restored in sunlit vividness. This time they are embodied in a stiffly staged
marriage procession with the bridal veil floating out the funicular window,
perhaps the film's most famous image, or shots of children playing with kites,
set against a lustrous blue sky. No wonder critics found Ivens and his film ulti-
mately 'optimistic'.
Although Schoots ([1995] 2000) delights in painting a picture of Valparai-
so as an old-fashioned work barely acknowledged by refractory critics (he
emphasises its rejection from Cannes46), the documentary fared well in terms
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
of critical reception, garnering the jury's award of honour at Leipzig, and the
prestigious and perhaps less stacked FIPRESCI (International Federation of
Film Critics) award at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival as well as the gold
medal for the most original subject at the Bergamo Internazionale del Film
d'Arte e sull'Arte. In this decade of cinephilia and sprouting festivals, a multi-
ple festival launch and theatrical career for a documentary short was no small
achievement - especially for the seasoned trouper who hadn't had a film suc-
cessfully distributed in Western Europe since La Seine - and prior to that not
since 1939!
Thanks to a theatrical career twinned with Marker's sci-fi hit Lajete, Val-
paraiso had a strong impact on Paris film culture. It was reviewed favoura-
bly everywhere, and no less than two Paris film magazines published the full
decoupage (Gauthier, 1965; LAvant-Scene du cinema, 1967). While a British
reviewer carelessly, if not obtusely, treated Valparaiso as a Marker film (Month-
476 I ly Film Bulletin, 1967, 159), closer to home perhaps the highest compliment
came from one reviewer who identified Ivens's eye as a native one, uncontami-
nated by the picturesque, in contrast to Marker's indelibly Parisian sensibility:
Ivens holds on to similarities where another would trace differences.
The picturesque is in the bag and doesn't get out. Nothing surprises, but
everything touches us. We are born in Valparaiso. In contrast, there's no
doubt that the commentator Chris Marker was born between rue Jacob
and rue Sebastien-Bottin. He wants to surprise us. Ivens wants friend-
ship. (Marcabru, 1964)
Indeed, most continental critics saw the documentary as an affirmation of the
58-year-old Ivens's ascension to the rank of 'auteur', a status to be consolidat-
ed five months later by the publication of the first Ivens monograph in French
by Abraham Zalzman in 1963.
Panizza (2011) offers a long overdue summary of the film's reception in
its host culture, which was delayed at first for three years by the lack of an
exhibition infrastructure, and then as can be well imagined by two decades
of murderous politics in which many of the players had been forced into exile
or worse.47 A few reviewers of the 1960s offered predictable outrage at the
film's matter-of-fact revelation of 'seamy' sides of the city, no doubt a drunk
sprawled on the downtown sidewalk and the brothel, and a Chilean consul
in London reportedly recommended a ban on the film for 'denigrating Chile
and the Chilean people' (Panizza, 2011, 68, citing unidentified diplomat).48
However, another magazine reviewer (quoted in Panizza, 2011, 67-68) defend-
ed the work from those who 'would have preferred the city's urban progress
and more prosperous areas', and championed its 'personal view'. Others com-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
mented on rare screenings addressed the academic community: one uttered a
few reserves about certain details of local veracity, or more substantively about
the 'loss of pace' and 'falsity' of the water sequence, and the film's 'hybrid mix
of styles', while another was in tune with certain Europeans' reticence about
Ivens's lacking the cutting edge in documentary aesthetics, as emphasised by
Schoots:
We would have loved a more direct cinematic technique for Valparaiso.
Ivens remains faithful to his cinematographic training and attached a
certain visual discretion. But using his own means, which have made him
famous, he manages to beautifully express what he wants: the intimate
drama of a city, its history, its place names, its distractions, the needs and
business of its inhabitants (Valdes, 1964, quoted in Panizza, 2011, 69).
Ultimately however, Valparaiso joined so many other Ivens films in not reach- 477
ing intended audiences in the here and now of its host society, in this case
1960s Chile. Regarding those audiences he did reach, whether there or in
France and on the international festival circuit, whether then or in the inter-
vening half century, it seems that his intention of allowing multiple readings
through 'a kind of secret between the progressive public and myself towards
the reality of Valparaiso' bore fruit. The 2009 Australian reading placed it
'outside of [the] parameters [of Ivens's] explicitly leftist political and social
allegiances and beliefs' (Danks, 2009) as do 1970s American screening notes
(unidentified screening notes, n.d., Chicago, JIA), while Marcel Martin (1972)
recognised therein the 'critical reflections of a social pamphlet'. Along with
auteur status, came the usual redbaiting: one French critic detected suspect
political ideas in the film and decried their vehicle, 'The Joris Ivens para-
dox is that of a certain left that conjoins the most revolutionary ideas with a
rear-guard aesthetics. A Valparaiso is a little like having Fidel Castro talking
like Sully Prudhomme' (Tremois, 1964, quoted in Marsolais, 1974, 184).49 In
retrospect, Bravo (2007, quoted in Panizza, 2011) ironically if not uncharita-
bly voiced similar reserves about his mentor's accomplishments: unable to
escape the picturesque or a European's vantage point, Valparaiso is for him an
inescapably 'fake film'.
All the same, two Valparaiso spin-offs were not long in coming. Le Petit
Chapiteau is a six-minute gem built out of footage on the hillside miniature cir-
cus that could not be used in Valparaiso. Its account of the modest entertain-
ment is continually distracted by cutaways to children in turn enchanted by
the showmen and contortionists. This miniature work is beautifully accompa-
nied by another Prdvert poetic commentary, this time mercifully compressed.
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
85. Le petit chapiteau (1963): a six-minute
gem built from Valparaiso out takes offers
clowns, showmen and contortionists to
fascinated working-class kids. Frame
enlargement, courtesy Eye Film Institute.
© Universidad de Chile/ARGOS Films.
86. Le Train de la victoire (1964): the
16mm election film follows communist
Salvador Allende's presidential campaign,
registering an optimistic political project,
its charismatic leader and his constituents.
478 Frame enlargement, courtesy Eye Film
Institute. © FRAP
Le Train de la victoire (The Victory Train, 9), Ivens's second 16mm work (after
Nanguila), was filmed on a return visit the year after the Valparaiso premiere
during Allende's next FRAP campaign in September 1964. Initially sponsored
by a French television channel but then left stranded, Train was eventually pro-
duced by FRAP and not surprisingly registers the ebullience of an optimistic
political project and its charismatic leader. It's a jubilant rail movie, following
for a week the candidate's whistle-stop trajectory down the coast toward Santia-
go, bursting with the enthusiasm of his constituents, and livened by a piano and
guitar score by Becerra again. The film's chief appeal now is as a treasure horde
of stock footage that prophetically portends Allende's imminent martyrdom.s°
FRANCE: POUR LEIMISTRAL
Ivens's two final European essay films of this cycle, shot and finished in
mid-decade, were both released in 1966: first the Dutch city film Rotterdan
in April and then in late summer at the Venice festival the French Mistral, an
essay film on the famous, unpredictable Provence wind of the same name.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
I shall consider the latter film first since this personal project - perhaps the
most personally rooted of the entire lyrical essay cycle - had been conceived
almost a decade earlier and shot between 1963 and 1965, while the Dutch film,
a commission, had been shot in September of 1965. The interpolated com-
pletion of several films in the mid-sixties, including the last instalments of
the essay cycle and the beginning of the Indochina cycle, happened around
the same time within an intensifying spiral of Ivens's divided interests. This
moment was astonishingly productive for a man approaching 70 yet seeming-
ly spreading himself ever thinner and increasing his pace rather than slowing
down, but its success was arguably uneven.
If the modest project for Valparaiso had expanded outwards to include its
two satellite shorts and surpassed its original artistic conception, Mistral, once
referred to by Ivens (letter to Valli, 1960, JIA) as 'my greatest artistic dream',
emerged less as the most ambitious and longest-nurtured production plan of
his career than as the barely recognisable residue of this dream. This encyclo- I 479
pedic project on the epic struggle between humankind and the elements of
nature in the tradition of Zuiderzee and Lied, is notable in its final version as
a shrunken compromise, a 'castrated film' (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 284)
that was his most bitterly disappointing personal defeat since Italia or even
arguablyFirst Years. The concept first emerged in 1957 (at the very beginning of
the 1950s according to a later less reliable recollection [Destanque and Ivens,
1982, 282]), and was pushed back and forth between front and back burner
as the entire lyrical essay cycle and Ivens's pedagogical, political, and artistic
commitments around the planet kept drawing him away. Did a project about
the perennial cycles and struggles of the natural world, of which human civili-
sation is an inextricable part, provide a salutary anchor for the 'Flying Dutch-
man' no matter how accustomed he was to the stresses of remote airports and
Cold War skirmishes? And was this in a way complementary to his new rela-
tionship with Marceline Loridan that was consolidated by his move into her
homey rive gauche apartment in 1965, the year the Mistral project came to an
end? With two decades retrospect he thought as much:
Why Pour le Mistral and why at that moment? I sometimes still ask myself
this question. I believe that I was ripe to plunge myself into an experi-
ment like that and I see a stage, a kind of transition in my life and in my
work. A symbol perhaps? I don't know at all. Before Pour le Mistral, it was
Cuba and Valparaiso, and right after was the sky and the earth of Viet-
nam. Perhaps this film on the wind was not so crazy as one could believe?
I like to think that it has its place and its logic and it came at a moment in
my life where I felt the need to stop in order to film the battle of the wind
and the clouds in the sky of Provence, at St-Rmy. This peacetime sky
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
would be succeeded by another sky, a sky of sound and fury, where the
star would no longer be the wind, but death. (Ivens and Destanque, 1982,
286)
The Mistral concept would have produced a two-and-a-half-hour compendium
that matched the state-financed Lied and Italia, or even what can be consid-
ered its eventual remake Histoire, in its artistic and thematic scale and scope.
But the thriving private film industry for shorts and nonfiction in France at
the peak of the New Wave somehow could not pull it off. Ivens seemed lined
up to become the new Flaherty with this never-ending shoot, and his exas-
perated producer, whom Ivens had once cast as a risk-taking and sympathet-
ic young saviour, would be pushed to his limits by delays, interruptions, and
overruns, finally forced to pull the plug and to edit the unfinished material
already assembled. The increasing urgency of the geopolitical situation, espe-
480 cially around Indochina, summoning Ivens to intervene, did not help the sit-
uation any more than the shortage of time, money, and cooperation from the
unpredictable Aeolian star of the film. Ivens secretly went to Hanoi in June
of 1964, at the invitation of a North Vietnamese government then faced with
the inevitable escalation of American aggression (US bombing of the North
began two months later), and reconnoitred both the North's defences and
its cinematic infrastructure, establishing the relationships that would bring
him back to Indochina the following year and lead to four films in the region.
The overextended director's protracted absences, hush-hush or not (June
in Hanoi, September in Santiago, November in Leipzig), and the resultant
on-again-off-again status of the production, could not have reassured an inex-
perienced producer who had clearly overextended himself as much as Ivens
had. The outcome was inevitable, not only Ivens's cries of frustration and
an outburst of personal vituperation against the hapless producer, but also
most importantly the shortcomings of a flawed, 32-minute lyrical essay sal-
vaged from this mess that barely exceeded the other less personal essays of
this cycle in its scale. Nevertheless, Mistral, once detached in retrospect from
Ivens's smashed dreams, ended up strong enough to garner a Golden Lion at
Venice and to assume pride of place in that festival's lifetime retrospective of
his work; it also has maintained its bold and anomalous cinematic interest a
half-century later.
The meridional French state of Provence is home to the legendarily fierce
wind that unexpectedly sweeps down from the Alps across the state's distinc-
tive craggy yet fertile terrain towards the Mediterranean, shaping its entire
economy and culture. Provence was also Ivens's occasional holiday refuge in
the post-war years, as he increasingly put down roots in Paris. It is hard to pic-
ture the restless, diehard communist at home and relaxing amid the decadent
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
tourists whom Vigo had castigated once and for all in A propos de Nice (1930,
France, 45). But there were also pockets of Parisian rive gauche literati settled
along the Riviera and just inland, from Prdvert to Picasso, not to mention the
cinema people congregating in Cannes each May with whom Ivens apparent-
ly felt at home. He became a regular as the fifties and sixties wore on, usually
staying at the house offered the penniless filmmaker by his Parisian medical
specialist Dr. Raymond Leibovici.
Ivens experienced his first epiphanic discovery of the Mistral in 1958, lying
on his back looking at the sky in St-Tropez, and seeing the wind clear the sky
of its clouds:
I had just been present at the battle of the god of the wind against the
world of the clouds, and that had been so sudden, so obvious, at the
same time so simple and so unbounded that my breath was cut off and
my heart was on alert. I was sorry that I did not have a camera with me to I 481
record the images of this fleeting spectacle and share my feeling. (Ivens
and Destanque, 1982, 282)
Although some producers mocked the idea of a film on an invisible entity,
Ivens's first Paris producer Garance Film offered the initial contract in 1959,
the year after their hit with La Seine, but nothing came of this amid all the back-
and-forth between Italy, Africa, and Latin America. Another distraction was
Ivens's completion in the summer of 1960 of the montage for Cindmatheque
francaise founder Henri Langlois's documentary project on Marc Chagall, a
compilation of the Russian-Jewish artist's images deployed as a biography,
which had been in the works for more than two years and was doomed to be
one of Ivens's rare lost works.5' Once the Cuban and Valparaiso projects were
completed by the spring of 1963, Ivens managed to obtain another contract
for Mistral, this time with the young New Wave producer Claude Nedjar, a 'the-
atre man' 40 years his junior, who was willing to come on board with a project
that was very risky indeed.
An ambitious plan had been developed in collaboration with two writers
whom Ivens, ever averse to producing proposals and treatments himself, espe-
cially in his new adopted second language, had brought into the project. They
were predictably from rivegauche cultural circles, Armand Gatti, yet another for-
mer Marker collaborator, and Ren Guyonnet. The proposal was entitled Sang
de ciel ('Sky Blood'), and offered a narrative of the capricious and potent natural
force, even more anthropomorphising than Ivens's conception of the Missis-
sippi and the Nile had been a decade earlier. Ivens and Nedjar were so excited
about the proposal that they were even discussing a spin-off record and book
(yet another Lied retread). Lied and Italia were not the only templates for this
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
composite hybrid, but also the likewise ambitious omnibus and anthology for-
mats that were in the heady air of the New Wave cinemas of the 1950s and 196os,
ranging from the thematic Ro.Go.Pa.G. (Godard et al., 1963, Italy/France, 111) to
the city compilation Paris vu par... (Six in Paris, Godard et al., 1965, 95), round-
ed off by the early 1970s American variations Visions of Eight (Milos Forman et
al., 1973, 11o) and de Antonio's Underground (1975, 87). Perhaps the films that
come closest to Ivens's model, in the sense that different authors and different
artistic forms are incorporated, are not surprisingly also associated with Ivens,
Loin du Vietnam and Histoire.52 In fact, as Stufkens (2008, 402) has convincing-
ly demonstrated, the original plan for Loin was based on a proposal for a six-
part feature-length composite Vietnam film proposed by Ivens to the Conseil
mondial de la paix in July 1966, during the final edit of Mistral (which by then
had heartbreakingly been stripped of its original encyclopedic scale). Marker
and others had been recruited to this proposal several months before Marker
482 I brought together the new Loin collective in December of that year. Such ency-
clopedic hybrids by and large were not always commercially successful in their
theatrical aspirations, and in a way epitomised the hubris of certain commer-
cial-minded convergences of documentary cultures and New Wave cinephilias.
It was an era where things were arguably going in another direction and direct
cinema was re-establishing documentary's place less in the theatres than within
parallel exhibition infrastructures, audiences, and social vocations.
The film was to be an eclectic composite essay composed like a symphony
in five movements, with terms like theme, variation, and finale, and tempos
like scherzo and appassionato in the conversation, along with a whole range of
styles, 'lyric, satiric, humorous, scientific, fantastic, social, cultural and adven-
ture'. The key elements were to be:
1) A six-minute abstract animated film that Ivens's old acquaintance from
his days at the National Film Board of Canada, Norman McLaren, had
agreed to develop.53
2) A 20-minute 'Lettre de Provence', a selection of scenes and spontaneous
shots filmed by amateur filmmakers from Provence, capturing their lives
under the Mistral, a repeat of Lied's successful recruitment strategy, facil-
itated by a thriving regional cine-club network.
3) A three-minute 'social relations' art film on the Paris-Nice express train
in service at the time called 'Le Mistral'.
4) The 40-minute documentary to be made by Ivens.
5) A 20-minute short fiction film on the Mistral theme, a heterosexual
romance to be directed by a young director (a retread of Windrose?).
Stufkens (2008, 365) has deduced that Loridan, who had lived in Bellene,
Provence at a traumatic moment in her youth just prior to her deporta-
tion, was the candidate for this final segment.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Calls for the amateur contributions to the Mistral compendium went out in
Cinema pratique in the spring of 1964 and several interesting responses were
received though none followed through (Stuflens, 2008, 368-369). There is no
record of any advances in any of the other three proposed segments except
Ivens's own. In all, three shooting periods were eventually organised and
carried out in Provence, in the fall of 1963, in the winter of 1964-1965, and a
final five weeks in early spring of 1965. The cinematographers were Claude
Dumaitre, the veteran of La Seine, credited with the material from Haute
Provence, and Pierre Lhomme, rising star of the New Wave who had distin-
guished himself on Marker's Lejoli Mai (Ivens had personally defended this
film to none other than East German President Walter Ulbricht in November
1963 to ensure its Leipzig festival prize, and just prior to the Mistral premiere
he was to say '[Marker] is without a doubt the best French filmmaker, he made
LeJoli Mai' (Ivens, 1966a, 20).
One of the particular aspects of the project was its attention to sound, to I 483
which the spin-off record fantasy clearly testifies. The influence of direct cin-
ema was evident in this emphasis, though interviewing with 'farmers, fish-
ers, lumberjacks, weathermen, hunters. and also poets' affected by the wind
never materialised as elements of the final product, to Ivens's great regret.
Although 16mm sync cinematography was part of the technical layout, along-
side 35mm, there is no synchronised speech of any kind in the film. Rather,
the direct aesthetic seems to have shaped the obsessive drive by Ivens and his
sound consultant, the avant-garde composer Luc Ferrari, to record the sounds
of a subject that everyone said was invisible but never inaudible - as that post-
war avant-garde genre, concrete music (Stuflens, 2008, 365-366). Much crea-
tive energy went into the recording of the wind, notably in a 'wind cage' that
Ferrari had designed for the purpose - in the face of the impracticality of his
earlier idea of planting microphones in human ears to replicate the sound:
During the shoot, the sound man had become as crazy about the wind
as I was. For the first time of his life he had no wind against him. On the
contrary, instead of fleeing it he had to capture all its nuances. He had
recorded the wind with its different musics and we'd be able to make an
original record out of it. (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 285)
Ivens's notes for the sound recording offered much specific detail as to what
was to be recorded:
- poplars, a group of people (talking while walking); cypresses, dead
trees (cracks and pops branches), fever, wind in the grasses
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
Sheep - shepherds, hills with various sounds, dogs, voices from far off, a
gunshot, etc.
Church interior (normal, and if possible abandoned church), bells (in the
wind), tractor that is ploughing, windmill, weathervane (creaking)
- deserted house (everything that creaks: doors, windows, etc.), stones
falling, walking on tiles and stones, birds, forest (wind)
Rocks at Sisteron, wind on the bridge with river (Verdon), organ rocks
(Mdes, electric wires, echo (St-Geneiz towards Sisteron).
Sheets that flap, bamboos, conservation roof in tree, microphone in
pebbles +junipers (roof), electric pylons, ocher tunnel. (Ivens, pro-
duction notes, JIA)
It is easy to imagine what happened to the grandiose concrete music propos-
als in the last phase of production after the April 1965 plug-pulling. The sound
484 I effects that ended up in the finished scaled-back product often prosaically
perpetuate 1930s synthetic studio effects, just like in La Seine and the other
films. Just as often however, they reflect Ivens's original instructions geared
toward sensory immersion and experimentation, vividly and dramatically
constructing a pantheistic universe of struggle with the wind god. The crew's
creative microphone placement clearly bore fruit, but I doubt that such effects
are synchronised given the Provenal flora's lack of lips and Ivens's traditional
indifference to the ontological principle involved. Whatever the case, Ferrari
and his ambitious sound design are not acknowledged in the final credits of
the film, and one can only conclude that he was another expensive casualty of
the plug-pulling. The sound is attributed to a commonly encountered sound
technician of the nouvelle vague, Bernard Ortion, and the orchestral score,
effectively modernist and commanding but far from the experimental 'con-
crete music' once envisaged, is credited to Antoine Duhamel, now known for
the score for Godard's Pierrot lefou (11o), also of 1965.
Much of Ivens's research was also focused on artistic heritage, the visual
and literary mythologies of the Mistral, and their translation into cinematic
form. It was as if the increasingly self-reflexive senior filmmaker was out to
exceed those critics who had endlessly praised for decades the cultural ref-
erences through his work and to push the work's encyclopedic vocation to
include visual culture:
I studied Dutch painters who, with their techniques, had tried to grasp
the terrible wind from the Northwest that weighs down the sky and
brings the storm. In Florence, I observed Botticelli's wind in Venus's
hair. I read and reread the poems of Shelley, Lorca, Saint-John Perse and
Frdric Mistral. I resaw films where the wind becomes a dramatic ele-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
ment like the admirable The Wind of Sj6strom or the moving Steamboat
Willjunior of Buster Keaton. I collected stories and legends on the wind
and, little by little, I acquired the certainty that I could gather together
all the elements in a great filmic poem. But the most important was my
encounter with van Gogh. Looking as his paintings, those that he painted
in Provence, I discovered that he had brushed all of them in the light of
the Mistral, above the cypresses, the presence of this implacable sun
that is like the herald of a danger, the premonitory sign of his madness.
Ordinarily, the cypress is the tree of solemnity. Compact and slender, it
punctuates the landscape, borders lots, adorns cemeteries, and testifies
to a civilization. Its pride is obvious, it is there to break the wind and,
when the mistral starts to blow, it becomes a completely different tree.
The cypress changes the position of its leaves and, from dark to calm, its
mass transforms into a green torch that reaches to the sky. It's thus that
Van Gogh had painted it and it's thus that I too wanted to grasp it, in its I 485
colour of the wind. (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 283-284)
This research was more palpable in the final film than the experimental
sound research, and the film can be seen on one level as an homage to Ivens's
compatriot, though not overloaded with exact quotations from van Gogh's
painterly oeuvre.54 Rather, his visual concept went beyond a conservative and
literal-minded approach to painterly adaptation. Lhomme provided a strong
tactile and dynamic sense of nature caught up in the wind, dizzy with spec-
tacular pans, vertiginous tilts and giddy travelling shots, frames bursting with
swaying cypresses, breathtaking enunciations of colour (a startling field of
yellow mustard), landscapes often caught classically at a 'sublime' distance
but its textures caught especially in close-up, caught in snowy meadows, fren-
zied foliage and whipped branches. All is lit with volatile intensity and acute
colouration and often animated with close-up, embodied and gestural camer-
awork (had Lhomme seen Brakhage? was he self-consciously replicating van
Gogh's brushstrokes?) that pushes some of the imagery sometimes toward
pantheistic subjectivism and sometimes to the point of abstraction, all offer-
ing the evocative equivalent of van Gogh's sensory and psychic disturbance in
the face of the Mistral. Ivens must have been gratified when eventual reviewers
would emphasise the film's sensory effect: 'Instinctively the spectator raises
the collar of his/her coat' (Vidal, 1964); 'One can feel the breath that the Mis-
tral spreads over land and water like a blanket' (Fortuin, 1968).
On a macro level Ivens continued the Valparaiso practice of shooting in
both black and white and colour and planned a structural passage from the
former to the latter that repeated the earlier film's tectonic emulsion shift.
Moreover, he had other tricks up his sleeve, an even more dramatic shift from
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
classical aspect ratio to widescreen, to embody through the shape of the frame
the sudden and unpredictable assault of the wind suddenly swooping hori-
zontally across the landscape. And to further convey the power of the wind,
aerial shots were provided for, echoing similar strategies in earlier epic nature
battle films, in Zuiderzee (his first usage of aerial views) as well as Lied. But this
time the filmmakers were developing the point of view of the roving, robust-
ly anthropomorphised wind - much less gentle than its incarnations as the
blowing Zephyrs Ivens had seen ruffling Venus's hair in the Botticelli. He also
ensured that the latest in the emerging family of zoom lenses, the PanCinor,
was at his disposal, and Mistral can be considered the first of Ivens's works to
systematically deploy this quintessentially 196os tool. These expensive tech-
nologies no doubt heightened Nedjar's budgetary skittishness from early
in the production, but Ivens's concept bore fruit, especially the spectacular
aerial travelling shots that provide the climax of the film, the anthropomor-
486 I phised point-of-view sequence originating in the Alps, culminating in the final
20-second dive across coastal dunes out into the Mediterranean.
Nedjar cut short the cinematography at the end of April 1965, despite
Ivens's frustrated plea that the three shoots had obtained the cooperation of
the recalcitrant wind for a total of only eight days. Relationships soured and
the director and crew, who had financed much of the shoot in its final sprint
through their savings and unremunerated labour respectively, made gestures
towards a withholding of the rushes from the producer. After several months,
catching his breath and determined to realise his investment, Nedjar set the
project back on track the following spring with view towards a Venice 1966
premiere, apparently with Ivens's begrudging cooperation, together with a
familiar editor Jean Ravel (who would get major credit along with cinematog-
rapher Pierre Lhomme, as 'collaborator') and an unfamiliar commentary writ-
er, Provencal poet Andre Verdet. 20 years later Ivens was forthright about his
still vivid disappointment, uncharacteristically blunt about the work of collab-
orators still living at the time:
Everything collapsed like a house of cards. I was present powerlessly at
this flop, my beautiful dream on the Mistral diluted in the abandonments
and pettinesses of a production that no longer had the means to live up
to its commitments. The film reflected this seepage. The commentary
was mediocre, the music half-finished, the passage from black and white
to colour, that I had imagined nuanced and rich in meanings [including
through dissolves], was reduced to a lab effect without subtlety and,
above all, all the lived anecdotes that I had selected, all the little stories
of which the wind was the star and that were supposed to give the film its
true shape, were never shot. Caught between a failing production and a
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
wind that had never stopped imposing its will, my illusions had melted
like snow in the sun. (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 286)
While the finished film does not offer for the innocent viewer concrete evi-
dence of most of these melted illusions, the effect of the commentary, despite
Verdet's credentials as a distinguished poet and multidisciplinary artist, is
justly summed up by the director in his words 'mediocre' - and a few days after
the premiere 'pompous' (Ivens, letter to Michelle, quoted in Schoots, [1995]
2000, 286). Mercifully, it lays over only one-fifth of the soundtrack (compared
to Valparaiso's one-third). And that one-fifth was read by Pigaut at breakneck
speed, somewhat of a challenge for non-native speakers dependent on sub-
titles and not able to access its intensely incantatory thrust in the original
French - literary, figurative, descriptive, highly allusive as if Verdet had read
too much of Ivens's notes about Shelley and Saint-John Perse. At best it is
dysfunctional and at worse seriously migrainogenic. Even one French critic I 487
would call it 'unbearable' (Haudiquet, 1967)!
This problem aside, the final version of Mistral is a fine nature and land-
scape essay that well deserved its Golden Lion. This despite this genre's dis-
sidence with other documentary trends of 1965-1966. For these the urgent
aesthetic challenge was lip sync encounters with individuals whether as por-
traits or as conduits to social or geopolitical or historical issues: portraits
of composers from Stravinsky (Stravinsky [Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor,
1965, Canada, 451; A Stravinsky Portrait [Richard Leacock, 1966, USA, 551) to
Bob Dylan (Don't Look Back [D.A. Pennebaker, 1967, USA, 96]), jostled with
interview encounters with ordinary but cinematic individuals, from Warhol's
Chelsea Girls (1966, USA, 210) to Marker's Le mystere Koumiko (1967, France,
46), especially those caught up in the century's geopolitical violence, from
Memorandum (Donald Brittain, 1967, Canada, 58) to The Mills of the Gods: Viet-
nam (Beryl Fox, 1965, Canada, 56). Films about nature were simply not cutting
edge in 1965, nor throughout the entire decade, and Mistral seems old-fash-
ioned and prophetic at the same time.
The 33-minute definitive version, apparently finalised after Venice, is
organised very generally around the passage of the seasons, and around the
cycles of the wind, loosely retaining without making explicit the musical
architecture Ivens had envisaged for his 'poem' - undoubtedly more sona-
ta-form than symphonic. Built through the visual and aural nature tropes,
indeed themes and variations, and the citational practice outlined above,
the discourse of the wind is interspersed with narrative clusters arising out
of the human society in its path, consisting of Ivens's three traditional ele-
ments:
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
87. Pour le Mistral (1966): a Marseilles vista
shows shantytown residents struggling -
against the wind to carywater. DVD
frame capture. © CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
- Firstly, documentaire organisd: sequences most often following everyday
work, that of shepherds guarding their charges on windswept plateaus,
fieldworkers, landholders and housewives working within and setting
up barriers to the ferocity of the wind, women and children carrying out
488 everyday subsistence in an exposed hillside Marseilles shantytown; vil-
lage elders playing cards in a streetfront cafd in Avignon.
- Secondly, more outright dramatisation: notably a scripted Christmas
midnight mass sequence, often referred-to because it was suggested
by Ivens's famous friend Prdvert, in which a grande dame arriving at
the church in her limousine has her pearls ripped off by the wind - the
Mistral's revenge on her pride? She abandons her scattered pearls and
attends the mass, the only interior in the film, but soon her devotion is
distracted by the pearls on the priest's chasuble. Also memorable is a
cryptic choreographed sequence organised around a young dance-the-
atre troupe rehearsing Romeo and Juliet out of doors on a gusty square.
Perhaps this linkage of the Shakespearean social, erotic, and emotive
turbulence to the tempestuous meteorological stage - wind-crossed rath-
er than star-crossed - was a nod to the narrative romance never pursued
beyond the drawing board.
- Finally, Ivens's spontaneous 'life-caught-unawares' observational
impulse, reinvigorated with La Seine, resurfaces in Mistral, thanks at least
in part to the new zoom and long focal distance lenses, but becomes a
minor current, engaging most strikingly a comic sensibility for which
Ivens is not especially famous. Here Ivens's other cinematic muse, Kea-
ton - or perhaps Keaton-meets-Jacques-Tati - comes into play, if we look
again at the comic intervals capturing the pride of human enterprise
flouted by the elements, the wind toying with women's skirts, etc. A series
of urban street shots, caught at the fullest moment of the Mistral's pow-
er, shows city dwellers struggling to carry out their mundane tasks, and
then frozen at their moment of humiliation - citizens losing control of
their bicycles, seniors seeing their letters snatched just as they are being
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
mailed. This lighthearted observation speaks to the wind as a naughty
imp rather than a titan, a countercurrent to the epic struggles that are at
the centre of the film.
88. A freeze frame showing the Mistral
as a naughty imp harassing cyclists and
other urban citizens, a countercurrent to
epic struggles. DVD frame capture. © CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
489
Throughout Mistral, familiar social themes from class difference to the strug-
gle for survival through labour are kept in view, inextricably embellished by
the sensuous apperception of the volatile natural environment. In sum, as he
had intended, Ivens had successfully tapped, as so often before, a synthesis
of epic and lyric scale, maintaining a dialectical presence of panoramic views
of pregnant horizons and skyscapes alive with hurtling clouds (using in one
stance accelerated motion, it seems) together with the minutest of details of
everyday manual labour or the vibrating shimmer of an insect on a petal.
Verdet's commentary attempts this same dialectic, but Ivens is correct
that this 'mediocre' gloss falls short of its mark. Aside from the issue of trans-
linguistic accessibility that I raised earlier, it is hard to imagine that Ivens
would have accepted the current definitive version of this text had he not been
on a collision course toward Venice and pulled sideways at the same time by
his growing involvement in the Vietnam cause and concomitant estrange-
ment with the Soviet bloc, not to mention both the Rotterdam release and the
Ciel premiere that spring. Hyperbolically literary and extremely dense, the
commentary is offered largely in rhyming quatrains or other complex rhym-
ing schemes, and fails most of the principles about commentary writing that
Ivens had developed since Spanish Earth, distracting in its allusiveness and
redundant in its detailed descriptions of what is seen on screen. Even in a pas-
sage more effective than most, the eloquent treatment/vista of the Marseilles
shantytown residents struggling against the gusts to access water, the text's
evocative switch to the interrogative mode and plaintively Marxian utopian,
'if only' image of work as a 'coral to polish' and life as a 'festive state' where
justice prevails, is undermined by its excessive verbiage and a piled-up figura-
tiveness of language laid over the figurativeness of the imagery:
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
La misere n'est pas encore religuie dans les archives de l'histoire. A notre
table pourrons-nous encore nous orchestrer, et notre lit sera-t-il encore par-
fois comme une barque sur le lac ou la mer belle dans la magie de la saison ?
Laporte, l'escalier, la rue, les perspectives nettes, l'espace et l'azur comme
une conjonction heureuse, le travail comme une proiefacile, un corail a polir.
Et lajustice a l'dtat defete? [Misery has still to be relegated to the archives
of history. Will we still be able to gather at our table? and our bed, will it
still be at times like a boat on the lake, or the sea beautiful in the magic
of the season? The door, the stair, the street, neat perspectives, space
and the blueness like a happy conjunction. Work is an easy prey/quarry, a
coral to polish. And justice in this festive state?]
Politically speaking, Ivens's essay on a turbulent natural universe cannot be
said to be prophetically ecological in the same sense as Ivens's stressed pro-de-
490 I velopment films, read against the grain, from Zuiderzee and Komsomol to Lied
and Italia. However, since Provenal civilisation clearly exists in harmony
with the capricious wind, Ivens's agrarian fantasy, especially seen within the
macro pattern of the career-long back-and-forth between urban and pastoral,
can certainly be seen as a last enunciation of the utopian vision of nature in
harmony with mankind's struggle to labour and reproduce. This last vision is
especially poignant in the light of Ivens's imminent rediscovery of the other
sky that he remembered for Destanque in 1982 as the technologically deter-
minist sky of capitalist war rather than the sky of nature's 'sound and fury'
(Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 286). Not surprisingly, Mistral has been occasion-
ally revived in the 21st century, alongside Valparaiso, as an environmental film
(for example the Ecocinema festival, Greece 2006).
No theatrical career would be in store for Mistral, no doubt due to its being
out-of-sync with the increasing mood of the decade's documentary work and
Ivens's preoccupations elsewhere, quickly moving on as usual after a 'flop'
(Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 286). Restricted to a path as a festival film, and sen-
tenced moreover to short film ignominy in the lower antechamber of hell, critics
rarely discussed this film at any length. After its Venice premiere, where it was
largely ignored despite its prize, it played in East Germany as part of the yearlong
Ivens's 70th birthday celebrations and in the left-wing Florence documentary
event Festival dei Popoli in February 1967, and had a triumphant exposure in the
Netherlands in the fall of 1968 along with the 70th birthday celebrations there.
J.C.A. Fortuin (1968) admired the precision of the cinematography but praised
especially the 'eloquent' montage, 'ascribing poetry to the violence of the storm
and drama to what would otherwise have been nothing more than an interest-
ing reportage about a natural phenomenon'. In similar vein, the Nieuwsblad van
het Zuiden (1968) praised its 'enormous dramatic energy' coming principally out
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
of the editing: 'one of the strongest films that Ivens has ever made, fashioned
in a style one recognizes immediately, a craftsmanly style that others will reject
as conventional, but a style that evokes such tension within and between the
images that it can only be the work of a master'. 20-something cinephile-crit-
ic-turned-director Verstappen (1968), however, embarking on his own career as
a feature film director the same year and epitomising the hip youth New Wave
culture of the 196os, recognises his kinship with an artist 40 years his senior and
emphasised the 'welcome back native son' angle:
The photography in Mistral, for example, is dazzlingly beautiful, every
frame an impeccable composition, with overcast skies and landscapes
that haven't been seen since Brueghel. In a certain sense, Mistral appears
to be a film from the Dutch documentary school. [...] Mistral is more
powerful, however, its photography more classical, its montage more
inventive than the work of the Low Countries. I 491
The Dutch had reawakened to the work of their best known expatriate film-
maker, with the final two films in this cycle Mistral and Rotterdam, and Ver-
stappen's generation, immersed in New Wave cinephilia and New Left politics,
who remembered neither the War nor the Dutch East Indies, were now primed
to constitute one of Ivens's most attentive audiences over the Asian peregrina-
tions of the next quarter century.
The French audience was more blase about Mistral and the critics hardly
noticed it - its festival prize notwithstanding. Only Haudiquet (1967) focused
momentarily on the two final essays, which he called film poems, and saw in
Mistral a confirmation of Ivens's stature as 'the great poet of the documenta-
ry'. The critics in Florence were equally appreciative: Frosali (1967) wondered
whether a poetic nature documentary belonged in a festival of social cinema
but praised the film's 'beautiful images, great humanist sense of nature, won-
der and tenderness, [that] enliven the documentary, unique in the genre',
while his colleague (Novelli, 1967) had no doubts whatever that 'the splendor
of the images, the intensity of the colour and the poetry of the Ivens's film are
among the most beautiful sights in this Festival'.
NETHERLANDS: ROTTERDAM EUROPOORT
Rotterdam, the last film made in the lyrical essay cycle of the 1950s-60s,
imposed in 1965-1966 a certain symmetrical shape upon this phase of Ivens's
career. For one thing, this 2o-minute city film was an occasion for the eter-
nal expatriate to work again in the homeland from which he had been exiled
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
30 years before to make a 'come-home-all-is-forgiven' commission. Moreover
this urban essay on Europe's largest port comes at the end of the systole-di-
astole pattern of the essay film cycle - its oscillation between rural and urban
worlds, between nature and civilisation. In fact the pattern is encapsulated in
both the relationships of each film to each other and those within each film
itself (the latter most dramatically within Italia). Ivens rounds this pattern off
with a gentle cinematic questioning of a turbulent and congested metropo-
lis with '8oo,ooo faces' that complements Mistral's contemporaneous essay
on epic struggles within the natural universe. Finally, as many commenta-
tors have emphasised, Rotterdam's glimpse of the iron vertical lift bridge over
the Maas was a symmetrical return to the very monument that had inspired
Ivens's first major film Brug almost 40 years earlier, that is, the symbolic cen-
tre of Rotterdam's life.
Rotterdam can most productively be compared to the other two 'pure' city
492 I films in this cycle, La Seine and Valparaiso (though most of the other essay
films of the cycle contain a city-film fragment or element, Italia its Ravenna,
Carnet its Havana, Nanguila its Bamako, Mistral its Marseilles). Rotterdam is
also unique, for the native son no longer needs to suppress his cultural curios-
ity toward the 'other', can luxuriate in his mother tongue, and can fully banish
the temptation of the exotic and the picturesque from his palette. The result
arguably comes closest among his films to capturing the rhythms and spac-
es of 20thcentury urban civilisation in the global north, those beneath the
aestheticised surfaces of Regen and the sentimental affect of Valparaiso. The
project, no less messy in its production process than Italia or Mistral, survived
despite heavy odds against it (another good-intentioned, tight-pursed produc-
er who ended up having to say enough is enough), and is arguably one of the
enduring works of the cycle, ripe like Ivens himself for rehabilitation.
Discussions of a new Ivens Dutch film began to proliferate after the suc-
cessful screening of La Seine in Arnhem in 1957, and especially after Ivens's
65th birthday blowout in Amsterdam in February 1964, organised by Jan de
Vaal, Ivens's friend, fan and defender, future head of the Ivens archive, and
leading impresario of the rehabilitation process. The unforgiving government
opposed any state funding for such a film, butthe Rotterdam entrepreneur Joop
Landre came to the rescue. He happened to be an old Ivens acquaintance and
budding film producer who was making a contribution to Holland's emerging
post-war film New Wave as well as its revolution in private broadcasting. Most
importantly he was fortunately well connected to the Harbour commission for
the country's largest port. Landre began to solicit ideas from Ivens, and, in the
midst of Mistral preparations, Ivens naturally suggested a clouds film, then a
Venice-Amsterdam project pulled out of his ideas drawer from a decade earli-
er, and finally another recycled project based on the 'Flying Dutchman' perso-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
na that had fascinated him since the 1920s. This persona was derived from an
18thcentury legend and canonised by Heine and later Wagner in the 19th cen-
tury as a tale of a punished nautical hero doomed to sail the globe and make
land only every seven years (Ivens would use a 100-year variant of the story), yet
who is eligible for redemption through a woman's love. Ivens's revived interest
was an index of his growing self-reflexivity as he aged and basked increasingly
in self-fulfilling critical spins. This last idea, implicitly autobiographical, got
incorporated into Landrd's own proposal for a documentary on the Rotterdam
port accompanied by Ravel's Bolero (Stuflens, 2008) and by December 1964
the deal was set, with a handsome budget of 121,600 guilders (Paalman, 2011,
424), fortunately bereft of the suggested score. Ivens's friends at Argos, happy
with the success of Valparaiso, came on as co-producers alongside Landrd and
the municipality, and secured Paris as the post-production headquarters.
Why would Ivens have taken on one more project at a time when he was
already being torn apart by conflicting loyalties to both the Mistral and Viet- 493
nam? No doubt the warm glow around Dutch rehabilitation was clinched by
the continuing need to earn a living. In the climate of scarcity within the docu-
mentary industry, one lined up future projects then as now by never saying no.
It would be almost a year before the shoot in Rotterdam got underway in Sep-
tember 1965, and as it turned out the premieres of Rotterdam, Ciel, and Mistral
all took place in rapid succession in 1966.
Developing the concept at the same time as the Mistral cinematography
and the Ciel startup in Hanoi, Ivens chose a 'semi-documentary' format and
leaned toward the element of fantasy and dramatisation to an extent not
reached since Italia. The Dutchman would be a mediator persona, whose wide-
eyed gaze would serve as a conduit upon the city for the spectator. His point
of view and his voice would be incorporated into the film, a variation on the
perennial trope utilised in city films from Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with
a Movie Camera, Vertov, 1929, USSR, 68) and Rien que les heures (Nothing But
Time, Cavalcanti, 1926, France, 45) to My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007, Cana-
da, 8o) and La memoire des anges (The Memories ofAngels, Luc Bourdon, 2008,
Canada, 8o). Perhaps as a reaction against the increasing 'naturalist' dogma
of direct cinema, which Ivens continued to critique in 1965 and 1966, as we
have seen, the emerging Dutchman character was closer to pure fiction than
any of his other films since TillEulenspiegel. It even went so far as to pastiche
some imagery from the 'other side', namely the glamorous aura and aquatic
prowess of the James Bond movie hero, whose huge success had had three hit
incarnations thus far in the sixties, and whose fourth, Thunderball (Terence
Young, 1965, UK, 130), was imminent at the end of 1965.
The fantasy element, as striking as it would be, was not intended to over-
whelm the social thesis of the film. Ivens's hitherto classic Marxist analysis
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
of labour - work as dignified, strenuous, and alienated yet potentially liberat-
ed by technology - was to segue into a more postmodern critique of an urban
existence dominated by technology that does not liberate but alienates and
depersonalises. In his notes he confronted the irony that the biggest port in
the world deployed an 'empty' technology:
Social system out of date the human side neglected - only profit counts.
The 'barons of the port', bullies [brutalistes] with noise and their song of
the masses. [... The Dutchman's] insistent dream: at sea he thought that
mankind would have evolved more quickly to a higher level, to its youth.
(Ivens, production notes, n.d., JIA)
Ivens, moreover, anticipated that as usual these social themes would create
friction with the sponsors:
494 I
What is important above all, these are the problems of the country
in which you are filming. The Return of the FlyingDutchman is a film
commissioned by the city of Rotterdam: but in Rotterdam also people
have problems and necessarily I will have a hard time showing them. In
France, it would be the same with certain subjects that are taboo: wages,
housing. (Ivens, 1966a)
For the team Landrd and Ivens assembled a hard core of proven Dutch tech-
nicians, namely cinematographer Eddy van der Enden, whose already exist-
ing footage of the petrochemical installations of the port impressed Ivens and
was incorporated into the final film (Paalman, 2011, 425), and sound special-
ist Tom Tholen, responsible for the 'brutaliste' urban soundscape Ivens had
pointed to.55 Ivens recruited as assistant his new girlfriend Loridan, whose
censored 1962 documentary Algdrie, annde zro (co-dir. Jean-Pierre Sergent,
35), was finally surfacing and about to win the Leipzig festival Grand Prize in
November. Also from Paris came cinematographer Etienne Becker, yet anoth-
er veteran from Marker's LeJoliMai, who had established himself as an expert
on his new 16mm Eclair camera, the privileged instrument of the new direct
cinema, which Ivens wanted to use for handheld and synch-sound on-the-
street shooting (predictably, as it turned out, not a single moment of impro-
vised direct lip-synch-sound would be retained in the film, but the handheld
camerawork is indeed virtuoso). To cast the Dutchman, the Amsterdam exper-
imental sculptor Carel Kneulman was recruited halfway through the shoot to
replace an acrophobic performer who had already been cast, and future lead-
ing lady of the Dutch film industry, Willeke van Ammelrooy, was signed to play
his romantic interest Senta.56 Finally, one of the Netherlands' most famous
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
poets, Gerrit Kouwenaar, a prizewinning and socially critical experimentalist
and former Resistance activist, came on board to write what turned out to be
one of the best handful of commentaries in the Ivens oeuvre. Argos recruited
Montand to read Marker's French version of the narration.
Despite everything falling so well into place, the shoot turned out to be
no less stressed than that for Mistral. Ivens skimped on the preparation and
research time he normally reserved, and the shoot began in late September
five days after his arrival, without a script or even shooting plan in place, lead-
ing to much anxiety within the crew. To make matters worse Loridan, and no
doubt the other Parisians, did not speak Dutch. One of the Paris assistants,
Miroslav Sebestik (quoted in Stufkens, 2008, 349), put a positive spin on
the uncertainty: 'The film is evolving as we shoot. The scenario, the idea for
the film, is developing with every passing day. This allows us to maintain an
improvisational dimension, a freedom. Filming this way is seeking'. But this
did not reassure budget-conscious Landrd, who soon instructed Ivens to can- 495
cel his idea to extend the Cinemascope experimentation he had begun the pre-
vious year in Mistral. Kneulman arrived only in the third week of the shoot, at
which point a scenario was finally solidified. Ivens himself disappeared to the
Ciel post-production in Paris at the start of November and the shoot contin-
ued two weeks without him under Loridan's linguistically challenged super-
vision before wrapping up (Stufkens, 2008, 347). Tensions continued during
an accelerated postproduction - the 24-to-1 ratio was one challenge (albeit a
luxurious one), the distance between Rotterdam and Paris was another, and
Ivens's request for additional cinematography was also turned down by Lan-
dre. The film was completed with the addition of Kouwenaar's text, trimmed
by Ivens to a still prolix 36% of the running time, and of Tholen's soundtrack,
just a month before the official premiere at the end of April 1966. The Rotter-
dam municipal brass was in full, proud - if slightly puzzled - attendance.
The definitive version of Rotterdam that emerged at that moment opens
just like his other port city essays Regen, Seine, Valparaiso, and Shanghai with
an introit into the city through its harbour and aquatic thoroughfares, brood-
ing and nocturnal. But in this case the dominant point of view belongs to the
mysterious frogman-attired seafarer on board his jetfoil, hurtling over the
waves past the smoky and noisy tugs, freighters, and cranes towards the city.
Rotterdam adds a twist to the Valparaiso/Mistral aesthetic template of colour
displacing black and white in the course of the documentary: here the black
and white is given a bluish aura throughout and is interpolated with green-
and red-tinted sequences, alongside those in conventional colour. The port
city discovered by the time-travelling intermediary is captured through the
usual mix of spontaneous observation, documentary mise-en-scene, and out-
right dramatisation. The latter is especially central because of the narrative
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
premise around the Dutchman, especially in two scenes requiring dialogue, a
scrape with boys who threaten him with 2oth-century plastic toy guns, and an
encounter in the opera house green room with the soprano who can redeem
him, Senta. A tall and gangly figure whose erratic and stiff choreography is out
of sync with the century and the space, not unlike Jacques Tati's, the Dutch-
man's point of view is mostly implied: there are no literal point-of-view shots,
but much of the cinematic wanderings through the city seem to be through
his eyes, for example, a motif of women looking out through windows onto
the outside world and at the camera, mostly thoughtful and sad as if awaiting
a sailor's return. The commentary also incorporates his implied voice. Kouwe-
naar's text is a poetic collage of his subjectivity as outside observer ('The past
is beautiful but the present is alive. Bliss is a word but a city is a machine. This
city I saw burning. This city I saw building. The past weighs on but the pres-
ent weighs heavier.'), mingled with those of zot"-century inhabitants of the
496 city ('Last night on the Lijnbaan I saw a very peculiar old-fashioned sailor as
if looking for something, as if being looked for'), with only a little exposition,
always oblique. Eloquent sonata-like passages ponder such themes as: the
alienation of apartment tower housing; public rituals from funerals to wed-
dings (not one but two!7) to teenage collective movie-going and motorcycling;
urban landscapes complete with traffic and laconic commuters on motorised
bicycles; much window-shopping and streetfldnerie. The frustrated romantic
subplot involves more pursuits and missed encounters than sparks, includ-
ing only one shot of the two figures together. The Dutchman finally takes his
leave from this unreceptive city as a paraglider, emerging from under the De
Hef bridge and disappearing out to sea framed by the massive hulks of ships
silhouetted against the grey northern sky.
89. Rotterdam Europoort (1966): a
melancholy city film essay pondering the
alienation of apartment blocks and public
rituals like weddings. DVD frame capture.
Original in colour. © ARGOS Films/CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Given Ivens's social objectives, how does his construction of work manifest
itself in this post-industrial city film? On the one hand, he vigorously retains
his classical sense of the heroism and agency of manual labour with his ste-
vedores and especially his crane operators, perched high above the harbour
and the robust Ivensian ballets of girders and cargo they direct. On the oth-
er hand, the most emphatic moment is perhaps a glimpse of the boredom.
An older man's sole activity is to remove plastic bales of bananas one after
another from a conveyor belt, an image that sparks from the time-traveller an
open-ended but acute reflection: 'What does a man think of when he's work-
ing? ...of another man's money? of freedom? of nothing at all? of himself? of
his son? Sunday morning? of his own working hand? that does and by doing
changes? ['the world' in another version]'? This faint concluding nuance of
Lied-era socialist realism is virtually unique in the film.
As with all of Ivens's essays, Rotterdam relies on intertext, notably cita-
tion and compilation. The post-war rebuilders of Rotterdam's filled the city I 497
core with public sculpture and Ivens offers a diegetic canvas of public art that
actually seems more inspired than dutiful. Rotterdam's outdoor statues are
encountered dynamically by Ivens's camera: the Renaissance native son Eras-
mus, who originally had been supposed to play a larger role in the film;s8 the
stout and impassive bourgeois observer Monsieur Jacques, somehow epito-
mising 1950s smug prosperity; finally two less complacent - in fact torment-
ed - modernist monuments to the century's traumas, Ossip Zadkine's The
Destroyed City evoking the Blitz that launched the Nazi occupation of the city
in 1940, and Wessel Couzijn's Corporate Entity, a huge writhing assemblage
of abstract metal shapes with a anguished humanoid figure at the core. The
last of these is as ambiguous a statement about its capitalist patron as Ivens's
film is about his.... As for archival imagery, the mainstay of Valparaiso, Ivens
was brilliantly restrained and there are only three sequences of extra-diegetic
inserts. Two are of 1940 Nazi footage of the razing of Rotterdam, amounting
to only four haunting shots of bird's-eye aerial bombardment and firestorms
on the ground, reminding us of how weighty the past really was in post-war
Europe, a traumatic memory flash for an economic system in denial. A second
visual citation, this time four centuries old rather than mere decades, is Piet-
er Brueghel's iconic 16thcentury painting Babel, of the unfinished tower from
Genesis, inserted towards the climax of the documentary as a mirror image
of the chaos of contemporary urban life. Two vivid pans of the spiral tower
suffice, linked to the giant football stadium Ivens has just shown us, at first
bursting with fans and then eerily deserted, plus an inspired close-up detail
showing how the doomed, crumbling edifice rises beside a miniature busy
port not unlike Rotterdam. Compared to the rich visual and musical hybridity
of Valparaiso and the lavish painterly citationality of Mistral, Rotterdam's dis-
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
90. Rotterdam Europoort (1966): the eerily
deserted giant stadium is linked bylvens
to Brueghel's 'Babel'. DVD frame capture.
Original in colour. ( ARGOS Films/CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
creet compilation work is a disciplined and spare confirmation of the princi-
ple of less is more.
498 Upon its premiere in Rotterdam in April 1966 alongside the original Brug,
Rotterdam was circulated in capitals on five continents by Dutch informa-
tion agencies, reportedly with a consensus that the film was 'quite interest-
ing artistically but a useless publicity film' (Schoots, [1995] 2000, 289). Aside
from whether diplomats were actually oblivious to the promotional impact of
artistic ambassadors, one American harbour industry insider actually demon-
strated the film's publicity value, in a published review in a trade journal: this
reviewer describes a favourable audience of New York port officials despite the
Rotterdam mayor's having 'apologetically' flagged the film as 'controversial':
This view of Rotterdam in strikingly vivid colour, strove to capture not
only the day-to-day functionings of a great port, but the faces, moods,
and aspirations of the people who make it function. [...] What Mr. Ivens
did for Rotterdam was give the port its proper due as a viable economic
institution and then wreath it with something more. There was, as I say,
the human touch [...] always either in the foreground or in the immediate
background is the sense of this great port imbued both with a sense of
history and a sense of forward purpose. (Ridder 1967)
As for Dutch reviewers, their astute enthusiasm cemented Ivens's rehabilita-
tion process:
Almost everything Joris Ivens does and undertakes in his 2o-minute-long
film runs counter to the traditions that have evolved around the city doc-
umentary. [...] A monumental film evocation of an international harbour,
a film that will continue to be a benchmark in the evaluation of the genre
for a long time to come. (Boost, 1966)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The filmmaker reveals something you didn't expect: something more,
something less, in any case something different. (Huizinga, 1966)
Associations between ideas and emotions, the visual rendering of a
shock, are what the filmmaker has given to Rotterdam. Emotion, not
things in themselves, life and not objects. (Steggerda, 1966)
Other than this immediate reception on native turf, there are oddly enough
few other archival traces of Rotterdam's career in either Dutch or French ver-
sions - was the tension between the Paris and Dutch producers enough to keep
the film even out of the usual festivals? Ivens and Destanque themselves omit
it from the 1982 autobiography. No doubt the provincialism of the Paris and
New York gatekeepers of film culture, with regard to both Dutch cinema, short
films, and documentaries not participating in the era's rush of direct cinema,
were also a factor, and the sole French critic writing on the French version sug-
gested that the fantasy element problematised the film's status as documen- 499
tary (though this did not prevent him from calling Rotterdam 'one of his best
films' [Haudiquet, 1967]). Nevertheless, Rotterdam did receive the honour of
the published transcript/decoupage of the French version in LAvant-scene du
cinema (1970), which assured its circulation in the French cine-club market,
and it went on to appear in Ivens's retrospectives over the years (though point-
edly not the 2002 American tour). Revived occasionally in recent festivals, its
inclusion in the 2008 DVD box set ensures its perennial presence in the cycles
of forgetfulness, fashion, and rediscovery.
Many discussions of this film point to its implied autobiographical dis-
course - all the more so that its working title was Return of the Flying Dutch-
man (Stufkens, 2008, 351-352). This discourse, always implicit, adds a layer of
complexity to the film's already rich hybridity: its encounter of geographical/
spatial, economic, ethnographic, historical, and architectural tropes of the
city film documentary genre are already layered with the imaginary and sub-
jective discourses that cement Rotterdam's status as an essay film. Stufkens
(2008, 355), in discussion with Loridan, sees the aborted redemption of the
Dutchmen through his failed romance with Senta as a riff on the filmmaker's
final rupture with Loridan's predecessor Fiszer. But my own preference would
be to gloss the last shots of the film, depicting the hero paragliding under the
old bridge and past the shipping and then out to sea, otherwise. Is this coda a
kind of symbolic send-off for the final phases of the 68-year-old Ivens's career?
Though Rotterdam is far from Schoots's ([1995] 2000, 289) absurd dismissal
as 'little more than a distraction', as I have shown and no intelligent cinephile
could doubt, the context and text of this rich and ambiguous city film essay
vibrate with the itch to return to the kind of frontline engagement of Ivens's
earlier years. Now wrapping up a decade of 'lyrical essays' in which subjective
THE 'POET' REBORN? 1956-1965
explorations of a spectrum of new voices, spaces, histories, and struggles con-
stitute a specific and distinct artistic and political practice, now rooted perma-
nently in Paris rather than his homeland, and now inseparable from his final
artistic and conjugal consort, the Dutchman's career nevertheless now veers
back out to sea. It heads for East Asia, first to Indochina and then to China
for the last two prolific decades of a filmography articulated in modes of doc-
umentary expression and political intervention, both old and new but com-
pletely different.
500 I
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
P CI FOCI Vnezi.
iI deo Ia terra
FilMsUI ietnam ld Joris yens
mestre gioue S gilugno
W OCINEMA FEXCELSIOR
QLM peeena Me rftill Irdrodurr& WI f ilm
Uo sprati crsien inwmtorat
91. Le Ciel, la terre (1966): poster for Italian Communist Party-sponsored
screening in Venice in 1966. Original in colour. Courtesy coll. EFJI,
Nijmegen
CHAPTER7
Southeast Asia 1966-1970:
Reinventing the Solidarity Film
Silence in the face of the war in Vietnam is impossible.
- Loin du Vietnam
The very evening the victorious army of the Viet Minh entered Hanoi in 1954, I 503
the Vietnamese organisation of trade unions had organised as part of the vic-
tory celebrations a showing of Joris Ivens's latest film, Das Lied der Strme
(Song of the Rivers, 1954, DDR, 90). Eleven years later, in the spring of 1965, the
event was to be repeated; only this time, Joris Ivens himself was in attendance
as guest of honour.
1964 had been a year of frustration for Ivens: not only was the Mistral pro-
ject still in question, but another project in Chile, sponsored by French televi-
sion, had been abandoned at the last minute by its sponsor. As we have seen,
Ivens went to Chile anyway and shot a ten-minute short on the September elec-
tions of that year, Le Train de la victoire (The Victory Train, 9), especially focus-
ing on Salvador Allende. But Ivens's disappointment was profound. It was not
the first time that his planned debut on the small screen had been sabotaged
by skittish bureaucrats.
It seemed in 1964, just as it had seemed in 1956 that Ivens's career was in cri-
sis. For one thing, the retrospectives had started: in Leipzig the previous Novem-
ber and at the Amsterdam Filmmuseum that February. And the Mannheim
festival in October had enshrined him in its all-time pantheon of documentary
filmmakers, second only to Flaherty in votes accrued, and had in addition vot-
ed The Spanish Earth (1937, USA, 53) among the twelve greatest documentaries
of all time. Even the Dutch had forgiven him, and this above all posed the ques-
tion of how a militant could still remain subversive under all those accolades.
The 66-year-old wandering combatant, after nearly a decade of visits to every
continent, including shooting in seven different countries in as many years, was
spending less time behind the camera than he would have liked, and, moreover,
was furious at the repeated critical comments about his having left active politics
behind. During his many festival appearances in those years of the mid-sixties -
504
92. Le 17cParallele (1968): Production photo of Loridan, Ivens and helmeted
crew members on the ground, 1967. Courtesy coll. EFJI, Nijmegen © ARGOS
Films/CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
in 1964, he officiated at four, Florence, Mannheim, Venice, and Leipzig - Ivens
often met delegations of Vietnamese filmmakers who regularly but unsuccessful-
ly pressed him to visit their country. The invitations did not go entirely unheeded.
In February 1965, now that the US elections were over, the conflict in Viet-
nam escalated to a new stage. North Vietnamese territory was bombed by
American planes for the first time. The following month, Ivens completed the
third and final round of shooting for the Mistral film, and once again the pro-
ject bogged down in seemingly insurmountable production difficulties. Ivens
wired the Association of Filmmakers of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam
that he wanted to come, and by June he was filming air raid alerts in the streets
of Hanoi. He had entered, together with Loridan, as usual almost by chance, a
new and vital phase of his career.
The Indochinese period was to result in four major documentaries, two
features, two shorts, plus his participation in the French collective feature,
Loin du Vietnam and a short interview film with Ho Chi Minh. These are all
films of extraordinary power in themselves and both summations of many of
the achievements of his career to that point and at the same time departures
in entirely new directions.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The four films from Vietnam and the single one from Laos hark back in
terms of their forms and their energies - not to mention their subject matter
- to the works of Ivens's greatest period, the thirties. Once more a people's
war enlists the anger, compassion and solidarity of the roving troubleshoot-
er, and once more the struggle of a peasant population to make a living amid
the smoking rubble of their homes and fields inspires the homage of his cam-
era. Again, the political struggle - the effort towards productivity, literacy, and
community - is cast as the crucial base of the military struggle.
At the same time, the Indochina films seemed fresh and original, as they
appeared one by one through the late sixties. Up to this point, the technologi-
cal revolution of direct cinema/vrite had touched Ivens's work only intermit-
tently and superficially; as we have seen he had serious reservations about the
new enthusiasm of young filmmakers for a truth which he considered always
to have been at the root of his own art and which no new equipment could
achieve without a certain perspective and commitment behind the camera. I 505
Just as the technical and stylistic innovations were gradually absorbed into the
mainstream documentary lexicon and thus increasingly defused of any radical
import, they finally surfaced in the work of Ivens himself, but in his case pro-
viding the major tool for a renewed militancy, and making possible a stirring
(if awkward at first) model for the direct/vrite generation of the potential use
of the new film idiom in the service of a revolution other than merely aesthetic.
Thus with Le Ciel, la terre (The Threatening Sky, 1966, 28), Loin du Vietnam
(Far from Vietnam, 1967, 115), Le 17 Parallele (The 17th Parallel, 1968, 113), Le
Peuple et ses fusils (The People and their Guns, 1970, 97), and the short Rencon-
tre avec le prisident Ho Chi Minh (Meeting with President Ho Chi Minh, 1970, 8),
Ivens not only startled his detractors with a fresh and energetic rediscovery
of the themes that had animated his greatest films, but moved definitively
towards a solution to the thorny problem of applying the new aesthetics of
documentary to the perennial task of militant filmmaking.
LE GEL, LA TERRE
Jean-Pierre Sergent, Ivens's collaborator in the later Indochina period, has
distinguished among the three major Indochina films in the following way:
for him, Ciel is a poster, Parallele is a story (rdcit), and Peuple is a theoretical
essay (Hennebelle, 1970, 81). Such a designation is ultimately too schematic
of course, but is useful in pointing to the distinct rhetorical modes at the base
of each film: Ciel is indeed exclamatory and hortatory in its emphasis, Par-
allele is primarily narrative, and Peuple is explicitly analytical in its intent and
form. The three films taken together constitute a telling progression, each one
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
implying a critique of the mode of discourse of the previous film. However,
Sergent's categorisation should not obscure our attention to the rich mixture
of modes and styles that makes up each of the films in a different way. Certain-
ly the notion of 'poster' rhetoric is not in itself sufficient to describe the com-
plex formal and thematic mix to which Ciel owes its singular appeal. In fact, if
the dominant rhetorical mode of the film is indeed composed of elements of
direct poster-like address, its chief formal modes are collage and compilation.
As such, it must be seen alongside Nieuwe Gronden (New Earth, 1933, Nether-
lands, 30) and Lied, as well as its more exact contemporaries, the essays Pour
le Mistral (For the Mistral, 1965, France, 33) and Rotterdam Europoort (1966,
Netherlands, 20), as an admirable contribution to that particular subgenre of
documentary.
Ivens's first response to the escalating Vietnamese situation was one of
great urgency. As with the Spanish Civil War 30 years earlier, his first impulse
506 I was to rush into circulation a short reportage film to compensate for what he
saw as a vacuum of information about the war in the West. He had in mind a
kind of television film like that of Wilfred Burchett, the Australian commu-
nist journalist, whose reportage film in collaboration with Humanitd journal-
ist Madeleine Riffaud, Vivre sous les bombes (1966, 25), had created quite an
impression in Paris theatres just prior to Iven's involvement in the situation
(Some of Burchett's footage of South Vietnam was to find its way into Ciel and
later into Loin). The film would be produced by the Hanoi documentary film
studio together with Dovidis, a small Paris production company.'
Ivens, however, was not content with limiting the project to a compilation
of existing material, like the short-term Spanish project edited in haste by Van
Dongen while Ivens and Ferno were shooting Spanish Earth. Ivens was eager
to make a quick trip to North Vietnam himself and to bring back an impres-
sionistic short film on the model of the Cuban Carnet de viaje (TravelNotebook,
1961, Cuba/France, 34) that he had made in another besieged nation several
years earlier. Once in Hanoi, Ivens realised that this model as well was inade-
quate, even for the short-term project that he had in mind. Something more
profound was needed in spite of the necessary brevity of his visit. However, it
was not until the montage stage back in Paris later that summer that the final
conception of the film was finally hammered out, that is the theme of the two
fronts, the earth and the sky, and the resulting binary structure that shaped
the film. The 35-minute film would sometimes show under an English title
that lost this binary, The Threatening Sky.
The final collage construction of the film, then, seems to have been con-
ceived in the haphazard fashion that often shapes political filmmaking under-
taken in emergency situations with low budgets. The collagist orientation of
the film was apparently determined by the convergence of a number of factors:
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
the urgency which Ivens felt about the project, which led him to include exist-
ing newsreel material in the film despite his earlier intention to the contrary;
the original 'travel notebook' conception, still visible in the film; the instinc-
tual desire for 'profundity' which animated Ivens as usual once he got behind
the camera in Hanoi and felt the limitations of street-scene impressionism;
budgetary restrictions of course; and ultimately the challenge of creating a
finished film in the editing room from a range of disparate resources with-
out obvious internal coherence. Yet despite this lack of conscious design in
the production of the film, the finished product offers a worthy model for the
various collage films that were to follow, those by Emile de Antonio, Marcel
Ophuls, and 'Newsreel' among others, films constructed on a more conscious
theoretical basis to be sure. Like these films, Ciel must be seen as a reaction to
the tide of direct cinema (despite its tentative probe in that direction that we
shall examine). At a time when the gospel of spontaneity and 'objectivity' was
an orthodoxy with very few dissenters, Ciel appears as a link in that small but I 507
important chain of political films that embraced collage and compilation as a
strategy more suited than direct cinema to their specific political and artistic
goals.
The skeletal base of Ivens's collage in Ciel is the standard linear diegesis,
proceeding chiefly by means of narrative logic, that animated Ivens's other
films about people's wars, namely Spanish Earth, The 400 Million (1939, USA,
53), Our Russian Front (1941, USA, 38), and Pueblo armado (An Armed People,
1961, Cuba/France, 35). This pattern was to achieve its ultimate refinement in
Parallele, before being challenged and superseded in Peuple. As we have seen,
the classic articulation of this structure in Spanish Earth was built upon an
alternation of focus between Madrid and Fuentiduena, the military struggle
and the civilian struggle for production. In Ciel, the same alternating focus is
achieved without such a rigidly dichotomised locale. A classic narrative line of
various agricultural activities in the fields - ploughing, irrigation, earth-mov-
ing, and rice transplantation, elaborated leisurely with the customary modula-
tions between epic sweep and lyric-analytic detail, is interrupted sharply by as
many as eight tightly edited crisis-tropes, depicting aerial attacks or alerts, or
ground-to-air battles, plus several other interjections portraying some aspect
of civil defence or munitions manufacture. This is not to mention an addi-
tional major sequence surveying the toll of a bombing raid on a village. This
interpolated dramatic current depicting the military front is ultimately given
a climactic shape in that the final section elaborates the shooting down and
capture of an American pilot.
This dual thematic of the film, stated by the title and developed by means
of the alternating exposition of the two fronts, each with its own graphic and
rhythmic character, is of course the expression of that political principle
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
underlying Ivens's work since the 1930s, simply the importance of the labour
of individual ordinary people to the macrocosmic political (and by extension
military) dynamic.
The crisis-tropes, which punctuate Ciel, are just as skilfully wrought as
their prototypes in Spanish Earth, although here they are more frequent and
more numbingly predictable. They primarily consist of editorially synthesised
arrangements of close-up and medium-shot anti-aircraft crews, heroically
calm, in shot/countershot with the tiny swooping bombers. The inevitable
explosions are as often fabricated by means of the sound mix and montage
as they are visible within the verifiable integrity of the shot, though on the
whole they remain at one remove from the minutely exact snippet illusion-
ism of Spanish Earth. One particular attack has a nightmarish quality rare in
Ivens's oeuvre - a terrified woman, presented in low-angle medium shots tries
frantically to row her skiff away from a danger vividly suggested by screaming
508 I motors on the soundtrack and a particularly hyperbolic intercutting of diving
bombers. The sequence seems prolonged with a dreamlike logic to suggest the
futility of her effort. As Grelier (1965, 115) states with Gallic finality, the film
oscillates between two poles, life and death. The elements of collage, attached
to this underlying diegetic pattern of alternating stasis and crisis, serve both
to heighten its dramatic and rhetorical impact, and to add an entirely new ana-
lytic dimension.
A fundamental structural principle of this collage is the overlap of sound
and image. As we have seen, Ivens had always insisted, more or less, on com-
mentaries in his films that were not so much a simple accompaniment to the
image-track as a poetic counterpoint to it. Fresh on the heels of the evoca-
tive poem-commentaries read over the lyrical essays, Ivens clung stubbornly
to that increasingly rare genre of literary creation, the commentary film, the
privileged use of speech directly addressed to the viewer. The script for Ciel
is a dexterous blend of poetic inspiration and the informational material
demanded by this particular film's goals and is written by Jean-Claude Ulrich,
whom Schoots ([1995] 2000, 409) discovered to be none other than Chris
Marker. The decision to have the script read by two distinct voices turned out
to be an appropriate one. The voice of Serge Reggiani, delivering those factual
parts of the commentary, alternates with the less professional voice of Ivens
himself, offering material of a more personal flavour, largely recollections of
his own experiences and impressions in Vietnam. In addition, the presence
of Ivens's voice adds an aura of authenticity and emotion to his personal tes-
timony, a statement of personal outrage and solidarity. The voice, flavoured
by an irrepressible Dutch accent (and asthma as well), rings with the convic-
tion of the old militant and his admiration for the courageous society he had
visited. He had not forgotten the lessons of Flaherty's The Land (1942, USA,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
43), of Huston's The Battle ofSan Pietro (1945, USA, 32), and of course of Hem-
ingway's last-minute reading of his own commentary for Spanish Earth, where
the untrained voice of the artist has imparted a powerful resonance to the
soundtrack of a film.
Early in the film we see fast tracking shots (through a windshield) glid-
ing through the streets of Hanoi, as the city prepares its defences. The camera
moves past groups of civilians digging shelters, lines of workers moving earth
(in bucket-brigade fashion naturally), past a crowd of young women gathered
around a poster display, and then through the outskirts into the countryside,
through villages, past groups of peasants at work in the fields or carrying their
tools or produce alongside the road, and finally pausing as a ferry unloads its
crowd of passengers where a bridge has been bombed out. Meanwhile Ivens's
voice reminisces about the other beleaguered cities he has known, Madrid in
1937 and Havana in 1960, and 'many other cities where the people were pre-
paring for battle',2 and as the camera continues to glide past the preparation I 509
of shelters, he adds that 'not one was as calm as Hanoi, that morning of June
14th, 1965', and that 'the calm of Hanoi was its first victory'. The allusions to
the other cities not only locates the Vietnamese struggles in its larger interna-
tional political context but celebrates it as well by allusion to heroism of the
past. (This particular resonance is compounded elsewhere at least for viewers
familiar with Ivens's work, by echoes of his classical anti-fascist films, not only
in scenes that recall the fortifications and smoking rubble in cities as diverse
as Madrid, Moscow, and Shanghai, but also in more particularised instances
such as the image of the barrel of a gun concluding the film, a reminder of
the close-up of the sole rifleman at the end of Spanish Earth, or a sequence
in which ancient statuary survey bombing damage with the same stoicism of
their counterparts in Spanish Earth and 400 Million.) Furthermore the mention
of the exact date balances the passage's larger view with the dramatic specific-
ity of personal witness. The sequence concludes with its flowing movements,
and finally over a shot of Ivens himself surrounded by children, smiling more
sheepishly than any of them, he testifies to their 'incredible moral resistance'.
At another point, we see classical Ivensian footage of irrigation work in
rice paddies, peasants moving water with baskets in a steady unison rocking
motion, while the artist's voice-over recalls being present at harvest time, a
time of unending work, and ends with this movingly concise line: 'I heard
songs of the work, poems of the rice'. Near the end of the film, Ivens's voice
recapitulates the film's basic theme, his reflection on the other peoples at war
he had witnessed in the last 40 years, in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. 'But
today', he adds, 'there are no longer two adversaries which fight each other,
there are two worlds entirely unknown to each other. The enemy is no longer
of this earth, to discover him you must raise your head'. One long sequence
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
93. Le Ciel, la terre (1966): With Vietnamese
kids on location in 1965: one ofJoris
Ivens's few appearances in any of his films.
DVD frame capture. © Dovidis, Paris/CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
details the manufacture of various spikes, booby traps, and snares, including
a chilling panorama of an entire paddy field being installed with huge bamboo
510 spikes just below the water level. Alongside this passage, Ivens recollects his
meeting with Ho Chi Minh, who observed that for 25 years all of Vietnam has
been one single snare and that the Americans are like a fox with his hind legs
caught in a trap, pawing the air in its attempts to disengage and getting further
ensnared as a result.
As for the other current of commentary read by Reggiani, it repeatedly
expands its purely factual material with an allusiveness or irony. For example,
alongside a sequence devoted to various civil defence preparations, primari-
ly the camouflaging of boats, anti-aircraft installations and even bicycles, the
commentary tells the story of Macbeth and his fatal confidence in the Birnam
Wood prophecy, with the conclusion, suggestively terse, that 'the forest now
has changed its name'. At other times, this strategy takes a more ironic form: a
starting montage of newsreel material, mostly Saigon disturbances and atroc-
ities committed by the South Vietnamese army, is set off by stinging sarcasm:
Saigon, first stage of the escalation. American specialists came to reor-
ganize the police. Other specialists modernized the nightclubs in the
rue Catinat. It's the time of advisers. Soldiers with degrees in psychology
come to explain to people that the students are communists, that the
French are communists, that the Buddhist monks are communists. Hav-
ing thus demonstrated that everybody is communist except themselves,
the Americans stop advising and start operating.
In addition to both their reportorial and contemplative functions, each of the
two narrative voices relies on a kind of indirect discourse, to heighten the pres-
ence of the Vietnamese people who are the subjects of the film. In the absence
of direct recording, the voices of the subjects of the film, alive but silent on the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
screen, become real for the spectator in this way. For example, there is Ivens
repeating what Ho told him, or, in the coda of the commentary, his report of
what the Vietnamese had told him is used as a summarisation of the film's
thematic: 'When I left, the Vietnamese said to me, "The Americans can wage
their science-fiction war. Their planes fly over our country with the speed of
sound. But we are already there, on the spot, we are where we live"'. Anoth-
er effect of such indirect discourse is the verbal evocation of the poster-style
rhetoric of many of the visuals, the text's embodiment of the colour and
vigour of the Vietnamese catchphrases and mottos that dramatise the popu-
lar inspiration of the war effort. Without succumbing to the rhetoric of Cold
War sloganeering, the commentary echoes the vivid but simple metaphors of
the popular experience of resistance: 'A field of rice is a battlefield', 'The sky
is the enemy', 'All of Vietnam is a trap'. Ivens also includes non-verbal expres-
sions of the same popular mythology of struggle. A notable example is a cho-
reographic re-enactment of an anti-aircraft battle performed by teenaged boys 511
in white, intercut with snippets of real battle, as Ivens's voice explains that
'peacetime does not belong to this generation's memory'. This breathtakingly
lovely sequence would be incorporated immediately into Octavio Getino and
Fernando Solanas's La hora de los hornos (Hour of the Furnaces, 1968, Argenti-
na, 260) - including many scratches incurred through endless underground
screenings no doubt.
94. La hora des los hornos [The Hour of the
Furnaces] (1968): Argentine underground
filmmakers Solanas and Getino excerpted
this boy-bomber choreography from Le
Ciel, la terre in one of the 196os' most
famous documentaries, but it's a rare Ivens
film that the estate has left inaccessible in
the vault. DVD frame capture.
Ivens's sensitivity to the simple eloquence of popular rhetoric, both verbal and
cultural, is even more fully manifest in the subsequent Indochina films with-
out the restrictions of the short-film format.
This, then, is the basic double-layered structure of the film. At the base,
the image-track is developed with the standard Ivensian narrative momen-
tum, pulsating with the rhythmic alternation of life and death, earth and sky,
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
largo mise-en-scene and subito montage. Upon this is attached the verbal layer,
at times in unison with the image layer but more often expanding it or diverg-
ing from it, informed with its own oscillatory rhythms, the alternation of the
two voices, fact and feeling, event and meditation, exposition and allusion.
Upon this basic structure are grafted numerous other components, both
visual and aural, which enrich and embellish the mosaic. We have recognised
no doubt that the film's primary visual diegesis is composed fundamentally
of the four familiar modes of visual discourse that Ivens has relied on in his
films of this genre throughout his career: the semi-documentary mise-en-scene
presentation of everyday life; the intricate montage-cluster tropes by which
a narrative crisis is evoked; the static 'newsreel' mode, here limited to a few
sequences in which a number of Vietnamese leaders are introduced; and
finally the 'travel notebook' spontaneous style composed of random and can-
did views of environmental impressions, here apparently shot in 16mm (the
512 I bulk of the film was shot in 35mm, about 2000 metres [73 min.], while about
1200 metres [11o min.] were in 16mm). Certainly, the richness of the blend
of styles and textures in this particular film is enhanced by Ivens's use of two
operators, one, Duc Hoa, a war correspondent who was no doubt responsible
for the smooth and efficient battle footage, and the other a young woman who
was apparently a novice, Thu Van, probably responsible for much of the spon-
taneous 'travel notebook' footage.
Scattered within these four fundamental visual modes are a number of
distinct others, each contributing to the overall effect. Most prominent of
these is the extensive use of newsreel material and other stock footage. As ear-
ly as the credit sequences, the viewer is bombarded with stock shots of the
American forces, especially a shot of bombers taking off from the deck of an
aircraft carrier, repeated a number of times in shot/countershot with a stacca-
to series of shots of anti-aircraft militia, largely in iconic close-up and punctu-
ated by abrupt black spaces. The sharp rhythm of the cutting is accentuated
by muffled roaring of aircraft engines on the sound track. The first sequence
of the film proper continues in the same vein, confronting newsreel footage
of the invaders as well as glib US television reportage and official Washing-
ton propaganda with a fierce flesh-and-blood anti-aircraft crew. The bombers
return again and again during the film in similar synthetic confrontations,
including many shot by Ivens himself in the midst of real air-ground battles,
but their constant repetition hammers in the aura of the anonymous enemy
in the sky. The sharp contrast in image quality between the stock material,
usually in extreme long shot in any case, and the higher-definition actuality
shooting is very suggestive of Ivens's theme of the impersonal, sanitised war. A
sharper-focus close-up vision of this stark reality is an approach that American
anti-war documentarists took up in subsequent years (in In the Year of the Pig
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
[Emile de Antonio, 1968, 103] for example). Ivens himself had experimented
with the relationship of television and film in L'Italia non e unpaesepovero (Ita-
lyIs Not a Poor Country, 1960, Italy, 112) five years earlier-now was the chance
to pursue this experiment.
The later sequence in Ciel composed of newsreel material from South
Vietnam and built on a different principle has already been mentioned. It con-
tains, among other things, the famous shots of the self-immolating monk, an
assortment of atrocity footage dealing with the South Vietnamese army and
police, and culminates in footage of American troops destroying Vietnam-
ese villages with flame throwers and bulldozers, no doubt for Ivens the most
poignant images of all. This visual litany of horrors, once more set in vivid con-
trast to the peaceful and orderly vision of society in the North, again empha-
sises the cruel irrationality of the war, and the two alien universes of sky and
earth. Reggiani's voice underlines the brutal irony and the impersonality of
the aggression: 'a far-reaching strategic plan develops it, computers think it, 513
radar stations control it, and cybernetics coordinate it'. Meanwhile the South
Vietnamese soldiers appear on the screen with their American arms, exposed
as pawns of the American computers. Over the movement of the montage, the
voice-over abruptly halts, and the footage unrolls in brutal silence.
Silence thus enters the collage as another important constituent. It is as if
the humiliation of 'suspected guerillas' and the razing of villages were beyond
the power of verbal description to explain. Then comes a transition that
stands out in a film built upon abrupt montage-assaults for its haunting lan-
guor and the elegiac shading of its modulations. This transition begins with
a silent close-up of raindrops spotting the surface of a pool of water, which a
tilt up soon reveals the location as a temple court surrounded by statues of
horses and elephants, scarred by both time and war; a cut to a view of some
ancient graves then follows. These quotations from the legacy of traditional
sculpture naturally add their own element to the already eclectic mosaic of
visual modes. At this point, a short commentary by Ivens recalls 'four thou-
sand years of legend, two thousand years of history' and connects the aura of
Vietnamese tradition to the contemporary power of the Vietnamese resistance
'which electronic brains cannot decipher'. The total effect is an echo of the
famous passage in 400 Million where ancient ceremonial sculptures seem wit-
ness to the marauding invaders.
Soon another sequence of horror follows, this time captured in the viv-
idness of Ivens's own idiom, a survey of damage and casualties in a village
after a bombing raid. Much of this sequence also depends for its impact on
the presence of total silence, again the only possible comment on the havoc
depicted on the screen. As we have seen, the strategy of using silence originat-
ed as early as Spanish Earth. In that film, speechless moments after a similar
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
bombardment stood out in a decade in love with sound as perhaps the most
chilling effect of the film. In Ciel the effect is similar. The opening impulse of
the film is to describe its subject its subject fully in words, and the soundtrack
seems saturated, not only with the voices of the narrators but also with the
heavily rhetorical use of concrete noise that is of aircraft engines and sirens,
relieved only by the few soundless intervals already mentioned. Gradually the
pauses among the talk and noise become more spacious, and the spectrum of
non-verbal sound becomes more diverse, more subtle, and less strident. In the
final movements of the film this spectrum includes not only the noises of war
but also the equally dramatic noises of civilisation, the ripple of water as peas-
ants transplant the young rice seedlings. Also introduced at this point is a vari-
ety of musical accompaniments: including muted electronic music over silent
footage of peasant demonstrators surrounding a downed pilot; traditional
Vietnamese vocal music, a haunting melody over a classic rice-transplanta-
514 I tion sequence in the finale; and a more contemporary piece, an elegiac-sound-
ing, presumably patriotic, song, sung by an unforgettably plaintive alto voice
supported by a chorus, set over that long scene of irrigation and earth-moving
activities already mentioned - as epic as any Ivens scene since Zuiderzeewerken
(Zuiderzee, 1930-1933, Netherlands, 40-52), and heightened immeasurably by
the music. In short, these musical elements in the final section of the collage
greatly add to the rich variety and expressiveness of the aural layer of the film.
