Front matter
The Works of Joris Ivens 1926-1989
FRAMING Amsterdam FILM Ho EYE FILM INSTITUTE Press
NETHERLANDS
Part II
Torn Curtain: Ivens the Cold Warrior 1946-1956 351 The ‘Poet’ Reborn? 1956-1965 401
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Conclusion: Qui s'arréte se trompe 653
Appendix: Films onIvens 695 Filmography 701 Reference List 711
Index 739
NOTES TO THE READER
Original-language titles of films are used in the filmography and reference list as well as upon first use in each chapter, followed by standard English translation (in italics) or the author’s English translation in the event that no official 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, whichever 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 otherwise 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 production 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 forty years, and like all scholarly undertakings and labours of love is a collective 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 Sergent, 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, Robert Maguire, and J.W. Smit; other early readers, the now departed Erik Barnouw, Peter Harcourt, and especially Jay Leyda.
My students in Joris Ivens seminars in 2006 and in 2011 for their generosity, curiosity, and commitment.
Literally dozens of research assistants and other students and former students, 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 Vitulano, 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, René Seegers, and Ephraim Smith, cinephile activists Randy Rowland and Kay Power, and programmers supreme Ezra Winton and Svetla Turnin.
Members of the Concordia University community, whose students, faculty, and staff have sustained and encouraged my work for almost forty years, individuals 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, Instructional 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 many years 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 professionalism, especially Jeroen Sondervan, Senior Commissioning Editor 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 Cinéaste; Scarecrow 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 California 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 Morrison 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 exemplary Jump 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 100: the Documentary Context’, Nijmegen 1998 (Kees Bakker); ‘Cinema without Borders', New York, 2002 (Wanda Bershen and Red Diaper Productions); Joris Ivens and China', 110th 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; Société franco-africaine de cinéma; 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,
Archives françaises du film; La Cinémathèque du ministère des affaires étrangères et de la coopération, Paris; La Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal; Chris Marker estate; DEFA-Stiftung, Berlin (especially Ralf Schenk and Günter 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; Staatliches 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 others) 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 André Stufkens singlehandedly enabled and inspired this book by his generosity, erudition, omniscience, and ineradicable smile - despite everything. Out of courtesy 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 ethical 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, courage 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 software and much much more, and for accompanying me in the realm of representation, politics, and desire.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION | 13
1 Joris Ivens, Portrait by Chris Marker (1963).
Chapter 1
‘Avant-garde’. Poster, 1931.
De Brug, 1928. Production Still.
De Wigwam, 1912. Frame capture.
Études des mouvements à Paris, 1927. Frame capture. De Brug, 1928. Frame capture.
De Brug, 1928. Frame capture.
Branding, 1929. Frame capture.
Regen (1929). Frame capture.
Regen (1929). Frame capture.
Chapter 2
11 Philips-Radio, 1931. Poster.
12 Borinage, 1934. Production still.
13 Wij Bouwen (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.
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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.
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 BipGoesto Town, 1941. Frame capture.
39 WorstofFarm Disasters, 1941. Frame capture. 40 Oil for Aladdin’s Lamp, 1941. Frame capture. 41 Our Russian Front, 1941. Frame capture.
42 OurRussian Front, 1941. Frame capture.
43 Action Stations, 1943. Frame capture.
44 Action Stations, 1943. Frame capture.
45 Know Your Enemy Japan, 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.
52 Pierwsze Lata [The First Years], 1949. Frame capture.
53 Pokójzdobedzieswiat [Peace Will Win], 1951. Frame capture.
54 Pokójzdobedzies$wiat [Peace Will Win] (1951). Frame capture.
55 Freundschaft siegt, 1952. Frame capture.
56 Freundschaft siegt, 1952. Frame capture.
57 Wyscig Pokóju Warszawa-Berlin-Praga [Peace Tour 1952], 1952. Frame capture.
58 Das Lied der Ströme, 1954. Frame capture.
59 Das Lied der Ströme, 1954. Frame capture.
60 Das Lied der Ströme, 1954. Frame capture.
61 Die Windrose, 1957. Frame capture.
62 Die Windrose, 1957. Frame capture.
63 Die Windrose, 1957. Frame capture.
64 MeinKind, 1955. Frame capture.
65 MeinKind, 1955. Frame capture.
66 Les Aventures de Till l'Espiégle, 1956. Frame capture.
Chapter 6
67 Lettres de Chine [Before (Early) Spring], 1958. Poster. 68 ..àValparaiso, 1962. Production still.
69 La Seine a rencontré Paris, 1957. Frame capture.
70 La Seine a rencontré Paris, 1957. Frame capture.
71 SixHundred 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 UItalia non è un paese povero, 1960. Frame capture. 75 LItalia non è un paese povero, 1960. Frame capture. 76 L'Italia non è un paese povero, 1960. Frame capture. 77 Demain à Nanguila, 1960. Frame capture.
78 Demain à Nanguila, 1960. Frame capture.
79 Carnet de Viaje, 1961. Frame capture.
80 Carnet de Viaje, 1961. Frame capture.
81 Unpueblo armado, 1961. Frame capture.
82 Un pueblo armado, 1961. Frame capture.
83 ...À Valparaiso, 1963. Frame capture.
84 ..AValparaiso, 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
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89 90
Rotterdam Europoort, 1966. Frame capture.
Rotterdam Europoort, 1966. Frame capture.
