The Films of Joris Ivens: Humanitarian Principles and Debatable Political Allegiances (Web Exclusive)
by Mitchell Abidor

Joris Ivens, whose filmmaking career spanned more than fifty years and covered much of the planet, is unquestionably one of the cinema’s greatest left-wing documentarists. Ivens’s journey was not simply a geographical one. Born into the comfortable Dutch middle-class at the turn of the twentieth century, he evolved from poetic avant-gardism to militant communism during the Stalin years. In the years following the Sino-Soviet split, he continued to evolve and found his way via the Cuban Revolution and the Indochinese fight against the United States to Maoism. His political evolution, however, was also accompanied by an important aesthetic evolution. The life and films of Joris Ivens are thus exemplary not only because of his consistently radical political stance but also because they reveal many of the problems inherent in being a militant documentary filmmaker.

Born in Nijmegen in the Netherlands in 1898, Joris Ivens (pronounced Yoris Eevens) was attracted to film as an adolescent—his father owned a photography business—an interest encouraged by his family. His first film, made when he was thirteen, was The Wigwam (1911). In this short film young Ivens already demonstrated an impressive knowledge of film. The Western tale, complete with costumed cowboys and Indians, also shows the influence of Georges Méliès on its youthful director: in its opening shots the cast—all members of the Ivens family—vanish one by one right before our eyes.

Ivens’s early work was marked by a heavy dose of the poetic aestheticism of filmmakers like Fernand Léger in Ballet Mécanique (1924) or Dimitri Kirsanoff and his Brumes d’Automne (1929), films in which plot takes no part, and in which shapes, objects, and movement are the focus. Ivens’s Études de mouvements à Paris (1928) is an assemblage of images of speeding cars, crowds, and order coming out of disorder on the streets of Paris. The Bridge (1928) is another of his formal exercises, reducing an Amsterdam bridge to its component parts, all metal and geometric shapes, blended and edited into a symphony of the products of industry. Perhaps his most fully realized work along these lines was Rain (1929), a poetic fifteen-minute film shot on the streets of Amsterdam during a rain shower. The film is a painterly suite of umbrellas massed and isolated, of puddles and canals and the drops falling onto them, of people hurrying and strolling in the rain. (Each of these short films can be viewed on YouTube.)

Ivens never fully abandoned this early cinematic mode. Throughout his career, alongside and even within his political films, he sought beauty. There are few films as romantically Parisian as La Seine a rencontré Paris, made in 1957, when Ivens was already decades into his life of militant filmmaking. This short film travels the Seine to reveal the life on and along the banks of the river—the artists, the lovers, the bateaux-mouches, and the barges—all of it accompanied by a romantic score and a poem by Jacques Prévert read by Serge Reggiani. As Ivens said in an interview in Rosalind Delmar’s Joris Ivens: 50 Years of film-making (London: British Film Institute, 1979), “It’s not a matter of here’s the artist, there’s the political person. It’s simply that at certain moments I need to do something else.”

But Ivens incorporated his aesthetic interests into virtually all his films. Praise of work and the people who do it, of the selflessness of labor in socialist societies, and of the cold beauty of machinery features early and late in Ivens’s films. His film Song of Heroes (1932), about the construction of the steel plant in Magnitogorsk and the work in the coal fields that supply it, the first film made in the Soviet Union by invitation to a foreigner, is a compendium of images of machines and the men and women who use them. In its aestheticizing of the workplace and labor, the film is markedly similar to nonpolitical films like The Bridge and Philips-Radio (also known as Industrial Symphony, 1930), made in a factory of the great Dutch radio manufacturer. The motif of work and its beauty is present decades later in his homage to the Vietnamese in their fight against the United States, The Threatening Sky (1966), in which we see men and women working in the rice fields between American bombing raids, as we also see in his final films shot in China, the twelve-hour How Yukong Moved the Mountains.