The finale is accompanied by only two short passages of verbal commentary,
both by Ivens, both terse but evocative, personal statements of summary.
One additional visual mode used as a raw material in the collage is anima-
tion, a technique Ivens had not incorporated into a work since Italia and Car-
net, although it had certainly figured as part of the larger Mistral conception
that had never been fully realised. In Ciel the discussion of traps is followed
by a cartoon interlude borrowed from public civil defence spots that exuber-
antly depicts American soldiers first being dispatched by jungle booby-traps,
and then being chased by hornets delivered to them in an innocent-looking
package by a young and mischievous-looking patriot. It all unfolds to a rol-
licking score, constructed from tuneful buzzing sounds, which is well suited
to the piece's slapstick style but which expresses an eloquent contrast, at least
for the Western viewer, to the deadly serious stuff it contains. If the conscious
goal of the animated sequence is to emphasise the racist character of the war
by playing with the presumptions and responses of Western audiences who
had by 1966, like it or not, been already fully conditioned by television satura-
tion of an American 'yellow-peril' perspective of the war, then the sequence is
indeed successful in its reversal of the dominant iconography, the white men
now being presented as the bungling villains.
The assemblage of this range of eclectic elements is effected with a skil-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
ful sense of tempo that gives a wholeness and coherence to the entire work,
despite its heterogeneous composition. The various materials are welded
together by means of a violent accumulation of montage-assaults that natural-
ly serve rhetorical and affective functions in addition to their purely structural
use. The smooth transitions that had been so much a part of lyrical essays,
as well as of Spanish Earth, often designed to occur within a single shot in
those films, have completely disappeared with Ciel and have been replaced
by abrupt displacements, both auditory and visual. Habitually, a large close-
up of hands feverishly at work will suddenly introduce a sequence, or some
other detail of an action such as a close-up of a buffalo's legs or the plough it
is pulling, instead of the contemplative establishing shots upon which Ivens
had relied for several decades of filmmaking. Or conversely, a close-up swing
of an artillery muzzle will interrupt an agrarian tableau. The contrast with the
preceding shot is always striking in terms of scale, tempo, and visual and audi-
tory texture. If this editorial strategy and the explosive rhythm that results, I 515
legitimised by 196os New Wave editing styles to be sure, are integral to the
declamatory rhetoric and poster function that constitute the film's primary
motivation, in a more general sense they are in harmony with that ideological
orientation that becomes increasingly articulate in the subsequent films: that
is, the sudden close-ups continually draw the spectator back to the microcos-
mic detail of human labour that for Ivens constitutes the key to political theory
and practice. As the film proceeds towards the end, the rhythm of the intercut-
ting seems even more emphatic, the sequences become shorter and denser,
the commentary having all but disappeared.
Ciel is clearly a transitional film. It represents at once the culmination of
Ivens's interest in collage and the beginning of his film cycle on the people's
wars in the Far East. Along with Mistral and Rotterdam, Ciel must be seen as
Ivens's final response (for now) to the challenge of what can be called collage
or hybridity, a processing of the same formal problems and solutions as these
other two films. All three were shot within what must have been a frenetic sev-
en or eight-month period in 1965 (that is, the final shoot for Mistral took place
at that time), and the montage of all three seems to have been simultaneous
thereafter. All three premiered in the spring or summer of the following year.
Together the three films present a rich catalogue of filmic modes and rely to
no small extent for their effects on the juxtaposition of filmic material. Of the
three films, Ciel owes its special vitality no doubt to the specificity and urgency
of its objectives.
Despite the lingering modernist overtones inherent in Ivens's interest in
collage during this period, his goal is not to startle or to deconstruct, but to
inform and enlist. The modernist or avant-garde influence lingering through-
out this period has been subjugated to the primary goal of communication.
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
Ivens's variety of militancy has little stake in the interrogative modes of the
Godardian project. His public is persistently conceived of as non-specialist, in
terms of both politics and aesthetics. Certainly the humanist faith that posed
the hand on the rifle and the plough against the computers in the sky could
not ignore that audience only accessible through traditional channels of com-
munications and by means of the idiom of mainstream culture. Ivens had at
this time no special interest in or relationship with the avant-garde; his public
was more likely to read Humanite-Dimanche than Tel Quel. In this sense, the
consistency of his career is apparent: neither a conscious formal innovator nor
an aesthetic theorist, he instinctively assimilates whatever stylistic and techni-
cal resources are current and uses them in the pursuit of his goals. And at the
same time, where current film vogues do not suit his purposes, he unabashed-
ly draws on the legacy of earlier periods of film history. Certainly the insistent
commentaries in the sixties, and the continued reliance on various degrees
516 I of 're-enactment' right up to the end of the sixties and beyond bear witness to
that (Ivens, [1969, 229] even expresses a perverse pride in the 'authentic' look
of the re-enactments in Ciel, an attitude tantamount to heresy in 1965).
The Ivens of Ciel, then, looks both backwards and forward, back in the
film's formal affinities to the collage/hybrid films of the Cold War and lyrical
essay periods, and forward in its thematic kinship to the films of the people's
wars. Ultimately, this convergence of a specific formal project and an acute
political problematic seems to have demonstrated for Ivens the inadequacy of
the former. If collage offered for Ivens an alternative to a virtuoso direct cin-
ema with its dangers of aestheticism and indulgent subjectivism, Ciel at the
same time tentatively explores the unrealised potential of that same direct
cinema for Ivens's political goals, a potential that collage apparently could
not fulfil. Thus if Ciel is Ivens's final statement (for now) of the collage/hybrid
alternative, it is also an admission of its inadequacy. In this film, the problem-
atic of the direct is confronted in such a way as to make the leap forward with
Parallele and indeed the progression all the way to Comment Yukong dplaa
les montagnes (How Yukong Moved the Mountains, 1976, France, 718) virtually
inevitable.
In some ways, the treatment of sound in Ciel is quite conventional: the
static construction of its few synch sound scenes, for example, hardly differ-
ent from the approach to similar material in Spanish Earth; or the film's reli-
ance on the synthetic, post-synchronised sound effects, a practice that would
have seemed gratingly anachronistic even in 1966 if the urgency of the film's
political intentions had not provided the author special dispensation from
the requirements of the filmic fashion. Yet Ciel can also be said to be a spe-
cial sound project: its diegesis is closely linked to its commentary, both the
informational content of Reggiani's voice-over and the personal reflections
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
of Ivens's, not to mention the small but important role of direct sound itself,
however primitive, in the directly recorded speeches of Prime Minister Dong
and the leader of Front de libration nationale (FNL). Even the concrete sound
effects are crucial to the film's diegesis, the impact of the montage-assaults
being to a large extent the result of sound cuts as much as of image cuts, the
sudden sirens and aviation noises of the attack tropes, for example. In addi-
tion, the rich interplay of voices on the soundtrack, not only those of Reg-
giani and Ivens, but also that of the US television announcer, of US Defence
Secretary MacNamara, of the Prime Minster and the FNL leader, not to men-
tion the singers, suggests in general a pushing forward of the potential of the
human voice as a dynamic material of Ivens's art. The use of Ivens's own voice,
inspired as it seems, appears no more than a temporary substitute for what
was inevitable, that is, the realisation of the voices of his subjects. The film is
full of the sense of the inadequacy of the filmmaker's sound technology for the
task at hand. The constant use of indirect discourse, for example, is perhaps I 517
one aspect of this. A close-up of a weeping and talking man during a survey of
his bombed home is cruelly silent. Ivens himself recalls in a 1965 interview the
frustrations of a situation in which sound technology had been lacking:
Cervoni: You weren't ever able to do any synch-sound reporting, taking
sound and image at the same time?
Joris Ivens: Often I didn't even have a tape-recorder. The tape-recorders
were in the hands of radio reporters. Once during relocation, I heard
some extraordinary accounts, among others the testimony of a peasant
woman, a woman who had become a 'heroine of the people' for having
shot down an enemy plane. I started shooting, getting her gestures, her
expression, but I had to record what she said by means of written notes!
(Cervoni, 1965)
The peasant woman, no doubt, is the first incarnation of that other woman
refugee whose long eloquent testimony opens Parallele, this time recorded
in sync. One can only speculate regarding the extent to which the absence of
direct sound technology had shaped Iven's cinematic politics for over 30 years.
What is clear is the extent to which the discovery of direct sound was intrin-
sic to political aesthetics of the subsequent Indochina films and the consoli-
dation in the 1970s of 'cinematic Maoism' in its affirmation of the corporeal
specificity of the individual speaking subject and its relation to the collective.
Ciel premiered in March of 1966 at the Second Festival of the Free Cinema
in Paris. Not surprisingly it had its most impact in France, where it attracted
more attention than Mistral and Rotterdam combined, warmly received at a
time when French intellectuals were slowly mobilising against the war (God-
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
ard's three films from this period, Masculin Fdminin [1966, 103], Made in the
USA [1966, 90], and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle [Two or Three Things
I Know About Her, 1966, 87], all contain 'Paix au Vietnam' motifs). The press
exhibited as much interest as could be expected in a 2o-minute film, paying
rather more attention to Ivens's impressions of Vietnam and dutifully reprint-
ing his appeals for aid to Vietnamese filmmakers. As usual, there was uproar
at the censorship of the film (three anti-US references were excised from the
commentary, including a comparison of the American tactic of carpet-bomb-
ing to Hiroshima). Positif s (1966) sympathetic critique of the film, perhaps
the most insightful to appear in the journals, contained among other things a
recognition of echoes of Spanish Earth and the offhand observation that parts
of the film seemed reconstructed. This latter observation, which would have
been meaningless had it been made ten years earlier, suggests the extent to
which the aesthetic premises of direct cinema had been already assimilated
518 I by the film community in 1966, and the theoretical climate in which the sub-
sequent Indochina films would be formed. Ciel was also distributed in the UK
and North America under its English title The Threatening Sky, and seemingly
from hand to hand in solidifying circuits in the global South. Despite its limit-
ed circulation (it is regrettably omitted from the 2008 box set, and surprisingly
untapped even by Youtube), Ciel lived on if only through our glimpse of it in La
hora de los hornos...
LOIN DU VIETNAM
Ciel bowed in the spring of 1966 in Paris and elsewhere, followed by Mistral
at the end of summer, and by the onset of winter Ivens had come on board
Chris Marker's adventurous new solidarity feature Loin. This composite pro-
ject, derived as Stufkens has shown from an unrealised set of ideas proposed
by Ivens when the similar, encyclopedic version of Mistral was finally being
shelved, assembled virtually the entire cadre of rive gauche political filmwork-
ers for a project designed to intervene in the escalating crisis around the war.
Ivens and Loridan arrived in Hanoi in January 1967 and immediately set about
producing the only part of the enterprise to be shot in North Vietnam. A mira-
cle of fast-track production, Loin was to premiere scarcely eight months later
at the Montreal film festival in August 1967. A key moment in several subhis-
tories of the cinema - the solidarity film, films about the Vietnam war, com-
pendium films, the cinematic output of the French Left in the era around May
1968 - this unique but once neglected film (it was restored and re-released in
2013) deserves careful contextualisation within the oeuvre of its oldest co-au-
thor by far.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Historians of the cinema of the French New Wave of the 196os have tra-
ditionally divided the phenomenon loosely into the rive droite current -
incorporating filmmakers aspiring to break into the star-studded auteur or
commercial cinema, such as Truffaut, Chabrol, and Lelouch - and the rive
gauche current, whose members blended their cinephilia with left-wing polit-
ical commitment - such as Marker, Varda, Godard, and Resnais. The feature
documentary film Loin provides a useful introit into the current sometimes
revisionist focus on the rive gauche, for it was a key document in trajectory of
the rive gauche cinema and political culture, synthesising the transformations
of the hinge year in which it was produced, 1967. As a cinematic conversation
among rive gauche committed artists whose political and artistic consensus
was being challenged by this historical conjuncture - including the immi-
grant senior in their midst - this rich film symbolically inaugurated the con-
vergence of left cinema and political upheaval known as May 1968, a reminder
forever of Ivens's role as a respected patriarch of that current. 519
1967 was marked on the international scale by the escalation of the mili-
tary conflict in Vietnam, which had involved World War II-scale bombardment
of Hanoi since February 1965 - and of course the martyrdom of Che Guevara
- and in France momentous industrial strikes at Rhodiaceta (Besanon) and
St-Nazaire, echoed by growing student unrest. All these developments hailed
rive gauche filmmakers, and set the context in which a coalitional cinematic
response became possible - and necessary.
The project was instigated as I have indicated by Marker, veteran docu-
mentarist and frequent collaborator of other filmmakers on the scene from
Ivens to Resnais, the eventual maitre d'oeuvre and editor of the work, together
with Varda and a host of sympathisers within the film milieu.3 Loin was the
first major production - and test case - of the Socite pour le lancement des
oeuvres nouvelles (Society for Launching New Works, SLON), the French collec-
tive production and distribution organisation that Marker and others formed
that year to promote political filmmaking in France and that would mark the
subsequent decade of French committed cinema. Also on board with the Viet-
nam project were Varda's husband, Jacques Demy, the Brazilian expatriate
Ruy Guerra, the New Wave pillars Resnais and Godard, the newly commer-
cial New Wave hanger-on Lelouch, fresh from his Oscar-winning blockbuster
Un homme et unefemme (A Man and a Woman, 1966, 102), plus the US expa-
triate William Klein, a fashion photographer known for acerbic satire of his
homeland. Ivens's Ciel had created a strong impression, so his presence in
the group seemed indispensable, despite the political difference between the
69-year-old communist and the 30-something unaffiliated-left filmmakers at
the peak of their power. Michele Ray, a French journalist, also joined the effort
with her footage of South Vietnam from both sides of the FLN membrane,
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
complementing Ivens and Loridan's Hanoi testimony. The line-up reflected
the spectrum of rive gauche allegiances but also constituted a major coalition-
al achievement for the skilled diplomat Marker, joining together artists with
a strong track record of working with communists and the left like Varda and
Resnais with hyper-individualist avant-gardists like Godard and Klein. The
precariousness of this coalition would become evident as the planned con-
tributions by Demy and Guerra were soon dropped (the collective didn't like
Demy's proposed narrative about a Puerto Rican male G.I. and a female Viet-
namese prostitute [Varda, 1994, 92]), but problems came to the surface even
more dramatically upon the release of the film.
The final two-hour film included eleven fairly distinct parts:
- long episodes on the theme of the anguish and impotent self-interroga-
tion of intellectuals, courtesy Resnais, Godard, and Ray;
- actuality footage from North and South, some of it even then already
520 I familiar to Western audiences;
- impressionistic footage of US operations in South Vietnam and pro and
anti-war demonstrations in New York, shot by Lelouch and Klein respec-
tively;
- an interview with Fidel Castro;
- a compilation historical backdrop to the Vietnam conflict narrated by
Varda;
- an interview with Anne Morrison, widow of Norman Morrison, the Quak-
er who burned himself in front of the Pentagon in 1965, intercut with a
testimony by Ann Uyen, a Vietnamese woman living in exile with a simi-
lar young family; and
- a collage refrain of miscellaneous media artifacts of the war and US civ-
ilisation in general (newsreel footage, video material, a televised speech
by US General Westmoreland alongside testimony by black power advo-
cates, analysed and distorted, stills, comic strips, radio voices, popular
music, etc.).
All was assembled with hyperbolic flair and dialectical rigor by Marker, who
also provided an eloquent voice-over intro and conclusion, respectively situat-
ing the conflict as a war of the rich against the poor, and urging spectators to
face the challenge of the war far from Vietnam.
Ivens and Loridan were about to embark on their most important Indochi-
na work, the feature documentary Parallele, when they undertook their con-
tribution to Loin. Ivens had met with Marker and Resnais before leaving Paris
to discuss the 'theme and direction' of the planned film (Ivens and Destan-
que, 1982, 290). A follow-up list drawn up by Varda (letter to Ivens, 1967, JIA)
on behalf of the collective for the couple to take to Hanoi made a number of
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
requests for specific shots for the film, e.g. 'men and women lying and hidden
in a rice field (or corn or some kind of bushes) - when they get up they are cov-
ered with leaves'.
Varda had clearly been impressed with the allusion to Macbeth and the
re-animated Birnam Wood in Ciel, and given colour stock for the purpose
Ivens was happy to oblige. Or rather, taken ill in Hanoi, Ivens happily delegat-
ed the half-dozen sets of shots to Loridan who commendably absorbed her
partner's style for the purpose, and exposed eleven cans of stock for the cause.4
Varda's requested shot, prominent in the prologue, shows a brilliantly yellow
expanse of waving grain, first coming to life with the choreographed advance
of a troop of camouflaged militia and then returning to its former serenity.
Similar requests included 'a shot of soldiers matching three or four abreast,
leaves in helmet, and the same thing rear view, and a single man. Also cam-
ouflaged with leaves, not marching, standing immobile in extreme close-up,
and then the same man lying nude on the road or running through a village'. 521
Ivens drew the line at the last detail of the request, apparently in deference
to his hosts' sense of decorum, but the other material was all sent back to Par-
is. The former shot appears as the penultimate movement of the film, while
Marker inserted the close-ups of the soldier, with its heroic poster-like stylisa-
tion, in the midst of Godard's monologue halfway through the film.
95. Loin du Vietnam (1967): heroic portrait "
of Vietnamese soldier produced by Ivens
and Loridan on order for Agnes Varda
and the collective French solidarity film.
DVD frame capture. Original in colour. ©
Sofracima/Icarus Films/CAPI Films, Paris,
and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Varda also asked for some atrocity footage, 'flaming ruins', etc. that Ivens
apparently did not provide; the producers had no shortage of this material in
any case, either from North or South.
Ivens's and Loridan's finest contribution to the film, however, was con-
ceived in his own style. No preconceptions of Parisian intellectuals were nec-
essary to stimulate four or five concise sequences of calm attention to detail
that stand distinctly apart from the other currents in the film. The Ivens
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
sequences are all silent and all in colour with one exception. This is the first
brief scene, in black and white, which shows peasants defusing and collect-
ing small fragmentation bombs filled with tiny ball bearings aimed at chest
level, the target of which 'is human flesh'. The camera follows the defusing
process in close-up, scans the stockpiles that the workers have accumulated,
and records their absorbed expressions and purposeful gestures. The same
watchful attitude informs the colour sequences, which record brigades pre-
paring individual concrete air-raid shelters for the streets of Hanoi. The first
of these, an attentive record of women filling wooden moulds with concrete,
is followed by an actual alert with passers-by running to the shelters we have
just witnessed being built as the camera tracks up and down the street from
a car, recording rows of faces settling in to or emerging from their individual
shelters beneath the street. Detailed subjective information on the future of
the war is thus offered in the Ivens/Loridan footage. Their tightly coordinat-
522 ed close attention and panning close-ups of moving workers' faces and hands
and the product of their labour seem to encapsulate materialist cinema.
96. Loin du Vietnam (1967): more
characteristic black-and-white Ivensian
footage shows a worker's intense face,
hands and her labour as she defuses a US
fragmentation bomb. DVD frame capture.
© Sofracima/Icarus Films/CAPI Films,
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
A further sequence records a troupe of agitprop players performing in a vil-
lage, the camera shifting back and forth between the relaxed and cheerful
spectators and the ingenious show, which presents an unrecognisably paint-
ed President Johnson lamenting his woebegone US Air Force (a still from the
scene became the iconic image of the film). The commentary repeats Ivens's
impression of the great calm pervading the atmosphere in Hanoi. However, it
is not only Hanoi but Ivens's footage itself that seems an island of calm in this
otherwise chaotic film, relying mostly for its impact on sensory and affective
discourse, rather than factual exposition. Ivens's footage of concrete activities
on the part of both Hanoi civilians and rural peasants offers clear evidentiary
support for the range of perspectives and emotions expressed elsewhere in the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
film by the collective. As usual with Ivens, the ordinary tasks accomplished
with the hands of workers, unassumingly and unremittingly, constitute the
most visible and most truthful emblem of the revolution in action.
Ivens's unquestioning faith in the evidence of cluster bombs being
defused or bomb shelters being moulded by women's hands, and in the unas-
sailable political relevance of this evidence for Western society, might situate
him in apparent sharp contrast to Godard's minimalist self-interrogation that
takes place within the same film. Godard's segment searches for the lessons
of imperialist war and their application at home, expresses a personal agony at
the dilemmas of industrial strikes in his own back yard, and regrets an elitist
cinema that cannot speak to the proletariat. Both moments, however diver-
gent they may be, emerge with stark affect from the film as it loses the imme-
diacy of its agitational role almost a half-century later. They have an impact as
compellingly parallel testimonies and perceptions with a relevance extending
far beyond the issues of 1967. The two presences, Ivens and Godard, super- | 523
ficially separated by a seemingly insurmountable gulf - stylistic, conceptual,
cultural, and generational - ironically appear in retrospect to have the most
affinity of any two contributors to the film. Both present workers and their
means of production: respectively peasants and their tools, and an intellectu-
al/artist and his camera. Both meditate on this evidence as the final authority
for and subject of political analysis and revolutionary art.
Schoots ([1995] 2000, 292) predictably calls Loin a 'fretful', 'egocentric',
and 'far-from-flattering' 'bizarre mix', and at the time of its release in late 1967
the film sparked strong responses from both French and US critics as well.
Such responses are a good indicator of the film's success in intervening in the
two milieus - in stirring up infrastructural subcultures of critics and audienc-
es, but in different ways.
The US critical response by and large showed total disarray, at best a prim-
itive stage of political critical culture in that country in 1967, the postwar red
scare having completely erased the legacy of political film culture of the Popu-
lar Front era. US critics seemed to lack language and criteria for dealing with
political cinema of any type, not to mention the resurfacing solidarity work of
the 1960s. Moreover, Loin's revelation of apparent anti-Americanism among
native son Klein and the idolised leaders of the New Wave was apparently hard
to swallow. Andrew Sarris's ([1967] 1971) dismissal of the film as a 'patchwork
quilt' unlike anything he had seen since Mondo Cane (Gualtiero Jacopetti,
1962, Italy, 1o8) is arguably apt,5 as is his critique of Ivens's indulgent roman-
ticisation of the peasant similar to that in Spanish Earth. However, his rating
of the entire film as 'zero as art' says more about the confusion of US liberals
in 1967 than the worth and interest of the film. His Village Voice piece after
the New York Film Festival denounced Loin as a masterpiece of evasion. He
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
includes a sermon on the inherent conservatism of all peasants and a veiled
attack on French intellectuals for their failure to stop their own Vietnam, Alge-
ria (echoing a similar comment within Loin by Resnais, who along with Mark-
er, Godard, and Loridan had been far from silent on French colonialism in
North Africa, as Sarris knew full well but seemed conveniently to forget). While
politely applauding Ivens, Godard, and Resnais for at least trying to make a
personal statement, Sarris scolds them for yielding their right to edit their
own footage, such is his blinkered auteurism's blocking of the concept of col-
laboration. Sarris's perception of the film as 'lies from Hanoi and Paris' seems
embarrassingly defensive in retrospect, but even he is outdone by the inco-
herent hysteria of the New York Times's Renata Adler (1968) upon theatrical
release of the film the following June (I'll come back to Adler), which effective-
ly seems to have killed the film's career - at least in the United States.6 Mean-
while, US left film criticism had not found its voice, and Cineaste, then in its
524 I inaugural year at the outset of a decade of national leadership in New Left film
criticism, somehow avoided reviewing the film. Only American Richard Roud
(1967), the New Wave devotee and presumably the programmer of the film in
the New York festival, came to its defence. Writing as an expatriate for Lon-
don's Guardian, Roud critiques the US schizoid bad conscience around what
is undeniably a 'propaganda film', praising it as 'an important film, a beautiful
film, a moving film': 'Rare indeed have been the occasions when contempo-
rary art has successfully involved itself with politics. In this film, the cinema at
last has its "Guernica"'.
The much greater richness and resilience of the French critical discourse
around the film can be encapsulated briefly here simply by a repertory of the
terminology deployed to describe the film. In contrast to the Americans' dis-
missive and inaccurate invective, the Paris responses, unanimously positive
across the ideological spectrum, included the following terms, culled from
the ten reviews cited in my list of sources, as the basis of their criticism:
1. meditation; reflection - beyond testimony and fiction
2. [filmed political] essay
3. dossier ('file')
4. film engagd ('committed film')
5. film utile ('useful film')
6. collective testimony
7. demonstration; a manifesto (the French manifestation has the ring of
both English concepts, though normally means the former)
8. didactic
To this list, the filmmakers themselves in their interviews and public discus-
sions of the film, external or internal, added the simple terms: 'a banner', 'un
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
cri' (a cry or a shout) and the useful 'cinematic roundtable/meeting'. Having
the conceptual equipment to define and describe a film, its form and its objec-
tives, is arguably the most basic tool of film criticism: the French had it, the
Americans were still working on theirs (although the New York Times' Adler
at least had the critical equipment to describe [accurately] Loin as a 'collage').
The word 'solidarity' is a key concept for understanding Loin, for summing
up the film's significance artistically as well as historically. Although the word
is less prominent as a defining genre in the critical reception to Loin, in the
discourse around the production of this film and within the narration of the
film itself, it designates both the film's objectives and self-conception as part
of a documentary genre (and thus provides an opportunity to sum up the gen-
re arguably invented by Ivens 30 years earlier). The rive gauche collective's let-
ter to the North Vietnamese leadership (quoted in Mundell, 2003, 26), carried
by Ivens and Loridan to seek permission to film from the Hanoi authorities,
was explicit in this respect: I 525
Words of friendship and solidarity, however sincere they may be, are only
words. [...] Silence in the face of the war in Vietnam is impossible. But
saying 'solidarity' from afar and without risk, may also be a convenient
way of easing one's conscience. Our solidarity occurs in towns that no
one bombs, in lives that no one menaces. What does this mean? We
know that this war is your war, that the peace, when it becomes possible,
will be your peace, and that no one has the right, even with the best of
intentions, to put themselves in your place, to speak on your behalf.
Where is our place? To answer these questions, we have undertaken to
make a film. It is a response that is neither praiseworthy nor heroic, but
which has the sole motive of being tangible, within our means and within
our limitations. It is with our work, it is within the context of our profes-
sion, that we want to bring a little life to this word 'solidarity'.
Marker's narration takes up this theme in both his introduction and conclu-
sion to Loin, explicitly in the former: '[58 names] and many other technicians,
assistants and friends have made this film during the year 1967 to affirm, by
the exercise of their craft, their solidarity with the Vietnamese people in strug-
gle against aggression'.
Could anyone argue that this film failed in Marker's objective to 'bring a
little life into this word solidarity'; that he and his colleagues made the polit-
ical relationship between the rive gauche and Vietnam 'tangible'; that they
revived through craft the solidarity genre that had been invented in no small
part thanks to Ivens in Spain and China? (Waugh, 2009). And that the genre
would now launch a whole new reinvigorated chapter in its history as fellow
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
traveller of the New Left and would still be vigorously kicking against imperi-
alism in the post-9/11 21s century?
It is therefore fitting in conclusion to probe this 'tangibility' of this film
in the context of this genre a bit further, to cast Loin in terms of the peren-
nial generic dynamics of the solidarity film. I have identified these dynamics
within Ivens's founding contributions to the genre from the 1930s, in terms of
three factors (Waugh, 2009):
1. engagement with cultural difference, even conflict:
Loin offers a vivid depiction of the dialectics of rich vs. poor, calm vs.
frenzy, Vietnam vs. France/US... with an emphatic dialectical rhythm
throughout. It offers also a vivid depiction of cultural specificity in, for
example, everything from low-tech shelter construction to agitprop the-
atrical performance techniques - but always as in the process of dynamic
526 I updating, never as static 'otherness'.
2. engagement with constituency:
Loin is not only addressed to the rive gauche in particular and the West
in general - not the Vietnamese - but is also about this constituency, not
about Vietnam. Marker makes this especially clear in the concluding
narration:
This war is not a historical accident, nor the delayed resolution of a
colonial problem: it is there, around us, within us. It begins when we
begin ourselves to understand that the Vietnamese are fighting for
us, and to measure our debt towards them. [...] And the first honest
movement that we can make towards them is to try to look at their
challenge head-on.
This framework, together with the self-questioning of the Godard,
Resnais, and Ray episodes, suggests that the film is not only an impor-
tant moment in the rediscovery of the solidarity cinema by the New Left,
but also one of the founding texts of what we might call meta-solidarity,
which both try to look head-on at a distant struggle and, as Godard puts
it, endeavour to question our stakes in bringing it home.
3. engagement with documentary form, craft, language (however conservative
formally solidarity documentary has tended to be):
Loin inevitably grapples with the issue of forms, whether emerging or
conventional, and their success in achieving an efficacy of communica-
tion and ethics of solidarity. There is no space here to go into the impas-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
sioned critical debates over Marker's indulgent inclusion of clashing
styles of material, all either loved or hated by critics, from vdrite reportage
of US street politics to the first-person interventions of the rive gauche
auteurs, to Marker's essayistic collage, praised as productive or decried
as incoherent, depending on taste and ideological positioning. It is suf-
ficient to acknowledge here their vigour and pertinence - and their pro-
phetic laying out of the debates about form and technology that would
dominate the aftermath of May 1968, both in France and elsewhere.
The coalitional spirit of Loin did not last long after its release, but lessons were
learned. Launched at the New York Film Festival as Farfrom Vietnam in the fall
of 1967 (following its Montreal premiere), Ivens and Lelouch publicly locked
horns at the Paris official opening of the film in December (two months after its
screening for the strikingworkers at Besanon). Ivens, just back from harrowing
months literally underground filmingParallele, castigated Lelouch's attitude of I 527
pity towards the Vietnamese - what the Resnais episode in the film calls 'vic-
times a la mode' and what we might now call a 'victim aesthetics' - insisting rath-
er on the necessity of unconditional victory for the besieged people.? Ivens had
long been practising what he was preaching in the pragmatic way of support-
ing Vietnamese filmmakers: while in the country to shoot Parallele, as Stufkens
(2008, 403-404) has outlined, he had sparked student efforts halfway around the
world to provide assistance to North Vietnamese filmmakers and documentary
facilities, with local committees in four different European countries fundrais-
ing to send equipment and materials to both the Libration and the Hanoi stu-
dios. The Lelouch eruption may have harmed the film's lackluster exhibition
career, since the distribution of the film had been entrusted to the director's
distribution firm. Schoots ([199512000 292) describes a lackluster exhibition for
the film in 'many provincial towns' and in four theatres in Paris, boosted by 'a
minor sensation when the right-wing extremist organization Occident protest-
ed by smashing showcases and slashing seats in one of the Paris theatres'.
Even more serious for exhibition abroad was the hostile reception greeting
the film's US opening at the New Yorker Theatre in Manhattan in the spring of
1968, with the New York Times critic (Adler, 1968) dismissing it with the pretext
that this banal and ugly 'rambling partisan newsreel collage', 'facile and slip-
shod and stereotyped', had been overtaken by 'events' anyway (meaning the
Tet offensive of January 1968 and the subsequent withdrawal of Johnson from
the Presidential race that spring). But critic RenataAdler unknowingly touched
on the essence - both the virtues and the liabilities - of solidarity itself, its
relation to 'events'. No doubt related to this initial failure and this presump-
tion about actuality, Loin remained out of circulation in its English version for
40 years, a lamentable absence from the documentary, solidarity, and essay
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
filmic sub-canons, to which it clearly belongs. It is absent even from today's
ardent Marker canonicity on the English-language graduate dissertation mar-
ket. Still, this exemplary solidarity film remains resonant for all the ephem-
erality of its hook to 'events', an exemplary study in artistic commitment at a
pivotal moment in the trajectory of left politics and neo-imperialism. This film
and the community from which it emerged have a transhistorical and trans-
cultural relevance that could not be more acute to the renewal of both engaged
documentary and neo-imperial conflict in the first decades of the 21St century.
Thankfully, it was restored and revived by the Archives francaises du film du
CNC together with Ivens's erstwhile collaborators at Sofracima in 2009, when
it was presented at Cannes. This breakthrough in the Left archive was followed
finally by the film's American re-premiere four years later, in a brilliantly pro-
grammed series 'Cinema of Resistance' at the Film Society of Lincoln Centre,
reuniting this epochal film with the other milestones of the 196os and 1970s
528 I from Parallele to La hora de los hornos. It could not have been more timely.
LE 17E PARALLELE
Ivens was satisfied that Ciel had fulfilled its primary short-term function. That
is, that it had
[S]hown with the means of the documentary film that the Vietnamese
people are resolute and sure of winning. That they are struggling hero-
ically against the criminal aggression of the American, and that their
political awareness is giving them an incredible moral power. The film
was a 'poster' documentary that corresponded to the needs of the time.
(Hennebelle, 1970)
At the same time, Ivens was the film's most exacting critic. However well the
film had met the short-term need within his Western public, as he himself
explained in the preface to Loridan's published version of Parallele, a new film
was required:
To explain thoroughly in a new film what a people's war in 1967 is, we
have to go further than Le Ciel, la terre and further than the reportage
films of other filmmakers: that is to say, we would not be able to stay at
the surface of events, but share everything with the people, in a given
spot, over a certain period, in order to be able to penetrate better by our
shooting into everyday life. (Ivens and Loridan, 1968, 8)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
His idea was that a new film would have to be more than a poster, in fact, a
weapon 'in the service of the people, that is, of its struggle'. If Ciel had vividly
proclaimed the 'moral power' of the Vietnamese people, it had not shown the
means by which that power was organised into a people's war, nor the source
of that power.
On Ivens's original departure from Hanoi in the summer of 1965, the dele-
gation that accompanied him to the airport had invited him to return to teach
a course on documentary. It was not until February of 1967 that Ivens final-
ly accepted that invitation, in the meantime having released three films and
done another round of festivals. In the intervening period, the priorities of the
Vietnamese film industry had changed: upon his arrival, Ivens was asked to
make another film instead of teaching the planned course.
Almost immediately, Ivens's decision was to ask permission to shoot his
film in Vinh Linh, near the seventeenth parallel, the boundary between the
North and the South, a district referred to as the 'line of fire'. This area, fac- | 529
ing the enemy across the demilitarised zone, was the site of the most visible
escalation at the time, under the fire of both the South Vietnamese army and
the Seventh Fleet. It was an ideal location in terms of Ivens's insistence that
his new film completely integrate into the people's war rather than register
surface impressions of Hanoi. (The fact that Western audiences were margin-
ally familiar with the regions of North Vietnam around Hanoi and Haiphong
through various films of reportage already in existence, but never had been
exposed to material from this particular front, also entered into the consid-
eration.) The Vietnamese were naturally reluctant to expose their famous
guest to so much danger, but were persuaded by Ivens's decision that this
film should be based on concrete details of the actual fighting and the organ-
isation of life within the arena of struggle. The story of Ho Chi Minh himself
personally allowing the diminutive Loridan to be part of the team after ini-
tial hesitation, deciding she was tough enough when he noticed the Auschwitz
number tattoo on her forearm, is the stuff of legend (Stufkens, 2008, 387-388).
The Hanoi authorities provided Ivens and Loridan with a crew of nine, includ-
ing a doctor-translator Xuan Phong, a security man, and drivers for the three
command-cars assigned for the shooting, an organiser, and a man responsi-
ble for arranging transport. Two cameramen were recruited to cover different
skills and approaches: Dao Le Binh was skilled in news journalism, 'fast with
his hand camera, having an impulsive and active temperament', while Nguyen
Quang Tuan's background was in fiction, 'more inclined towards reflection
and calm, and very attentive to his cinematography' (Ivens and Loridan, 1968,
1o). While the team was being formed in Hanoi to meet Ivens's explicit stan-
dards of high political consciousness and professional expertise, Ivens and
Loridan spent their time filming their contribution to Loin, and screening var-
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
ious films by Vietnamese filmmakers, including some about the region he was
to visit and Chung mot dong song (On the Same River, Hong Nghi Nguyen and Ky
Nam Pham), the prizewinning 1959 melodrama about lovers separated by the
Ben-Hai river, the artificial boundary between North and South Vietnam. The
habitual interactive pedagogical process between visitor and host was already
underway, and Dr. Xuan would later become a filmmaker herself (Stufkens,
2008, 404; see also Retour a Vinh Linh -40 ans apres [Revisiting Vinh Linh -40
Years Later, Xuan Phuong, 2007, Vietnam, 50]).
If Ivens wanted to be thoroughly integrated with the war, his wishes were ful-
ly realised. The tortuous and harrowing trip back and forth between Hanoi
and Vinh Linh lasted 24 days (Stufkens, 2008, 393). Travelling only by night,
and without lights because of the constant bombardment of the road, reg-
ularly delayed by craters in the road, the team evenly divided the stock and
530 I the equipment among the three vehicles and arranged detailed plans for any
emergency, emphasising special plans for each camera in the case of an alert.
The actual shooting itself proved to be even more hazardous - the project
guides had been clearly instructed to protect their guests at all costs and Ivens
alarmed them to no end by refusing a safety helmet except during air raids,
and by often shooting from in front of the artillery batteries (Stufkens, 2008,
389). Loridan tells of recording an anti-aircraft battle, in which an American
F-105 was shot down, from a foxhole 50 metres away from the battery, of Ivens
persuading a reluctant anti-aircraft officer to permit the team to stay with his
battery in spite of the certainty of imminent attack, of spending intermina-
ble periods in bomb shelters despairing of ever being able to expose a frame.
The presence of attack was so real that the cameras had always to be camou-
flaged with khaki net. Ivens had clearly progressed very little from the days
when Hemingway had been convinced that his days were numbered by all of
the risks he took.
Team morale during the long hours of waiting in the dark was a serious
problem. The lack of air, the constant noise of bombardment, the enforced
idleness, and the hazards of subterranean living taxed the patience of even
the old veteran. Shooting notes from the period reveal an atmosphere charged
with the complaints of the crewmembers, and outline pep talks from the 'vieux
combattants' (as he referred to himself in one) on the necessity of adopting a
'combative attitude' toward 'difficulties, dangers, and problems' (Ivens, pro-
duction notes, JIA). After several weeks of moving about the district and even
an incursion south of the border close to Con-Thien at the time of the strategic
battle of the same name against an encircled outpost of Marines, Ivens and
the team decided to settle in a single village for an extended period in an effort
to observe the concrete reality of the daily lives of participants in the war. No
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
doubt part of the motivation for this decision was the difficulty the filmmakers
had had in getting close to the peasants, who for security reasons inevitably
distrusted the Europeans and refused to help them before knowing who they
were: it seemed that establishing roots in a village was the only solution to the
problem. The village chosen consisted of four hamlets of 500 persons each,
750 families in all, the target for 376 bombing attacks the previous year, seven
bombs per inhabitant!
Within that village, it was Ivens's plan to concentrate on one or two indi-
viduals and to express the life of the community through those individuals.
When Ivens had declared in 1946 that the 'personalised' documentary was
the documentary of the future, he meant of course that specific genre of doc-
umentary that he had done much to pioneer, his blend of Flahertian individu-
alism and socialist realism (Ivens, 1946). Ivens's prophecy couldn't have been
more wrong, judging from the next two decades of his own career and the gen-
eral trends of documentary history during that period (with several important I 531
exceptions). But a revival and an updating of 'personalised documentary' was
on the horizon.
As Ivens zeroed in on the village in Vinh Linh and started searching around
for his characters, it seemed that history was repeating itself. The casting pro-
cess in the Vietnamese village was based on all the principles that had animat-
ed Ivens's search for Afanaseyev in Magnitogorsk, for Julian in Spain, and for
the host of exemplary - but not too exemplary - icons that had appeared in
such films as Pesn o geroyakh (Komsomol, 1933, USSR, 50), Spanish Earth, 400
Million, Power and the Land (1940, USA, 33), and Pierwsze lata (The First Years,
1949, Bulgaria/Czechoslovakia/Poland, 99), and which had been the central
figures in such unrealised projects as New Frontiers and the original concep-
tion of Action Stations (1943, Canada, 50). The movement from the iconic gen-
erality of Ciel to the concrete characterisation of Parallele seemed identical to
the shift from Zuiderzee to Komsomol 30 years previously. Both were motivat-
ed by the same Marxist-humanist faith in the revolutionary potential of flesh-
and-blood workers and peasants, in the dignity and beauty of actual labour,
and most importantly, in the didactic value of the representation of the life
and work of a specific exemplary individual, as opposed to the anonymous col-
lective man and woman.
Ivens's shooting notes during his search for his characters in Vinh Linh
are even more specific in terms of his conception of the character he needed.
She was to be a young woman, 'photogenic', 'with natural grace', who could
'play her own role'. As a woman she could be seen in the context of a family
and the role of women in the people's war could be emphasised. This was a
particularly important role, as Ivens pointed out in his 1968 preface to Lori-
dan's book, since 70 per cent of the agricultural work in Vinh Linh was done
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
by women and most of the men had been mobilised in the repair of roads and
dams or in the military (Ivens and Loridan, 1968). The filmmakers' intention
was not to privilege one person in preference to other villagers, but to focus on
one who would represent the largest number of villagers. She was not to be the
most beautiful, the most clever, or the most militant - she would not be made
into a perfect being, which 'would not seem true'. Around her, other charac-
ters would be organised; through her the sense of the true struggle of the peo-
ple would be expressed. One note expands this idea even further:
To follow her, to tie her explicitly to everything that happens in the vil-
lage, for example, a crater used for agriculture, not to show it neutral, but
with her - not her, but her experience in the middle of the others. The
effect on the public [will be] greater. Everything, personal situations that
I thought of in Hanoi.
532 I
In fact, two women were eventually chosen to be the foci of the film, Min,
the 23-year-old leader in the local militia and a representative in the district
general council, and Thu, 26-year-old chairperson of the village. It is an open
question whether Ivens's original stress on the ordinariness of his charac-
ters was carried through to the final form of the film. For, as it turned out, in
addition to their political roles, both Min and Thu are strikingly photogenic
young women, and, even more important, impressively articulate and gifted
in their leadership abilities. The two women are also miraculously spontane-
ous, though reserved, in front of the camera, a certain index of the Parisians'
ability to disarm their hosts during their two-month stay in the village. The
shooting notes suggest that Ivens's approach to the incorporation of these two
women as characters into his film was, as usual, somewhere between the poles
of non-interventionist observation and outright dramatisation. For example,
the plans for shooting on 15 June provided for waking at 3:15am, departure at
4:00, arrival at 5:00 (apparently at another part of the village), and shooting at
7:00; according to Ivens's instructions to his advance co-coordinator, a group
of the people's militia were to be ready, about 30 to 40 persons, of whom a
percentage of men, with guns, etc., around Thu's house. Comrade Min and
Thu were to be there. The entire group was to be there. The action to be filmed
was to be a 'military excursus, the way they usually do it'. In the afternoon, the
camera was to follow Min in her activities planned for the day in the village
or in the fields. In other words, much of the village material seems to consist
of re-enactment in the strict sense, that is, the re-enactment of a customary
event by that event's usual participants, a strategy that had always been cen-
tral to Ivens's technical repertory and one that he saw no need to be apologetic
for, even in 1966 (Ivens, 1969, 229). Obviously, given the combat setting for
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
the shooting, a wide range of degrees of mise-en-scene entered into the filming
by necessity - Ivens quite rightly would not have entertained for a moment a
Leacockian compunction about non-intervention when it came to filming a
nocturnal anti-aircraft battle, and approached everyday village activities with
the same rationale. The amount of attention given Mien and Thu by the film-
makers, interestingly enough, led to an expression of resentment by other
women of the village at one point; however, they were mollified when Ivens
and Loridan explained that they were merely being considered typical of the
other women in the village. Moreover local party officials instinctively tried to
interfere with the shoot, but the Hanoi security person managed to get them
to accept the principle of 'film first, then discuss' (Stuflens, 2008, 392).
97. Le 17" Parallele (1968): exemplary
protagonists Mien and Thu, articulate and
photogenic but 'typical', in a mise-en-scene
during a bombing lull. DVD frame capture.
© ARGOS Films/CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Notwithstanding such complications, Ivens's desire for a deeper awareness
of the concrete realities of village life was amply rewarded. The risks he and
Loridan took, their patience and persistence through almost six months
of shooting in North Vietnam, and two months on the road and on location
instead of the planned one (Stuflens, 2oo8, 388) resulted in a film whose rich-
ness of contemplative detail, whose intimacy with the rhythms of the lives of
the villagers, do indeed make the earlier, short film seem shallow and pale in
comparison. Ivens's genius for close observation of the material details of the
lives of ordinary people is expressed to the full. In this film, there are no 'travel
notebook'-style windshield tracks, registering an ambience at random - the
rhythms, the nuances, and the material environment of village life are cap-
tured vividly with that modest flair and thoroughness that recall the classic
Ivens. Perhaps it was his exposure to an agrarian people tied to the cycles of
the fields and the seasons, and bathed in unremitting sunlight like the Span-
ish, Chinese, and Bulgarian peasants of earlier decades, that inspired in Ivens
a return to an earlier sensibility. The five-to-one ratio was tight according to
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
Western standards but eminently feasible in the circumstances for this hybrid
of direct cinema and mise-en-scene (Stufkens, 2008, 395).
On the surface there are certain similarities between the construction of
Parallele and the linear narrative framework that was the structural base of
Ciel. That is, we have in both films a sequential elaboration of various aspects
of village life, interrupted by the dramatically built crises provided by air raid
alerts or actual battles. Both films were even given the same rough climactic
structure insofar as each one ends with the shooting down of an American
plane and the capture of the pilot. But the similarities can be exaggerated. For
one thing, the record of the daily life of the villagers and soldiers, so tantalis-
ingly brief in the 40-minute Ciel, iconic sketches rather than dramatic exposi-
tions, was lavishly extended by Ivens and Loridan in the next film, not only in
duration (two hours this time) but in degree as well. Not only do the two main
characters, Min and Thu, become alive in the course of the film as real, rec-
534 I ognisable figures, but a whole roster of secondary characters is introduced as
well with varying degrees of detail and depth.
Furthermore, the moments of crisis in Ciel punctuated the film regularly
and often; their staccato impact, repeated as often as every five minutes dur-
ing the course of the film, was an integral part of the film's declamatory rheto-
ric. In Parallele, their function is much less significant (there are only three or
four such dramatic peaks in two hours) and they are presented almost offhand
as part of the daily routine of people living under bombardment without hav-
ing any additional rhetorical role.
Also eliminated in Ivens's desire to get closer to the people is the former
film's reliance on the strategy and structure of collage. On the whole, Parallele
is much less complex formally than the earlier film, in fact than most earlier
Ivens films. The progression of events unrolls in a leisurely, straightforward
manner. Many of them are apparently constructed just as they occurred dur-
ing the crew's stay in the village and are recognisable from Loridan's diary of
the shooting, though their sequence is not always exact. One of the film's fin-
est achievements is the evocation of the pace of village life, slow and orderly
despite the bombing; and in the long run, this sense of pace undisturbed by
the disruptions of war may well be more effective propaganda than the climac-
tic intensity of Ciel. Ivens was explicit in his desire to make the impact of the
film rest on its own powers of observation, on its own apprehension of its sub-
ject matter, rather than the kinetic or editorial devices of the artist.
The diegesis of the film proceeds with a slow oscillatory rhythm that
informs the film with a simple formal elegance. The diegetic movement of the
film alternates between passages of straightforward narration in the classical
Ivensian semi-documentary manner, and points at which this mode of nar-
rative pauses, giving way to an excursus of what can be described as indirect
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
discourse. Here an event is described orally to the camera, by a character who
has taken part in it or witnessed it, through the medium of direct sound. For
example, the film opens with an account of the American campaign to relo-
cate the villagers within the demilitarised zone by forced evacuations to 'pro-
tected' hamlets, razing the peasants' homes and crops in the process. The
story is told by refugees who have managed to escape to the North. While vis-
uals in this sequence consist of rather static footage of the narrators and their
audience in shot/countershot, much of it in close-up, often with an interview-
er from the Peoples' Armed Forces of Liberation in the foreground with a ques-
tion, the soundtrack, on the other hand, is a richly inflected, dramatic series
of testimonies by the peasants concerned, vivid in details of cruelty and terror
(translated by subtitles). This form of first-person narrative has a central posi-
tion in the film, accomplished through a wide variety of mediators, including
political and military officials, the two women already mentioned, a preco-
cious nine-year-old boy named Pham Cong Duc who tells of his own exploits I 535
against the Americans, and a cultural official who recites poetry. A wide range
of devices are employed for this purpose. Occasionally, a narrator will speak
directly to the camera, as with Lan, a political commissar in the army, who
makes a fervent declaration in French of the Vietnamese determination, with-
out a dramatic pretext. Duc, the young guerilla, tells an invisible interlocutor
behind the camera of his having found an American heli-pad in the jungle,
subsequently destroyed by his 'uncles', and of his ambitions to become a sol-
dier. More often the director chooses the rather novelistic device of a dramatic
framework to serve as a pretext for the story of his narrator. For example, in
one scene where Min tells about her role in the defence of the village and the
various air battles she has witnessed, the account is structured as a letter that
she is in the middle of writing and interrupts to discuss with a friend. In anoth-
er scene, Thu is interviewed by the film crew's doctor-translator who poses as
a Hanoi journalist. In this context, she discusses the village's defences, the
problems of morale and shelters, and the progress of the village women in
their new roles. In another case, a rather stiff meeting among various political
officials is the pretext for a similar conversation.
The innovatory use of such stylisation in these testimonial scenes must
not deflect all attention from the narrative sequences achieved by the more
traditional means, the profoundly fluid and moving progressions that elabo-
rate the day-to-day activities of the villagers without the intervention of indi-
rect discourse. The comparable passages from Ciel have been deepened and
extended. The brief tableaux in that film of the essential village undertaking
- ploughing, transplanting, earthmoving, irrigation, and munitions manu-
facture - have been broadened to include a vast range of subjects, including
many of the supplementary but less picturesque agricultural activities such as
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
distribution via the cooperative store as well as glimpses of the general areas
of health, child care, education, road and dike reconstruction, building repair,
culture, and general political work. Here, the leisurely, contemplative pace of
the film permits the inclusion of passages of stunning lyrical affect. One such
interlude shot in an air-raid shelter diegetically interrupts an anti-aircraft
battle and was actually shot under a bombardment: a dot of light approaches
the camera on a black screen, a villager carrying a lamp through a tunnel as it
turns out, moving through long corridors and finally arriving in a dimly lit hol-
low where the lamp reveals a mother patiently fanning her sleeping children,
framed dramatically in the high-contrast play of shadow and light. The whole
effect is less the aestheticisation of suffering, though the scene is haunting-
ly beautiful, than the affirmation of the continuity of life under conditions of
indescribable hardship.
536
98. Le 17e Parallele (1968): lamplight
reveals a mother fanning her sleeping child
underground, affirming the continuity of
life under indescribable hardship. DVD
frame capture. © ARGOS Films/CAPI Films,
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
In general, a scene of village life is drawn out much longer than its counterparts
in the shorter film, is attentive to numerous details that the poster-like scope
of the former film would not permit, and attains a certain concrete vitality
through the participation of live dialogue. Although spontaneous, non-dieget-
ic dialogue is used throughout the film all too sparingly, it is perhaps this last
factor that makes the crucial difference. For example, one admirable sequence
in which Han, the cultural official, and his wife and daughter work on their
shelter is elegantly narrated by means of fluid camera movements and an
understated commentary and followed by a short scene in which the daughter
washes at the village well where a live conversation between Mien and Thu,
also washing, is recorded in direct. As the voices discuss the day's activities,
and the number of planes spotted that morning instead of the weather, the
camera records the sunlit group in classical Ivensian mise-en-scene: close-ups
of one woman combing her long hair, intercut with group medium shots,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
the camera lavishing attention on the details of the faces, the hands, and the
water, building a subtle but exquisite interplay of voices and images.
Occasionally, a scene is built of a combination of this traditional narrative
construction and the indirect discourse already described. One such scene
is built with such understated virtuosity that it is a highlight of the film, the
scene where Thu is interviewed by the team's translator, Dr. Phuong. Thu's
and Phuong's conversation, replete with the intuitive political wisdom of the
popular idiom, is about the growth of consciousness among the village wom-
en during the war ('it's only after two years of destructive war that we respect
each other and love each other more and more').8 After some establishing
shots initiate the dialogue, the screen image begins to shift from the speakers
to views of other village activities, an artful montage of village life ensues, the
medium two-shot of the speakers returning to the screen only periodically, in
perfect complement to the content of the dialogue. The first cutaway from the
actual interview introduces a long shot of an old woman weaving baskets in 537
a sunlit doorway, another of a woman stooping over an arrangement of cir-
cular baskets drying rice in the sun, next, two progressively closer shots of
the weaver, and finally a medium close-up of two new women drawing water
from the well, framed before and after by the familiar shot of the two speakers.
Then comes a closer, now medium, shot of the rice-dryer followed by anoth-
er return to the speakers. The rice-dryer is then again presented as she refills
her baskets, and at this point, the camera shifts closer to Thu and Phuong,
capturing their conversation in medium close-up. Suddenly an entirely differ-
ent activity is introduced, a woman in long shot in the shade of a columned
verandah gently rocking a baby, and then a different view of this same activ-
ity follows, revealing a young man weaving nets nearby. A highly contrasted,
shaded close-up of the face and hands of the net-weaver follows, and then is
replaced by a smiling, sunny close-up of Thu that in turn gives way to a close-
up of the face and shoulder of the stooping rice-dryer as she sways back and
forth in a steady rhythm. The close-up of Thu concludes this coda-like string of
close-ups and the sequence as a whole. The subtly orchestrated interweaving
of these crescendos of camera proximity and narrative complexity coincides
with a heightening magnetism of Thu's testimony as the initial awkwardness
of the interview format is forgotten. The total effect is elegant and compelling,
without departing from the serene mood of the quiet afternoon sunshine of
the scene.
The mobile camera is by no means a discovery of direct cinema nor of Ivens
in 1967. Nevertheless, Ivens and his operators, principally Dao one suspects,
made important strides toward that special fluidity and spontaneity of cam-
era, primarily handheld, characteristic of such artists of direct cinema as Lea-
cock or Brault, though staying shy of the flamboyance of either. Equipped with
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
a heavy reflex camera with a blimp, movements of any kind were a challenge -
yet the more static patterns of Ivensian mise-en-scene (shot/reverse shot, medi-
um two-shot/close-up insert, etc.) that most often predominate often give way
to an elegant walk, behind two women, say, as they leave the village into the
jungle, or through the passageway of a shelter. The customary tilts and pans
that have been the staple of Ivens's style for decades suddenly become much
more expansive and flexible, an ample pan for example taking in all of the vari-
ous activities within a communal shelter during a raid, or perhaps an attentive
hovering about the details of a scene before a brisk pan of the entire scene that
culminates in a track past it. It is particularly the shelters with their cramped
spaces and long corridors which seem to have stimulated that new expressive
potential of Ivens's style that distinguishes this film from earlier, less sponta-
neous ones. The expert long takes that dominate Yukong nine years later are
the culmination of the first tentative steps in Parallele.
538 I The role of the commentary in this film is still an important one, though
markedly reduced insofar as the strategy of indirect narration by internal
mediators made it unnecessary. Having abandoned the evocative ironic tone
and allusive texture of Marker's script for Ciel, as well as the personal reflective
tone of the Ivens part of that commentary, here the voice-over, read by a wom-
an with self-assured, rive gauche matter-of-fact-ness, is concise and informa-
tive. The first line is 'Fifteen thousand Marines, ten thousand puppet soldiers
landed here'. Often the commentary assumes the first-person posture of the
indirect discourse narrative, which alternates with it on the soundtrack, add-
ing to the sense of immediacy of the film: 'We hollow huge shelters not only
to protect ourselves from bombs when they fall. But to live there. Our shelters
are not holes where we hide. We have a slogan "Transform shelters into battle
stations." Our shelters are our battle stations'.
Another aspect of this personalisation of the commentary is the effort
to capture the flavour of the popular idiom of the Vietnamese people as
expressed in the rhetoric of collective resistance, that militant folk wisdom
that also surfaced in the slogans and figuration throughout Ciel. In this film,
for example, we hear over a shot of the restoration of the damaged thatch of
a bombed house, the voice-over meditation, 'Here they say, "Healthy leaves
must cover torn ones"'. Elsewhere 'Each handful of rice saved is also a victory',
'If the Americans come here, they will be drowned in the ocean of the people's
war', and 'every day our people enflame themselves more and more with anger
and hate'. The currents of such thought, both aphoristic and metaphorical,
make the commentary, despite its often purely informative function, a dynam-
ic element of the film.
The film's reliance on this pattern, now outlined, of alternation of action
and discussion, direct and indirect discourse, arises from a conjuncture of
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
various influences at this point in Ivens's career. The most important of these
is of course the pervading presence of direct cinema in that historical con-
text. Since Ivens's intervention at the 1963 meeting in Tours that had been so
important in the dissemination of the theory and technology of direct cinema,
at which Ivens's endorsement of the new technology had been qualified by his
serious reservations about the new tendency toward naturalism and ideolog-
ical slovenliness among the new filmmakers - since that critical point in doc-
umentary history, the idiom and the aesthetics of direct cinema had become
the accepted point of departure in European and North American documen-
tary. Even Ivens, having resisted the flood so long with his lyrical essays, some-
times received as charmingly old-fashioned, could no longer resist. Ivens has
always relied on the language of the times to communicate his message, and
one might have predicted that his impulse to penetrate beneath the surfaces
of a people's war could only mean doing so by listening to his subjects' voices
with the direct technology then in vogue - the culmination of tentative steps in 539
Italia and ...A Valparaiso (1963, France/Chile, 27).
Nevertheless, the strict exigencies of shooting under emergency condi-
tions, within a relatively short time and avery stringent budget (Pierre Perrault,
for example, would spend literally years with his subjects during this period
with the virtually unlimited resources provided by the National Film Board
of Canada for their superstar director) necessitated this mingling of many
scenes of traditional silent, semi-documentary shooting, with the more con-
temporary synchronised material. No doubtvarious other factors necessitated
keeping the direct material to a minimum: Ivens's own lack of experience in
the style and above all that of his Vietnamese operators; his unfamiliarity with
the language, by no means an unimportant consideration. We must also con-
sider Ivens's rather stylised format for synchronised sound - the interviews,
the interrupted letter-writing, etc. - as influenced by these conscious aesthetic
and political attitudes as well, that is, his distaste for what he saw as the exces-
sive naturalism of many of the cineastes-direct, the tendency toward the accu-
mulation of superficial detail at the expense of the deeper material structures
of experience. Ivens's intervention in the natural ordering of his material, that
is, in whatever arrangement was required for the semi-dramatised scenes of
indirect discourse that dominate the film, must be seen at least in part as an
intuitive Brechtian strategy, the manipulation of reality to facilitate the spec-
tator's distanced, rational response. Certainly a Brechtian sensibility is appar-
ent in Ivens's decision to limit emotional involvement with the film, that is,
in his playing down of the climactic battle scenes that punctuate the earlier
film, and his avoidance of 'atrocity footage' (one of the early notes records the
decision to 'avoid images of babies on road - show once only, but forcefully').
There are other similarities with the Brechtian aesthetic, which would be elab-
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
orated by Louis Marcorelles (1968) in his article on Parallele in Cahiers du cin-
ema. Marcorelles points to the extreme simplification of the dramaturgy and
the reliance on 'poetic intensification' as a means of expressing the theme, as
examples of these similarities.
Finally, one must consider a complex of personal influences as coming
to bear upon the shape of the film, particularly since this film was the first of
a series of projects more collaborative in design than any of Ivens's previous
films. The contribution of Loridan especially, as we have already seen, seems
to be instrumental. Her name heads a list of collaborators under Ivens's name
in the credits whose respective functions are not detailed.9 In 1967, according
to the pre-feminist fashion of the day, she not unwillingly accepted less bill-
ing than she deserved in the interests of the promotion of the film. Whatever
may be the case, Parallele is the first film in which the collaboration of Lori-
dan and Ivens is a significant one: on Rotterdam, she was credited as assistant
540 I director but her contribution really involved only casual and miscellaneous
consultation on a film conceived without her participation and conducted in a
language unknown to her; with Ciel, a project which she readily admitted not
to be her type of film, she was present only in the montage phase. Loridan's
interest in filmmaking dates from her contribution to Rouch and Morin's
Chronique d'un eted(Chronicle of a Summer, 1961, 85), in which she performs the
role of an on-the-street interviewer asking Parisians 'Are you happy'? with the
help of the new synch-sound portable equipment (she came to that produc-
tion with a background in a polling firm). Even more famous in Chronique d'un
dtd is her one-woman confessional sequence where she walks through Paris,
Nagra slung over her shoulder, remembering her deportation to Auschwitz as
a teenager during the war and her subsequent return to Paris after the Liber-
ation. Loridan's professional filmmaking career was pursued entirely within
the context of direct cinema, and her filmography includes Algerie annde zero
(35), a prizewinning solidarity film on post-independence Algeria shot in 1962
and resonant with testimonies of the citizens of the new country - both sync
sound and simulated sync in this transitional moment. Her co-director on this
pioneering film (regrettably unavailable) had been Jean-Pierre Sergent, her
co-star in Chronique d'un et: the two had been lovers (they break up onscreen
in the Rouch film) as well as fellow militants in the outlawed Algerian inde-
pendence organisation Front de libration national, and Sergent would come
back to collaborate with Loridan and her new mate in Laos, after Parallele. Fol-
lowing Algdrie Loridan's career with French television involved direct cinema
reportage and the preparation of broadcasts. In Vinh Linh, Loridan was thus
more than qualified to become the soundperson for the production, primarily
because of the shortage of staff, although she was not strictly speaking a sound
engineer despite her experience as an interviewer. Her enormous talent in this
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
job, her great sensitivity to the spontaneity required in such a role, was evi-
dent from the beginning. Ultimately her influence in Ivens's shift towards syn-
chronised sound - or rather what Stufkens (2008, 409) and Costa (1999, 277)
call the film's 'mix of synchronous and post-synchronous sound' - cannot be
denied. Nor, for that matter, can the vicarious influence exerted through her of
Rouch, whose inspiration is surely present in the unpretentious, stylised for-
mality of the direct sound sequences and in the use of first-person voice-over
narration in the film.
Furthermore, the structural oscillation of the film must also be seen in
terms of the contributions of the two quite different cameramen supplied by
the documentary studio in Hanoi. Dao distinguished himself by his resource-
fulness on the front line. At times, Ivens was even exasperated with his impul-
sive style when it was expressed in less urgent situations, drafting notes to him
to 'wait, observe, and listen' before shooting, complaining that he was 'too
quickly happy with quantity, not enough study'. The other operator was more 541
at home in such circumstances: Nguyen was responsible for most of the syn-
chronised scenes, no doubt completely comfortable with the semi-documen-
tary approach Ivens developed for these scenes, that is the variety of camera
set-ups and alternating camera distances, etc. Ivens consciously attempted to
teach the two men his style (at one point, he chides one of them, 'You say yes,
but fall into the old style. Not yet captured my style' [production notes, 1967,
JIA]), but their respective individuality productively reinforced the film's oscil-
latory patterns of filmic discourse.
Ultimately, however, the precise form of Ivens's encounter with direct cin-
ema is consistent with his own aesthetic and political temperament. A man
who for 40 years had been telling people not to look at the camera would have
had considerable difficulty adjusting to the direct didactic approach, which
might have seemed more organic in the situation, and more suitable to the
blunt, unpretentious political rhetoric of his Vietnamese patrons. If the direct
confrontation of the camera by the boy, Duc, and by the political commissar,
Lan, are among the most impressive sequences of the film, partly because of
the unmediated directness of their address, the other synchronised sequenc-
es that rely on the various dramatic diegetic devices already described seem
more in character with the man, and with the traditional socialist realist aes-
thetics whose standard he bore for decades in the West, often alone. Ivens's
curious tendency towards a refusal to acknowledge the camera in the era of
Godard, Rouch, and Perrault, seems in keeping with the basic formal conser-
vatism that had been characteristic of his career and of socialist realism in
general. No doubt this conservatism has always been a function of the high
priority he has placed on direct communication with a substantial public. In
any case, it is to his credit that the semi-dramatised synchronised scenes lose
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
their initial stiffness as they progress, as the unpretentious directness and
sincerity of the villagers' discourse overcomes any resistance on the part of
the spectator. Whatever may be the success of such scenes in this film, it is
true that they represent an important step toward the fulfilment of the 'cin-
ematographic Maoism' represented by Yukong in the next decade; they con-
stitute a provisional statement of unanimity with the strategies of the direct
cinema, not in terms of technique or style alone, but with their potential value
as applied to political principles that predate direct cinema by many years.
There are numerous precedents in Ivens's career for the use of semi-dra-
matic situations to bring out a deeper perspective of an event than is visible on
the surface. Both Komsomol and Spanish Earth were heavily criticised for their
use of reconstruction: Julian's letter-writing scene in the latter film serves a
similar diegetic function to Min's letter scene 30 years later. It is simply the
addition of direct sound to the traditional aesthetic of documentary drama-
542 I turgy, practiced more or less universally by documentarists, even by Vertov,
until the advent of direct cinema in the late fifties, without any feeling of con-
tradiction, that makes Parallele seem somewhat tentative.
After the return to Paris in mid-July 1967, the post-production was anything
but smooth and expeditious. While the rushes had turned out mostly well
(except for two hours of unuseable exposed stock), the film had been shot
on speculation with no European producer on board, and those now invited
to participate flinched at the full-length format that Ivens and Loridan now
insisted on. Only after the couple had mortgaged Loridan's apartment to fund
the editing (Stuflens, 2008, 393-394) and had vindicated themselves with a
113-minute epic made to their own liking without any producer interference
did Argos finally come on board (to the tune of the equivalent of approximate-
ly 90,000 [2015] euros [Stufkens, 2008, 394]). At the peak of the final stage
of the editing in January 1968 the North Vietnamese Tet offensive escalated
the conflict and threatened both to render their narrative from eight months
earlier outdated and to heighten public interest in their frontline testimony.
The March 5 premiere in four separate rive gauche cinemas was a star-stud-
ded event with the entire rive gauche in attendance, just like the old days. One
attendee was Ivens's old Havana colleague Santiago Alvarez, in town for the
editing of his own very different Vietnam film, Hanoi, martes 13 (1968, Cuba,
38), which would premiere the following month. Parallele's theatrical first run
was a success (almost 13,000 tickets in the first two weeks [Stuflens, 2008,
395]), despite predictable right-wing threats and sabotage, but in a significant
shift for Ivens's career the film's broadcast career was even more important
and kicked in almost immediately, first in the Netherlands that same month,
and later Denmark and West Germany, followed by broadcast sales in the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
English-speaking world and Japan as well as the DDR. The tie-in launch of the
couple's paperback on their experience in Vinh Linh, a few weeks after the pre-
miere, was part of the successful publicity barrage, and a prize from the Centre
national de la cindmatographie was the icing on the cake. By the end of April
both filmmakers were back in Hanoi for a celebratory local premiere with the
individual and collective heroes of their film.
A two-hour feature and a theatrical hit attracts critics, and for once there
occurred a lively and substantive critical discussion of the film, at least in Par-
is and the Netherlands. Direct cinema apostle Marcorelles's (1968) article in
Cahiers is the most articulate analysis, focusing on the apparent contradictions
inherent in Parallele's hybridisation of politically motivated documentary dra-
maturgy and direct cinema. Marcorelles's perspective is a curious updating
and application of Bazinian phenomenology, and reveals the ideological moti-
vation that such a perspective entails. Marcorelles saw the film's major prob-
lem as stemming from its unsuccessful attempt to reconcile 'applied Marxism' 543
and 'cindma vdcu' ('lived cinema'). Marcorelles was referring to that interactive
incarnation of direct cinema developed in the 196os by documentarists from
Rouch to Perrault and even Marker, who would catalyse real-world events with
their subjects, and aspire to achieve the truth of authenticity through the arti-
fice of their intervention and their relationship with social actors. Ivens and
Loridan were not quite there according to Marcorelles, and the critic admired
most their use of direct cinema in transmitting an unmediated reality, that is
in those observational passages of the film that Ivens would have considered
most naturalistic, the unstructured sequences that include spontaneous dia-
logue: 'in as much as Ivens has described the simple life of an unconquerable
people, watching them live, breathe, watching this antlike labour underneath
the earth, listening to youngsters playing war but nevertheless remaining
youngsters'. In the next decade the same critic would champion the couple's
more successful development of cindma vdcu in Yukong.
Marcorelles's most explicit objection is that the film is retrograde in its
periodic recourse to synthetic battle sequences, a much smaller element in
Parallele than Ciel, to be fair, although still an important one:
When in the editing and mixing room, shots mounted end to end join the
artillery fire coming from the Vietnamese camp and its supposed result
in the other camp, when Antoine Bonfanti (the mixing engineer) adds to
the soundtrack the background noise of artillery fire, we are falling back
into the classical cinema.
It is hard to dispute this reproach except with that special dispensation we
occasionally permit well-intentioned films with specific agitational goals on
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
behalf of a cause we admire, whose most important criteria of achievement
are passion, urgency, and efficacy.
In any case, Marcorelles's more fundamental posture seems to be the
familiar Bazinian faith in the ambiguity of experienced reality. This ontolog-
ical position, in fact an ideological one as well, is extended by Bazin to the
realm of aesthetics and by Marcorelles even further into the problematic of
direct cinema: art in general and the direct cinema in particular should record
and express this ambiguity, this fundamental illegibility of the world. Ivens, a
dedicated Marxist (if not always an explicit one, theoretically speaking), could
never be reconciled to this vision of reality, nor to this view of art, since for him
reality and history had a precise, analysable meaning, and art in turn reflects
this meaning and can even participate in its fulfilment. From Ivens's point of
view, the task is not a reconciliation of applied Marxism and cinema vecu, as
Marcorelles suggests, but a cinematic discovery of an intrinsic Marxist mean-
544 I ing in real-world experience.
Marcorelles's concluding questions, 'Do we still need art? What is the pur-
pose of the cinema?' only throw additional confusion into his analysis with
their implication that Marxist praxis and art are mutually incompatible. For
Ivens, this implied prioritisation of aesthetic principle over political princi-
ple would be an artificial, ideological construct. The revelation of Parallele is
direct cinema's knack for listening to ordinary people control their lives and
struggle for their future. There is of course a real limitation for a hurried pro-
ject with such budgetary restrictions as Ivens faced, that is that direct cinema
will most readily listen to the most politically articulate of potential subjects,
and even those who, as the critic from Le Monde (Lacouture, 1968) put it, 'are
more willing to resort to the formulas of the Nhdn Dan'0 than to the "verbal
genius" of a people whose mocking vivacity is one of the weapons of war'. If
Parallele is occasionally vulnerable to this tendency," it is more often the case
that both the 'verbal genius' and 'mocking vivacity' of the Vietnamese peo-
ple do break through the formal and technical barriers of filmic discourse in
1967 to register an aesthetic and political achievement of undeniable radical
import. Parallele would be joined in the dark years of 1967 and 1968 by oth-
er enduring epic testimonies to Vietnamese resistance and other eloquent
denunciations of the atrocity of imperialist war, not only Loin du Vietnam and
Hanoi, martes 13, but also a masterpiece from within the belly of the beast
itself, Emile de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig - all these films of conscience
together forming a political and artistic critical mass that can be said to have
cumulatively helped turn the tide.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
LE PEUPLE ETSES FUSILS
No sooner had Parallele premiered in March of 1968, and Ivens and Loridan
had emerged from the attendant round of interviews and press screenings,
than the pair found themselves once more in Indochina. At first Loridan began
planning a film with Xuan Phuong about a National Liberation Front-con-
trolled neighbourhood in the supposedly US-dominated South, but a project
set in Laos, in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Sergent, soon took precedence.
The three filmmakers would make a film in those zones of Laos then liberated
by the Lao Patriotic Front under the leadership of Prince Souphanouvong (aka
the Pathet Lao, the Hanoi-allied faction who would assume power in 1975).
As usual the concept for the new film was inseparable from a profound pro-
cess of evaluation of the one just completed. If Parallele had shown a people's
war, it had not shown the process of organisation leading up to that struggle.
As described by Sergent, perhaps the most theoretically articulate of the col- 545
lective, and the one most in tune with the turbulent intellectual and political
atmosphere in which the film was completed in Paris, the Vietnamese film
had omitted the 'outline of the conditions necessary to reach this stage [...]
the political work that preceded and made possible these results' (Henne-
belle, 1970). The spokespeople for the Vietnamese in Parallele had all been
highly conscious and articulate fighters; it was clear to the filmmakers that for
a film to do more than generate consciousness about a foreign struggle, that
is, to serve a didactic function vis-a-vis the home front, to bring Vietnam home
to France, as Godard and Marker had said in Loin, the new film would have
to attempt to show the absorption of ordinary workers and peasants into the
struggle for their own interests. As Loridan suggested in the same 1970 joint
interview, Parallele had concentrated too much on the political cadres, and
not enough on the masses: 'The people are not given the floor enough in it'.
She felt that the film had emphasised the military aspect of the struggle to the
detriment of the political aspect, of the methods of organisation. Ivens him-
self summarised the stages of the auto-critique that led to the heavily didactic
formula of Peuple in this way:
Le Ciel, la terre appeared essentially like an agitation film. That is, as a
kind of banner-film [film-drapeau]. A heroic people are shown in it who
struggle by counting first on their own power. But, in discussing this with
many spectators in various countries, after screenings, I realized that
I was often being asked, 'Your movie is fine but the who's, what's, and
how's are missing. How do you go about organizing a war of liberation
like that'?
It was in answer to this question that I shot, just afterwards, Le 17e
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
Parallele with Marceline Loridan and some Vietnamese cineastes. This
film constituted a progression, but one could go even further. It was
necessary to deepen it still more: what happens in a liberated zone? Who
are the cadres and what do they do? How do you go about unifying the
peasants? (Hennebelle, 1970)
In choosing Laos as the setting for this film, the filmmakers deliberately
focused their attention away from Vietnam, which had been occupying world
attention almost exclusively, despite the fact that the war in neighbouring Laos
had also escalated ferociously, Laos having become the most heavily bombed
country in history, as the film's commentary tells us.'2 According to Loridan,
their purpose was also to break the idea that monopolised the bourgeois press
(in Europe apparently) that the Vietnamese were exceptional or chosen:
546 I There isn't any exceptional people, there isn't any chosen people. What
the Vietnamese people have done, every people can do, taking inspiration
from their example, following their principles, and adopting their meth-
ods that are those of Marxism-Leninism and the people's war. (Bonitzer
et al., 1976)
There also seems to have entered into the motivation of the collective an explic-
it acknowledgement, a critique even, of the illusionist idiom upon which Ivens
had so often relied throughout his career, including Parallele with its synthet-
ic anti-aircraft battle and semi-dramatised diegetic pretexts. This critique
has much in common with the rediscovery of the Brechtian problematic by
the 196os generation of radical artists, and is perhaps anticipated, as we have
seen, in Parallele with its avoidance of excess atrocity footage (unlike Mark-
er's assemblage in Loin, for example), or with its minimisation of traditional
narrative technique. As Ivens explains further in the same interview (Henne-
bell, 1970), with Parallele 'it was possible to get settled in an armchair and, to a
certain extent to exult in your emotions. This time, that is no longer possible.
You are forced to reflect'. And Loridan voices a similar criticism of their ear-
lier work: 'Le 17e Parallele played somewhat on fascination. You came out of
the screening saying, "Ah, what wonderful people"? but I wonder if you made
progress politically'. The aim was now to produce a film in Ivens's traditional
exemplary mode, but in a concrete, austerely didactic way, which he had rarely
attempted. In other words, if the Vietnam film had been didactic only in the
abstract, inspiring by example, the Laos film was to instruct in a concrete way,
to articulate and demonstrate the precise lessons to be derived.
As the team set about their work, however, they were less than precise
about the exact mechanics of this intended didacticism. Upon their arrival,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
they heard a series of political reports by both the leaders and the cadres of
the Lao Patriotic Front (LPF), and set about the shoot using these reports as a
point of departure. As in Vietnam, the subject of their film was the resistance
of a people under bombardment by the US and their clients in Vientiane. How-
ever, here the resistance was centred in huge natural grottos buried within the
sides of cliffs, instead of the subterranean shelters of Vinh Linh. The shoot-
ing was organised around four major focal points that eventually provided
the film with its four-part structure. First, two mountain villages, one, Muong
Niuyt, recently liberated by the LPF, and another, Sophao, which had long
been part of the zone controlled by the LPF, provided examples of the political
tactics of the Front in two different stages of implementation. Another focus
was the complex of grottos that served as the headquarters for the political
wing of the LPF, and another was the centre of military training for the libera-
tion army. These four areas of concentration surface as the themes of the four
parts of the finished film entitled respectively, 'The People's Army Arms the 547
People' (about the newly liberated village), 'Who Commands at the Guns' (the
leadership of the LPF), 'The People Can Do Anything' (Sophao), and the last,
'Without its Army, the People Would Have Nothing' (the military). The team
also occasionally filmed aerial raids and ground-to-air battles, including once
more the shooting down of an American pilot, although this material has no
significant presence in the finished film.
The collective's operators and technical crew were as usual recruited from
local talent, although in this case, the local industry was scarcely yet in exis-
tence and Ivens and Loridan had to train as well as recruit their assistants. The
Lao participants had apparently no role in the conceptual development of the
film, and are oddly not mentioned in the credits of the film. The most import-
ant innovations in the collective's approach was the new emphasis they placed
on direct-sound shooting. From the very start, the film was conceived of as
stringently and unapologetically discursive - Loridan's catchphrase 'donner la
parole au people' ('give the floor to the people', or 'let the people speak') was
not to be a hollow one. The crew shot long, often static, sequences recording
the voices in play at political meetings, and in discussions, formal and infor-
mal, among students, political cadres, villagers, and soldiers. In all, about
nine hours of 16mm film were exposed (6ooo metres), most of it in sync.
It came as a great surprise to Ivens and his team, one night in May, bur-
ied deep in the grottos of the liberated zone, to hear short-wave radio reports
of the worker-student agitation in Paris, in fact, of student-police battles over
barricades in the rue des Saints-Peres, right under the very apartment vacated
by Ivens and Loridan for supposedly greener revolutionary pastures. When the
collective returned to Paris that summer after nearly three months in Laos,
the events of May and June were already history, but the atmosphere in which
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
the montage of the film was to be effected had been vastly changed. The tats-
gendraux of the cinema had met during the crisis, and since then a number of
filmmaking collectives had formed with the goal of making radical cinematic
interventions on the political front. These included the Groupe Medvedkine,
the Groupe Dynadia, and others including the Groupe Dziga-Vertov, the most
famous though the least typical. SLON, Marker's distribution outfit that had
produced Loin, newly stimulated by the events, also formed an important part
of the new radical front in the film industry.'3 Some of the new groups had
incorporated workers into their membership and most were oriented specifi-
cally towards providing workers' organisations with the tools and resources of
filmmaking. Every area of film aesthetics previously unquestioned was being
challenged and reworked in the air of excitement and ferment, not the least of
which were the mystique of the auteur, the role of the artist in society, and the
ideological determination of filmic structures. This reworking was happening
548 I far beyond the French borders as well, a characteristic of New Left and 'third
world' media activism worldwide, and a characteristic of youth and artists'
dissent in general across Europe (in which Ivens the elderly militant enjoyed
immersing himself, especially in France, Italy, and the Netherlands).
Ivens, Loridan, and Sergent decided to accommodate their own filmmak-
ing practice to the new cultures of revolt; they formed a collective to finish the
film, recruiting people who had participated in the events of May and June
while the threesome had been in Laos. It was felt to be particularly import-
ant for the collective to include non-filmmakers. Ultimately the group includ-
ed, in addition to the three initiators of the project, three students, a worker
from a Renault factory, a journalist, and two young filmmakers - some of these
remained anonymous in the final credits of the film.
Though Ivens throughout his long career had seldom made a film without
at least one important collaborator, the process of editing the new film as part
of a collective of eight or nine was a real challenge, in many ways as arduous
as the shooting under bombardment. Ivens found the process excruciatingly
slow, particularly at first - he would leave the group gathered around the edit-
ing table for a coffee break and return to find them exactly in the same place
where he had left them. Conflicts would arise between the three who had been
to Laos and their collaborators, conflicts that had to be smoothed out metic-
ulously in the manner required in that year of painstaking evaluation of basic
concepts and values. At times, this conflict is expressed in the final form of the
film, in moments of contradictory impulse, for example, where a moment of
Ivensian lyricism is deliberately undercut by the editorial strategy, or where
footage clearly designed for Ivens's traditional form of narrative continuity is
subverted by a certain kind of editorial interruption. If, as Ivens admits, the
final form lacks the souplesse of his other work (Ivens, interview with author,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
February 1976), Peuple must still be seen as one of the boldest statements to
have come out of that euphoric, turbulent period in the history of the French
Left, and, in terms of Ivens's filmography, a remarkable testimony to the new
inspiration he received from his first substantial contact with the European
New Left. If the work is somewhat flawed by the utopian self-seriousness of its
immediate historical context, the basic importance of the aesthetic and polit-
ical questions it raises makes it a companion piece to films such as its exact
contemporary, Godard's equally austere Le Gai Savoir (oy ofLearning, 1969, 95).
Sergent's characterisation of the Laos film as an essai thdorique is a useful
departure point for an analysis of the film fashioned by the collective out of the
Laos footage. Intransigent in its didacticism and refusing concessions to pop-
ular taste, unwilling merely to publicise the Laos war or to attract sympathy to
the plight of a distant and exotic people, the film attempts to build on the rec-
ognition that, as Sergent puts it, 'to make militant films, you have to militate
yourself, and you can't become militant except in your own country'. The Lao- 549
tian example becomes a pedagogical tool in an explication of the principles
of the organisation of a popular struggle: the film seems light-years distant
from the sensibility evident in the fund-raising, public-awareness orientation
of Spanish Earth.