Chapter 7
Le Ciel, la terre [The Threatening Sky], 1966. Poster.
Le 17° Parallèle, 1968. Production still.
Le Ciel, la terre, 1966. Frame capture.
La hora des los hornos [The Hour of the Furnaces], 1968. Frame capture. Loin du Vietnam, 1967. Frame capture.
Loin du Vietnam, 1967. Frame capture.
Le 17° Parallèle, 1968. Frame capture.
Le 17° Parallèle, 1968. Frame capture.
Le Peuple et ses fusils, 1968. Frame capture.
Le Peuple et ses fusils, 1968. Frame capture.
Rencontre avec le président Ho Chi Minh, 1970. Production still.
Chapter 8
Comment Yukong déplaca les montagnes, 1976. Poster.
Comment Yukong déplaca les montagnes, 1976. Production still. Les Kazaks - minorité nationale, Sinkiang, 1977. Frame capture. Les Ouigours - minorité nationale, Sinkiang, 1977. Frame capture. Autour du pétrole: Taking, 1976. Frame capture.
L'Usine de générateurs, 1976. Frame capture.
Histoire d’un ballon: Le Lycee no. 31 à Pékin, 1976. Frame capture. Le Village des pécheurs, 1976. Frame capture.
Une caserne, 1976. Frame capture.
Le Professeur Tsien, 1976. Frame capture.
Une répétition à l'Opéra de Pékin, 1976. Frame capture. Entraînement au Cirque de Pékin, 1976. Frame capture.
Les Artisans, 1976. Frame capture.
Impressions d'une ville: Changhai, 1976. Frame capture.
La Pharmacie no. 3: Changhai, 1976. Frame capture.
Une femme, une famille, 1976. Frame capture.
Une histoire de vent, 1988. Poster.
Une histoire de vent, 1988. Production still.
Une histoire de vent, 1988. Frame capture.
Une histoire de vent, 1988. Frame capture.
Conclusion
122 Ivens retrospective, Paris, 2003. Poster.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FOREWORD BY ANDRÉ STUFKENS
Director European Foundation Joris Ivens
‘The next generation is sitting on the shoulder of the previous one’, Joris Ivens 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 people 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 2oth century. Later on, the legendary Jay Leyda devoted himself completing Ivens's first autobiography The Camera and I. 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 ideological 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 outspoken right wing artists like Céline, Pound, Koch, or Riefenstahl.
It was only when film studies matured in an academic context that academic 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 Loridan-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 countries, 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 symposia (1998 Nijmegen, 2002 New York, 2009 Nijmegen/Beijing), with scholars such as Michael Chanan, José Manuel Costa, Bert Hogenkamp, Charley Musser, 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 evidence 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, expanding, 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 spectrum of Ivens's film oeuvre, and at the same time with an intriguing, provoking 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.
FOREWORD BY BILL NICHOLS
Here, as we witness the vivid and tumultuous unfolding of a new century, comes a voice speaking to us from its past and its future. Tom Waugh’s dissertation 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 (University Microfilms Inc.) in the minimalist form that mimicked the typed dissertation 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 practice 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 theoretical 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 summary 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 Yukong Moved 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 greatest. 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 masculinity 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 modest to a flamboyant style, from memory to imagination, from shame to grace, from quotidian matters of our daily bread, to transcendent questions of our 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.
‘Documentary is the conscience of the cinema’, I told him. Since then I have never changed my mind.
The Conscience of Cinema is about a film mode that played that role throughout the world film industry of the 20!" century. It is about an artist who pushed documentary 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 20 century’ (Haudiquet, 1967), ‘the most famous documentarist of the century’ (Boulad, 1989), the ‘filmmaker of the documentary of witness [who] occupies a special place in the cinema’ (Lévesque, 1988), and ‘one of the cinema’s outstanding lyric poets... one of the greatest camera-eyes in the world’ (Garel, 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-seventies 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.
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Dutchman’ as a senior professor on the cusp of retirement in the 21“ century.
Why have I come back to Ivens after so long? For one thing the dissertation I defended in 1981, already huge, covered only the first 20 years 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 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 energized 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 São 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 latter 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) (Stufkens, personal communication, 2014). The Ivens estate, directed by Ivens’s lively octogenarian 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 retrospective. 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 festival in the world, mysteriously lost its name and thereafter became the ‘VPRO
IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary’. (The Amsterdam ‘disappearance’, a non-unanimous decision made officially for reasons of ‘branding’ [Ally Derks, personal communication, February 2014], echoed a similar occurrence in 1971 when the East German Leipzig documentary festival abolished its own Ivens prize, embarrassed that its favourite artist had veered pro-Chinese and anti-Soviet; happily the Prix Joris Ivens at Paris’s documentary festival Cinéma du réel, 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 outmoded in the post-auteurist phase in the discipline of film studies in the 21* 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 Sarris at Columbia University, I already had serious reservations about the various 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. IfI am contributing 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 culture, then all the better service to the short-attention spans of the digital generations. 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 resonating 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 21* 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'soeuvre is emblematic of the response of entire generations 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 contemporaries is continuously kept in view throughout the study.
Ivens's aesthetic and ideological trajectory has its origins in the Western European avant-garde of the late silent period, and moves, stimulated by
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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 1960s, 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 1980s, heralding the end of both Soviet and Chinese aspirations toward the party-state and accompanying utopias, and the advent of globalisation - though not the ‘end of history’.
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