In keeping with Ivens’s communism, which places a premium on the ways humanity transfigures the world, the products of industry are at the heart of his films, both the aesthetic and the political. But the beauty of nature is not ignored. It is central in The Mistral (1966), about the wind that blows through the south of France, but it is perhaps most lovingly presented in Power and the Land (1940), Ivens’s documentary about rural electrification in the American heartland. Ivens shows the benefits of citizens forming cooperatives that will bring electricity to their farms, demonstrating the myriad ways electrification simplifies life on the farm, not just in the bringing of abundant light but also the easy availability of ice, washing machines, and electric clothes irons. Ivens’s film was shot in a magnificent rural American setting, presented in images of rolling fields and farmers straight out of the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton, all of this against the folksy narration of Stephen Vincent Benét. In Power and the Land, Ivens gives us a European’s idealized vision of the American landscape with an overlay of Popular Front leftism.

Ivens’s politics were inspired by his support for the Soviet Union, which dated to the 1920s. Ivens regularly claimed that he had never joined the Communist Party of any of the countries in which he lived. Late in his life, once in an interview published in a pamphlet from a Dutch Maoist group and later in an unpublished manuscript, he did acknowledge that he had been a member of the Dutch party for a few years. He was invited to visit the Soviet Union by the filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin in 1930, followed by two other visits in the next three years. In 1933 he “converted” to militant filmmaking with the film Borinage, a brutally naturalist account of the life of miners in Belgium. It was from this point that Ivens began to travel the world, making documentaries about liberation struggles in nations such as China, with The 400 Million (1939), and Indonesia with Indonesia Calling (1946). In the latter case, his identification with the nation’s struggle against Dutch colonialism led him to be named the Film Commissioner of the new Indonesian Republic. His identification with the Soviet Union, and after the war the entire Soviet camp (where he lived for nine years), was nearly total, but the Sino-Soviet split of 1962 led him to question that identification, though not his radical commitment.

Accompanying Ivens’s focus on industry was the emphasis he placed on the masses. His concern was the heroism of the collectivity, both in actual battle and in daily work. The title of his 1933 film on the construction of Magnitogorsk, Song of Heroes, can be applied to all Ivens’s political films.

Cinematically, this emphasis on the masses was not an entirely positive thing. Ivens’s avoidance of the individual as hero often led him to a total depersonalization of the work process. Some of this grows out of Ivens’s aestheticizing tendencies. To take an early nonpolitical example, Industrial Symphony is a film set and shot entirely in a factory during a single workday. The viewer feels the workers are not only involved in the construction of a product but are also equally reduced to component parts of the framed image. In Das Lied der Ströme (The Song of the Rivers, 1954) the thousands of workers we see along the Yangtze are certainly involved in changing nature, but it is the simple beauty of mass and movement we are taken with, as we were on a smaller scale in Rain. The workers in front of blast furnaces in Song of Heroes and the crane digging at the earth in New Land (1933) have an unquestionably impressive effect, but we are never shown what the work means to the actual worker. And in those films which do show us the drama of the individual, most notably in Pierwsze lata (The First Years, 1947) they do so in such an optimistically propagandist fashion that we don’t believe in the reality of it.

This depersonalization is exacerbated by the prevalence of voice-over narration, which further removes the human and the personal presence from this and other Ivens films. Ivens would later explain that he was a partisan of voice-over narration, since he felt that workers were often embarrassed to give voice to their own opinions and feelings, but also because he simply didn’t feel comfortable with the technical aspects of direct sound. He credited the wife and collaborator of his final years, Marceline Loridan, for his realization that direct sound was the way to go, and his final films, shot in China, makes use of it.

Ivens took advantage of the voice-over technique to mold the tales as he wished, with voice-over doing the work done in feature films by actors. This is the case in films like The First Years and The Song of the Rivers. In these ostensibly documentary films, Ivens resorted to the use of devices borrowed from fiction films, including narratives with plot and character development. This hindered their believability as documentary films, but increased their utility as propaganda works.