The collective interview in Cinma by the three filmmakers (Hennebelle,
1970), already alluded to, is typical of the spirit of the film in its self-analyt-
ic rigour and theoretical forthrightness. Various descriptions of the film are
offered: 'an attempt at a systematisation of the people's war', 'an attempt at
revolutionary pedagogy', '[an endeavour to present] a concrete type of revolu-
tion in the making', and 'an exchange of experiences between the Lao revolu-
tionaries and the French'. There is also much discussion among the three of
'the barrier of exoticism' confronted by the film: the solution to this perennial
problem of militant filmmakers on foreign fronts (the temptation to be 'aven-
turiers-cindastes', as Loridan puts it) is, in Sergent's terms, this latter orienta-
tion toward the film as an 'exchange', and in Ivens's terms, his own traditional
insistence on being 'tied' to the people being filmed. Both perspectives of the
problem can be thought of as ultimately the same. In terms of the customary
theoretical problematic of didactic art, Ivens is very clear in locating the film
outside of the category of art: 'My film on Laos doesn't demand recognition,
it's what happens in it that has to be recognised. People shouldn't experience
it as an artistic achievement - they have to be made aware of the reality'. Ser-
gent, for his part, even goes so far as to point to two specific sequences directly
utilisable in a concrete way by French spectators: a scene in which soldiers
are shown helping village women in their work while carrying on propaganda
shows 'how the task of explication can be carried out in a factory, for example',
and another sequence showing village mutual help brigades, primarily organ-
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
ised by women, would demonstrate to French women the way to organise day
care centres, etc. It is only by this direct commitment to a functional didacti-
cism, to an authentic self-militancy, that the collective were able to come to
terms with the pitfall of 'exoticism', of revolutionary romanticism, in short,
with the entire problematic of the ideological composition of the cinema iso-
lated with such courage and perseverance by French radicals in those heady
days of post-1968 and afterwards.
This commitment is clearly manifest in the final impact of the film in a
number of ways. Marked by the formal austerity and unrepentantly didac-
tic flavour of many of the radical films of the era, most famously those of the
Groupe Dziga-Vertov, Peuple seemed inaccessible, perhaps more than any film
Ivens had ever made, to all but a highly alert and strongly predisposed audi-
ence. The distribution plans for the film, at least in its initial phase, seemed
to take this into account: speakers from the collective were to be present at
550 I non-commercial screenings to lead the public in discussions, a tactic other
radical filmmakers were emphasising at the same time - the American News-
reel collective, for example - and brochures were also provided at theatrical
screenings with additional background information about Laos to compen-
sate for what some observers saw as a paucity of information in the film itself.
Nevertheless, audiences unprepared for its rejection of traditional modes of
filmic discourse, often found the film baffling and uncompromisingly dry.
Vincent Canby ([197111973), for example, when the film finally opened in New
York for a brief run in June 1971, found it 'so self-confident in its attitudes,
so stern in its admonitions, so cinematically lifeless in its techniques', that
its very competence as propaganda was in question, suffering even in com-
parison to the output of the US Information Service. Of course, Canby could
not have understood that he was participant in an experimental probe of new
cinematic forms, and that the aesthetics of illusionism, identification, and cli-
max that had characterised the traditional propaganda film had been victims
of the post-1968 re-evaluation of the language of the cinema. In their desire
to instruct rather than titillate, the collective had eliminated virtually all the
dramatic impact that Canby sensed missing from the film, the reliance on
empathy, and various other dramaturgical manifestations of bourgeois indi-
vidualist ideology. There were only residual traces of most of the tradition-
al ingredients; for example, only the brief credit sequence, a short, staccato
anti-aircraft battle, constructed with the barest minimum of narrative conti-
nuity, remains of the synthetic dramatic texture that had been characteristic
of Ivens's earlier films. A scene in which an American plane had been shot
down was hastily cut out of the final version because a preview audience had
applauded - the collective wanted to avoid provoking this kind of exhilaration
and contentment on the part of its audience, since it would interfere with the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
film's didactic goal. Most of the film's directly anti-American references were
similarly excised. None of the audience energy catalysed by the film was to be
channelled off into a facile anti-Americanism.
The basic diegetic structure ofParallele, that is its narrative continuity, has
also been suppressed in the Laos film, or rather, confined to a few interludes
restricted to a transitional or an atmospheric function. As we have seen the
synthetic montage tropes of the former film appear now only as a backdrop
for opening and closing credits, their former function of audience identifica-
tion and pace variation no longer operative. The use of familiar characters as
narrators and protagonists has also disappeared. In short, the predominant-
ly dramatic logic that had been the formative principle of Parallele has been
replaced by a logic that is discursive and analytic.
The decidedly different employment of the direct cinema elements in
each film points clearly to this new logic. If in the Vietnam film, the direct cin-
ema passages were used primarily as diegetic devices (Min tells of her partic- | 551
ipation in village defence during bombings, for example), here the live speech
elements either illustrate the theoretical points being discussed, that is,
issues of political strategy, for example, or else contribute to that discussion
itself. The film's reliance on these passages for its thematic is perhaps its most
important achievement, and certainly its most radical innovation. That there
are so few precedents for the direct-cinema recording of explicit political dis-
course among ordinary people makes the film all the more notable. And this
despite the occasional awkwardness or formality of the material, the occasion-
al lapses into that familiar staginess that was the temptation of socialist real-
ism and all of its related forms since its earliest origins, a few demonstrations
of the filmmakers' inability to distinguish between real dialogue and cant, and
the occasionally questionable strategy of extending many of the direct cinema
passages at great length. Each of the groups of Laotians under the scrutiny of
the camera - LPF leaders, political workers, soldiers, peasants both from new-
ly liberated villages and from those under LPF control for some time - each
in turn becomes the focus of direct sequences, and their discourse becomes
the diegetic impulse of the film at those points. Such sequences are inevitably
long and require the rigorous concentration of the spectator.
Ultimately this uncompromising strategy pays off. In one case, a long and
relatively static scene in a newly liberated village depicts a number of soldiers
helping village women pounding rice.
The sequence comes early in the film before the film's unhurried, analytic
pace has made its full impact. The soldiers talk casually and intermittently with
the women as they help with the gigantic foot-operated pounder, commenting
on the differences in village life after liberation, and offering advice towards
achieving self-sufficiency. The senior woman's laconic, polite responses, her
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
99. Le Peuple et ses fjisils (1970): in a newly
liberated village, a soldier helps an elderly
woman pound rice, static and unhurried,
but absorbing. Frame enlargement,
courtesy Eye Film Institute. © CAPI Films,
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
expressionless face, and the rhythmical thud of the pounder become more
and more absorbing as the scene continues, and the point (reinforced by the
552 subtitles) is ultimately secured, that is the importance of long, patient action
alongside the oratory on the part of revolutionary workers in order to win the
trust of the people and help them to take control over their lives. The impact
of the scene is only gradually and subtly built up as the interaction of the wom-
en and the soldiers unfolds with unhurried deliberateness. Another sequence
consists of an even longer meeting of a mutual aid brigade in a village commu-
nity that is having a certain success in applying revolutionary principles to the
lives of its members. The spectator follows a long discussion among the peas-
ants who first sum up their achievements before proceeding to criticism and
self-criticism. Here the women voice complaints about the men's negligence
in caring for the village buffaloes. The slow, deliberate manner in which all of
the problems are aired and acted upon suggests with vividness but without
artificial histrionics the manner in which real change is brought about. These
are two of the most memorable scenes in the film.
Historically, the traditional voice-over coincided perfectly with the vision
of classical bolshevism, that is, the political wisdom of an avant-garde guiding
and instructing the masses (with all the intrinsic dangers of bureaucratisation
therein). It was also restricted by the technical crudenesses of a technology
geared entirely toward the exigencies of industrial, narrative cinema, rather
than the less commercial, more subversive possibilities of documentary. The
capacity of direct cinema to record live, authentic voices, coincided with the
new post-Stalinist radicalism of Mao and the New Left, radicalism derived in
its essence from the wisdom of the masses. The voices of the Laotians in Peuple,
unhampered by the preconceived narrative demands of Parallee, represent
this wisdom in a palpable form. The voices are admittedly often stilted by the
dogmatism of an isolated and peasant-oriented political movement engaged
in one of the most vicious wars of modern times and combating illiteracy and
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
hunger at the same time; but there are revealing glimpses of an ongoing pro-
cess of growing consciousness and collective action in the voices we hear. Few
of Ivens's predecessors in the application of direct cinema to the realm of poli-
tics - Rouch, Perrault, Marker - had revealed such a clarity of vision on the part
of their subjects. Only Solanas's La hora de los hornos, roughly contemporane-
ous with Peuple but not seen by the collective until after the montage, rivalled
it in this aspect. But where the Argentine film was comprehensive, expansive,
and richly heterogeneous, enlivened by the artist's sensitivity to his own cul-
tural context, Peuple is precise, disciplined, and sharply focused.
Of course, the vision is still incomplete: two months in bombing shel-
ters can only yield a fragmentary, provisional political statement. The final
step in the process, anticipated by the Italian interviews at the beginning of
the decade, would not be consummated until Yukong, when, after eighteen
months of living among what seemed like the most important political exper-
iment ever undertaken, and above all listening endlessly to the voices of its 553
participants, Ivens and Loridan would arrive at a form of political clarity.
At the time Peuple was released, however, and two years later when the
export ban was finally lifted and it could be shown outside France, it was not
the voices of the Lao peasants that attracted most attention - after all, since
1968, Ivens had been joined by several others who had discovered the rad-
ical potential of the act of listening, the most innovative feature of the film
seemed to be the typographic framework in which the collective had mounted
their material, the setting of intertitles and superimposed titles, about 70 in
number, as well as voice-overs that dominated the organisation of the film.
The intertitles go well beyond the tradition of Brecht or Godard in providing
essential information and interpretation as well as capsulated summaries and
slogans. Indeed at times, the interjected titles seem so abrupt, self-conscious,
and solemn that they would almost appear parodic in another context. What
might appear an exaggerated presence of titles, exaggerated even in refer-
ence to the examples of Vertov, Godard, and Solanas whom they most clearly
evoke, is however part of the design of the film. The orthodox notion that 'lit-
erary' content is uncinematic is of course part of the web of aesthetic premises
attacked by the film. Sergent speaks of his conception of the film as 'flat' ('i
plat'), 'like the pages of a book' (Hennebelle, 1970). The startling disruption
effected between the kinetic and audio-visual substance of the live sequenc-
es and the flat, black, typographic interruptions is part of an overall scheme
of discontinuity that the collective deemed essential for the film as part of
its general reaction against the conventions of continuous narrative cinema.
Interviewer-critic Guy Hennebelle (1970, 85) pointed to obvious parallels with
La hora de los hornos, which had been launched in European festivals in 1968-
1969, also structured prominently by titles, but Ivens countered that the two
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
sets of titles served different purposes, the Argentine film one of agitation,
and the Laos film one of explanation. According to Sergent, the concept of the
film was 'for it not to be dramatic, not chronological, but constructed in rup-
ture, in discontinuity'. A long explanatory caption typically not only provides
an introduction before and/or a summation after a sequence but interrupts
it periodically with slogan-like capsules of interpretation and/or exhortation
as well. For example, the rice-pounding sequence already described follows
an explanatory reading, 'The combatants mobilize and educate the peasants
of the newly liberated zone. On every occasion, they aim at heightening their
political consciousness. They expose the lies spread by enemy propaganda.
They explain the objectives of their revolution'. A lengthy dialogue then fol-
lows, interrupted by a total of five titles before its end.
Often a caption succinctly and emphatically summarises a long preced-
ing passage of dialogue or commentary. A voice-over paragraph describing the
554 work and the goals of an artistic brigade touring from village to village with
their pageants of anti-aircraft combat is followed by the slogan 'Unite with the
people. Unite the people'. A conversation among teacher trainees about the
political content both of a teacher's training and his or her role is interrupted
first by the Marxian caption 'Understand the world so as to transform it', and
then after another passage of dialogue the Althusserian 'To understand the
world is to transform it' (to invoke an iconic thinker of 1968).
100. Le Peuple et sesfusils (1970): 'To
understand the world is to transform it'.
An analytic title card interrupts a teacher-
training scene in another Indochina film
perhaps too '1968' to be rescued from the
archive. Frame enlargement, courtesy Eye
Film Institute. © CAPI Films, Paris, and C'EST 'E I H E 1
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Often, the pattern of the use of captions, dialogue, and commentary is rigor-
ously methodical in terms of its pedagogical intent: a principle is first articu-
lated, then discussed, then demonstrated, and finally repeated in summation.
For example, the sequence on the liberated village of Phathi is begun with an
introductory segment of the commentary that elaborates the principle that the
military liberation just completed is only the first phase of the struggle. Then
follows a long synch-sound sequence in which an officer instructs his men
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
along the same lines, i.e. explaining the post-military tasks of propaganda and
material aid to the villagers, within an egalitarian framework rather than a
hierarchical one. Next follows a live-sound sequence of peasants and soldiers
in the fields, and then a rest period in which the socialisation of the soldiers
with the peasants is demonstrated, the spontaneous conversation and singing
and laughter vividly present on the soundtrack though not translated in subti-
tles. Eventually the commentator explains the history of this particular village
before liberation, concluding with the comment, 'Today they are discovering
that a revolutionary army can serve them in many ways'. Then a final caption
summarises the content of the preceding material: 'After the victory, the army
mobilizes the masses it has just liberated. It must educate them, organize
them and arm them'. The gamble, of which the collective must have been fully
aware, was that such emphatic repetition of key principles, although pedagog-
ically sound in principle, is potentially alienating for a spectator through its
possible excess, or, worse still, its posture of condescension. I 555
There are other times when the relation of text to image is less complex
and less problematical. For example, a lively sequence of military training in
bayonet combat is interrupted twice by short slogans about fighting the ene-
my; here, the dialectic relationship of action and analysis is reduced to its
most basic structure.
On the whole, the effect of the typographic interventions seems impos-
sible to measure or categorise except in terms of specific audiences and spe-
cific screening experiences. Certainly Ivens found audiences to which he
showed the film personally much more responsive to the political and topi-
cal issues at stake than he had been used to but he attributed this as much
to the increasingly political climate in Europe after 1968 as to any property
of the film. According to his experiences in Europe after the release of the
film, audiences are much less likely to respond to a film in purely aesthetic
terms. An essay published after the release of Peuple as an addendum to the
Dutch translation of The Camera andI details his sense of changing audience
response, and in addition provides a clear outline of his perceptions of the
goals of the Brechtian framework of Peuple in terms of that audience dynam-
ic (Ivens, 1970, 173). According to the essay, the function of the intertitles is
to break the fascination provoked by the images, to break up the filmic dis-
course and the inevitable romanticisation that takes place in response to such
a reportage, delivered uninterruptedly. The function of the text is to prod the
spectators to think over their own personal and group situation, 'to take the
text critically within themselves, to relate what they have seen to their own per-
sonal experiences'. According to Ivens, the intertitles both 'deepened' the Lao
situation, and made it more general. They also, according to his concept of the
film's design, are responsible for a certain alternation between an appeal to
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
the emotions (the image) and an appeal to the reason (the text), an alternation
which informs the film with a 'rigorous tension'.
Ivens admits that Peuple is not an 'easy' film nor does it try to 'please' the
viewer or appeal to the 'normal reactions of the movie-going public'. There are
important qualifications to be made of the Ivensian articulation of the Brech-
tian/modernist impulse evident in such an admission, and distinctions to be
made between that articulation and the contemporary applications of simi-
lar impulses by such collectives as the Groupe Dziga-Vertov. It is important to
realise that the consensus of the Ivens collective saw Peuple as a film of expli-
cation, propaganda, and popularisation, rather than as an assault upon the
preconceptions of the viewer or the traditional structures of filmic discourse.
That Ivens would stress the appeal to both reason and emotion, rather than
an exclusively analytic orientation, suggests a significant divergence from his
contemporary Godard (though more than one critic reviewed Peuple and the
556 I Groupe's Pravda [1970, 58] together [Thirard, 1970]). No doubt Ivens would
approve of one critic's view that 'Le Peuple et sesfusils resorts to a traditional
form of expression, but is nevertheless a revolutionary film, the strongest per-
haps of these recent years' (Ivens, 1970, 189). The aesthetic of functionality
and accessibility have not been replaced by the doctrine of deconstruction. As
we have seen, Peuple depends on both the analytic project and the stylistic tex-
ture of Godardian discourse - the latter is undeniably present not only in the
typographic interventions, but in the incorporation of the other strategies of
discontinuity, in the unapologetic didacticism, and certainly in the play of dif-
ferent materials and visual textures. However, the ultimate tone is less one of
Godardian self-interrogation - and the ultimate consequences of such inter-
rogation when taken to extremes, that is, immobility - than of the traditional
Ivensian posture of affirmation and exhortation, though now tempered in the
dynamic of a pedagogic orientation toward the spectator. No doubt this com-
plex mix of assertion and analysis is made possible through the medium of
direct cinema: it is the voices of the Laotians that contribute the tone of revo-
lutionary activism and the mediation of artist and spectator that provides the
analytic overlay.
The filmmakers' Paris network was well aware of the risks involved in such
an experiment. Six years after the sympathetic interview with Ivens, Loridan,
and Sergent published in 1970, its author Guy Hennebelle had more critical
distance from what he called the post-1968 'filmed lecture' and the 'real epi-
demic of title-itis' it entailed:
Moved by a concern that is legitimate all the same, to explain, to make
the audience understand a certain number of truths, militant filmmakers
often tend to adopt a professorial tone and to prop up with a lot of inter-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
titles a veritable filmed demonstration: a plus b equals c. [...] That was
reinforced at the same time by an excessive and somewhat masochistic
reaction against the idea of spectacle. Given that Hollywood and a num-
ber of other cinemas had made use of the attractions and the baits of the
mechanisms of representation specific to Tinseltown to condition the
spectator, we tended to want to 'deconstruct' not only these artifices but
also the cinema itself, held responsible for these evils. [...] This tendency
leads ultimately to a 'scholastic realism' that is particularly boring and
overbearing [...] the cinema remains and will always remain a spectacle.
What is more appropriate to denounce are the manipulations of which it
has been the object in a certain commercial cinema. Such is not the dan-
ger - far from it - in militant cinema, which suffers on the contrary from
too great a formal austerity. [...] We must banish boredom and cultivate
the notion of aesthetic pleasure. [...] We can never say enough how much
the French, in the theatre as well as in the cinema, have considerably I 557
distorted the concept of distancing, which they have transformed into
the fig-leaf of the worst intellectualist pedantry, while the plays of Brecht
were conceived also to be warm, funny, and moving. We must combat
this deformation and rethink also the systematic refusal of the principle
of identification. (Hennebelle, [1976] 1984, 18o-181)
In terms of the specifics of Ivens's cinematographic style, strictly speaking,
Peuple was not exempt from these tendencies despite its moments of undenia-
ble 'aesthetic pleasure'. It must be considered a transitional film, like the oth-
er Indochina films. Given the necessity of using an untrained Lao camera crew
and the hardships of shooting consistently in emergency conditions, the cam-
era style of Ivens's and Loridan's version of direct cinema cannot of course be
considered mature or even coherent in this film. The photographic approach
to the film's subject matter is uneven to say the least, though Ivens of course
would hardly consider the matter worthy of discussion (the updated Dutch
version of The Camera and I also contains an impassioned promotion of the
use of Super 8 and pamphlet-style filming on an amateur level in the service of
political agitation, and an unconcerned dismissal of the relevance of the cate-
gory of art in this context, with the suggestion that a technically imperfect film
can often be more important than a perfect one [Ivens, 1970, 189]).
In any case, the synch-sound dialogue passages in Peuple occasional-
ly seem unremittingly static. The camera sometimes resorts to a shot/reac-
tion-shot mise-en-scene of the most limited inspiration, or else engages in a
restless and distracted float about an event, zoom-happy and insert-ridden,
zeroing in on a cigarette being lit, for example, for no apparent reason. Fre-
quently prolonged and distracting cutaways suggest the difficulties that must
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
have dogged the crew in their efforts to record as well as photograph their
subjects while avoiding the resort to reconstruction that might have tempted
Ivens in earlier days. In one place, the beginning of the impressive sequence
that depicts the meeting of the mutual aid brigade, an entire, lengthy discus-
sion is relayed entirely by means of intertitles and long shadow scans of the
assembly - sleeping babies, pensive listeners fanning and drinking tea - with-
out ever isolating the speaker whose low-key, barely distinguishable voice is
audible, but translated only on the intertitles. In this particular instance, how-
ever, what appears to be a rough spot arising from some technical exigency or
other, is ultimately not unsuccessful on the aesthetic and pedagogic level: the
intertitles spell out emphatically the villagers' proud but modest summary of
the progress they are making, their achievements in the field of hygiene and
collective social security, and above all the sense of community they express
unconsciously in very moving terms, both personal and poetic, that rough
558 I peasant lyricism that so often surfaces in the film.
The non-discursive passages of the film, which appear with the rhythmic
regularity already pointed to, serve as an interpolated current of lyrical and
narrative interludes This current reveals an internal stylistic eclecticism aris-
ing from both the technical hardships incumbent on the project, and the tran-
sitional character the late sixties had for an Ivens halfway between Valparaiso
and Beijing (it is assumed that within the collective it was Ivens who under-
took primary responsibility for the shooting, that is, the supervision of the Lao
cameramen, who themselves did not make any direct conceptual contribution
to the film, although it can also be assumed that their relative inexperience is
partly responsible for many of the uneven patches in the cinematography). In
any case, here passages of classical Ivensian documentary mise-en-scene alter-
nate with passages relying on the new more mobile, more spontaneous idi-
om of direct cinema, often achieving a graceful fluidity and expressiveness.
For example, a long walking movement follows a woman carrying water (what
else!) from the jungle into the village clearing, or another movement through
an underground machine shop takes in the general activity in long shot before
arriving at an eloquent close-up pause on the face of a machinist. However, it
is not until the leisure and the relative luxury of the Chinese shooting several
years later that Ivens and Loridan had the occasion to perfect this new style,
and master in their own way the art of the plan-sequence or long take.
In this non-discursive current of Peuple, it is still the old Ivens that is the
most visible and the most impressive. If it is true, as bourgeois liberal critics
continually say in regard to post-1968 Godard, that even politics cannot sup-
press the keen eye of the artist, then it is the long interludes of classical Iven-
sian observation that reveal the continuity of an artistry that has remained a
constant through the decades of ideological struggles and political growth.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
As has always been the case, Ivens is most comfortable and expressive while
watching ordinary people shaping their lives by means of the sacrament of
work. As soon as the villagers undertake some job, the fidgetiness of the dis-
cussion sequences, or the self-consciousness of the one or two choreographed
'spontaneous demonstrations' vanish (and this film is no less exempt from
this particular Ivensian foible than any other), and the old master of Zuiderzee
reasserts himself. An inevitable extra-long landscape shot introduces a scene
of hoeing, ploughing, or harvest, firmly relating the minuscule collective of
workers to their environment (in this film, an environment breathtakingly
rugged, mountainous, and cinematic). Then comes a closer view of a single
worker or a pair, a long shot broad enough to capture the entire field of his
or her labour. Inevitably, the close-ups follow, close attention being accorded
the intersection of tool and earth, of firmly planted foot or dexterous hand,
always intercut or connected by an efficient tilt to close-ups of the intent faces
of the workers. A graceful float of the camera may follow the plough or move 559
from worker to worker. The mechanics and the sequence of the operation are
always clearly and carefully observed in close-ups; the various formations of
workers are always contemplated at greater distance by an artistic eye that
picks out the graphic relationship of a curving line of hoers to the hills on the
horizon, or the intricate functioning of a silhouetted assembly line. In Peuple,
it is these compelling interludes of homo laborans that complement the work-
ers' discussions and meetings, which authenticate in a material way the reality
of the revolution that Ivens has undertaken to demonstrate.
Often these scenes of work underline in a specific way a point made by the
discursive element of the film. For example, the feminist insights achieved by
the women in the meeting are expressed materially by the scene where wom-
en are learning to plough. The several scenes of soldiers working alongside
the peasants are vivid and concrete demonstrations of the film's perhaps most
important theoretical conclusion, the necessity for the participation of revo-
lutionary cadres in the lives of ordinary people. This perception reflects the
crucial problematic of the 1968 ferment in Europe as well as the reality of the
Laotian situation. It dominated the atmosphere in which the film was mount-
ed (as well as the composition of the collective) and provided the thematic for
the huge spectrum of political filmmaking that followed the May-June events
from Marker's La Bataille des dix millions (The Battle of the Ten Million, 1971,
France/Cuba, 58) to Godard's Toutva bien (1972, 96). This theme, also exempli-
fied in the finale's demonstration of peasants and soldiers brandishing tools,
weapons, and fists (which became the film poster's iconic image), was appar-
ently the most successful point made in terms of audience acceptance. Even
Archer Winsten (1971), venerable critic of the New York Post, was impressed by
the sight of soldiers working alongside peasants.
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
This particular insight is also an indication of Ivens's and his collective's
growing affinity towards Maoism during the sixties. This affinity is demon-
strated by the probing of other main tenets of Maoism as well, that is, the
issues of feminism, the role of criticism, self-criticism, and analysis, the threat
of bureaucratisation, and the danger in isolation of political and intellectu-
al leadership from the masses (a shot of Prince Souvanavong hoeing with the
peasants is significant by its presence in Peuple, even if its point is slightly
undercut by the floating whiteness of his otherwise convincing hoeing under-
shirt). Ivens's growing fascination with the Chinese experiment can be detect-
ed elsewhere in the film as well, namely in the references to the collusion of
the US and the USSR in the encirclement of China. Ivens had been gravely
disappointed in Vietnam at the failure of his onetime patrons, the Soviets, to
come to the aid of the beleaguered North Vietnamese, speaking publicly in
criticism of the Soviets for the first time in the summer of 1966 (Ivens, 1970,
560 189). In Laos this disenchantment had deepened.
Ivens seldom publicly expressed this growing dismay with the Russians
before the release of the Laos film (delayed until February 1970 because of
the slowness of the editing process and the censorship problems). While in
Vietnam, Ivens had been awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize, which
he had donated to Latin American oppositional filmmakers (Stufkens, 2008,
404), and shortly after his return from Laos the next year, he received what he
regarded as one of the greatest honours of his life, an honorary doctorate from
Karl Marx University in Leipzig. The great aura of festivity and adulation that
surrounded this November event was a moving seventieth birthday present -
Ivens's public in the DDR was more widespread and worshipful than in any
other country (except perhaps Holland, where few people had seen his films
in any great numbers). The streets of Leipzig were festooned with his portrait.
However, the celebration was somewhat marred, not only by the Soviet inva-
sion of Czechoslovakia the previous August and by his growing enchantment
with Mao Zedong, but also by what he saw as the increasing stagnation in the
Soviet film circles in which he had once been a devoted co-worker. The Leip-
zig festival held that year in the same month as the university ceremony, was
also the occasion for his anger: the organisers had not only excluded from
the festival all Western European films that testified to the revolutionary fer-
ment of that year, but in addition arranged the expulsion of a number of Ber-
lin film students who had managed to see some of the Paris material when
Ivens and Loridan showed it unofficially. After Leipzig, Ivens ended his life-
long association with the USSR, resigning from the Soviet-sponsored World
Peace Council (and saw Leipzig's Ivens award cancelled in 1971). He turned
with increasing interest to various alternative political activities in Western
Europe and elsewhere, including strikes, workers' occupations, and student
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
agitations, supporting everyone from squatters in Amsterdam to anti-airport
agitators in Narita, Japan. In turn he faced a personal embargo from his many
old friends not only in the USSR but also in East Berlin, where he had lived for
many years, including his personal friend and biographer, Hans Wegner. If he
publicly still refrained from explicit anti-Soviet polemics, privately he began
to say, with typical wryness, 'I stayed revolutionary. If others have changed, it's
not my fault' (Ivens, interview with author, February 1976).
The theatrical premiere of Peuple in February 1970 was in another of the
small rive gauche art houses that had launched Ivens's successive films in
Western Europe for most of his career, this time the Studio de la Harpe. It
played alongside an unedited interview with Ho Chi Minh that he and Loridan
had brought back from Hanoi a few months before Ho's death in 1969 (it con-
sists of an jerkily shot eight-minute audience of a group of young militia with
Ho, who discuss their shooting down of US planes and other combat experi-
ences with their 'Uncle'). 561
101. Ivens with Ho Chi Minh, 1968.
Production photo © EFJI, Nijmegen /CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Alongside the theatrical career, the filmmakers personally showed the film in
more than 50 venues in Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands, as well as France
(Hennebelle, 1970). Critical response was as respectful as it was bountiful,
especially with the myriad French film magazines, as if critics had attended
SOUTHEAST ASIA 1966-1970: REINVENTING THE SOLIDARITY FILM
carefully to the lessons of 1968. So had the censors: Peuple was forbidden an
export license because of its anti-American references and it was not until over
a year later that the film could be shown outside of France, after the producers
had successfully challenged the censor's ruling on a technicality. Its impact
so long after the heat of the moment was minimal, despite its attention to the
political movement that would gain control of Laos within the decade. (Nev-
ertheless, the New York theatrical run attracted dutiful if uncomprehending
critical attention, even from Women's Wear Daily!) Not included in the 2008
box set, this unique and fascinating work of art and politics from a key year of
Western radical politics is not available in any format. Back in the late sixties
and early seventies, however, Ivens's and Loridan's schedule of globetrotting
had accelerated and they continued to show the film personally and proudly
all over the world, to young filmmakers in Brazzaville, to strikers in an occu-
pied Coca-Cola factory in Rome, as well as at the circuit of international fes-
562 I tivals that Ivens regularly visited with a new film under his arm. By February
1972, Ivens's and Loridan's wanderings had taken them to Beijing, where old
friend Zhou Enlai jokingly - or not so jokingly as it turned out - asked Ivens
why he hadn't brought his camera...
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
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102. Comnment Yukong deplaca les montagnes (1976): original Gennan
poster underlines heroism of both subjects and artists. Oriinal1 inlour
Courtesy coil. EFJI, Nijmegen.
CHAPTER 8
China 1971-1989
Waugh presents the working methods of Ivens and Loridan well, and one gets a full
understanding of their approach to filmmaking. However, the article seems to me at
fault in its slightly naive and overly laudatory treatment of both Ivens and the Cultural
Revolution. [...] On Waugh's part the picture presented is too praiseworthy and rosy.
-Alan Rosenthal,1988
Feeling revolutionary is a feeling that our current situation is not enough, that some-
thing is indeed missing and we cannot live without it. Feeling Revolutionary opens up
the space to imagine a collective escape, an exodus, a 'going-off script' together.
-Lisa Duggan andJos Munoz, 2009
China is the place - or at least the utopian cinematic China onscreen - where I 565
the career of the elder 'Flying Dutchman' and the career of the naive earth-
bound Canadian who has written this book first crossed paths. China is also
the specific focus of this last chapter, or more precisely, Ivens's two major
China works of the last two decades of his career, produced in the 1970s and
1980s respectively, during the Cultural Revolution and during China's gradu-
al emergence as an economic powerhouse of neo-liberal capitalist globalisa-
tion. Though Comment Yukong diplaca les montagnes (How Yukong Moved the
Mountains, 1976, France, 718) and Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind, 1988,
France, 78), both co-authored with Marceline Loridan, could each command
their own chapter, I consider them as an inextricable pair. Together these two
films embody both the contradictions, richness and scope of Ivens's legacy,
and the intensity of his historic encounter with China that must be considered
as a core of that legacy, an encounter shaped by political risk and intensity,
shame and transcendence, renunciation and final synthesis.
A disgruntled BA in English Language and Literature, this would-be grad-
uate student in film studies, arrived wet-behind-the-ears in New York City in
1972, was soon discovering his passion for 'committed documentary', and
would write a passionate master's thesis the following year on Quebec direct
cinema as embodied by the work of nationalist poet-documentarist Pierre Per-
rault. I was soon looking for a doctoral research subject but was increasingly
frustrated by my program at Columbia, which I found to be a cloister of apathy,
formalism, and mediocrity. Shaped like many other young intellectuals in the
West in those heady days by the New Left and the emerging social movements
of the 1970s, including feminism and soon enough gay liberation, I looked
off-campus for my intellectual and political community and quickly found it
in many places: in an eclectic intellectual-artistic heritage that ranged from
I i.
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103. Comment Yukong ddplaca les montagnes (1976): the crew before
a campus dazibao wall. The foreground message from an electronics
professor calls on students to go to the countryside to experience working
people's lives under Chairman Mao's guidance. Production photo, courtesy
coll. EFJI, Nijmegen © CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Vertov and Grierson (yes!) to Brecht and Marcuse; in the increasingly articu-
late networks of radical proto-queers that I was reading Das Kapital with once
a week; in the cluster of radical film critics, teachers, and historians at the rival
university, NYU, including the gentle and generous Jay Leyda, who eventually
confessed to me that he had been Ivens's ghostwriter for The Camera and I;
and in the increasingly influential political film mags led by Cineaste, Screen
and the brand new jump Cut from 1974 onwards (I was spending a stultify-
ing summer working in the Columbia library periodicals room and there dis-
covered the then Berkeley-and-Chicago rag's inaugural issues, emblazoned
with Shirley Temple but bursting inside with perspectives of Cuban cinema
and working-class Hollywood, and denunciations of the auteurist film studies
regime I was being fed at Columbia: it lit a fire under me).
Another off-campus resource was the network of screening venues for the
cinematic wing of the New Left. It was amazingly resilient, regularly offering in
repertory an increasingly eclectic canon that included everything from Point of
Order (Emile de Antonio, 1963, USA, 97) to Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memo-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
ries of Underdevelopment, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, 1968, Cuba, 97). We didn't have
video, of course, but if you waited long enough and read The Village Voice very
carefully you could catch almost everything eventually in museum screenings
or repertory houses or campus festivals. There were even first-run theatrical
sites that specialised in the political as well as the foreign, like the First Avenue
Screening Room where, if memory serves, I saw Haskell Wexler, Tom Hayden,
and Jane Fonda's Vietnam documentaryIntroduction to the Enemy (1974, 6o) and
the radical diva herself! I had loved Fonda in Godard's Tout va bien (1972, 96)
which I saw in one of these venues, and wrote a passionate term paper about
that film, which my program tolerated I guess because it was about their fetish
idol Godard along with Brecht and working class revolt. MOMA continued to do
its part as a major link in this radical exhibition chain, as it had on Ivens's first
trip to New York in 1936 (it would host a few years later the American premiere
of Yukong in 1978), offering for example a retrospective on Marxist compilation
documentarist de Antonio in 1975: this led to my even longer term paper on de I 567
Antonio, which became my first publication ever, in Jump Cut naturally, in June
of 1976.
I don't recall when Ivens first appeared on my radar, perhaps in a docu-
mentary seminar led by Columbia's bright light, my mentor Erik Barnouw,
whose great book Documentary came out in 1974, the year I finished my MA,
larded with as fat an index entry for his fellow Dutchman Ivens as it had for
Grierson and Flaherty (though not as fat as for Vertov). Or maybe I had first
stumbled across Ivens through The Camera andl (1969), which was in the lefty
bookstores I was frequenting, was cheap, and made me want to know more
about that guy with the camera on the cover: I was soon as engrossed in the
narrative of his still surging career, 75 and counting, as I was amazed at what
seemed to be an embargo on his work in both English-language film litera-
ture and the radical exhibition network (except maybe for The Spanish Earth
[1937, USA, 53] and Le 17eParallele [The 17th Parallel, 1968, 113]) - for after all
the Vietnam War was not over. The situation was slightly better in French, a
language I forced myself to learn in high school and university, and I bought
the two monographs on Ivens from Paris, which cost several weeks' groceries.
As rumours began to proliferate about Ivens's and Loridan's imminent epic
on the China's Cultural Revolution, I was hooked - less because of a passion-
ate personal response to films that I had mostly not yet seen, than because of
the urgency of appropriating an undervalued Left cinematic activist heritage.
I needed to get moving before my funding ran out, and by the time Yukong
bowed in Paris in March 1976, I had already finished my coursework, visit-
ed the Ivens collections in Amsterdam, East Berlin, and Paris, wrapped up
my first chapter - on the Indochina films - and interviewed the white-haired
patriarch in his Paris flat, and Loridan to boot. I also secured his permission
CHINA 1971-1989
to review the film series for Jump Cut, which hit the stands in all its crisp but
ephemeral high-acid newsprint glory in December 1976.
In compiling my review, enthusiastic of course, despite having seen only
four out of the twelve films (somehow in Paris I believe, the month before the
premiere!), I relied on an assortment of critical responses, tentative, perhaps
random, but admittedly euphoric, that was an obvious index of these films'
importance both to my own intellectual and political place in 1976 and to the
New Left audience of the 1970s. I was especially plugged into the enthusiasm
of Parisian critics, like Maria Antonietta Macciocchi and Louis Marcorelles,
who were not marginal ultra-leftists but respected mainstream voices writing
in one of the world's most influential dailies, Le Monde.
When Israeli scholar Alan Rosenthal would reprint my Jump Cut piece
twelve years later in his anthology New Challenges in Documentary (Waugh,
[1976] 1988), he was not easy on my enthusiasm of the previous decade, as
568 I already seen in my epigraph:
Waugh makes clear his political sympathy, which is fine, but one senses
that neither the critic nor Ivens himself asked the difficult questions
about the Mao regime [...] (a fault that in a similar way undermined
Shirley MacLaine and Claudia Weill's The OtherHalf of the Sky [1975]).
On Ivens's part, one must remember that he was filming during the
Cultural Revolution and that he apparently was a ready follower of the
line of the Gang of Four. As critic Henry Breitrose put it, 'Ivens's films
are curious historical artifacts about a China that existed mostly in his
mind.' (Henry Breitrose to Alan Rosenthal, 12 January 1985) (Rosenthal,
1988, 126)
While I need all the comparisons to Shirley MacLaine I can get, and while
Rosenthal's misinterpretation of the Gang of Four connection was entertain-
ingly absurd, on the whole I thought the criticism was as ideological as it was
frank though not unfair (but I could not help noticing that mine was the only
piece among 44 chapters held up to such an editorial disavowal). I wryly noted
as well that the book was published by the same University of California Press
that had declined to publish or review my Show Us Life on committed docu-
mentary in the early 1980s, and had repeatedly declined to publish a book ver-
sion of my dissertation on Ivens. This fact I attributed to the Reaganite climate
that would prevail in US academic publishing for another six years as well as to
the baffling, still-in-force Ivens embargo.
The Cultural Revolution had been launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 to
reinvigorate his country's revolution that was less than two decades in. First
as a careful campaign to root out dead wood and potential rivals in the Beijing
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
party hierarchy, and next as an effort to do the same in the country's educa-
tional world, the Cultural Revolution never had transparency as its watchword:
[Mao] had started the Cultural Revolution by letting (his wife and future
leader of the Gang of Four) Jiang Qing secretly supervise (in Shanghai)
the production of a newspaper article attacking an intellectual in order
to topple the boss of Beijing. Now, in phase two, he would manipulate a
mass movement at China's educational institutions to unseat the head of
state. (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, 2006, 52)
The jury is still out on how to explain these decade-long, cataclysmic events
known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Were they attributable
more to the 70-something Chairman's revolutionary fervour or to his no doubt
justifiable paranoia? Mao was still smarting after the USSR's de-Stalinisa-
tion process of a decade earlier and perhaps worried that the Soviet putsch of I 569
1964 that had thrown out Khrushchev provided a tempting template for his
own party, and was of course furious with the Soviet revisionists' betrayal of
Marxism-Leninism, not to mention their refusal to share nuclear technolo-
gy. Were these geopolitical concerns at the root of the Cultural Revolution?
If Mao demonstrably fomented the upheavals, was he also tapping into real
grass-roots waves of criticism and revolutionary activism that had its own
grounds, energy, momentum, and rage at the calcification of the now two-dec-
ades-old revolution? Or was it simply a mass hysteria of score-settling, scape-
goating, monumental demographic displacements, economic dislocations,
and steam- and bloodletting manipulated by factions in the Communist Party
of China (including an oedipal baby-boomer uprising, personified in the Red
Guards, not dissimilar to the youth revolt that was happening in the West?),
which coupled with cataclysmic economic and political blunders led to even
what some have called democide (Macfarquhar and Schoenhals, 2006)? Was
Mao the heir of Marx and Lenin who made some mistakes, as the official CPC
1983 postmortem had it, or a senile megalomaniac who had no inkling of the
havoc and bloodshed his policies and whims were causing? Or, as is likely the
case, is the answer all or most of the above?
Of course the Cultural Revolution's byzantine dynamics and layers of con-
tradictions enrobed in cultural difference and Aesopian language were not
clear to the Western New Left any more than they were to most Chinese - and
Ivens was right that there were 100 Cultural Revolutions, 'as elusive as mul-
tiform' (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 315). Our idealistic enchantment in the
West with certain key aspects of the events - their opposition to cynical Soviet
bureaucracy and imperialism and to the exhausted cynicism of the Old Left in
general, their challenge to hierarchy, authority, complacency, and privilege,
CHINA 1971-1989
their repertory of fresh new performative political rituals like criticism and
self-criticism, their populist confrontation with discrepancies between urban
and rural realities, between the industrialised North and the so-called under-
development of the South, and between intellectuals and the so-called masses
- sparked a huge following within Western social movements on the left. Or
as Yukong collaborator Alain Badiou put it more elegantly in the heat of the
moment in 1980, during the Beijing trial of the Gang of Four:
Behind the enormous confusion about its various stages, the lines of
force of the Cultural Revolution, the entrance on the stage of tens of mil-
lions of actors, and the blockage of its goal, all bear on what is essential:
the reduction of the gap between and intellectual and manual labour,
between town and country; the subordination of the productive impetus
to the institution of new social relations; the end of university elitism;
570 I the reduction of the insolence of cadres; the end of wage systems of ine-
quality and stratification; the ideological opposition to the degenerate
'Marxism' that rules in Moscow and in the 'communist' parties pledging
allegiance to it, and so on. (Badiou, [1980] 2005, 66o)
Some accounts of the New Left's attraction to Mao's revolution in North Amer-
ica (where the Black Panthers carried out community fundraising through
selling the little red book of Mao's thought [Gitlin, 1987, 349]) have tended
towards the caricatural:
My anti-Stalinist movement friend Chris Hobson and I felt moved by
the Cultural Revolution in China, which we saw as old Mao's last-ditch
effort to crush state bureaucracy, to shake off the heavy hand of Stalin-
ism. (We didn't know, or chose to overlook, the fact that Stalin remained
prominent in Maoism's pantheon.) In 1967, Paul Potter gave a speech
supporting the Cultural Revolutionaries on the grounds that the Chinese
purgers of corruption, like us, were bands of brothers and sisters seeking
meaningful work. [...]
How could the organization [Students for a Democratic Society] that
began by echoing Albert Camus and C. Wright Mills end with one faction
chanting, 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win', while
members of the other waved their Little Red Books in the air and chanted
'Mao, Mao, Mao Tse-tung'? The comic-book crudeness of the sloganeer-
ing at this point was self-evident to anyone with a residual hold on reality.
(Gitlin, 1987, 264, 382)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
And of course period voices from Jean-Luc Godard (La Chinoise [1967, France,
96]; See You at Mao, aka British Sounds [1970, UK, 52]) to John Lennon ('But
if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao/You ain't going to make it with
anyone anyhow') were already clinching the caricatural discourse in the late
sixties. Godard's images of young Parisian intellectuals lounging about a
bourgeois apartment declaiming quotations from the little red book, filmed
at the height of the Red Guard moment of the Cultural Revolution, are under-
standably famous in themselves and as precursors of the events of May 1968.
Others have emphasised the tie-in to the Vietnamese resistance and 'third
world' leadership rather than the Cultural Revolution's domestic significance
in and of itself:
[China's] attraction for new generation activists date especially from
the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 and
China's post-1967 claims that it was Vietnam's firmest supporter. The 571
Cultural Revolution was pivotal because it seemed to promise a more
democratic and creative kind of socialism than that of the USSR. Official-
ly, it called for ordinary people to rise up, participate in political life, and
criticize officials who wielded power, even if they were leading Commu-
nist officials, and Cultural Revolution doctrine claimed that socialism
would be built mainly through moral and ideological transformations,
not economic development. For US young people rebelling against alien-
ation and consumerism this approach seemed totally on target (and only
later would many become aware of the gap between the Cultural Revolu-
tion's claims and its bitter reality). [...]
Ideologically the Communist Party of China (CPC) put itself forward
as a new centre for the world revolutionary movement (in a way that
the Cubans and Vietnamese parties did not) and promoted itself as the
shining example and prime champion of liberation movements waged by
peoples of colour all over the world. (Elbaum, 2002, 45)
In France, however, the left engaged scientifically as well as politically and cul-
turally with the Cultural Revolution, Godard's ambiguous if not flippant films
notwithstanding. One of the Yukong production team, specifically a contrib-
utor to the commentary, was Badiou, a young philosopher who became the
leading mouthpiece of French Maoist ideology. A founding leader of the Mao-
ist organisation Union des communistes de France marxiste-ldniniste, Badiou
was a prolific producer of polemics and politico-philosophical tracts engaged
in fierce debates within the French intellectual and political networks that
were the heritage of May 1968. Around the time of his participation in Yukong
and its completion and circulation, the targets of his critique included oth-
CHINA 1971-1989
er thinkers on the Left, including his teacher Louis Althusser (Badiou, [1975,
1977] 2005), and of course the 'revisionist' French Communist Party and main-
stream trade unions. Badiou wrote the commentary for Yukong and presum-
ably consulted in particular on its political line. One of the earliest and most
authoritative critic fans of the Yukong series, Macciocchi (1922-2007), was also
a prominent French Maoist whose 1971 book De la Chine (Macciocchi, [1971]
1973) was the first major French encounter with and celebration of the Cultur-
al Revolution. Ivens and Loridan themselves also participated in such debates,
albeit their ardour tempered by post-production on Le Peuple et sesfusils (The
People and their Guns, 1970, 97); after their first return from Beijing the pair
published in tcran afervent and uncharacteristic piece on the Cultural Revolu-
tion's policies on art and cinema, with many citations from Mao, and intrigu-
ing details on recent Chinese cinematic history, including the film industry's
forced hibernation during the Cultural Revolution (Martin, 1972).
572 I From such lofty issues to the ridiculous, my tailored Mao jacket from 1971
is the most trivial exhibit of a search among Western progressive intellectuals
and activists for models of resistance, revolt, and reconstruction to follow, and
I still have somewhere on a shelf of Marxist theory, perhaps alongside the writ-
ings of Rosa Luxemburg, my own little red book.
By the time Ivens and Loridan landed in 1971 upon the unexpected invi-
tation of Zhou - the first bloody, turbulent phases of the Cultural Revolution
were long over, having yielded to the next transitional stage of gradual con-
solidation, retrenchment, and stabilisation. The Cultural Revolution is con-
stantly and repeatedly referred to throughout Yukong in the past tense by both
filmmakers and characters. The political atmosphere was still marked of
course by continued skirmishes between ultra-left factions on the one hand
and reformist and modernising factions led discreetly by Ivens's patron,
Zhou Enlai, on the other hand. Then simmering in obscure terminology, this
tension would only erupt definitively after Zhou's and Mao's deaths within
eight months of each other in 1976, the year of Yukong's first run in Paris.
This historical trajectory was not clear to foreigners as it was unfolding, and
many Western radicals were scarcely aware that the ground had shifted. One
dramatic aspect of the second phase of the Cultural Revolution in China
was the concomitant process of 'opening up' to the world, initiated by the
modernisers and reformists in the Chinese political landscape - which had
allowed the European filmmakers' invitation in the first place. Glimpses of
China finally began to emerge to Western journalists and on Western screens
in the early seventies - alongside diplomatic breakthroughs first by ping-
pong players and then by politicians, first Canada's Pierre Elliott Trudeau
whose trial-balloon recognition of the PRC came in 1970, and then Nixon the
following year (US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger was in Beijing
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
incognito in June 1971 laying the groundwork for the following year's presi-
dential visit as Ivens and Loridan were there laying the groundwork for what
would become Yukong).
Our cinematic glimpses of the Chinese 'permanent revolution' were scat-
tered and tantalisingly superficial. Of those films made by the Chinese them-
selves, only the occasional documentary had offered any useful insight into
the shape of their revolution-in-progress. Chinese feature films were usually
based on ballet and operatic modes too deeply rooted in Chinese tradition
to serve as much more than exotica to audiences in the West. The Western
documentarists who started to visit China brought back fascinating films, to
be sure. But the films remained unhappily distant from their subject, never
succeeding in probing more deeply than the impressionism of any short-term
traveller's notebook.
Among such China films were MacLaine and Weill's The Other Half of the
Sky: A China Memoir (the film critiqued by Rosenthal; 1975, USA, 74), Marcel 573
Carriere's Glimpses of China (from the National Film Board of Canada, 1974,
69), and Don McWilliams's Impressions of China, a short compilation of slides
and Super 8 footage taken by a group of Canadian high school students.
Michelangelo Antonioni's ChungKuo - Cina (1972, Italy, 207) is no doubt the
most famous: invited by Zhou at the same time as Ivens and Loridan, and
shot like Yukong starting in May 1972, Antonioni's feature documentary later
became a lightning rod of tensions between modernising and ultra-left fac-
tions - like Yukong in its own way - and an international cause clebre, as we
shall see below. Of these first outsider glimpses, MacLaine's and McWilliams's
films seemed to come off the best because of their simplicity and unpreten-
tiousness, their acceptance of their own limited focus. Unlike the larger, more
ambitious films of Antonioni and Carriere, they refuse to make any sweeping
assessment of a culture and a society of which they have necessarily received
only random surface impressions. Instead, they concentrated on the personal
dimensions of interaction between travellers and hosts.
The Chinese themselves say that those who come to China for the short-
est time write the longest books. (And in those cases when filmmakers have
almost zero track record in either documentary, China, or the left, as with
Antonioni,' they make films that are even longer!) This may have been true up
to that point, but in the mid-1970s as the Cultural Revolution was running out
of steam, Ivens and Loridan stayed a very long time - almost eighteen months
- and made a very long film indeed, in fact twelve films, a total of almost twelve
hours. Yukong, their long, intensive study of everyday life under the second
phase of the Cultural Revolution, opened up a whole new era in China films.
The series opened in Paris in March of 1976, timed serendipitously between
the deaths of Zhou and Mao, and created quite a stir.
CHINA 1971-1989
Throughout Ivens's entire career, it was a customary, no doubt instinctu-
al, reflex for him to pause after a cycle of films on liberation struggles and turn
to the subject of economic and social struggles in a new peacetime setting. So
it was inevitable that Ivens, the anti-imperialist combatant under the bombs
in Southeast Asia, would shift gears and sooner or later show up once again in
China as Ivens, the poet of socialist construction.
Ivens and Loridan's partnership was almost a decade old in 1971 when
they were welcomed in Beijing. Ivens had visited China twice before with his
camera, as we have seen, and many times without. When Zhou, eight months
the filmmaker's elder, half seriously asked why Ivens hadn't brought his cam-
era with him, the leader thus had good reason to. Ivens and Loridan began
to think seriously when Zhou suggested a new China film. Meanwhile they
left with Zhou the selection of French documentaries made during May 1968
that they had with them, and took the rest of the summer to visit Shanghai
574 1 and Nanjing as well as Beijing, beginning to get inklings of the vast social and
political excitement as well as turbulence underway. The couple were convert-
ed, although the rather Maoist Laos film that was finally circulating in France
reminds us of course that they were already on board. They gradually aban-
doned the few film ideas they were considering in Europe at the time, includ-
ing a version of Erasmus's In Praise of Folly (a spin-off of Rotterdam-Europoort
[1966, Netherlands, 20]) (Stufkens, 2008, 356), and would carry out preliminary
research about possible film ideas, first in China and later that year in Europe,
testing possible audience interest and specific areas of curiosity. Before their
departure from Beijing, Zhou organised a screening of the Paris films for art-
ists and cultural bureaucrats, including three high-up officials who turned out
later to be the core of the modernisers' nemesis, the Gang of Four, who were
not amused. The couple sensed but could not yet define the political struggles
that would dog them over the next decade, but plowed ahead and were back in
Beijing in March 1972.
Their topic was to be the Cultural Revolution. Although the Chinese Cen-
tral Newsreels and Documentary Studio offered valuable technical and per-
sonnel support, the film was not to be a co-production. Financing was to be
entirely the responsibility of the filmmakers. Ivens and Loridan themselves
were to produce the film with three successive advances from the French Cen-
tre national de la cinematographie and with additional personal loans to be off-
set by anticipated worldwide television sales.
Their original conception called for a three or four-hour work, a two-head-
ed ensemble including a transitional work on everyday life within the Cultural
Revolution, and a more Ivensian 'international' 'synthetic' concept 'in which
the majesty of China's natural resources and history were to be combined with
a story about socialism under construction' (Stufkens, 2008, 422-423). Start-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
ing preliminary shooting without a clear scenario, as usual, the pair gradually
decided that such a divided approach could only lead to the generalised, super-
ficial result that they wanted to avoid, shelved the synthesis film for another
day and focused all their attention on the Cultural Revolution. Their projected
three-month stay was first stretched to five months and finally to eighteen to
allow for the extended immersion within Chinese society that could permit
the kind of intimate, authoritative perspective they wanted. Over that year and
a half, Ivens and Loridan proceeded leisurely, in a manner more reminiscent
of Flaherty than of the customary urgency that had resulted in almost 50 Ivens
films since 1928. They set up camp for lengthy periods in a wide range of dif-
ferent locations. After initial scouting and formation of their crew in Beijing,
they headed for the Xinjiang region, filming Uyghur and Kazakh minority cul-
tures (this early footage would later in 1977 be incorporated into autonomous
programs with their own circulation since the filmmakers did not consider
the quality up to par with the rest of Yukong). 575
104. Les Kazaks - minorite nationale,
Sinkiang (1977): model open air school,
filmed as Ivens and Loridan did not want to
film the Cultural Revolution, surrounded
by local party cadres showing off for
Beijing. DVD frame capture. Original in
colour. © CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
105. Les Ouigours - minorite nationale,
Sinkiang (1977): local women enjoying tea
and comparing women's lives before and
after the Cultural Revolution. DVD frame
capture. Original in colour. O CAPI Films,
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
There they discovered how they did not want to film the Cultural Revolution.
That is, they did not want to film episodes surrounded, bullied, and manipu-
lated by local party cadres who wanted to show off the best side of their local
CHINA 1971-1989
revolutions to the Beijing party headquarters and to the world, a situation that
sparked traumatic flashbacks of the Guomindang-controlled and harassed
shoots of 1938.
Back in the capital, Zhou eventually helped his French guests make the
terms of the project clear and practical - independence, autonomy, and pro-
tection, and a focus on everyday life. Meanwhile they were also training their
Chinese crew: they had selected the talented Li Zexiang as their cinematog-
rapher by screening a great number of Chinese films upon their arrival and
deciding upon one where the camera style showed the promise of the flexibil-
ity they wanted. They then proceeded to show him examples of the fluid and
mobile direct cinema synch-sound work from the 'young European cinema'
that had not yet permeated Chinese documentary and that they wanted him
to emulate. Buoyed by the new support team, understandings, and arrange-
ments, the filmmakers headed for Shanghai, where they spent four months
576 I in a generator factory, and another two months in an experimental pharma-
cy in the same city, next a month in a military barracks near Nanjing, and a
similar stretch in a Shandong fishing village, and finally a petroleum field in
the remote northern Daqing area, the focus of the nation's pride for its role
in energy self-sufficiency. Along the way were several Beijing interludes where
the six films based in the capital were shot (one feature and five shorts). They
had visited a number of Beijing educational institutions before wrapping up
at the end of 1973, including Beijing's Tsinghua University at the very outset,
where the cinematography by Li and a still untrained local crew turned out to
be unuseable (Li at first thought the foreigners' style was 'naturalistic' while
they thought his work was profoundly inhibited by his cultural propensity
for static long views and short takes, not to mention his lack of experience in
synch sound 16mm). Ultimately, only two shorts would touch on the academ-
ic settings that had been the crucible for so much upheaval in the late sixties,
the popular Une histoire de ballon: Lycie no. 31 Pkin (The Football Incident, 21
min.2) shot spontaneously at the very beginning of the process in a Beijing
high school, and another short Le Professeur Tsien (Professor Tchien, 13 min.),
on a Beijing physicist academic who had experienced first-hand the brunt of
the Cultural Revolution and its banishment of intellectuals, yet cast a positive
light on it for the camera.
The only other major gap in their itinerary was the peasant milieu. That
was no small omission in a society that was still largely agricultural. In con-
trast, fifteen years earlier during the Great Leap Forward, a rural agricultur-
al setting had completely dominated Lettres de Chine (Before Spring, 1958, 38)
and the urban counterpart that would come to the fore in Yukong had been
utterly avoided. Is this contrast symptomatic?: in both the 1950s and the
1970s, had Ivens skirted, either consciously or intuitively, a key crucible of
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
each moment's upheaval? This gap in Yukong was partly compensated for by
attention to the rapport with agricultural communities that was a feature of all
the urban contexts they observed, and in any case the settings of Le Village de
pecheurs (Fishing Village, 102 min.) and Autour du pitrole: Taking (The Oilfields,
84 min.) were indeed remote, though not agricultural. Hardly interested in a
travelogue without a practical application to their audience's lives, the film-
makers' rationale - and perhaps rationalisation - also included the argument
that a thorough exploration of the agrarian application of the Cultural Revo-
lution would have demanded a full year of exposure to the seasonal cycle, etc.,
and the film's largely urban Western audience was expected to be able to iden-
tify more closely with the urban problematics examined by the filmmakers.
This reasoning can be taken at face value, for it was no doubt assumed in good
faith, but can also be read as part of the web of contradictory and unspoken
pressures that were inevitable in the couple's touchdown at the epicentre of
such a fraught and complex political experiment. More than one critic would 577
comment on this 'sizeable lacuna, not easily understood: the peasants - those
peasants who are the great mass of the Chinese - hardly appear at all, or very
indirectly. Are they allergic to the camera?' (Gervais, 1976).
On returning to France in March 1974, the pair set about an eight-
een-month process of editing the 120 hours of synchronised rushes that they
had accumulated, a long process of organising and selection. In late 1975, a
futile effort to obtain some reshoots long distance led to a trip back to Beijing
and a confrontation there with the Gang of Four, who had become ascendant
as the Premier and Chairman declined, a confrontation much more serious
than earlier run-ins. The four were profiting from Zhou's hospitalisation to
escalate the ongoing power struggle and demanded 61 cuts from the preview
of the Shanghai material that the couple screened (all on the absurdly literal
level of 'delete shots of pharmacy customers carrying worn luggage since they
look like peddlers'). The couple quickly left the country on the ailing Zhou's
secret advice, and they realised their epic was done, reshoots or no reshoots:
eleven hours and 50 minutes of finished film, twelve documentaries in all,
including four features, four medium-length works, and four shorts.
The ultimate ratio had turned out to be about ten to one, perhaps ample
for Ivens, but austere in comparison to ambitious direct cinema projects of
the period in the West such as An American Family (Craig Gilbert, Alan Ray-
mond, and Susan Raymond, 1973), another television series of similar scale
that clocked in at twenty-five to one (Rosenthal, 1988). In contrast the even
more similar series L'Indefantome (Phantom India, 1969, France, 378), carried
out by Louis Malle in India in the late sixties, was based on a very Spartan ratio
of three to one.
The couple's magnum opus was subdivided into four theatrical programs3
CHINA 1971-1989
each lasting about three hours, a challenge even for the committed, opening
simultaneously in four rive gauche art houses in early March. It was still run-
ning in Paris five months later at the death of Chairman Mao, but reduced to
a single theatre. Rejected by commercial distributors, the filmmakers' game
plan was self-exhibition and self-promotion on the part of CAPI Films, with the
idea of reaching both theatrical and diverse unconventional audiences. Over
the long run in France, Yukong reportedly reached 130,000 viewers in the cap-
ital and 300,000 in France as a whole (Stuflens, 2008, 432). The next stop was
Cannes, where the L'Usine de generateurs-Une histoire de ballon program was
shown, and then Venice, where the whole work was on the bill. North America
came later with the Montreal premiere that same fall, followed by MoMA and
two cinematheques in the Bay Area in 1978.
In France, the programs basked in almost unanimous critical acclaim,
from the dailies, general interest magazines, and film magazines, left and
578 I right alike, with many long and detailed, sympathetic interviews circulating in
every corner. The lengthy review in the Nouvel observateur (Bory, 1976, 61-62),
a liberal weekly general interest magazine with almost a half million readers,
was typical: 'And this cinema, a major cinema if such a thing exists, a cinema
on its feet [...] helps peoples to take over their own history by helping them
gain a clear awareness of the obstacles they find in their path. [...] The twelve
hours of Joris Ivens are not only passionate, they are beautiful'. Only Cahiers
du cinema, whose scrupulous and lengthy coverage appeared later than the
other media, had the audacity to compare Yukong implicitly unfavourably to
Godard's Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976, France, 53), which bowed six
months after Yukong and recycled the filmmaker's self-reflexive dissection of
solidarity cinema from Loin du Vietnam (Farfrom Vietnam, 1967, France, 115),
only this time with Palestine in its sights rather than Vietnam.
Notwithstanding the scale of the response to the theatrical run, the most
important target was television. Despite a disappointing deal with French tel-
evision - only the public third channel took it on - things went slightly better
elsewhere. English, German, Italian, Dutch, and Finnish versions were pro-
duced, each carefully monitored for quality control, and were soon broadcast
in European and North American markets. Most broadcast deals were limited
to eight-hour versions of the series and only Italy, Holland, Canada (French),
and Finland took on the whole twelve hours (Schoots, [1995] 2000, 334). Since
the Chinese circulation of the film series was interwoven inextricably with
the playing out of the final denouement of the Cultural Revolution (Stufkens,
2008, 443), we shall come back to that story later.
The working title of Ivens's and Loridan's epic had been fittingly The Sec-
ond Long March. But the release title finally chosen had an appeal with con-
siderably more mystery about it though it was equally epic and even evoked
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
the Ivensian trope of massive earth moving - not to mention the important
advantage of being a citation from Mao Zedong. How YukongMoved the Moun-
tains is the title of an old Chinese fable that appears in the writings of Chair-
man Mao, and was recapitulated in a title card at the start of each of the twelve
instalments:
We are told that once upon a time there was an old man called Yukong...
He decided to carry away, with the help of his sons, two great mountains
that blocked the access to his house, by means of a pick. Another old
man... burst out laughing and said to them:
'You will never be able to move those mountains all by yourself'.
Yukong answered him, 'When I die, there will be my sons... In this way
the generations will come after each without end... With each blow of the
pick, they will get that much smaller... Why then won't we be able to flat-
ten them'? I 579
Heaven was moved by this and sent down to earth two celestial
genies who carried away the mountains on their backs. Our heaven is
none other than the masses of the Chinese people.4
Ivens's and Loridan's answer to the West's curiosity about China contained
both the same devastating logic that is in Yukong's response to his question-
er and the same infectious confidence that is at the root of Mao's revision of
its moral. The new China films were particularly important for a lingering
diverse international left configuration of social movements and political
formations, and in particular those whose engagement on the cultural front
as scholar-activists was animated by several considerations. As socialists, we
saw in the twelve-part film its potential as an instrument and witness of social
change. As cinephiles, we were enthralled by its ability to capture in colour
16mm synch sound the vitality and everyday political sensibilities of ordinary
people, its magic combination of affect and ideas. As had happened often in
Ivens's career, we were engaged by the sight of film serving as people's means
of expression when they are in the process of developing a revolutionary
awareness or are caught in the flux of resistance and change. As a documen-
tary scholar I was captivated by the series' epic grandeur and intimate detail,
and endlessly cited Walter Benjamin's ([1936] 1969, 232) epigraph about
'modern man's legitimate claim to being reproduced'. As a graduate student
and soon to be teacher animated by those principles, I was drawn to this epic
as an object of study, both classic and innovative, and it is no accident that I
published my rave of Yukong in Jump Cut ([1976] 1988), which was fomenting
its own mini-Cultural Revolution in English-language film studies.
Over the half-century between 1938 and 1988, Ivens's four cinematic
CHINA 1971-1989
encounters with China all seemed to coincide with major crises in Chinese
history: the war against Japanese aggression in 1938, the Great Leap Forward
of 1956-1957, the Cultural Revolution 1966-1976 and the transformed par-
ty's and society's embrace of neo-liberal globalisation of the 198os that was
symptomatically problematised in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, a
year after the release of Histoire, only weeks before Ivens's death. In each case,
Ivens brought to bear upon the particular conjuncture the generic structures
available at that point of film history and at that moment in his own aesthetic
trajectory. Each encounter idealised its societal object in its own way, each was
enlivened by the tension between the commitment to meet the China he loved
on its own terms and his mission as both artist and ambassador to celebrate,
record, and advocate - and maybe even question those terms. Each encoun-
ter resonated with the tension between mutual exchange and the enlighten-
ment and enlistment of foreign audiences. Each of the four episodes, what
580 Sun Hongyun (2005, 16) has called 'key moments of Chinese history [...] small
piece[s] of the 20h century', included its own mode of solidarity and its own
challenge to the host society, in solidarity of course (such challenges were
hyper-diplomatic, crystallised perhaps in Loridan's question to factory work-
ers studying Engels in their off time, 'Why are you studying 19thcentury phi-
losophy'?)
In 1938, as we have seen, Ivens had refined the solidarity template that
he had first developed in Pesn o geroyakh (Komsomol, 1933, USSR, 5o) and
Spanish Earth, adapting it to the highly stressed, conflictual and straitjack-
eted circumstances of the Guomindang-Eighth Route Army United Front.
Two decades later during the Great Leap Forward, his work was almost ful-
ly subsumed under the pedagogical framework of his Beijing institutional
context. But two films came out of it, calling on several generic structures.
First the demonstration film, reinvented simply in Six Hundred Million With
You (1958, China, 12), had extended the tropes contained within Misere au
Borinage (Borinage, 1934, Belgium, 34) and Indonesia Calling (1946, Austral-
ia, 22), in developing the latter film's 'third world' ideological frieze: Arab
alongside Chinese rather than the earlier shoulder-to-shoulder line-up of
Indonesian, Australian, South Asian, and Chinese. (One of the consequenc-
es of its long excerpt in Ren Seegers's 2008 documentary critique of Ivens's
relationship with Maoism Een oude vriend van het Chinese volk [An Old Friend
of the Chinese People, Netherlands, 531 is to remind how good the original
35mm black-and-white demonstration documentary, not available in the
DVD box naturally, now looks as a pioneering postcolonial poster film.)
Second, the three-part Before Spring had offered a hybrid of ethnographic
impulses with socialist realism, a nonfiction riff on Wu Guoying's hieratic
feminist fiction of communes, harvests, and summer storms that Ivens had
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
presided over in Die Windrose (The Windrose, Cavalcanti et al., 1957, DDR,
11o) from two years earlier.
Film the future, Ivens was telling his Beijing students (Film Archive of
China 1983), and in Before Spring they did so - in collaboration of course with
young cameraman Wang Decheng and writer He Zhongxin, and finally with
the famous actor-director Xie Tian as eventual narrator. The three episodes
showed agrarian life in three different regions of China as the late winter
advances towards the full-blown spring, with a socialist realist confidence surg-
ing out of the relationship between silent images and the commentary gloss:
first Mongolian herdsmen driving their horses and camels through the north-
ern snow, dreaming of imminent rail links and the marketing of their milk
products throughout China; next a village in the Nanjing region as snow melts
over the fields and waterways is prepared for planting and children clamour for
spring and dream, according to the commentary, of careers as scientists; and
finally even further south a lakeside village is celebrating spring with enough I 581
fish for every family while a migrant worker back home for the New Year's fes-
tival notices new changes every year. Seegers's (2008a) charge that the third
part involves a Potemkin village of well-scrubbed and well-dressed extras - 'As
if Ivens filmed a Chinese village scene staged in a studio' - is unbecomingly
Euro- and present-centric. Not only mistaking Ivens's 1950s pre-direct collab-
orative process shaped by differences in camera cultures and inflected by the
novelty of the new colour cinematography, Seegers is apparently unaware of
the Chinese custom of wearing new clothes for the spring festival! (This insult
to a director who was legendary for stopping a whole shoot when a busybody
came up to wash a grease smudge off a bulldozer repairman's face before a
take, and who critiqued his cameraman at the start of Yukong for having set
up an elaborate lit environment before a night shoot in a university dormito-
ry5 [Li Zexiang, 1983, 115])! Yet the film's romantic hue is undeniable, all the
more with its exquisite patina of 1950s colour (Sovcolour negative printed on
western Agfa colour stock), shaping its observations of agrarian work, festi-
vals, intergenerational transmission, and everyday life. To see the three parts
of this film as prophetic heralds of Yukong fifteen years later is to confirm the
lingering role of the socialist realist aesthetic in the 1970s series, never before
acknowledged, both in dramatic structure (at least three of the parts ending in
spectacular Komsomol-like celebrations like Before Spring) and in its reliance
on exemplary characters and heroically iconic epic settings. A peasant poem
retained in the Before Spring documents captures this heroic flavour and has
stuck with me, perhaps if only because it could also have pertained to the very
urban Yukong:
CHINA 1971-1989
We will heap up our wheat
And I will climb on the top
Then I will wipe my sweat with a cloud
And light my cigarette on the sun. (Ivens, Before Spring production notes,
JIA)
In 1971 and 1972, Ivens and Loridan were immersing themselves in a society
that had moved well beyond the Great Leap Forward only to traverse the even
greater Cultural Revolution and then enter a healing phase around the still
open wounds from these massive upheavals, whose dynamics and repercus-
sions were still playing out. It is hard to imagine that this recent history and
ongoing present were not on the filmmakers' radar every single day, as well
as being imprinted on their films in every shot, both negative and positive.
These imprints varied: the endlessly recurring 'before the Cultural Revolu-
582 I tion... and now' tropes, which punctuate every film; the veiled references to
Ivens's host Zhou and the recently dead Lin Biao and the not-so-veiled ref-
erences in Daqing to the disgraced 'traitor' Liu Shaoqi (the PRC President
deposed in 1966); the inclusion of the Cultural Revolution rituals of criti-
cism and self-criticism in almost every film. Structurally more important was
the almost palpable tension between the filmmakers' professed objective of
quotidian typicality and their hosts' socialist realist-inflected eagerness to
extract the positive and the constructive from the still-ongoing traumatic
process. Chinese subjects and facilitators avidly demonstrated exemplary
testimonies, gestures, and relationships, keen both to film the future and
also to perform a present of working through and carrying on the heritage of
the revolution - clearly inflected by a camera culture that favours exemplary
conduct in front of any camera.
Solidarity is among other things an act of friendship. The filmmakers,
aware of the still precarious state of the body politic, and out of affection and
respect for Zhou their host, the vulnerable tightrope walker, reconciler, mod-
erate and canny survivor, chose not to focus on any invisible undercurrents,
abuses, and detours they were sensing, and let their subjects speak for them-
selves. It was a strategic gamble that paid off, cinematically speaking at least.
Shortly after the Yukong production, Ivens explained this complicated ethical
- and hence political - negotiation of solidarity and friendship through the
editing of their enormous trunk of rushes:
With Marceline, we had not completely abandoned the idea of making a
film on the Cultural Revolution, but we were overwhelmed by the immen-
sity of the subject, by its obscurities and by the profusion of our material.
But what preoccupied us before anything else was the contradictions
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
of the Chinese reality and the regime's difficulties. We wanted to talk of
them, but we didn't know how to do it. As soon as we got back to Paris, we
were confronted with this problem first of all. If we started by demolish-
ing China before combating the basic ignorance of Westerners, we risked
going against the current of what we were wishing to do. For example, if
we wanted to speak of Xinjiang and the problems we encountered there,
how to say it? Whom should we accuse? The system, Zhou Enlai, the Par-
ty's dogmatism?
Other questions came to our minds. What was the share of individu-
als, of their stupidity or their ignorance? The role of conservatism, within
or outside of the Party? The role of the traditions and the blockages of the
old society? The role of cynicism and that of helplessness [incapacitel]?
An anti-communist has no problem answering all of these questions: it's
communism's fault, that's all you need to say. Or else, it's the Chinese's
fault. For ourselves, the answers were otherwise complex, and my friend- | 583
ship for China forbade me to take the slightest risk. We preferred to keep
silent and devote ourselves entirely to the editing of our film. After all,
that's how we were going to express ourselves. (Ivens and Destanque,
1982, 326-327)
Loridan added one nuance to this reflection: 'We could not also take the risk
of betraying the great friendship we had for Zhou Enlai and, even more, for
China' (Prudentino, 2003, 138).
In ChungKuo, Antonioni felt no such compunction or friendship. Repeat-
edly violating the ethical right of the subject, whether national or individual,
to control his or her own image, Antonioni seems perversely to have insisted
on filming whatever his hosts requested him not to. For example, the things
he was asked not to film and did included the following: a gunboat in Shang-
hai Harbour, a free-enterprise peasant market on a rural road, even a buri-
al caught in telephoto when his hosts suggested that the filming of a burial
would offend the Chinese sense of privacy. As he and Ivens/Loridan demon-
strated, it is easy to shoot film in China. But it is far more difficult and a far
greater achievement to receive and honour people's trust. For Ivens and Lori-
dan, their first responsibility was to their subjects, and Antonioni was not so
motivated.
Let's now first move through the twelve parts of the Yukong series both
describing them and pointing briefly to the political and aesthetic issues
they raise, then focus on direct cinema as the vehicle of this epic, and finally
assess the reception and aftermath of the work both domestically (by this I
mean both France and China!) and abroad, in terms of its political and cultur-
al meaning historically speaking.
CHINA 1971-1989
My favourite Yukong feature film in the 1970s was La Pharmacie no. 3:
Changhai (The Drugstore, 79 min.) - and this I share with Loridan it turns out. It
seemed the most fully achieved in its confluence of an observational and inter-
active application of direct cinema and in its felicitous cinematic encounter
with the Cultural Revolution. My opinion has hardly shifted.
The inspiration to film such an establishment came quite spontaneously.
Although the filmmakers tended towards the ideal of dealing with some kind
of commercial setting in Shanghai, they felt that any of the large department
stores would have resulted in too diffuse a film - and Frederick Wiseman's The
Store (1983, USA, 118) would soon prove them right. When Ivens became ill
during their visit to Shanghai it happened that the workers in the neighbour-
hood pharmacy took a special interest in his care and recovery. The couple
developed a special friendship with them. Impressed with the workers' experi-
mentation with a program of community outreach beyond the usual merchan-
584 I dising notion of pharmacy, Ivens and Loridan decided to make their film on
it. They spent the next two months constantly at the store and in the neigh-
bourhood following the staff in the course of their duties. The pharmacy was
a model one, a sort of pilot project experimenting with the idea of extended
community service (as explicitly acknowledged in the narration), but paradox-
ically it is the film of the series that best captures the complexity and contra-
dictions of everyday life within the Cultural Revolution, and doesn't forget in
the process humour, pathos, and empathy, as well as a strong narrative.
During the film we see the interaction between the pharmacists and the
local community, as they provide all sorts of clinical consultation and care
as well as drugs (free if dispensed from a prescription). They even engage
in on-the-spot acupuncture for a variety of minor ailments. We also witness
endless meetings among the staff themselves as they conduct evaluations of
their work and their own personal roles. (With Antonioni's film, the content of
those one or two such meetings that he presents is not relayed directly or liter-
ally to the audience but either summarised in voice-over narration or omitted
altogether).
The members of the pharmacy staff each become live and identifiable
characters. One bespectacled young man, Xiao Liu, perhaps Yukong's most
famous character, gets impatient and nervous with clients whom he consid-
ers 'idiots'. He conducts perpetual self-criticism of this failure without ever
offering the audience any convincing hope that he will improve.6 A young
woman had once wanted to be a doctor but decided that service to the people
was more important. An elderly clerk is ultimately revealed to have been the
former owner of the pharmacy and is now an employee of his one-time enter-
prise. This last character is charmingly candid before the camera and jokingly
admits to non-revolutionary feelings, namely an unquenchable taste for prof-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
it. But his admission is contradicted by the evidence of his rapport with his
fellow employees and his conscientious work behind the counter.7
Here again we can make a telling comparison with Antonioni's treatment
of a similar subject. Ivens and Loridan treat the role of acupuncture as part of
the pharmacy's clinical practice almost matter-of-factly. They emphasise the
socio-political and personal relations among the characters, whom we know
on other terms than as agents of acupuncture (which had become something
of a Western fad during the 'opening up' process). We also see the totality of
the pharmacy's social role, of which acupuncture is only a small part. Anton-
ioni, on the other hand, chose to observe the use of acupuncture techniques
in major surgery (a childbirth) as conducted by gowned functionaries to
whom we are scarcely introduced. In general that scene's observation seems
detached from any systematic view of Chinese socio-medical practice. Anton-
ioni's interest in the scene is twofold. It's in the exotic significance of the nee-
dles and the 'human' drama of the woman giving birth, specific and concrete I 585
to be sure, but abstract in its divorce from societal context. In Pharmacie the
acupunctural ministrations of the young pharmacists have a political as well
as a dramatic and visual meaning.
Ptrole, shot the following autumn at the end of the eighteen-month
process, surveys the northern oil fields at Daqing, in the northeastern prov-
ince of Heilongjiang. The selection of this prestigious site for the last shot of
Yukong's six full-length films had symbolic strategic resonance for the host
society, though at the time of filming its pioneering role in China's energy
self-sufficiency was already on the wane (Wikipedia, 2014). Ptrole thus ech-
oes Pharmacie in the sense that it too is about a model enterprise. As usual,
the filmmakers' emphasis was on the community of workers, men and wom-
en that lived around the project, engaging with them intimately in homes
and workplaces, with a backdrop of spectacular collective struggles with the
area's wintry natural environment and spectacular collective celebrations of
this success story of industrial autonomy. Interestingly, Ptrole contains one
of Yukong's only two compilation segments, an all-too-brief excursus of 1960
archival shots showing the first drillers, mostly dealing with the harsh wintry
conditions, but also reading Mao by firelight. (The other compilation segment
is in L'Usine de ginrateurs [The Generator Factory], illustrating one elderly
worker's pre-revolutionary memories and the Shanghai region's revolutionary
past in general. The segment also illustrates Ivens's revolutionary past as well,
with its clip of the Shanghai bombardment from The 400 Million [1939, USA,
53]. Ivens, the narrator at this moment, sums things up, 'This people is master
of its memory'.)
In contrast with the legendary Daqing, while still in Shanghai Ivens and
Loridan deliberately decided to focus another of the feature films on a gener-
CHINA 1971-1989
1o6. Autour du petrole: Taking (1976): a rare
use of compilation in Yukong, 1960 archival
shots of the first Daqing drillers, engaging
with harsh winters and Mao's thoughts
by firelight. DVD frame capture.. © CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
ator factory. Protected and encouraged by Zhou, they could film any topic they
wished, except a nuclear installation. They even would have been permitted
586 to go to Tibet had not Ivens's asthma prevented it.' Even with a collection of
twelve films to be made, the initial choice of individual areas of concentra-
tion had profound political and aesthetic implications. If the team had dwelt
exclusively on such experiments as Drugstore No. 3 or such prestige projects
as Daqing - and they were certainly dazzled by the diversity and the scale of
experimentation and production breakthroughs of these kinds - the result-
ing films would have had a certain utopian relevance and socialist realist reso-
nance towards the future without a balance of a less exotic and more complex
picture of contemporary China. Accordingly, they decided to find a factory
suitable for filming. They made a firm commitment to focus on an ordinary,
typical work situation to balance the exemplary aspect of films such as that on
the pharmacy:
We visited fourteen other factories, tractor factories, watch factories,
pilot factories, exemplary for their management, for their relations
between cadres and workers, for their role in the Cultural Revolution. But
we wanted at any price to film something average. It would not have been
interesting to film the watch factory that gave rise to the most important
dazibao movement (wall posters). We would have described a perfect
democratic situation, at a given moment, and would not have touched at
the heart of the difficulties. Whereas with choosing an average factory,
that involved hoping that something would happen. [...] In any case, if
we had filmed in the watch factory, with these people working on micro-
scopic pieces, that would have been less spectacular. You have to create a
strong visual impression as well. (Macciocchi, 1976)
The resulting film Usine was by far the series' longest at 129 minutes and
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
focused on a manufacturing complex with 8000 workers near Shanghai.
Over their four-month stay there, the filmmakers developed the concept of
everyday life within a living social and political institution as well as an eco-
nomic one, an open place, not walled in, where families of workers are part
of a living and working community. But it was their good fortune and ours
that something did indeed happen in the generator factory that the team
filmed, a spontaneous movement of criticism by workers against the man-
agement. The protest is expressed first in dazibaos, huge, strikingly cinemat-
ic banners, large-character hand-brushed paste-up posters usually involving
criticism of politicians and administrators. These had dominated the West-
ern media's visual impressions of Chinese politics since the mid-sixties, the
fundamental, public Cultural Revolution activity enshrining grass-roots cit-
izen democracy (and contributed a new word to the English language along
the way). The workers' criticisms targeted administrators who always stay in
their office, official favouritism seen in such matters as the distribution of 587
cinema tickets, and general ineptitude in the running of the factory. Even-
tually we sit in on workers' meetings, their study sessions on Engels and the
general problem of revisionism, long meetings with the bosses, and joint
efforts to arrive at a new anti-hierarchical and non-bureaucratic organisa-
tion of the factory in revolutionary committees. We hear the voices of factory
workers as they design their dazibaos, one metaphorising their institution as
a disabled vehicle: 'You should draw it like this... The truck is stuck in sand
in the desert and its wheels are turning round and round. You can hear the
noise of the motor but the truck is not moving. That's how we should repre-
sent the management'.
107. L'Usine de gen drateurs (1976). Factory
workers creating a dazibao critiquing the L.
management for trying to drive a truck in
the sand. DVD frame capture. Original in
colour. © CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
The film gives an overwhelming sense of being present at a particularly impor-
tant moment of history, and the institution's ordinariness within this fraught
historical context (Shanghai factories had been on the vanguard of the Cultur-
CHINA 1971-1989
al Revolution, sometimes sites of pitched battles among factions or among
radicals and conservatives and the military, with much loss of life) perhaps
ensured that the film demonstrates more fluidity and freshness than some of
the other feature-length works. It was one of the two items selected for the
1976 Cannes screening, a fine documentary on its own terms and in isolation
(Macciocchi, 1976).
Ballon also shows institutional ferment, and was the most successful short
of the series, if its privileged place alongside Usine at the 1976 Cannes Festival
and its 1977 Cdsar award for best documentary short are any indication. The
film covers a single incident that Ivens and Loridan happened upon quite by
accident during the course of their routine visit to a Beijing high school at the
very start of the Yukong circuit. The film has an entirely different sort of dra-
matic and cinematic interest than those films with a larger scale and scope - a
chamber film vignette rather than an epic - and bears the freshness of discov-
588 ery. As the filmmakers arrived in the schoolyard, they noticed a sense of excite-
ment in the air. Students and teachers hastened to give the filmmakers their
own versions of a student-teacher dispute that had just taken place. A wom-
an teacher had rung a bell signifying the start of class, and a teenaged boy,
engrossed in his play, had kicked a ball in her direction which he claimed had
passed over her head. She then confiscated the ball. When the crew arrived,
a meeting of the class had just been called to discuss the affair, and the film-
makers were invited to record the session. After an initial recap of the incident
by playground bystanders, the camera proceeds inside. The rest of the film
follows the analysis by teachers and students of what happened. At first both
sides are evasive, self-righteous, and accusatory. The boy provides alibis for his
behaviour and freely charges the teacher with not respecting his ideas, and the
teacher remains adamant.
1o8. Histoire d'un ballon: Le Lycee no.3 a3
Pdkin (1976). Happy ending : both teacher
and pupil having admitted to political
error, face is saved and an awkward
handshake wraps it up. DVD frame capture.
Original in colour. © CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
This remarkably spontaneous discussion moves through various stages in
its eleven minutes, each freely commented upon by those present. The girl
students sometimes side with the teacher and sometimes with the boy and
his allies. The meeting finally arrives at a moment of reconciliation which is
curiously ritualistic and face-saving for all, but affecting and authentic all the
same. The teacher finally admits to having underestimated the boy's political
consciousness in confiscating the ball. The boy admits to having tried to avoid
loss of face in constructing his excuses. An awkward handshake and exchange
of grins concludes the episode.
The vignette is all the more moving when one realises that the two teach-
ers featured were certainly aware, no doubt first-hand, that their profession
had been one of the principal targets of the Red Guard 'Seize power! Seize pow-
er! Seize power'! phase of the Cultural Revolution (some of the torturers had
been hardly older than the boy who hit his teacher with the ball) and educa-
tors' ranks had been depleted astronomically, in Beijing as in most other plac- | 589
es (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, 2006, 126). A sizable minority of the pupils
are wearing Red Guard armbands, yet the two women perform with grace and
eloquence. This film, though it provides a thoroughly absorbing vignette of
the revolution in progress, is different from the other entries in that it focuses
entirely on discourse around the event that had transpired, and criticism and
dialogue become its own event. When I attended a revival screening of the film
organised in Beijing in conjunction with the Ivens's 110th anniversary in 2008,
it was followed by a panel bringing together a few of the original participants.
The atmosphere was jovial, full of pride about this 35-year-old document of a
process, despite the official consensus over the last quarter-century that the
Cultural Revolution was a historical trauma to be survived and disavowed.
This vignette is short and sweet, also full of humour and charm, amazingly
cinematic despite its early place in the shooting sequence and its whole reli-
ance on talk within a constricted pedagogical space rather than action, and
proof that within the contradictory process of the Cultural Revolution authen-
tic spaces for community, growth, and problem-solving were possible. Its
retention as one of the two Yukong items included in the 2008 box set is under-
standable (however lamentable the fact that it is one of only two).
Of the twelve Yukong films, two are directed primarily to issues of gender
politics. One of the most significant aspects of the Cultural Revolution for
many Western viewers of the film was the specifically feminist dimension of
that Revolution (Kristeva, 1974). Unefemme, unefamille (A Woman, A Family,
1o8 min.) studies the working and home life of Gao Shulan, a woman welder
and union official in a locomotives factory near Beijing, and deftly navigates
this complex terrain. For example, it had long been a commonplace of the
'China film' to point out how Chinese women had once had their feet bound
CHINA 1971-1989
in childhood. Neither the Italian nor the Parisians depart from this tradition,
but again a comparison points out important qualitative differences. Anton-
ioni uses a gratuitous and crude close-up of the feet of a nameless old woman
passing by. In a far different manner, Ivens and Loridan's reference to the old
custom comes almost incidentally from a character whom we have come to
know naturally, as a person, Gao's mother-in-law, within the framework of the
film rather than as a specimen of self-righteously culture-centric and voyeur-
istic chinoiserie.
No doubt it was partly Loridan's influence that the film's response to fem-
inist problematics is such a focused one. Since Ivens's association with Lori-
dan, he had perceptibly modulated his perspective on women. Shared credits
were one index of this modulation: in the past Ivens had frequently shared
directorial credits with male collaborators, such as John Ferno, though never
with Van Dongen or Michelle, but things changed with Loridan in the 196os.
590 I As Loridan explained to interviewers of Filmfaust in 1977 (quoted in Schoots,
[1995] 2000, 300):
It was only through the women's movement after May 1968 that it
became clear to me that as a woman I had to earn a place for myself as
opposed to men. [...] I have expressed and proven myself in the work -
but not publicly every time a film was finished. I didn't think it worth the
trouble of signing my name because I knew that they would only speak
about Joris Ivens anyway and not about Marceline Loridan.
Their practice of publicly accepting joint responsibility for the Indochina and
China films indeed did not always impact on their critics' and collaborators'
references to the work, least of all in China.
Perhaps more precisely, the feminist thematics of Ivens's work, always
present throughout his career arguably, had come more explicitly to the sur-
face in Vietnam and now especially in China, both filmically and extra-film-
ically. For instance, in Ivens's iconic repertory, woman-mother is now given
equal emphasis in relation to woman-soldier and woman-worker. (To be fair,
Ivens has always been more sensitive than most of his contemporaries to the
importance of women's labour and the drudgery involved in housework. He
scrupulously had presented the farmwife in Power and the Land [1940, USA,
33] as an equal partner in the Ohio dairy farm.) History, as well as Loridan, has
also played a role in Ivens's shift in emphasis. The role of women in the Span-
ish Civil War, for example, hardly compares to that in the Indochinese strug-
gles in which, according to the couple's testimony, the women's heroism and
perseverance were crucial to the final military (and economic) victory.
With Yukong the project context was not a military situation like Spain and
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Vietnam but rather the production of everyday life in a peacetime period of
gradual normalisation. There is in general throughout the twelve hours a rig-
orous commitment on the part of the filmmakers to balance the role of women
in the ongoing revolution to that of the men, even and especially where a cer-
tain form of the sexual division of labour still exists. This is true, for example,
in the oilfields of Daqing. In Ptrole, this film on an industrial community, not
a feminist topic per se, we see that the manual work and most of the engineer-
ing jobs are seemingly assigned to men. As usual, this work offers more of a
'strongvisual impression' than that of the women. Yet there is special attention
to gender politics in the film's monitoring of political discussion among work-
ers, and especially among women workers. The women in the oil fields say, for
instance, that formerly their husbands never talked of anything serious with
them, but that now they discuss economics and politics. Formerly their hus-
bands' permission was necessary in their allotment of the family income, but
now there is no such hierarchisation of family responsibility. Women hoeing I 591
vegetables in the shadow of the derricks reject the possible status implications
of such a division of labour. They take pride instead in their contribution to the
oil project and claim equal importance in their roles with the men.
Elsewhere in Ptrole, an animated 'group interview'/conversation by wom-
en sewing-machine workers on Marxist theory and economic policy is inter-
rupted by one of the series' rare interpretative voice-over interventions. This
voice-over updates Lenin's famous remark that revolution consists in a wom-
an kitchen-worker participating in the state, with the corollary that revolu-
tion must also mean seamstresses talking of philosophy. At another point,
the anti-Confucius campaign that intrigued Western correspondents in the
seventies is given a feminist slant when Confucius is referred to as the 'wom-
an-eater' and is quoted as saying, 'A door opening on a courtyard is not a real
door. A woman is not a real human being'.9
This film and the others do not whitewash the situation of women in Chi-
na. Although there seem to be women on the research and administrative bod-
ies of the oil project, as we have already seen, the film does not paper over the
residual existence of what seems to be an unnecessarily rigid sexual division
of labour. Even more, as Femme demonstrates, the implication of the twelve
films seen as a whole is that the liberation struggle of women has advanced
much further in the vocational area than on the home front: Gao, whose pro-
fessional duties as welder and union official are the focus of Femme, seems
clearly more outspoken in the exercise of her job than in relation to her hus-
band, whom she sees only on the weekend. In Pharmacie, during a weekend
visit to the young woman pharmacist's home, the husband is carefully shown
doing his duty at the washboard, but he is also clearly disgruntled at being
filmed doing so.
CHINA 1971-1989
Moreover, this film and the others, and by extension Chinese feminist dis-
course in general, are unhappily reticent in probing of areas of sexual mores
and family structures. Ivens put the following relativist light on this matter:
Sexuality, here in Europe it's a rehashed-over subject. After centuries of
prohibitions we are living a period of relative liberty that can be inter-
preted as degeneration or as progress. In China, sexuality doesn't pres-
ent itself in these terms at all. In old China, that is to say China before
1949, marriages were all arranged by families. Girls were sold, and if a
woman publicly displayed her love for a boy, she risked being lynched.
Sexual freedom in China is first of all monogamy; it's that a girl can freely
choose her husband and, still today, when a woman marries, one asks
her if she is being forced or not. (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 325)
592 The contradictory cultural and historical difference of which Ivens speaks is
highlighted in Village during a sequence when the women's group of young
fishers are swimming on the village beach, in uniformly modest black swim-
suits. The voice-over explains that the cameraman was too shy to record the
moment of leisure and companionship in anything other than extreme long
shot. Yet at the same time, the openness of the discussion of birth control car-
ried on in public in the crowded pharmacy puts Western society to shame -
even in the 21 century. Gao's disclosures of her decision to limit her family
and the revelation of several long-distance marriages seem the only tentative
probes of alternatives to the traditional heterofamilial framework, which is
otherwise taken completely for granted. All the same, Ivens and Loridan do
not indulge the template of the companionate couple, still enforced in the
West, and implicitly explore the extended family - itself situated within a
neighbourly courtyard that provides much visual evocation of community - as
an economic and reproductive unit.
109. Le Village des pecheurs (1976). A
group encounterwith the collective of -
young women fishers reminds that the
precarious situation of women is still being
'struggled'. Original in colour. © CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Village is set in the maritime village of Da Yu Dao, in Shandong province,
where an exemplary collective of young women have become sailors and
fishers. Everyday life in the village and the application there of the Cultural
Revolution are on the agenda, with a heroically Ivensian backdrop of vessels
plying their way over the brilliantly blue ocean in and out of the cinematic har-
bour. But the centrepiece is the young women's voices and labour, and they
are shaped by discourses of then and now. Their autonomy and their physical
strength are both taken for granted and given a heroic cinematic construction.
However, interviews with individual male authorities from the clinic doctor to
the revolutionary council chair threaten to overwhelm the more taciturn wom-
en, usually encountered in groups, and remind that the situation is still being
'struggled' (to use Cultural Revolution parlance). All in all, the film brings out
the precarious contingency of women's progress across the society as a whole,
which adds to these two films' credibility: the feminist achievement in China
is shown as a slow, constant process involving everyone, men and women, in 593
a process of analysis and critique like the larger Cultural Revolution itself. Sig-
nificantly the best feminist films in Western society in the 1970s had relied,
like that of Ivens and Loridan, on various incarnations of direct cinema in
their endeavour to capture the process of perpetual analysis and exchange,
consciousness raising, and ideological offensive that are the preliminary req-
uisites and continuing support for the feminist struggle.
From a homosocial women's universe we come to a male one, Une caserne
(The Army Camp, 57 min.). The Nanjing military community offered the
filmmakers a glimpse of army life where officers eat with the men, soldiers
help peasants with agriculture, soldiers' wives and officers work alongside
the soldiers in neighbouring factories, and the military helps the civil-
ian community in road upkeep, cultural activity, and militia training. The
filmmakers must have sensed the extreme sensitivity around the People's
Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution, 'the pillar in the Chinese
party-state' according to Badiou ([2008] 2010, 144), only a year after the fatal
alleged attempted defection of Marshal Lin Biao. The latter had occasioned
a symbolic stop to years of extreme tension between the military and polit-
ical leadership of the country, which at times was on the brink of civil war -
especially around the army's role in curtailing the excesses of the late 196os
and in returning the country to 'order' (McFarquhar and Schoenhals, 2006).
No one in the crew realised that the Nanjing shoot was the series' egregious
example of pre-shoot manipulation, in this case by military brass who knew
a thing or two about liaison with the outside world: the soldiers were expe-
rienced men kept on for an extra year for the purpose, and in retrospect the
accommodations had seemed 'too beautiful, too tidy', with a ten-man room
converted into a six-man room for the filmmakers. Moreover, the inevitable
CHINA 1971-1989
segment of the soldiers criticising their officers probably sets off warning
signals to some viewers with their perfunctory ritualistic quality. Not surpris-
ing then that Caserne turned out to be one of the stiffest and most cautious
of the Yukong films in general, though still rich in its gleanings and much
classic Ivensalia.
110. Une caserne (1976). A criticism session
with officers and soldiers has a perfunctory,
ritualistic quality in this stiffest of the
Yukong films. DVD frame capture. Original
in colour. © CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
594
The role of intellectuals within the Cultural Revolution was another fraught
issue for the filmmakers - and obviously for this writer: as a self-professing
intellectual who to this day tries to live the Cultural Revolution attack on 'the
divorce between theory and practice'. A comfortably tenured academic, I won-
der what I would do in the situation of the many intellectuals who come alive
in Yukong segments. Would I perform before the cameras with courageous
authenticity? with duplicitous and artful complicity? a combination of both?
Intellectuals including filmworkers had been regular targets of scapegoating
and violence by Red Guards and others during the first several years of the Cul-
tural Revolution As the couple were first getting their project off the ground,
many of Ivens's former collaborators from the 1950s were languishing in the
remote countryside in 'May 7 Schools' 'working alongside the peasants', and
could not be contacted. At least two of Yukong's most valuable collaborators
had been recruited from the countryside, apparently by Zhou, in order to con-
tribute to the documentary production, manager Qian Liren and translator Lu
Songhe. The issue was touched on in Usine with its cheerful encounter with
engineers who formerly had had nothing to do with workers but are now seen
working alongside them and relating to them as equals in order to maximise
improvements to equipment and procedures. Ivens and Loridan joined in the
ritual and worked for a week in the Beijing locomotives factory, the subject
of Femme, to try out this particular Cultural Revolution ritual, apparently with
benefits to all (Stufkens, 2008, 419, 440-441).
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
111. Le Professeur Tsien (1976). The role
of intellectuals: the subject Professor
Qian critiques knowledge as merchandise
with a grain of personal experience and
authenticity. DVD frame capture. Original
in colour. © CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
Professeur Tsien features a 60-something university teacher Qian Weichang
(1912-2010), a physicist who had been the target of the Red Guard during the
Cultural Revolution, and tells his story. It is a moving and seemingly honest 595
story, for all the ambiguities that surround the long takes of him, his wife and
his two teenaged daughters sitting in their comfortable living room in front
of his bookshelves, fanning themselves in the hot lights and the Beijing sum-
mer heat. Qian spent the late thirties and the war in North America doing his
graduate work in physics and returned to China on the eve of the Revolution.
His narrative conforms to the familiar 'then and now' and self-criticism tem-
plates, but the grain of personal experience adds individual authenticity to the
encounter: the wife who occasionally jumps in to add even more correctness
to the conversation ('We agreed with the Red Guards'), the son whose joining
the ranks of the workers was first felt as a loss and then as a gain, his reported
experience working in a steel factory where the worker at his side taught him
about testing metals, the critique of knowledge as merchandise, and Qian's
earlier fetishisation of his books. The role of intellectuals is thus treated as
thoroughly and as sensitively though as superficially as the running time of
twelve minutes suggests: it is hard to understand Qian's commitment, and
that of other rehabilitated citizens within the other films, to moving beyond
recent traumas without recrimination or blame, at least publicly. Maybe
non-consensual ostracism and re-education in some cases were actually a
positive experience? When I pondered the same enigma in Beijing in 2008,
listening to panels that included several May 7 School veterans, and hearing
Lu and other witnesses in Seeger show the same positive forward focus along-
side their utter devotion to Ivens, I attributed the performance of generosity
and frankness by these witnesses in part at least to cultural factors, but this of
course is not the whole story.
What to think of Yukong's three cultural shorts, on the Chinese opera, cir-
cus, and traditional crafts respectively? Historically the courtship of authori-
CHINA 1971-1989
tarian or bureaucratic regimes with 'cultural' cinema had been as productive
as it was a safe apolitical refuge throughout the 20th century, whether we are
talking about the various state studios Grierson sparked around the Common-
wealth from Canada to India, whose finest creations at certain moments tend-
ed to be uncontroversial arts documentaries, or the six-decade-long cinematic
history of the USSR and its tributaries, which traversed cautious periods when
its finest output consisted of biopics of nineteenth century composers and
medieval icon painters or adaptations of Shakespeare. Une repetition a l'Opra
de Pikin (In Rehearsal at the Peking Opera, 32 min.), focuses on opera perform-
ers in acrobatics and dance and a performance of a new work; Entrainement au
Cirque de Pikin (Behind the Scenes at the Peking Circus, 16 min.) again focuses
on performers and a performance of acrobatics; and Les Artisans (Tradition-
al Handicrafts, 15 min.) focuses on lingering ancient crafts. All emphasise
training and the transmission of artistic skills and properties from men-
596 f tor to student, from one generation to the next. Shot towards the end of the
Yukong circuit in Beijing, these three shorts express a direct cinema style that
is the most restrained of the series, though the intimate, attentive, submissive
encounter with workers on the job jibes perfectly with the Ivens oeuvre. At the
same time the three films are exceptional in the series in that their subject is
presented without discussion or materialist framework. Sun Hongyun's (per-
sonal communication, May 2014) opinion is that the three shorts were intend-
ed to respond to Antonioni's film. These three films were clearly an implicit
acknowledgment of the threat to the transmission of China's artistic herit-
age posed by the Cultural Revolution, specifically thanks to the hegemony of
Ivens's nemesis, cultural despot Jiang Qing (legendary for allowing eight and
only eight permissible opera templates). This reading gives these otherwise
seemingly innocuous little films a slight political thrust. It also gave them a
mighty propaganda edge with Western audiences who could well have heard
of the desecration of Buddhist monuments and other treasures during the
worst earlier excesses of the Red Guards.
But the filmmakers surely had an eye on programming as well. The respec-
tive combinations of opera with petroleum, circus with military life and the
fishing industry, and craftsmen painting dolls with generator manufacture
respectively in the individual theatrical packages was not so much a wry com-
ment on politics as show business as a strategic insertion of the spectacular
into the discursive. The filmmakers disavowed the lure of the exotic with one
hand and with the other sweetened the package with great acrobatic leaps,
non-western music and pretty porcelain for their theatrical and television
audiences in the West who may just have been experiencing blue and grey
Mao suit fatigue. Almost never discussed in Yukong literature or in Chinese
accounts of the series, these three shorts (the longest is the opera film) were
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
possibly soft-pedalled because of culture's association with Jiang, or simply
because culture needed to play second fiddle to production and politics, as it
arguably had through Ivens's career. Whatever the case, it is likely that these
preoccupations with the Chinese cultural heritage were the only remnants in
Yukong of Ivens's original 1972 synthesis project and the likeliest bridge for-
ward to the fully realised encounter with China's cultural heritage in Histoire
in the 1980s.
112. Une repetition a l'Opera de Pekin
(1976). A political thrust in these
three restrained films about cultural
transmission: an implicit critique of the
Cultural Revolution's threat to heritage?
DVD frame capture. Original in colour. 597
© CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
113. Entratnement au Cirque de Pkin
(1976). Familiar exoticism offers a
propaganda and programming edge with
Western audiences perhaps fatigued by
Mao jackets? Original in colour. © CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
114. Les Artisans (1976). Observation of
fastidious craftsmanship without an
overlay of analysis or materialist context.
DVD frame capture. Original in colour.
© CAPI Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
CHINA 1971-1989
Finally, Impressions d'une ville - Changhai (Impressions of a City: Shanghai (60
min.) shot cumulatively during the filmmakers' six-month-long stay in the
southern metropolis at the start of their peregrinations, is perhaps the most
personal of the Yukong films. The commentary for Pharmacie had already
confessed to the Parisians' fondness for this cosmopolitan and elegant port
city most resembling their own, and Impressions indulges this affection.
Perhaps the most dated of the Yukong series, Impressions feels now like a
time capsule of practices and spaces that have disappeared from urban Chi-
na in the meantime. It is also the Yukong instalment where the significant
use of a hidden exterior camera is noticeable. Nevertheless window-shop-
ping and on-the-street interviews, indulgence in cross-cultural observa-
tion, make the film unique. Long interviews with two charming traffic cops
who talk about their work in relation to the Cultural Revolution, delighted
that anyone is interested in their unglamorous work, make the film espe-
598 cially irresistible. An ending with the ceremonial launch of a huge ocean
vessel as spectacular as the concluding mass rally in Petrole and the climac-
tic denouements of a few other films as well, brings the tourist gaze back
to the celebration of everyday production. In comparison to Ivens's other
city films - especially Regen (Rain, 1929, Netherlands, 16), La Seine a rencon-
tre Paris (The Seine Meets Paris, 1957, France, 32), and ...A Valparaiso (1963,
France/Chile, 27) - Ivens and Loridan deepened the ethnographic potential
of the hoary genre with person-on-the-street interviews and the intensity of
direct synch-sound. But they did not do so at the expense of the enchanting
lyrical potential of the legendary harbour (which did not enchant the Gang
of Four, who found the misty dawn Ivensian lyricism bespoke pollution -
not necessarily untrue...).
115. Impressions d'une ville: Changhai
(1976). An Ivensian harbour vista
in a classic city film with deepened
ethnographic potential. DVD frame
capture. Original in colour. © CAPI Films,
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens. -
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
At the start of the 1960s, the new technology of direct cinema suggested special
possibilities in the direction of cinematic 'democracy', the weighty concept
invoked strategically by Ivens in the 1976 citation above (Macciocchi, 1976),
and of the political empowerment entailed by Loridan's phrase 'letting the
people speak'. By the early seventies it had still to live up fully to this potential,
ultimately neither focusing consistently on potentially oppositional topics
nor applied systematically to transformative ends - except perhaps for France
in the aftermath of May 1968. Sporadic currents of an activist direct cinema
elsewhere in Europe and in North America, and isolated movements of sim-
ilar orientation in Latin America and Asia (such as that led by Sukhdev and
some less prominent regional contemporaries in India), struggled to build up
a continuous tradition with a wide base, a culture around a genuinely radical
discourse or a significant impact. If nothing else, the increasingly expensive,
emerging standard platform of synch colour 16mm continued to be a major
hurdle for those typically under-budgeted and under-equipped filmmakers 599
who moved into the seventies still wanting to change the world. The practic-
es of even the most sustained projects, like the US Newsreel collective output
(1968 on) or the Canadian Challenge for Change project (1967-1980), were dif-
ficult to maintain and renew. Many landmark political films of the day like
Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas's La Hora de los hornos (Hour of the Fur-
naces, 1968, Argentina, 260) didn't make full use of synchronised sound, no
doubt because they couldn't afford it (they couldn't even afford colour!). But
by the last half of the 1970s, two prizewinning North American feature doc-
umentaries, both focusing on gender in relation to the classic proletarian
theme of the strike action, Harlan County, USA. (Barbara Kopple, 1976, 103)
and Une histoire defemmes (A Wives' Tale, Sophie Bissonnette, Martin Duck-
worth, and Joyce Rock, 1980, Canada, 73), demonstrated how instrumental
the 16mm 'let the people speak' formula had become as the tenacious New
Left clung to a foothold in the mainstream. But they did so through a strong
narrative formula rather than an interactive or rigorously analytic agenda. As
for the French films of the summer of 1968, Loridan-Ivens (telephone inter-
view, February 2014) does not remember what films from this surge the pair
got into trouble for showing at Leipzig in 1970 or brought with them to Beijing
in 1971, but their legacy was already being tarnished by Paris intellectuals for
whom each season brought its latest political fashion and faction.
Writing in 1976 after having seen Yukong and interviewing the two film-
makers, yet sensing the hurdles to applying it to the western context, the Paris
critic Guy Hennebelle assessed a decade's worth of French progressive cine-
ma, and a lively subcategory of direct documentaries in film and video that
aspired to 'let the people speak'. He was more inclined to be critical of their
abuses and faults than he was inspired by their demonstrated impact or prom-
CHINA 1971-1989
ise, and echoed some of Ivens's criticisms from the previous decade, ultimate-
ly advocating hybrid cinemas for which the direct would be only one of several
elements:
The crushing majority of militant films are shot in direct. [...] This fact
suggests once more the reaction against the polish and slickness of the
Hollywood cinema and the will to assure oneself a guarantee of authen-
ticity in 'letting people speak' who have never had the chance. But if the
direct offers these advantages, it can set loose also - and this happens
too often - a tedious avalanche of words, a verbal deluge which quickly
becomes tiring and which is also frustrating: in effect, it is rarely more
interesting to hear someone telling past events than to see with one's
own eyes the events themselves, indirect or reconstructed. [...]
As much as the direct has undeniable advantages, it also presents an
especially grave disadvantage on certain occasions: in effect, it happens
that the people interviewed restore in their speech the cliches of the
dominant ideology that have been hammered into them by television
and other media. If they are not careful, militant filmmakers can, in spite
of themselves, simply end up rehashing the ideology they are trying to
combat! The use of the direct can correspond also in certain cases to an
escape from the problems that political analysis inevitably poses. [...]
One gets out of [them] by 'letting the masses speak', but in reality one
only masks one's incapacity to produce a correct interpretation of the
situation, to achieve the 'communist decoding of the world' spoken of by
Vertov. [...]
I can't say often enough how false it is that direct cinema restores
reality without deformation of any kind. It is better to admit frankly the
manipulation and make it agreeable to the eye and the ear by making use
of the whole arsenal of the cinema. (Hennebelle, [1976] 1984, 181-182)
If we can now forgive Hennebelle's overlooking of to the cinematic potential
of oral historiography, at the time I enthusiastically opined in Jump Cut that
in Yukongwe finally had a film that represented that convergence of technical
potential and truly democratic subject matter that had been so long in com-
ing. Familiar with the ideological traps that Hennebelle was locating within
the French progressive direct cinema, I felt and feel that this epic negotiat-
ed its way dialectically through these traps, less through the formal hybridity
that had characterised earlier work from Pour le Mistral (For the Mistral, 1965,
France, 33) to Loin than through a dialectic process of both embracing solidar-
ity and moving beyond solidarity. Ivens's and Loridan's complex marshaling
of the direct in their outsiders' exploration of ongoing social transformation
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
allowed a detailed, challenging and above all useful relationship with a peo-
ple involved in the aspiration to and the process of radical change in their
daily lives. The filmmakers' technological apparatus, multiform direct style,
and assemblage of multiple generic angles (two portraits; three city films; one
event film; three institution films; three arts films) were finely tuned to capture
cumulatively the dynamism and intricacy of the process of social change and
democratic empowerment in twelve widely different contexts in five distinct
regions and to bring it back to us in the west as an intervention in our own
process.
I also in 1976 observed that the Cultural Revolution, as encountered,
recorded, and transmitted by Ivens and Loridan, was engaged with as a liv-
ing struggle rather than as afait accompli. Rather than fall into the additional
trap into which socialist realism was arguably mired in Pierwsze lata (The First
Years, 1949, Bulgaria/Czechoslovakia/Poland, 99), Ivens and Loridan and the
Chinese themselves presented their revolution as a constantly ongoing pro- 6o1
cess in the ordinary, everyday lives of flesh-and-blood individuals. The process
was constantly in need of self-criticism and renewal, and was transforming not
only political and economic structures but personal ones as well. Yukong was
not an exhaustive book on the methods and effects of the Revolution. What
Ivens and Loridan did instead was take the time and energy to really observe
and listen to Chinese people engaged in taking control over their own everyday
lives. And the filmmakers did so with an amazing degree of intimacy, the sense
of which they succeeded in passing on to the 1970s New Left audience.
Of course, I could not know in 1976 that the next fewyears, after the deaths
of Zhou and Mao and the fall of the Gang of Four, would see a sharp turn in
Chinese politics and history - or was it a gradual turn? A whole generation of
modernisers, moderates, and pragmatists rose to the surface and would in
fact turn into that crude demon of Mao's thought, capitalist roaders. Much
but not all of the process that I had admired onscreen would be renounced,
yet not only Yukong but also its filmmakers, who had fled the capital in 1975,
would be paradoxically disavowed, rehabilitated, and celebrated at the same
time, and then politely forgotten before yet another rehabilitation. But that is
another story we shall come back to a little bit later to alight on briefly before
moving on to the final Chinese chapter of Ivens's career.
Meanwhile in 1976, the finest compliment that was paid the film in the
French press was that of Louis Marcorelles,1o the high priest of direct cin-
ema in France, who come round to Ivens's side after his 1967 demurrer on
Parallele. Marcorelles had a slightly different take than Hennebelle and rein-
forced my own response, referring to Ivens's and Loridan's achievement as
'cinematic Maoism':
CHINA 1971-1989
A strange predestination one day had to bring together Mao Zedong's
applied Marxism-Leninism and that modern technique for capturing
everyday life called direct cinema. Just as the masses are henceforth writ-
ing the history of the world, and particularly in China, just as lightweight
cinema, which demands a minimum of technology but a maximum of
human presence, constant attention to reality, offered the ideal working
tool for approaching the Chinese masses, letting them speak.
The big word is out: letting them speak, or, if one moves to the other
side of the camera, to take up speech." [...] Everyone now has the right
to speak: a different speech, not only the frozen speech of manuals,
the dramatized speech of Corneille and Labiche, but the lived speech
of those whom we have never heard speak, live, the forgotten ones of
history, those who create the world with their own hands. The meeting
between the applied Maoism of the Cultural Revolution and this cine-
matic Maoism [is] defined by a very precise technique. [...]
No more than correct ideas, dear to Chairman Mao, correct films
don't fall from the sky: they are obtained through the strength of the
mike and the camera, in a daily combat with nature among the people.
[ ... ]
In terms of cinema, a revolution it is [...] the camera of Li Zexiang
was in perpetual movement, marrying the fluid shapes of the real. Com-
munication was established by exchange, friendship, familiarity: by
the camera as well, which one forgot, as should be the case. The image,
whatever one thinks of it, keeps all its importance, even takes on new
relief in counterpoint with speech, gives a purer meaning to the words
of the tribe. [...] Autour du ptrole and L'Usine degincrateurs are the most
successful of the package, making the links evident. (Marcorelles, 1976)
I agreed fully with the term 'cinematic Maoism', apt in its context of the post-
1968 Left, with all of the connotations of a populist inspiration and authority
and a self-renewing dynamic rooted in the people. Direct cinema previously
'let the people speak', to use Loridan's expression for the goal of the China
films (Loridan, interview with author, February 1976), with certain important
successes to its credit as well as the liabilities that Hennebelle (1976) stressed.
But when the resources of direct cinema were finally applied to a society with
a concentrated agenda of 'letting the people speak' for the first time in their
history, the result shifted paradigms.
In formal and cinematic terms, Ivens and Loridan 'let the people speak'
in a variety of ways, deploying a range of direct cinema processes, sometimes
observational, occasionally even narrative, but mostly interactive. Interviews
and monologue performances are the prevalent idiom: often the camera con-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
fronts a single subject head-on, usually in close-up, mostly 'set up' in the sense
that a collaborative spirit dominates (though the filmmakers refused to give
the questions in advance), but sometimes also improvised on-the-spot (Lu
Songhe, interview and conference presentation, Beijing, November 2008).
The subject or subjects talk directly to the camera in response to provoca-
tively worded questions thrown out from behind the lens, almost always by
Loridan. Either responding or performing, the subjects are remarkably can-
did and also are clearly eager to please the filmmakers, to assert their own
dignity and empowerment (and perhaps even to please the local officials who
may have often been hovering off-camera, as Yukong's critics have stressed
[Zhang Tongdao, conference presentation, Beijing, November 2008]). Yet the
evidence onscreen and on the soundtrack cannot be denied: the witnesses
speak politically - personally, substantively, eloquently - in a way that under-
mines whatever myths of Chinese reserve, Red Guard cant, manipulation by
CPC cadres or more generalised surveillance a Western viewer has held before 603
seeing such a film.
Loridan's talent for putting her subjects at ease had been amply demon-
strated before, as we have seen. In China, she gradually learned the language
over the period of her stay, that is, the Beijing dialect, and two fulltime inter-
preters functioned as an integrated part of the crew. Despite the necessity of
filtering all communication back and forth through translation (and for even-
tual non-French and non-Chinese spectators through an even more multi-lay-
ered process of post-synched translation), the dedication of the filmmakers
and the openness and humility with which they were able to relate to their
subjects ensured the trust of those filmed. I have heard it speculated that the
two filmmakers' shortness of stature was also an unspoken and perhaps even
unrecognised factor in this trust - and of course Ivens's wrinkles (notwith-
standing the Red Guards' sometimes hideous gerontophobia) - and the rela-
tionship of trust was obviously reinforced by the Chinese identity of the crew.
But spatial configurations were also key: production stills of interview
set-ups reveal how the filmmakers and crew were typically part of a close rela-
tionship that spatially matched a real world interaction of a small group of
five or six speaking in normal voices. In this sense, for example, the slightly
cramped space of the Shanghai drugstore was actually an asset. One leisure-
ly four-minute conversation with a young woman employee two-thirds of the
way through Pharmacie (a character, whom we have already observed serving
clients, administering acupuncture, and participating in long staff meetings,
and who was in fact initially planned to take up more space in the film [Lu
Songhe, interview with author, November 2008]) unfolds with the subject busy
behind the counter in the midst of the establishment's working day. The cam-
era varies its proximity to her, sometimes capturing the whole busy environ-
CHINA 1971-1989
ment and sometimes focusing on her smiling and slightly shy but voluble face
up front and up close.
116. LaPharnacie no. 3:Changhai (1976).
The charming pharmacy employee who
later takes us home: one of Ivens and
Loridan's many open, interactive and
mutually trusting portraits. (DVD box,
2008). Original in colour. © CAPI Films,
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
604
A male fellow employee occasionally jokingly kibitzes and customers listen in
and smile and floating cutaways allow us not to lose sight of the activity all
around. Prodded by Loridan's questions she talks first of her six-year career
in the shop, beginning with her initial feelings of misfit, her youthful aspira-
tion to practice medicine, but then her understanding through the Cultural
Revolution process that participating in the life of the community pharmacy
satisfies her needs and 'selves the people'. She then veers into family life and
reflects on her role as a woman and on sharing with her husband their respon-
sibilities, finances, and childrearing. She then tactfully generalises on wom-
en's achievement in China and her own feelings of freedom. Eager to please,
flattered by the attention and the opportunity to share, but blushing at the
bluntness of the questioning, this social actor's overall performance-portrait,
its climax in intense close-up, engages with both crew and spectator in a per-
formative relationship that is typical of the basic Yukong approach. Later we
will follow her home to meet her extended family, where her descriptions of
family life and gender roles are borne out but complicated.
Let's elaborate slightly while still on the topic of the close-up, the principal
visual co-efficient of the film's extraordinary relationship with its subjects, a
configuration that can of course be optical as well as spatial. Indeed, Yukong's
succession of long contemplative close-ups of the Chinese people is itself a
source of genuine fascination, but can be thought through more precisely in
comparative terms. For example there is a categorical distinction to be made
between this technique as used by Ivens and Loridan and that used by Anton-
ioni in his China film. Antonioni's film is also in many respects a physiogno-
mical treatise, or as he says in the film's burdensome narration, 'a survey of
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
faces'. There are worlds of difference between Ivens and Loridan's open and
interactive portraits, based on the mutual trust of filmmaker and subject, and
the close-up telephoto zooms that Antonioni inflicts, for example, on reticent
subjects in a remote village who have never seen a Westerner (and who were
simultaneously being harassed by local cadres, according to Jie Li [2009]).
Antonioni also has close-ups taken in a market with a hidden camera' filming
shoppers among the vegetable and poultry stalls. In principle, these shots are
hardly different from the close-up zooms of the chickens and hogs that also
compose the sequence.
Beijing scholar Sun Hongyun (2009, 50; conference presentation, Bei-
jing, November 2008) pursues the comparison, contrasting Ivens's 'affection'
with Antonioni's 'infiltration', calling the latter's optical close-ups 'excessive-
ly aggressive' and his contemplative style as 'callous', cold and intrusive. The
less diplomatic Loridan went even further: '[Antonioni had] a look and also a
behaviour vis-a-vis the people he was filming that, for me, was very disagree- | 605
able. Because as for me I don't like snatching [piquer] people like butterflies,
whether it's in China, Japan, or Ardeche. It was camera-rape, and ourselves,
we wanted to do the opposite' (Ivens and Loridan, 1976a, 8). There is certainly
a qualitative difference between silent faces captured by a long lens and close-
ups of subjects in dialogue with the filmmakers behind the camera. In the one
case, the artist seems to impose him/herself upon the subjects; they become
mystified, exoticised, colonialised, if you will. In the latter case, the artists have
subjected themselves to the people filmed in a kind of cinematic democracy.
Here the people have asserted control over their images through the exercise
of their capacity for self-expression. The central principle of Ivens and Lori-
dan's film is that one must listen and engage as well as observe. The filmmak-
ers extended the Maoist principle of people's control of their own lives and
social situation to the realm of the image and the soundtrack.
Interviews are not only of single individuals: the group interview is a
sophisticated and versatile resource throughout the series as well, and in some
ways arguably reflects China's volatile but fundamentally collectivist society
better than the individual close-up interview. Although Jie Li employs a dichot-
omy of private-public in this context, I believe the individual-collective one is
more applicable, certainly to Chinese society in the early 1970s. I have argued
elsewhere that the 'group interview' format, relatively rarer in the individu-
alist West, emerged historically in other such contexts as direct cinema was
affirmed and adapted to local cultures, for example the newly surfacing inde-
pendent Indian documentary in the next decade, whether an extended fam-
ily address the camera together as their slum dwelling is being demolished
in Anand Patwardhan's Bombay Our City (1985, 82) or a group of fishermen
do likewise in their beachfront workplace in the face of state appropriation
CHINA 1971-1989
in the aptly titled Voices from Baliapal (Vasudha Joshi and Ranjan Palit, 1988,
40). In a typical group interview in Yukong, say of a factory work-floor cohort,
a question often goes around a circle, and the group input ranges from sub-
stantive (Usine) to smilingly and proudly perfunctory (as when Loridan warms
up a group of women at a day care centre in Village by asking each to share the
number of children they have had). The collective interview or 'talking group'
has a rich potential for both cultural and political explanations of the relation
of the individual to the group and to the camera:
A social actor's identity is defined by his or her relation to a group, rather
than through a distinctive individual psychology. His or her first alliance
is not to the self or the state, but to the immediate community, on whom
rests the responsibility for responding collectively to an outside threat and
for working out a solution. [...] In the talking group convention, allowing
6o6 oneself to be filmed is not a private affair but a participation in collective
speech, in group identification and affirmation. [...] The processes of oral
culture create a catalytic dialectical tension among different groups and
enter into community consolidation and problem solving. Group speech
operates on a collective scale with a transformative power that is analo-
gous to that of the individual subject's access to language in the psycho-
analytic process. [...] Functioning as a kind of cultural empowerment with
a wide range of political ramifications, the Indian direct cinema matches
the first-person plural of its subjects' dialogue with a model of first-person
plural cinematic discourse. (Waugh, [1990] 2011b, 248-252)
Of course the Parisians' status as outsiders complicates this last match, but
all the same Yukong's group interviews, from the smiling pair of traffic cops in
Impressions to the group of busy female agricultural workers in Ptrole - talk-
ing while cornhusking, knitting, breastfeeding, sometimes talking all at once
- demonstrate a collective cinematic empowerment. Jie Li (2009, 35) points to
a more insidious aspect of the collective interview: 'Yukong rarely if ever fea-
tures a private interview - all interviews are conducted within a work team, a
family, or another kind of group setting, thereby showing another fact of life
during the Cultural Revolution: no one can escape surveillance from others'.
While her cautionary note is important, I do not agree fully with her (for one
thing she exaggerates the scarcity of private interviews in the series), since cul-
tural values around privacy and individualism are intrinsic to the matter, and
since all collective societies encompass by definition benign forms of surveil-
lance and constraint by which individual behaviours are kept in conformity
with cultural norms (and surveillance is hardly unknown in certain individu-
alist societies!).
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Sometimes in Yukong, rather than interacting with social actors, the cam-
era and recorder simply participate in an ongoing event, which always develops
spontaneously in spite of their presence. The patient and gradual immersion
of the crew within an environment allows the slow building up of mutual
confidence with the people to be filmed. Non-interactive episodes are some-
times observational in the strict sense, for example recurring scenes where the
always fascinated Ivens just intently watches physical labour, from epic long-
shot earthmoving to a close-up of the highly skilled turn of a lever, as if almost
nostalgic for the 1930s. Sometimes the non-interactive approach might be
called catalytic or 'mise-en-presence'. In the latter sense social actors and crew
collaborate on facilitating an event that might not otherwise have happened
there and then but which would then unfold spontaneously - a principle well
known to the era's practitioners of direct cinema in the West. Sometimes the
fine line between non-interventionist observation and collaborative mise-en-
presence is blurred: a case in point is the pharmacy staff's weekly meetings 607
for criticism and improvement, which the by now familiar crew unobtrusively
observed and which are marked by ranges of comfortable spontaneity along-
side what one might call exemplary performances among certain participants.
An engaging five-minute conversation where a dozen workers move from the
advantages of having oxygen tanks in stock to the importance of courtesy and
patience with all customers fluctuates among self-conscious ritual perfor-
mances of prescribed self-criticism to interventions by individuals who have
clearly forgotten the camera. Also in this category, collective food preparation
scenes abound throughout the series, including an extended courtyard dump-
ling-making sequence in Femme, and are excellent occasions for performing
the truth of relationships - among social actors, between them and the crew,
between them and the spectator.
117. Unefemme, unefamille (1976). Star
Gao Siuian (foreground) with her mother
and family in their courtyard making
dumplings: 'the mixture of truth and
theatre'. DVD frame capture. DVD frame
capture. Original in colour. © CAPI Films, P a e__
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.____
- _ -i - t r
CHINA 1971-1989
The artifice of a spatially stable and temporally delimited narrative event
where everyone's busy fingers contribute (usually ending in the pleasurable,
shared consumption of the victual produced) is highly productive. Tani Bar-
low's (2005a) expression, 'the mixture of truth and theatre' is an apt descrip-
tion of such an effect. Another term from French-language direct cinema
theory of the period, already encountered in Chapter 7, is highly applicable to
such events, cindma vdcu ('lived cinema').
Admittedly an aficionado of observational purity could view the mise-en-
presence strategy with apprehension, and the unexamined pejorative terms
'staging', 'set-up' or 'artificially arranged' (Seeger, 2008) enter the discussion
with their own ideological colour (though the terms are never applied to Rouch
or Perrault, to mention just two of the direct cinema innovators of the technique
in the first decade of the direct). For the last 50 years Ivens had obstinately insist-
ed on the documentarist's ethical right to 'reconstruct' the event to be filmed.
608 I He paradoxically asserted that the look and feeling of authenticity are more
important than actual authenticity. Aside from an occasional lapse into the
socialist realist fondness for static, declamatory mise-en-scene, rare enough but
undeniable, Yukong, to my and other 1970s eyes, was remarkably free of such
liabilities. Subsequent exposes of alleged deceit, manipulation, and gullibility,
reports of multiple takes for example, constitute not only a sideswipe at Ivens's
and Loridan's ethics and intelligence as artists but also a misunderstanding of a
complex technique that is based on the paradoxical relationship of artifice, con-
straint, and performance to truth. Zhang Tongdao (quoted in Seegers, 2008b, 5)
puts it more pragmatically and less judgmentally than others in terms of sub-
tle relations on the site of filming and the balance between layers of 'realness'
and 'positive' and 'negative' sides, in particular after the early Xinjiang disaster
when the filmmakers adamantly rejected the interference of local cadres:
I don't think Ivens shot any fake scenes. You need to distinguish between
public China and private China. The footage Ivens shot was all real. The out-
er layer he filmed was real. But there was another reality which he didn't have
access to. He wanted to document it, but he was surrounded by government
officials. He only got to see what they deemed appropriate. [...] The people
who accompanied him were all Party members. They were higher and lower
officials. It's not that they misled Ivens on purpose. They themselves felt that
they had to show the positive side rather than the negative side.
Moreover,
The Chinese government arranged for many officials and cinematogra-
phers from Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio to accompa-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
ny Ivens so that he would not be able to get close to the negative aspects
of China. Ivens tried to fight against this because when shooting Ivens's
principles were to pursue truth and nature. When he was filming, Ivens
only met people that had been trained to be shot. Ivens could only shoot
the bright side of China but he could not get close to the other side that
showed the fighting, the starvation, and the difficult labour and educa-
tion. Ivens was blinded by a mask and never doubted the correctness of
the Cultural Revolution.
(This comment about 'training' is misleading, problematised if only by the
pro-filmic behaviour onscreen of many subjects throughout the series. Even
for some subjects who may have been involved in pre-shoot orientation activi-
ty with local cadres or Beijing facilitators, such as in Ptrole or Caserne, around
anything that stretched from how to behave in front of the camera to what we
would now call 'talking points' to include or emphasise, the word 'train' is too 609
blunt a concept to describe this process, in my opinion, all the more so since
questions were not provided in advance [Lu Songhe, interview and confer-
ence presentation, Beijing, 2008]. If Prof. Zhang is accurate on this nuance,
the trained subjects all turned out to be brilliant actors, admirably skilled in
Western-style behavioural acting, which cannot possibly be the case.) Less
nuanced accusations (Schoots, [1995] 2000, 329) are usually also based on a
sloppy scrutiny or memory of what is on screen, as well as critics' and partic-
ipants' ignorance and decontextualisation vis-a-vis direct cinema's inventory
of strategies and procedures; moreover they have seldom been corroborated
in precise terms of what second-language or translated informants actual-
ly meant to say, and thus have not undermined my fundamental trust in the
authenticity of this fundamental strategy (more later). Ivens with Loridan had
developed these strategies of mise-en-presence during the Indochina period
wherever budgets and bombing lulls permitted and mastered them over eight-
een months in peacetime China where other less urgent stresses were in play.
Finally, here and there throughout the series, collaborative narrative mise-
en-scene, a tactic held over from the pre-direct period, is a fallback resource.
This is especially true in Femme, not surprisingly, since it is the series' only
extended individual portrait, and Gao was a party member, union delegate,
and Cultural Revolution veteran who no doubt instinctively felt the need to
control every nuance in her portrait. The technique looked dated in 1976,
for example, with the camera following Gao on a train with her daughter and
husband, all strictly following the 'don't look at the camera rule', but the film
springs back to life with its privileged moments of interactive group interviews
and long mises-en-presence. Narrative editing, including even the hoary point
of view shots that were already problematical in La Seine, as I have argued in
CHINA 1971-1989
Chapter 6, compounds the issue. As late as 1968, Ivens had been scolded by
Marcorelles himself for this latter tendency in Parallele, as we have seen. For
me, however, the most flagrant relic of earlier narrative idioms is the 'don't
look at the camera rule', which many practitioners of the direct had consigned
to the dung heap of anachronism (though not hold-outs like Wiseman) but
which Ivens still stubbornly clung to in certain contexts and which Chinese
subjects like Gao Shulan enthusiastically obeyed. (In an amusingly self-reflex-
ive moment, the rule is also enthusiastically obeyed by a young father, caught
in long shot profile in Impressions watching the concluding ship launch spec-
tacle while holding his toddler daughter in his arms. The latter is more inter-
ested in the crew however, and the father must prod her and direct her to obey
the rule and points to the spectacle she is supposed to be pretending to watch,
like him. One assumes most other instances of the rule being flouted in the
series ended up on the cutting room floor.)
61o Another French documentarist, Louis Malle, more than three decades
Ivens's junior, arguably had his finger more on the pulse of emerging direct
cinema aesthetics and ethics when in 1968 he set things straight with his cin-
ematographer for the ethnographic television series L'Indefantome, Etienne
Becker (who had by coincidence just finished shooting Rotterdam for Ivens):
I thought it was important to start in a village, because it is the essential
Indian social structure. [...] Etienne said, 'But they're all looking at me, it's
not right, tell them not to look'. I said, 'Why should I tell them not to look
at us since we're intruders? First, I don't speak their language; just a few
of them speak a little English. We're the intruders, disturbing them. They
don't know what we're doing, so it's perfectly normal that they look at us.
To tell them not to look at us, it's the beginning of mise-en-scene'. It's what I
resent about so many documentaries where filmmakers arrive from some-
where and start by telling the people, 'Pretend we are not here'. It is the
basic lie of most documentaries, this naive mise-en-scene, the beginning of
distortion of the truth. Very quickly I realized that these looks at the cam-
era were both disturbing and true, and we should never pretend we weren't
intruders. So we kept working that way. (French and Malle, 1993, 71)
Malle was coming to his own considerable documentary accomplishment
from the direction of New Wave fiction rather than documentary proper, yet
this divergence - generational? philosophical? - between the two artists and
their sense of direct cinema ethics and aesthetics is telling: Ivens kept his
artistic sensibility rooted in certain earlier practices at the same time as mov-
ing forward into Yukong's cutting edge interactive work while it took a novice
to point out the emperor's nudity.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The other visual co-efficient of Ivens and Loridan's 'cinematic Maoism' is
what they called the 'plan-sequence'. I translate this as 'long take' rather than
the literal 'sequence shot', because the filmmakers and editors almost never
constructed full sequences upon a single shot. Rather their standard approach
was often to assemble several long takes, some minutes in length, to fashion
a sequence or a recurring motif. This cinematic approach based on long takes
and a spontaneous, mobile camera, was at that time completely foreign to the
Chinese tradition. Yet the training process that Ivens and Loridan provided for
Li had its results. Li wielded the camera (an Eclair 16) with flexibility and sen-
sitive control throughout the film, would enact graceful circles, hover around
an event and float dexterously from one participant to another, catching both
speakers and listeners, encouraging the spectator's trust in the indexicality of
a scene.'3
The long takes confirm the sense of authenticity and spontaneity that is
already richly connoted by other visual and behavioural cues, but the non-Chi- |611
nese audience may not be not fully equipped to decipher cultural intonations
of body language, facial expressions, and voice, not to mention content. This
problem is complicated by traditional cultural barriers to self-expression that
operate in Chinese society with its still palpable feudal and colonial heritage -
at least in the 1970s - against which not only the filmmaker but also the revolu-
tionary had to struggle. One current insight put it this way: '[the] un-openness
of ancient Chinese culture and the intricacies of Chinese personal relation-
ships frustrated Ivens's filming at every turn' (Sun Hongyun, 2005).4 The long
take preserves a sense of these intricacies all the same, of the pace and the
structure of the political discourse, including culturally shaped opacities,
ambiguities, and inhibitions that were part of the Cultural Revolution on the
grass-roots level. Moreover the long take honours the perpetual self-question-
ing and self-awareness, ritualised, repeated, and occasionally formulaic, that
has its own rhythm and is at the centre of the process the filmmakers wanted
to capture. Ivens's and Loridan's self-effacement before the natural shape of
an event, factoring in minimally the requirements of compression of course,
clearly guided the editing, especially in the longer films, Pharmacie, Usine,
Ptrole, and Femme. In short, some group discussion scenes have an indul-
gence that the 'sound bite' culture of the West could never tolerate.
One exemplary long take scene was shot on the floor of the Beijing loco-
motives factory featured in Femme. This virtuoso six-minute sequence intro-
duced by Ivens's own voice-over about the politics of remembering starts with
193os-style workplace exposition attentively following workers strenuously
but gracefully removing long glowing steel rods from the furnace and insert-
ing them into electrical spring coil-shaping equipment. We follow through the
process until the finished wound coils, still glowing, pop out onto the shop
CHINA 1971-1989
floor. A group of workers introduce themselves and each tells when he joined
the factory (one's employment even predates the 1949 revolution). The group
then invites the filmmakers to follow them over to another corner of the shop
to view an old mechanical device that was once used to bend the coils, an appa-
ratus operated mechanically by human strength rather than flicking a switch
on a control panel. (Did Ivens remember that he had filmed a similar appara-
tus in action 40 years earlier in Zuiderzeewerken [Zuiderzee, 1930-1933, 40-52]?)
The outdated machine has been preserved in line with the political principle
of political remembrance just elaborated, and it is demonstrated for the cam-
era in a vivid single-take mise-en-presence, by six or seven straining, sweating
labourers rotating a lever. The theme suddenly becomes technical innovation
and improvement of working conditions, and the group, which includes tech-
nicians and worker delegates as well as factory floor workers, now take the
time to explain collectively to the crew how the Cultural Revolution brought
612 together these three groups to facilitate improvements in procedures and
equipment. Ivens the narrator explains the key Cultural Revolution plank of
the distinction between worker and intellectual, and the ensuing shop-floor
group monologue is lively and interesting, ranging among different degrees of
stiffness and comfort within the group. All are animated by the 'before/after'
trope, the workers remembering that their heads were empty during the days
when brute muscle was the only requirement and engineers remembering
how they used to be shut up in the office away from the workers and the appli-
cation of their science. The fluid long takes are essential for preserving - even
if only incompletely - the rhythm and integrity of labour and thought, speech
and listening, interpersonal relationships and the space of it all.
It would of course be absurd to make exaggerated essentialist or formal-
ist claims for the abstract virtues of the synchronous head-on close-up, inter-
view or monologue, individual or group, of mise-en-presence, or of the long
take. Direct cinema like any other art form is shaped inevitably by the artist's
selectivity, subjectivity, and application of ethical principles-and his or her
own disclosure of them to subjects and spectators. But here a real dialectic is
in effect. Ivens and Loridan found a hybrid cinematic form that not so much
minimised their own subjectivity, but rather transformed their subjectivity
into a relationship with their subjects. This form is open to and dependent on
the subjectivity of both filmers and filmed, culturally and contextually deter-
mined of course. It is also contingent on the integrity of the events before the
camera, which are transmitted to us transparently and respecting original
durations, thought patterns, spaces and relationships - to the optimal degree
possible. In short, Chinese people were speaking to us more directly than they
ever had before. Moreover Ivens's own occasional intervention as voice-over
narrator (and Loridan's distinctive Parisian voice as interlocutor), perpetually
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
remind the viewer of their subjectivity and of their personal stakes in these
relationships.
It could be argued that a similar effect comes out of the pair's choice to
transcend the traditional linguistic limits of direct cinema not by subtitles
but by a form of dubbed translation over the original language soundtrack,
somewhat lowered in volume. This acoustic structure is to this day much more
common in Europe than in North America, and in this case tends to stress
the dialogic dynamics of the original encounter. It is to the filmmakers' credit
that the dubbing is done very smoothly and sensitively, with great attention to
maintaining audibility of the original Chinese, translators constantly on hand
in the mixing studio to prevent the loss of the tiniest syllable or intonation.
Ivens's (1976a) cinematic rationale for this post-production practice was sim-
ple: 'I believe that the option - subtitling or dubbing - is one of the fundamen-
tal choices: you have to give a film to be read or to be seen'. But the well-known
preferences of the television industry were obviously also a factor. I 613
Ivens had been in Moscow in 1936 and in East Berlin in 1953 and was well
aware of the real-world turns that the dictatorship of the proletariat could take,
though he had seldom publicly reflected on these turns. Still he and Loridan
were perhaps less than fully aware of the complex turbulence that shaped the
political landscape in which Yukong was filmed and was to be released (this
is Seegers's, [2008a, 2008b] obsessively conspiratorial theme: 'why had Ivens
not been told of what was really going on by his Chinese colleagues'?). Or at
best they were naively confident that their sponsorship by an elder statesmen,
whose terminal illness was already reportedly obvious to most when the film-
makers met him, could protect them and their project in perpetuity. They real-
ised how wrong they were when they discovered the Gang of Four capitalising
on Zhou's 1975 hospitalisation to harass them and their film. What better way
to attack the rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping, who was temporarily in office once
more as premier, and steer the country in their own ultra-left direction, than
by demanding weird and picayune cuts from foreign filmmakers! The dis-
tressed couple quickly left town, as we have seen, and prepared for the March
premiere in Paris and the series' subsequent releases throughout Europe and
North America. Zhou was to die two months before the release without ever
seeing the film. However distracted Ivens and Loridan must have been by
Yukong's career, they followed closely the events that took place in Beijing that
April, a mass challenge to the Gang disguised as a spontaneous memorial to
Zhou in what was actually the first Tiananmen incident. They also acknowl-
edged Mao's death in September (their footage of the Paris commemoration
made it onto Chinese news) which led within a month to the military coup that
arrested Jiang and her three henchmen and soon restored Deng and his 'lib-
eral' regime to power. They also noticed with hurt and surprise how the Chi-
CHINA 1971-1989
nese media had not acknowledged Yukong's triumphant career in the theatres
and European festivals that summer and in North American cinematheques
in their wake, but would later discover that long, positive coverage had been
prepared and denied publication (Ivens and Destanque, 1983, 334).
The post-Mao era soon made up for this neglect and the filmmakers once
more became the toasts of the Chinese regime - partly in Zhou's honour, for
the Cultural Revolution was quickly going out of fashion. By February 1977,
Ivens and Loridan were back in Beijing, guests of Marshal Ye Jianying who had
appeared in 400 Million and had masterminded the coup against the Gang.
Deng was restored to power in July and the next month the 11th Party Con-
gress officially declared the Cultural Revolution over. Thus at the end of the
year when Yukong ceremonially premiered in Beijing in its Chinese version,
with much speechmaking by filmmakers and politicos, the film series was
already about the past rather than the present. Nevertheless the series began
614 I to circulate throughout the country in hundreds of prints (Stufkens, 2008, 433-
434) - most of it. Four of the features made the cut: Pharmacie, Village, Usine,
Ptrole, and two of the shorts Ballon and Artisans, admittedly six highlights of
the series. But the Shanghai city film was shelved, perhaps because of its tour-
istic interest, alongside Caserne (the less said about the PLA in general, whose
role in the new order remained somewhat ambiguous?), Professeur Tsien (part
of the pattern of disavowal of the traumatic memory of elites and intellectu-
als who had been sent down along with Deng himself - if they were lucky?),
plus two other shorts and a feature, Opra, Cirque, and Femme (which I suspect
had too much of Jiang's fingerprints on them because they featured either the
arts that had been officially under her wing, or a hardline Beijing female cadre
who had played an active role in the Cultural Revolution [Ivens and Destan-
que, 1982, 334]). Speculation about such byzantine mysteries aside, few failed
to notice that the state studio was sponsoring the circulation of an epic cine-
matic homage to a decade-long political experiment that was officially over.
As Zhang (2009, 37) wryly commented, 'the sudden change in Chinese poli-
tics slapped Ivens in the face by claiming that the Cultural Revolution was a
national disaster [...] while Ivens had been commending it to the West. The
belief in communism broke again. Ivens said he was an ideological man but
never thought of concealing something or deceiving anybody. "In that 50 years
my relationship with China and communism changed a lot, I was bitten by
the teeth of history and the fight taught me to be cautious"'.5 According to
Stufkens (2008, 453-454), 'all screenings of the film after the first screening at
the end of 1977 were halted eighteen months later [June 19791', though Sun
Hongyun (2005) reveals that that would not stop the informal circulation of
the films as VHS gradually emerged in the new market economy of the 1980s
and then gradually ceded to DVD over the years.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The rehabilitation of Ivens and Loridan continued: they were regularly on
the scene throughout the late 1970s, consulting with the Chinese film studios,
as well as catching up with their 'disappeared' old friends and learning first-
hand more of their 7 May tribulations. In 1979 Ivens took part in a Conference
of Literary and Art Workers, and the following year recalled 'Old and young
film workers all impressed me with the fact that after ten dark years Chinese
film art was recovering and advancing' (Ivens, [1980] 1983, 77).
Ivens's eighty-first birthday was celebrated with a huge splash in Novem-
ber 1979, widow Zhou presiding, and this led to an official retrospective at the
Film Archive of China in Beijing the followingyear. The book catalogue accom-
panying the retrospective would appear only two years later (Film Archive of
China 1983), full of splendid testimonies about the greatest friend of the Chi-
nese people from most of his Chinese collaborators since the 1950s.16 Moreo-
ver, both The Camera andl and Ivens's 1982 interviews with Claire Devarrieux
were published in translation by China Film Press. This may have been little 615
consolation for Ivens and Loridan, who felt shame, depression, and ostracism,
not to mention economic hardship and unemployment back home in France
(Loridan, 1998, quoted in Sun Hongyun, 2005, 15), around a work they had
devoted many years of sweat and soul to in tribute to a revolution that had sud-
denly been declared a disaster (On 27 June 1981, the trial of the Gang over, the
Central Committee of the CPC [1981] had officially declared that the Cultural
Revolution 'brought serious disaster and turmoil to the Communist Party and
the Chinese people'). In 1982, Loridan, the more outspoken of the two, admit-
ted to a Dutch journalist (Volkskrant 20 January 1982, quoted in Seegers 2008b)
that she could no longer watch the films and felt ashamed, and confided to a
French journalist Claude Brunel (December 1982, quoted in Stufkens, 2008,
452), 'What are people thinking about the film these days? It's hard to say [...]
abrupt turnabouts in history can be disconcerting. But this film represents a
page in the history of China. Some say the series is a monument. For Joris and
me it is a monster, a folly'. She elaborated with slightly more complexity in a
later Dutch interview (Volkskrant 17 January 1989, quoted in Stufkens, 2008,
453) a few months before Ivens's death - and at the apogee of the Chinese turn
to its neo-liberal regime:
Three years ago there was a retrospective screening of all twelve parts of
Yukong. I turned green and wanted to die. Had I believed it all, everything
that was said in those films? Apart from the fact that Pharmacie remains
a handsome film in its own right, I later came to understand that it was
the work of a couple of westerners filming the dream, which later turned
out to be a utopia, that people can change, that there is something good
in people. It's almost unimaginable that those people were lying. [...] It's
CHINA 1971-1989
possible that the regime used us. But our cameras were always focused
on the people and at the time you believe in the people you're filming. It's
a question of innocence, but in that innocence we might perhaps have
cheated people.
By 1985 the pair had informed their old friend Jan de Vaal at the Nederlands
Filmmuseum that the series was no longer to be available for screening.
Loridan had learned well the lessons from her Paris and Beijing friends
about how to erase history and disavow the convictions of earlier days, and
had not listened carefully to her own commentary in Femme spoken in voice-
over by her late husband 'Connaitre le passe, ne pas oublier, c'est un principe
politique [Knowing the past, not forgetting, is a political principle]'. Nor to the
words from his autobiography 'I had nothing to regret of my past' (Ivens and
Destanque, 1982, 344). When it came 20 years later to preparing the definitive
616 DVD box set of her husband's oeuvre in conjunction with the Foundation bear-
ing his name, Loridan did one better than Yukong's post-Mao Chinese distrib-
utors in 1977. Instead of allowing only one half of the series to be seen, she
decreed that only one-eighth would represent Yukong in the selection, Phar-
macie and Ballon. It seems that the baby had been thrown out with the bath-
water,' both by the new leaders of the Chinese state and the co-director of the
most eloquent, artistic record of its revolutionary past.
The meaning and legacy of Yukong are complex in the neo-liberal era of
Chinese history, post-Tiananmen, as globalised markets and big box sweat-
shops proliferate in the boom and bust cycles of global capitalism. The era
had already been foreseen in 1980 by Badiou ([1980] 2005, 66o-661) as 'the
politics of Deng, the politics of Coca Cola, of the omnipotence of factory direc-
tors, of productivity incentives,'18 of the reduction of education to exams, and
of the suppression of the rights to strike and to post one's grievances'. View-
ers must sigh with mixed sadness and irony when they watch the fastidious
recycling of metal and oil 40 years ago in the generator factory and Daqing oil
field, seen now in a new China where cottage industries of electronic recycling
thrive throughout the toxic backyard dump to the global North that China has
become; they must have the same reaction when they watch Gao Shulan's teen-
aged daughter being chided and teased by mother and brother for buying new
pants she doesn't need, seen now as an augur of the rampant consumerism of
the 21St century. Deng and his successors had already thrown the baby out at the
same moment they were sending the tanks out upon the protesting students in
1989, students who were echoing on the same spot their 1976 ancestors who
were challenging the Gang through mourning Zhou, and echoing their even
more numerous Red Guard ancestors who even a decade earlier than that, also
on Tiananmen, challenged hierarchy, complacency, and abuse:19
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
The path that Deng defined was to transform China in two decades from
a closed backwater to an open centre of capitalist dynamism with sus-
tained growth rates unparalleled in human history [...] the construction
of a particular kind of market economy that increasingly incorporates
neoliberal elements interdigitated with authoritarian centralized con-
trol. [...] But the reforms also led to environmental degradation, social
inequality, and eventually something that looks uncomfortably like
the reconstitution of capitalist class power [...] neoliberalization in
the economy was not be accompanied by any progress in the fields of
human, civil, or democratic rights. [...] A democracy of consumption was
encouraged in urban areas to forestall social unrest. [...] The urban/rural
differential in real incomes is now, according to some estimates, greater
than in any other country in the world. [...] China has travelled the path
from one of the poorest and most egalitarian societies to chronic ine-
quality, all in the space of twenty years. [...] The accumulation of wealth I 617
[...] proceeded in part via a combination of corruption, hidden ruses, and
overt appropriation of rights and assets that were once held in common.
(Harvey, 2005, 120-145)
This book cannot answer the questions raised by this fraught history that
unfolded both before and after Ivens's death. But I will not throw out the
Yukong baby with the Cultural Revolution bathwater in the meantime, and will
not allow Seegers, Schoots and the capitalist roader film critic at the Interna-
tional Herald Tribune to have the final word on this rich, honest, committed,
gargantuan, enduringly political, epic work of art: 'The film itself is not distin-
guished by any cinematic artistry and never rises above the newsreel level, but
as a screen reportage it is an achievement crowded with valuable information'
(Curtiss 24 March 1976, quoted in Schoots, [1995] 2000, 329). An engineer in
Usine in Yukong cites Chairman Mao to the effect that there will be three or four
or five more cultural revolutions, and the final word has thus not yet been said.
Those of us who felt 'hailed' by Yukong in the West in the 1970s, and
embraced it, from this humble graduate student to Marcorelles, Maccioccho,
Badiou, and Hennebelle to the dozens of critics, programmers, and viewers
around the world, were not dupes or knaves. It is incumbent upon us to remem-
ber our utopias, our myopias, and our pragmatisms and to understand, rather
than to silence, blame and shame. The Chinese film studies community have
perhaps done us in the West one better: the 2008 Beijing conference celebrat-
ing Ivens's 110th birthday did not seem like a toast to foreigner who had blindly
chronicled a disaster, but rather a careful exploration of a treasured history of
an artist-friend who 'let the people speak'.
A consensus among 21st-century Chinese film scholars is clear in recognis-
CHINA 1971-1989
ing certain lasting achievements and enduring value in Yukong: Ivens filmed
his subjects with 'warm faith and great energy' and 'we can feel what comes
from the heart' (Sun Hongyun, conference presentation, Beijing, November
2008). Young Shanghai scholar Jie Li (2009) points to a clear legacy even if it
is shared with the very different Antonioni and is at the very least unintended:
If all of China was a stage (or a movie), and all Chinese men and women
were actors, there were still imperfect rehearsals, spontaneous lapses,
and tears at the edges of the stage set. It's the inclusion of accidental
figures and unscripted moments alongside iconic images and polished
performances that distinguish both ChungKuo and the Yukong cycle from
Chinese domestic productions of the time. Both films thus provide us
with the most human pictures we have of life during the Cultural Revolu-
tion, whose visual legacy otherwise appears to us today as fanatic, hysteri-
618 cal, exaggerated, and overwrought.
Zhao Chunlan, a specialist in architecture and environment, finds Yukong to
be a unique research resource:
The long, spontaneous conversations from men and women on daily life
presented opinions never before seen or found elsewhere. The unique
way of filming and the open minded way of approaching the people in
front of the camera resulted in films that were completely different from
Chinese state films of that era.
Moreover,
As revealed in Ptrole, many wives were proud to talk about their activi-
ties in home building and farming. When building activities had been
traditionally perceived as man's job only, it became a vital practice and
experience for these women to prove their potentials and capacities. (The
Ivens Yearly, 2006b, 40)
Outspoken independent documentarist Li Yifan (Before the Flood [co-dir. Yan
Yu, 2005, China, 147]) has a similar sense:
Ivens provided a different way of looking at China under communism.
In those days, communism was everywhere, even in the schools. Ivens's
perspective focuses attention on ordinary matters, not on the party and
government functionaries. He doesn't ask who's wrong and who's right,
but exposes the consequences of political change on everyday life with
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
a non-political vision. I have seen the Yukong series and I thought it was
very good. (Relouw, 2005, 7)
Other Chinese filmmakers have also partaken of this heritage. Ivens's and
Loridan's cinematic Maoism would enter the Chinese cinematic lexicon, but
not overnight and not universally. Ivens was eager to explain this impact in
1976. Drawing from the profound intercultural respect which comes from his
40 years of Marxist practice and addressing a Western reader, he hypothesises
how the Chinese cultural heritage impinged on the political aesthetics of Chi-
nese documentary:
The Chinese cinema is different from ours. It is more contemplative, more
static. The camera doesn't take part in the action, the camera records,
it observes it. According to ancient Chinese philosophy, man, standing
between heaven and earth, looks at the ten thousand things of the uni-|619
verse. The result is that the camera doesn't move. For a cameraperson, to
understand that he or she can move with the camera, it's quite an upheav-
al. And most often, when this is undertaken, a Chinese cameraperson falls
into the opposite extreme and moves it too much. It is necessary to explain
to him or her the role and the function of each camera movement. Another
important point is that in the Chinese cinema, in general, there are fewer
close-ups than in ours. That's also tied to a cultural tradition. In the body
of their visual art, you don't see portraits brought up close to people, except
in the Buddhist tradition. It was necessary for me then to explain the role
I was giving to the close-up, why compact framings were useful. That took
a long time, because in China you have to have the patience to convince
people. It is not a question of persuading them with arguments on the
basis of authority, as you can often do elsewhere. That also is the Cultural
Revolution. (Ivens and Loridan, 1976a)20
In China, you know, man [sic] is not the centre of the universe, like in the
West. Look at Chinese paintings: man is represented there as very small,
his relationship with the world is thus of another sort. (Macciocchi, 1976)
Li's, Ivens's and Loridan's achievement, when regarded in terms of Yukong's
intervention into this cinematic tradition, takes on a different and even more
admirable aspect, and the subsequent teaching careers of both Li and Ivens's
friend and contemporary Situ Zhaodun were two routes among many for this
transmission of influence (Stufkens, 2008, 20). Jie's is among several claims
pointing to the palpable influences Yukong would have on Chinese documen-
tary, its rocky career notwithstanding, for example on China's perhaps most
lauded 21st-century documentarist:
CHINA 1971-1989
China's new documentary movement produced such films as Wang
Bing's nine-hour three-part epic West of the Tracks (2003) on northeast
China's industrial area as millions of workers undergo a painful transi-
tion from state-owned industry to a free market. Based on techniques
like synch-sound, long takes, follow shots, and interviews, this sequel on
the fate of China's working class is perhaps the closest inheritor of the
Yukong cycle in style and content, except that there is no more faith in the
redeeming power of a political, social, or cultural revolution. (Jie, 2009,
36)
Gauthier (2001, 18) has also made this claim about influences on Wang Bing,
and Prudentino (2003, 133) sees an even wider web of influences among more
hybrid works by Tian Zhuangzhuang and others of the 'sixth generation'. It
was not the first time that Ivens's roving camera had had a stimulating effect
620 on the cinematic practice of another society in this way.
Although Chinese witnesses are scrupulous about not explicitly claiming
a political heritage of the Cultural Revolution, Loridan (quoted in Prudentino,
2003, 138) was able in 2003 to salvage some positive outcomes of her trauma:
'At the same time I respect these experiments that they attempted, even if they
renounced them five or ten years later; experiments of generosity, giving of
self, sharing, caring for others in an extremely hard and egotistical, closed and
envious society'. Ivens had anticipated the need for a balanced stock-taking
two decades earlier:
Today we are reproached quite often of not having evoked the other
China, of not having spoken of repression and struggles, of excesses
and mistakes. But how to do that? In a certain way there's been a misun-
derstanding about Yukong. Some have perceived and classified it as an
official film. Holding this view has no sense. Official in respect of whom?
Zhou Enlai? Certainly not, he never gave or even suggested a direction.
In relation to Jiang Qing?2" Even less. No, Yukong is an Ivens film and its
defects and its limits are the defects and limits of Ivens. On their side, the
Chinese - and I mean by that filmmakers, intellectuals, political cadres,
men and women we worked with - perceived another dimension. For
me, for Marceline, getting a worker to talk, or an employee or a fisher, in
front of the camera was a natural thing. For them, it was a revolution. In
this sense, Yukong got out of our hands and went beyond us. The film was
built in the middle of these ambiguities, but, it was my feeling and it was
my decision, it had to be made. That's called taking risks. When one is
a documentarist and when one works in the heat of events, it's difficult
to avoid them. The current of history almost moves in one direction, you
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
think you are following it correctly and, suddenly, it changes direction,
or else an undercurrent, invisible until then, becomes stronger and
carries everything with it. What does that mean? That beyond all these
turbulences there is a direction that I've chosen, to which I believe and to
which I try to stay faithful. It's Man in the conquest of his Freedom and
his Dignity. Do I have to spell it out for it to be clear? Yukong was made in
this spirit. (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 334)
Ultimately, our estimation of Yukong's success is tied to our historical under-
standing of what is dismissed as the 'failure' of the Cultural Revolution, and
Badiou helps us relativise that concept to such other 'failed' historical epi-
sodes as the Paris Commune, the October Revolution, and May 1968:
We have to think about the notion of failure. What exactly do we mean
by 'failure' when we refer to a historical sequence that experimented 621
with one or another form of the communist hypothesis? What exactly do
we mean when we say that all the socialist experiments that took place
under the sign of that hypothesis ended in 'failure'? Was it a complete
failure? By which I mean: does it require us to abandon the hypothesis
itself, and to renounce the whole problem of emancipation? Or was it
merely a relative failure? Was it a failure because of the form it took or
the path it explored? Was it a failure that simply proves that it was not the
right way to resolve the initial problem? (Badiou, [2008] 2010, 6)
Tani Barlow is among the few American scholars to share such a serene and
lucid view of the legacy of Ivens's work and of the Cultural Revolution, outlin-
ing several pragmatic reasons for the importance of keeping Yukong in view,
worthy of being cited at length:
First, seeing the documentary film will help disrupt a well-established
tendency to see the Maoist Cultural Revolution in black and white terms,
because Yukong documents mundane political drama. It presents us with
a complexity that has been lost in the bitter polemics of the post-Mao era.
Viewing Yukong now will return politics to a day-to-day issue, where it can
be seen more clearly and reconsidered. [...]
[Next] the fate of politically engaged art and philosophy hangs in the
balance. The great tradition of engaged cinematic art has been reborn
in China. Documentary-style cindma vdritd is a leading sector in the arts
scene. The socio-economic 'Great Transformation' of the Chinese polity
has brought into being a thriving art movement that is seeking to docu-
ment the lives of the poor, migrant, minoritized, or dislocated, as well as
CHINA 1971-1989
the everyday experiences of ordinary rural or urban people. In this way,
although obviously not directly in a cause and effect relation, Yukong is a
progenitor of filmmakers in China today. And what happens in the Peo-
ple's Republic engages moviegoers everywhere.
[Finally] the drama of present day Chinese 'development' and its
neo-liberal high tide is anything but benign: Yukong is agitprop art, and
as art, it carries a political heritage that should not be forgotten in these
times.
Barlow also turns like myself to Maoist Yukong collaborator Badiou for an elo-
quent summation of her argument:
In his poignant essay, 'Love What You Will Never Believe Twice', Alain
Badiou argued that from political catastrophes we inherit problems, not
solutions. It is important to remember what impels us to act, even cat-
astrophically. [...] The question of whether a history of the Cultural Rev-
olution is possible is also important. If it is possible to document what
led millions and millions of people all over the globe to take a radical
road toward desired social equality and anti-capitalism in the late 196os,
then perhaps two previously obscured promissory notes can appear as
redeemable. We can ask why revolution became repression. We can think
again about a future post-capitalist world at least in part because we have
inherited the failures and successes of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
The problems of China are everyone's problems. [...] Yukong documents
a failed attempt to address crises that have not gone away. Its value to our
today and tomorrow is vast. (Barlow, 2005a, 18)
Finally, American queer theory supplements French Maoist philosophy in
offering an even more ringing conclusion to this section on Yukong and his
dreams of future generations:
The history of political formations is important because it contests
social relations as given and allows us to access traditions of political
action that, while not necessarily successful in the sense of becoming
dominant, do offer models of contestation, rupture, and discontinuity
for the political present. These histories also identify potent avenues of
failure, failures that we might build upon in order to counter the logics of
success that have emerged from the triumphs of global capitalism. (Hal-
berstam, 2011, 19)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
UNE HISTOIRE DE VENT
This leaves us, then, with the Later Works of those artists who have lived
without ever ceasing to learn of life. The field is relatively narrow; but
within it, what astonishing, and sometimes what disquieting treasures!
[...] It is a progress from light-hearted 18"'-century art, hardly at all
unconventional in subject matter or in handling, through fashionable
brilliancy and increasing virtuosity to something quite timeless both in
technique and spirit - the most powerful of commentaries on human
crime and madness, made in terms of an artistic convention uniquely
fitted to express precisely that extraordinary mingling of hatred and
compassion, despair and sardonic humour, realism and fantasy.
-Aldous Huxley on Goya, 1943
The Yukong aftermath was very hard on Ivens and Loridan. But the now ageing
couple bounced back and started developing new projects.
We have already seen how Loridan's response to the post-Mao fluctuations
in their artistic, political, and personal status was more public and apparently
more extreme than Ivens's, who had already been bitten by the teeth of his-
tory, as he put it, many times (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 15). In respect to
Loridan, whom Schoots ([1995] 2000, 275) describes as being 'marked forever'
STITI. r 1ii . t k 4 ,E'.E..-.
,TIILUf*A J.' ".4~ .' A. I' t nbAl l.2, 1V %I I~II W A~ 1LkT -, : Fio.E '.+
118. Une histoire de vent (1988): Italian poster by the film's Italian
distributor, the state documentary and educational outfit. The Melies-
inspired 'old-man-on-the-moon' sequence is the film's most iconic.
Original in colour, courtesy coll. EFJI, Nijmegen.
119. Une histoire de vent
(1988): production photo of
filmmakers and crew in Dazu
cave before the Buddha of the
thousand comforting hands
and eyes (translator Lu Songhe
is directly behind Ivens).
Original in colour, courtesy
coll. EFJI, Nijmegen © CAPI
Films, Paris, and Marceline
Loridan-Ivens.
by 'erratic mood swings, vulnerability, and insecurity, which changed into
unreasonable severity at the least sign of threat', it might be thought that no
longer being able to watch the Yukong films and feeling ashamed are strong
reactions, not incomprehensible, but turning green and wanting to die surely
take things a step further. Coupled with her dogged support for - and protec-
tiveness of - her chronically ill and increasingly fragile husband and artistic
collaborator, her public repudiation of an entire decade of their joint career
together commands a certain awe, which swells as one follows her intense
sprint for the rest of the 198os across increasingly rocky terrain towards the
elderly pair's final epic enactment of the creative process. Loridan turned 55
in March 1983, two months after the final scuttling of the Florence project that
had been on the drawing board for more than three years, and Ivens would
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
turn 85 that fall. Histoire occupied the next five years, bowing at the Venice fes-
tival in the fall of 1988, and the 90-year-old 'Flying Dutchman' finally touched
down for good on 28 June 1989.
I would like to persist with this angle on shame, not as a biographical line
(for Schoots has squeezed that dry), but as a textual hermeneutic. For I think
the creative processing of shame through art is a compelling explanation both
of the intergenerational artist couple's resilience after two cataclysmic humil-
iations in the last decade of Ivens's life, and also of Histoire as a cinematic
text. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's (1993a, 14) classic delineation of the affect of
shame has definitively marked two decades of queer and cultural theory. Not
only 'shame is simply the first, and remains a permanent, structuring fact of
identity: one that has its own powerfully productive and powerfully social met-
amorphic possibilities', but also for our purposes, her link of shame to cre-
ativity is as fitting as it is well known. Building on the work of psychologists
and anthropologists about the processing of stigma and spoiled identity, she I 625
undertook a pioneering case study of late-19thcentury American novelist Hen-
ry James (1843-1916) in the last decade of his career. Indebted to this work, I
am making on the one hand the simple point of the therapeutic operation of
the art-making process. This point seems patently obvious at several points in
the Ivens filmography in relation to those fresh spurts of creative energy after
moments of interruption, renunciation, and trauma, represented for example
by Spanish Earth (after the frustrating idleness and danger in Moscow), Indo-
nesia Calling (after the Netherlands East Indies debacle), La Seine (after the
inertia at DEFA and the failure of Till - not to mention the shame of de-Stalini-
sation), the Cuban and Chilean work (after the Italian humiliation), etc.
On the other hand using Sedgwick's psychoanalytic and deconstructionist
parsing, I would be tempted furthermore to delve deeper and in more detail
into the process between Yukong and its complement Histoire, were space
available in this study, which it is not. Suffice it for now to contemplate His-
toire's rich summation and synthesis of Ivens's life and career: notably the
film's opening reconstitution of a juvenile scene with its performative invo-
cation of a child aviator who is the father of the globetrotting filmmaker man
is breathtakingly poignant, as are the excerpts from one of his earliest works
as a young apprentice, Branding (Breakers, 1929, Netherlands, 42). The film's
reparative operation with regard to the traumas of the last decade or so of that
career is not hard to extrapolate.
One discovers thereby astonishingly fruitful and uncannily detailed par-
allels between the Histoire project and Sedgwick's take on what she calls the
'queer performativity' of James's testamentary prefaces to the re-publication
of his life's work (the New York edition) in the first decade of the 20th century.
I am so struck by the relevance of these parallels, that is both artists' 'strategy
CHINA 1971-1989
for the production of meaning and being, in relation to the affect shame and
to the later and related fact of stigma' (Sedgwick, 1993b, 58), that Sedgwick's
reflections are worth quoting at length. James undertook this enterprise of
[C]onsolidation and revision [...] between two devastating bouts of mel-
ancholia. The first of these scouring depressions was precipitated in 1895
by what James experienced as the obliterative failure of his ambitions as
a playwright, being howled off the stage at the premiere of Guy Domville.