As Ivens’s career progressed, and as he increasingly freed himself from the Soviet Union, he managed to bring the individual and the masses into a much closer relationship. The people of Vietnam in The 17th Parallel (1968) and Laos in The People and Their Guns (1970), because they have learned to live under attack, and because they are—as individual men and women—allowed to tell us their experiences themselves and are not constricted within the carefully composed and circumscribed frame of Ivens’s earlier films, are not only political heroes, but heroic human beings.

It is in this sense that the mammoth How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976) serves for Ivens as a kind of self-criticism. The workers not only work but they also talk about their work. We are no longer presented with a mere representation of work and workers. Instead, we find out what the work means to them. In addition, the work is, for the most part, nonheroic (harvesting seaweed, for example) and is presented to us nonheroically. It is simply a job performed daily, but that nevertheless changes the world. In contrast to the almost cardboard heroes of Song of Heroes, with its Young Communists braving the conditions in the Urals while creating a new world, but doing so in so unidimensional a way that its effectiveness is neutralized. In Ivens’s Chinese film there is an episode which is roughly equivalent to the construction of Magnitogorsk in Song of Heroes, but in the former we actually get to meet the workers in the city, and the film is infinitely more effective for it.

Ivens never hesitated to recreate events for the camera, feeling that this in no way interfered with the documentary truth or nature of the film. Even though several of his films are entirely restaged or are for all intents and purposes scripted, as in The First Years and Italy Is Not a Poor Country (1960), he insisted that he only made documentaries. Ivens never hid his tendency to recreate or even create events. Cutting into a close-up in the middle of a scene can only be done if there are multiple takes from (or, far more unlikely, multiple cameras shooting the same scene), and Ivens’s films up to his film on Laos are often cut in the classic long shot/medium shot/close-up style, little of which is possible without the restaging of events.

This staging and restaging occur in regard to elements small and the large, the almost subliminal and the obvious. Borinage contains several examples of this. In a scene in which a worker is being evicted from his home, he is visited by a fellow worker. The latter has in his pocket a copy of Drapeau Rouge, the newspaper of the Belgian Communist Party, carefully folded so that we can see exactly what newspaper he is reading and what party he represents. Communist solidarity with those losing their homes and their presence in the struggle is thus very simply expressed through minimal means. Again, in Borinage, Ivens had the workers restage a demonstration because he and his camera were not present for the actual event. Even though it its restaged, the feel and meaning of documentary remain, because these are the real workers restaging the real struggle in which they were engaged

Late in his life, Ivens spoke to Claire Devarrieux in Entretiens avec Joris Ivens (Paris: Éditions albatros, 1979) of the general question of reconstruction of events, a dispute he asserted he was “tired of.” “Are the authenticity of the place and the action the sole guarantees of truth, or are we allowed to intervene and present the truth as the truth?” He admitted to reconstructing events in many films and in many ways, but in his eyes, it was all justified. “In the same way that the documentary, or the documentary method, enriches the fiction [film], [fiction] is an injection of blood.” Fiction in documentaries “provides “a supplement of real power” to documentaries.

Ivens’s film on Indonesia’s post-WWII fight for independence, Indonesia Calling, a film financed by the Waterfront Unions of Australia, contains an example of restaging which demonstrates the “supplement of real power” to which Ivens referred. A boycott of Dutch ships bound for Indonesia, which had been called by Australian dock workers, had been almost totally successful. But word comes that a ship with an Indian crew has left Sydney for Indonesia. The Indonesians and their Australian dockworker allies take a motorboat out after the strikebreaking Indians to tell them to turn back, appealing to their sense of anti-imperialist solidarity. But it is all, apparently, to no avail, and the leaders of the boycott head back to port. But we are then shown a series of brief shots on the strike-breaking ship of Indian crew members who have changed their minds and decided to abandon their Dutch ship in solidarity with the Indonesians. These shots violate the film’s established point of view, which was ostensibly with the Indonesians at the time, breaking the documentary believability of the film. But maintaining a consistent cinematic point of view mattered less to Ivens than maintaining a consistent political point of view.