By 1907, though, when the volumes of the New York edition were begin-
ning to appear, James's theatrical self-projection was sufficiently healed
that he had actually begun a new round of playwrighting and of negotia-
tions with producers [...] eventuating, indeed, in performance. The next
of James's terrible depressions was triggered, not by humiliation on the
stage, but by the failure of the New York edition itself: its total failure to
626 sell and its apparently terminal failure to evoke any recognition from any
readership.
[... The prefaces are] a series of texts that are in the most active
imaginable relation to shame. Marking and indeed exulting in James's
recovery from a near-fatal episode of shame in the theatre, the prefaces,
gorgeous with the playful spectacle of a productive and almost promis-
cuously entrusted or 'thrown' authorial narcissism, yet also offer the
spectacle of inviting (that is, leaving themselves open to) what was in fact
their and their author's immediate fate: annihilation by the blankest of
nonrecognizing responses from any reader. [...]
At least two different circuits of the hyperbolic narcissism/shame
orbit are being enacted, and in a volatile relation to each other. The first
of these [...] is the drama of James's relation to his audience of readers,
[...] the second and related narcissism /shame circuit dramatized in the
prefaces is the perilous and productive one that extends between the
speaker and his own past, [...] the intensely charged relationship between
the author of the prefaces and the often much younger man who wrote
the novels and stories to which the prefaces are appended. [...]
What undertaking could be more narcissistically exciting or more
narcissistically dangerous than that of rereading, revising, and consolidat-
ing one's own 'collective works'? [...]
James, then, [...] is using reparenting or 'reissue' as a strategy for
dramatizing and integrating shame, in the sense of rendering this poten-
tially paralyzing affect narratively, emotionally, and performatively pro-
ductive. (Sedgwick, 1993a, 8-11, my emphasis)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
One might be tempted to imagine that such parallels occur because the
dynamics Sedgwick points to must be intrinsic to most testamentary initia-
tives by elderly toilers in the arts, as Aldous Huxley demonstrates in the essay
on Goya excerpted in the epigraph above.22 We will come back to this possi-
bility slightly later when I situate Histoire within a fascinating intertext of first
person work within the cinematic essay genre from the period of the late 20th
century. But meanwhile, rather than leaping ahead to the details of the textu-
al processing of shame in Histoire, let us come back to the early 198os when
Histoire was still a treatment in a drawer, and Ivens's 'self-projection', his pro-
cessing of shame, was happening in the pages of his final autobiography La
Mdmoire d'un regard. Preparing the way for Histoire, this first 'narcissistic' iter-
ation of Ivens's invocation of his childhood and his summation of his career
climaxes in an intense and uncharacteristically personal and 'perilous' dis-
cussion of his special relationship with China, to which he and Loridan would
soon return to 'do right by' after the shame of 'cheating' the Chinese (Schoots, I 627
[1995] 2000, 349). The discussion finally alights on friendship, both with their
Chinese friends who have weathered the flux of the last two decades even
more than the two outsiders, and with their friends, family members, and col-
laborators around the world who have travelled Ivens's six-decade career or
parts thereof with him. The final pages of Mmoire are an uncharacteristically
personal and tender litany of individual after individual, those whom he had
fallen out with either politically or personally like Van Dongen and Wegner
and those with whom he had maintained close bonds like the Chinese cadre,
cultural bureaucrat, and film educator Situ Huimin, who had 'disappeared'
during the Cultural Revolution and then like Ivens and Deng was rehabilitat-
ed. At this moment he embraced and elaborated a discourse and practice of
friendship. This practice moved beyond the politics in the narrow sense that
had recently covered him and Loridan in shame, including the brand of 'Sta-
linist' and public shunning on the streets of Paris (Seegers, 2008b). It seemed
in addition to be trying to probe a broader form of politics, solidarity, and
forgiveness, a politics of human relationships - a politics of filmmaking as
human relationships - that would ultimately surface cinematically in Histoire
alongside that film's soft-pedalling of earlier forms of solidarity politics.
In the midst of this process of 'thrown authorial narcissism' and the post-
Mao roller coaster ride, a new project on Florence was being developed begin-
ning in the latter part of 1979. The artists, producers, and funders (including
the region of Tuscany, the municipality of Florence and Ivens's old neme-
sis that had shamed him two decades earlier, RAI-Radiotelevisione Italia-
na) would draw out the process, ultimately in vain, for three and a half years.
Florence was clearly intended to be both a reparative initiative and the kind of
testamentary synthesis of Ivens's career that Mmoire was turning out to be
CHINA 1971-1989
and Histoire would become. Although Florence had not been featured in L'Ita-
lia non e un paese povero (Italy Is Not a Poor Country, 1960, 112), this commu-
nist-dominated city had always been a special place for Ivens, and its annual
left-leaning documentary festival Festival dei popoli had been almost a second
home to Ivens since its founding in 1959. According to Stuflens, Florence was
to be a subjective film with fictional elements rather than a classical documen-
tary, a film in which Ivens himself was to play a role, and was to establish links
with his youth in a sort of jeu de miroir', links with his love for rivers and with
the city's wealth of artistic treasures. The film was intended as an art-historical
film, but to focus primarily on the city's present inhabitants. The narrative of
the history of culture, of the masterpieces of the Renaissance, and of the ever
flowing river, is interspersed with images of tourists in their annoying droves,
and of the garbage the city's refuse collectors had to deal with on a daily basis.
In search of new technologies, Ivens devised a scene in which he talked about
628 his life in front of a video wall screening, among other things, a profusion of
fragments from his own films (Stuflens, 2008, 463-464).23
Thus, Florence was to be yet another city essay film, a return to the 1960s
in a way with its echoes especially of Rotterdam. The process went very far until
the financing fell apart at the last minute in early 1983, thanks in part to shifts
in the region's political winds from left to right, and Ivens and Loridan were
howled off the stage, so to speak, in yet another seriously demoralising blow.
The germs of Histoire had already being sown during Ivens's three earli-
er China projects: the fascination with Chinese culture's iconographies of the
wind in 1938, incarnated in that film's memorable shots of 'the great lions
of China looking in the four directions of the wind' and references to artists
who could 'paint the wind'. Ideas for specific teaching exercises during the
Beijing interlude of the late 1950s no doubt shaped the wind motifs in Before
Spring but did not lead to a hoped-for specific film on the wind itself. As we
have seen, a French rendition of the concept saw the light as Mistral in the
following decade, which incorporated stunning aerial footage embodying the
point of view of the capricious Provenal wind but also aimed for other ambi-
tious elements that could never be realised. A few years later, the wind con-
cept resurfaced as a too-expensive, futile, and no doubt untimely proposal to
incorporate aerial photography of the sublime geography of Western China
into the strictly tripod- and shoulder-borne Yukong itself. The latter proposed
treatment, called Roof of the World (referring to the common name for Chi-
na's highest mountain range, the Pamirs, which extend from the western edge
of the country into central Asia) reached its final form in December 1972, a
project to be filmed entirely from the air, from the perspective of the clouds
and wind, at four different altitudes. Each altitude was to have its own musical
tempo (andante, adagio) and the perspective was to begin at the highest alti-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
tude, from the highest mountain peak, to the lowest. The source and course of
China's greatest rivers were to be followed, old cities and cultural monuments
interspersed with revolutionary locations and scores of red flags to be filmed
(Stufkens, 2008, 460).
As we have seen, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had its own
imperatives, and the urban earthbound logic of Beijing and Shanghai soon
trumped the Pamirs. The only inkling of the future Histoire in Yukong is the
festive cakes that appear in Femme, which Ivens the narrator informs us are
made each year in memory of the mythological drunken poet who drowned,
a tale heard perhaps for the first time that day by Ivens and which would be
memorably dramatised in Histoire. Amid the couple's frequent visits to Chi-
na around Ivens's eightieth and eighty-first birthday, after Yukong and after
Mao, the treatment of Roof of the World sat in the drawer ready to be revived
(Stufkens, 2008, 459-460). This time, well before the collapse of the Florence
project, things began concretising around the new China wind idea. As narrat- | 629
ed to Destanque in 1981, the year of the great Beijing retrospective (the auto-
biography was begun in 1979 and the book launched in May 1982), the new
version of the treatment already had the Roof of the World title. This treatment
for a 'great poetic fresco on China' contained two main elements.
Firstly, a fleshing out of the earlier nature epic proposal, with new height-
ened emphasis on Chinese cultural history:
I think I will realize this dream, take off from the summit, glide towards
the sea and dive all the while surveying space and the history of China.
Let me say that Roof of the World is going to be the most lyrical film I
have ever made, a fantastic, epic film depicting the immensity of the uni-
verse and the dimensions of civilization, from cave dwelling to socialism.
The clouds as backdrop. I have always been fascinated by clouds. When I
travel by plane, I can spend hours watching their ever changing forms. In
the sky there is infinite space, pure air, and a strange dizziness that draws
me higher and higher. On the ground there are people. And in the thick
tufts of cloud I see other forms take shape in my mind's eye, images from
legends, battles, figures from the world of mythology. This is China's
memory, its history.
I then descend with my camera from the roof of the world and fly
[above the clouds. It's the plane and I am] elevated above reality. Sudden-
ly I see the earth through a hole in the clouds. The contours of the culti-
vated landscape follow the lines of geographical relief and I dive to the
surface. In a couple of seconds I descend to the level of humanity [in the
rice paddy, at the level of his look and his hand. Two children play under
a tree, an insect crosses a ray of sun, I am in] the microcosmos. I dally for
CHINA 1971-1989
a moment and then I return, back to the sky, and my vista expands anew
to the level of the cosmos. I am free of the laws of gravity and space. In my
next dive, I penetrate the ocean, plunge to the depths of the China Sea.
Silence all around, strange fish dart past. I linger for a moment in this
underwater universe and then I return to the people, or to the sky, on the
roof of the world.
I am the master of space, but also of time. Only film provides such
freedom. I embrace the history of China and give the audience an impres-
sion of China's ancient past and boundless future. Four thousand years
ago, the Chinese were already carving statues. Man was there with his
intelligence and he remains. [...] When I move through the clouds, I see
enormous projections of this civilization, in which mythology and reality
coincide. (Stufkens, 2008, 463-464, my additional translation)
630 I Secondly, a depoliticisation of the discourse about China, the word 'socialism'
notwithstanding, was in the works:
I committed myself and I had struggled very close to the Communist Par-
ty at a time when I considered that it was right to do so. If now I doubted
this party and rejected it, in doing so I was affirming my commitment
and confirming my will to struggle for my ideas. This struggle took anoth-
er direction, but I had nothing to regret of my past. [...] If I make The Roof
of the World, the partisans of 'Ivens the militant filmmaker' will have a
basis to ask themselves questions and answer them as it suits them. [...]
Today, before a commitment, it seems to me essential to do a tabula rasa
of dogmas and ideologies that have disappointed us, to reconsider words
that have obscured our intellects, and to come back to the reality of facts.
Facts are hard, sometimes unbearably hard, all the more so for people
like me, who have dedicated themselves to the struggle of socialism and
revolution. (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 279-280)
The vagueness of 'my ideas' and the 'reality of facts' is, needless to say, unchar-
acteristic of the earlier Ivens. Roof would continue Ivens's specialty genre of
the 'China film' but would distance itself from the specificity of solidarity dis-
courses, at least in the narrow political sense, retaining only vestigial traces of
Ivens's erstwhile passion for Mao's revolution.
Once silent in the early 1970s about the 'ambiguities' of the Cultural Rev-
olution (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 334), the couple would now be silent
onscreen about the disconcerting neo-liberal course that the heirs of that rev-
olution were now pursuing. The only possible exception would be ambiguous
overtones about both Mao and Deng in one or two scenes, to be discussed
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
later, but both at this embryonic stage in the development of Histoire and in
the finished product six years later, the politics that 'the militant Ivens' had
devoted almost a half-century to elaborating were gone missing. The shame of
non-recognition and subsequent disavowal is certainly a factor, but also obvi-
ously the continuing imperative of public loyalty to a Deng regime that was
after all still welcoming the couple with open arms and whose support was
needed to make all those aerial shots in Roof.
These and a few other teeth of history at this point (Ivens and Destanque,
1982, 15) seemed to be relegating politics to discourses around rather than on
the screen. That is to say, the symptomatic focus by both Ivens in his autobio-
graphical text and Loridan in her interviews on the dissident communist writ-
er Bai Hua (b. 1930), in trouble from the earliest points in his career and newly
targeted by Deng for a contentious fictional film24 the year Ivens finished his
autobiography, symbolically kept the flame of politics burning:
I 631
Bai Hua is a communist, he adores his people, his country, and he wishes
China to advance with socialism and in democracy. But Bai Hua is a man
of truth, an artist who affirms his point of view and, affirming this, gives
evidence of the contradiction that opposes the writer and political power.
This contradiction has been there forever, but it is particularly violent
in regimes said to be 'revolutionary'. It's an objective contradiction that
we shouldn't be scandalized by or deny, but on the contrary recognize it,
shake it up, go beyond it. (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 336-337)
Ivens's final sally forth, days before his death in 1989, in support of Paris stu-
dents protesting the Tiananmen massacre, is a final vivid punctuation to this
discourse of politics around (Schoots, [1995] 2000, 361).
After the final plug-pulling of the Florence project in January 1983, an
important element of that film was added to the Roof project, namely the
aspiration to use the city film hook as a framework for a personal synthesis
of - an apologia - for Ivens's career. Thus rounded out, Roof was on its way to
becoming Histoire, the project acquiring a new momentum that would carry it
through to completion five years later despite Ivens's increasing health prob-
lems and all the interruptions and script changes these occasioned.
Along the way a new collaborator joined the team, Elisabeth D. Prasetyo (b.
1959), a journalist and screenwriter whom Loridan and Ivens had met on the
set of Juliet Berto's fiction feature Havre (1986, France, 90). Berto, an actress
turned director, was a former Godard collaborator and ironically the support-
ing star of his La Chinoise but her Maoist aura had dissolved by the time she
took on Ivens for a supporting role in her first feature. That film, shot in the
summer of 1985, was a not very consequential art film otherwise notable for its
CHINA 1971-1989
cinematic display of a very Ivensian port city as its set and for casting Ivens as
Dr. Digitalis, a sort of spiritual guide for its tormented and aimless young char-
acters. Ivens's four or so short scenes showed him improvising philosophical
guidance for the characters and demonstrated his incontrovertible presence
onscreen as a 'luminous' white-maned patriarch (Berto, 1985). This led the
couple and Prasetyo to devise a similar role for the hitherto camera-shy docu-
mentarist in the still-evolving China project. Along with this persona, Havre's
atmosphere of slightly fantastic goings-on in 'found' exterior sets would be
recognisable in Histoire, and Schoots and Stuflens corroborate that it was the
Indonesia-based Prasetyo responsible for mixing additional fiction and fan-
tasy elements into the existing documentary-based project (Stufkens, 2008,
465-466). Prasetyo would also bond with Loridan as a long-term collaborator,
sharing the writer credit with her on her 2003 feature La Petite Prairie aux bou-
leaux (The Birch-Tree Meadow, France, 91), an autobiographical fiction based
632 I on her experience of deportation and internment in Auschwitz, and on her
2008 memoirs My vie balagan (as Elisabeth Inandiak).
Throughout the process Loridan's collaborator role swelled from that of
facilitator and encourager to the apparent author of significant segments in
the film - and in all likelihood surrogate author of Ivens's voice in the film -
all the more since Ivens's bouts of illness, some very life-threatening, became
more frequent as production got underway in earnest in late 1985 and con-
tinued into late summer of 1987. In fact, these last two months of produc-
tion unfolded fully under Loridan's control as Ivens lay convalescing in Paris.
Although the theme of memory and autobiographical performance is Ivens's,
it may well have been Loridan who convinced her husband of the validity of
first-person corporeal performance and more ominously to renounce his
political legacy (or to allow these readings to be performed).25 For example,
it was she who almost solely developed in Ivens's absence in 1987 the studio
setpiece that offered Histoire's only explicit though still ambiguous sendup
of Maoism (see below). Editing was complete in time for Venice one year lat-
er, where the film and Ivens's entire career received special honours, and the
Paris theatrical launch happened in March 1989, three months before Ivens's
death.
Although Ivens was not overjoyed with the box office for the film in the
final months of his life - except in the Netherlands where it did well - in fact
the film was greeted enthusiastically everywhere, playing three of the most
prestigious festivals in the world, Venice (awarded a career prize, although
this honour was ignored by critics [Logette, 1989]), Toronto, and New York.
Critics were unanimous from Paris ('Une Histoire du vent has touched us deep-
ly, in that distant zone that very few works reach' [Logette, 1989], to Chicago
('masterpiece' [Rosenbaum, 1992]). The critics in Montreal, where I saw the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
film at the Festival du nouveau cinma in the fall after its launch, were perhaps
typical in their praise: from 'a unique film, very beautiful, full of inventions,
unclassifiable' (Perreault, 1988) to what was perhaps the most fervent appre-
ciation anywhere:
Reality or fiction, what does it matter? Joris Ivens invites us on the
most beautiful voyage on the earth and in the sky - a superb homage to
Mdlies's Trip to the Moon - that the imagination of an obstinate man can
have creatures of reason make. Everywhere his almost divine will carries
him, he instals his set and invents his world. The documentarist is not
content with what he sees nor with what he hears. He must film the invis-
ible and record the inaudible. And he does so with grace, beauty, and
the elegance of creators who are no longer afraid of anything. In the face
of death, Joris Ivens, a wise old atheist, is reconciled with the Gods. In a
sublime impulse, Tale of the Wind makes the poetry of the soul resonate I 633
in the hearts of men. (Boulad, 1989)
This said, most notices tended to synopsise or describe and relate it to Ivens's
career as a whole without analysing the film in detail, like Variety ('a winning
docu-fantasy by this great documaker [...] even more impressive is the way the
work sums up a career that spans the 20th century' [Variety, 1988]), and Per-
reault was not the only critic to use the word 'unclassifiable' (e.g. Garel, 1989).
Of course, Ivens did not live to see the film canonised as a key plank of the
growing literature about essay cinema (Scherer, 2001; Lopate, 1996, 261) in
the 1990s and thereafter.
As a full-length intertextual, autobiographical, hybrid essay film, with a full
claim to documentary status despite its significance reliance on dramatisa-
tion, Histoire commands an artistic and thematic spectrum of discursive and
aesthetic resources rivalled by few of Ivens's previous finished films (although
the epic aspirations of First Years, Das Lied der Strome [Song of the Rivers, 1954,
DDR, 90], and perhaps Yukong arguably come close). Several never-realised
projects had also anticipated the range and richness of the discourses mar-
shalled by Ivens and Loridan in Histoire, mostly obviously the five-part Mistral
from two decades earlier, but also the two large-scale proposals of the World
War II era that never went beyond the drawing board, the proposal to Archi-
bald MacLeish of 1941 and the Netherlands East India encyclopedia project.
Histoire's ambitious synthesising operation incorporates dramatisation, com-
pilation, landscape, direct cinema observation, performance, and pastiche. It
would be misleading, however, to think of Histoire as Ivens's final untramme-
led realisation of so many earlier, frustrated encyclopedic dreams. This film
CHINA 1971-1989
too, as we have already seen, was frustrated in its own way, like so many ear-
lier grandiose dreams, by the hurdles and detours of history - not the least of
which was Ivens's own waning health - and emerged as a distant and down-
scaled relative of the original proposals.
Histoire's essayistic structure interweaves six major threads in a mosaic
form that loosely coheres through the first of these as elaborated below, the
narrative arc of the Ivens persona of the old filmmaker finally encountering -
and taming? - his oeuvre and the wind:
1. in what the couple's old collaborator Sergent calls an 'auto-fiction', the
dramatised narrative arc of the old filmmaker revisiting his youth and
encountering the wind, is a loose descendant of the original thread in
the treatment following a semi-fictionalised elder filmmaker filming
China. Eight mediator characters (five of them dramatised, and three
nonfiction) serve to hook up this persona and his narrative arc with pres-
ent-day China. The fictional characters are: the mythological figure of the
monkey king trickster, borrowed from Beijing Opera; a little girl astutely
observing the shoot in the desert, the first female in Ivens's long tradition
of child mediator characters; a gap-toothed witch finally hired to bring
forward the recalcitrant wind with her spells; the legendary moon prin-
cess who wants to return from her exile to the earth; and Ivens himself as
the shame-conjured child aviator who wants to fly to China. Documen-
tary characters include the elderly martial arts trainer befriended by the
Ivens persona on an urban square, who counsels the asthmatic on his
breathing; a sculptor commissioned by the filmmakers to create a dragon
mask to help in the wind appeal; and the hapless Mr. Wang, custodian
of the terracotta warriors that had been constructed by an emperor to
protect his grave in the third century BCE (only a recent discovery, in fact
in March of 1974 while the couple had been editing in Paris, and of which
they probably saw samples for the first time in a post-Mao travelling exhi-
bition in Europe in 1981 [Stufkens, 2008, 463-464]) who stubbornly refus-
es the filmmakers access to the tomb site and suffers their cinematic
revenge. Within this arc then, Ivens's old objective of personalisation sur-
faces, but moves beyond the political instrumentalisation and exemplary
dramaturgy it had always embodied, as per the socialist realism schema.
This narrative arc is, as Sedgwick (1993b, 52) would put it, 'gorgeously'
rich in shame, periodic instances of shame experience and processing
cropping up intradiegetically throughout the film. On a literal level, I am
referring to a comically foregrounded banana-skin pratfall suffered by
the elderly life coach, to the Ivens persona's melodramatic collapse in the
desert waiting in the heat for the wind that won't come, to the evocative
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
scene where a party cadre orating the triumphs of harvest quotas in a vil-
lage rally is 'howled off the stage' (if not literally, at least by having his PA
system unplugged by the supernatural simian trickster, disguised as the
Ivens character), and to the protracted refusal of the Deng regime, in the
guise of the bureaucratic Mr. Wang, to yield to the filmmaker's entreaties
for his traditional privileged access. The latter episode leads comically
to grandstanding and face saving on both sides, communication break-
down, rage and then perhaps the most memorably imaginative sequence
of the film, the fantastic revivification in warrior suits of the unfilmable
statues. Beyond these narrativisations, I am also referring to the basic
narrative premise of this thread, the perennial capricious refusal of the
wind to respond to the Ivens persona's maniacally hubristic Canute-like
summons, the epic and monumental impotence of the autobiographical
artist persona - paradoxically embodied in what some critics saw as one
of Ivens's most potent works. Perhaps a key shame-rich moment, particu- 635
larly in relation to the parallel with Sedgwick's James, is the brief dream
scene where the elderly Ivens encounters the juvenile would-be pilot,
holds his hand as they walk across a rocky shore toward a romantically
high lit sea, the several shots misted with superimposition as if to spare
the spectator the intensity of this confrontation of elder with his child-
hood. This personal narrative is set within the foil of five other threads.
120. Une histoire de vent (1988): Ivens, the
superimposed elder artist, encounters his
childhood, holding the hand of the juvenile
would-be pilot as they walk across a rocky
shore towards the sea. DVD frame capture.
Original in colour. © CAPI Films, Paris, and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
2. Interwoven with this arc is a more documentary and self-referential
intertext around Ivens's career and oeuvre. While it stops short of the
systematic survey in front of a video screen that was anticipated for
Florence, citations of several films are introduced, especially the obvious
choice of 400 Million, of which a compressed version of the Battle of
Tai'erzhuang is included, notably its sneak attack over the mountain,
infantry assaults and the eventual routs of the Japanese (supplemented
by a few archival shots of presumably Red Army training activities from
CHINA 1971-1989
the period, culminating in a generic explosion). Unexpectedly, the imma-
ture work Branding is also featured - anomalous because it is Ivens's only
pure fiction before Till and for this reason presumably hitherto neglected
both in Ivens's previous track record of self-referencing throughout his
career (which have always emphasised Philips-Radio [1931, Netherlands,
36], Borinage, Spanish Earth, and Indonesia, now forgotten) and in critical
overviews of his oeuvre. The visual tie between the 1929 film and the 1988
film is clearly the wind blowing across the surface of the sand and the tur-
bulence of the wind-driven North Sea surf and shoreline backdrop, but
in general its inclusion seems to be part of Histoire's revisionist reassess-
ment of 60 years of activist filmmaking, re-inserting the playful, childlike,
and romantic into the trajectory of revolt.26 A print of Branding is ceremo-
niously handed to the Chinese sculptor Yin Guangzhong towards the end
of Histoire, as if this doomed love triangle narrative has suddenly become
636 I the symbolic bearer of Ivens's artistic significance.
3. The thread of China's cultural heritage is also major, all the more since
Yukong had accorded almost no attention to architectural and cultural
monuments (not surprisingly in view of that Cultural Revolution's literally
iconoclastic track record). Stufkens and others have reminded us of the
recurring motif of brooding silent statuary watching the unfolding of his-
tory in Ivens's China oeuvre as a whole (for example the line of three idols
that contemplate the massacre of Tai'erzhuang in 400 Million), and this is
fleshed out in three major sequences in Histoire. Two of these feature Bud-
dha: the first is the giant Dazu cave Buddha of the thousand comforting
hands, each eye emblazoned with a watching eye, presented high-angle in
intimate encounter with the silent and contemplative Ivens figure; the sec-
ond is the giant Leshan monolithic Buddha that presides over a confluence
of three rivers in Sichuan, seen in sublime aerial shots and slowly disclosed
from the foot upwards. Most memorably, the latter part of the film revolves
around the aforementioned Xi'an terracotta army. The warriors animate a
major sequence towards the end of the film, but first observational verite
follows the crew confidently entering the great hall of the archeological
site-museum, where they immediately run into bureaucratic obstacles
despite their much-vaunted 'permit', and then records their eight days of
negotiations with the site director Mr. Wang. The latter's obstinate refusal
to allow the filmmakers more than the standard ten-minute stationery
setup for filming the monument from three predetermined angles, and the
filmmakers' impatient but futile protests, create an ambivalence around
what Wang reasonably and insightfully calls the 'mountain' between the
disciplines of archeology and cinema, not to mention the confrontation
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
between uncharacteristically Parisian arrogance and Deng-era Chinese
civil servant prudence, the clash between the mutually incomprehensi-
ble languages of 'I am fighting for my art and my freedom of expression'
and of professional accountability. This explodes into Ivens's wheel-
chair-bound rage and creative obsession wherein he frantically assembles
tourist-knockoff warrior replicas and marshals a precision procession of
the stiff grey warriors towards the camera, the grave guardians escorting
the stubborn elderly artist teetering on his cane, one of several sequences
where Chinese cultural heritage comes to cinematic life.
4. Chinese mythologies are also reanimated. Other than the recurring medi-
ator character of the trickster Monkey King, three legendary personas
are staged as well, in stylised colour or monochrome presentational lit-
eralness: the archer Hou Yi who heroically shoots out the nine suns that
threaten to burn up the Earth; the drunken romantic poet who drowns I 637
as he tries to embrace the reflection of the moon on the surface of a pond
and is then is commemorated in an annual fish-feeding ceremony; and
most developed the mediator figure of the moon princess Change, with
whom the filmmaker has an extended encounter, conversing about the
windless boredom on the moon and entertained by the princess's circle
of maidens dancing around them, sensuously swirling their ribbons.
5. Not only the foregoing synthetic studio landscapes, but exterior natural
landscapes are also at the centre of the Chinese heritage that Ivens vowed
to celebrate with aerial surveys in both of the final China films. Here the
filmmakers finally get to indulge to the maximum, thanks to the Chinese
air force. Eight aerial interludes, longer and short, punctuate the film,
from the cloudscapes that introduce the opening credits scene of the Air
France airliner heading toward Beijing to snowy high altitude terraced
slopes, from anthill-like mountainous towers (the Yunnan stone forest,
reminiscent of Mistral) to river-scapes both surging and graceful, and
finally human-shaped landscapes, including glimpses of a bejewelled
nocturnal urban shoreline and especially the Great Wall. Histoire may not
fully be Roof of the World as conceived a decade earlier, but it is a fitting
apotheosis to the dozen or so aerial excursuses that propelled Ivens's oeu-
vre from Zuiderzee onwards. Ivens's aerial tropes usually proudly surveyed
man's transformation of his natural environment but sometimes, as in
Mistral and here, evoke nature's indifference to - or even resistance to -
this domination. The earthbound landscapes are less stunning perhaps,
but equally part of this discourse of natural heritage, borrowing from both
Chinese pictural iconography and European Romanticism in their breath-
CHINA 1971-1989
taking horizons, both misty and sunset-illuminated, jagged and flat, reso-
lutely pre-modern, even classical, in framing and composition. Departing
from the materialist and modernist frameworks of earlier landscape
work, the unabashed Histoire tropes clearly contribute to what Stuflens
(2008, 479-480) emphasises as the metaphysics in this final work - revived
from the Catholic mysticism of his childhood and surfacing from an
undercurrent extending throughout the oeuvre. One sequence positions
the diminutive Ivens in profile atop a magnificent cliff, after an arduous
climb for the entire exhausted film crew, with a sublime misty vista laid
out before him: there with his microphone Ivens picks up the voices of
the wind, universalised as a spiritual force in its cultural incarnations in
specific places around the planet from Nebraska to Tunisia.
6. Histoire's intertextuality embraces not only Ivens's own work but also
638 I in a standout moment a citation from and embellishment of Georges
Mdlies's Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902, France, 13). The
convalescing filmmaker persona escapes from his hospital room, borne
by a dragon at the command of the Monkey King, heads to the moon
as evoked in the appropriated shot of Mdlies's space capsule, and then
emerges from the mouth-door of the pastiched Mlies moon-face onto
an uncertain space landscape. The artifice of Mdlies's 'primitive' special
effects is stepped up, and Ivens's encounter with the drunken poet and
the moon princess unfolds. While the photogram of the caped space trav-
eller emerging from the moon door is Histoire's most iconic still, in the
context of the film as a whole the Mlies segue offers an unexpected odd-
ity, perhaps due to Prasetyo's input or even Loridan's. Ivens was hitherto
unknown for an interest in primitive cinema neither in his avant-garde
days or in his final decade: the meaning of a 'ten best' list he compiled in
1988, played up by Schoots ([1995] 2000, 350) seemingly does reflect an
embrace of Parisian New Wave cinephile paleontology as well as a return
to some of the programming standards of his Filmliga youth.27 If this
playful turn also jibes with the shamed renunciations of the moment,
a reversion to pre-political youthful innocence, it also productively
cross-pollinates two heritages, early film history and Chinese mythology,
and integrates them with Histoire's filmmaker narrative.
7. If Loridan's participation in the above intertext is likely, her shaping of one
final thread, during her partner's 'sick leave' in Paris during the final phase
of the Histoire shoot, is according to Schoots ([1995] 2000, 356) a matter
of historical fact. I am referring to the five-minute studio set piece located
halfway through the film that offers a microcosmic mosaic of Deng-era
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
post-Mao Chinese society. The gigantic set is visualised self-reflexively as
we are led through eight or so mise-en-scene corners within the bustling
space, each performing simultaneously one typical capsule of contempo-
rary social life: a Western-style wedding celebration unfolding in front of
a big red heart; a Beijing opera scene confronting a king and a princess;
male gymnasts demonstrating their prowess on a pommel horse and rings;
a contemporary chanteuse singing a jubilant yet sentimental love ballad;
a comic scene of a bungling photographer snapping a group of Chinese
tourists at a cardboard Great Wall; a party cadre lecturing his rural audi-
ence on agricultural yields and the Eleventh Party Congress, complete with
high platform and PA system; and finally a choir of uniformed schoolchil-
dren enthusiastically and skilfully singing 'We are the young Communist
Pioneers'. The mischievous Monkey King is present monitoring it all, and
is especially mocking of the orator whose performance is then sabotaged
when the trickster unplugs his microphone and supplants his harangue 639
with a kitsch English pop song. At the end the Monkey King leaves the
now empty set disguised as Joris Ivens. The overall effect is complex, even
ambiguous if not incoherent. Overall it seems to imply a mild critique of
post-Mao Chinese society, post-revolutionary consumerism and all, while
the two overtly ideological performances, notably those of the orator and
the children's choir, might be thought to embody a critique of the Cultural
Revolution were it not that they are arguably characteristic of the PRC's
entire 40-year revolutionary history (it is thought that the irreverence of
the studio scene accounts for the lack of a Chinese distribution green light
[Zhang Jianhua, conference presentation Beijing, November 2008]). The
performance style is hyperbolic and the sensibility of nonfiction has been
left at the huge heavy doors of the studio - except perhaps for the perfor-
mance of the children whose ardour and sincerity around their Maoist
lyrics inject real-world truth value into the moment. Also injected is ethical
ambiguity. Earlier Ivenses had their playful moments certainly, but would
they ever have set up children as non-consenting bearers of satire?
121. Une histoire de vent (1988): the Maoist
children's choir in the dramatised film
studio sequence. Ardour and sincerity
inject real-world truth value into an
ambiguously satirical moment. DVD frame
capture. Original in colour. © CAPI Films,
Paris, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens.
CHINA 1971-1989
The layers of dramatisation and performance in Histoire do not disqualify this
self-presenting essay film as an autobiographical work of course. To help us
understand this element of the film and bring additional resonance to it, let us
situate it alongside an intertext of six other first-person films, arguably almost
all if not all testamentary films in the literal sense, all by elder Euro-American
male filmmakers like Ivens looking backward and forward at the same time:
Title of film Author Country Date Author's Author's
dates age at
release
Le Testament d'Orphde Jean Cocteau28 France 1960 1889-1963 70 years
(The Testament of
Orpheus)
Love Sacrifice (aka Stan Brakhage USA 1986 1933-2003 53
Confession)
Scattered Remains James Broughton USA 1988 1913-1999 75
Mr. Hoover andl Emile de Antonio USA 1989 1920-1989 68
Blue Derek Jarman U.K. 1993 1942-1994 51
JLG. Autoportrait de Jean-Luc Godard France 1995 1930- 64
dicembre
Cocteau's Testament d'Orphe is a polished and expensive art film feature that
ironically bears the most resemblance to Histoire. This final instalment in
the artist's Orpheus trilogy presents the now elderly eponymous poet looking
back on his life, time-travelling through fantasy epochs and landscapes, while
reflecting on the orphic calling, his creations, and his younger and handsome
male companions (which include his current and his former consort accord-
ing to lore that is both extra-filmic and indispensable to reading the work). At
the other end of the spectrum, Brakhage's Love Sacrifice is a silent diary-style
experimental short, capturing spaces of yesterday's gold-lit familial kitchen
and today's private bedroom, the fondly remembered past and the present
of loss and masturbatory frenzy, archived journal and live performance, vir-
tuosities of both intimate camera handling and subjective editing. Brought-
on's Scattered Remains, shot in part like Histoire in an exotic other space, Sri
Lanka, co-authored like Histoire with the artist's younger spouse, assembles
the artist's recited poems with seashore- and river-scapes with a mesmerising
panoply of the bearded elder's frontal self-portraits, stroboscoped, voguing,
dervish-whirling, accelerated, clapping, plain... De Antonio's feature-length
Mr. Hoover and I, like all of these works a nonlinear assemblage, sets up the
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
eponymous FBI director as a perennial Javert-like nemesis who has structured
the artist's career through his demonic pursuit. The film interweaves along the
way the author's monologues and public speeches about his life, scenes with
friends and younger spouse, and self-referential archival materials around the
artist's childhood and career. Jarman's Blue, famous for its unwavering blue
screen throughout its feature length, evokes the artist's blindness - an oppor-
tunistic condition derived from HIV, the most stigmatising or 'shameful' syn-
drome of his age. The film is striking for a rich soundtrack mosaic of voices,
Jarman's and his friends', reciting his journal entries, poems, reminiscenc-
es, and reflections on career, life, and mortality. Godard's feature-length dia-
ry-styleJLG:Autoportrait de decembre, more a self-portrait as the title indicates
than an autobiography, shows the artist puttering around his idyllic lakeside
home, taking notes, reading books, looking at art, reciting philosophy, and
tending to his career with meetings and telephone calls, reflecting on current
events and history, occasionally going out for walks or tennis, while his scant- | 641
ily clad nubile assistant talkatively busies herself with cleaning the house - all
interwoven with gorgeous winter landscapes accompanied by characteristi-
cally serene Beethoven and contemporary music.
While all seven artists foreground their subjectivity, Ivens and Cocteau
tend towards the representational, as perhaps befits their generation - per-
forming their first person narrative according to the codes of fiction, and nev-
er directly acknowledging the camera. In contrast Brakhage, Godard, Jarman,
Broughton, and de Antonio are much more self-reflexive, tending towards the
presentational, that is, confronting the camera either probingly or offhand-
edly, and thus confronting with their look or their voice the spectator, with
the shame-processing intensity inherent in the testamentary and confession-
al modes.
The existence of these six other testamentary first-person films made
approximately at the same time as Histoire (with the exception of Cocte-
au prophetically predating the others by a quarter century) suggests among
other things that as usual Ivens was in the midst of the cinematic trends of
his era, either consciously or unconsciously, both in terms of documenta-
ry and avant-garde work (though it is unlikely that he would have seen more
than one or two of these six works). German scholar Christina Scherer (2001)
has already insightfully connected Histoire to the last two of these directors
(though to earlier titles by Jarman) in relation to essayistic practices of mem-
ory and montage, but I would like to take another angle and broaden the
field. Of the six films, four are by other elderly auteurs (Brakhage's should be
described as a mid-career work) and the sixth is by Jarman, a younger artist
about the same age as Brakhage but knowingly terminally ill. Mr. Hoover and
I rubbed shoulders with Histoire at the 1989 Toronto International Film Fes-
CHINA 1971-1989
tival, three months after Ivens's death at the age of 90, three months before
de Antonio's death. The release of Cocteau's Testament in 1960 preceded the
artist's death by three years, while Blue was released in 1993, the year before
Jarman's death. While Brakhage and Godard both still had prolific decades
ahead of them, their works still have the sensibility of a memoir and apologia
pro sua vita, and add considerably to this collective comparison. What juxta-
positions the winds of film history blow upon us, both poignant and felicitous!
Let's start with Ivens and de Antonio, and the felicitousness is compound-
ed when one recalls that two of the most productive Marxist filmmakers of
the century marked the last year of their lives - the year the Berlin Wall fell,
don't forget - with a first-person testamentary work that seemed to bracket
yet arguably reinvigorate at the same time earlier ideological fervor, as well
as thereby jointly closing a chapter of documentary history. (Nichols grasped
the momentous synchrony in dedicating Representing Reality to the two men
642 I jointly in 1991). Both Ivens and de Antonio scrupulously avoided referring to
the tectonic shifts in Eastern Europe in their final works, though one infers
from Ivens's brush with incipient Chinese capitalist bureaucracy and de Anto-
nio's despair at the erosion of the US constitution in the first Bush presiden-
cy, that emerging mythologies of the so-called 'end of history' were very much
on their minds. One fascinating convergence is that both artists had hither-
to shyly eschewed any onscreen appearance, and suddenly in their last films
burst in from the wings for a corporeal performance of intense cinematic pal-
pability, the elder filmmaker frail, sight-impaired, diminutive, and asthmatic
and the younger one corpulent and sanguine, both bodies and careers ravaged
by shame and by history. The two filmmakers' self-dramatisations perform a
Benjaminian bi-directional retrospection, combining childhood memories
coloured by regret, ambivalence, and exhaustion with narcissistic self-mythol-
ogisation, pride, and defiance. Histoire is as rich, exotic and over-the-top as Mr.
Hoover and I can be called minimalist, domestic, and quotidian, but like the
other films in this group both present the filmmaker's body as the crux of its
poetic synthesis of the artist's oeuvre and of the historical arena in which his
works unfolded.
For me, Ivens, de Antonio, and Jarman command a particularly intense
affect because of their contribution as Marxists in the first two cases, and as
queer activist in the last. Jane Gaines, in her sustained effort since the 1990s
to probe the encounter of radical cinema with Marxist ideology and aesthet-
ics has developed the concepts of 'pathos of fact' and 'socialist melodrama'
(Gaines, 1996, 64, 67), 'sensuous struggle' (Gaines, 1999, 91), and 'realism
beyond realism' (Gaines, 2007, 19), in order to theorise cinematic narratives
of class conflict and revolutionary struggle, and our engagement with them as
spectators. Though her essays do not apply to my argument in the narrow and
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
literal sense, these explorations of 'the compatibility of intellect and affect'
(Gaines, 1996, 64) may have bearing on de Antonio's, Ivens's, and Jarman's
documentary mises-en-scene of geriatric or corporeal disempowerment, auto-
biographical melancholy and testamentary passion. With Mr. Hoover and I
seen alongside Histoire and Blue, another melodrama, this time disguised as
Shakespearean tragedy, King Lear, cannot be kept out of the picture - all the
more so with Ivens's flaring white locks and his clouded corneas. Like Lear,
none of these filmmakers is willing to go quietly, and de Antonio, Ivens, and
Jarman construct an individual pathos in their backward look upon a life's
work of cinematic critique and solidarity, and in their performances of ver-
bal and gestural defiance toward an unknown future - a 'post-communist' one
in the case of the two Marxists. Each film vividly expresses in its way a mov-
ing personal sensitivity to and artistic confrontation with the betrayals of the
realms of material relations and of ideology, frustration at the uncooperative-
ness of history, flirtations with renunciation, apostasy and compromise, fas- | 643
cination with the unexpected detours in what Eisenstein (1942, 32-33) termed
the road to truth, true investigation and the creative act. All three films ulti-
mately embody rage and then a persistence that is obstinate but serene in the
face of the Revolution still deferred. Neither Histoire, Mr. Hoover and I or Blue
should be seen in isolation from the larger filmographies, of course, oeuvres
all structured by cycles of affirmation and renunciation, in short by a melodra-
matic roller coaster arc and revolutionary pathos.
All seven of these final or late works were greeted respectfully, with only a
tinge of the slight embarrassment that greeted the last works by the septage-
narians Ford and Hitchcock and the octagenarians Bergman and Antonioni -
if only in the sense that they were exempt from criticism. All except Ivens's and
Jarman's seemed to be indulged as unnecessarily inconsequential in com-
parison with the world-historical weightiness of the filmmakers' oeuvres as a
whole, and even the Ivens film was usually described rapturously and related
to the oeuvre as a whole without the critic ever dwelling unduly on the task
of evaluating the single film qua film. The Godard and Brakhage films have
symptomatic availability problems, unusual for such canonical figures - no
doubt the latter deriving from the family and estate's discomfort with such
a frank and explicit sexual discourse. I have admitted with regard to both de
Antonio and Ivens that I was experiencing a kind of fatigue in the 1980s, and
hesitated about some of the artistic and discursive choices of either - a lack of
loyalty that shames and puzzles me in retrospect (Waugh, [1976] 2011) when
I remember the exasperating deserts of cancelled projects and recalcitrant
budgets both filmmakers were traversing throughout the decade (seven years
for de Antonio between his second last film and last, eleven years for Ivens).
At the same time, I was personally fully caught up in the life and artistic tra-
CHINA 1971-1989
jectory of fellow gay activist Jarman, whose death removed him from arguably
the most prolific momentum of his career, and of course I personally identi-
fied with the queer iconic status of Cocteau and Broughton. Fatigue might also
describe my personal attachment to the two remaining heterosexual autobi-
ographers, for I had never belonged to the altogether too mystical Brakhage
cult and lost interest in Godard after the mid-seventies, if only because of his
persistent sexism and his own reverential cult.
Filmmakers don't often get to choose their testamentary utterance. It
is unlikely that de Antonio sensed the tolling of the bell as clearly as Ivens,
Broughton, Cocteau, or Jarman, or knew how little time he had to accompany
his film on its rounds, and it is unlikely that Brakhage and Godard had any
sense at all of the need to put their affairs in order. Nevertheless, despite my
varying degrees of attachment to this corpus, I feel a strong sense of the 'radi-
cal pathos' of the films, in the artists surveying their toil in the superstructural
644 I vineyard, their efforts to intervene in the world through art, and in their life
choices, with such contradictory feelings. Cocteau, Brakhage, Broughton, and
Godard all came from avant-garde traditions of self-referentiality, belonging to
a tradition of first-person discourse from their earliest utterances, and shared
none of the others' reticence to represent themselves onscreen throughout
their respective previous oeuvres. Nevertheless, I feel a consistent pathos in
the face of the six worn authorial bodies (and one disembodied voice) occupy-
ing the screen so unforgettably - especially with regard to Ivens and de Anto-
nio who did so for the first and last times.
All of these films, as autobiography and testament in relation to their male
filmmaker personae, are also defacto by virtue of their authorship about mas-
culinity - and even, one could argue in comparison to Broughton, Cocteau's
and Jarman's flaunting of their queerness, about the spectrum of sexual ori-
entation as well. Another comparison I made retroactively - and perhaps idi-
osyncratically if not whimsically - pertained to the concept of Vanaprastha,
which is according to Hinduism, the third 'hermit' stage of the four stages of
life. After the duties of the 'student' and 'householder' stages are complete, a
man, now a grandfather, renounces physical, material, and sexual pleasures,
retreats from social and professional life, and goes to live in prayer in a for-
est hut. This construction, read in the 21st century, is clearly about masculin-
ity as well as the human condition in general, and masculinities are cultural
constructions, of course, East and West. My small, eclectic transnational cor-
pus of Euro-American elder-male-authored 'documentaries' converge in crys-
tallising, not Vanaprastha per se, but some of this Judeo-Christian culture's
scripts for senior masculinity and an obligation of renunciation that is only
oblique and partial in comparison to the Sanskritic prescription. As I've indi-
cated, in these autobiographical hybrids the core indexical referent and expos-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
itory trope is the authorial male body: his body as text, his face, his voice, his
posture, and gait; his corporeal disempowerment and shame as document,
the 'foul rag and bone shop of the heart' (Yeats, 1939). Unlike the Hindu tem-
plate, these films do not inscribe honour, retreat, and renunciation in a met-
aphysical forest (although Broughton is on the beach, Ivens in the desert and
on the mountaintops, and Godard on an idyllic lakeshore). Rather they enun-
ciate tenacity, play, rage, and desire, in short the shame of corporeal winding
down, and instead index the processing of masculine decrepitude and impo-
tence through the winding up of documentary performance.
Upon a welter of hegemonic and dissident scripts of masculinity from
Western and Eastern culture, these seven documentary intersections of corpo-
real scripts of ageing and masculinity all layer over a particular performative
script, the vocational model of the male outsider, romantic artist, the orphic
bard. Ivens had never really played this role except perhaps as the socialist
realist herald of utopias, but he finally embraces it in his last work, complete I 645
with wild hair, dark cape, obscured eyes, and visionary mountaintop mise-en-
scene. The implied metaphysical bent of such a vocation plays out of course in
tension with the corporeal text.
In the interest of illuminating the testamentary nature of Ivens's final
work and its processing of shame, I would like to further develop the compli-
cated and precarious comparison of this corpus in relation to the three terms
I have listed. The affect-systems of play, desire, and politics come together in
each text in a triangulated performance matrix. Each is indexically manifest
onscreen in its own way in literal terms of authorial embodiment.
First look at 'play'. In contrast to the Hindu model of meditation, abne-
gation, and renunciation, and notwithstanding the impending sentence of
the decrepitude of the body and of mortality, our corpus is counter-intuitive-
ly bursting with play, filmic and pro-filmic, corporeal as well as affective and
intellectual, as if to deny and challenge the shame of ageing body and plan-
et. The films may well be world weary with the AIDS pandemic (Jarman), the
war in the Balkans (Godard), the erosion of American democracy (de Antonio),
the creeping tide of bureaucracy and consumerism in post-Mao China - not
to mention asthmatically clogged lungs (Ivens). But it is as if the whole corpus
is presided over by Ivens's Monkey King trickster, mischievously mugging for
the camera, throwing banana skins, unplugging electrical circuits and exult-
ing in disguise and sudden acrobatic appearances out of nowhere, hamming
it up in extreme close-up in complicity with the lens and the spectator - as if
in recompense for the author persona's scrupulous obedience to his own old
rule 'don't look at the camera'. The queer filmmakers engage with this spir-
it most blatantly, camp oblige, even Jarman on his deathbed with his fierce
and assaultive linguistic version of play, but especially Cocteau and Brought-
CHINA 1971-1989
on with their charming, childlike, and simple special effects, for example the
former's motion reversal that catapults the beautiful Cdgeste back up from
the ocean into the lover-bard's cliffside presence and the latter's stop-motion
and lighting effects that playfully transform his own body into shapes, shells,
silhouettes, and surfaces. But even the self-important heterosexuals Godard
and de Antonio evince this spirit, with their wryly staged performance scenes
- albeit with a slight lugubrious edge - from the former's self-consciously and
dysfunctionally performed tennis match to the latter's literally John Cage-ian
play with indeterminacy and bread-making. As for Brakhage's intense riff on
the notion of 'playing with oneself' on camera, enough said. This playfulness
may well be about the 'second childishness' (Shakespeare's As You Like It) we
stereotypically ascribe to old age, but I think it is also about the license for
the carnivalesque, as explored by Bakhtin ([1940] 1968) and his successors
Huizinga (1955) and Shepard (2011), irreverent reversals of norms that have
646 I a social dimension as well as the more psychic operation of individual bodily
pleasure and recreation. Ivens's joyous reanimation of the warrior replicates,
defying through a kind of slapstick choreography his shaming at the hands of
bureaucracy, is a case in point, but the play among his peers is variously lin-
guistic, cinematic, vestimentary, musical, and dramatic.
Next look at 'desire'. It is not only Brakhage's frenzied onanism, enacted
with admirable but painful literalness, that figures this affect. The other six
artists do so as well with the intense sensory texture of their performances
and cinematic excess, as if defying the Hindu prescription of abstinence and
the Shakespearean diagnostic of 'shrunk shank', with its implication of impo-
tence. Queer Jarman, Broughton, and Cocteau all match Brakhage with the lit-
eral enactment of arousal and jouissance, though with greater discretion and
at the same time greater joy shaping their eruptions of eros. Jarman embraces
and celebrates shame with both the gleefully explicit obscenity of his hyper-
bolic self-branding:
I am a mannish
Muff diving
Size queen
With bad attitude
An arse licking
Psychofag
Molesting the flies of privacy
Balling lesbian boys
A perverted heterodemon
Crossing purpose with death...
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
and the amorous tenderness of his eulogistic appeals to the drowned depart-
ed:
Deep love drifting on the tide forever
The smell of him
Dead good looking
In beauty's summer
His blue jeans
Around his ankles
Bliss in my ghostly eye
Kiss me
On the lips
On the eyes. (Jarman, 1993)
Cocteau and Broughton both offer ribald and athletic mise-en-scenes of pri- |647
apic animality and queered pantheistic sensuality enunciated through the
cliches of Greco-Roman iconography, respectively the artist figure's two loin-
cloth-clad boy toys playing horsey (centaur?) in an otherwise insufferably dig-
nified art film, and a beachfront choreographic dalliance between two satyrs
with masks, a giant phallic prosthesis and a flute as the only costumes. This
is far from the hermit's forest, but so is Ivens's desert, and the images of his
persona obsessively commanding the elements and then beaming radiant-
ly in the face of the at-last-come wind, white hair streaming against the sky
are among the most sensuous in his sensuous oeuvre. Compared to this pan-
theistic sensuality the pastiche eroticism of de Antonio's young spouse cut-
ting his hair as patiently as lovingly (in homage to his friend Warhol's tease
in his snail-paced Haircut [1963, USA, 27]) is decided low-key. And Godard's
compulsive objectification of his housecleaner, and later of an unqualified
job applicant who gets the monteuse job on a basis other than qualifications,
has more in common with Brakhage's shamefully mundane everyday - until a
lucid self-awareness bursts onto the screen when after looking through a pile
of canonical high art cheesecake (from Rubens and Fragonard to Renoir and
Kirchner), Godard comes across the nude self-portrait of Egon Schiele (1910),
gnarled and shriveled despite his ripe old age of 21 (only a decade from his
grave), whose premature rags and bones Godard stares upon as if into a mir-
ror. Metaphysical or materialist, transcendant or quotidian, queer or heter-
osexual, all seven male filmmakers are staging fantasmatic performances of
desire, working through the richness of stigma and spoiled identity, not only
of corporeal decay, but also of loss of gender identity, adult status, and sexual
power, queering old age through asserting desire in a disconnect of body and
libido.
CHINA 1971-1989
My third term, politics, builds on Sedgwick's notion of shame as a 'socially
metamorphic' dynamic, and all seven filmmakers marshal cinematic mem-
ory in the production of that potential transformative dynamic of shame. Of
the seven only de Antonio and Jarman maintain the discourse and affect of
traditional radical politics, of King Lear's refusal to 'bear it tamely' and his
'noble anger'. Godard's anger at Srebrenica is deftly channeled into philo-
sophical problems rather than political ones - in a replay of his immobilis-
ing introspections in Loin and Ici et ailleurs - while Ivens's unpolitical anger at
Mr. Wang is as peevish and pathetic as it is uncharacteristic of the gentle and
respectful cross-cultural communicator of yore (it is telling that the Chinese
film crew members were torn and sided with Mr. Wang). In fact in a recourse
that the younger, materialist Ivens might have shunned, all seven artists resort
to opening doors to the mystical resolutions of landscape and what Jarman
calls 'the universal Blue'. Are they halfheartedly and intermittently grasping
648 I the serenity and renunciation of vanaprastha after all? As with the six other
filmmakers, Ivens's engagement with memory is selective, and he forecloses
the metamorphic utopias of the past whether revisionist or Marxist or post-
colonial - a brief citation from 400 Million showing the coalitional military
riposte against Japanese fascism is identified with symptomatic vagueness by
the ideology-avoidant title 'China at war with the Japanese invader filmed by
Joris Ivens in 1938'. His engagement with Deng-era China is no less selective:
is an archeologist doing his job of protecting 20oo-year-old clay artefacts from
a 25-member film crew (Euvrard and Marsolais, 1988) really the only thing
encountered in post-Mao China worthy of anger - in fact ignoble petulance
- in Ivens and Loridan? Part of me shares the shock, as recounted by Schoots
([1995] 2000, 358), of old socialist co-worker Henri Storck and communist
co-worker Catherine Duncan at the couple's disavowal of even their shared
past as political militants. The latter did not hold back in her old age any more
than she had in her Old Left youth, asking,
Is it possible to divorce Joris from his revolutionary past? Are we to think
of him as a reformed Red, now devoted to the wider issues of art? Do we
return to Rain, The Bridge, Breakers, as our points of reference, to which
perhaps should be added the French films on the Seine and the Mistral?
Setting aside all the major films (and quite a number of the minor) as the
aberrations of a young idealist? [...] The Joris we knew is almost absent
from the film [...] an official portrait for posterity.
But the other part of me wants to read Histoire as an affirmation of the place
within a more broadly defined politics of culture, friendship, space, subjec-
tivity and memory, both personal and collective, or as I put it elsewhere, as 'a
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
poetic meditation on the artist's career and legacy and on the historical arena
in which his works unfolded' (Waugh, 2011, 151). Does such a poetical poli-
tics nudge these artists' mystical gestures towards the vanaprastha tropes of
serenity and the invisible as explored by Ivens in and around Histoire, or sim-
ply clash incoherently and unresolvedly with the turbulent excesses of defi-
ance, corporeality, and individualism also written into these films? Perhaps,
like the six others I have pointed to, and like myself, Ivens himself was of two
minds in the last years and utterances of his life, and rather than evincing
what Schoots uncharitably calls 'confusion', embraced both transformation
and transcendence.
This parting section has yoked together a heterogeneous if not eclectic,
small corpus of autobiographical, performance-based hybrid documentary
by elderly or dying men that raises for me issues not only of masculinity and
ageing but also of the life cycle, the gendered body and its play, desire, and
politics, and of the way the shame of decrepitude and mortality invests in the I 649
testamentary creative process. Although first person documentary is a very
rich corpus, as Elisa Lebow, Jim Lane, many others make clear, testamentary
films by elders are relatively rare - even rarer for women filmmakers than for
men (in contrast to the corpus of literary autobiography where testaments by
elder women are arguably privileged, though perhaps still not fully assuming
gender parity). My narrower corpus of seven films crystallises all of the prob-
lems that we are faced with as we watch Histoire, not only the dialectic of trans-
formation and transcendence but also authenticity and performance, desire
and transgression, corporeality and affect - for author and spectator alike.
I embarked on this final chapter by narrating my own personal discovery
of Ivens and should conclude on a similar note as well. Personally speaking,
as the turbulent decade of the seventies in which I discovered and champi-
oned Maoist Ivens recedes into ancient history, I feel my own kind of shame
in harping nostalgically on the lost heritage of that era's New Left and social
movements, and clinging to my 'slightly naive and overly laudatory' youthful
utopias (Rosenthal, 1988). It is not that, now entering the baby boomer senior
demographic, I am tempted to suddenly subscribe to a new social movement
of little interest to me previously (Seize grey power! Seize grey power! Seize grey
power!), and shamefacedly to champion a cinema of elder introspection on
that account (however tempting that might be). It is simply that linking His-
toire to an intertext is essential for understanding - historically and culturally
- this shameful film and Ivens's artistic trajectory as a whole, as has been the
case at each stage throughout this book.
It is no less essential to linkingHistoire to the Ivens intertext, to the Maoist
Ivens, to the documentary Ivens also - in short to Yukong - as we wrap up this
final chapter spanning the China films of Ivens's last decades, and not only in
CHINA 1971-1989
the spirit of Duncan's raging recrimination. Is the documentary Ivens as miss-
ing from Histoire as the 'idealist', 'Red', 'revolutionary' Ivens? 'We had made
the rounds' of documentary, Loridan declared in more than one post-release
interview, with the implication that they had 'done' documentary and moved
beyond it with Histoire ('nous avons fait le tour') (Sergent, 1988; Euvrard and
Marsolais, 1988). Would one be justified in perceiving in Histoire with all its
mythological detours and eruptions of fantasy a dilution, even renunciation,
of Ivens's documentary legacy? In addition to the renunciation of oppositional
politics, has the pioneering experiment of direct cinema of fifteen years earlier
has also been more or less shamefacedly jettisoned - the renunciation of cin-
ematic Maoism as well as of political Maoism? Every critic savoured Histoire's
studio-based microcosm sequence with its celebration of artifice, histrionics
and scripted cinematography, which is far from the only passage in this eclec-
tic work to set aside the heritage of direct cinema of course. At the same time,
650 I every critic also referenced the above-described vdrite entrance to the Xi'an
warrior site, and the film's bountiful heritage and landscape moments. How
could it be denied that much nonfiction resonance remains in the film? This
resonance arises primarily from the autobiographical Ivens persona, body, and
physiognomy (and with respect to Ivens's infinitely fascinating face this film
has much in common with the transcendently narcissistic Broughton among
our testamentary corpus). It rests also to a large degree in his encounter with
real-world spaces and with mediator characters performing themselves there-
in, for example the martial arts master or the mask-sculptor (the only episode
in the film where Ivens showcases his legendary talent for observing manual
labour). A most wonderful case in point is a small child who is held by Ivens
upon his return from the moon to earth, his return from fantasy special effects
to the truly special effect and affect of documentary. The child seems dazed
by all of the attention as well as by the white-maned, white-skinned elder's
improvised address in a language he does not understand: 'I've come a long
way. I can't speak your language. It's a pity, isn't it? I can feel your hand. Your
hand is gripping my fingers. That's good, isn't it? I understand you. We're
speaking the language of hands'. Such nonfiction interactions - pity (shame
at the futility of 70 years of verbal and visual language?) and understanding,
affect, and intellect - extend of course to the film's broader politics of inter-
personal relations, and bring us back to a reading of Yukong itself as an epic of
interpersonal relations between the filmmakers and their social subjects who
are performing - vainly, as it turned out, or at least temporarily - revolution.
Ultimately, the two final epics, Yukong and Histoire, together constitute a
strange diptych cohered primarily by the outsider's gaze upon the site of both
belief and shame, upon the entity, construct, place, population, and nation
state that is China. This diptych is truly dialectical in its exploration of transfor-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
mation and transcendence, truth and imagination, politics and poetics. The
intensity of this encounter of political passion - for the Cultural Revolution,
for the citizens who declared its utopias to the camera - with renunciation - of
tenacious belief, of innocence, and of revolutionary cinematic commitment
- brings us back to the concepts of both radical pathos and the metamor-
phic possibilities of shame. Have any other major filmmakers ever carried us
through such seismic shifts in affect and form within less than two decades?
Have any other parting filmmakers ever offered such an 'astonishing,' and
'disquieting', such 'extraordinary mingling' (to come back to Huxley's words)?
Have any other artists ever performed such a profound intervention, such a
radical disavowal, and such a creative self-re-invention within their oeuvre?
1 651
CHINA 1971-1989
y t
I
_ Y
a kit-
i r-
122. Poster, Ivens retrospective, Paris 2003. A filmmaker in the torment
of the 20tl century'. Original in colour. Courtesy coil. EFJI, Nijmegen.
Conclusion:
Qui s'arrete se trompe
This happens to all artist - artisans excellent style, their [work] contin-
ues same style all life. This is the graveyard of artists and writers. But
must choose - make clean break; Huxley on Goya's later life and works
- Desastres de Guerra
-JorislIvens, notesfor The Camera and I, c.1943
In a stroke of programming inspiration, the New York Film Festival showed I 653
Une histoire de vent in 1989, preceded by Ivens's short poetic city film, also
about a natural element, Regen, completed 60 years earlier. The programmer
wheels in me start spinning and I wonder what other felicitous pairings might
be imagined? Borinage and Autour du pitrole? Nieuwe Gronden and Demain a
Nanguila? Branding and Lied der Strome, Power and the Land and Le Peuple et
ses fusils? Power and the Land and The Grapes of Wrath? Komsomol and Doctor
Zhivago? Borinage and Norma Rae? Prolific genius that he was, Ivens's oeuvre
will never exhaust possibilities for such synchronies.
Unfortunately, Ivens had died three months earlier and did not live to
bask in the inspiration of this moment of synthesis. The decades-long process
of taking stock of this prolific and polarising oeuvre as a whole had already
been launched by Ivens and Loridan themselves in their last film, and now
was to begin in earnest, as is normal, continuing to this day. I hope this book
makes a contribution to that process, alongside the stupendous efforts of the
European Foundation Joris Ivens and its tireless and inspired director Andre
Stuflens, who is as earth-moving as an Ivens crane operator in Zuiderzee.
Ivens's last two decades marked by cycles of triumph and shame, affirma-
tion and renunciation, he mercifully did not live to experience an ultimate act
of shaming embodied in two spiteful obituaries delivered by Paris's 'progres-
sive' daily, Liberation, once his ardent supporter. The long article by erstwhile
anarchist Edouard Waintrop (1989) contained the word 'Stalinist' six times
in the body and headlines, and seasoned the diatribe with 'light-footed [swin-
gant] and short-sighted' and 'bad faith/guilty conscience'. It was supplement-
ed by a shorter piece by distinguished resident film critic Serge Daney who
writes better but was no gentler:
CONCLUSION: QUI S'ARRETE SE TROMPE
Little known, rarely seen, Ivens's films don't seem to belong to film his-
tory. They are formidable documents on an intrepid young cameraman
who put his immense talent as a journalist at the service of Moscow (and
then of Beijing). Nothing else. Nothing, in any case, of what makes Fla-
herty or Vertov still timely even today.
If one dared this paradox, one could say that Ivens is a great film-
maker of a very particular type, someone who sees nothing. Or rather
one who, between the pre-established scenario (which was most often
Stalinist) and the images gathered, will always choose the scenario.
Strange filmmaker who always knows what he films, who never doubts
the direction of what is being imprinted on film, who imagines with dif-
ficulty that humans serve for anything else than to compose the epic and
friendly picture of peoples in struggle for communism. Even Une histoire
de vent is the whim of someone who knows in advance what he will film.
654 I (Daney, 1989)
It is obvious that 'little known, rarely seen' applies specifically to the author's
own personal deficient knowledge of the oeuvre (Daney, spearheader of Cahiers
du cinma in its post-political 1970s, had offered a six-page piece on Yukong in
1976, but specialised in television, art cinema, and auteur fiction rather than
documentary). However Libration retained some infinitesimal semblance
of professional journalistic balance in accompanying the two tirades with a
gentle and dignified reminiscence by an Ivens devotee, Claire Devarrieux, who
had published a series of long interviews with Ivens in the 1970s (Devarrieux,
1979) and left a glimpse of the humanity of a great artist for her readers:
Joris Ivens, always moving, never renounced. Even very old he stayed
available to people. [...] He was always in movement. [...] In the 1970s,
when one asked him where he would go today, what revolution he would
put his camera in the service of, he said that it was henceforth much
harder to choose his camp. Ten years later, travelling backwards over his
path as a militant, he remembered that at the moment when they were
signing petitions in Paris, he himself would take off. He who hesitates is
lost. Joris Ivens in any case continued... To make films. He always lived.
He always fought. He alone (all alone) was the proof that wise old men are
not so crazy, that western society sends them too quickly out to pasture.
Bit by bit, Joris Ivens had discovered metaphysics. He saw peaks follow-
ing on peaks, he knew that the horizon has no limits, and that science's
answers only make questions dig in deeper. In the last film he made, with
Marceline Loridan, Histoire de vent, you see men carry statues and other
men surging up behind, and others again, and so on. That was his lesson
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
of life. Because he did not renounce. Because he accepted infinite com-
plexity through refusing to lose his soul. And we, what do we look like,
with our doubts that make us drop the pedals? [...] It was the great history
of the century and of art that animated him. He wasn't high-talking, he
could observe this history of humanity through the anguish of his neigh-
bours [...] that form of intelligence that is courage when it stubbornly
confronts unhappiness. (Devarrieux, 1989)
This book has tried to rise above Paris turf wars and factionalism as well as the
perennial redbaiting and mudslinging exemplified by the above two diatribes,
but also to resist the temptation to defend and exalt - which admittedly Devar-
rieux narrowly avoided. I have done so simply by looking closely at the films
that are indeed little known and rarely seen. In the foregoing eight chapters, I
have endeavoured to examine their vitalities and their paradoxes, their histor-
ical contexts and contradictions, the materialities along their trajectory from 1 655
concept to reception. In short, to poach DeVarrieux's wonderful language, I
have parsed their refusals and embraces, their ultimate courages and intel-
ligences, surgings and confrontations, their observations of anguish and of
'tomorrows that sing'.'
The Foundation and the estate have done us an immeasurable service in
providing 20 of those films in the 2008 DVD package, restored with such pro-
fessional rigour and love. Both of the Paris polemicists used the concept of
'aestheticism' to denigrate Ivens's work. This surprised me since in my mind
the artist seldom deployed the cinematic apparatus's potential for unleashing
ineffable beauty on the screen without uncompromisingly rooting that beau-
ty within his foremost missions of discovering worlds and the world, natural
and human, of understanding human labour and everyday life, struggles and
utopias. That said, one essential dividend of the prizewinning DVD box is an
overdue reminder of the breathtaking formal beauty of this oeuvre and its mis-
sions, beauty that my generation had too often forgotten in the face of faded
and shredded 16mm prints and VHS tapes - or even of a tantalising film still
in The Camera andl. I am encouraged all the more by the restoration and re-re-
lease of the full Yukong series and of the 1950s DEFA productions from East
Berlin, and of course the Foundation's ongoing programme of facilitating
screenings, retrospectives, research, and festival spotlights worldwide.
French moral authorship and intellectual property law and its contempt
for the principle of fair use has crippled the process of Ivens reaching his
deserved 21st-century audience. Nonetheless, the ongoing activities of the
Foundation and the various institutional restoration projects are allowing
thousands of fans, students, teachers, researchers, activists, and historians to
make progress in finishing what is an unfinishable job, closing the last gap in
CONCLUSION: QUI S'ARRETE SE TROMPE
the dike around the most prolific and iconic documentarist of the 20th centu-
ry. Indeed, the most exciting frontier of ongoing and future research on Ivens
is among German researchers like Gunter Jordan and others using DEFA and
other East German archives. I will be gratified if my chapter on the Iron Cur-
tain period, of which I am proud, the only one not to incorporate at least some
work from earlier in my career, will be a small player on that frontier.
This book addresses English-language film enthusiasts, students,
researchers, and fans, the constituency that has unfortunately been least well
served by the stewardship of the Ivens estate despite the fact that Ivens made
five of his greatest films in our language in three different countries between
1936 and 1946. I hope that The Conscience of Cinema can be a modest cata-
lyst in the process whereby we will access the fullness of this vital artistic and
political heritage. And not only we English-readers but all citizens of the full
constellation of six continents that Ivens graced with his vision of human
656 I struggles and tomorrows that sing.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
NOTES
INTRODUCTION 657
1 As this book nears completion, the restoration of Ivens's Cold War-era DEFA films
and their DVD release under the supervision of the filmmaker's former collabora-
tor Gunter Jordan, together with Ralf Schenk, has been announced (2015).
2 The policy change coincided with the installation as IDFA Board Chair of Derk
Sauer, a media magnate with a background as a Dutch Maoist activist.
3 The Mannheim list was (in descending order of votes cast by their international
panel of documentarists, archivists and critics ): Nanook of the North (Robert
Flaherty, 1920, USA-Canada, 79), Night Mail (Harry Watt and Basil Wright, 1936,
UK, 25), Turksib (Viktor Turin, 1929, USSR, 57), Berlin - Symphonie einer Grossstadt
(Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Walther Ruttmann, 1927, Germany, 65),
Chelovek s Kino-aparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, 1928, USSR,
68), Louisiana Story (Robert Flaherty, 1948, USA, 79), Farrdbique (Farrdbique - The
Four Seasons, Georges Rouquier, 1946, France, 90), Staroye i novoye (The General
Line, Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, 1929, USSR, 121), Nuit etBrouil-
lard (Night and Fog, Alain Resnais, France, 1955), Drifters (John Grierson, 1929,
UK, 61), The Spanish Earth, and Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread, Luis Bufuel,
1933, 30) (Talman-Gros, 1964). Rotha's list, for which he shared responsibility
with MOMA film curator Richard Forsythe and Sinclair Road, included five Ivens
documentaries, Borinage, New Earth, Spanish Earth, 400 Million, and Power and the
Land, and only Grierson and Flaherty matched the Dutchman's level of visibility
with five or more films.
4 The estate's shortsightedness is not the only factor in Ivens's lamentable disap-
pearance from the view of international tastemakers and gatekeepers as sym-
bolized by this poll, the efforts of the Ivens Foundation notwithstanding: aside
from the obvious bountiful problems with populist polling itself as a canonizing
mechanism, the overwhelming anglophone provincialism of the voters was clear-
ly responsible for the American preponderance in the two lists (followed distantly
by France) and the total invisibility of most 'minor' documentary cinemas (from
the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Italy to India and of course that crucible of
direct cinema itself, Canada!). It is worth noting that, despite the obvious 'pres-
ent-centrism' of the process, Ivens and Soviet compilationist Esfir Shub were the
only ones of the 'founding parents' of the classical (pre-1960) documentary to be
missing, Flaherty, Grierson, Vertov, Riefenstahl, Vigo, Bunuel, Franju and Jen-
nings all being present (compilation itself was largely absent, and even as canon-
ical an American artist as Emile de Antonio nowhere to be seen). Approximately
225 critics, academics and programmers voted and approximately 100 filmmak-
ers (Sight & Sound, September 2014). The Spanish Earth, once on the top ten,
received only two votes, this author's and one other. The Ivens Foundation offered
a different spin on the process and celebrated the votes received by eleven Ivens
658 I films in the process (in descending order of votes received): Regen, ...a Valparaiso,
Histoire, Borinage, Le 17eParallele, Spanish Earth, La Seine a rencontre Paris, Loin du
Vietnam, Pour le Mistral and Yukong ( accessed 14 October 2014).
5 Not to mention the pitfalls of deploying transcriptions of Chinese proper nouns
through two distinct sets of Dutch, French, and English transcription conven-
tions derived from the Wade-Giles system used until the mid-seventies (Mao
Tse-tung) and the pinyin system used officially thereafter, at least for PRC sources
(Mao Zedong).
6 Projectionists' notes for parallel screenings of Ivens's Canadian documentary
Action Stations or its shorter 16mm version probably exist in the archives of the
National Film Board of Canada, but the Conservative regime in Ottawa (2005-
2015) imposed crippling cutbacks on federal archives and labourious research
protocols on research that have disastrously impeded film historians from explor-
ing such resources.
7 Organisations that attracted Ivens's alliance and participation ranged from the
Amsterdam Filmliga (1927-1933), Association of Documentary Film Producers
(1939-1942), and the World Union of Documentary (1947-1950) to the Association
internationale de documentaristes (1964-c.198o) (Campbell [1978] 1982, 162;
Alexander 1981, 256-258n; Ellis and McLean 2005, 101; Stuflens 2007, 17).
8 Cf. Nichols's (2011, 70-171) similar comparison of contrasting iconographies in
these two films, using production stills and frame captures, echoing my detailed
analysis in my 1981 dissertation.
9 The correct date is 1955.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
CHAPTER1
1 'Wigwam' is of course a perfectly respectable English word, and it is not known
when or why the English title used on the DVD box set, The Tipi (a variant of the
more usual 'tepee'), first began to be used.
2 By 'formalism' I mean the aesthetic strategy by which a work's primary motivation
is the analysis of its own forms. Though an anonymous Soviet reviewer once used
this label pejoratively with regard to Ivens's work (VechernieIzvestiya 4 March
1930, quoted in Grelier 1965, 157), no such connotation is necessarily intended
in the present analysis. 'Realism' is of course not to be confused with socialist
realism, a historical movement to be examined beginning in Chapter 2, nor with a
use of the term in early documentary historiography by Paul Rotha (1952, 75-104),
as one of his four categories describing traditions in the classical documentary:
the naturalist (Flaherty, Epstein), the realist (Ivens, Cavalcanti, Ruttmann), the
newsreel (Vertov, The March of Time), and the propagandist (Grierson, Turksib, I 659
Riefenstahl).
3 The 'Flying Dutchman' legend would continue to have a great fascination for
Ivens until he incorporated it into Rotterdam-Europoort in 1965, and it has
become a motif of this book.
4 Henri Storck first showed me Krull's book in Brussels in 1976 and spoke of the
two artists' reciprocal influence. The Ivens-Krull marriage was primarily one of
convenience for Krull, who, like the hundreds of Eastern European refugee intel-
lectuals and aristocrats on the European cultural scene between the wars, resort-
ed to one means or another to secure a passport; Ivens was reportedly happy to
provide her in this way with a Dutch one. Marriage was an institution that Ivens
would continue to be ambivalent about, except for practical reasons, for much of
his life.
5 Spearheading a commercial feature industry during World War I, Filmfabriek
Hollandia had achieved short-lived success with a series of dramatic features,
mostly adaptations, notable chiefly for naturalistic accents. According to Bert
Hogenkamp (interviews and personal correspondence with author, December
1980 - January 1981), the Dutch film historian, Pathe, the French film giant, was
deeply involved in this venture in order to use neutral Holland as a means of
ensuring the continuation of its distribution network cut off by the war. More
recently, political and religious groups such as Social Democrats and Catholics
had begun exploring the possibilities of using film in their work, following earlier
examples in France and Germany; it was in this atmosphere of awakening interest
in film that the Amsterdam intellectuals began gathering and eventually formed
Filmliga. Ivens would be involved in the eventual spread of this interest to the
Dutch unions at the end of the decade.
NOTES
6 Brug played at Studio 28 and Regen at the Ursulines. Rotha (1960, 296) men-
tions these two theatres as being instrumental in the formation of the French
avant-garde of the twenties and adds the name of a third, Studio Diamant.
7 Grelier (1965, 68-70) and Stuflens (2008) provide fairly detailed accounts of the
three major non-extant exercises, Zeedk-Filmstudie, Schaatsenr~den (Ice Skating,
1929, Netherlands, 8), and Ik-Film (I-Film, 1929, Netherlands).
8 The Maas is also known as the Meuse and is part of the Meuse-Rhine-Scheldt
delta.
9 A further modernist touch in Brug may be a shot of Ivens with his camera film-
ing the bridge. This should probably be read as a self-reflexive inscription of
the artistic process within the work of art, in the manner of Vertov's Chelovek s
kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929, USSR, 68); but on the other hand
it could conceivably be read as a naive, unselfconscious insertion in manner of
Herbert Ponting's images of his camera fastened to the hull of his Antarctic vessel
660 I in The Great White Silence (1910-1924, UK, 108).
10 It is conceivable but unlikely that Clair's Tour, the closest contemporary parallel
to Brug, was influenced by Ivens's film, which was first shown in Amsterdam
about the same time as Clair was shooting his film on the Eiffel Tower. Brug's
Paris premiere, however, occurred in January 1929, one month after the first Paris
showing of Tour.
11 Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, a nineteenth-century French Romantic poete-mau-
dite.
12 This translation is based on Badzs's 1945 Moscow text in Iskusstvo Kino (TheArt
ofFilm), which is virtually identical to his 1930 text, Der Geist des Films, in its treat-
ment of Brug.
13 Interestingly, Mannus Franken would also continue working with non-profes-
sional actors, arriving at a form of semi-documentary narrativity with his Indone-
sian film Pareh, een RUstlied van Java (Pareh, Song of the Rice, 1935, Netherlands/
Indonesia, 92) quite independently of Ivens's efforts in the same direction.
14 Vredenburg (1929) made his own contribution to that same issue of Filmliga, a
description of his collaboration with Ivens and Franken detailing his attempt to
imitate the sound of the indigenous popular music of the region. He also invokes
a standard theme of contemporary avant-garde film theory, that is, the analogy
between film editing and musical composition.
15 Dulac's La Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928, France,
28), scripted by Antonin Artaud, was reviewed in the same number of Filmliga as
Branding (van Ophuijsen, 1929).
16 Ivens would remember having been struck by Nosferatu early during his studies in
Germany (Destanque, 1983).
17 There is some debate as to whether Dovzhenko's works had already appeared in
Holland by this time, and, if so, whether Ivens would already have studied them.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Bert Hogenkamp (personal communication, December 1980) thinks that this is
unlikely but Jan de Vaal (1977), director of the Nederlands Filmmuseum, referred
to a presentation of Zvenigora by Filmliga on 5 May 1928, one month prior to the
Branding shoot.
18 Images d'Ostende is a very useful companion film to Regen, since it is almost exact-
ly contemporary to Ivens's film, the work of a fellow director from the Low Coun-
tries, the artisanal product of a similar film society milieu, and a treatment of a
similar subject. It suggests, among other things, what Regen might have looked
like had Ivens persisted in his modernist orientation of Brug.
19 Drifters also incorporates certain narrative structures into its continuity. Grierson
is also notable for having studied the Soviet filmmakers before embarking on his
career.
20 The last sentence is apparently a 1945 addition to Badzs's original analysis, no
doubt legitimising my invocation of Stalin's infamous 'propaganda tsar' then
presiding over Soviet culture. 661
21 That Ivens would refer to Bunuel's famous shot simulating the slicing of a wom-
an's eyeball with a razor in Un chien andalou (1928, France, 16) as an example of
his own past modernist orientation in Regen confirms the extent to which Ivens
himself regarded his early work as partaking in the cosmopolitan avant-garde
of the late twenties. Interestingly, Storck ([1954] 1965, 138) claims that Bunuel's
own evolution beyond 'certain surrealist ornaments and symbols' towards an
'often very scathing social criticism' was due to Ivens's influence. Indeed the two
filmmakers' paths would often cross during the thirties.
22 Van Dongen produced the first sonorised version of Regen in 1932, using a score
by the young Surinamer composer Lou Lichtveld, who was shortly to score
Philips-Radio (1931, Netherlands, 36). The second version employed a score writ-
ten especially for the purpose by Hanns Eisler in 1940 as part of his film music
research for the Rockefeller Foundation. The dissemination of Regen received
a new boost during the seventies due to the market of bootleg Super 8 prints of
classic films and during the 21st century, thanks to the DVD box set and its offer of
three different versions, and the Internet, mercifully still free of charge as we go
to press.
CHAPTER 2
1 I am grateful to Bert Hogenkamp and Andr Stufkens for suggesting some factual
aspects of the foregoing analysis of the Dutch context of WQ Bouwen.
2 According to Bert Hogenkamp (personal correspondence, December 1980), an
eleven-reel print of WY Bouwen found in the vaults of the Bouwvak Arbeiders
Bond had Heien situated as the first reel and reels 8 to 11 devoted to Zuiderzee.
NOTES
Although the original Dutch title for the latter is Zuiderzeewerken I am referring
to it by the standard English title Zuiderzee, following the practice of Ivens in The
Camera ands (1969).
3 The shot discussed by Wegner does not appear in the MOMA version of W Bouw-
en; it does appear, however, in both Zuiderzee and Nieuwe Gronden.
4 Although in the 1970s Ivens denied his membership in the CPH at any time
(interview with author, April 1978), Jan de Vaal (1977), founder of the Joris Ivens
Archives at the Nederlands Filmmuseum, as well as Schoots ([1995] 2000, 70)
affirm it unequivocally, the latter dating his membership to 1931, based on Soviet
archival documentation.
5 As Hogenkamp (n.d., 6) suggests, Ivens's memory of the exact date should be
read with caution. (n.d., 6). Analogous editing experiments were being conducted
at the same time by Henri Storck in Brussels: his montage of 1928 newsreels
entitled Histoire du soldat inconnu (History of the Unknown Soldier, 1932, 11) is still
662 extant. The influence of such work is also visible in Vigo's Apropos de Nice (1930,
France, 45). The Japanese invaded Manchuria in September 1931, a fact that
helps date this activity.
6 Hogenkamp's original citations.
7 A further epic form discussed by McConnell is the 'self-conscious' epic (Virgil's
TheAeneid and Eisenstein's Ivan Groznyy [Ivan the Terrible, 1944-46, USSR, 187]).
This is not directly relevant to this study, inasmuch as Ivens's imminent taking up
of 'self-conscious' forms, like direct address, coincides with his engagement in
non-epic genres (agitation, for example).
8 For example, Herbert Reynolds (1976) states in the MOMA Program Notes that
Zuiderzee appears more 'modern' than the more explicitly political Nieuwe
Gronden. Another reason for the film's 'universal' appeal is suggested by Stufkens
(personal communication, 2014), namely that it is bereft of the provincial, local
iconography that dominates other Dutch cinematic renditions of the project,
from flags to folkloric costumes and handicrafts.
9 Compare Griffith's apocalyptic, seaside flash-forward to 'Liberty and Union ...
Now and Forever' at the end of Birth of a Nation, Virgil's flash-forward to Imperial
Rome in TheAeneid and Milton's flash-forward to Christ in Paradise Lost.
10 Grelier's (1965, 22) analysis is the most substantial using this method.
11 Compare my use of the conceptual binary 'presentational/representational' with-
in the context of documentary performance in direct cinema in Waugh (1990) and
in subsequent chapters of this book.
12 The point of view of Zuiderzee as epic film continues to be pertinent to this discus-
sion of the film's modes of discourse inasmuch as the epic is a literary form that
is quintessentially narrative, and primarily indirect in its address.
13 In 1933, Van Dongen and Bon would collaborate on the experimental studies
of the latter: 'hand-coloured geometrical forms - abrupt change from square to
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
triangle to circle with simultaneous changes into primary colours' (Van Dongen,
1976).
14 Voice-over narration had already been commonplace for as much as three years in
the commercial newsreels (Fielding, 1972, 159-188), and by 1933, the voice-over
narration convention in travelogue films was apparently already common enough
for Bunuel's satire on this convention in Las Hurdes, an effect heightened by the
no less satiric use of a Brahms symphonic score.
15 In addition to the French coverage of the film noted below, the Rotterdam daily
Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (30-31 May 1931) ran a long two-part article on the
sound mixing process used in Philips-Radio.
16 Rend Clair imitated this sound gag inA nous la liberte (Freedom For Us, 1931,
France, 104), which was shot in the Paris studio where the Philips sound record-
ing was being completed in 1931. According to Camera (Ivens, 1969, 63), Clair
showed Philips-Radio to his crew before the shooting of his feature fiction and
the closeness of Clair's gag to Ivens's supports this claim. In the light of this I 663
'borrowing' by Clair, it is appropriate that Clair was to halt the plagiarism suit
brought against Chaplin by his producers when Chaplin imitated Libertd in his
turn in Modern Times (1936, USA, 87). To complete the circle, Ivens would refer to
Philips-Radio in subsequent presentations as a documentary Modern Times.
17 The Dutch film journal Skrien chose the poster in 2001 as the most beautiful
Dutch film poster of all time (Stufkens, 2008, 103).
18 Gunning (2002, 23-25) also dwells on the fundamental ambiguity of the film.
19 One earlier use of the term in French, cited in the previous chapter, 'actualitds
documentaires', clearly employs the French usage of the period, namely 'news-
reels', rather than the film genre intended in his discussion a few years later.
20 The descriptions of this film (which has only recently become available) in Weg-
ner (1965, 39) and Grelier (1965, 74) seem to be taken from Ivens's recollections
in an early manuscript of Camera and from contemporary reviews of the film.
21 The original Russian title is Pesn o geroyakh. The film was commonly known in
French as LaJeunesse a la parole (literally, 'Youth has the floor'). In German and
English the film was commonly called Song ofHeroes (Heldenlied), a translation
from the Russian. The other common title Komsomol, which I have used in this
study, has the advantage of being an original Russian alternate title, comprehen-
sible to English-speaking readers, and the choice of Ivens (n.d. [c.1970], JIA) in
the Dutch version of his autobiography.
22 In fact, Mezhrabpom (Mezhdunarodnaya Rabochaya Pomoshch) is the Russian
acronym for the Workers International Relief. The studio itself was officially
called Mezhrabpom-Russ in 1924-1928 and Mezhranpomfilm thereafter. I use the
shortened version Mezhrabpom when referring to the film studio and the English
acronym WIR for the Workers International Relief. The WIR is also sometimes
known in English-language scholarship as the International Labour Defence
NOTES
(ILD), though this was strictly speaking an American communist organisation
connected like the WIR to the Comintern. The exact configuration of relationship
among these organisations remains murky.
23 Vertov ([1931] 1972) bitterly discusses the critics of his film in 'First Steps'.
24 Pudovkin would have discussed his first sound project, the aborted Life's Very
Good, during his visit to Holland two years earlier. It was eventually released as
Prostoy Sluchay (A Simple Case, 96) in December 1932, a complete debacle (Leyda,
1960, 279-280, 292-294). Eisenstein's first sound film was still a long way off -
Ivens was already on location in Magnitogorsk when his old friend arrived back in
Moscow in April 1932 from the Mexican misadventure.
25 Kulaks were a class of higher-income peasants targeted by Soviet authorities for
resisting collectivisation in the agricultural sector. Many were sent to remote
work camps including in the Magnitogorsk region beginning in 1931. Kulaks
were satirised as obese class enemies in The GeneralLine and ambiguously 'per-
664 I sonalized' in Earth.
26 Vertov (1972, 248) must surely have shared this view, considering the 'furious'
criticism that he describes having suffered from RAPP just prior to his prepa-
rations for Tripesni o Lenine (Three Songs About Lenin, 1934, USSR, 62). Stefan
Morawski ([195711974, 258), one of the few reliable and objective insider histori-
ans of socialist realism accessible in English, does likewise.
27 This view is supported by Morawski ([195711974, 260) and by the evidence of
Soviet films themselves, which often continued to be relatively fresh and lively
throughout the late thirties and the War.
28 The British school may also have served as a conduit for the Soviet influence, their
experiments with 'personalized' documentary being largely concurrent to those
of Ivens. Grierson was always well informed of Soviet developments and Paul
Rotha (1952, 142) cites some of the debate about the need for more individual
characterisation in documentaries at a Soviet conference attended by him in
January 1935. Several of the 'personalized' British films of the next few years had
input from Rotha, and were also widely seen in the US.
29 Komsomol was also inspired in part by still photographic work reflecting similar
dynamics. See work by Maks Alpert and Georgi Petrusov as collected in Ddewitz
(2009). Stufkens (2008, 109) has determined that Alpert's photo essay, published
abroad, on the shock worker Kalmykov, was a specific model for Komsomol and
that film's own 'personalized' role-model character Afanaseyev. Emily Joyce Evans
says Kalmykov was 'probably fictional' (Ddewitz 2009, 18), but Dutch filmmaker
Pieter Jan Smit found his widow in 1997, and heard of his 1938 execution for
'counter-revolutionary' activities (Stufkens, 2008, 117-118).
30 One of Vertov's many colourful phrases for the bourgeois acted cinema.
31 This said, not all of Ivens's plans for Afanaseyev's characterisation made it into
the final film, for example a scene of the riveter interacting and sharing domestic
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
tasks with his barracks co-inhabitants (Stufkens, 2008, 121). Also deleted was
speechmaking by local politicos.
32 Many of these structural characteristics are visible in the socialist realist novels of
the thirties as well, for example, Valentin Katayev's Time, Forward! (1932), also set
within the industrialisation of the Five-Year Plan, and Mikhail Sholokhov's Virgin
Soil Upturned (1932), set within the collectivisation of agriculture.
33 In fact most of the 'newsreel' footage of the dumping of surplus food was re-en-
acted by Ivens and his collaborators on location in the Paris region and in the
Joinville studios.
34 Ferguson's rave was dampened by an uncharacteristically obtuse dismissal of the
coda as 'incidental'.
35 Storck's original French title of this film is Misere au Borinage (Poverty in the
Borinage), and this is the title of the Belgian's later sound version of the film. I
use the more convenient title Borinage because it was Ivens's choice from 1934
onwards (Stufkens 2008, 165), in preference to Storck's, because: 'Poverty was I 665
one thing, it was obvious, but I didn't want to foreground it. I was aware of pov-
erty and of the destitution in which these people lived, but it wasn't misery, not
really. These men, these women were dignified. Beyond the conditions that were
imposed upon them, beyond their desire to surmount them, waiting for better
days, they accepted these limits and tried to live and be happy. The problem
was ideological. We had come to Borinage to make a film on the miners' living
conditions. We needed to go beyond poverty, forget the lost strike, look beyond
immediate evidence. The most engaged miners made us become aware that
a lost strike is not a defeat after which there's nothing to hope for.' (Ivens and
Destanque, 1982, 117)
The title also appears in this shortened form in non-French-speaking literature
and in traditional Ivens scholarship, including the definitive 1978 filmography.
I am grateful to Hogenkamp and Storck (1983), as well as Stufkens (2008), for
several factual details in the production and distribution history of the film, and
in the history of the Borin struggle. These are not individually cited except where
Hogenkamp's interpretative judgments enter my analysis.
36 Four critics and filmmakers from the Netherlands, the UK, Austria, and France
voted for Borinage as one of the ten best documentaries of all time in the 2014
Sight and Sound poll. accessed 16 October,
2014.
37 For account of artistic convergences of Von Gogh and Ivens see Stufkens (2002).
38 This anecdote related by Storck (interview with author, January 1976), but now
thought to be apochrophal (Stufkens, personal correspondence, May 2014) has
an interesting ending even if it may be untrue. Borinage's wealthy sponsor was
never to see the film he had made possible - he died on a train en route to the
NOTES
premiere and was subsequently buried with a hammer and sickle engraved on his
tomb.
39 This text appeared in Dutch (Links-Front, 11 October 1933), Russian, German,
French ('Notes de Travail sur Borinage', Commune [Paris] no. 7-8, March-April
1934), and English ('Jottings of a Film Producer', International Theater [Moscow]
no. 3-4, 1934). This citation is the author's translation from the French, rather
than the Moscow English version.
40 The Borinage summary comes immediately after the montage introduction in
one version, but is situated somewhat later in the version shown at the January
1934 Paris avant-premiere.
41 Subsequent research has provided historical names for most of the anonymous
characters in the film so that 21s-century century DVD viewers with Stufkens's
(2008) accompanying book in hand heighten their affective identification with
the film's characters across the chronological chasm of eight decades.
666 I 42 Not surprisingly, this shot breakdown from the 2008 restored DVD version differs
slightly from the 1934 mimeographed document of the original film screening
personally provided by co-director Henri Storck (1976).
43 Ivens's criticism of the British film may not be entirely fair: he could not have
been unaware that both Lorentz's and Storck's 'conquest of this particular
problem' was due in part to their use of studio sets, but that HousingProblems is
unique for its pioneering use of on-location sound recording. You may not have
been able to smell those London slums, but you could hear them for the first time
in film history. In any case the British were also wrestling with this same aesthetic
and ideological problem. Grierson had a special pejorative word 'aestheticky' and
Rotha (1952, 153) discussed the problem at length in Documentary Film: 'Beauty
is one of the greatest dangers to documentary: it is not only insufficient but fre-
quently harmful to the significant expression of content. Beauty of purely natural
things, of sunlight and flowers, of the ceiling of the sky, is unimportant unless
related to purpose and theme. Beauty of symphonic and rhythmic movement is,
as we have seen nothing in itself. What is important is beauty of idea, fact, and
achievement, none of which have anything to do with the actual filming of indi-
vidual shots'.
44 As further confirmation of Ivens's relationship with interwar European photo-
graphic culture, Regen was screened during the epochal 1929 FiFo (Film und Foto)
exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929, presumably selected by the curator of the Dutch
representation, the photographer and designer Piet Zwart, associated with the
New Objectivity and other avant-garde currents in Holland (Stufkens, 2008, 75).
45 Kracauer (1947, 233-234) has similar criticisms of New Objectivity in From Cali-
gari to Hitler.
46 Elsewhere, by a curious coincidence, Benjamin ([1931] 1978, 72) names Krull as
an example of the tendency he is criticising.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
47 The Workers Film and Photo League (WFPL) in the US also employed variations
of this form at this time. Russell Campbell (1978, 148-149) provides a detailed
breakdown of one extant film that does so, Bonus March (Leo Seltzer, 1932, 12).
48 The Ivens-Shub admiration was mutual. She devoted a chapter of her autobiogra-
phy to Ivens (Shub, 1972).
49 A WIR-sponsored Paris screening (private, since public screenings were forbid-
den) was mentioned in the WFPL organ Filmfront (15 February 1935, 18); Hogen-
kamp (1979, 16) provides this information about the Dutch distribution.
50 Storck, letter to Joris Ivens, March 1934. Shown by Storck to the author, January
1976. Though Storck and Ivens would never work together again, they remained
friends. Storck would contribute one of the finest homages to the 1963 East
German Festschrift in honour of Ivens's 65th birthday, and their jovial reunion
in their eighties in Katwijk (Cindmafia [1981, 331 together with and shot by Jean
Rouch) is a lovely extra in the 2008 DVD box set.
51 Van Dongen studied with Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin at the Moscow Acade- | 667
my of Cinematography, according to her later recollection, and lectured on edit-
ing at the Academy (Van Dongen, filmography).
52 Hogenkamp reveals that the 1960 version was distributed in England by both the
British Film Institute and the Workers' Film Association, symbolic evidence of
the film's continuing bifurcal constituency.
CHAPTER 3
1 Campbell ([1978] 1982) is the most detailed and reliable account of the ideologi-
cal context of the films of the American Popular Front, to which I must acknowl-
edge my indebtedness. Alexander (1981) is a less comprehensive, more easily
available treatment of the same subject.
2 It is unclear how this arrangement could have continued after Mezhrabpom was
collapsed into Soyuzdetfilm in June of that year, also as part of the new political
reality, but this has not been confirmed.
3 A compact 1934 statement of Hurwitz's position, 'The Revolutionary Film - Next
Step', is anthologised in Jacobs (1979), from which the quotes in this discussion
are taken.
4 It was not Ivens's first encounter with Spain, nor specifically with Spanish left film
culture. Juan Piqueras Martinez, editor of the left-wing Spanish film magazine
Nuestro Cinema (Madrid), published a detailed account of Ivens's work and an
interview with Ivens on Komsomol in the June-July 1933 issue of his magazine,
complete with three production stills from Magnitogorsk (Piqueras 1933). They
apparently met in Paris, and the issue in the Biblioteca nacional de Espana bears
Ivens's autograph upon the still of his Komsomol crew. Piqueras was dispatched
NOTES
by a Franquist firing squad in July 1936. I am grateful to Enrique Fibla for this
link.
5 This village, now on the southeastern outskirts of Madrid near the Valencia high-
way, is not identified in the film.
6 This incomplete and misleading description of the classical sound documentary
could be found even in such otherwise groundbreaking articles on documentary
as Nichols (1976) and Kuhn (1981).
7 Ivens did not bow to pressure to cover elsewhere industrial production and wom-
en working in factories, as well as the literacy campaign, received from the Italian
communist 'Carlos', political commissar of the communist Fifth Regiment
featured in the film, and production consultant (Stuflens, 2008, 198). According
to Diario de la guerra espafola, the memoirs of Mikhail Koltsov (1938, quoted in
Stuflens 2008, 198), Pravda correspondent and reputedly Stalin's personal del-
egate on the Spanish front, Koltsov consulted with Ivens on the film, along with
668 I Carlos, and the two advised a focus on family life, worker-peasant unity, and the
defence of democracy and culture. Koltsov, who appears heavy-handedly as the
murderous Soviet commissar in Hemingway & Gellhorn (Philip Kaufman, 2012,
USA, 155) was liquidated in the purges when he returned to Moscow.
8 For an account of the newsreels' coverage of the Sino-Japanese War see Fielding
(1972, 207-210).
9 Pinyin transliteration of Chinese words is used throughout for the purpose of
consistency, including in citations originally using the Wade-Giles system. Where
a proper name more familiar in its Wade-Giles form is used, this version follows
the Pinyin form in brackets at first use.
10 Tuttle has gone down in history as one who named names during the postwar Red
Scare.
11 Poll cited by Campbell (1978, 294). Roosevelt's speech was given in Chicago on 5
October 1937 and greatly encouraged pro-Chinese elements: 'When an epidemic
of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quar-
antine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the
spread of the disease' (Guerrant, 1950, 137).
12 Leyda (1972, 110-112) vividly demonstrates how untruthful and incomplete ear-
lier American film visions of China had been. A more detailed but less forthright
version maybe found in Jones (1955).
13 Ivens's playing along with the Guomindang's game may also have been a ploy.
14 According to legend, Dunham smuggled his precious footage out of China in
ginger jars (Campbell 1978, 292); newsreel operators often had to resort to similar
tactics (Fielding 1972, 208).
15 The English writers were completing a book assignment on the war,Journey to
a War. The two excursions crossed paths at several points. Isherwood's ([1939]
1972, 165) account of their April meeting in Xi'an relates that Capa found Chinese
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
faces less satisfactory for the camera than Spanish faces, that the filmmakers
were then still counting on going to Yanan, and that the Englishmen took photos
back to the US with them to skirt the censors.
16 According to Ivens's own brief account of his itinerary (Ivens, 1939).
17 According to this account, it was Nichols who dissuaded Ivens from destroying
the negative.
18 For a catalogue of the content of Dunham's footage see Campbell (1978, 301-304).
19 Ivens ([1938] 1969, 176) also remembers avoiding 'picturesque' images that his
audience would have already encountered in 'travelogues', 'so I concentrated
more on the less exotic things'.
20 Leyda (1972, 8) tells of some of the first such filmmakers; Susan Sontag (1978,
167-180) discussed another 1970s example, Michelangelo Antonioni, revealing
the enormous complexity of the subject. The fact that Antonioni encountered
attitudes from the heirs of Mao during the Cultural Revolution that are similar to
those 30 years earlier of the minions of Jiang would suggest that cultural factors I 669
are indeed the determining factor. However, the fact that the BBC was expelled
from India about the same time in a cloud of rhetoric that resembles the Beijing
criticism of Antonioni implies that this aesthetic of photography is common
among Westernised postcolonial elites and is thus more properly ideological.
The fact that Ivens's exercise with his Beijing students, Six Hundred Million With
You (1958, China, 12), virtually reproduces the Guomindang mise-en-scene style
of 1938, while his Comment Yukong deplaga les montagnes (How YukongMoved the
Mountains, 1976, France, 718) successfully introduced the diametrically opposed
aesthetic of direct cinema to China, warns that the subject is perilous terrain for
armchair cultural analysts.
21 The Lintong (Xi'an) incident of December 1936 was an attempted coup mounted
by the Guomindang's northern commanders in a successful attempt to force
Jiang to negotiate an alliance with the Communists against the Japanese.
22 The filmmakers did in fact have some primitive sound-on-disk equipment with
them and recorded some 'wild' sound effects used on the soundtrack (Ivens,
letter to author, 19 October 1980). Some of the folksongs recorded by the crew in
the Yellow River valley ended up on the soundtrack of the National Film Board of
Canada's 1942 production on Chinese culture, Flight of the Dragon (Leslie Thatch-
er, 13) (Morris, 1965, 29).
23 Both Grelier and Zalzman claim, apparently on the basis of conversations with
Ivens, that some of Harry Dunham's shots from Yanan were also used. This seems
to be in error: none of those appearing in China Strikes Back is visible, and there is
no credit given to Dunham.
24 Baddeley's (1963, 35) 'recommended' shooting, ratio is 3 or 3 2 to 1 but it can
'unexpectedly' reach to 15 to 1.
25 See also Barnes (1939) and 400 Million (1939).
NOTES
26 Three versions of the commentary exist at JIA: a first undated typescript version
entitled 'We, the Chinese People'! (22 pages); a 'final' version prepared for the
recording; the final version as it appears on the final film, which reflect numerous
further short excisions.
27 Ivens himself would not narrate a film, except for the Dutch version of Nieuwe
Gronden, until the Vietnamese film of 1966, Le Ciel, la terre (The Threatening Sky,
France, 28).
28 The outcome was Composingfor the Films (Eisler 1947), which the composer later
produced, fresh off the presses, before the inquisitors of the House Committee
on Un-American Activities (HUAC) as evidence of his ideological propriety - in
vain (Bentley, 1971, 73-109).
29 As such, the symposium on 'Music in Films' (Eisler, 1947, 5-21) that gathered
together most of the prestigious film composers of the last half of the decade can
be seen as the summation of a period at its close rather than the harbinger, as its
organisers may have imagined, of future trends.
30 Adorno 'conducted the music division of another Rockefeller undertaking, the
Princeton Radio Research Project. The problems with which he concerned him-
self were those of a social, musical, and even technical aspect, closely related to
the moving picture. The theories and formulations presented here [in Eisler's
Composingfor the Films] evolved from cooperation with him on general aesthetic
and sociological matters as well as purely musical issues' (Eisler, 1947, xx). Ador-
no was the chief cultural critic of the refugee Frankfurt School of Social Research.
His Marxist cultural analysis was apparently too highbrow for HUAC.
31 This concept 'strengthened' (my retranslation) comes from Ivens's lecture at
Columbia University (13 December 1939).
32 Capra's composer, Dimitri Tiomkin, would provide Ivens with less 'detestable'
service in OurRussian Front (1941, USA, 38).
33 Ivens's handwritten suggestions for Eisler on this document are very suggestive of
the origins of the score.
34 Ivens remembered the isolated violin in Hervo (1978).
35 This admittedly speculative analysis is supported by at least one case history:
upon first being introduced to 'serious' modernist music as a late adolescent, the
author's first and lingering response was that it sounds like educational film music.
36 The concept comes from Eisler (1947, 34), undoubtedly deriving it from his for-
mer collaborator, Brecht. Eisler (1947, xx) declares that 'traditional resources long
since frozen into automatic associations [...] can be used meaningfully again if
they are clarified and "alienated" in the light of advanced practice'. However, this
is not Eisler's method in any of his scores with which I am familiar.
37 Ivens would fulfil his long-standing ambition of 'filming the wind' in the early
sixties during his 'lyrical essay' period with Pour leMistral (For the Mistral, 1965,
France, 33) and of course with his final autobiographical essay Histoire.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
38 Jiang was a newsreel favourite (Fielding, 1972, 201) and an even greater favourite
with the Luce media: he was Time's 'Man of the Year' (with his wife) for 1937.
Halberstam (1979, 102, 109-122) details later developments in the honeymoon
between Jiang and the US media.
39 All the same, Ivens succeeded in resisting the extreme hagiography of the Guo-
mindang and Jiang urged upon him by his American backer, Li; a late editing
decision cut all reference to the Lintong incident, the Jiang kidnapping, the
site of which near Xi'an Ivens had been shown by his hosts as if it were 'a kind
of Lourdes' (Ivens, 1969, 176). The Jiang kidnapping had been recreated for The
March of Time (Fielding 1972, 167), but Ivens (15 December 1938, JIA) made a
note to himself to play this incident 'down or out' and the final decision was the
latter.
40 The small-scale mobile industries in the interior were part of the Guomindang's
'New Life' Movement to revive China and resist the Japanese.
41 Ivan Pyryev would be Ivens's co-director on Freundschaft siegt (Friendship Tri- 671
umphs, 1952, USSR/DDR, 100).
42 Miriam Hopkins made at least one other contribution to the Chinese cause, join-
ing the anti-Japan boycott by wearing cotton stockings instead of silk (Ceplair and
Englund, 1980, 126).
43 Ivens was not alone in encountering French censorship problems in the first
months of the war: Malraux's film L'Espoir (Days of Hope, 1945, 88) also had diffi-
culties in September.
CHAPTER 4
1 As many as one-third of the officers of the League of American Writers resigned as
a result of the Pact (Caute, 1973, 189). Ceplair and England (1980, 120-153) report
similar defections from Hollywood leftist groups.
2 Ivens's role as president was mostly honorary. The functioning administrator was
secretary Mary Losey, a former March of Time researcher, director of the American
Film Center, and leading spokesperson for the American documentary move-
ment. Losey was active in the left milieu frequented by Ivens, the sister of Joseph
Losey, and the wife of Frontier Films member William Osgood Field.
3 Ornitz's father, Samuel Ornitz, the Hollywood scriptwriter, was one of the Holly-
wood Ten. Arthur Ornitz later became president of the Cameraman's Union.
4 Ferno would collaborate with Julian Roffman on And So They Live (1940, USA, 24)
for the Sloan Foundation, andA Child Went Forth (Joseph Losey, USA, 1941, 20),
both films on childhood in underprivileged social strata, as well as a beautiful
1941 film for the National Film Board of Canada, High over the Borders (Raymond
Spottiswoode, 1941, 23), an essay proposing the migration of birds as a metaphor
NOTES
for international cooperation. At the end of the war, he returned to the Nether-
lands to make two films on the liberation and post-war period, Gebroken djken
(Broken Dikes, 1945, 15) and Het laaste scot (The Last Shot, 1945, 16).
5 Lorentz had however refused Strand and Hurwitz's earlier radical script for Plow
(Snyder, 1968, 31).
6 Agee and Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) is one such reaction in the
view of Stott (1973, 259-314).
7 Variety (1940), however, no authority on 'stix pix', found the well-fed, hard-work-
ing and well-equipped Parkinsons exaggeratedly primitive.
8 Lorentz's roots in that part of Ohio were also a factor in the Parkinsons choice
(Snyder, 1968, 123).
9 This prescription is present in all three versions of this 'manual' (Ivens, 1940,
33-34, 36; 1942, 298-299; 1969, 217-218). This specific wording comes from 'Col-
laboration in Documentary'.
672 I 10 Snyder's sources are interviews with both Lorentz and Crosby.
11 Snyder recounts Crosby's recollection of the episode. The incidents included a
nearby field being set ablaze, an extra's heart attack, and the business manager's
being overcome by smoke.
12 Zalzman (1963, 69) is the only author to mention this.
13 This recollection does not coincide precisely with Snyder's account, though it
does not necessarily contradict it.
14 Snyder (1968, 127) cites the letter in part.
15 Alexander (1982) suggests that Lorentz's suppression of the barn-burning
sequence, with its implied indictment of the utility companies, was an attempt
to remove as much controversy from the film as possible, in view of the ongoing
debate in Congress over the future of the US Film Service. The debate, however,
did not get underway in earnest until February 1940. This would suggest that this
specific factor could not have been a major one at the time of Lorentz's letter,
though Lorentz must certainly have felt that he had already made enough ene-
mies.
16 A retroactive feminist rewriting of the credits for this and several other films, both
by Ivens and Flaherty, is in order. Van Dongen's contribution to Flaherty's Land
and Louisiana Story (1948, USA, 78) is discussed in Achtenberg (1976, 48).
17 These overtones are presumably what MacCann (1973, 103) means by the film's
'shortcomings of informational structure and of plot'.
18 In FightforLife, Lorentz was able to avoid this hitherto unavoidable structural
requirement of dramatised, didactic documentary by using the original device of
a film-within-a-film, motivated within the narrative.
19 I use the term 'identification' as Ivens and his contemporaries used it, that is
innocent of the complexities that both Freudian and Brechtian film criticism of
later decades brought to it. While this use is not inconsistent with the Brechtian
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
notion, it is clear that Ivens's and his contemporaries' evolution towards charac-
ters with which their audience could 'identify' at the same time took them away
from their Brechtian strategies of the early thirties.
20 In the light of several precedents and contemporary examples, Ivens's 1967 recol-
lection appended to Camera (Ivens, 1969, 228) must be read with caution: 'Before
the war, it was so exceptional to direct documentary material in this way that
there would be big arguments each time one of us tried it, as in Pare Lorentz's
FightforLife or in my Power and the Land'. Few of the 'big arguments' took place in
print, apparently.
21 Pudovkin ([1949] 1968, 170) discusses such tactics in Film Technique and Film
Acting. One of his methods for filming Mongolian extras during the production
of Potomok Chingis-Khana (Storm OverAsia, USSR, 1928, 127) was to have them
distracted by a conjuror.
22 I reflect in more detail on these issues and their subsequent play in documentary
history in Waugh ([1990] 2011). I 673
23 Dyer (1979, 53-68) is building on the conceptual model of O.E. Klapp.
24 One of Moore's other scores was for Youth Gets a Break (National Youth Adminis-
tration, Joseph Losey, 1941, USA, 20).
25 The customarily imaginative programmers at New York's Rialto Theatre outdid
themselves for the premiere engagement of Power: although the feature attrac-
tion was Allan Dwan's undistinguished western, Trail of the Vigilantes (1940, USA,
75), the cartoon depicted Disney's Donald Duck in Modern Inventions (Jack King,
1937, 9) where he is considerably less in control of the automatic barber-shoesh-
ine combination machine than the Parkinsons are, fortunately, of their new elec-
tric milking machine.
26 Alexander (1981) offers a psychoanalytic study of Ivens' characterisation of Bip.
27 Compare the reference in the commentary for Flaherty's Land, another commis-
sion for the Department of Agriculture, to 'problems that no longer one man can
solve alone'.
28 Rotha (1952, 316-317) has a slightly different version: 'The aesthetic effects [of
Valley Town] on the audience were as nothing compared with the impact on
the sponsors. [... It] seemed a bitter indictment of the roundabout solutions of
classical economics. The Sloan Foundation thus felt moved to finance a "com-
panion piece" to redress the balance, but Machine:Master or Slave? was slick and
unconvincing. Nevertheless, it must be noted that the soliloquy sequences in
Valley Town overwhelmed and obscured its general theme, and that the price paid
for this technical experiment was the withdrawal of a sponsor on whom so many
American documentary hopes were based at that period'.
29 These accounts are based on assorted New Frontiers notes and outlines in JIA.
30 Zalzman (1963, 70) says that Ivens's collaborator on the New Frontiers script was
Wieland Herzfelde, brother of German anti-fascist artist John Heartfield and an
NOTES
important publisher, then a refugee in New York. Leyda (interview with author,
January 1981) said that this cannot be true. Ivens never having replied to my
query on this, I want to believe Zalzman, for this would be yet another fascinating
intersection of Ivens's career with international left cultural workers as well as a
confirmation of General Motors' evident suspicions that the project was riddled
with reds.
31 A contemporary filmmaker's alarm at this ominous development may be found in
Rotha (1973, 233).
32 The future victims ranged from Morris Carnovsky, who was involved in the
post-synchronisation of 400 Million and would be blacklisted, and Carl Foreman,
co-director with Ivens of the aborted Know YourEnemy:Japan (1942, 62), who
emigrated to England, to John Grierson, Ivens's sponsor for Action Stations,
who would be linked to a Soviet spy scandal by the Canadian equivalent of the
Red Scare. The biggest star of all, of course, was Eisler. In his appearance before
HUAC, Eisler's work with Ivens onKomsomol was discussed and he professed to
being flattered by the charge that he was the 'Karl Marx of Communism in the
musical field'. Had he been readmitted to the US, Ivens would not have escaped a
similar star appearance: Eisler's interrogator's comment, 'We will get to Mr. Ivens
later', sounds intriguingly ominous (Bentley, 2001, 76, 84, 86).
33 The Dutch government did however accept his offer of the use of the film Nieuwe
Gronden, which they re-edited for the purpose of wartime propaganda, minus,
needless to say, the montage coda, but with a narration by Irving Jacoby stressing
the parallel between the struggle for earth and the struggle for freedom (Bdker,
1978, 280, 289).
34 Oil is not lost, contrary to the opinion of Shell Oil (letter to author, 6 October
1975), but extant and in good condition in the National Film Archives of Canada,
Ottawa.
35 On Ceplair and England's (1980, 437-438) lists of 'Key Political Activists' in Holly-
wood in the thirties and forties, Ivens's associates figure prominently: among the
31 'liberals' appear March, his wife Florence Eldridge, Hopkins, Lewis Milestone,
Nichols, Welles, and William Wyler; among the 52 radicals appear Dashiell Ham-
mett, Hellman, Parker, Stewart, Foreman, and Maddow, plus other well-known
writers, including later members of the Hollywood Ten with whom Ivens worked
in the Hollywood Writers' Mobilization.
36 Information on Ivens's teaching at USC comes from the following: assorted lec-
ture notes, JIA; interviews with the author, February 1976 and April 1978; Wegner
(1965, 110).
37 Only 38% of the US public was in favour of aid to the Soviets (Dallek, 1979, 296).
Dallek goes into some detail on how religious affiliations and the Church hier-
archy intervened in these attitudes. Further evidence of US isolationist attitude
at this point, which must have alarmed pro-Soviet filmmakers in particular, is
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
a resolution introduced into the Senate that August condemning Hollywood's
alleged pro-war propaganda (Sklar, 1975, 245).
38 The Herald Tribune ran Milestone's photo alongside their review of the film
(Barnes, 1942).
39 One other possible explanation for this sudden preponderance of commentary is
the absence of Van Dongen from the project, for the first time in Ivens's sound-
era career. Griffith's (1952a, 329) account of Van Dongen's own project, News
Review No. 2 (1944-1945) suggests that she had her own personal distaste for
overbearing commentaries. The film was 'an even vaster account of events on all
fronts round the world during two years of war. This binding together of human
beings in a common experience was achieved almost without the aid of commen-
tary, which was in both cases [that is, in her earlier film, Russians at War (1943, 61)
as well] negligible'.
40 Simonov's play opened on Broadway in January 1943, a Theater Guild production.
This play may be the source of Leyda's (1972, 64) apparently erroneous account of I 675
a film of this name by Ivens and Van Dongen in 1942. Roger Manvell (1976, 182)
repeats the apparent error. Leyda is presumably thinking of Van Dongen's Rus-
sians at War, or even Front though Van Dongen denies having had anything to do
with this film.
41 A fuller account of the controversy surrounding Mission to Moscow is Culbert
(1979, 121-146).
42 MacCann's (1973, 123-128) vivid account of this period includes the well-docu-
mented suggestion that MacLeish's short career in wartime information was due
to congressional antipathy to him both as a presidential favourite and a poet.
43 Among WFPL veterans and other filmmakers with radical or liberal sympathies
employed at the OWI were Maddow, Lerner, Hurwitz, Meyers, Jacoby, Hammid,
Henwar Rodakiewicz, Van Dyke, Philip Dunne, Waldo Salt, and Roger Barlow.
44 Set in Canada, this film stars Laurence Olivier as an anti-Nazi French-Canadian
trapper!
45 Ivens himself ascribes these reservations to Grierson (interview with author, April
1978).
46 Another NFB left-winger was famed animator Norman McLaren, who became
friends with Ivens when they crossed paths in Ottawa, no doubt on the basis of
their shared Spanish Civil War history and imminent shared solidarity with the
Chinese Revolution; Ivens later invited McLaren to participate in Pour le Mistral
(For the Mistral, 1965, France, 33) - to no avail.
47 This phrase, now a cliche of Canadian film history, originates in a 1950 'Act
Respecting the National Film Board' of the Canadian Parliament (repr. James,
1977, 709).
48 Rodney James (1977, 90) describes this tripartite structure as giving the 'impression
of three short films cut together to make a long one', erroneously, in my opinion.
NOTES
49 Applebaum went on to a distinguished career in Canadian and American film
music. One of his scores would be for another project associated with Ivens, The
Story ofG.I.Joe (William A. Wellman, 1945, USA, 108).
50 Action Stations may have been upstaged by a Hollywood dramatic film on the
same subject, Universal's CorvetteK-225 (Richard Rosson, 1943, 98). This film,
praised for its 'virtually documentary treatment' by Crowther (1943), was also
derived from location work on a Canadian Corvette, and appeared on Crowther's
'ten best' list for 1943.
51 It is difficult to establish the time span of the project. Leyda (1964, 59) describes
the project as having been 'more than a year' under Ivens's direction. Van Dongen
(interview with author, 1976) remembers Ivens's involvement as having been
much less than that. It seems plausible that Van Dongen was actually involved in
the mechanical task of screening footage for as much as a year and that Ivens was
similarly engaged for a shorter period but with a general supervisory role for most
676 I of the duration of the project.
52 The treatments are entitled respectively: 'Outline for Know Your Enemy:Japan'
(16 August 1943), inscribed 'First revised outline' in Ivens's handwriting; 'Know
Your Enemy Japan' (26 August 1943) inscribed 'Short outline by US Signal Corps'
in what appears to be Van Dongen's handwriting; 'Restricted War Department
Photographic Scenario, The United States Army Presents Know Your Enemy:Japan,
A Special Service Orientation Film No. 19' (23 November 1943)', all JIA.
53 One possible antecedent is Esfir Shub's project of reconstructing the character of
the historical Leo Tolstoy forRossiya Nikolaya II i Lev Tolstoy (The Russia ofNicho-
lasIIand Leo Tostoy, Esfir Shub, 1928, USSR)
54 Contemporary catalogue description of Mask of Nippon, quoted in Peter Morris
(1965, 82).
55 This version of Know YourEnemy:Japan is deposited in the Joris Ivens Archives
despite Ivens's disavowal of the film. It was eventually released in 1980 by the
National Audio Visual Center (NAVC) of the US National Archives and broadcast
over PBS, whereupon one viewer termed it 'one of the most racist films ever made'
(Pappas, 1980, 48), erroneously attributing it to Ivens. NAVC researcher William
Blakefield was more accurate in his rendition of the credits (Ivens is listed as one
of five scriptwriters; there is no credit for director, but Capra is listed as 'supervi-
sor'), and gentler in his description of the film: 'Students of Japanese history and
culture will undoubtedly take exception to many of the ideas promulgated in the
film; it should be noted in fairness that such views were almost universally held
by Americans at the time. Perhaps these attitudes are merely representative of the
xenophobia historically present at meetings of East and West, understandably
heightened by the hostilities of war. [...] The film is considered of historical value
and does not necessarily reflect current policy of plans of the Department of
Defence.' (Blake field, 1980, 27-28)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
56 This version of the discontinuation of Know YourEnemy:Japan was proposed by
Zalzman (1963, 76) and is repeated by Delmar (1979, 40).
57 This treatment may be incomplete since its ending on page 22 seems abrupt.
58 Ivens's panel on documentary film was chaired by Hurwitz and featured Howe,
Maddow, and Kenneth MacGowan, the film theorist and teacher (UCLA) and
producer for Twentieth Century-Fox.
59 Dogged research by the author has not been able to corroborate this much-re-
peated factoid of Ivens lore.
60 Stott (1973, 141-210) notices important analogies of approaches in documentary
expression in journalism and the arts to evolving methods of enquiry in the
social sciences during the thirties. By extension the analogies with specifically
cinematic documentary approaches are quite striking, for example between
'participant observer' research and candid observational filming, between 'case
history' research and personality-oriented filmmaking (or as Ivens would call it,
the 'personalised' documentary), and between 'informant narrative' research and I 677
the 'internal narrators' that became popular in documentary during the forties.
61 Flaherty spent fifteen months with Nanook and two years on Aran (Calder-Mar-
shall [1963] 1970, 62-87, 141-157). Storck lived among his peasant subjects of La
Symphonie paysanne for two years (post-screening discussion, 16 October 1980).
Kopple lived intermittently in Harlan County for four years, including continuous
residence for the thirteen-month duration of the strike (Kleinhans, 1977).
CHAPTER 5
1 The archives of loyal East German collaborator and biographer Hans Wegner
took decades to move from Berlin to the Ivens Foundation in Nijmegen after all,
thanks largely to bureaucracy.
2 Some of the foregoing factual material is indebted to research conducted by
Schoots ([1995] 2000), though interpretations and contextualisation are my own.
3 Ivens later remembered burying the Yugoslav reels in a basement of the Prague
documentary studio, never to see them again (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 233).
4 The Bulgarian cinematographer Zachary Zhandov (1911-1998) had directed two
documentary shorts immediately after the war in 1946 and would move into
features in 1951 with Trevoga (Alarm, 115); Czech cinematographer Ivan Fric
(1922-2001), known for having shot part of and edited Theresienstadt (The PUhrer
Gives theJews a City, Kurt Gerron, Germany/Czechoslovakia, 1944, 23), the notori-
ous 1944 Nazi propaganda film about the showcase camp Theresienstadt, would
maintain his place in the Czech film industry until the mid-sixties; Polish-Jewish
cinematographer Wladyslaw Forbert (1915-2001) had been active since a Zionist/
Palestinian documentary in 1934, had just finished the documentaries Budujemy
NOTES
Warszawg (Warsaw Rebuilds, Stanislaw Urbanowicz, 1945, USA/Poland, 15) and
TheJewish People Live (Mir, lebngeblibene, Natan Gross, 1947, Poland, 80), and
would continue his collaboration with Ivens on Peace Will Win, followed by a pro-
lific career in camera.
5 Zhdanov died in 1948, but his influence cannot be said to have receded until well
after the death of Stalin five years later.
6 Ivens evoked socialist realism explicitly only four times in the texts that have
been preserved from this period, twice explicitly and twice by implication. Was he
scarred by bureaucracy in USSR and Eastern Europe, and provided only the mini-
mum talk of the talk?
7 Schoots ([1995] 2000) accuses Ivens of exaggerating the extent to which Dutch
official harassment affected his decision to stay behind the Iron Curtain for
almost a decade, an exile without papers. Still Schoots's research reveals that
Ivens woke up to being a target for Dutch retribution for the Indonesia episode
678 I in the summer of 1948 when they forced the withdrawal of Indonesia Calling
from the Locarno festival, and thereafter he was faced with obligatory passport
extensions every three months rather than the usual two years, motivated also
by a made-in-Holland Red Scare. This led to the May 1950 confiscation of his
passport, purportedly due to a public screening of the 'communistic ending' of
his seventeen-year-old Nieuwe Gronden (New Earth, 1933, Netherlands, 30). Fol-
lowing Ivens's protests against 'the idea that I am a politician, whereas I am an
artist' and against 'obstructing the freedom of travel of leftists', the three-months
extension resumed in October and continued until 1957, the year of his Paris
cinematic 'comeback', replaced by six-months extensions until a full thaw in 1961
(the thaw with the US did not come until 1979 [Waugh, 1995]). Schoots points
to inconsistencies between Ivens's aggrieved persecution narrative and the fact
that he travelled frequently, seemingly everywhere except Holland and the US
during those years. Regardless of whether the inconsistencies can be explained
by the resourcefulness of Ivens's East German sponsors in procuring laisser-pass-
ers within the socialist world as well as Finland, Italy, Belgium, and France, the
inconsistencies hardly matter. As we now understand (Walker, 2005), there are no
such things as inconsistencies in traumatic memories, rather symptomatic gaps.
The reality of Ivens' perception of persecution and ostracism, based on regular
shamings at the hands of his compatriot diplomats for almost a decade, gives
him posthumous moral prevalence over his latter-day compatriot nitpicker and
denialist. Passports were weapons during the Cold War, as Ivens's friend Paul
Robeson also knew, and the two artists engaged resourcefully in the process of
healing of their traumatic wounds.
8 Up until this moment, it had been the Poles who had inaugurated almost single-
handedly the fledgling Holocaust cinema, the Yiddish-language film TheJewish
People Live surfacing in 1947 though denied exhibition, completed just as Ivens
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
and crew were about to set foot in Warsaw for First Years. One expects, though I
cannot verify this, that cinematographer Forbert, who had already made docu-
mentaries on Zionism and the Holocaust, and perhaps even Bossak, who used the
nom de plume Szebulski apparently to play down his Jewish heritage (Ivens 1978),
may have had input into this remarkable scene in the ruins of the ghetto.
9 The congress film's generic siblings, the rock concert film, the 'march' film, and
the sports event film, have historically confronted the same dangers and fared
somewhat better than the congress film.
10 Clergy were well represented at the Congress, not only cynically silenced Soviet
Orthodox and Muslim representatives, but also a US delegate, the courageous
pacifist Rev. Willard Uphaus (Methodist Federation for Social Service), who would
be jailed as a HUAC victim. This presence reminds us how the conscience of civil
society was configured as the voices of the clergy during the Cold War, even as late
as the Vietnam anti-war movement.
11 The Bandung conference, harbinger of the Non-Aligned Movement and of 'third I 679
world' solidarity, took place in 1955.
12 I came into the possession of two well preserved 16mm prints of Peace Will Win
thanks to the preservation efforts of progressive Washington teachers Kay Powers
and Randy Rowland in 2010, who found the reels in a barn in Idaho, where they
had perhaps been stored after use in the anti-war movement of the 196os or even
earlier during the 1950s. They are now archived at Concordia University and a dig-
itised version of this rare language version is deposited at the Ivens Foundation.
13 Another example of the cycle, in cheerful 16mm, is They Chose Peace (1952, Aus-
tralia, 29), produced by Melbourne's Realist Film group on a similar event, the
1952 Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship in Sydney, lovingly restored by John
Hughes (2006).
14 According to Jordan (1999), DEFA had been founded in 1946 by 'reform commu-
nists' but the ruling East German communist party took it over the following year.
15 Among major filmmakers of Ivens's generation, Ford had broken into colour in
1939 with Drums Along the Mohawk (USA, 104), Powell in 1940 with The Thief of
Baghdad (UK, 106), Eisenstein in 1944 with Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible, Part
I, USSR, 95), Hitchcock in 1948 with Rope (USA, 80), Ivens's old Popular Front
friends Milestone and Renoir in 1949 with The Red Pony (USA, 89) and in 1951
with The River (France/India/USA, 99) respectively.
16 According to Schoots ([1995] 2000, 238, 249), Michelle got Ivens's permission to
lop off the Stalin material for the Paris screening.
17 Nonetheless the film was revived in the 21St century for a London celebration of
the Friedensfahrt champion, Scottish cyclist Ian Steel, and for a French sports
film festival.
18 Various gargantuan and often contradictory numbers float through the sec-
ondary literature around Lied, which become confusing and occasionally seem
NOTES
apocryphal, though not necessarily false: 800 delegates attended the congress,
representing 79 countries (commentary) and 188 million workers (Wikipedia),
though it is said elsewhere that WFTU had 60 million members in 1945 ( accessed 8 March 2014); 32
cinematographers were involved (Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 241), Schoots
([1995] 2000, 244) says in eighteen countries while Ivens says 32 countries (Ivens
and Destanque, 1982, 241) and the Ivens Foundation website says 'eighteen' in
one window and '36' in another; 120,000 metres of film were allocated (cf. 100,000
metres colour stock for Freundschaft), while post-production processed 75 hours
or 12,000 metres of rushes (Grelier, 1965, 97), and the first version was 4575
metres (166 minutes). Grelier (1965, 56) says the film was seen by 250 million
spectators in 28 different languages, a figure corroborated by the website (Ivens
said eighteen languages [Ivens and Destanque, 1982, 243]), while another claim
puts the audience at 500 million (Ivens and Pozner, 1957); such audience figures
680 I include the of course unverifiable Chinese figure of 40 million (Schoots, [1995]
2000, 245). I usually presume the conservative version of each statistic and am
still awestruck.
19 Between World War II and its 1960 independence, Cameroon was a hotbed of
communist-led organisation and insurgency under the Union des populations
camerounaises (Union of the Peoples of Cameroon).
20 The Nigerian shots emphasise child labour and hungry kids lining up for food,
under the commentary revelation that 95% of the colony's children do not go
to school, and are difficult to identify definitively as archival or new in-the-field
imagery.
21 I cannot identify such shots if they are included: the only explicit shot referencing
the country is a mise-en-scene, probably made at the Congress, of a black man and
a white man in suits, conversing around a desk, identified in the commentary as
a Brazilian and a Cuban unionist, seen once the Cuban (Lazaro Pena) had been
released from jail. Another Cuban shot late in the film shows not prison material
but street action in what is probably Havana.
22 One shot from Iran is identified by the voice-over in the German version but not
the English version, an extreme long shot, not very sharp, of workers leaving what
could be an oil refinery plant, as part of the global concatenation of workers'
strike actions; in the English version this unfolds under the commentary's list of
translations of the word 'unity' in various languages, including 'Persian'.
23 All eyes were on postcolonial struggles in Korea and Vietnam as the film was
being made, but also on Egypt, with the '1952 Revolution' taking place in July of
that year, the declaration of the Republic in June 1953, and Nasser's confirmation
in power just around the time of the premiere; the film clairvoyantly anticipates
the continuation of the country as a flashpoint and its eruption in the Suez crisis
two years later.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
24 Leyda was of course not only Ivens's ghostwriter on the original version of The
Camera andI, not only his collaborator in the New York communist documentary
scene during the Popular Front, but also the editor/translator of Eisenstein's Film
Sense and Film Form, the two books that were basically the bible for English-lan-
guage progressive film editors for a whole generation after their publication in
1942 and 1949 respectively. His pioneering study of compilation documentary
Film Begets Film (1964) is sadly neglected.
25 One or two shots depicting the Ku Klux Klan, derive from fiction rather than docu-
ment, calling into question editorial intelligence in this sequence, if not ethics.
26 I find Robeson's official account of his involvement less than fully plausible, i.e.
that he received a commission unidentified for security reasons, and assigned the
translation and made the recording of the song, all without knowing for whom or
for what it had been assigned.
27 Cavalcanti, one of East Berlin's stable of senior expatriate artists, like his script-
writer Jorge Amado a Brazilian exile, veteran of the 1920s French avant-garde and 681
the 1930s Grierson 'firm', went on to make a second German-language feature,
the successful Brecht adaptation Herr Puntila und sein KnechtMatti (HerrPuntila
and His Servant Matti, 1960, West Germany/Austria, 97).
CHAPTER 6
1 Ivens had interacted with that milieu as well as with the Parti communiste
francais (PCF) and its international patron, Moscow, since the late 1920s. In the
interwar years, Ivens was a regular of the Paris left avant-garde, commuting regu-
larly from Amsterdam and elsewhere. He collaborated with artists ranging from
Eli Lotar, Luis Bunuel, and Jean Renoir to his sometimes wife, the constructivist
photographer Germaine Krull, and he contributed to the debates in Paris left
periodicals around the nature of art and politics. During the Cold War what I call
the Humanitd constituency of Paris leftists was an even more ardent audience for
Ivens's ongoing film work than the fractured audiences east of the Curtain.
2 It is here necessary to repeat my frequent cautionary note on the fluctuations of
terminology since the early seventies around 'direct cinema' and 'cindma vcritc',
on certain contradictions and inconsistencies due to errors that have become
institutionalised within English-language film studies and a certain insularity
among unilingual scholars and media practitioners that has compounded the
problem. Readers may nonetheless need to accommodate a certain inconsistency
in my own use of the terms 'direct cinema' and 'cindma vcritc' in my discussions
of documentary history. Within francophone film studies in general, from Mar-
corelles (1970) and Marsolais (1974) to Gauthier (1995), 'direct cinema' is a huge
umbrella category that included both the interactive aesthetic inaugurated by
NOTES
Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronique d'un dtd (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961,
85) - hybrid formats variously channeling Flaherty's catalytic process or marshal-
ing kinds of interactivity refined by directors as diverse as Marker and Perrault
- and the American 'fly-on-the-wall' subgenre usually naively called 'vrit' and
sometimes 'direct cinema'. (For about 20 minutes in 1960, the French followed
Rouch and Morin in toying with the moniker 'cinma vrit' for their self-reflexive,
interactive documentary method tried out in Chronique d'un dtd - a translation
of Vertov's kinopravda, of course - and this, unfortunately, caught on across the
Atlantic likefoiegras, with some critics and practitioners taking it up and some
not, and some like Robert Drew taking up the more logical 'direct cinema' and
some not.) The mistake and confusion was compounded by Erik Barnouw (1974)
in his canonical Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, who, not reading
French, was not familiar with the lively complex French language debates on
the new documentary forms, and had not even read the English translation of
682 Marcorelles, and moreover made the mistake of interviewing Drew and taking his
idiosyncratic and atypical adoption of the 'direct' moniker as a universal category.
Whole generations of equally insular Anglophone scholars have passed on this
error and there has been no way out of this mess for generations. I wish we'd had
Nichols's distinction between 'observational' and 'interactive' documentary at
the very beginning instead of only with RepresentingReality:Issues and Concepts
in Documentary in 1991, for this nomenclature is clear and definitive (even his
complicated 1976 advancement of the 'direct discourse' and 'indirect discourse'
dichotomy would have helped). We didn't, and I had not yet discovered what a
quagmire this had already become for historians and critics of the documen-
tary as I started publishing in the 1970s. At a certain point in the 1980s I would
give up my crusade to convert Anglophone film studies to a historically correct
signification of 'direct' and 'vrit', and simply switched to the more descriptive
'interactive' vs. 'observational'. In this book I rely on the most accurate thrust of
'vrite' to mean the American observational school, except when referring to his-
torical French debates following Rouch and Sadoul's flirtation with Vertov's term
for a couple of years in the early sixties, prior to the definitive abandonment of the
term in French-language film culture at the Lyon conference in 1963 (ironically
the same conference where a one or two Americans mistakenly picked up 'direct'
and thought it meant observational). Proof of the 21t-century crisis in nomencla-
ture is the influential National Film Board of Canada documentary Cindma Vdritd:
Defining the Moment (Peter Wintonick, 1999, 102), which circulates in three dif-
ferent versions, crammed with interviews with pioneers and practitioners, each
blithely indifferent to the parallel terminology and featuring, for example, Amer-
ican documentarist Jennifer Fox enthusiastically equating the term cinma vrite
with fly-on-the-wall observational practice. When required I follow the French
practice of using 'direct' to refer to the umbrella rubric that incorporates both
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
American-style observation and Rouch-style interactivity (including the legion of
interview-based styles that followed, including that adopted by Ivens and Loridan
in China). Mostly however, I follow a practice I adopted in the 198os of avoiding
the whole mess altogether by using Nichols's 'no fuss no muss' distinction,
'observational' vs. 'interactive' - without forgetting the prevailing standard, the
'hybrid'.
3 Montand would narrate the French version of Rotterdam a decade later.
4 Akerman, Antonioni, Arlyck, Bitomsky, Buba, Cocteau, Demme, Fisher, Jost,
Julien, Malle, Mekas, Moore, Moretti, Morris, Riggs, Rouch, Ruiz, Syberberg, van
der Keuken, Wenders.
5 Allen, Akomfrah, Andersen, Baldwin, Benning, Berliner, Clarke, de Antonio,
Debord, Folman, Friedrich, Godmilow, Green, Guzman, Kiarostami, Macdonald,
Makavejev, McElwee, Monteiro, Moss, Nemec, Ophuls, Parajanov, Peck, Pollet,
Rosler, Rossellini, Rubbo, Sachs, Solanas, Sukorov, Tahimik, Viola, Visconti, von
Trier, Wang. 1 683
6 Corrigan's (2011) otherwise insightful discussion of Marker's 1950 photo essay
The Koreans avoids any consideration of the significance of his subjects being
North Koreans in that particular geopolitical context and time, while Ivens's film
of 1951, Peace Will Win, directly situates its North Korean subject in relation to the
Korean War.
7 IncludingLes Enfants duparadis (Children ofParadise, Marcel Carnd, 1945, France
190), whose luminous and worldly heroine Garance lent the production company
her name.
8 Though he had been trained by Ravel and Stravinsky.
9 The French brought out their own translation of Abramov in 1965 (Premier plan);
1968 saw both a special Vertov issue of Avant-scene du cinma and the Soviet film
experts Jean and Ludmila Schnitzer's short monograph from Anthologie du cin-
ma; Sadoul's unfinished monograph on Vertov was assembled in 1971 (four years
after the author's death), and Cahiers du cinma's publication of Soviet film schol-
ar Sergei Drobashenko's 1966 selection of Vertov's Articles,journaux, projets came
in 1972.
10 Although Ivens was on record as disliking The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949, UK,
104) (Schoots, [1995] 2000, 236), it is uncertain whether he is referring to the
genre that retroactively became known as film noir, used in a scholarly French
monograph first in 1955 (Borde and Chaumeton, [1955] 2002).
11 I am taking slight liberty with chronology in emphasising the contemporaneity
of these seven 1957 films: Varda's film was undertaken in the winter of 1957-1958
and released in 1958. It could be argued that the 'life-caught-unawares' revival
tendency had been heralded as early as the end of World War II, with Helen Lev-
itt's 16mm In the Street (USA, 14), shot at the end of the war but released only in
1948: its views of Harlem street life were often obtained thanks to a perpendicu-
NOTES
larly swiveled viewfinder that deceived subjects as to the direction the camera was
pointing.
12 In addition to this citation, Ivens's major pronouncements on cinma vcritc, as
referred to in this discussion, are as follows: interview on Ciel for Image et son
translated and reprinted in Camera (Ivens, [1965] 1969, 257-261), plus two inter-
views in French - in France nouvelle (Ivens, 1965) and in Lettresfrangaises (Ivens,
1963).
13 'Clochard', meaning literally someone who loiters under the town clock, is less
pejorative that the English equivalent, 'wino' or 'rubbie'.
14 Anderson's Every Day Except Christmas was much more explicit in this respect, no
doubt due to both authorial interest and the refusal of the culture of Wilde to take
sexual diversity for granted as the culture of Genet and Cocteau did.
15 Also the French writer Andr Verdet in Mistral and the Cuban Henri Fabiani in
the Cuban films, a scriptwriter and director. Not to mention honorary writer Chris
684 I Marker, whose extraordinary contribution to Valparaiso arguably bests them all
(Marker also wrote the French version of the Rotterdam commentary).
16 Varda also indulged in a haute-couture product placement in Du ctd de la cte
(1958, 25).
17 The 1958 short film jury at Cannes included Parisians Edmond Sdchan and Jean
Mitry as well as Ivens's old Polish colleague Jerzy Toeplitz.
18 There exists confusion about the English title of the film because Ivens's auto-
biography uses Early Spring (Ivens, 1969, 274) but all subsequent references
indicate Before Spring. Even though Early Spring is a more accurate translation of
the original Chinese title, Before Spring is now standard in the English-language
scholarship.
19 Ivens would try to revive elements of this idea a decade later with his Rotterdam
producer Joop Landrd and then again in the 1980s.
20 The charismatic Mattei's suspicious early death in a plane crash in 1962 added to
the legend, as did left-wing director Franco Rosi's 1972 biopic starring Gian Maria
Volont6 Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 116).
21 Orsini had collaborated with the brothers on their only directed project here-
tofore, San Miniato, luglio '44 (1954), a documentary on their eponymous home
town (Tuscany) in 1954, together with communist neorealist scriptwriter-godfa-
ther Zavattini.
22 Documentarists would begin varying the benign androcentrism of this exemplary
boy figure going out into the world only decades later. Ivens himself finally did so
in Histoire with that film's girl mediator character.
23 The National Film Board of Canada's Back-BreakingLeaf (Maurice Bulbulian,
1959, 30, probably shot in 1958) also included important onsite interviews, also
relatively static and stiffly addressed to the camera. The cutting-edge government
studio however included a breakthrough synch-sound interview with a taxi driver
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
on his night-time rounds in the dead of the Montreal winter, with a portable unit
and excellent sound, a year earlier in Bientot Noel (The Days Before Christmas,
Georges Dufaux et al., 1958, 29). Marceline Loridan's famous monologue as she
walked through Paris wired to the Nagra in her handbag was shot in the summer
of 1960 (Chronique d'un ete) by Michel Brault, the Quebecois cameraman!
24 Nanguila was first revived in February 2007 at FESPACO's retrospective of Malian
cinema (Ouagadougou), then in subsequent African film festivals in Tarifa, Spain,
in 2010 and Cordova, Spain, in 2012.
25 Details of the production were received with much thanks from Varlin's son and
granddaughter, Pascal Winter and Claire Winter, email correspondence, October
2013.
26 As the project took shape in the fast-evolving geopolitical environment of 1960,
the applicable jurisdiction for the shoot, with whom the Societe had contracted
the film, was the Fedration du Mali, an entity within the so-called Communaute
francaise that had been fashioned out of the former French Sudan the previous I 685
year (the working title of the film had been Soudan). The Fedration was to
become fully independent on 20 June 1960, just as the Nanguila shoot was being
wrapped up in time for the tropical rains, but fell apart two months later as Sen-
egal seceded. This left the Republic of Mali on its own, which was proclaimed
one month later and promptly withdrew from the Communaute. This transition
registers on the soundtrack of the film itself, where the adjective 'soudanais' is
heard early in the film, replaced by the name of the new republic, Mali, in its film-
within-a-film coda.
27 The two men had not crossed paths during the Malian's extended clandestine
visits to Beijing a few years earlier, but they would do so later according to Bouyatd
(interview with author, January 2013).
28 Rebillon would become one of the more interesting producers of the 1960s
French New Wave, notable in particular for Resnais's communist-themed La
Guerre estfinie (The Warls Over, 1966, 121), starring Ivens's friend Montand.
Varlin (also known by her married name Catherine Winter, maiden name Judith
Hait-Hin), took her nom de gendrique from a leader of the Paris Commune. She
had left the party four years earlier over Budapest, and after Nanguila would make
one of her next marks as co-writer of Marker's LeJoliMai, shot in 1962 about
among other things another African 'great event' - Algeria. Nanguila's three cred-
ited editors were also journeywomen of the New Wave rive gauche: Suzanne Bar-
on, collaborator of Rouch and Tati and future collaborator of Malle, and director
of two shorts in the Sofracima Africa series; Helene Arnal, previous collaborator
of Windrose contributor Yannick Bellon and who would edit Ivens's Cuban films
the following year; plus Gisele Chezeau, veteran of La Seine and future Chabrol
associate.
NOTES
29 As documentary director, Sidib is known for Chants et danses du Mali (1969, 20).
See Bachy (1983, 32).
30 Sidibe is co-credited for the film's music on the Ivens Foundation website, but
this is neither corroborated nor disproven by the actual credits of the film.
31 Seemingly the French urban crime drama Ddlit defuite (Hit andRun, Bernard
Borderie, 1959, 95).
32 Stufkens (2008, 401) argues that Santiago Alvarez, who as a young director in his
early forties was getting started in ICAIC newsreels as Ivens was teaching there
and showing his films, shows a palpable Ivens influence in his work, for examples
echoes of Nieuwe Gronden in Hanoi, martes 13 (1968, Cuba, 38).
33 Yanki, Nol urged more US sympathy towards their ex-colony (whose khaki-clad
leader had just created a sensation at the UN) before it was too late, i.e. Before
Cuba Went Over to Communism. The Frenchmen Claude Barret and Claude
Otzenberger also gathered some rather superficial journalistic impressions
686 I of the Revolution, which were broadcast in France and on CBS in the United
States.
34 IAm Cuba was revived for the DVD art cinema market in 1995, after the collapse of
the USSR.
35 Ivens and Loridan appear in Varda's 1963 footage of a Cuban musical solidarity
gathering in Paris.
36 According to the European FoundationJoris Ivens Newsletter (2001), the original
length of the film was 37 minutes, a version shown on the 2002 US tour. The
version on the official DVD box set lasts 27 minutes, based on the definitive 1964
version trimmed by the director.
37 For example, the Australian Adrian Danks (2009), published a glowing affir-
mation of the film in 2009, positing it as an 'extremely revealing film about the
nature of collaboration', seemingly timed with a screening at the Melbourne
Cindmatheque.
38 Francois Reichenbach (1921-1993), the Oscar-winning, gay Americanophile
French documentarist was known for commercially viable documentaries on
travel and cultural themes. Although he would collaborate with Marker on the
anti-Vietnam War film La sixieme face du pentagone (The Sixth Side of the Penta-
gon, 1968, 28) in 1967, he was not part of Ivens's PCF-friendly Paris circle. The
printmaker-caricaturist-social critic Honord Daumier (1808-1879) was along with
Goya, van Gogh, and Brueghel the pre-cinematic European visual artists who had
been a reference for Ivens throughout his career.
39 That Ivens added in his memory two difficulties to Brecht's famous five reflects no
doubt deficiencies in the vagabond's travelling library.
40 Many of the Santiago students would indeed speak the truth in the future, as
per the future prominence of several of them in the Chilean film industry, both
domestic and diasporic. As for Bravo, after Train de la victoire, he maintained an
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
intermittent, low-visibility career as maker of documentary and fiction both in
Chile and in exile over the next three decades.
41 Original notes in French, with a small amount of English; punctuation and for-
mat adjusted for reasons of space.
42 Other pertinent commentary/image-track ratios are 58% for Marker and Resnais's
Les Statues MeurentAussi (1953) and 81% for Varda's Salut les Cubains (1963).
43 Becerra, like so many of Ivens's Chilean collaborators, would go into exile in 1973;
Montero, like everyone else involved in the Paris end of the production, was a
stalwart of rive gauche left-wing society.
44 Anticipating Louis Malle's damning iconography in Calcutta (1969, France, 105).
45 In the black-and-white art film feature fiction Testament d'Orphde (1960, France,
77), Jean Cocteau's brief colouring of a rose into a bright red flower is no doubt
a precedent for Valparaiso but as one of the 1960 film's several magical special
effects it does not really constitute a shift to colour.
46 This is plausible since the Paris premiere was 8 June 1963, two weeks after the I 687
closure of Cannes.
47 At the time of writing in 2013, Neruda's body was being exhumed to verify reports
that the poet was poisoned by the Pinochet regime two months after the 1973
coup, rather than dying of cancer as traditionally reported.
48 My favourite anecdote in Panizza (2011, 43) recounts the academic eyebrows
raised at the expenses incurred during the sequence shot in the famous port
brothel.
49 Prudhomme seems to be the laughingstock of French literary history, first Nobel
laureate in 1901 yet forgotten, due largely to his reactionary aesthetics in the age
of Mallarmd and Verlaine.
50 Ivens's footage appeared in SalvadorAllende (Patricio Guzmin, 2004, Canada,
100) (Ivens Yearly 2oo6a).
51 Stufkens (2008) speculates that this commissioned work, not likely classifiable as
a major link in Ivens's filmography, was lost in one of the Cindmatheque's many
fires.
52 That 13th century Chen Rong's Chinese representations of the wind as a dynamic
character were inspiration for both Mistral and Histoire confirms the kinship
of the two projects made a quarter-century apart. Perhaps misinformed by the
research commissioned for Mistral, Ivens's proposals focused on cutouts, though
this medium is not associated with Chen (Tim Rice, personal correspondence
2013).
53 Evidence of this correspondence exists in the National Film Board of Canada
archives. After an initial conversation on the Champs-Elysdes, the negotiations
went nowhere, due to the last-minute nature of Ivens's follow-up request and
other communications and logistics problems: 'At such a short notice I have no
immediate inspiration about the subject and would certainly have taken quite a
NOTES
deal of time to mull it over in my mind' (McLaren, letter to Ivens, 9 October 1963).
I am grateful to Glyn Davis for sharing this discovery. The two men seem an odd
couple but in fact shared not only their history of working for the NFB during
World War II but also their communist roots and sinophilia. They had probably
reunited at the Venice Film Festival in 1959, when Ivens was on the jury and
McLaren won an award for Short and Suite (1959, 5).
54 Stufkens (2008, 373-375) refers specifically to van Gogh's 1888 The Sower, notable
for its tilted, gnarled foreground tree towering over the stooped and twisted farm-
worker, as a source.
55 Tholen would go on to make his own 'cine-poem' on the port, incorporating out-
takes from Rotterdam, encouraged by Ivens, Toets (Touch, 1967, 18).
56 Van Ammelrooy is best known outside of the Netherlands for her starring role in
the Oscar-winning Antonia's Line (Marlene Gorris, 1995, 102).
57 Why did 1960s European Marxists from Pasolini to Ivens fasten on baby-boomer
688 I marriages as a tragic image of the ravages of capitalism?
58 Ivens missed this opportunity to dialogue with his Renaissance compatriot;
Stufkens (2008, 356) reveals that one of many subsequent never-realised film
ideas was an ambitious feature-length project about Erasmus, to be composed
of eleven short films inspired by everyone from Michel Foucault (!) to Peter Weiss
and the Marquis de Sade. It would have a more critical edge in relation to Dutch
society than Rotterdam, and Stufkens speculates that it was abandoned out of a
combination of tact towards the filmmaker's newly welcoming homeland and the
urgency of the geopolitical situation in Asia.
CHAPTER 7
1 Dovidis, founded in 1950 by Pierre Neurrisse, a socialist veteran of the Resistance,
specialised in television documentaries (Michel, 2010, 87).
2 Excerpts from the Ciel commentary are from Ulrich [Chris Marker] (1966).
3 Varda's leadership in the project and her exemplary resourcefulness as team play-
er are beyond dispute. After putting together much of the project, she left for her
famous 1967 sojourn in California and returned only to discover that Marker had
deleted all but a few shots of her fictional episode of 'a woman who lives in Paris
and experiences delirium, confusing the demolition of the old neighbourhoods
in the 20th arrondissement with the US bombing of Hanoi, and the manhole cov-
ers with the "man holes" where the Vietnamese were hiding. In a mental panic,
she becomes aware that this distant war contrasts tragically with her modest and
well ordered milieu'. Some of Varda's material was however retained by Marker,
namely shots of Vietnamese repairing dikes she had set up and filmed in a vacant
field near Paris's Porte dorde; it would serve as a transition from the compilation
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
history of the conflict narrated by Varda, and Godard's monologue 'Camera
Eye'. On her return to Paris Varda was not even able to view her episode that had
already been fully edited before her departure, but she apparently did not unduly
resent the decision of her collaborator who had after all been assigned the final
cut. Rather she 'would take a leaf out of his book' and declared the final result a
respectful rendition of the group's thinking, but 'without warmth': 'Strong and
intelligent personalities gathered together in a group are not necessarily the
most likely to transmit a feeling, nor the most efficient for indicating the urgency
of taking a stand'. Varda returned to Los Angeles and participated in anti-war
demonstrations there (Varda, 1994, 92-93). It is likely that Varda also was imitat-
ing Ivens's style in her shots retained for the final film - so much so that this Ivens
expert was sure he recognised in the footage of files of workers moving clods of
wet earth from hand to hand a classic trope from over 30 years of Ivens's docu-
mentary work - until he read Varda's memoir. There is in any case a lesson here
for facile auteurists. I 689
4 Schoots's ([1995] 2000, 292) account has Loridan handling the Loin shots because
Ivens was teaching at the film school in Hanoi. Stufkens (2008, 387) also notes
Loridan's role soon after in providing material for and appearing before the Rus-
sell International War Crimes Tribunal in Copenhagen in 1967-1968.
5 Was Sarris making an erroneous unconscious connection between Loin contrib-
utor William Klein and the Paris painter/performance artist Yves Klein whose
famous blue nude body paintings were depicted sensationally in Mondo Cane?
6 The English version of Loin seems to have been cut for its US release by 25 min-
utes, down from its original 115 minutes, but further details are not available at
this time. The revived version (2009), and the subsequent 2013 DVD, are the origi-
nal length.
7 Lelouch was not the only nouvelle vaguiste who found himself offside. Rive droite
auteur Truffaut is an interesting case study, immersed in the late sixties in vari-
ous apolitical cinephile activities, but who would join other New Wave filmmak-
ers including Lelouch at the superstructural barricades the following year when
film institutions came under attack from the Gaullist government. Nevertheless,
the previous year, with his Hitchcock riffs, La Maride dtait en noir (The Bride Wore
Black, 1968, 107) and La Sirdne duMississipi (MississippiMermaid, 1969, 123) both
in the pipeline, Truffaut's response to Loin in Cahiers du cindma (Truffaut, 1967)
was an ad hominem attack on Ivens who seemed to represent for him the vile
combination of cinma dupapa and the PCF, an attack that also baited Marker in
the process: 'the pseudo-poetic career of Joris Ivens, sponger off of festivals, who
ambles around from progressive palace to progressive palace, filming water pud-
dles with municipal funds and much aestheticism. Next, upon these decorative
images - thus right-wing images - his pal also devoted to the genre, Chris Marker,
will try to veneer onto it a left-wing commentary'. By an interesting coincidence,
NOTES
Ivens had been on the jury of the Venice Festival the previous fall and Truffaut's
Fahrenheit 451 (1966, UK, 112) had been in the running for the Golden Lion but
had lost out to La battaglia diAlgeri (The Battle ofAlgiers, 1966, Italy, 121), by
Ivens's former collaborator Gillo Pontecorvo. Hell hath no fury like the revenge of
an auteur narcissist scorned.
8 Citations from the text of Parallele are from Ivens and Loridan (1968).
9 The definitive version of the film in the 2008 box set restores Loridan to the co-di-
rector credit.
10 The Hanoi version of the USSR Communist Party organ Pravda.
11 It has been remarked over the years that Parallele makes no explicit acknowl-
edgement of Soviet and Chinese aid to the North Vietnamese, though the former
is visible on the screen in terms of hardware (Dolmatovskaya, 1968, quoted in
Stuflens, 2008, 408).
12 Quotations from Peuple are from the official English-language decoupage of the
film distributed in the 1970s by CAPI Films.
13 For Ivens's involvement with these activities see Mundell (2006).
CHAPTER 8
1 To be fair, Antonioni had directed six or so documentary shorts in the pre-direct
years of the late 1940s, before entering the fiction feature industry, which may
explain his lack of interest in direct sound.
2 The original 1976 Paris release was announced as 17 minutes, while both the
MOMA print and the 2008 DVD version inexplicably measure 21 minutes.
3 The four programs combined Autour du petrole withlImpressions d'une ville - Chan-
ghai, Une rptition a l'Opera deP Pkin, and LeProfesseur Tsien (total running time
192 min); L'Usine de gnrateurs with Une histoire de ballon and Les Artisans (total
165 min.); La Pharmacie with Unefemme, unefamille (total 189 min.); and Le Vil-
lage des pecheurs with Une caserne and Entra nement au Cirque dePikin (total 175
min.).
4 My translation from the French titles. The French/English title text in Yukong is
an abridgement of the official English translation from Mao's concluding speech
at the Seventh National Congress of the CPC on 11June 1945 (Mao Zedong, [19451
1967).
5 Approximately 30% of Yukong was shot with natural light, according to the
Yukong lighting engineer Guo Weijun (2008).
6 Liu would resurface 35 years later in a Beijing Normal School media studies
classroom, invited by Professor Zhang Tongdao, as relayed in Seegers's Een
oude vriend. Although Seegers sets up the episode to expose the falsity of the
original filming context, the upshot is contradictory. Liu, speaking in Mandarin,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
a language he apologises for not knowing, in fact utters nothing incriminating
and simply reveals what is obvious, that both 1973 and 2008 filmings build on
Chinese culture's ingrown values of hospitality, and subjects' and facilitators'
instinctive desire to please foreign guests, filmmakers, and fellow citizens. Pro-
fessor Zhang also organised the colloquium honouring Ivens's 110th birthday,
held at his institution in November 2008, and at that time hosted the conferees at
a screening of Ballon together with several original participants, to similar effect,
at worse ambiguous and contradictory and at best nostalgic and celebratory.
7 This character was later claimed by a right-wing Dutch columnist to be an
impostor, a security guard familiar to touring foreigners for his impersonations
of exemplary revolutionary citizens, which Schoots ([1995] 2000, 335) claims was
corroborated by third-hand reports of National Film Board of Canada still photos
from several years later. Ivens convincingly refuted this charge (Stufkens, 2008,
452).
8 The autonomous region and its flagrant incarnation of internal Han imperialism 1 691
had not yet become the flashpoint of world pressure on the People's Republic's
international relations.
9 The reference reflects the 'Criticize Lin Criticize Confucius' campaign orchestrat-
ed by the Gang of Four. The Daqing shoot took place in the summer of 1973 well
after the September 1972 fatal 'crash' that ended Lin Biao's Vice-Premiership, but
during the campaign orchestrated as a kind of political damage control for the
catastrophe. Roland Barthes's one-month tour of China along with Kristeva and
others of the Tel Quel group of sympathetic Parisian intellectuals, beginning in
April 1974, featured daily bombardment with critiques of the curious bedfellows,
the late ex-heir apparent and the sixth-century BC philosopher (Barthes, [2009]
2012).
10 Author of the influential UNESCO-funded Eldments pour un nouveau cinema
(1970).
11 Originally, that is, 'prendre la parole'. Unfortunately there is no valid English
equivalent for this phrase other than 'take the floor' or 'go to the mike' which are
inadequate for this context with their connotation of a public meeting, so I use
the awkward 'take up speech'. Similarly, 'donner la parole aupeuple', one of the
basic slogans of direct cinema and of Loridan in particular, more literally means
'giving speech to the people', but should be translated as 'letting the people
speak'.
12 To be fair, one of Yukong's twelve parts, Impressions, a medium-length study of
Shanghai, does suggest the travelogue vein of the Antonioni film, and as such
contains hidden-camera material taken from a truck in the streets of the city.
The problem was in Ivens's mind the tendency of Chinese crowds to stare at for-
eigners, especially filmmakers, in public places. However, Ivens's use of a hidden
camera is more of the exception than the rule in Yukong, entering palpably into
NOTES
only one out of twelve films, whereas it characterises (in my opinion) Antonioni's
voyeuristic approach in general. Sun Hongyun (2009) has explored similarities
between the two films in this respect.
13 Interestingly, Western documentary culture already took for granted this
long-take synch-sound style in 1970 to the degree that Godard felt the need to
de-familiarise it in See You at Mao (aka British Sounds, UK, 52) where his scene
hovering around a circle of British automobile workers sharing beefs diaboli-
cally flouts convention by only showing participants who are listening and not
speaking.
14 In interviews Loridan would repeatedly complain about impassive and silent
group responses encountered after screenings and meetings in China.
15 Zhang is quoting Ivens and Destanque (1982, 15). My preferred translation: 'In 50
years, my relations with the different communist parties have evolved a lot. Histo-
ry has sharp teeth and I can say that I have been "bitten by history"'.
692 I 16 The career of the Chinese version of the book is not known.
17 I am aware that Yukong collaborator Alain Badiou has also used this clich in
reference to the disavowal of Maoism, but the reader is assured we came up with
it independently.
18 Badiou probably had in mind the long sequence in Usine where workers debate
the politics of productivity premiums, which they associate with the fallen Liu
Shaoqi and which have been abolished.
19 Seegers (2008a) intercuts archival shots, almost certainly of the 1966-1967 Tian-
anmen rallies of thousands of Red Guards chanting in unison in homage to the
Chairman, with shots of Ivens and Loridan, though he must know full well that
such rallies had not occurred for several years and that during the couple's work
in China the atmosphere was completely different and they almost certainly never
witnessed such a thing. Why did no one tell him?
20 Lin Xu-dong (2005, 29) supplements the cultural explanation with a pragmatic
one for the stylistic tendencies that so frustrated the Parisians at the outset,
specifically around shot duration: 'One great cause of consternation among
the Chinese crew members was the ratio of film shot to film used. For Chinese
filmmakers accustomed to working in an environment in which resources were
extremely scarce, the vast amount of film consumed in the process of making a
foreign documentary was scandalous. For many years, due to the unreliable qual-
ity of domestically produced film, film had to be imported from overseas. Howev-
er, the national economic crisis of the early 1960s and China's policy of isolation
from the international community meant that foreign currency was in extremely
short supply and subject to stringent internal controls. Chinese cinematogra-
phers, allotted as little film as possible to accomplish their task, sometimes
found themselves working with a film ratio as low as 1:1. So ingrained did this
practice become that, as late as the 1980s, students in Chinese film schools were
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
still being admonished to allow only eight seconds for panorama, six seconds for
medium-range shots, and three to four seconds for close-up'.
21 The 2008 Beijing conference produced several amusing anecdotes about Jiang's
vain efforts to lure Ivens into her orbit and to end up with an Ivens-authored biop-
ic about her (Lu Songhe, interview and conference presentation, 2008).
22 As we have seen in Chapter 2, Ivens had prophetically and enthusiastically discov-
ered Huxley's (1943) work on Goya during the American phase of his career, and
it can be argued that all of his war films resonate with this inspiration, though not
with the essay's insights into the art of elderly artists, not only visual artists like
Goya and Piero della Francesca but others from Beethoven to Yeats.
23 Bringing Ivens into strange bedfellowship, no doubt for the first and last time,
with none other than Annie Sprinkle. The American feminist porn star used this
device in her 1999 autobiographical work Herstory ofPorn:Reel to Real (USA, 69).
24 Ku Lian (Portrait of a Fanatic, 1982, Taiwan, 105) was never shown in public in Chi-
na. In this film, Bai depicted an oversea Chinese painter who returned to China to I 693
devote his life to his motherland only to face prosecution and death. The painter's
daughter asks him a telling question: 'You love your motherland, but does the
motherland love you'?
25 According to Stufkens (2008, 467) it was Loridan who removed the sole implicit
reference to the Indonesia episode of Ivens's political trajectory.
26 The reassessment did not extend to the DVD box set, which does not include
Branding, and presumably not for any of the usual reasons, either budget or avail-
ability.
27 According to Schoots ([1995] 2000), Ivens's list included Cavalcanti's Rien que les
heures (NothingBut Time, 1926, France, 45); Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922,
USA, 79); Clair's Le Chapeau de paille d'Italie (Italian Straw Hat, 1928, France,
60); Ruttmann and Eggeling's abstract films (1921-1925); Pudovkin's Potomok
Chingis-Khana (Storm overAsia, 1928, USSR, 74); Eisenstein's Stachka (Strike,
1925, USSR, 82) and Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925, USSR, 66);
Clair's La Tour (The Eiffel Tower, 1928, France, 14); Bunuel's Las Hurdes (Land
without Bread, 1933, Spain, 30); the silent films of Charles Chaplin; the films of
D. W. Griffith. Other than Griffith, these directors had been mentioned in The
Camera andI(alongside with Berliners Murnau, Pabst and Dupont [Ivens, 1969,
18, 21]), but there is almost no evidence that he had thought of any of them
since first drafting the autobiography in the 1940s. Whether or not this idiosyn-
cratic list-making, with its exclusion of non-Soviet political filmmaking and of
any sound films other than Bunuel's - indeed of any documentarist other than
Bunuel and Flaherty - is part of the renunciatory thrust of the last years of the life
of this politically committed pioneer of the sound documentary, a fleeting polem-
ical gesture advocating for cinematic heritage at the cusp of the digital era, or a
hasty and ill-conceived whim of second cinephile childhood, it certainly helps
NOTES
provide a context for the anomalous invocation of Mdlies in Histoire. There is also
the possibility that a communication glitch on the part of Schoots (who is not a
reliable film historian), his source Tineke de Vaal, or Ivens himself, contaminated
or decontextualised this information, twice transmitted orally.
28 Jonathan Rosenbaum (1992) has also made a comparison between Histoire and
Cocteau's Testament.
CONCLUSION
1 'Les lendemains qui chantent' is a popular slogan of traditional French communist
culture, first popularised in the 1937 poem 'Jeunesse' by Paul Vaillant-Couturier
(Wiktionnaire, 2014).
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
APPENDIX: FILMS ON IVENS
A Filmography Compiled byAndri Stufkens,
Director European Foundation Joris Ivens.