At the time Indonesia Calling was being shot, the Dutch government, of which Indonesia was a no longer a colony, attempting to convince the Indonesian people that they were alone in their struggle, that no one cared about their fight. A print of Indonesia Calling was smuggled into Indonesia and the images of the solidarity of the Australian working class gave them renewed strength. This was the effect Ivens sought, and if it meant violating the rules of documentary cinema, let the rules be damned. Reaching and touching a large audience was the goal.

And his audience was vast. The Song of the Rivers, made for the World Trade Union Federation, and certainly not one of Ivens’s strongest films, was made in eighteen different versions and languages and was seen by 250 million people, forty million in China alone. Made in 1954, it presents the stories of workers on six rivers (the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Nile, the Yangtze, the Volga, and the Amazon), and though the bright and optimistic second half of the film, which demonstrates in too facile a form the solidarity of workers all around the world and the beauties of socialism on the Volga and the Yangtze, it is not nearly as powerful as the harshly condemnatory first half of the film, which includes footage from Leo Hurwitz’s Native Land (1942). For a filmmaker like Ivens, a film viewed by 250 million people and which demonstrates their force and power, and which aids them in their struggle, cannot be all bad.

This leads us to two glaring questions and problems in the oeuvre of Ivens: the utility and veracity of information presented in his films.

Ivens’s masterpiece, one where all his impulses meld perfectly, is The Spanish Earth (1937). One of the great—if not the great—film on the Spanish Civil War, it is a film thoroughly committed to the Spanish Republic, with a decidedly communist tilt that few today notice. All the speakers at a rally shown in the film are leaders of the Spanish Communist Party or foreign supporters of the party. The film celebrates the Spanish fight against fascism, its native form and its German and Italian supporters. The bravery and tenacity under bombardment of the Spanish people is highlighted every minute. The film particularly celebrates the incorporation of all combatant units of the Republic into the People’s Army, a professionalization of the Republican forces carried out at the demand of the communists and the Soviets. But thanks to the script, written by Ernest Hemingway, there is none of the browbeating we see in Ivens’s most dedicated communist works. This is not a blindly optimistic film: death is something that lies in wait, and victory is far from certain. Individual fighters for the Republic are presented, so the stakes in the war are not buried in mass propaganda. The Spanish Earth is a film in praise of the Spanish people that shows the stakes as they apply to individual Spaniards. The individuals we see—officers, soldiers, even a baker whose bread bears the initials of the Communist-supported union federation—are all part of a mass in motion.

The Spanish Earth is still a film that inspires, but the tone of Ivens’s films on the Soviet Union and postwar Soviet camp—Song of Heroes, Our Russian Front (1942), The First Years, Peace Will Win (1951)—are especially grating to our eyes and ears. The bright new world being constructed in 1933 in Song of Heroes we know to have been a chimera, while the statements in Our Russian Front about Russia’s preparedness for a Nazi attack and how they were fighting for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were simply false, as were the references to the freedom and independence of the nations of Eastern Europe in The First Years and Peace Will Win. All of this can lead us to question the honesty of the filmmaker.

This is, however, too easy. The distance we have traveled since then allows us to dismiss the idea that a new world was being constructed in Eastern Europe during and after the war, but at the time Ivens’s films were being made, the situation was considerably different. Hope and belief still existed, so even if problems were evident, as they were to Ivens, as he later claimed, it was possible, or should we say necessary, for him to think they’d be overcome. Looming over every political choice was the Cold War, when for many if not most intellectuals of the left it was a case of one camp or the other, the Soviet Union or the United States. For Ivens, as for many left-wing intellectuals, from Jean-Paul Sartre to the Catholic thinker Emmanuel Mounier, there was never any doubt which side he was on: the films he made expressed that unambiguously.