A
NONFICTION FILMS "REVISITING" OR INSPIRED BY PARTICULAR
FILMS BY JORIS IVENS OR BY IVENS AND MARCELINE LORIDAN
(CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)
1967 Toets (Touch) Tom Tholen Netherlands 17 Rotterdam
Europoort, 1966
1968 Masters ofthe Rain Marion Michelle Bulgaria 25 Pierwsze lata
[The First Years],
1949 (Bulgarian
episode)
1976 Railroad Richard Serra USA 19 De Brug, 1928
Turnbridge
1978 A chacun son Wieslaw Hudon Belgium 83 Borinage, 1934
Borinage
1980 Cine-mafia Jean Rouch and Netherlands 35 Branding, 1934
Robert Busschots
1981 Over de brug Hans Keller Netherlands 100 De Brug, 1928
1988 Borinage: das Helmut Brugel West Germany 60 Borinage 1934
Verratene Land
1996 Ivens inJoegoslavie Roelf van Til and Netherlands 12 Pierwsze lata [The
Heidi van Barne- First Years], 1949
velde (found Yugoslav
footage)
1996 Magnitogorsk,jeugd Pieter van Smit Netherlands 6o Komsomol, 1933
van de hoogovens
1 695
696 |
1996 Der Windsbraut Daniela Schulz Germany 30 Une histoire de
vent, 1988
1997 Bruggen Dick Rijneke Netherlands 13 De Brug, 1928
and Mildred van
Leeuwaarden
1997 De Brugwachter Dick Rijneke Netherlands 42 De Brug, 1928
and Mildred van
Leeuwaarden
1998 Quando l'Italia non Stefanio Missio Italy 43 L'Italia non e un
era un paese povero paese povero, 1960
1999 Les Enfants du Patric Jean Belgium 54 Borinage, 1934
Borinage. Lettre a
Henri Storck
2001 DEFA und die Hans-Dieter Rusch Germany 15 Die Windrose,
Windrose 1957
2004 SalvadorAllende Patricio Guzman Chile 100 Le Train de la
victoire, 1964
2005 Powerfor the Ephraim K. Smith USA 57 Power and the
Parkinsons Land, 1940
2006 A Piece ofHeaven S. Luisa Wei China 83 Ivens and China
2006 IlMio Paese Daniele Vicari Italy 113 L'Italia non e un
paese povero, 1960
2007 Rain Lawrence Martin UK 15 Regen, 1929
2007 Retour a Vinh Linh. Xuan Phong Vietnam c. Le 17e Parallele,
40 ans apres. 50 1968
2008 The Parkinsons Ephraim K. Smith USA 61 Power and the
Land, 1940
2008 See You at the Eiffel Valtin Valchev Bulgaria 95 Pierwsze lata
Tower [The First Years],
1949 (Bulgarian
episode)
2008 Een oude vriend van Rene Seegers Netherlands 53 Comment Yukong
het Chinese volk deplaca les mon-
tagnes, 1976
2009 Indonesia Calling. John Hughes Australia 90 Indonesia Calling,
JorislIvens in 1946
Australia.
2012 Hollow City Andrea de Sica Italy 18 L'Italia non e un
paese povero, 1960
(Matera sequence)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
B
FICTION
1992 Heimat (Part 2 Edgar Reitz Germany 1 1961 biographical
Chronik einerjugend) episode
1996 Beyond the Bridge Installations
Mirages-Poem- Merel Mirage Netherlands at Nederlands
Navigator Filmmuseum,
Utility S(h)elves Istvan Kantor USA Amsterdam
META Didier Lechenne France
La siesta-The Nap Muntadas Spain/USA
Ice Skating Fiona Tan Netherlands
Wind-force Kees Aajjes Netherlands
1996 De vliegende Andre Stuflens, Netherlands 50
Hollander with high school
students
2009 Keine Kohle, kein Holz Erik van Lieshout Netherlands c.15 Borinage, 1934
(animation)
2012 Hemingway and Philip Kaufman USA 155 The Spanish Earth,
Gellhorn 1937
1 697
APPENDIX: FILMS ON IVENS
C
NONFICTION ABOUT IVENS (GENERAL)
1964 Joris Ivens. ErFilmte auf5 Joachim DDR 23
Kontinente Hadaschek
1973- Diary (Yoman), part 3 David Perlov Israel 330 Chagall, 1962
1982 ..A Valparaiso,
1963
Pour le Mistral,
1965
1999 Passages.JorisIvens en Mireille Kooistra Netherlands 30
de kunst van deze eeuw
(introduction to exhibi-
tion "Tijdgenoten")
2003 China through the Eyes of Shao Zhen- China 90
Ivens (W OFt Jt tang with Sun
Q, 6-episode TV series, Hongyun/CCTV
multiple broadcasts as
2-episode "Documentary
Master" programme -
"Ivens in China" and
"Ivens in the World"
as well as in 4-episode
version).
698 I
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
D
FILM AND VIDEO INTERVIEWS WITH JORIS IVENS (SELECTED)
1963 Menschen am Pullschlag Alfons Machalz DDR 110
derZeit:Joris Ivens (2-part
TV series)
1968 Interview withJoris Ivens Gordon Hitchens DDR/USA Leipzig Film
Festival
1970 JorisIvens Rediscovers Hans Keller Netherlands 50 VPRO network
Holland (Netherlands)
1973 Grierson Roger Blais Canada 58
(National Film
Board of Canada)
1981 Conversations with Amalie R. USA 59
Willard Van Dyke Rothschild
1981 Too Much Reality Sarah Boston UK 6o BBC
1981 Interviews with Ivens, Van Peter Davies Canada 6o
Dongen, Gellhorn
1983 Tdmoins:JorislIvens Robert Destanque France 100
with Marceline
Loridan-Ivens
1 699
APPENDIX: FILMS ON IVENS
FlLMOGRAPHY
This filmography has been compiled based on several existing versions, especially 701
those in Bakker (1999a) and Barbian (2001) and most importantly in consultation with
the European Foundation Joris Ivens. Films are listed by title chronologically in the
language of their original production (except for Chinese), with official English titles
provided in italics or unofficial English translation in roman type between paren-
theses. Unless otherwise noted, Joris Ivens is director prior to 1931, usually including
camera and editing in whole or in part. Unless otherwise noted all films prior to 1931
are silent, all films beginning in 1936 are with sound, those prior to 1952 are in black
and white, prior to 1960 in 35mm.
Code: DIR= director; CO-DIR = co-director; PROD = producer; WRIT = writer;
CAM= cinematographer; ASST= assistant director or operator; ED= editor;
CAST =performer; NARR= narrator; MUS = music; CONS = consultant.
D E WI GWAM [Brandende Staal, aka FlamingArrow], 1912, 10min., Netherlands. CAM:
Kees Ivens, staff CAPI Nijmegen. (DVD box, 2008)
0, ZO N N E LAN D [Oh Sunland!], 1922, 7 min., Netherlands. Home movie.
'T ZO N H U IS [The Sunhouse], 1925, 6 min., Netherlands. Home movie.
'T ZO N H U IS [The Sunhouse], 1927, 2 min., Netherlands. Home movie.
THEA'S MEERDERJARIGHEID ZONNELAND [Thea (Ivens's sister) Comes of Age in Sun-
land], 1927, 12 min., Netherlands. Home movie. (lost)
KIN OSCH E TSBO EK [Film Sketchbook], 1927, Netherlands. (lost)
PROEFOPNAMES CHARLOTTE KOH LER [Charlotte K6hler Tests], 1927, Netherlands. (lost)
ZE ED IJK-FI LMSTU DIE [Zeedijk Study], 1927, Netherlands. (lost). Other sketches depict-
ed water pumps, shoppers, a public advertisement ('Persil') and onlookers, footage of
legs dangling over the water, street pavers, family members.
DE ZIEKE STAD [The Sick Town], 1927-1928, 35mm, Netherlands. WRIT: Erich Wich-
man. (lost)
ETUDES DES MOUVEMENTS A PARIS [Movement Studies in Paris], 1927, 6 min. Nether-
lands. (DVD box, 2008)
702 I DE B R U G [The Bridge], 1928, 16 min., Netherlands. ASST: Van Es; ED ASST: John Fern-
hout; PROD: CAPI Amsterdam. (DVD box, 2008)
B RAN D I N G [Breakers], 1929, 42 min., Netherlands. CO-DIR: Mannus Franken; WRIT: Jef
Last; ASST: John Fernhout; CAST: Hein Blok, Jef Last, Co Sieger.
IK-FI LM [I-film], 1929, Netherlands. CAST: Hans van Meerten. (lost)
SC H AATSE N R IJ D E N [Ice Skating], 1929, 8 min., Netherlands. CAST: John Fernhout. (lost)
ARM DRENTHE: DE NOOD IN DE DRENTSCHE VENEN [PoorDrenthe:Povertyinthe
Peatlands of Drenthe], 1929, 15 min., Netherlands. PROD: VVVC, Leo van Lakerveld.
(lost)
R E G E N [Rain], 1929, 16 min., Netherlands. CO-DIR & WRIT: Mannus Franken; ASST:
John Fernhout, Cheng Fai, Helen van Dongen, Anneke van der Feer. (DVD box, 2008)
W I J BO U W E N [We Are Building], 1930, 110-141 min., Netherlands. CAM: Willem Bon,
Jan Hin, John Fernhout, Mark Kolthoff and Eli Lotar; WRIT: E. Sinoo; PROD: VVVC,
Nederlandsche Bouwvak Arbeiders Bond.
The following constituent parts of W jBouwen were also shown separately.
Heien [Pile Driving], 13 min.
NVV-Congres [NVV Congress]
Jeugddag [Youth Day]
Nieuwe Architectuur [New Architecture], 7 min.
Caissonbouw [Caisson Building], 37 min.
AmsterdamseJeugddag [Amsterdam Youth Day], 30 min.
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Zuid-Limburg [South Limburg], 14 min.
Zuiderzeewerken [Zuiderzee], 40-52 min.
VAN STRIJD, JEUGD EN ARBEID / TWEEDE VAKBONDSFILM [Of Struggle, Youth, and
Labour / Second Union Film], 1930, Netherlands. CAM: Willem Bon, Jan Hin, John
Fernhout, Mark Kolthoff, Eli Lotar; WRIT: E. Sinoo. (partly lost)
JEUGDDAG VIERHOUTEN [Day of Youth Vierhouten], 33 min.
Breken en Bouwen [Demolition and Construction], 1930, 12 min., Netherlands.
CAM/ASST: Mark Kolthoff. (lost)
VVVC JO U R NAALS [VVVC News], 1930-1931, 15 min., Netherlands. PROD: VVVC, Leo
van Lakerveld (lost)
Three episodes:
VVVC-Journaal [VVVC-news], 1930, 15 min., Netherlands. (lost) 703
1. Filmnotities uit de Sovjetunie [Film Notes from the USSR], 1930, 11-20 min., Nether-
lands. (lost)
2. Demonstraties van proletarische solidariteit [Demonstration of Proletarian Solidari-
ty], 1930, 20 min., Netherlands. (lost)
T R I B U N E F I L M, 1930, 20 min., Netherlands. CO-DIR/ED: Mark Kolthoff. (lost)
D O N O G O O -TO N KA, 1931, Netherlands. CAM/ED: Willem Bon; WRIT: Jules Romains;
CAST: Delfts Studenten Corps. (lost)
P H I LI PS- RAD IO, 1931, 36 min., sound, Netherlands. CAM: Jean Drdville, John
Fernhout, Mark Kolthoff, Joop Huisken; ED: Helen van Dongen; MUS: Lou Lichtveld;
PROD: Philips. (DVD box, 2008)
CREOSOOT [Creosote], 1931, 81 min., Netherlands. CAM: Jean Drdville, John Fernhout,
Eli Lotar; ASST: Mark Kolthoff.
P ES N O G E ROYAC H [Song ofHeroes, aka Komsomol], 1933, 50 min., USSR. ASST: Herbert
Marshall; CAM: Aleksandr Shelenkov; WRIT: Iosif Sklyut; CAST: Afanaseyev; MUS:
Hanns Eisler; PROD: Mezhrabpom-Film. (DVD box, 2008).
N I E UW E G R O N DE N [New Earth], 1933, 30 min., Netherlands. CAM: John Fernhout, Joop
Huisken, Helen van Dongen, Eli Lotar; ED: Helen van Dongen; MUS: Hanns Eisler;
WRIT: Julian Arendt and Ernst Busch; NARR: Joris Ivens. (DVD box, 2008; a shortened
version was produced by the Netherlands government-in-exile in 1944, 22 min.)
F I L MO GRAPH Y
MISERE AU BORINAGE [Borinage], 1934, 34 min., silent, Belgium. CO-DIR, WRIT, & ED:
Henri Storck; CAM: Henri Storck and Franois Rents; PROD: Club de l'ecran. (DVD box,
2008)
SAARABSTIMMUNG UND SOWJETUNION [Saar Referendum and Soviet Union], 1934,
sound, USSR. CO-DIR: Gustav Regler. (lost)
BORTSY [Kdmpfer, aka The Struggle], 1936,95 min. USSR. CO-DIR: Gustav von Wangen-
heim, Joseph Kurella; CAM: Bentsion Monastyrsky; ED: Helen van Dongen; MUS: Hans
Hauska.
M I L L I O N S O F U S, American Labour Productions, 1936, 20 min., USA. Ivens's contribu-
tion to this Los Angeles collective production by film industry progressives is unknown.
704 I THE RUSSIAN SCHOOL IN NEW YORK, 1936, USA. (lost)
THE SPANISH EARTH, 1937, 53 min., USA. CAM: John Ferno; ED: Helen van Dongen;
WRIT/NARR: Ernest Hemingway; MUS: Marc Blitzstein, Virgil Thomson; PROD: Con-
temporary Historians, Inc. (DVD box, 2008)
THE 400 MILLION, 1939, 53 min., USA. CO-DIR & CAM: JOhn Fernhout; CAM: Robert
Capa; ED: Helen van Dongen; WRIT: Dudley Nichols; NARR: Fredric March; PROD: His-
tory Today Inc. (DVD box, 2008)
POWER AND THE LAND, 1940, 33 min. USA. CAM: Floyd Crosby, Arthur Ornitz; ED:
Helen van Dongen; WRIT: Edwin Locke, Stephen Vincent Bendt (commentary); NARR:
William P. Adams; MUS: Douglas Moore; PROD: Pare Lorentz, US Film Service. (DVD
box, 2008)
NEW FRONTIERS, 1940, (unfinished), USA. CAM: Floyd Crosby; WRIT: Wieland Herzfel-
de?; PROD: Sloan Foundation. (lost)
BIP GOES TO TOWN, 1941, 9 min., USA. SUPERVISION: Joris Ivens; ED: Lora Hays; MUS:
Douglas Moore; PROD: Rural Electification Administration. (DVD: RuralElectrfication
in Ohio:Historic REA Films 1940-1941, Dr. Ephraim K. Smith, Heritage Productions,
Inc., powerforparkinsons.com)
WORST OF FARM DISASTERS, 1941, 6 min., USA. SUPERVISION: JOris Ivens; ED: Lora
Hays; MUS: Douglas Moore; PROD: Rural Electification Administration. (DVD: Rural
Electrification in Ohio: Historic REA Films 1940-1941, Dr. Ephraim K. Smith, Heritage
Productions, Inc., powerforparkinsons.com)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
OI L FOR ALADDIN'S LAMP, 1941, 35mm, 21 min., USA. CAM: Floyd Crosby; PROD: J.
Walter Thompson Advertising Agency, Shell Oil. (National Archives of Canada; 1949
version revised by H.E. Hockey available accessed 15 March 2014)
OUR RUSSIAN FRONT, 1941, 38 min., USA. CO-DIR: Lewis Milestone. CAM: Roman
Karmen, Ivan Belyakov, Arkadi Shafran; ED: Marcel Craven; WRIT: Elliot Paul, Ben
Maddow (David Wolf); NARR: Walter Huston; MUS: Dmitri Shostakovich; PROD: Art
Kino, Russian War Relief. ('World at War' Collection, Signature, Fastforward Music,
UK. DVD)
ACT ION STAT1IONS, 1943, 50 min., Canada. CAM: Osmond Borrodaile, Francois Villiers,
John Norwood; WRIT: Morley Callaghan, Allan Field; MUS: Lou Appelbaum; PROD:
John Grierson, National Film Board of Canada. (Short version: Corvette PortArthur,
22 min.; DVD and streaming: accessed 15 March I 705
2014)
K N OW YO U R E N E MY: JAPAN, 1945, 62 min., USA. DIR: Frank Capra; ED: Major Aaxton,
Frank Bracht, Elmo Williams; WRIT: Frank Capra, Carl Foreman, John Huston, Edgar
Peterson; NARR: John Huston; MUS: Dimitri Tiomkin. Early script development and
research byJoris Ivens and Helen van Dongen.
T H E STORY OF G. I. J OE , 1945, 108 min., USA. DIR: William A. Wellman; CAM: Russell
Metty; ED: Abrecht Joseph; WRIT: Ernie Pyle, Leopold Atlas, Guy Endore, Philip Steven-
son; MUS: Louis Applebaum, Ann Ronell; CONS: Joris Ivens. (Video-Cinema Films, Inc.
DVD, n.d.)
N DO N ES IA CALLI N G, 1946, 22 min., Australia. CAM: Joris Ivens, Marion Michelle et al.;
WRIT. Catherine Duncan; NARR: Peter Finch. (DVD box, 2008)
PIE RWSZE LATA [The First Years], 1949, 99 min., Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland. CAM:
Bulg.: Zachary Shandov; Czech: Ivan Fric; Pol.: Wladyslaw Forbert; ED: Karel Hoeschl;
WRIT: Marion Michelle, Catherine Duncan; NARR: Stanley Harrison; MUS: Kan Kapr;
PROD: Lubomir Linhard; Bulgar Film, Sofia; Statni Film, Praag; Wytwornia Film6w
Dokumentalnych, Warsaw.
P OKOJ ZD O B FDZI E $WIAT [Peace Will Win], 1951,90 min., Poland. CO-DIR: Jerzy Bossak;
CAM: Wladislaw Forbert, et al.; ED: Johanna Rojewska; WRIT: Jerzy Bossak; NARR: S.
Arskiet al.; MUS: Jerzy Gert, Wladislaw Szpilman; PROD: Wytwornia Film6w Dokumen-
talnych, Warsaw.
FILMOGRAPHY
FREUNDSCHAFT SIEGT [Friendship Triumphs], 1952, 100 min., colour, USSR, DDR.
CO-DIR: Ivan Pyryev; CAM: W. Pavlov et al.; ED: A. Kulganek, K. Moskvina; WRIT: Ivan
Pyryev, A. Frolov; NARR: S. Antonov; MUS: Isaak Dunayevski, M. Matussovski; PROD:
Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft. (Restored German-language version 2015, 96 min.,
DVD DEFA-Stiftung)
WYSCIG POKOJU WARSZAWA-BERLIN-PRAGA [Friedensfahrt1952, aka Peace Tour1952,
aka RaceforPeace Warsaw-Berlin-Prague], 1952, 53 min., colour, Poland, DDR. CAM:
Karel Szczecisnki et al.; ED: Krystyna Rutkowska; WRIT: Ewa Fiszer; MUS: Wernfried
Hibel; PROD: DEFA. (Restored German-language version, DEFA-Stiftung DVD set
2015)
DAS L I E D D E R ST R6 M E [Song of the Rivers], 1954, 90min., DDR. CO-DIR: Vladimir
Pozner; ASST: Joop Huisken, Robert Menegoz; CAM: Erich Nitzschmann et al.; ED:
706 I Ella Ensink; WRIT: Vladimir Pozner, Bertolt Brecht; NARR: Ernst Busch (German),
Alex McCrindle (English); MUS: Dmitri Shostakovich, Paul Robeson; PROD: DEFA.
(Restored German-language version 2015, 105 min., DVD DEFA-Stiftung)
M E I N K I ND [My Child], 1955, 22 min., DDR. DIR: Vladimir Pozner, Alfons Machalz.
WRIT: Vladimir Pozner; NARR: Helene Weigel; PROD: DEFA, International Democratic
Women's Federation. (Restored German-language version, DEFA-Stiftung DVD set
2015)
DIE ABENTEUER DES TILL EULENSPIEGEL [LesAventures de Till l'Espiegle, aka TheAdven-
tures of TillEulenspiegel, aka BoldAdventure], 1956, 90 min., colour, DDR, France. DIR:
Gerard Philipe; PRODUCTION COORDINATOR (DEFA)/ARTISTIC ADVISER: Joris Ivens;
CAM: Alain Douarinou, Christian Matras; ED: Claude Nicole; MUS: Georges Auric;
CAST: Gerard Philipe, Jean Vilar, Fernand Ledoux, Nicole Berger, Jean Carmet; PROD:
DEFA and Productions Ariane. (Restored original French-language version, TFI Video
DVD 2009)
DIE WIN D ROS E [The Windrose], 1957, 110 min, DDR. DIR: Alberto Cavalcanti, Alex
Viany, Wu Guoying, Yannick Bellon, Gillo Pontecorvo, Sergei Gerasimov; ARTISTIC
ADVISER: JOris Ivens; ED: Ella Ensink; WRIT: Jorge Amado, Sergei Gerasimov, Lin Jen,
Henri Magnan, Franco Solinas; MUS: Chi Min, Wolfgang Hohensee, Anatoli Novikov,
Mario Zafred; CAST: Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Yan Meiyi, Clara Pozzi, Vanya
Orico, S. Kirienko et al.; PROD: DEFA, International Democratic Women's Federation.
(Restored German-language version, DEFA-Stiftung DVD set 2015)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
LA SE IN E A RENCONTRE PARIS [The Seine Meets Paris], 1957, 32 min., France. CAM:
Andre Dumaitre, Philipe Brun; ED: Gisele Chzeau; CONS: Georges Sadoul; WRIT:
Jacques Prdvert; NARR: Serge Reggiani; MUS: Gdrard-Philipe; PROD: Garance Film.
(DVD box, 2008)
LETTRES DE CHINE [Before Spring], 1958, 38 min, colour, China. CAM: Wang Decheng;
WRIT: He Zhongxin; NARR: Xe Tian; PROD: Central Studios for Newsreel and Documen-
taries, Beijing.
SIX HUNDRED MILLION WITH YOU, 1958,12min. China. CAM: crew of the Central
Studios; WRIT: He Zhongxin; PROD: Central Studios for Newsreel and Documentaries,
Beijing.
L'ITALIA NON E UN PAESE POVERO [Italy Is Not a Poor Country], 1960, 35mm, 112 min.
(three parts), Italy. ASST: Giovanni (Tinto) Brass, Valentino Orsini, Paolo and Vittorio | 707
Taviani; CAM: Mario Dolci, Mario Volpi; ED: Maria Rosada; NARR: Enrico M. Salerno;
MUS: Gino Marinuzzi; PROD: Enrico Mattei, Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, Radiotelevisi-
one italiana.
Three parts:
1. Fuochi della valPadana [Fire in the Po Valley]
2. Due Citta [Two Cities] and La Storia di due alberi [Story of the Two Trees]
3. Appuntamento a Gela [Meeting in Gela]
D E MAI N A NAN G U ILA [Nanguila Tomorrow], 1960, 16 mm, 50 min., colour, Mali,
France. CAM: Louis Miaille; ED: Gisele Chzeau, Hdlene Arnal, Suzanne Baron; WRIT:
Catherine Varlin (Winter); CAST: Moussa Sidibd; NARR: Roger Pigaut, Moussa Sidibd;
MUS: Louis Bessiere, Moussa Sidibd; PROD: Socidtd Franco-Africaine de Cindma,
Gisele Rebillon.
CARNET DE VIAJE [Travel Notebook], 1961, 35mm, 34 min., Cuba, France. ASST: Jorge
Fraga, Jose Massip (Cuba), Isabelle Elizando, Guy Blanc (France); WRIT: Henri Fabiani,
Nicolas Guillen (poem); ED: Hdlene Arnal; NARR: Henri Fabiani; MUS: Harold Gramat-
ges; PROD: ICAIC (Saul Yelin), Garance Film (Roger Pigaut).
UN PUEBLO ARMADO [An Armed People], 1961, 35mm, 35 min., Cuba, France. ASST: Jorge
Herrera, Ram6n F. Suarez; ED: Hdlene Arnal; WRIT: Henri Fabiani; NARR: Serge Reggiani;
MUS: Harold Gramatges; PROD: ICAIC (Saul Yelin), Garance Film (Roger Pigaut).
CHAGALL [Marc Chagall], 1962, 35mm, France. DIR: Henri Langlois; CAM: Frddric
Rossif, Jean Guynot; ED: Joris Ivens. PROD: Cindmatheque franaise. (unfinished and
lost)
F I L MO GRAPH Y
.A VALPARAISO [Valparaiso], 1963, 35mm, 27 min., black and white/colour, France,
Chile. ASST: Sergio Bravo, A. Altez, Rebecca Yanez, Joaquin Olalla, Carlos B6ker; CAM:
Georges Strouvd; ED: Jean Ravel; WRIT: Chris Marker; NARR: Roger Pigaut; MUS: Gus-
tavo Becarra, Germaine Montero; PROD: Argos Films, and Cind experimental de la
Universidad de Chile. (DVD box, 2008)
LE PETIT CHAPITEAU [The Little Circus], 1963, 35mm, 6 min., France, Chile. CAM:
Patricio Guzman; ED: Jean Ravel; WRIT & NARR: Jacques Prdvert; PROD: Argos Films,
and Cind experimental de la Universidad de Chile.
LE TRAIN DE LA VI CTO I RE [The Victory Train], 1964, 16mm, 9 min., France, Chile. CAM:
Patricio Guzman; ED: Sergio Bravo; MUS: Gustavo Becerra; PROD: Frente de Acci6n
Popular (FRAP)
708 I AAH...TAMARA, 1965, 35mm, 28 min., Netherlands. DIR: Pim de la Parra; CAM: Gerard
van den Berg; CAST: Joris Ivens et al.
POUR LE MISTRAL [For the Mistral], 1965, 35mm, 33 min., black and white/colour,
widescreen, France. CAM: Claude Dumaitre, Pierre Lhomme; ASST: Jean Michaud et
al.; ED: Jean Ravel, Emmanuelle Castro; WRIT: Rend Guyonnet, Armand Gatti, Andr
Verdet (commentary); NARR: Roger Pigaut; MUS: Luc Ferrari (not used), Antoine Duha-
mel; PROD: Claude Nedjar, Centre Europden Radio-Cindma-Tdldvision. (DVD box,
2008)
LE CIEL, LA TERRE [The Sky, the Earth, aka The Threatening Sky], 1966, 35mm, 28 min.,
black and white, France. ASST: Cao Thuy; CAM: Duc Hoa, Robert Destanque, Thu Van;
ED: Cathrine Dourgnon, Frangoise Beloux; WRIT: Jean-Claude Ulrich [Chris Marker];
NARR: Serge Reggiani, Joris Ivens; MUS: Ensemble artistique des dtudiants vietna-
miens en France; PROD: Dovidis.
ROTTERDAM EUROPOORT [RotterdamEuroport], 1966, 35mm, 20 min., colour, Nether-
lands. CAM: Eddy van der Enden, Etienne Becker; ASST: Mirek Sebestik, Marceline
Loridan; ED: Catherine Dourgnon, Genevieve Louveau, Andrde Choty; CAST: Carel
Kneulman, Willeke van Ammelrooy; WRIT: Gerrit Kouwenaar; NARR: Kouwenaar, Yves
Montand (French); SOUND: Tom Tholen; MUS: Pierre Barbot, Konstantin Simonovich;
PROD: Joop Landrd, Nederlandse Filmproduktie Mij, Argos Films. (DVD box, 2008).
LOIN DU VIETNAM [FarFrom Vietnam], 1967, 35mm, 115 min., black and white/colour,
France. CO-DIR: [Chris Marker], Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein,
Claude Lelouch, Agnes Varda, Michele Ray, Roger Pic; CAM: Joris Ivens, Marceline
Loridan (Hanoi); ED: Chris Marker; NARR: Maurice Garrel, Bernard Fressom, Karen
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Blangeurnon, Agnes Varda; MUS: Michel Fano, Michel Chapdenat, Georges Asperghis;
PROD: S.L.O.N., Paris. (Restored English-subtitled version, Icarus Films Home Video
DVD 2013)
LE 17E PARALLELE [The 17thParallel], 1968, 35mm, 113 min., black and white, France.
CO-DIR: Marceline Loridan; CAM: Nguyen Quang Tuan, Dao Le Binh; OTHER COLLAB-
ORATORS: Bui Dinh, Hac Nguyen, Thi Xuan Phuong, Pham Chon, Liliane Korb, Maguy
Alziari, Phung Ba Tho, Jean-Pierre Sergent, Dang Vu Bich Lien, Jean Neny, Antoine
Bonfanti, Pierre Angles, Michel Fano, Harald Maury, Donald Sturbelle, Andrd v.d.
Beken, Bernard Ortion, Georges Loiseau, Ragnar, Studio central du film documentaire
(Hanoi), the people and army of Vinh Linh; PROD: CAPI Films, Argos Films, Paris.
(DVD box, 2008)
LE PEUPLE ET SES FUSILS [The People and their Guns], 1970, 35mm, 97 min., black
and white, Laos, France. DIR & WRIT (COLLECTIVE): Jean-Pierre Sergent, Marceline | 709
Loridan, Joris Ivens, Emmanuelle Castro, Suzanne Fenn, Antoine Bonfanti, Bernard
Ortion, Anne Rullier; PROD: CAPI Films, Paris.
RENCONTRE AVEC LE PRESIDENT HO CHI MINH [MeetingwithPresidentHo ChiMinh],
1970, 35mm, 8 min., France. CO-DIR & CO-WRIT: Marceline Loridan; WRIT: Marceline
Loridan.
COMMENT YUKONG DEPLA A LES MONTAGNES [How YukongMoved theMountains],
1976, 16mm, colour, 718 min., France. CO-DIR: Marceline Loridan; CAM: Li Zexiang,
Yang Zhiju; ASST: Jean Bigiaoui; COLLABORATORS: Franoise Ascain, Christine Aya,
Dominique Barbier, Joel Beldent, Fabienne Bergeron, Paul Bertault, Sylvie Blanc,
Joelle Dalido, Robert Destanque, Martine Goussay, Dominique Greussay, Jacqueline
Haby, He Tian, Guo Weijun, Rende Koch, Alain Landau, Guy Laroche, Joelle Lebeau,
Donna Ldvy, Jacques Ldvy, Lucien Logette, Sarah Matton, Eric Pluet, Ragnar van Ley-
den, Tho Robichet, Jacques Sansoulh, Xia Zhou'an, Franoise Sigward, Tan Qinwen,
Qian Liren, Xia Jiaohe, Dominique Valentin, Julie Vilmont, Wu Mengbin, Ren Zheng,
Ye Cheyan, Zu Chongyuan; TRANSLATOR: Lu Songhe; ED: Suzanne Baron; WRIT: Alain
Badiou; PROD: CAPI Films, Institut national de laudiovisuel (INA), Paris. (CNC 2014.
Comment Yukongdplaga les montagnes, DVD box set)
Autour du pdtrole: Taking [The Oilfields], 84 min.
La Pharmacie no.3: Changhai [The Pharmacy: Shanghai], 79 min. (DVD box, 2008)
L'Usine degenrateurs [The Generator Factory], 131 min.
Unefemme, unefamille [A Woman,A Family], 110 min.
Le Village des pecheurs [The Fishing Village], 104 min.
Une caserne [An Army Camp], 56 min.
Impressions d'une ville: Changhai [Impressions of a City: Shanghai], 60 min.
FILMOGRAPHY
Histoire d'un ballon: Le Lycee no.31 a Pekin [The Football Incident], 19 min. (DVD box,
2008)
Le Professeur Tsien [Professor Tchien (Qian)], 12 min.
Une repetition a l'Opera dePikin [Rehearsal at the Peking Opera], 30 min.
Entrainement au Cirque de Pekin [Training at the Peking Circus], 18 min.
Les Artisans [Traditional Handicrafts], 15 min.
COMMEMORATION IN PARIS OF THE DEATH OF MAO ZEDONG (news-item), 1979. CO-DIR:
Marceline Loridan.
LES KAZAKS - MINORITE NATIONALE, SINKIANG [The Kazakhs -NationalMinority,
Xinjiang], 1977, 16mm, 50 min., colour, China, France. CO-DIR: Marceline
Loridan; ED: Suzanne Baron; WRIT: Marceline Loridan; PROD: CAPI Films, Paris.
710 I LES OUIGOURS - MINORITE NATIONALE, SINKIANG [The Uigurs -NationalMinority,
Xinjiang], 1977, 16mm, 35 min., colour, China, France. CO-DIR: Marceline Loridan; ED:
Suzanne Baron; WRIT: Marceline Loridan; PROD: CAPI Films, Paris.
HAVRE, 1986, 35mm, 96 min., colour, France. DIR: Juliet Berto; WRIT: Juliet Berto,
Elisabeth D. Prasetyo; CAST: Joris Ivens.
U N E H I STO I RE D E V E NT [A Tale of the Wind], 1988, 35mm, 78 min., colour, France.
CO-DIR: Marceline Loridan; CAM: Thierry Arbogast, Jacques Loiseleux; CAST: Joris
Ivens, Han Zenxiang, Wang Delong, Liu Zhuang, Wang Hong, Fu Dalin, Liu Guilian,
Chen Zhijian, Paul Sergent, Zou Qiaoyo, Yin Guangzhong; TRANSLATOR: Lu Songhe;
ED: Genevieve Louveau; WRIT: Marceline Loridan, Elisabeth D. Prasetyo; MUSIC:
Michel Portal; PROD: Marin Karmitz, La Sept; CAPI Films, Paris. (DVD box, 2008)
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
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THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
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REFERENCE LIST
INDEX
16mm 174, 219, 223, 262, 295, 334,
346, 367, 369, 374, 414, 470, 494,
576, 579, 599, 679 n. 13, 683 n. 11;
distribution of Ivens's films on 31,
322-3, 345, 367; educational market
323, 333, 348, 655; Ivens's use of 31,
322, 332, 411, 443-4, 447, 478, 483,
512, 547
17Parallele, Le (The 17th Parallel, 1968)
30,32-3,459,504-5,507,516-17,
520, 527-46, 551-2, 567, 601, 610,
658 n. 4, 690 nn. 8, 11, 696, 709
400 Million, The (1938) 30, 56, 196, 205,
218-54, 257, 266, 268, 271, 274,
279, 281-2, 302, 309, 312, 315, 375,
406, 428, 507, 509, 513, 531,585,
614, 635-6, 648, 657 n. 3, 674 n. 32,
704; commentary 240-3; original
plan 219, 224-9; reviews 237-9, 251;
score 245-5; self-censorship 222,
248-9; theatrical distribution 253-4
A
Apropos de Nice (1930) 70, 189, 481, 662
n. 5
A quoi revent les jeunes films? (What Do
YoungFilms Dream About?, 1924) 74
... A Valparaiso (1963) 28, 30, 402, 406,
413,427,440,465-79,481,485,487,
490, 492-3, 495, 497, 539, 558, 598,
658 n. 4, 684 n. 15, 687 n. 45, 698,
708
A Wives' Tale, see Une histoire defemmes
Abenteuer des Till Eulenspiegel, Die (Les
Aventures de Till L'Espiegle, aka Bold
Adventure, 1956) 28, 197, 386-7,
390,393-6, 403, 493, 625, 636, 706
Abramov, Nikolai 414, 683 n. 9
'absolute film' 59-61, 71, 73, 75-6, 83-4,
87, 95, 98, 144
Abu-Khaled, Mariam 196
Achard, Marcel 472
Acheson, Dean 367
acting: non-professional 64, 80-2, 92,
104, 156, 205, 271-7, 296, 316, 343,
355, 376, 394-5, 463, 660 n. 13;
professional, in documentary 274,
277, 395, 416
Action Stations (1943) 30, 44, 75, 258,
277, 288,303,308-323,333,355,
450, 531, 658 n. 6, 674 n. 32, 676 n.
50,705
1 739
activist documentary 29-30, 114, 342,
346-8, 360, 401, 465, 556, 567-
9, 599, 636; see also committed
documentary; solidarity
documentary
'actors, social' 416-17, 439, 543, 604-7
Adams, William P. 282, 704
Adler, Renata 524-5, 527
Adorno, Theodor 243, 670 n. 30
Adventures ofDollie, The (1908) 52
ageing 644-6, 649
agitprop 29, 160, 176, 199, 201, 360,
459, 522-3, 526, 543-5, 554, 557,
622, 662 n. 7
740 | Agricultural Adjustment
Administration (USA) 260
agriculture 241, 312, 326, 356, 377, 455,
459; collective 150, 155, 215, 286-
7, 302, 357, 389-90, 665 n. 32; in
Bulgaria 356-7; in China 576-7, 581,
593, 606; in Italy 436, 438; in Mali
443-6; in revolutionary Spain 203-5,
215-8; in the US 215, 259-64, 283-7,
344; in USSR 150, 152, 155, 664 n.
25, 665 n. 32; in Vietnam 507, 531-
3, 535; sharecroppers 215, 262; see
also automation; nature, mastery
of; peasants
Ahrendt, Julian 168
Aitken, Ian 38
Aitken, Max (Lord Beaverbrook) 297
Aleksandrov, Grigori 657 n. 3
Alexander, William 39, 658 n. 7, 667 n.
1, 672 n. 15, 673 n. 26
Alexis Tremblay Habitant (1943) 318
Algcrie, anndezdro (1962) 494, 540
Alicata, Mario 432
allegory 146, 158, 203, 357, 436, 440
Allende, Salvador 466, 468, 478, 503,
687 n. 50, 696
Alone, see Odna
Alpert, Maks 664 n. 29
Alter, Nora M. 39
Althusser, Louis 554, 572
Alvarez, Santiago 542, 686 n. 32
Amado, Jorge 364, 387-8, 390, 681 n.
27, 706
amateur filmmaking 36, 51, 55, 68-9,
78, 104, 106, 200, 369, 376, 378,
482-3, 557
American Family, An (1973) 577
American Labor Productions 200
analytic mode, in Ivens 127, 144, 183,
187, 507, 551; in Brug 68-70, 73, 77;
in Peuple 554, 556; in Regen 90-1; in
WUBouwen 107-8
And So They Live (1940) 289, 671 n. 4
Anderson, Lindsay 416-17, 474, 684 n.
14
animation: in Ivens's work 122, 142,
160, 237-238, 274, 326-7, 341, 434,
437, 439; in war documentary 305-
6, 325
Anstey, E.H. (Edgar Harold) 164, 233,
291
anthology film, see omnibus film
anti-Americanism 454, 523, 551, 562
anti-clericalism 189, 202, 217
anti-colonial movement 252, 336-7,
343, 347, 381, 383, 398, 429, 680
n. 23; see also colonialism; 'third
world'
anti-fascist movement 101, 193, 197-9,
216, 218, 243, 246, 250, 252-3,
261-2, 293-4, 296, 333, 348; see also
Popular Fronts
anti-nuclear movement 364-7, 371-2,
679 n. 13
Antonioni, Michelangelo 573, 583-5,
596, 604-5, 619, 643, 669 n. 20, 683
n. 4, 690 n. 1, 691 n. 12
Appollinaire, Guillaume 425
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Arab Spring 35, 195
Aragon, Louis 175
Aranda, Francisco 297, 330
architecture 53, 103, 105-7, 115, 171,
403,455-6, 474, 636
archival imagery, see compilation mode
archive, of Ivens's work, see Ivens, Joris
Archives frangaises du film du CNC 528
Argos Films 412, 413, 466, 493, 495,
542, 708-9
Aristotle 72
Arm Drenthe: De nood in de Dreutsche
venen (Poor Drenthe:Poverty in the
Peatlands ofDrenthe, 1929) 111,
702
Armed People, An, see Pueblo Armado
Arsenal (1929) 59, 68
art-house distribution, of
documentaries 31-2, 63, 214, 218,
253, 288, 561, 578
Art/Violence (2013) 196
Artaud, Antonin 660 n. 15
Arthur, Paul 38, 40, 409
Artkino 297, 303, 367
Asamblea general (GeneralAssembly,
1960) 453
Association des ecrivains et artistes
rdvolutionnaires (AEAR) 175
Association for People's Culture
(Netherlands, VVVC) 111-14, 300,
702-3
Association of Documentary Film
Producers 658 n. 7
Association of Friends of the Soviet
Union (Netherlands) 190-1
Atalante, L' (1934) 421
Atkins, Tommy 267
Atlantic Charter 333, 336-7, 345
atrocity footage 230, 251, 327, 366, 513,
521, 539, 546
Auden, W.H. 223, 280, 721
audiences 31-3, 359, 491, 498, 514, 550-
1, 596-7, 601, 611, 626, 680 n. 18, 681
n. 1; avant-garde 63, 66-7, 84, 130,
140-1, 160, 191, 516; identification
117-18, 276, 312, 551, 672 n. 19;
mainstream vs. specialised, in war
documentary 244, 246-7, 249, 253,
301-5, 322-3, 325; military 303, 305;
non-theatrical 323, 348, 381, 578;
political responses 163-4, 165, 555-
7, 577; postcolonial 344-6, 429-30,
447, 449, 477, 580; problems in
research on 44-5; Soviet 78, 101, 117-
18, 120, 123, 132; working-class 78,
88, 101, 104, 115-18, 134, 136, 190
Aufderheide, Patricia 38
Australian Council of Trade Unions
(ACTU) 336
auteurism 27-8, 39, 48, 14, 285, 351,
462, 473, 475, 519, 524, 527, 548,
566, 654; Ivens as auteur 40, 46,
64-5, 476-7
authenticity, see truth, in documentary;
'naturalness', visual code of
autobiographical film 29, 632-6, 640-4,
649-50, 693 n.23
automation 100, 130, 264, 281, 284,
289, 361, 673 n. 25; see also labour,
manual; machine film
Autrusseau, Jacqueline 440, 446
avant-garde movement 39, 50, 81-2, 88,
91, 97, 120, 128-9, 483; in Belgium
173-4; in Holland 54-60, 62-3, 81-2;
Ivens's roots in 19, 27-8, 64, 69,
73-4, 78, 94, 103, 107-9, 159-60, 200,
641, 661 n. 21, 666 n. 44; Ivens's
rupture with 190, 210, 259, 283,
515-6; Ivens's views on 138-41;
political allegiances 60, 114, 182;
see also 'absolute film'; machine
film; modernist aesthetic
1 741
INDEX
Aventures de Till L'Espiegle, Les, see
Abenteuer des Till Eulenspiegel, Die
B
Bach, Johann Sebastian 391
Bachy, Victor 686 n. 29
Back-BreakingLeaf(1959) 684 n. 23
Baddeley, Hugh 232-233, 305, 669 n. 24
Badian Kouyatd, Seydou 443-4, 446,
449, 685 n. 27
Bai Hua 631
Bai mao nu (The White-Haired Girl, 1950)
389
Bairstow, David 369
742 I Bakker, Kees 10-11, 40, 43, 374, 441,
701
Baldzs, Bla 63, 77-8, 98, 101, 119, 121-
2, 137, 146, 353, 355, 660 n. 12, 661
n. 20
Ballet mdcanique (1924) 74
Balmain, Pierre 423
Barbaro, Umberto 432
Barbian, Jan-Pieter 40, 701
Barlow, Howard 236-7, 251, 306, 669 n.
25, 675 n. 38
Barlow, Roger 310, 675 n. 43
Barlow, Tani 621-2
Barnouw, Erik, 37-8, 328, 331, 567, 682
n. 2
Barsam, Richard Meran 38, 257, 289
Bas-fonds, Les (The Lower Depths, 1936)
214
Bata (shoe company) 357
Bataille des dix millions, La (The Battle of
the Ten Million, 1970) 462, 559
Battaglia diAlgeri, La (The Battle of
Algiers, 1966) 690 n. 7
Battle ofAlgiers, The, see Battaglia di
Algeri, La
Battle of China, The (1944) 328
Battle ofMidway (1942) 304
Battle ofRussia, The (1944) 297
Battle of San Pietro, The (1945) 126, 509
Battle of the Ten Million, The, see Bataille
des dix millions, La
Battleship Potemkin, The, see Bronenosets
Potemkin
Bazin, Andre 543-4
Beat culture 415
Becerra, Gustavo 472, 478, 687 n. 43,
708
Becker, Etienne 46, 494, 610, 708
Bed and Sofa, see Tretya meshchanskaya
Beethoven, Ludwig van 366, 391, 641,
693 n. 22
Before Spring (Lettres de Chine, 1958)
427-9,438,465, 576, 580-2, 628, 684
n. 18, 707
before/after (documentary format) 261,
264-5, 269-71, 374, 453, 455-6, 575,
582, 612
Beijing Film Academy 388
Belgian Mine Workers Union 268
Bell & Howell 272
Belle Nivernaise, La (The Beauty from
Nivernais, 1924) 81
Bellon, Yannick 46, 387-90, 685 n. 28,
706
Benedek, Laslo 307
Bendt, Stephen Vincent 279-80, 282,
704
Benjamin, Walter 19, 182-4, 186, 189-
90, 579, 642, 666 n. 46, 713
Benoit-Ldvy, Jean 257, 285
Berlin:Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt
(Berlin: Symphony of a Great City,
1927) 59, 61, 74, 130, 657 n. 3
Berlinguer, Enrico 370, 432
Bershen, Wanda 10, 398
Bertina, Bob J. 421, 425
Berto, Juliet 631-2, 710
Biberman, Herbert 347, 384
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
BientotNoel (The Days Before Christmas,
1958) 685 n. 23
Big Parade, The (1925) 58, 60
Bip Goes To Town (1941) 284-5, 704
Birth of a Nation, The (1915) 120, 662
n. 9
Bissonnette, Sophie 599
Black Fury (1935) 323
Blair, Betsy 412
Blitzstein, Marc 211, 289, 704
Blue (1993) 640-3
Boerensymfonie (La Symphonie paysanne,
1944) 278, 677 n. 61
Bogataya Nevesta (The Country Bride,
1937) 253
Bohn, Thomas W. 244, 300, 302, 304-6,
320, 324-5
Bdker, Carlos 41, 674 n. 33, 708
Bold Adventure, see Abenteuer des Till
Eulenspiegel, Die
Bon, Willem 104, 127, 662 n. 13, 702-3
Bonfanti, Antoine 543, 709
Bonus March (1932) 189, 667 n. 47
Borinage, see Misere au Borinage
Borradaile, Osmond 258, 311, 316, 355
Bortsy (The Struggle, 1936) 193
Bory, Jean-Louis 578
Bossak (Szelubski), Jerzy 353, 364-5,
679 n. 8, 705
Botticelli, Sandro 484, 486
Boulad, Bernard 25, 633
Bourdon, Luc 493
Bourke-White, Margaret 198, 307, 344
Brakhage, Stan 22, 485, 640-4, 646-7
Brandende Staal, see Wigwam, De
Branding (Breakers, 1929) 28, 54-6, 59,
64, 79-90, 95, 97, 99, 107, 116, 127,
271, 277, 625, 636, 646, 653, 660 nn.
15, 17, 693 n. 26, 695
Brandon Films 345-6
Brandon, Tom 345-346, 355
Brant, Henry 282
Brass, Tinto 46, 431-2, 441, 707
Brault, Michel 416, 537, 685 n. 23
Bravo, Sergio 46, 402, 466-7, 472, 477,
686 n. 40, 708
Breakers, see Branding
Brecht, Bertolt 19, 146, 148, 159, 168,
186, 189, 295, 304, 332, 348, 353,
360, 380, 386, 434, 467-8, 539, 546,
553, 557, 566-7, 670 n. 36, 672 n. 19,
681 n. 27, 686 n. 39, 706
Breitrose, Henry 568
Brezhnev, Leonid 404
Bridge ofMen (not realised, 1943) 330
Bridge, The (1942) 292
Bridge, The, see Brug, De
BriefEncounter (1945) 354
Bright Passage (1947) 355
British Sounds, see See You at Mao
Brittain, Donald 487
Bronenosets Potemkin (The Battleship
Potemkin, 1925) 58-9, 68, 162, 382,
693 n. 27
Broughton, James 22, 640-1, 644-7, 650
Browder, Earl 197
Brueghel, Pieter the Elder 83-4, 420,
469, 491, 497-8, 686 n. 38
Brug, De (The Bridge, 1928) 28, 34, 50,
52, 54-5, 59, 61, 63-80, 84, 87-91,
94, 96-7, 99, 101, 106-7, 125, 127,
130,182,186, 419, 474, 492, 498,
660 nn. 6, 9, 10, 12, 661 n. 18, 695-6;
modernist vs. realist elements 70-1,
73-4; scenario 71-3
Brun, Philippe 413, 707
Brunel, Claude 615
Brunsdon, Charlotte 471
Bryan, Julien 261, 294
Bucher, Jules 294
Buckland, Michael 31, 70
1 743
INDEX
Budujemy Warszawg (Warsaw Rebuilds,
1945) 677 n. 4
Buize, Fdlicien 192
Bunuel, Luis 38, 46, 100, 126-7, 175,
189, 330, 657 nn. 3-4, 661 n. 21, 663
n. 14, 681 n. 1, 693 n. 27
Burchett, Wilfred 506
Bureau of Motion Pictures of the Office
of War Information (BMP) 308
bureaucracy: in China 560, 569-70, 627,
635-6, 642, 645-6; in communist
Eastern Europe 356, 360, 363, 367,
369, 381, 392-3, 403, 414-15, 433; in
USSR 150-1, 552, 569, 678; RAI 434
744 I Burger, Hanns 224
Busch, Ernst 380, 703, 708
Bushido 327
By the Law, see Po zakonu
C
Cagney, James 276
Calcutta (1969) 687 n. 44
Caldwell, Erskine 307, 344
California Senate Fact-Finding
Subcommittee on Un-American
Activities (SUAC) 330
Callaghan, Morley 44, 310, 313-14, 705
Camera and I, The (1969) 19, 43, 51,
57-9, 66-7, 69-70, 76-8, 90, 93, 95,
97, 111-12, 124, 139-42, 172-3, 181,
190, 222, 230, 236, 249, 257, 277,
282, 296, 328, 555, 557, 566-7, 615,
653, 655, 662 n. 2, 273 n. 20, 681 n.
24, 693 n. 27
camera types: Debrie 129, 205, 221;
DeVry 70, 90; Jclair 494, 611;
Kinamo 31, 52, 70, 80, 90, 129, 187-
8,223,338
camera: handheld 31, 70, 86, 90, 93,
129, 188, 411, 447, 460-1, 470, 494,
537; hidden 416-18, 598, 605, 691 n.
12; subjective 66, 70, 73, 86-7, 93-4,
107, 109, 185, 284, 435, 437, 486,
596, 640
Cameron, Kate 237
Campbell, Russell 39, 188-9, 201-2, 205,
287, 323, 330, 658 n. 7, 667 nn. 47,
1, 668 n. 11, 14, 669 n. 18
Camus, Albert 570
Canada Carries On (series, 1940-1959)
306, 310-12, 320-2
Canby, Vincent 550
'candid eye', see direct cinema
Cantata de Chile (1973-1976) 452
Capa, Robert 213, 221, 232, 668 n. 15,
704
CAPI Films 11, 70, 82, 104, 106, 119,
127-8,142, 164, 375, 578
capitalism, critique of 110-11, 195, 201,
376, 402, 410, 416, 617, 622, 688 n.
57; in Borinage 175-6, 181, 186-7,
189; in Nieuwe Gronden 163-4, 166-
9; in Philips-Radio 132, 136-7
Capra, Frank 46, 212-13, 238, 244-5,
251, 298, 300-9, 319, 322-5, 327-8,
331, 334, 341-2, 670 n. 32, 676 n.
55, 705
Carnegie Corporation 259
Carnet de Viaje (Travel Notebook, 1961)
30, 427, 450-60, 464, 492, 506, 707
Carriere, Marcel 573
Cartier-Bresson, Henri 208-9, 412, 426
Cartier, Jacques 312
Cassiers, Willem 41
Caute, David 291, 671 n. 1
Cavalcanti, Alberto 62, 89, 91-2, 99, 136,
169, 280, 353, 375, 387-8, 405, 410,
493, 581, 659 n. 2, 681 n. 27, 693 n.
27,706
censorship 31, 45, 139, 190, 217, 359,
404, 434, 436; Dutch 57, 114-5;
French 171, 381, 430, 450, 452-
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
3, 494, 518, 560, 562, 671 n. 43;
Guomidang 221-2, 225, 227-8,
230-1, 234, 238, 247-8, 266; self-
censorship 216, 252-3, 302; Soviet
163; US 190-1, 214
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 345,
398
Central Newsreels and Documentary
Studio (China) 574, 608, 707
Centre national de production
cindmatographique (Mali) 444
Centre Pompidou 35, 43, 142
Centro sperimentale di cinematografia
432
Chabrol, Claude 519, 685 n. 28
Chagall, Marc 481, 689, 707
Challenge for Change (Canada) 188
Chanan, Michael 20,40
Chants et danses du Mali (1969) 686 n. 29
Chaplin, Charlie 58, 307, 456, 663 n. 16,
693 n. 27
characterisation, see personalisation
Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a
Movie Camera, 1929) 73-4, 99, 493,
657 n. 3, 66o n. 9
Chelsea Girls (1966) 487
Chen Cheng 250
Chiang Kai-shek, see Jiang Jieshi
Child Went Forth,A (1941) 671 n. 4
children 167, 169, 179, 185, 231, 240,
243-4, 313-14, 367, 380, 384, 390-1,
425, 428, 437, 442,456-7, 472-3,
477, 488, 581, 588-9, 606, 639; as
war victims 207, 215-16, 233, 304,
509, 535-6; playing 63, 85, 120-1,
235, 376, 419-20, 455, 459, 469-70,
463, 475, 629
Children Must Learn, The (1940) 289
China - Land zwishchen Gestern und
Morgen (China, Land between
Yesterday and Tomorrow, 1956) 381
China Strikes Back (1937) 218-20, 222-3,
226, 228, 237, 247-8, 250, 669 n. 23
Chinese Soviet Republic (1931-1937) 220
Chinoise,La (1967) 571, 631
Chomette, Henri 74
Choui Khoua (Shui Hua) 389
Christensen, Theodor 410, 462
Chronicle of a Summer, see Chronique
d'un dtd
Chronique d'un dtd (Chronicle of a
Summer, 1961) 411, 414, 437, 466,
540, 682 n., 685 n. 23
ChungKuo - Cina (1972) 573, 583-5, 596,
604-5, 618, 691 n. 12
Chung mot dong song (On the Same River, 745
1959) 530
Churchill's Island (1941) 310
Ciel, la terre, Le (The Threatening Sky,
1966) 28, 30, 44, 413, 47, 450, 489,
493, 495, 502, 505-19, 521, 528-9,
531, 534-5, 538, 540, 543, 545, 670,
684 n. 12, 688 n. 2, 708
Cienfuegos, Camilo 457
cinema novo (Brazil) 389-90
Cindma politique (journal) 36, 40,42-3,
214
cindma vdcu, see direct cinema
cindma vcritc, see direct cinema
Cindma Vritc: Defining the Moment
(1999) 682 n.
Cindmatheque frangaise 65, 393, 441,
481
Cindmatheque qudbdcoise 47
Ciruzzi, Aristo 431
city film 28, 59, 61, 65-6, 69, 77-8, 92,
98-99, 259, 402, 407, 421-2, 413,
437,465-78, 482, 488, 491-9, 598,
601, 614, 628, 631-2, 653
City, The (1939) 259, 261, 269, 280, 283,
Clair, Rend 62, 74, 79, 129, 660 n. 10,
663 n. 16, 693 n. 27
INDEX
class struggle 114, 163-4, 175, 184, 197,
201, 217, 278, 320, 330, 415-16,471,
489, 617, 642, 664 n. 25; see also
capitalism, critique of; Marxism
Club de l'ecran (Brussels) 173-5, 704
Coalfor Canada (1944) 323
Cold War 19, 21, 26, 28, 35, 37-8, 64,
164, 208, 308, 332-3, 345, 347, 352-
5, 359-61, 363-4, 367, 372, 376, 383-
4, 386, 396-9, 404-5,407, 409, 415,
422, 432, 511, 678 n. 7, 681 n. 1; see
also anti-nuclear movement
collage film, see compilation mode
Colman, Ronald 251
746 I colonialism 36, 39-40, 47, 231, 251-2,
381, 383-4, 423, 470, 474-5, 605,
611, 648; British 311-12; Dutch
333-8; French 375, 447-8, 524;
see also anti-colonial movement;
'otherness'; postcolonialism
colour film 371, 443, 449, 475, 491,
521-2, 579, 581, 599, 679 n. 15,
680 n. 18, 687 n. 45; combining
black-and-white and colour, in
documentary 469-70, 472, 474,
486, 495; Ivens's first adoption of
368-9
Columbia Pictures 322
Columbia University 27, 48, 565-6, 670
n. 31
combat, documentary footage of 223,
225-6, 228, 235, 248, 315, 332, 454-
5, 459-60, 532-3, 557
Comment Yukong dcplaga les montagnes
(How YukongMoved the Mountains,
1976) 21, 28-33, 35, 38, 42, 44, 47,
150, 153, 185, 233, 381, 399, 435,
464, 516, 538, 542-3, 553, 564-7,
570-625, 628-9, 633, 636, 649, 650,
654-5, 658 n. 4, 669 n. 20, 690 nn. 4,
5, 691 n. 12, 692 n. 17, 696, 709
commentary 229, 238, 320, 362-3,
371, 388, 391, 403-4, 434-5, 448-9,
457-8, 460, 466, 471-3, 475, 486-7,
518, 522, 554, 557, 571-2, 581, 598,
670 n. 26, 684 n. 15; Ciel (Marker)
508-11; commentary/image-track
ratio 240, 281, 305, 342, 471, 687
n. 42; explaining the image 186,
240, 242, 299, 489; first-person 205,
242,319,362,424-5, 473, 535, 538,
541; Indonesia (Duncan) 341-2;
informational vs. rhetorical, in war
documentary 305, 310, 538, 675 n.
39; Ivens narrating 510-11, 670 n.
27; Lied (Pozner) 379-80; poetics
413, 423-4, 489-90, 496, 508; Power
(Bendt) 279-82; Spanish Earth
(Hemingway) 211-13; voice-of-god
211-13, 240, 320, 342; see also direct
address
commissioned film 29, 36, 103-5, 107,
109-10,289-90,294,373,386-7,
396-7, 442, 445,492, 494; creative
and ideological limitations 139,
164, 258, 268, 366, 368; by Philips
128-32, 137; by trade unions
103, 116; by Shell 294-5; see also
sponsorship, government
committed documentary 37, 42, 48,
141, 398,431, 519, 524,565,617,
693 n. 27; ephemerality 382;
Waugh's writing on 48, 382, 384,
565,568
communism: and anti-colonialism 384;
in Chile 467, 478; in China 583,
600, 614, 618, 621, 643; in interwar
artistic circles 41, 54, 115, 146, 191-
92; in postwar Eastern Europe 352,
370, 372, 375-6, 391, 393, 432; see
also Marxism
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Communist International 111, 197, 217,
467, 664 n. 22; Cominform (1947-
1956) 369, 398
Communist Party of Belgium (KPB-
PCB) 174,190-2
Communist Party of China (CPC) 222-4,
247-50, 569, 571, 603, 615, 630, 639,
669 n. 21, 690n. 4
Communist Party of Great Britain 364
Communist Party of Holland (CPH)
112, 139, 176, 338, 355; Ivens's
membership in 111, 662 n. 4
Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI)
336
Communist Party of Spain (PCE) 216-17
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(CPSU) 193; 20th Congress (1956)
359, 388; see also Stalin, Josef;
Thaw; USSR
Communist Party USA (CPUSA) 197,
216-17, 219, 258-9, 376, 287, 330,
398
compilation mode, in documentary
film 132, 160, 164-5, 196, 201-
2, 274, 307, 314-15, 326, 481-2,
520, 567, 573, 658 n. 4, 681 n.
24; definition 114; 'illustrated
scenario' method 300, 305, 324-5,
328; in 400 Million 236-7; in ...A
Valparaiso 474-5; in Borinage 189;
in Ciel 506-7; in Front 298, 300, 303,
305-6, 309; in Ivens's DEFA films
351, 356, 365, 374-5, 377-9, 391;
in Know Your Enemy:Japan 324-6,
328-30; in Rotterdam Europoort
497-8; in Yukong 585-6; limitations
328-30; using the enemy's footage
in war documentary 328-30; see also
archive; newsreel
congress film 29, 106, 353, 364-6, 368-9,
373-4, 376, 382-3, 679 n. 9, 680 n.
18; see also demonstration film;
newsreel mode
Contemporary Historians, Inc. 202,
219, 704
Cooper, Sarah 39
Copland, Aaron 243
Coquille et le clergyman, La (The Seashell
and the Clergyman, 1928) 660 n. 15
Corrigan, Timothy 411, 683 n. 6
Corvette (warship) 258, 310-12, 314-17,
319, 322, 676 n. 50, 705
Corvette K-225 (1943) 676 n. 50
cosmopolitanism 536; of the avant-
garde 62, 82, 84, 88, 661 n. 21
Costa, Jose Manuel 20, 40, 541
Counterplan, see Vstrechnyy
Coward, Noel 354
Cranes Are Flying, see Letyat zhuravli
Cravenne, Marcel 300, 705
Crawford, Joan 213
Crawley, F.B. 312
Creosoot (Creosote, 1931) 29, 105, 118,
127, 138, 142-5, 703
Crisis (1939) 224, 253
Crosby, Bing 219
Crosby, Floyd 266-7, 284, 290, 294-5,
672 n. 10, 11, 704-5
Crown Film Unit (UK) 334
Cry of the World (1932) 199
Cuban Revolution 443,450-62,466, 686
n. 33; and local film industry 456-7,
465; Bay of Pigs Invasion 453-4, 458;
film representations of 453, 458,
462; US embargo 462; volunteer
militia 451-2, 458-60, 462-4
Cukor, George 292
Cultural Revolution (China) 28, 35, 45,
427, 565, 567-80, 582-4, 586-7, 588-
9, 593-8, 601-4, 606, 609, 611-15,
617-22, 627, 629-30, 636, 639, 651,
669 n. 20
1 747
INDEX
Curtiz, Michael 298, 323
Czechoslovakia: postwar history of 346,
355-8, 360, 362; Soviet invasion of
(1968) 41, 396, 560
Czlowiek z marmuru (Man ofMarble,
1977) 365
D
Dallek, Robert 246, 297, 302, 674 n. 37
Daney, Serge 25, 653-4
Dao Le Binh 529, 537, 541, 709
Darwell, Jane 304
Dauman, Anatole 466
Davidson, Joy 297, 306
748 I dawn-to-dusk (documentary format) 92,
261, 269-70, 413, 474; see also Seine
a rencontrdParis, La
Day in SovietRussia, A, see Den novogo
mira
Days of Glory (1944) 307
Ddewitz, Cordula 664 n. 29
DDR, see German Democratic Republic
De Antonio, Emile 22, 39, 460, 482, 507,
513, 566-7, 640-8, 658 n. 4, 683 n. 5
De Bleeckere, Sylvain 32, 41
De Boeck, Henri 192
De Graaf, Charles 115-17
De Haas, Jo 116
De Haas, Max 117
De Rochemont, Louis 199
De Rochemont, Richard 262
De Santis, Giuseppe 431
De Sica, Andrea 696
De Sica, Vittorio 354, 431
De Tribune (Netherlands) 112-13, 137
De Vaal, Jan 11, 40, 492, 616, 661 n. 17,
662 n. 4
De Vaal, Tineke 694
De Visser, Louis 111
declamatory rhetoric, see 'poster'
rhetoric
DEFA, see Deutsche Film-Aktien-
gesellschaft
Delluc, Louis 81
Delmar, Rosalind 40, 44, 345, 677 n. 56
Demain a Nanguila (Nanguila Tomorrow,
1960) 29,411,413,427,440-1,443-
50,478,492,653,685 nn. 24, 26,
28,707
demonstration film 29, 185-6, 188, 191,
201, 344, 369, 377, 380, 384-5, 453-
4, 520, 524, 559, 580, 679 n. 9; see
also congress film
Demy, Jacques 519-20
Den novogo mira (A Day in SovietRussia,
1941) 309
Deng Xiaoping 613-14, 616-17, 627,
630-1, 635, 637-8, 648
denunciation, in documentary film
126, 136, 166-7, 197, 246, 263, 287,
366, 371, 378, 454, 544, 566
Department of Agriculture (USA) 260,
283, 673 n. 27
Derks, Ally 27
Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline 75,
66on
Deslaw, Eugene 74, 76
Destanque, Robert 44, 48, 51, 53, 150,
176, 351, 355-6, 368, 373-4, 382,
385, 395, 398, 431-4, 454, 471, 479-
81, 483, 485, 487, 490, 499, 520,
569, 583, 592, 614, 616, 621, 623,
629-31, 660 n. 16, 665 n. 35, 677 n.
3, 680 n. 18, 692 n. 15, 699, 708-9
Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft
(DEFA) 353, 368, 371-5, 377, 383,
386-96, 404, 625, 655-6, 657 n. 1,
679 n. 14, 696, 706
Deux ou trois choses queje sais d'elle
(Two or Three Things IKnow About
Her, 1966) 409, 421, 518
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Devarrieux, Claire 43-4, 222, 615, 654,
655
Dezertir (The Deserter, 1933) 147
Di Vittorio, Guiseppe 373
Diaz, Josd 216
didacticism 32, 48, 140, 146, 159, 167,
172, 176, 262, 271, 273, 276, 289-90,
306, 312, 356, 360, 382, 402, 408,
437, 448, 524, 531, 541, 545-6, 549,
551, 556, 672 n. 18
Dien Bien Phu, battle of (1954) 375
Dies, Martin 291
Dieterle, William 200
Dimitrov, Georgi 193
direct address 146, 212, 281, 320, 344,
506, 508, 541, 662 n. 7; combined
with indirect address 167, 187, 418;
definition 126; function in socialist
realism 187; ideological risks
190; in Komsomol 160-1, 172; in
Zuiderzee 164; see also commentary,
didacticism
direct cinema 31, 33, 318, 346, 354,
374, 403, 492, 482, 494, 565, 576-7,
583-4, 596, 612-13, 650, 658, 662
n. 11; definitions 418, 420, 681 n.
2; in postcolonial context 461-2,
605-6, 610, 669 n. 20; interactivity
346, 411, 418, 434-5, 438, 543, 605,
613, 681 n. 2; interview, collective
602-3, 605-6; interview, on-the-
street 539-40, 598-600; Ivens as
precursor 70, 81, 187, 207; Ivens's
first experiments with 411-12,
416-7, 423, 429, 435, 470, 557;
Ivens's reservations about 417,
419-20, 442, 461-2, 505, 539, 544,
684 n. 12; live speech 551-2, 556,
602, 613, 691 n. 11; 'lived cinema'
(cindma vdcu) 543-4, 608; mobile
camera 447, 460, 537-8, 558, 576;
naturalism 187, 206, 390, 493, 539,
543; observational method 415,
417-18, 423, 426, 453, 461, 470,
518, 584, 607, 636; political role
462, 467-8, 553, 593, 599-60, 602;
post-1960s orthodoxy 206, 427, 464,
493, 507, 518; see also interview;
'life-caught-unawares'
Disque 957 (1928) 82
distribution, of Ivens's films 34, 37,
57, 88, 128, 219, 408-9, 433, 518,
527; 16 mm educational market
31, 322-3, 333, 345, 348, 367;
barriers to commercial distribution
190-2, 200, 213-14, 224, 253-4,
287-8; DEFA films removed from
distribution 357, 381, 392, 398,
403; in Canada 322-3; mainstream
theatrical 283-4, 322, 467;
marginal theaters 214, 253-4; non-
theatrical 322, 390, 550, 578; war
documentaries 307, 310
Dneprostroy 158
docudrama 355, 395; see also
dramatisation, re-enactment
documentaire organise 416, 419, 447,
488; see also mise-en-scene mode
Doisneau, Robert 426
Dolci, Mario 433, 707
'don't look at the camera' rule, see
'naturalness', visual code of
Don't Look Back (1967) 487
Donbass 129, 147, 192, 233
Dong Pham Van 517
Dos Passos, John 202-3, 221
Douglas, Melvyn 202
Dovzhenko, Alexander 59, 85, 101, 152,
154-5, 159, 660 n. 17,
dramatisation, in documentary 151,
153, 158, 187, 251, 260, 263, 265,
270, 289, 303, 402, 410, 416, 475,
1 749
INDEX
493, 495, 532, 539, 541, 672 n. 18;
1930s understanding of 206; in
Histoire 629, 633-4, 639-40; inItalia
434-5, 439; in La Seine 419-20; in
Mistral 488; in Nieuwe Gronden 164,
168; in post-dubbing 205, 241-2,
285, 471; in the original script of
Spanish Earth 203; see also mise-en-
scene mode; personalisation
Drdville, Jean 129, 142-4, 703
Drew, Robert 437, 453, 682 n.
Drifters (1929) 95, 164, 171, 199, 657 n.
3, 661 n. 19
Drobachenko, Sergei 163
750 I Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) 679n.
15
Du und mancherKamerad (You and Many
a Comrade, 1956) 378
Du Yuming, General 225
dubbing 208, 236, 242, 245, 320, 342,
345, 471, 613
Dubreuilh, Simone 425
DucHoa 512
Duckworth, Martin 599
Dudow, Slatan 146, 189, 410
Duhamel, Antoine 484
Dulac, Germaine 51, 62-3, 67-8, 73-4,
81-2, 660 n. 15
Dumaitre, Andr 413, 707
Dumaitre, Claude 483, 708
Duncan, Catherine 9, 335, 338-41, 345,
353, 355-7, 360, 362, 379, 648, 650,
705
Dunham, Harry 218, 223, 228, 248, 668
n. 14, 669 n. 18, 23
Dupont, E.A. (Ewald Andrd) 58-9, 693
n. 27
Duras, Marguerite 408
Dusk to Dawn (1922) 261
Dyer, Richard 188, 278, 673 n. 23
Dylan, Bob 487
E
Early Spring, see Before Spring
Earth, see Zemlya
Eastman Kodak 164, 338, 441
Eaton, Mick 39
EcceHomo (1939) 260, 262-3
editing 93, 101, 134-5, 140, 162, 166,
174, 192, 218, 221, 235, 240, 251,
283, 294, 340, 361, 379, 382, 422,
438-9, 443-4, 447, 457, 460, 465-6,
491, 507, 537, 542-3, 577, 582, 611,
632, 634; action 124-5; collective
548-9, 553; development of Ivens's
skills in 61-2, 68, 80-1, 111, 118; in
compilation film 299-300, 326-9,
662 n. 5; modernist 69, 80, 91, 135,
144, 210, 515; montage-assault
513, 515, 517; narrative 60, 71, 73,
82, 95-6, 109, 127, 200, 210-11,
274, 300, 361, 423, 537, 609; shot/
countershot 73, 109, 178, 180,
205, 247, 299, 508, 512, 535; shot/
subjective shot 93-4, 109; Soviet-
style 59, 68-70, 91, 127, 130, 142,
144, 210; within-the-shot 69-70
Education par limage (Belgium) 175
educational film 239, 244, 262, 289,
333-5, 348, 670 n. 35
Educational Film Institute, NYU 289
Eggeling, Viking 50, 62, 693 n. 27
Ehrenburg, Ilya 365, 367
Eighth Route Army 220, 223-7, 248, 251,
580
Eisenhower, Dwight D. 391, 398
Eisenstein, Sergei 38, 58, 62-3, 68, 74,
96, 115-16, 120-1, 125, 152, 154,
192, 296, 410, 437, 643, 657 n. 3,
662 n. 7, 664 n. 24, 667 n. 51, 679 n.
15, 681 n. 24, 693 n. 27
Eisler, Hanns 148-9, 168-70, 243-4,
282-3, 295, 305, 348, 353, 391,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
661 n. 22, 670 nn. 28, 29, 30, 33, 36,
674 n. 32, 703
Ekk, Nikolai 147
Elbaum, Max 571
electrification 129, 179, 260-7, 269, 271,
274, 276, 278, 281, 284-7, 361, 469,
704
Elephant Boy (1937) 311
Eleventh Year, The, see Odinnadtsatyy
Eliot, T. S. 71
Ellis, Jack C. 38, 658 n. 7
Elton, Arthur 233, 291
Emmer, Luciano 361
Empire Marketing Board 110
ENI, see Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi
Ensink, Ella 375, 378, 706
Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI) 432-
41
Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa
(Enthusiasm: The Donbass
Symphony, 1931) 129, 136, 147,
233, 245
environment, in documentary film, see
nature, mastery of
epic 29, 33, 35, 59, 63-4, 105, 107, 338,
345, 489, 629, 633, 635; definition
119-20, 662 n. 7; in First Years 346,
353, 356-8; in Komsomol 153, 203;
in Yukong 578-9, 581, 607, 617, 650,
654; in Zuidezee 120-1, 123-4, 163,
165-6, 355, 479, 486, 514, 662 n. 12;
see also nature, mastery of
Epstein, Jean 63, 81-3, 659 n. 2
Erasmus of Rotterdam 574, 688 n. 58
Ermler, Fridrikh 155
eroticism 85, 421, 488, 647
Espoir, L' (Days ofHope, 1945) 217, 671
n.43
essay film 28-9, 259, 356, 376, 390, 401-
2, 421, 436, 456, 460, 462, 482, 487,
492, 497, 499; canon 408-10, 633;
definition 407-8; Histoire de vent as
633-4, 640-2; Ivens's 'lyrical essay'
cycle 94, 243, 401-4, 406-9, 413-14,
426-7, 466, 478-80, 508, 515-16,
670 n. 37; literariness 408, 423-4,
434; social and political analysis
in 473-5, 490, 496, 505-6, 524, 539;
technology 410-11; travel-essay 429-
30; see also city film; lyricism
Etudes des mouvements a Paris
(Movement Studies in Paris, 1927)
55, 66, 373, 702
Euvrard, Michel 648, 650
Evans, Emily Jones 664 n. 29
Evans, Gary 311, 319
Evans, Walker 198, 344, 672 n. 6
event film, see congress film;
demonstration film
Every Day Except Christmas (1957) 416,
684 n. 14
everyday life, representation in
documentary 21-2, 121, 184, 216,
269, 271, 276, 315, 359-60, 397, 402,
415, 419, 431, 446, 448, 470, 488-89,
512, 528, 533, 573-4, 576, 581-2,
584, 587, 591, 593, 602, 618, 642,
647, 655
exoticism 162, 182, 215, 305, 456, 469,
472, 474, 476-7, 492, 535-6, 605,
640, 642, 669; in representation
of China 231, 238, 245, 247, 573,
585-6, 596-7; in representation
of foreign revolutionary
movements 39, 429-30, 549-50,
573; see also 'otherness'; solidarity
documentary; travelogue
expository mode 32, 71, 126, 156, 161,
164, 167, 180, 239, 251, 269, 271,
273, 281, 305, 315, 320, 378, 408,
434, 448; see also didacticism;
direct address
1 751
INDEX
F
Fadeyev, Aleksander 365
Farfrom Vietnam, see Loin du Vietnam
Farm Security Administration (FSA)
198, 263
Farm Services Administration (USA)
261
farming, see agriculture
Farocki, Harun 408
fascism, see anti-fascist movement;
Triumph des Willens
Fast, Howard 367
Federal Arts Project 198
Federal Theatre Project (USA) 268
752 I Federazione italiana dei circuli del
cinema 431
Feld, Steven 39
Fellini, Federico 39, 408
Fels, Florent 63, 70, 75-6, 98
feminism 56, 361, 385, 387-8, 390, 421,
446, 540, 559-60, 565, 580, 589-93,
672 n. 16, 693 n. 23; see also women
Ferguson, Norman 292
Ferguson, Otis 171, 665 n. 34
Fernhout (Ferno), Johnny 46, 56, 81, 89,
91, 104, 127-8, 142, 174, 196, 203,
205, 209, 220-1, 227, 262, 289, 295,
310, 331, 334, 338, 506, 590, 671 n.
4, 702-4, 714, 718
Ferrari, Luc 483-4, 708
Fete espagnol, La (Spanish Fiesta, 1919)
82
Feyder,Jacques 62
fiction film 95-6, 108-9, 154, 196, 205-6,
236, 327-8, 369, 389-90, 433, 438,
440, 443, 641, 690 n. 1; fiction/
nonfiction divide 354-5, 360, 363;
Ivens's experiments with 79, 318,
636, 387, 393-5, 482, 493, 631-4, 636
fictionalisation, in documentary film
203-4, 206, 225-6, 265, 271, 290,
293, 315, 325, 327-8, 390, 397, 46,
628, 664 n. 29, 688 n. 3; see also
personalisation
Field, Allan 320, 323, 705
Field, William Osgood 671 n. 2
Fifth Regiment (Spain) 207, 668 n. 7
FightforLife, The (1940) 182, 209, 244,
260, 263, 267, 274, 279, 283, 672 n.
18, 673 n. 20
film festivals: awards named after Ivens
26-7; Cannes 48, 354, 424, 427,
475, 481, 528, 578, 588, 684 n. 17,
687 n. 46; Edinburgh International
Festival of Documentary 345;
Festival dei Popoli (Florence)
490-1, 628; Festival du nouveau
cindma (Montreal) 632-3; Festival
of Free Cinema (Paris) 517; Ivens's
retrospectives 26, 490, 499, 503,
528, 653, 655, 685 n. 24; Karlovy
Vary 380; Leipzig 27, 383, 404,
425, 450, 476, 480, 483, 494,
503-4, 560, 599, 699; Locarno
678 n. 7; Mannheim 38, 217, 392,
503-4, 657 n. 3; Montevideo 392;
Montreal 518, 527, 578; Moscow
450; New York 523-4, 527, 632, 653;
Oberhausen Short Film Festival
424,476; of documentary film 34,
40, 43, 46; Venice 432, 478, 480,
487, 489-90, 502, 504, 578, 625, 632,
688 n. 53, 689 n. 7
Film Sketchbook, see Kinoschetsboek
Filmfabriek Hollandia 659 n. 5
Filmliga (journal) 79-80, 82, 85, 88-9,
95, 100-1, 141-3, 146, 151, 660 nn.
14, 15
Filmliga 57-63, 73, 87-9, 104-6, 173, 175,
191, 377, 738, 658 n. 7, 659 n. 5;
artistic orientation 58-61, 71, 115-
16; founding 57-8
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
filmmaker, role in society 31, 105,
127-8, 139-40, 160, 152, 173-6, 397,
453-4, 548-9; in war effort 296, 307-
8, 323; see also commission film;
committed documentary; solidarity
film
Finis Terrae (1929) 82-4
First Charge of the Machete, The, see
Primera carga al machete, La
First Five-Year Plan (USSR) 36, 149-50,
152, 157, 160, 163, 172; artistic
rhetoric around 150, 665 n. 32
First Years, The, see PierwszeLata
Fischinger, Oskar 129-30
Fiszer, Ewa 364, 371, 396, 405, 411, 421,
435, 439, 499, 706
Flaherty, Robert 25-6, 33-4, 37, 46, 91,
95, 105, 120, 127-8, 132, 154, 164,
199, 203, 205, 212, 216, 233, 238,
260, 263, 266, 278, 283, 311, 324,
343, 355, 362, 417, 437, 480, 503,
508, 567, 575, 657 nn. 3, 4, 659 n. 2,
672 n. 16, 673 n. 27, 677 n. 61, 682
n., 693 n.27
FlamingArrow, see Wigwam, De
flnerie (strolling) 496; see also city film
Flight of theDragon (1965) 669 n. 22
Flying Dutchman: as Ivens's moniker
25-6, 33-4, 396, 401, 443, 479, 625;
legend of 55, 492-4, 659 n. 3
folk themes 28, 51, 197, 360, 393, 662 n.
8; and the avant-garde milieu 82-3,
97; American 280-1; Dutch 71, 81-4,
662 n. 8; in film music 148, 211,
243, 282-3, 289, 305, 423, 452
Fonda,Jane 567
Fonteyne,Jean 174
For the Mistral, see Pour le Mistral
Ford, John 120, 216, 219, 304, 323, 331,
643, 679 n. 15
Foreman, Carl 324-6, 674, 705
Forgotten Village, The (1941) 293
formalism, in documentary aesthetic
54, 70, 63, 659 n. 2; see also avant-
garde; modernist aesthetic
Forman, Milos 482
Forsythe, Richard 657 n. 3
Fortuin, J.C.A. 485, 490
Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941) 311
Foster, Ralph 340
Fox, Beryl 487
Fox, Jennifer 682 n.
Fraga, Jorge 46, 452, 457, 463, 707
Franco, Francisco 195, 202, 217-18
Franju, Georges 403, 408, 658 n. 4
Frank, Robert 448
Franken, Mannus 55-6,79-82, 84-5, 88-
9, 660 nn. 13, 14, 702
Franklin, Sydney 219
Fraser, Don 335
French Communist Party (PCF) 362,
395-6, 405, 409, 412, 572, 681 n. 1,
686 n. 38, 689 n. 7
Frente de Acci6n Popular (FRAP) 466,
478,708
Freundschaft siegt (Friendship Triumphs,
1952) 29, 364, 369-71, 373-4, 388,
432, 671 n. 41, 680 n. 18, 706
Friendship Triumphs, see Freundschaft
siegt
Frobisher, Martin 312
Froelich, Carl 200
Front de libration national (Algeria)
540
Frontier Films 46, 198, 202, 209, 216,
218, 221, 237, 248, 253, 261, 286,
289, 291, 322, 335, 343, 347, 410,
671 n. 2
Frosali, Sergio 419
Fuentiduena de Tajo 204-7, 209-10, 212,
215, 273, 278, 507
Furhammar, Leif 217
1 753
INDEX
Fury (1936) 200
Futurism 65, 74, 76, 82
G
Gai Savoir, Le (Joy ofLearning, 1969) 549
Gaines, Jane 642-3
Gance, Abel 61, 74, 120
Gang of Four 568-70, 574, 577, 598, 601,
613-16, 691 n. 9
Gao Shulan 589-592, 607, 609-10, 616
Garance Film 412-13, 452, 481, 683 n.
7, 707
Garbo, Greta 221, 332
Garcia Espinosa, Julio 451, 462
754 I Garden, The (2008) 196
Garel, Sylvain 633
Garrison Films 214, 220, 224
Gass, Karl 401, 426
Gatti, Armand 462, 481, 708
Gauthier, Guy 38, 476, 620, 681 n. 2
Gebroken di ken (Broken Dikes, 1945)
672 n. 4
General Line, The, see Staroye i novoye
General Motors 288, 346, 674
George, G.L. 253
Gerasimov, Sergei 387, 706
German Democratic Republic (DDR):
Ivens's work and film publics in
351, 373-5, 380-1, 396, 560
Getino, Octavio 511, 599
Gilbert, Craig 577
Gitlin, Todd 570
Glas (Glass, 1958) 132
Glawogger, Michael 37
Glimpses of China (1974) 573
globalisation 28, 35, 195, 429-30, 465,
565, 580, 616, 622; 'global South'
28, 383, 386, 427, 436, 518
Godard, Jean-Luc, 22, 408-9, 421, 430,
474, 482, 484, 516, 519-21, 523-4,
526, 541, 545, 549, 553,556, 558-9,
567, 571, 578, 631, 640-8, 689 n. 3,
692 n. 13, 708
Gomez, Manuel Octavio 452
Gomez, Sara 453
Good Earth, The (1937) 219
Goretta, Claude 416
Gorin, Jean-Pierre 408
Gorky, Maxim 309
Gorod, kotoryy ostanovil Gitlera:
Geroicheskiy Stalingrad (The City
That Stopped Hitler: The Heroic
Stalingrad, 1943) 307
Goya, Francisco 173, 241, 295, 623, 627,
653, 686 n. 38, 693 n. 22
Gramatges, Harold 452, 707
Granton Trawler (1934) 164
Grapes of Wrath, The (1940) 216, 653
Great Depression 28, 76, 139, 166-9,
186, 188-9, 198, 215, 276, 289
Great Leap Forward (China) 387,426-8,
576, 580, 582
Grelier, Robert 9, 40-1, 44, 63, 76, 84,
87, 107, 115, 134, 137, 145, 149,
176, 185, 221, 368, 371, 379, 405,
425, 442, 449, 453, 508, 659 n. 2,
660 n. 7, 662 n. 10, 663 n. 20, 669 n.