We can criticize Ivens as we can criticize all communists of the Stalinist era. It’s legitimate to question whether his sincerity exonerated him of the charge of lying to his audience, though there are indications that we can confidently find him guilty of knowingly obfuscating the truth. Proof of which can be found in a memoir (Ma vie balagan, Paris: Robert Laffont, 2008) written by his third wife, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, who collaborated with him on How Yukong Moved the Mountains and his final film, Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind, 1988). Loridan-Ivens wrote of how the Chinese authorities kept an eye on all their movements during the shoot, and how when they attempted to shoot footage of workers leaving a factory, the workers were dressed in their best clothes. She wrote how, after a visit to Sinkiang, they had “refused to continue their work. The film we’d shot there was too fake to be shown.”

When Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and the leader of the Gang of Four, viewed footage shot by the two foreigners, she was incensed by it, claiming too many poor people could be seen. A people’s tribunal had requested sixty-one cuts in the film. The entire dilemma of the communist filmmaker is summed up in Loridan-Ivens’s account, “Will we speak out [in France] of our problems with Jiang Qing? Joris and I decided not to. We though that doing so risked to feed even more into the anti-Chinese concert raging in the West.” As she said years after the making of their Maoist documentary, “We were dupes of our era.”

Ivens remained a hardline Maoist until well into the Eighties, though he expressed reservations about the path China was following domestically in the early years of that decade. The former semi-official filmmaker of the communist movement of the Soviet camp faithfully repeated the Chinese line in foreign affairs, seeing the U.S.S.R. as the real threat to world peace. He wrote in in a letter to a friend, “If the Soviet party and government clique is not stopped by a combined effort from Europe and America I fear the worst. All of Europe could one day become a kind of Finland.” The director of films celebrating the glory of Vietnam now backed Cambodia in the war between the Khmer Rouge-led state and Vietnam, and even supported the Chinese atack on Vietnam. As his Dutch biographer Hans Schoots (Living Dangerously: A Biography of Joris Ivens, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000) wrote, “Vietnam had allied itself with the Soviet Union and thus belonged to the enemy camp.”

Ivens and Loridan returned to China for Ivens’s final film, A Tale of the Wind, completed in 1988. In this strange work, a mix of travel film and poetic tribute to China, gone is the praise of the construction of a new world. Instead, A Tale of the Wind is about what never changes. As Loridan-Ivens wrote, this was “a poetic and philosophical film about the eternal nature of Chinese civilization, which has survived all the changes in dynasties and revolutions of the past three thousand years.” The tale is told through the person of an old man, an asthmatic European, played by the asthmatic Ivens himself, who is seeking in China the breath that will save his life. The shoot itself was interrupted several times by the elderly Ivens’s health problems. The final image is a fitting one. Ivens, sitting on a chair in the desert, his magnificent white mane blown about by the wind. He rises from the chair and sets off into the desert, vanishing from view.

A Tale of the Wind was shown at the Venice Film Festival in September 1988 and greeted with loud and long applause. The film’s premiere was followed several months later by the Tiananmen Square uprising in Beijing, and Ivens, the lifelong communist, joined with the anti-communist Bernard-Henri Lévy in forming an international group of intellectuals to support the students’ demands for democracy. After attending a pro-student demonstration in mid-June, Ivens fell gravely ill, was hospitalized, and died on June 28, 1989. According to his widow, as he lay dying, unable to speak, he posed a question on a piece of paper: “And China? And China?”

Joris Ivens intended his films to be direct interventions in the ongoing struggles of the peoples of the world, and in this he succeeded. Perhaps only Chris Marker equals him in his internationalism. But it is also true that many of his films have aged badly. His cinematic paeans to Stalin’s U.S.S.R., to the nations of the Soviet bloc, and Maoist China ring hollow now. But as Ivens said about himself, and his political and cinematic course, he had always been “at one with [my] conscience. I was honest. I was myself.”

Distribution or Online Viewing Sources:

• Several DVD box sets of films by Joris Ivens are available for purchase on amazon.com or available for viewing on Prime Video.

• A number of his films are also available for viewing on YouTube or OK.ru.

• Ivens biographer Thomas Waugh’s article on The Spanish Earth can be found on Cineaste here. 

Mitchell Abidor is an author and translator whose translation of Maurice Dommanget’s Sylvain Maréchal, The Godless Man, was recently published by Haymarket Books.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 1