23, 68o n. 18
Grenier, Cynthia 25, 88, 144, 405-7, 411,
425
Grew, Joseph 327
Greyson, John 37
Grierson, John 26, 46, 57, 60, 95, 110,
124, 138-9, 164, 171, 182, 199, 206,
208, 212, 309-11, 318-19, 322, 324,
333, 354-5, 384, 566-7, 596, 657 nn.
3, 4, 659 n. 2, 661 n. 19, 664 n. 28,
666 n. 43, 674 n. 32, 675 n. 45, 681
n. 27, 699, 705
Griffith, Richard 37, 52, 59, 120, 304,
328, 345-6, 662 n. 9, 675 n. 39, 693
n.27
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Gross, Babette 146, 173, 193
Gross, Natan 678 n. 4
Groulx, Gilles 416
Groupe Dynadia 548
Groupe Dziga-Vertov 548, 550, 556
Groupe Medvedkine 548
Gruel, Henri 424
Guadalajara, the battle of (1937) 207
Guerra, Ruy 519-20
Guerrant, Edward O. 292, 668 n. 11
Guerre estfinie, La (The Warls Over,
1966) 685n.28
Guevara, Alfredo 451
Guevara, Ernesto 'Che' 457, 519
Guillen, Nicolas 424, 707
Gunning, Tom 40, 663 n. 18
Guo Moruo 229, 242, 245, 250
Guomindang 218, 220, 229-30, 240,
247-51, 309, 580, 669 nn. 20, 21,
671 n. 40; ceremonials 236, 242;
interference in shooting of 400
Millions 196, 221, 223, 228, 231-2,
235-6, 266, 576, 668 n. 13
Gutierrez Alea, Tomds 451-3, 457-8,
462, 567
Guyonnet, Rend 481, 708
Guzman, Patricio 46, 683 n. 5, 687 n.
50, 696, 708
H
Haanstra, Bert 132
Hagener, Malte 39, 54
Haircut (1963) 647
Halbertsma, N. A. 137
Hammerstein, Oscar 330
Hanoi, martes 13 (1968) 542, 544, 686
n. 32
harbourscape 56, 75, 83-4, 144, 339-41,
433, 468, 473, 497-8, 583, 598
Harlan County, USA (1977) 343, 599, 677
n. 61
Harriman, W. Averell 297, 301-3
Haudiquet, Philippe 25, 487, 491, 499
Hauska, Hans 192, 704
Hawes, Stanley 340
Hayden, Tom 567
Hays, Lora 284, 704
He Zhongxin 581, 707
healthcare 197, 263, 293, 455, 459, 469,
536, 585
Heart of an Indian, The (1912) 52
Heart of Spain (1937) 201, 210, 214-15,
218
Heartfield, John 114, 673 n. 30
Hegedus, Chris 37
Heimann, Thomas 388
Hellman, Lillian 202-3, 211, 219, 224,
242, 298, 674 n. 35
Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012) 32, 217,
668 n. 7, 697
Hemingway, Ernest 32, 42, 207, 211-18,
221, 240-1, 259, 281, 311, 379, 424,
530, 668 n. 7, 697, 704
Hendrix, Jimi 460
Hennebelle, Guy 595, 528, 545-6, 549,
553, 556-7, 561, 599-602, 617
Hennebert, Paul 174, 190
heroics 109, 126, 132, 165, 263, 355,
357, 359-61, 398, 443, 473, 497,
505, 517, 521, 543, 545, 564, 581,
593, 637; in Komsomol 149, 152,
154-6, 161-2, 181; in Zuiderzee 119-
23, 162, 181; see also epic; myth;
personalisation; socialist realism
HerrPuntila und sein KnechtMatti (Herr
Puntila and His Servant Matti, 1960)
681 n. 27
Herrera, Jorge 452, 707
Herzog, Werner 27, 408
Het laaste scot (The Last Shot, 1945) 672
n. 4
Heyer, John 338, 340
1 755
INDEX
Hicks, Jeremy 414,416
High over the Borders (1941) 671 n. 4
High Plain, Bolivia, The (1943) 294
Hill, Eugene, see Leyda, Jay
Hin, Jan 104, 117, 127, 702-3
Hindus, Maurice 355
Hirohito (Emperor Showa) 237, 325-9
Histoire de vent, Une (A Tale of the Wind,
1988) 28-32, 34-5, 79, 189, 231, 238,
248, 408, 410, 424, 435, 480, 482,
490, 565, 576, 578, 580, 588, 597,
599, 623-51, 658 n. 4, 662, 671 n. 37,
684 n. 22, 687 n. 52, 694 nn. 27, 28,
696, 710
756 I Histoire du soldat inconnu (History of the
Unknown Soldier, 1932) 189, 662
n. 5
History and Romance of Transportation,
The (1939) 261
History Today, Inc. 219, 225, 253
Hitchcock, Alfred 38-9, 643, 679 n. 15,
689 n. 7
Hitchens, Gordon 44, 327, 329, 699
Hitler, Adolf 46, 169, 200, 224, 259, 298,
302, 307, 327, 333, 666 n. 45
Ho Chi Minh 16, 30, 504-5, 510-11, 529,
561, 570, 709
Hoernle, Edwin 184
Hogenkamp, Bert 20, 42, 111-13, 116,
139, 174, 176, 184, 187, 192, 659 n.
5, 661 n. 17, 662 nn. 5,6, 665 n. 35,
667 n. 52
Holbein, Hans the Younger 295
Holland-Indonesia Association 354
Hollywood 32, 139, 195-6, 199-200, 202,
205, 209, 213, 219-24, 236, 274, 300,
305, 310, 317-18, 330-2, 337, 557,
566, 600, 675 n. 37, 676 n. 50; leftist
community in 261-2, 291-2, 294-8,
307-8, 323-4, 330, 347, 399
Hollywood Anti-Nazi League 292
Hollywood blacklist 291-2, 307, 330,
333, 347-8, 412, 670 nn. 28, 30,
674 n. 32; see also Hollywood Ten;
House Un-American Activities
Committee
Hollywood Ten 323, 399, 674 n. 35
Hollywood Writers' Mobilisation 321,
323, 330, 347, 674
Homme et unefemme, Un (A Man and a
Woman, 1966) 519
Hopkins, Harry 297
Hopkins, Miriam 253, 671 n. 42, 674
n. 35
Hora de los hornos, La (Hour of the
Furnaces, 1968) 511, 518, 528, 553,
599
Hotel des invalides (1951) 403
Hour of the Furnaces, see Hora de los
hornos, La
House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) 291-2, 307, 347,
412, 670 nn. 28, 30, 674 n. 32, 679
n. 10
HousingProblems (1935) 182, 233, 291,
666 n. 43
How Green Was My Valley (1941) 323
How YukongMoved the Mountains,
see Comment Yukong dcplaga les
montagnes
Hubbard, Jim 37
Huisken, Joop 104, 127-8, 353, 375, 381,
389, 392, 703, 706
Hulsker, Jan 100, 155, 157-8, 160, 170
humanism 55, 59, 101, 415, 442, 469,
491, 516, 531; anti-humanism of
the avant-garde 75, 78, 99
Humanitd,L' (Paris) 136, 396, 423-4,
443, 506, 516, 681 n. 1
humour 93-4 137, 281, 287, 320, 406,
469, 475, 488, 584, 589, 623, 634-5,
639
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Hungarian Uprising of 1956: 352, 392,
395-396, 398, 405, 685n
Hurdes, Las (Land Without Bread, 1932)
126-7, 175, 189, 657 n. 3, 663 n. 14,
693 n. 27
Hurwitz, Leo 198, 200-2, 261, 287, 330-
1, 347, 384, 667 n. 3, 672 n. 5, 675 n.
43, 677 n. 58
Hus, Jan 358, 360
Huston, John 126, 212, 328, 509, 705
Huston, Walter 298, 301, 705
Huxley, Aldous 173, 623, 627, 651, 653,
693 n. 22
I-film, see Ik-film
Ibirruri, Dolores, see Pasionaria, La
ICAIC, see Instituto cubano del arte y la
industria cinematogrdficos
Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976)
430, 578, 648
Idylle a la plage, Une (Romance on the
Beach, 1931) 85
Ik-film (I-film, 1929) 66, 660 n. 7
Images d'Ostende (1929) 82, 91, 661 n. 18
imperialism 31, 124, 259, 262, 333, 384,
394, 430, 523, 528, 544, 574, 691 n.
8; Japanese 325; Soviet 363, 569;
US 371
improvisation 32, 196, 234, 271, 395, 408,
414,434,449,452,460-1, 469,495
In the Year of the Pig (1968) 512-13, 544
Inandiak, Elisabeth 632
Ince, Thomas 52
Indefantdme, L' (Phantom India, 1969)
577, 610
indirect address, see direct address
Indonesia Calling (1946) 20, 28-9, 32,
276, 333-48, 351, 355-6, 362, 366,
375, 406, 414, 580, 678 n. 7, 696,
705; distribution 344-6
Industrial Britain (1932) 123, 132
industrialisation 347, 356, 385, 433,
436, 570, 665 n. 32; see also nature,
mastery of
Instituto Cine Experimental (Chile) 466
Instituto cubano del arte y la industria
cinematogrficos (ICAIC) 451-2,
457-8, 462-4, 686 n. 32, 707
internal narration 226, 241, 279, 303,
314, 317, 320, 435, 448, 677 n. 60
International Brigades (Spain) 207, 214
International Red Aid (MOPR) 114, 174
intertitles 79, 126, 135, 164, 177, 186; in
Peuple 553, 555, 558
Introduction to the Enemy (1974) 567
Iron Horse, The (1924) 120
Isaksson, Folke 217
Isherwood, Christopher 223, 225, 668
n. 15
Italia non e un paese povero, L' (Italy Is
Not a Poor Country, 1960) 29, 284,
430-44, 470, 473,479-81, 490, 492-
3, 513-14, 539, 696, 707
Italian Communist Party (PCI) 431, 502
Italian economic miracle 436, 438, 442
Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible, 1944) 662
n. 7, 679 n. 15
Ivan the Terrible, see Ivan Grozny
Ivens, Joris: archives 20, 38, 42, 43, 44,
47, 51, 101, 492, 499, 528, 554, 640-
1, 658 n. 6; DVD box set (2008) 20,
26, 35, 40, 141, 192, 353, 499, 580,
616, 655, 659 n. 1, 661 n. 22, 686 n.
36, 690 nn. 9, 2, 693 n. 26; estate 26,
38, 353, 399, 441, 511, 643, 655-6,
657 n. 4; European Foundation
Joris Ivens 19-20, 26, 40, 42-3, 375,
399, 444, 449, 616, 653, 655, 657 n.
4, 667 n. 1, 679 nn. 12, 18, 686 n. 30;
scholarship on 33, 40-4, 384, 405,
665 n. 35
1 757
INDEX
Ivens, Kees (Joris's grandfather) 51
Ivens, Wilhelm (Joris's father) 51
Ivens, Willem (Joris's brother) 104
J
J. Walter Thompson (agency) 294
Jackson, Wilfred 292
Jacobs, Lewis 38, 287, 307, 344, 667 n. 3
Jacoby, Irving 310, 674 n. 33, 675 n. 43
Jacopetti, Gualtiero 404, 418, 523
Jacquemotte, Joseph 192
James, C. Rodney 323, 675 nn. 47, 48
James, Henry 625-6, 635
Jansen, Huub 116, 197, 431
758 I Jardins du Luxembourg, Les (1927) 79
Jarman, Derek 22, 640-8
Jaubert, Maurice 280
jazz 136, 244
Jennings, Humphrey 46, 212, 243-4,
270, 279, 410
Jetee, La (1962) 466,476
Jewish People Live, The (Mir,
lebngeblibene, 1947) 678 n. 4
Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) 219, 222,
234, 242, 247, 250, 328, 669 nn. 20,
21, 671 nn. 38, 39
Jiang, Madame, see Soong Mei-ling
Jie Li 605-6, 618-20
JLG. Autoportrait de ddcembre (1995)
640-1
Joconde: Histoire d'une obsession, La
(1957) 424
Johnson, Hewlett 366
Johnson, Lyndon B. 522, 527
Joli Mai, Le (The Lovely Month ofMay,
1963) 411, 470, 472, 483, 494, 685
n. 28
Joliot-Curie, Jean Frddric 364
Jones, Dorothy 222, 668 n. 12
Jordaan, L.J. 19, 58, 63, 79, 110, 116,
191
Jordan, Gnter 42, 368, 370, 374-5,
377-9, 381-2, 392, 426, 656, 657 n. 1,
679 n. 14
Joshi, Vasudha 606
Joyce, James 71
Jutzi, Piel 146
K
K.S.E. -Komsomol ShefElektrifikatsii
(The Komsomol - Sponsor of
Electrification, 1932) 129
Kahana, Jonathan 40
Kalatozov, Mikhail 359, 453
Kameradschaft (Comradeship, 1931) 200
Karl Marx University (Leipzig) 560
Karmen, Boris 46
Karmen, Roman 297, 309, 462, 705
Katayev, Valentin 665 n. 32
Kaufman, Boris 70
Kaufman, Philip 32, 668 n. 7, 697
Kazan, Elia 237, 261
Keaton, Buster 485, 488
Keeper of the Flame (1942) 292
Keiller, Patrick 408
Kefta, Modibo 449
Kellner, Douglas 39
Kennedy, Ed 343
Kennedy, Scott Hamilton 196
Kheifits, Iosif 359
King, Allan 416-17
Kinoschetsboek (Film Sketchbook, 1927)
65,702
Kirsanoff, Dimitri 58, 62, 97
Kissinger, Henry 572
Klein, Gunter 426
Klein, Naomi 196
Klein, William 519-20, 523, 689 n. 5,
708
Kline, Herbert 201, 224, 253, 259, 261,
276, 293, 323
Kluge, Alexander 408
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Kluven vdrld, En (A Divided World, 1948)
346
Kneulman, Carel 494-5, 708
Knight, Eric 324
Know YourAlly (planned series, 1944)
323-4
Know YourEnemy:Japan (1945) 29, 303,
306, 323-333, 674 n. 32, 676 nn. 52,
55, 677 n. 56, 705
Koch, Howard E. 19, 330
Koenig, Wolf 487
Kolko, Gabriel 327, 331, 336
Koloschin, Anatoly 375
Kolthoff, Mark 104, 128, 702-3
Komsomol - Sponsor ofElectrification,
The, see K.S.E. -Komsomol Shef
Elektrifikatsii
Komsomol (youth organisation) 148-
50, 152-5, 158, 160-1
Komsomol, see Pesn o geroyakh
Kopalin, Ilya 298
Koppel, Ted 34
Kopple, Barbara 343, 599, 677 n. 61
Korean War 365, 367, 370-1, 683 n. 6
Kouwenaar, Gerrit 424, 495, 708
Kouyatd, Djibril 444
Kozintsev, Grigori 147
Kreimeier, Klaus 42
Kristeva, Julia 589, 691
Kroitor, Roman 487
Krull, Germaine 52, 54-6, 65, 71, 74-5,
82, 129, 182, 659 n. 4, 666 n. 46, 681
n. 1
Kubanskie kazaki (Cossacks of the Kuban,
1950) 368
Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wem gehirt die Welt?
(Kuhle Wampe, Or Who Owns the
World?, 1932) 146, 169, 189
kulaks 150, 664 n. 25
Kuleshov, Lev 61
Kuzbass 162
L
L'Herbier, Marcel 129
labour movement 31, 35, 88, 103, 107-
12, 121-2, 124, 127, 134, 166-8,
175-7, 183-6, 192, 200-1, 237, 343,
347, 357, 376-7, 379-80, 382-4,
389-90, 432-3, 465, 471, 522-3, 545,
548, 559-60, 584-7, 611-12; slogans
379-80; see also class struggle;
capitalism, critique of; labour,
manual; socialism; strikes; trade
unions
labour, manual 144, 154, 377, 419, 422,
489, 497, 570, 591, 650; assembly
line 130-2, 136-7, 559; bricklayers
106-9, 162, 166, 365, 369, 371;
construction workers 64, 88, 103,
105, 110, 117, 123-4, 126, 161-2,
285; glass-blowers 129, 131-6,
140-1, 144, 153; lumbering 143-4;
miners 152, 162, 173-9, 182, 184-7,
189-90, 192, 216, 290, 292-4, 323,
339, 379, 665 n. 35; shock brigades
149, 152, 159, 365, 664 n. 29
Lachize, Samuel 443
Lacouture, Jean 544
Lagny, Michele 402, 412-13, 421, 426
Land ofPromise (1946) 355
Land Without Bread, see Hurdes, Las
Land, The (1942) 216, 233, 260, 263,
266, 269, 283, 287, 346, 509, 672 n.
16, 673 n. 27
Landrd, Joop 492-5, 684 n. 19
landscape 270, 274, 290, 410, 559, 629,
641, 648, 650; in 400 Million 238-41;
in Branding 81-4, 86; in Creosoot
143-4; in Histoire 633, 637-8; in
Italia 434, 436-7, 442; in Ivens's
Cuban films 455-7, 459; in Mistral
406, 485-6, 491; in Zuiderzee 161-2
Lane, Jim 649
1 759
INDEX
Lang, Fritz 58-9, 74, 82, 200
Lange, Dorothea 198
Langlois, Henri 481, 707
Lao Patriotic Front (LPF) 545, 547
Leacock, Richard 34, 205, 437, 453, 487,
533
League of Nations 207, 215
Lean, David 354
Lebow, Elisa 649
Lefebvre, Jean-Pierre 474
Legg, Stuart 46, 310, 318, 410
Legotien, Hdlene 382
Lend-Lease 259, 273, 296-7, 302
Lenin, Vladimir 113, 158, 189-192, 199,
760 I 215, 233, 386, 560, 569, 591, 664
n. 26
Lennon,John 571
Lerner, Irving 202, 262, 289, 675 n. 43
Lettre de Sibrie (Letter from Siberia,
1957) 403, 430, 471, 474-5
Lettres de Chine, see Before Spring
Letyat zhuravli (Cranes Are Flying, 1957)
359, 389
Ldvesque, Robert 25
Ldvi-Strauss, Claude 41
Lewis, Avi 196
Lewis, Randolph 39
Leyda, Jay 19, 51, 100, 146-7, 171, 192-3,
222-3, 237, 261, 295-6, 300, 309,
323, 328, 374, 378-9, 566, 664 n. 24,
668 n. 12, 669 n. 20, 674 n. 30, 675
n. 40, 676 n. 51, 681 n. 24
Lhomme, Pierre 46, 483, 485-6, 708
Li Yifan 618
Li Zexiang 46, 464, 576, 581, 602, 611,
619,709
Lichtveld, Lou 129, 136, 661 n. 22, 703
Lied der Strdme, Das (Song of the Rivers,
1954) 28-30, 32, 153, 347, 351, 353,
364, 369, 373-4, 376-88, 390, 399,
412-13, 422, 429, 432, 435, 451,
479-82,486,490, 497, 503, 506, 633,
653, 679 n. 18, 706
Life (magazine) 199, 213, 221, 307
'life-caught-unawares' 127, 207-8, 414-
16, 423, 470, 488, 683 n. 11; see also
direct cinema; spontaneous mode
Lin Biao 582, 593, 691 n. 9
Linhard, Lubomir 355, 705
Linssen, Celine 57, 725
Litvak, Anatole 297, 300, 307, 328
Liu Shaoqi 582, 692 n. 18
Liu, K.C. (Guangjing) 219, 221, 224
Livingston, Jennie 37
Lizzani, Carlo 439
Locke, Edwin 261-3, 265, 704
Lodz Film School (Poland) 364-365,
368, 372, 383
Logette, Lucien 632, 709
Loin du Vietnam (Farfrom Vietnam, 1967)
30,430, 482, 503-6, 518-29, 544-6,
548, 578, 600, 648, 658 n. 4, 689 nn.
4, 5, 6, 7, 708-9; reviews 523-4
Lopate, Philip 633
Lorentz, Pare 46, 182, 199, 205-6, 209,
212-13, 215, 238, 242, 244, 258-63,
266-69, 274, 279-80, 282-3, 288,
306, 335, 666 n. 43, 672 nn. 5, 8, 10,
15, 18, 673 n. 20
Loridan-Ivens, Marceline 11, 21, 26,
35, 37-8, 42-3, 48, 79, 185, 353, 381,
405, 461, 479, 482, 494-5, 499, 504,
518-22, 524-5, 528-30, 532-4, 542-3,
545-9, 553, 556-8, 560-2, 565-7, 572-
5, 578-80, 582-5, 588, 590, 592-3,
598-606, 608-9, 611-16, 619-20, 623-
4, 627-8, 631-3, 638, 648, 650, 653-4,
683 n. 2, 685 n. 23, 686 n. 35, 689 n.
4, 691 n. 11, 692 nn. 14, 19, 693 n.
25, 699, 708-10; collaboration with
Ivens 540-1; reaction to Yukong
revelations 614-17
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Lost Horizon (1937) 251
Lu Songhe 594-5, 603, 609, 624, 693 n.
21, 709-10
Lumiere, Auguste and Louis 54
Lupton, Catherine 39
Luxemburg, Rosa 572
Lynch, David 39
lyricism 28, 32, 37, 41, 55, 59, 63, 84, 86,
121, 130, 205, 207, 212, 230, 238,
270, 280, 286, 299, 304, 315, 401-7,
424,426-7, 437, 439, 459, 466,469,
473, 475, 499, 507-8, 515-16, 536,
548, 558, 598, 629; in First Years
356-8; in Indonesia 340-1; in La
Seine 411, 413-15; in Lied 374, 376-
7; in machine film 74-5; in Mistral
479-80, 482, 489; in Regen 96-7, 101,
106, 108, 414; see also essay film
M
MacArthur, Douglas 337, 372
MacCann, Richard Dyer 263, 283, 308,
672 n. 17, 675 n. 42
Macciocchi, Maria Antonietta 568, 572,
586, 588, 599, 619
MacFarquhar, Roderick 569, 589
Machalz, Alfons 375, 386, 390-2, 409,
699, 706
machine film 71, 74-6, 78, 99, 121, 130-
1, 136-7, 141, 144, 162, 289, 294-5,
673 n. 28
MacKenzie, Scott 58
MacLaine, Shirley 568, 573
MacLeish, Archibald 202-3, 219, 224,
259, 308, 310, 320, 633, 675 n. 42
Mddchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform,
1931) 200
Maddin, Guy 493
Maddow, Ben 190, 192, 221, 240, 261,
289, 674 n. 35, 675 n. 43, 677 n. 58,
705
Made in the USA (1966) 518
Magnan, Henry 388-90, 706
Magnitogorsk 119, 141, 145, 148-9,
152-4, 160, 162, 187, 359, 531, 664
nn. 24, 25
Maisons de la misere, Les (The Houses of
Misery, 1937) 182, 280
Matresfous, Les (The MadMasters, 1955)
403,418
Malakhov kurgan (The Last Hill, 1944)
359
Malevich, Kasimir 60
Malle, Louis 577, 610, 683 n. 4, 685 n.
28, 687 n. 44
Malraux, Andre 217, 671 n. 43
Man and HisJob, A (1943) 318
Man ofAran (1934) 120, 128, 199, 211,
244, 677 n. 60
Man of Marble, see Czlowiek z marmuru
Man with a Movie Camera, see Chelovek s
kinoapparatom
Manet, Eduardo 457
Manvell, Roger 307, 675 n. 40
Marcabru, Pierre 472, 476
'March of the Volunteers' 249-50
March of Time, The (series, 1935-1951)
199-200, 212, 237, 262, 304, 306,
659 n. 2, 671 n. 39
March, Fredric 221, 241, 291, 704
Marche des machines, La (The March of
the Machines, 1927) 74, 76
Marco Polo Bridge Incident 218
Marcorelles, Louis 540, 543-4, 568, 601-
2, 610, 617, 682 n.
Marcuse, Herbert 566
Mardore, Michel 405, 421, 425
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 75
Marker, Chris 25, 34, 46, 375, 403, 408-
11, 422, 428, 430, 453, 462, 466,
470-6, 481-3, 487, 494-5, 508, 518-
21, 525-28, 538, 543, 545, 548, 553,
761
INDEX
762 I
559, 682 n., 683 n. 6, 684 n. 15, 685
n. 28,686 n. 38,687fn. 42,688nn.
2, 3, 689 n. 7, 708
Marsh, Jane 300, 306, 318
Marshall Plan 398
Marsman, Hendrik 55
Marsolais, Gilles 38, 81, 187, 477, 648,
650, 681 n. 2
Martin-Marquez, Susan 42
Martin, Marcel 477, 572
Marxism 38, 41, 54, 121, 132, 184, 190,
206, 215, 217, 376, 379, 382-3, 385,
409, 434, 442, 444, 466, 489, 493,
531, 543-4, 546, 554, 567, 569-72,
591, 602, 619, 642-3, 648, 670 n. 30,
688 n. 57
Marzani, Carl 347-8
Masculin Fdminin (1966) 518
masculinity 644-5, 649
Mask of Nippon, The (1942) 326, 676 n.
54
Massip, Jose 46,452,457,461, 707
Mat (The Mother, 1926) 57-8, 60-1, 68,
82, 377
Mattei, Enrico 432, 434, 440, 684 n. 20,
707
Maysles, Albert and David 37
McCarthy, Joseph 398
McLane, Betsy A. 38
McLaren, Norman 130, 372, 482, 675 n.
46, 688 n. 53
McNamara, Robert S. 517
McWilliams, Don 573
Meeting with President Ho Chi Minh, see
Rencontre avec le prdsident Ho Chi
Minh
Mein Kind (My Child, 1955) 28, 375, 385-
6, 390, 392, 409, 450, 706
Melodie der Welt (Melody of the World,
1929) 129
melodrama 51-2, 82, 84, 87, 119, 203,
292, 332, 354, 357, 360, 417, 530,
634, 642-3
Meltzer, Milton 277, 279, 288
Mdmoire des anges, La (The Memories of
Angels, 2008) 493
Memorandum (1967) 487
Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of
Underdevelopment, 1968) 452, 566
Memories of Underdevelopment, see
Memorias del subdesarrollo
Memphis Belle (1944) 297
Mdndgoz (Mengoz), Robert 375, 389,
413, 706
Mdnilmontant (1926) 58
Mersey, Arch 260
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 219, 304
Metropolis (1927) 74, 82
Meyer, Han 42, 172
Meyers, Sidney 171, 237, 261, 347, 384,
675 n.43
Mezhrabpom 145-7, 153, 173, 192-3,
198, 395, 663 n. 22, 667 n. 2, 703;
see also Workers International
Relief
Miaille, Louis 444, 707
Michaut, Pierre 142, 362, 405
Michelle, Marion 332, 335, 338-41, 345,
352-6, 360-1, 363, 368, 371, 391-2,
404, 487, 590, 679 n. 16, 695, 705
Milestone, Lewis 297-8, 331, 337, 674 n.
35, 675 n. 38, 679 n. 15, 705
militarism 203, 326-7, 377
Military Museum of the Chinese
People's Revolution 223
Million, Le (1931) 129
Millions of Us (1936) 200
Mills of the Gods: Vietnam, The (1965)
487
Mills, C. Wright 570
Miranda, Carmen 292
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
mise-en-scene mode 32, 37, 66, 70, 78,
80,107-8,127,134,196, 266, 298-9,
306, 311, 341, 376-7, 438, 447, 449,
459, 470, 495, 512, 557-8, 608, 639,
645, 647, 669 n. 20, 680 n. 21; in
400 Million 228, 234-6, 240, 247-8,
251; in Action Stations 314-6, 319;
in Borinage 180-1, 186; in Komsomol
146, 158, 161-2; in La Seine 414,
416-17, 419-20, 423; in Parallele
533-4, 536, 538; in Power 271-2,
274, 278, 281, 284; in Spanish Earth
205-9, 212, 221; in 1930s radical
filmmaking (Hurwitz) 200-1; mise-
en-presence (in Yukong) 607-10, 612;
see also documentaire organis
Misere au Borinage (Borinage, 1934) 29,
32, 35, 42, 60, 64, 104-5, 114, 119,
126-7, 139, 161, 163-5, 167, 169,
172-93, 197, 203, 237, 268, 275-7,
286, 330, 332, 339, 342, 343-4, 363,
375, 418, 438, 473, 580, 636, 653,
657 nn.3, 4, 665 n. 35, 666 nn. 39,
40, 695-7, 704
Mission to Moscow (1943) 298, 301, 307,
675 n. 41
Modern Inventions (1937) 673 n. 25
modernist aesthetic 28, 54-5, 59-60, 74,
80, 95, 97-8, 107, 120, 151, 162, 182,
210-11, 515-16, 556, 638; in Brug 67-
9, 71, 74, 106, 660 n. 9, 661 nn. 18,
21; in collage film 114; in Philips-
Radio 102, 135-6, 141-2; Ivens's
pragmatism in adoption of 64;
Soviet 144, 158; see also avant-garde
movement; machine film
Moi, un noir (I, a Negro, 1958) 448
Moll, J.C. 62
Mondo cane (1962) 404, 523, 689 n. 5
Monobloc 174-5
montage, see editing
Montand, Yves 387, 389-90, 405, 413,
424, 495, 683 n. 3, 685 n. 28, 706,
708
Montero, Germaine 472, 687 n. 43, 708
Moore, Douglas 282-3, 285, 321, 673 n.
24, 704
Moore, Michael 40, 683 n. 4
morale film 279, 300-1, 304, 306, 308-
11, 321-3, 330-1
Moravia, Alberto 424,434
Morawski, Stefan 664 nn. 26, 27
Morrison, Anne 520
Morrison, Norman 520
Mosfilm 368,430
Mother, The, see Mat
Motion Picture Guild 266
Moussinac, Ldon 63, 136-7, 141, 393
Moviola 298,457
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 391
Mr. Hoover andl (1989) 640-3
Mrs. Miniver (1942) 304
Muerte al invasor (Death to the Invader,
1961) 458
Mundell, Ian 38, 450, 525, 690 n. 13
Mtnzenberg, Willi 146
Murnau, F.W. (Friedrich Wilhelm) 82,
92, 266, 693 n. 27
Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) 106,
109, 567, 578, 657 n. 3, 662 nn. 3, 8,
690 n. 2
music, in documentary film 81, 129,
136, 169-71, 279, 342, 361, 391,
460, 471-2, 483-4, 514, 628, 641,
661 n. 22, 670 nn. 29, 30, 35, 676 n.
49; diegetic vs. non-diegetic 434,
447; electronic 442, 514; folk and
indigenous 148, 211, 243, 245,
282-3, 305, 342, 423, 452, 660 n. 14;
leitmotif method 243-4, 305; live
performance 417; objective vs. non-
objective 243-5; programmatic 244,
1 763
INDEX
764 1
282; vocal 168, 245, 249, 289, 321,
380, 391, 434, 472, 514, 639, 681 n.
26; see also sound
musical 368,388
Musser, Charles 40, 347, 377, 383-4,
422
Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glck (Mother
Krause'sjourney to Happiness, 1929)
146
My Child, see Mein Kind
My Winnipeg (2007) 493
Mystere Koumiko, Le (1967) 487
mythology 119, 152, 484; Chinese 629-
30, 634, 637-8, 650
N
Nanguila Tomorrow, see Demain a
Nanguila
Nanook of the North (1922) 154, 657 n. 3,
677 n. 61, 693 n. 27
Napoleon (1927) 61, 68, 120
narrativity, in documentary film 59-
60, 70-74, 85-7, 92-5, 108-9, 126,
133, 209-11, 225-8, 239, 266, 274,
290, 298-300, 314-15, 341-2, 369,
374, 418-20, 445, 447, 487-8, 507,
511-12, 534-5, 537-8, 550-3, 608-
10, 634-6, 660 n. 13, 661 n. 19; see
also dramatisation; mise-en-scene
mode
National Film Board of Australia 338,
340
National Film Board of Canada (NFB)
212, 309-12, 314, 318, 321-3, 326,
334-5, 340, 342, 346, 369, 372, 461,
482, 539, 573, 658 n. 6, 669 n. 22,
671 n. 4, 675 nn. 46, 47, 682 n., 684
n. 23, 687 n. 53, 691 n. 7, 699, 705
NationalHungerMarch (1931) 188
National Liberation Front (Vietnam,
NLF) 517, 519, 545
Native Land (1942) 198, 261, 286-7, 346
'naturalness', visual code of 84-5, 232-3,
235-6, 284, 317, 418-19, 541, 609-
10, 645; see also acting
nature, mastery of 40, 63, 65, 120-1,
124, 163, 376, 385, 442,585,637
Naumberg, Nancy 343
Nedjar, Claude 481, 486, 708
Neighbours (1952) 372
neorealism 82, 354, 389-90, 419, 431,
439, 462, 684 n. 21
Neruda, Pablo 19, 364, 404, 466, 474,
687 n. 47
Netherlands East Indies Film and Photo
Unit 337
New Deal 64, 197-9, 214-15, 258, 260,
263, 268-9, 287-8
New Earth, see Nieuwe Gronden
New Film Alliance 199-200; see also
Workers Film and Photo League
New Frontiers (1940) 198, 268, 289-90,
292, 312, 346, 531, 673 nn. 29, 30
New Left 28, 35-6, 217, 360, 382, 398,
491, 524, 526, 548-9, 552, 565-6,
568-70, 599, 601, 649
New Masses, The 245, 253, 259, 279, 282,
288, 292, 297
New Objectivity 182-3, 186, 666 n. 44
New Theater (Melbourne) 340
Newsreel (film collective) 599
newsreel (theatrical product) 111-14,
157-8, 191, 199-202, 206, 213, 218,
220, 225, 236-7, 239-40, 251-2, 254,
285, 296-8, 300, 304, 320, 330-1,
338, 341, 348, 449, 507, 510, 512-13,
520, 617, 663 n. 14, 668 nn. 8, 14,
686 n. 32
newsreel mode, in documentary film 32,
39, 111-14, 146, 167, 186, 189, 197,
199-203, 208-9, 232, 236-7, 242, 247,
271, 279, 319, 322, 328, 341-2, 365-7,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
369-70, 417, 507, 512, 527, 662 n. 5;
see also compilation mode
Neyenhoff, Otto 117
Nguyen Hong Nghi 530
Nguyen Quang Tuan 529, 709
Nibelungen, Die (1924) 58, 82
Nice Time (1957) 416
Nichols, Bill 21-2, 31, 34, 38-9, 60, 116,
126, 187, 190, 281, 396, 408, 642,
658 n. 8, 668 n. 6, 682 n.
Nichols, Dudley 219, 221, 224, 240-242,
246-247, 250, 280, 337, 669 n. 17,
674 n. 35, 704
Niebuhr, Walter 289
Nielsen, Asta 58
Nieuwe Gronden (New Earth, 1933) 105,
114, 119, 125-6, 136, 139, 161, 163-
72,189,197,237,269,283,285,
287, 315, 375, 418, 432, 506, 653,
662 nn. 3, 8, 670 n. 27, 674 n. 33,
678 n. 7, 686 n. 32; audiences 171;
soundtrack 168-70
Night and Fog, see Nuit et brouillard
NightMail (1936) 280, 657 n. 3
Nitzschmann, Erich 375, 706
Nixon, Richard 572
North Star, The (1943) 298, 307
Norwood, John 311, 705
Novelli, Mara 491
Nueva escuela, La (The New School, 1973)
452
Nugent, Frank S. 225, 229, 235, 238-9
Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955)
403, 412, 474, 657 n. 3
Nureyev, Rudolf 404
Nykino 46, 201-2, 289
0
Objective Burma (1945) 331
observational method, see direct
cinema
October Revolution (Russia) 149, 159,
214, 621
October, see Oktyabr
Odets, Clifford 219
Odinnadtsatyy (The Eleventh Year, 1928)
74, 151
Odna (Alone, 1931) 147
Office of Facts and Figures 308; see also
Office of War Information
Office of War Information (OWI) 307-8,
324, 330, 332, 335, 675 n. 43
OilforAladdin's Lamp (1941) 294-5, 309,
674 n. 34, 705
Oktyabr (October, 1927) 74, 120
Olalla, Joaquin 468, 708
Old Friend of the Chinese People, An, see
Oude vriend van het Chinese volk,
Een
omnibus film 357, 389-90, 436, 480,
482-3
On the Bowery (1956) 416
Opra-mouffe, L'(1958) 403,416
Ophuls, Marcel 507, 683 n. 5
Ornitz, Arthur 262, 264, 266-7, 285, 287,
344, 671 n. 3, 704
Orsini, Valentino 432, 434, 684 n. 21,
707
Ortion, Bernard 484, 709
OtherHalf of the Sky: A China Memoir,
The (1975) 568, 573
'otherness' 34-5, 231-2, 245-7,
429-30, 526, 549-50, 640; see
also colonialism, exoticism,
postcolonialism
Oude vriend van het Chinese volk, Een
(An Old Friend of the Chinese People,
2008) 580, 696
Our Daily Bread (1934) 215
OurRussian Front (1941) 29-30, 256,
296-309, 311, 319, 324, 406, 507,
670 n. 32, 675 n. 40, 705
1 765
INDEX
Overlanders, The (1946) 338, 340, 355
Ox-Bow Incident, The (1943) 331
P
Pabst, G.W. (Georg Wilhelm) 200, 693
n. 27
Painlevd, Jean 334
painting, Dutch: influence on Ivens's
visual style 62, 83-4, 93, 192 373,
420, 425, 432, 469, 485, 497-8
Pais, Frank 457
Pak Den-ai (Pak Chong-ae) 365-7, 397
Palit, Ranjan 606
Panizza, Tiziana 42, 466, 469-70, 476-7,
766 I 687 n. 48
Paramount 221, 283, 307, 322, 430
Pareh, een R stlied van Java (Pareh, Song
of theRice, 1935) 660 n. 13
Paris vu par... (Six in Paris, 1965) 482
Parker, Dorothy 202, 674 n. 35
Pasionaria, La (Dolores Ibirruri) 208-9,
216
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 408, 688 n. 57
Pathet Lao, see Lao Patriotic Front
Patwardhan, Anand 34, 37, 605
Paul, Elliot 298, 303-4, 705
Peace Tour 1952, see WyscigPokoju
Warszawa-Berlin-Praga
Peace Will Win, see Pokoj zdobgdzie swiat
peasants 386, 448, 453-4, 463, 505, 509,
517, 522, 531, 533, 535, 545-6, 667
n. 61; as/and soldiers 210, 227,
235, 396, 457, 459, 552-5, 559; in
China 576-7, 581, 593-4; in Italy
436, 438, 440; in Spain 203-5,
215; in USSR 154-5, 284, 664 n. 25;
romanticisation 358, 394, 523-4; see
also agriculture
Pche au hareng, Une (A Herring, 1930)
82
Pennebaker, D.A. 487
People of the Cumberland (1938) 237,
261, 269, 274, 286, 343
Perrault, Pierre 539, 541, 543, 553, 608,
682n.
personalisation 29, 121, 124, 146,
151, 201, 204-5, 224, 227-8, 241,
262, 265, 267, 293, 298-300, 306-7,
309, 313-14, 318-20, 353, 357, 359,
361, 363, 397-8, 432, 531, 538,
634, 664 nn. 28, 29, 677 n. 60; full
development of the model in Power
(Parkinsons) 270-1, 273-9, 290;
Komsomol (Afanaseyev) 148, 153-9,
161-2, 176, 284, 664 n. 29, 703;
social vs. psychological portraits
277-8; Spanish Earth (Julian) 204,
215, 239, 241, 290, 369, 531, 542;
unsuccessful attempts in Know
YourEnemy:Japan 3 25-8; see also
acting; dramatisation; socialist
realism
Pesn o geroyakh (Komsomol, 1933) 29-
30, 36, 64, 105, 118, 122, 124, 126-7,
136, 145-63, 168-9, 172-3, 176, 181,
185, 189, 192, 197, 201, 203, 261,
266, 269, 275, 277, 284, 303, 359,
361, 385, 428, 437, 490, 531, 542,
580-1, 653, 663 n. 21, 664 n. 29, 667
n. 4, 674 n. 32, 695, 703
Petit Chapiteau, Le (1963) 424, 427,
477-8, 708
Petite Prairie aux bouleaux, La (The
Birch-Tree Meadow, 2003) 632
Petric, Vlada 205
Petrusov, Georgi 664 n. 29
Pett and Pott: A Fairy Story of the Suburbs
(1934) 169
Peuple et sesfusils, Le (The People and
their Guns, 1970) 30, 187, 505, 507,
545-62, 572, 653, 690 n. 12, 709
Pham Ky Nam 530
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Phantom India, see Indefantome, L'
Philadelphia Story (1940) 292
Philibert, Nicholas 46
Philipe, Anne 393, 425, 520
Philipe, Gdrard 46, 353, 387, 393-6, 399,
403, 405, 419, 425, 706
Philippe-Gdrard, M. (Michel) 413, 423
Philips 128-30, 132, 136-7, 139-42, 147,
173, 272, 433, 663 n. 16, 703
Philips-Radio (1931) 29, 31, 102, 105,
118-19, 127-45, 147, 153, 159, 161,
164, 169, 172, 176, 181, 186, 197,
240, 284, 294-5, 409, 436, 636, 661
n. 22, 663 nn. 15, 16, 703
Picasso, Pablo 214, 404, 481
picturesque, see exoticism
Pierrot lefou (1965) 484
Pierwsze Lata (The First Years, 1949) 29,
64, 284, 346, 351-9, 361-2, 364, 367,
372, 374-5, 385, 403, 406, 419, 433,
435-7, 440-1,479, 531, 601, 633, 679
n. 8, 695-6, 705; commentary 362;
reviews 362-3
Pigaut, Roger 412-13, 444, 448, 452,
472, 487, 707-8
Plow That Broke the Plains, The (1936)
199, 211, 213-14, 243, 259, 269, 283,
346,672 n.5
Po zakonu (By the Law, 1926) 61
poetic realism: influence on Ivens 389-
90, 413, 426
Poignant, Axel 340
Point of Order (1963) 566
point-of-view shot, see camera,
subjective
Poitras, Laura 37
Pokoj zdob dzie swiat (Peace Will Win,
1951) 28, 351, 353, 364-8, 370-1,
373-5, 390, 393, 413, 429, 432, 678
n. 4, 679 n. 12, 683 n. 6, 705
Pollard, Spencer 289-91
Pontecorvo, Gillo 46, 373, 387-90, 431-
2, 690 n. 7, 706
Ponting, Herbert 660 n. 9
Popular Fronts 28, 32, 46, 76, 194-5,
199, 200, 202, 210-12, 215-16,
243-4, 246, 250, 253, 259-60, 262,
286-7, 302, 330, 333-4, 343, 365, 667
n. 1, 681 n. 24; see also anti-fascist
movement
populism 33, 62, 139, 281, 309, 326,
360, 380, 413, 423, 426, 459, 471,
473, 570, 602; in New Deal rhetoric
64, 216, 276, 285
Porcile, Francois 425-6
posing, see 'naturalness', visual code of | 767
postcolonialism 39, 231, 351, 461, 465,
470, 474; see also anti-colonial
movement; colonialism; exoticism;
'otherness'
'poster' rhetoric, in documentary 151,
158-9, 167, 344, 360, 363, 367, 506,
511, 515, 521, 528-9, 534, 536, 580,
608
Potamkin, Harry Alan 19, 63, 74-9, 83-4,
86, 97, 130
Potter, Paul 570
Pour le Mistral (For the Mistral, 1965) 28,
40, 48, 65, 406-7, 410, 413, 422, 435,
441, 445, 466, 471, 474, 478-93, 495,
497, 503-4, 506, 514-15, 517-18,
600, 628, 633, 637, 648, 658 n. 4,
670 n. 37, 675 n. 46, 684 n. 15, 687
n. 52, 698, 708
poverty 111, 174-5, 187-8, 274, 370;
aestheticisation of 182-3, 185, 456,
467-8, 473, 665 n. 35; in Southern
Italy 435-6, 438
Powell, Michael 311, 679 n. 15
Power and the Land (1940) 29, 32, 45,
205, 214, 228, 257-90, 311-12, 320-
23, 343-4, 346, 357, 406, 437, 440,
INDEX
531, 590, 653, 657 n. 3, 673 nn. 20,
25, 696, 704; choosing the subjects
263-4; shooting 264-7, 272-3;
commentary 279-82; distribution
283-4
Pozner, Vladimir 175, 295, 332, 348,
353, 375, 377-81, 383-4, 386, 388,
390-1, 405, 409, 680 n. 18, 706
Prasetyo, Elisabeth D. 631-2, 638, 710
Pressburger, Emeric 311
Prdvert, Jacques 413, 423-5, 473, 477,
481, 488, 707-8
Primary (196o) 437
Primera carga al machete, La (The First
768 | Charge of the Machete, 1969) 452
'primitive' cinema 638
Production Code (Hollywood) 271
proletariat, see labour, manual; labour
movement; trade unions
propaganda 115, 230-1, 248, 258, 269,
285-6, 436,452, 512, 524, 534, 549-50,
554-6, 596-7; classifying Ivens's work
as 46, 100, 141, 190-1, 369; Franquist
202, 217; in Ivens's Cold War films
357-8, 362-5, 367, 369, 280, 393,405-
6; WWII 236-7, 270, 279, 288, 303,
308, 327-9, 674 n. 33, 675 n. 37
Propp, Vladimir 41
prostitution, see sex work
Prostoy Sluchay (A Simple Case, 1932)
664 n. 24
Protazanov, Yakov 147
Prudentino, Luisa 583, 620
Prudhomme, Sully 477, 687 n. 49
Pudovkin, Vsevolod 57, 59, 62, 99-101,
111, 147, 152-3, 275, 296, 365, 377,
664 n. 24, 667 n. 51, 673 n. 21, 693
n. 27
PuebloArmado (An Armed People, 1961)
30, 413, 427, 450-1, 453-4, 458, 460-
1, 463, 507, 707
PullMy Daisy (1959) 448
'pure cinema', see 'absolute cinema'
Putyovka v zhizn (Road to Life, 1931) 147
Pyramide humaine, La (The Human
Pyramid, 1961) 444
Pyryev, Ivan 253, 353, 368-9, 671 n. 41,
706
Q
Qian Liren 594, 709
Qian Weichang 595
Quebec, Path of Conquest (1942) 312
Quiet One, The (1949) 347, 384
quotidian, see everyday life
R
R.T. 253
racism 241, 327, 384-5, 398, 514, 676
n. 55
radio 135, 147, 161, 241, 282, 335, 306,
517, 520, 547
Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI) 432,
434, 436, 440, 627
Rain, see Regen
Rainer, Luise 219
Rainer, Yvonne 408
Raizman, Yuli 147
Ramparts We Watch, The (1940) 262
Ramsey, Marion 260
Raquetteurs, Les (1958) 416
ratio, shooting 238, 341, 414, 460, 495,
533-4, 577, 669 n. 24, 692 n. 20
Ratoff, Gregory 307
Ravel, Jean 466, 486, 708
Ravel, Maurice 493, 683 n. 8
Ray, Man 62
Ray, Michele 519-20, 526, 577, 708
Raymond, Alan 577
Raymond, Susan 577
Razgrom nemetskikh voysk pod Moskvoy
(Moscow Strikes Back, 1942) 298
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
RCA sound system 129
re-enactment 36, 156-7, 188, 205,
227-8, 234, 236, 271, 306, 318, 339,
385, 460, 511, 516, 532, 608; see
also mise-en-scene mode; truth, in
documentary
Realengo 18 (1962) 457
realism 55, 66, 76, 91, 114, 118,
144, 183, 211, 331-2, 359-61,
363, 405-6, 429, 557, 623, 642,
659 n. 2; vs. modernism 59-60,
70-1, 74, 83-4, 87, 114, 144, 152,
361; see also neorealism; poetic
realism; socialist realism; truth, in
documentary
Rebillon, Gisele 443-4, 685 n. 28, 707
Red Diaper Productions 10, 398-9
Red Pony, The (1949) 679 n. 15
Redding (Rescue, 1929) 79
Redes (The Wave, 1936) 203, 343
Regen (Rain, 1929) 28, 54-6, 59, 61-5,
70, 75, 88-101, 105-6, 108, 127, 130,
163, 169-70, 182, 197, 270, 375,
413-14, 419, 492, 495, 598, 653, 658,
660 n. 6, 661 nn. 18, 21, 22, 666 n.
44, 696
Reggiani, Serge 412-13, 423, 508, 510,
513, 516, 707-8
Reichenbach, Franois 404, 418, 467,
686 n. 38
Reinhardt, Max 219
Relouw, Bram 618
Rencontre avec le president Ho Chi Minh
(Meeting with President Ho Chi
Minh, 1970) 30, 505, 561, 709
Renoir, Jean 128, 194, 214, 216, 218,
295, 304, 337, 413, 442, 679 n. 15,
681 n. 1
Rents, Franois 174, 704
Republicans (Indonesia) 336-7, 345
Republicans (Spanish Civil War) 202-5,
207-10, 213, 216-18
Resnais, Alain 375, 403-4, 408-9, 412,
422, 474-5, 519-20, 524, 526-7, 657
n. 3, 685 n. 28, 687 n. 42, 708
Retour a Vinh Linh --40 ans apres
(Revisiting Vinh Linh --40 Years
Later, 2007) 530, 696
Retour de Tidman, Le (1970) 444
Revolt of the Fishermen, see Vosstanie
rybakov
Reynolds, Herbert 662 n. 8
Reynolds, Quentin 309
Richter, Hans 59, 62-3, 73, 146, 410
Riefenstahl, Leni 19, 25, 39, 46, 208,
211-12, 216, 366, 369-71, 375, 658
n. 4, 659 n. 2
Riffaud, Madeleine 506
Riggs, Marlon 37, 683 n. 4
Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) 142
Riso amaro (BitterRice, 1949) 431
rive gauche (art community) 63, 401,
404, 408-9, 411, 475, 479, 481, 518-
20, 525-7, 538, 542, 561, 578, 685 n.
28, 687 n. 43
river motif, in Ivens's work 67, 73, 77
373-4, 377, 380, 384-5, 412-15,
417, 419-21, 425-6, 432, 628, 637,
640
River, The (1938) 259-60, 283
River, The (1951) 679 n. 15
RKO Pictures 283
Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963) 482
Road, Sinclair 657 n. 3
Robeson, Paul 353, 367, 380-1, 397, 678
n. 7, 681 n. 26, 706
Robin, Rdgine 152, 359-60, 397
Rocco e i suoifratelli (Rocco and His
Brothers, 1960) 434
Rock, Joyce 599
Rockefeller Committee on Latin
American Affairs 292, 294
1 769
INDEX
770 1
Rockefeller Foundation 37, 199, 243,
259, 661 n. 22, 670 n. 30
Rockefeller, Nelson 292
Roelants, Maurice 191
Roffman, Julian 310, 318, 671 n. 4
Rogosin, Lionel 416-17
Roldan, Alberto 452
Roma, citti aperta (Rome, Open City,
1945) 354
romance 85, 119, 424, 482, 488
romanticism 35-6, 75-6, 85, 89, 109,
121-3, 132, 146, 159, 161, 177, 181,
205-6, 216, 268, 311-12, 385, 388,
415, 455, 457, 494, 496, 635-7, 645;
'revolutionary romanticism' 359-
60, 550
Room, Abram 61
Roosevelt, Eleanor 213, 216
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 197, 220,
246, 259-60, 296-7, 301-3, 336, 668
n. 11
Roosevelt, Theodore 52
Rope (1948) 679 n. 15
Rosenbaum, Jonathan 632, 694 n. 28
Rosenthal, Alan 565, 568, 573, 577, 649
Rossellini, Roberto 354, 431-2, 439, 683
n.5
Rossiya Nikolaya II i Lev Tolstoy (The
Russia of Nicholas II and Leo Tostoy,
1928) 676 n. 53
Rotha, Paul 39, 245, 269, 279-80, 283,
287, 294, 323, 334-5, 346, 348, 355,
384, 657 n. 3, 659 n. 2, 660 n. 6, 664
n. 28, 666 n. 43, 673 n. 28, 674 n. 31
Rotterdam Europoort (Rotterdam
Europort, 1966) 28, 407, 437, 466,
478, 489, 491-500, 506, 515, 517,
540, 574, 610, 628, 659 n. 3, 683 n.
3, 684 n. 15, 688 nn. 55, 58, 695, 708
Rouch, Jean 39, 79, 403-4, 411, 414,
418, 444, 448, 540-1, 543, 553, 608,
667 n. 50, 682 n., 683 nn. 2, 4, 685
n. 28, 695
Roud, Richard 38, 524
Roue, La (The Wheel, 1922) 74
Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) 310, 315,
317, 320
Royaljourney (1951) 369
Ruiz, Raul 46, 683 n. 4
Rural Electrification Administration
(REA) 260-1, 263-4, 266-7, 274, 278,
280, 283, 286-8, 704
Russian Association of Proletarian
Writers (RAPP) 151, 664 n. 26
Russian School in New York, The (1936)
197, 704
Russian War Relief 298, 705
Russians at War (1943) 307, 675 n. 39
Ruttmann, Walther, 45, 59, 61-62, 74,
89, 92, 129-130, 410, 657 n. 3, 659 n.
2, 693 n. 27
Ruzicka, Werner 40
Ryan, Howard P. 293
S
Sadoul, Georges 25, 105, 362, 393, 405,
411-17, 419-21, 425, 450, 682 n.,
683 n. 9, 707
Sagan, Leontine 200
Saillant, Louis 373
Salt of the Earth (1954) 347, 384-5, 388
SaludosAmigos (1942) 292-3
Salut les Cubains (1962) 453, 687 n. 42
SalvadorAllende (2004) 687 n. 50, 696
Sandburg, Carl 330
Sandinistas 188
Sarris, Andrew 27, 523-4, 689 n. 5
satire 119, 295, 380, 422, 467, 482, 519,
639, 663 n. 14, 664 n. 25
Sauer, Derk 657 n. 2
Scattered Remains (1988) 640
Scheer, Maximilian 375
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Schenk, Ralf 42, 657 n. 1
Scherer, Christina 633, 641
Schoenhals, Michael 569, 589, 593
Schoots, Hans 19, 43-4, 46, 51, 54-5,
137, 150, 163, 193, 198, 338, 351,
353-6, 359, 363, 368, 371-4, 382,
395-6, 404-6, 422, 428, 449, 467-8,
475, 477, 487, 498-9, 508, 523, 527,
578, 590, 609, 617, 623, 625, 627,
631-2, 638, 648-9, 662 n. 4, 677
n.2, 678 n. 7, 679 n. 16, 680 n. 18,
683 n. 10, 689 n. 4, 691 n. 7, 693
n.27
Sciuscia (Shoeshine, 1946) 354
Screen Writers Guild 330
Scully, Frank 213
sea motif, in Ivens's work 55, 85-7, 91,
119, 121, 124-5, 165-9, 469, 472-3,
475, 490, 496, 629-30, 635-6
Seashell and the Clergyman, The, see
Coquille et le clergyman, La
Sebastian, John 245
Sebestik, Miroslav 495, 708
Second Front movement (WWII) 298,
306-8
See You at Mao (1970) 571, 692
Seegers, Rend 42, 580-1, 608, 613, 615,
617, 627, 690 n. 6, 692 n. 19, 696
Seine a rencontrd Paris, La (The Seine
Meets Paris, 1957) 28, 65, 362,
406-7, 411-27, 432, 434-5, 438, 451,
467-71, 473-4, 476, 481, 483-4, 488,
492, 495, 598, 609, 625, 648, 658 n.
4, 685 n. 28, 707; commentary 423-
4; reviews 425-6
sex work 409, 470, 327, 520
sexuality 85, 359, 390, 421, 482, 591-2,
643-4, 646-7, 684 n. 14; see also
eroticism
shame 22, 38, 145, 368, 398-9, 565,
592, 615, 617, 624, 631, 634-5, 638,
641-3, 645-51, 653; in queer theory
398-9, 625-7
Shanxi 222-3, 226, 248, 250-1
Sheean, Vincent 323
Shelenkov, Alexander 160, 703
Shell Oil 294-5, 309, 346, 433, 674 n.
34, 705
Sheriffed (1934) 343
Sholokhov, Mikhail 665 n. 32
Short and Suite (1959) 688 n. 53
Shostakovich, Dmitri 305, 353, 380,
705-6
Shub, Esfir 26, 46, 114, 129, 189, 296,
300, 410, 658 n. 3, 667 n. 48, 676
n. 53
Shumlin, Herman 202, 219, 222, 228,
242, 252, 258
Sidibe, Amadou 444,450
Sidibe, Moussa 444-50, 686 n. 30, 707
Siege (1940) 294
Signal Corps (US Army) 291, 306, 308,
323, 676 n. 52
Signoret, Simone 387, 389-90, 399,405,
424, 706
silent documentary 26-7, 70, 88-9,
92, 118-20, 126-30, 134-6, 163,
177, 187, 191-2, 269, 410; Regen's
sonorisation 163, 169, 661 n. 22
Simonov, Konstantin 307, 675 n. 40,
708
Situ Huimin 627
Situ Zhaodun 619
Six Hundred Million With You (1958) 29,
427, 452, 580, 614, 669 n. 20, 707
Sixiemeface du pentagone, La (The Sixth
Side of the Pentagon, 1968) 686 n. 38
Sjdstrdm, Victor 485
Skid Row (1956) 416
Sklyut, Iosif 152, 160, 703
Sloan Foundation 288-9, 291-2, 346,
671 n. 4, 673 n. 28, 704
1 771
INDEX
Sloan, Alfred P. 288
Sloan, Harold 288-9
SLON, see Socit pour le lancement
des ouvres nouvelles
Sluizer, Hans 100, 141
Slutsky, Mikhail 309
Smedley, Agnes 219
Smith, Ephraim K. 42, 284, 696, 704
Smith, Jack 200
Snow, Edgar 219
Snyder, Robert 260-1, 264, 266-9, 271,
281-2, 288, 672 nn. 5, 8, 10, 11, 14
socialism 112, 144, 150, 153, 159, 187,
197, 302, 333, 355, 376, 571, 574,
772 I 629-31
socialist realism 29, 33, 64, 85, 121-2,
124, 145-6, 161, 172, 176, 193, 203,
206, 262-3, 278, 358-61, 363, 369,
372-3, 387-9, 397-8, 402, 415, 428-9,
497, 531, 541, 580-2, 586, 608, 634,
645, 664 n. 26, 665 n. 32, 678 n. 6;
as Soviet 1930s orthodoxy 151-3;
Cold War excesses 354, 369-70, 387,
601; main features 359-60; 'positive
solution' orientation 155, 159, 185,
262-3, 269, 359-60; see also before/
after; epic; heroics; labour, manual;
utopia
Socialist Unity Party (DDR) 373
Socite pour le lancement des ouvres
nouvelles (SLON) 519, 548
Society for the Implementation of the
Zuidezee Works (MUZ) 119
Sofracima 450, 471, 528, 685
Solanas, Fernando 511, 553, 599, 683
n. 5
Solds, Humberto 452
solidarity documentary 30, 34-5, 45,
109-110, 195, 231, 346, 357, 360,
363, 401, 402, 407, 427-9, 436, 445,
459, 465, 505, 508, 518, 521, 578,
580, 582, 627, 630, 643; Loin as 523-
9; see also committed documentary
Solinas, Franco 387, 389-90, 431, 706
Song of Ceylon, The (1935) 126, 169, 245
Song ofRussia (1943) 307
Song of the Rivers, see Lied der Strme,
Das
Sontag, Susan 39, 232, 669 n. 20
Soong Ching-ling (Madame Sun Yat-
sen) 222, 224, 229, 235, 249, 251
Soong Mei-ling (Madame Jiang) 222-3,
227, 242, 247, 249
sound: ambient 319; concrete 148,
243-4, 279, 320, 483-4, 517; direct
148, 233, 272, 274, 279, 298-9, 319,
341, 423, 438, 517, 535, 541-2, 690
n. 1; image-sound relations 149,
164,169-70, 211-12, 243, 248, 281,
303, 362, 408, 410, 448, 470-1, 508,
517; Ivens's first experiments with
sound film 129, 135-6, 146-8, 163;
synchronous 208, 236, 282, 298-9,
319-20, 338, 362, 366, 410-11, 414,
435-6, 438, 447, 470, 483-4, 494,
516-17, 539-41, 554, 557, 576-7,
579, 598-9, 612, 620, 684, 692
Souphanouvong, Prince 545
Southerner, The (1945) 216
Soviet cinema 59-63, 67-8, 70, 74, 129-
30, 146-55, 193, 213-14, 253, 560
Soviet-Nazi Pact 28, 41, 253, 258-9, 262,
307-9, 330, 671 n. 1
Soy Cuba (IAm Cuba, 1964) 453
Spain in Flames (1937) 202, 298
Spanish Earth, The (1937) 30, 32, 35, 38,
46, 48,125,194-221, 223-5, 228,
230, 233, 236-42, 244-6, 251, 253,
259, 261, 269, 271-5, 281, 285, 302-
4,309,311,319,333,346,357,362,
366, 391, 406, 416, 424-5, 454, 459,
471, 489, 503, 506-9, 513, 515-16,
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
518, 523, 531, 542, 549, 567, 580,
625, 636, 657 nn. 3, 4, 697, 704;
commentary 211-13; distribution
217-18; editing 208-10; soundtrack
211
Special Administrative District (China)
220, 223, 249
sponsorship, government 45, 115,
146, 164, 190, 198-200, 214,
258-60, 262, 285-94, 308-9, 323-4,
333-5, 346, 355-6, 363, 368, 433,
613-14; bureaucratic obstacles
356, 465, 503, 595-6, 608, 618,
636; Ivens's views on 268; see also
commissioned film
spontaneous mode 32, 66-7, 70, 85,
121, 127, 131, 134, 146, 161, 177,
185, 187-8, 196, 201, 274-6, 285,
431, 434, 460-1, 469-70, 495, 507,
512, 532, 536-7, 541, 543, 555,
558-9, 576, 584; in 400 Million,
suppression of 228, 230-6, 238-9;
in Action Stations 315-6, 319; in La
Seine 414-5, 417, 423; in Mistral
482, 488-9; in Regen 89-91, 95, 97,
106, 108; in Spanish Earth 206-9,
228, 233, 271; in Yukong 588-9,
607, 611, 613, 618; see also direct
cinema; 'life-caught-unawares'
Stalen Knuisten (Fists ofSteel, 1930) 116
Stalin, Josef 46, 113, 151, 160, 208, 259,
297, 301, 303, 307, 359, 366, 369-70,
383, 392, 398-9, 414, 416, 552, 569-
70, 625, 653-4, 661 n. 20, 668 n. 7,
678 n. 5, 679 n. 16; de-Stalinisation
352-3, 369-70, 373, 386, 388, 398-9,
569-70, 625; see also Thaw
Staroye i novoye (The General Line, 1929)
74,115, 149, 151,154, 284, 437, 657
n.3,664n. 25
Starr, Cecile 346, 348
State Cinema School (Moscow) 152
Statues meurent aussi, Les (Statues Die
Too, 1953) 404, 687 n. 42
Stebbins, Robert, see Meyers, Sidney
Steichen, Edward 383
Steinbeck Committee 262
Steinbeck, John 267, 293
Steiner, Ralph 259
Stewart, Donald Ogden 292, 294, 298,
674 n. 35
Stop Japan (1938) 220
stop motion 51, 372, 646
Storck, Henri 46, 79, 82, 85, 91, 104,
173-7, 182-92, 268, 276-80, 343,
410, 648, 659 n. 4, 661 n. 21, 662
n. 5, 665 nn. 35, 38, 666 nn. 42, 43,
667 n. 50, 677 n. 61, 696, 704
Story of G.I.Joe, The (1945) 331-2, 676 n.
49,705
Story ofLouis Pasteur, The (1935) 200
Stott, William 198, 344, 672 n. 6, 677
n. 60
Strand, Paul 190, 203, 261, 330, 343-4,
672 n. 5
Strange Victory (1948) 347, 384
Stravinsky (1965) 487
Stravinsky Portrait, A (1966) 487
Streible, Dan 39
strikes 160, 167, 174, 185-9, 192, 201,
293, 336, 339, 341, 379, 426, 519,
523, 560, 562, 599, 616, 665 n. 35,
677 n. 61, 680 n. 22
Strouvd, Georges 402, 466, 708
Stryker, Roy 261
Stufkens, Andre 11, 19, 26, 40, 42-3,
51-6, 61, 65-6, 70, 78-9, 88-9, 93,
101, 106, 110, 114, 116, 128-30, 134,
136-7, 141, 147, 153, 158, 161, 163,
191-2, 214, 218, 250, 253, 414, 416,
420, 433, 482-3, 493, 495, 499, 518,
527, 529-30, 533-4, 541-2, 560, 574,
1 773
INDEX
578, 578, 594, 614-15, 619, 628-30,
632, 634, 636, 638, 653, 660 n. 7,
661 n. 1, 662 n. 8, 663 n. 17, 664 n.
29, 665 nn. 31, 35, 37, 38, 666 nn.
41, 44, 668 n. 7, 686 n. 32, 687 n. 51,
688 nn. 54, 58, 689 n. 4, 691 n. 7,
693 n. 25, 695, 697
Suarez, Ramon 452, 707
Sucksdorff, Arne 346
Sun Hongyun 580, 596, 605, 611, 614-
15, 618, 692 n. 12, 698
Sun Yat-sen, Madame, see Soong Ching-
ling
Sun Yixian (Sun Yat-sen) 237
774 I surrealism 114, 189, 661 n. 21
Sussex, Elizabeth 39
Svilova, Elizaveta 414
Symphonie paysanne, La, see
Boerensymfonie
Szelubski, Jerzy, see Bossak, Jerzy
T
Tager (sound system) 146, 148
Tai'erzhuang, the battle of (1938) 196,
223, 225-6, 229-30, 234, 236, 241-2,
248, 635-6
Take, The (2004) 195-6
Tale of the Wind, A, see Histoire de vent,
Une
Taleikin, Ivan 298-300, 303
Tanner, Alain 416
Targetfor Tonight (1941) 314, 354
Tati, Jacques 488, 496, 685 n. 28
Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio 431-2, 434,
439-40, 442, 707
Taylor, Alastair 318
Taylor, Richard 372
Taylor, Tina 200
television 32, 37, 48, 208, 348, 390-1,
440, 461, 478, 512, 513, 596, 600,
610; Ivens's relations with TV
industry 432-6, 444, 506, 540, 574,
578, 613
Tendler, Sergio 41
Tenney, Jack 330
Ter Braak, Menno 58, 63, 85-6, 88
Terra trema, La (The Earth Trembles,
1948) 439-40
Testament d'Orphce, Le (The Testament of
Orpheus, 1960) 640, 642, 687 n. 45,
694 n. 28
Thaw 352, 359, 386-8, 404, 414, 465, 678
Theresienstadt (The Fihrer Gives the Jews
a City, 1944) 677 n. 4
They Chose Peace (1952) 679 n. 13
They Were Expendable (1945) 331
Thief ofBaghdad, The (1940) 679 n. 15
Thirard, P.L. 465, 556
ThirdMan, The (1949) 359, 683 n. 10
'third world' 333, 347, 366, 371, 373-4,
383, 386-7, 402, 430, 436, 442,
460, 462, 466, 548, 571, 580; see
also anti-colonial movement;
postcolonialism
Tholen, Tom 46, 494-5, 688 n. 55, 695,
708
Thompson, Howard 367
Thomson, Virgil 211, 243-4, 283, 704
Thorndike, Andrew 353, 378, 426
Threatening Sky, The, see Ciel, la terre, Le
Three Caballeros, The (1945) 292
Three Songs About Lenin, see Tri pesni o
Lenine
Thu Van 512,708
Tian Zhuangzhuang 620
Tiomkin, Dimitri 305, 670 n. 32, 705
Tito, Josip Broz 331, 355-6
Tobis Klangfilm 129
Todd, Daniel 279-80, 288
Todorov, Tzvetan 41
Toeplitz, Jerzy 368, 684 n. 17
Toets (Touch, 1967) 688 n. 55, 695
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Tojo, Hideki 326, 328
Toorop, Charley 56
Torres, Oscar 457, 462
Tosi, Virgilio 42, 431-2, 442
Tour, La (The Eiffel Tower, 1928) 74, 660
n. 10, 693 n. 27
tourism 231, 421-2, 456, 481, 598, 628,
637,639
Tourneur, Jacques 307
Tout va bien (1972) 559, 567
Toute la mdmoire du monde (All the
World's Memory, 1956) 403
trade unions 31, 54, 88, 103-6, 108-10,
115-17, 124, 174, 200, 215, 291, 322,
325, 336, 338-43, 362, 366, 373-4,
376-7, 381, 384, 398, 433, 467, 503,
572, 589, 591, 609, 659 n. 5, 680 n.
21
Trail of the Vigilantes (1940) 673 n. 25
Train de la victoire, Le (1964) 29, 478, 50,
686 n. 40, 696, 708
transportation 65-7, 69-73, 76-8, 105-6,
119, 161, 301, 354, 356, 421, 469,
472, 475, 496, 498
Trauberg, Leonid 147
Travel Notebook, see Carnet de Viaje
travelogue 30, 171, 245, 252, 335, 402-3,
455, 460, 475, 577, 663 n. 14, 669 n.
19, 691 n. 12
Trdmois, Claude-Marie 477
Tretya meshchanskaya (Bed and Sofa,
1927) 61
Tretyakov, Sergei 163
Tri pesni o Lenine (Three Songs About
Lenin, 1934) 158, 188, 199, 215, 233,
664 n. 26
Trinh T. Minh-ha 408
Triomf (Triumph, 1931) 116
Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will,
1936) 39, 46, 211, 236, 244, 366,
371
Trnka, Jiri 360
Trudeau, Pierre Elliott 572
Truffaut, Francois 25, 395, 519, 689 n. 7
Truman, Harry S. 367
truth, documentary 26, 64, 82-3, 87,
97, 108, 118, 145, 175, 220, 252,
275-6, 319, 332, 338, 381, 399,
425, 505, 508, 523, 543,556,559,
607-10, 631, 639, 643, 649, 651,
668 n. 12, 686 n. 40; aesthetics
of 181-2, 206, 415-17, 423; and
dramatisation 157-8, 206, 516;
and socialist realism 359-60;
artist's intervention 419-20, 463-
5, 543, 610; Brecht's 467-68; vs.
Hollywood film industry 138-9;
see also direct cinema; realism;
re-enactment
Tsivian, Yuri 39, 734
Turin, Victor 26, 59, 119, 164, 657 n. 3
Turksib (1929) 59, 119-20, 122, 142-3,
149, 151, 657 n. 3,659 n.2
Turnin, Svetla 36
Tuttle, Frank 219, 668 n. 10
Two or Three Things I Know About Her,
see Deux ou trois choses queje sais
d'elle
U
UFA 129, 142
Ulbricht, Walter 375, 483
Ulrich, Jean-Claude, see Chris Marker
Underground (1975) 482
Une histoire defemmes (A Wives' Tale,
1980) 599
unemployment 35, 80, 165, 167, 185,
198, 263, 291, 294, 318, 370
UNESCO 346-7, 384, 466, 691 n. 10
'Unfriendly Nineteen' 297
Union Films 347
1 775
INDEX
776 1
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR) 57, 59, 61, 69, 141, 146, 149,
163, 193, 197, 210, 223, 259, 289,
295-6, 305, 307-8, 330, 414, 560-1,
569, 571; Ivens's trips to 62, 88,
106, 112-13, 118, 128, 140-1, 144-5,
147, 152, 163, 172-3; nationalities
155, 302
Union of Soviet Writers 151, 359
United Front, 2nd (China) 219, 248-50, 580
United Fruit Company 398, 454
United Nations 334, 346, 365, 686 n. 33
United States Film Service 42, 259-60,
262, 267-8, 271, 286, 288, 335, 672
n. 15
University of Southern California (USC)
295-6, 311, 323, 331, 674 n. 36
utopia 28, 121, 145, 159, 188-9, 195,
269, 372, 376, 386, 397, 428-9, 469,
489-90, 549, 565, 586, 615, 617, 645,
648-9, 651, 655
Uyen, Ann 520
V
Valley Town:A Study of Machines and
Men (1940) 289, 673 n. 28
Valli, Federico 440-1, 479
Van Ammelrooy, Willeke 494, 688 n.
56, 708
Van der Enden, Eddy 494, 708
Van der Feer, Anneke 56, 102, 702
Van der Maden, Frank 52
Van der Walls, H.C. 61
Van Dongen, Helen 89, 119, 127-9, 147,
163, 165-6, 170-1, 192-3, 197, 200,
202, 204, 209-12, 218, 224, 235, 237,
239-40, 245, 262, 268, 289, 295, 300,
307-8, 324-7, 331, 334-5, 337, 341,
506, 590, 627, 661 n. 22, 662 n. 13,
667 n. 51, 672 n. 16, 675 nn. 39, 40,
676 nn. 51, 52, 699, 702-5
Van Dyke, Willard 37, 259, 261, 289,
292, 310, 344, 675 n. 43, 699
Van Gogh, Vincent 84, 93, 174, 192,
425, 485, 665 n. 37, 686 n. 38, 688
n. 54
Van Lakerveld, Leo 111, 702-3
Van Ommeslaghe, Albert 174
Varda, Agnes 46, 403, 408, 416-17, 453,
519-21, 683 n. 11, 684 n. 16, 686
n. 35, 687 n. 42, 688 n. 3, 689 n. 3,
708-9
Vardte(Jealousy, 1925) 58, 66
Variety 213, 237, 239, 253, 283, 633, 672
n. 7
Varlamov, Leonid 298, 307
Varlin (Winter), Catherine 443-4, 448,
450, 685 nn. 23, 28, 707
Vasilyev, Sergei and Georgi 193
Verdet, Andre 486-7, 489, 684 n. 15, 708
Verlaine, Paul 97, 687 n. 49
Vermeer, Johannes 83, 93
Vermeylen, Pierre 191
Verstappen, Wim 441, 449, 474, 491
Vertov, Dziga 26, 34, 39, 46, 62-3, 74, 82,
89, 95, 121, 129, 147, 151-3, 157-8,
164,180,188,199-200,207,212,
215, 233, 238, 245, 296, 377, 410-12,
414-17, 493, 542, 553, 566-7, 600,
654, 657 n. 3, 658 n. 4, 659 n. 2, 660
n. 9, 664 n. 26, 667 n. 51, 682 n.,
683 n. 9
Viany, Alex 387, 390, 706
Vidal, Jean 485
Vidor, King 58-9, 215, 261
Vierny, Sacha 375
Viertel, Salka 295, 332
Vigo, Jean 45, 50, 70, 89, 92, 174, 410,
421, 481, 658 n. 4, 662 n. 5
Villiers, Frangois 311, 705
Visconti, Luchino 440, 683 n. 5
Visions ofEight (1973) 482
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Vivre sous les bombes (1966) 506
voice-of-god, see commentary
voice-over narration 37, 135, 160-1,
169, 274, 285, 305, 317, 341, 362,
369, 379, 390, 403, 408, 434, 450,
460, 464, 472, 509, 513, 516, 520,
538, 541, 552-4, 584, 591-2, 611-
12, 663 n. 14, 680 n. 22; see also
commentary
Voices from Baliapal (1988) 606
Volpi, Mario 433, 707
Von Wangenheim, Gustav 146, 193
Vosstanie rybakov (Revolt of the
Fishermen, 1934) 193
Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon,
1902) 638
voyeurism 418, 421-2, 453, 692 n. 12;
see also camera, hidden; 'life-
caught-unawares'; observational
method
Vstrechnyy (Counterplan, 1932) 155, 159
W
Waintrop, Jdouard 25, 653
Wajda, Andrzej 365
Waldron, Gloria 348
Walk in the Sun, A (1946) 331
Wallace, Henry A. 260
Walsh, Raoul 331
Wang Bin 389
Wang Bing 620, 683 n. 5
Wang Decheng 428, 581, 707
Wapikoni Mobile 188
war enemy, representation in
documentary: in 400 Million 241-2;
in Ciel 509, 511-12; in Front 299,
301-3; in Know YourEnemy:Japan
324, 326, 329-30; in Spanish Earth
217
Warner Brothers 199-200, 301
Watt, Harry 46, 270, 280, 314, 338, 340,
345, 354-5, 410, 657 n. 3
Watts, Bill 237, 261
Wave, The, see Redes
We Are Building, see W Bouwen
Wegner, Hans 40-3, 60, 79, 89, 110, 114,
122, 125, 131, 136-7, 144, 155-6,
159-60, 172, 243, 305, 323, 374, 390,
433, 447, 449-50, 561, 627, 662 n. 3,
663 n. 20, 674 n. 36, 677 n. 1
Weigel, Helene 386, 706
Weill, Claudia 568, 573
Weinberg, Herman G. 214, 251
Welles, Orson 39, 211, 359, 408, 674
n. 35
Western Electric 129
Westmoreland, William 520
Wexler, Haskell 474, 567
White Flood (1940) 261
Why We Fight (series, 1942-1945) 212,
245, 309, 341-2
Wigwam, De (Brandende Staal, aka
FlamingArrow, 1912) 51-3, 659 n.
1, 702
W jBouwen (We Are Building, 1930)
29-30, 88, 103-111, 114-15, 117-19,
122-3, 130-31, 133, 140, 161-2, 176,
187, 661 nn. 1, 2, 702
wind motif, in Ivens's work 48, 150,
247, 469, 475, 478-81, 483-90, 628-
9, 633-8, 670 n. 37, 687 n. 52
Windrose, Die (1957) 28, 350, 375, 386-7,
389-90, 396, 399, 405, 432, 440, 482,
581, 685 n. 28, 696, 706
Winsten, Archer 237, 269, 280, 559
Winton, Ezra 27, 36, 188
Wiseman, Frederick 39, 414, 584, 610
Woman of the Sea (not realised, 1944)
332
Woman's Face, A (1941) 292
Women are Warriors (1942) 300, 306
| 777
INDEX
778 1
women, representation in documentary
185, 189, 326-7, 385-91, 496, 509,
575, 589-93; motherhood 204, 215,
265, 270, 314, 390-2, 470, 536, 590;
role in war effort 300, 304, 306, 347,
459, 462, 464, 522-3, 531-3, 535,
589-90; women's labour 162, 265,
277-8, 367, 389-90, 445-6, 488, 549-
52, 559, 589, 593; see also feminism
Women's International Democratic
Federation (WIDF) 386-8, 390
Wong Howe, James 330
Wong, Fred 339
Workers Film and Photo League (WFPL)
46, 110-11, 146, 188-9, 197-8, 200-1,
203, 215, 221, 259, 262, 289, 332,
335, 343, 410, 667 nn. 47, 49, 675
n.43
Workers International Relief (WIR)
111, 146, 173-5, 183, 190-3, 197, 663
n. 22, 667 n. 49
workers, see labour, manual; labour
movement
World Federation of Trade Unions
(WFTU) 373
World Festival of Youth and Students,
3rd (East Berlin, 1951) 368-9
World in Action, The (series, Canada,
1942-1945) 306, 310, 320
World is Rich, The (1947) 346
World ofPlenty (1943) 346
World Peace Council (WPC) 364, 482,
560; 2"a Congress (Warsaw, 1950)
364-6; see also Peace Will Win
World War II 209, 212, 269-70, 277, 296-
312, 320-3, 327-32, 335, 386, 407-8,
633; trauma of 214, 351, 358, 372,
415, 497
World Without End (1954) 346, 384
World's Fair: New York (1939) 259, 261,
283; Paris (1937) 213
Worst ofFarm Disasters (1941) 284-5,
704
Wright, Basil 46, 126, 205, 245, 280,
348, 410, 570, 657 n. 3
Writers' Congress (UCLA, 1943) 321,
330
Wu Guoying 387-8, 580, 706
Wu Yinxian 223
Wyler, William 297, 304, 674 n. 35
WyscigPokoju Warszawa-Berlin-Praga
(Peace Tour 1952, 1952) 364, 371-4,
706
x
Xi'an 223, 227, 230, 235-6, 248-9, 636,
650, 669 n. 21, 671 n. 39
Xie Tian 581, 707
Xuan Phuong 46, 529-30, 545, 696, 709
Y
Yan Yu 618
Yanan and the Eighth Route Army (1939)
223
Yang Zhiju 46
Ye Jianying 614
Yelin, Saul 452, 707
Yin Guangzhong 636, 710
You Have Seen TheirFaces (1937) 344
Young, Terence 493
YourJob in Germany (1945) 328
youth 32, 106, 150, 153-4, 157, 160, 204,
216-17, 222, 236, 240, 356, 368-70,
372, 374, 415, 417, 435, 445, 450-1,
488, 491, 494, 543, 548, 561, 569,
571, 593, 604, 628, 634, 638, 648-9,
654, 663, 673 n. 24, 679 n. 13, 702
YouTube 39, 88, 101, 295, 518
Yuan Muzhi 223
Yutkevich, Sergei 147, 155
THE CONSCIENCE OF CINEMA
Z
Zadkine, Ossip 497
Zalzman, Abraham 40, 43-4, 224, 332,
405, 414-15, 459, 476, 669 ni. 23, 672
ni. 12, 673 n. 30, 677 nl. 56
Zanuck, Darryl 330
Zarkhi, Aleksandr 359
Zavattini, Cesare 43 1-2, 462, 684 ni.21
Zemlya (Earth, 1930) 149, 155, 159
Zemlya zhazhdet (The Earth Thirsts,
1930) 147
Zero de conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933)
174
Zhang Jianhua 639
Zhang Tongdao 603, 608, 690 n. 6I 779
Zhao Chunlan 618
Zhdanov, Andrei 98, 152, 358, 360, 368,
380, 678 n. 5
Zhou Enlai 224, 227, 242, 249, 562,
572-4, 576-7, 582-3, 586, 594, 601,
613-16, 620, 709
Zhu De 225, 248-9
Zuiderzeewerken (Zuiderzee, 1930-1933)
29-30, 33-34, 59, 78, 99, 105-6, 108,
110,1116-28,1134, 143-4, 162-6,1169-
70, 172-3, 176, 181, 189, 197, 355,
363, 375, 413, 418, 446, 464, 479,
486, 490, 514, 531, 559, 612, 637,
653, 661 n 2, 662 nfl. 2, 3, 8, 703
Zvenigora (1928) 155, 661 n. 17
INDEX