Name: Reza Fahlevi

Student ID: 215403895

Joris Ivens

Joris Ivens was a Dutch documentary filmmaker whose career has spanned for over 75
years. He was born in 1898 in Nijmegen, Netherlands (Schoots 2000, p. 11) as Georg Henri
Anton Ivens. His father owned a series of photographic shops and his mother was an artist, as
the Dutch painter Jan Toorop, who painted her portrait twice, said, ‘She is a woman with taste
– artistic, calm and intelligent’ (p. 14). In the family of artists, it is no surprise that Joris
developed an interest in filmmaking since his early age. When he was 13 years old, he made
his first film called De Wigwam (1912), which is a ‘Cowboys and Indians’ featuring his family
(p. 17). Since then, he has made several notable films such as Bridge (1928), Rain (1929) as
city symphonies; The Spanish Earth (1936) as a propaganda; Indonesia Calling (1946) as to
oppose the Dutch government to re-colonise Indonesia; 17th Parallel: Vietnam in War (1968)
and Far from Vietnam (1967) as to oppose the Vietnam War. Joris Ivens made documentary
films for most of his career; many of them about revolutionary struggles and the relationship
between humans and nature.

In his early filmmaking careers, Joris Ivens worked alone as director, scriptwriter,
cinematographer and editor; he made documentaries using his 35mm handheld camera. He
made a comment that the time of the one-man documentary was over and instead of working
alone, Ivens commented that a documentary must be made with ‘A collective of people who
understand each other’ (Ivens 1969, p. 212). Ivens’s inspiration for documentary filmmaking
came in the 1920s when Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (1925) was screened in Filmliga. Vertov
introduced the pure documentary that shows the reality as it was, in which Ivens found it
appealing (Schoots, p. 34-38). The Soviet Experiments did not only influence Ivens, but also
the British avant-garde movement (in which he participated in the group later). Unlike the
German Expressionism or the French avant-garde, the British avant-garde emphasized
documentary filmmaking as a medium to portray the realism, in which John Grierson said ‘A
reaction from the art world of the early and middle twenties’ (O’Pray 2003, p. 41). The British
avant-garde movement was influenced by the political situations at that time as well as
underlying influence of a Soviet-style commitment that shared together with the early
surrealism movement (p. 42). In this report, I will use Rain as an example for Joris Ivens’s
work.
 In Rain, Joris Ivens showed a documentation of Amsterdam during a rainstorm. What’s
interesting about Rain is not about the rain itself, it could’ve happened anywhere, but it’s a
compilation of beautiful images about the people and the environment during the rainstorm
(Balasz 1952, p. 175-176). Ivens composed the Kuleshov effect as his dialectical approach, and
we’ll get to it eventually. Here are the chronologies that showed in Rain:

 Amsterdam before the rain shows inhabitants, the canals, the architectures and the
rooftops are blending together. The residents are minding their own business.
 Rain slowly sends minuscule ripples through a canal and the droplets rapidly showered
the streets; a breeze picks up; birds start to fly away from the rain; the umbrellas started
to rise, obscuring the physiognomies of each individual.
 Focus shift has altered to different perspectives such as rooftops, boats and trams. The
rain slowly decreased its intensity. Now, instead of individuals, we see the natures as
they were showered. The rain interacts with them as it starts filling the dam, the canals
and the gutter from the pipes. The rooftops are obscured as well.
 Rain stops. Amsterdam returns to its status quo. The remnants of the rain still exist; the
streets are silvered with the reflection of the pond caused by the rain; the dew remains
to adhere in natures until it vaporised. Everywhere people are emerging from indoors.
Amsterdam returns to its vibrant state.

Joris Ivens’s personal approach is connecting the people and nature through a visual poetry
and rhythm. Like in every city symphony, it must have a rhythm in it. Vertov did it in Man
with a Movie Camera (1929) by showing how the cameraman operates the camera behind the
scene, while at the same time, we see the footage of what the cameraman is shooting. In Rain,
we see the similar shot, such as black umbrellas fill the scene which seems to ebb and flows
like the water themselves as the people beneath them moves. We can follow Ivens’s rhythm by
paying attention to where the water is falling into a canal in the following shot. Those shots
have a symbolic meaning that man and nature are enduring the same problem: Rainstorm.
Could the rain be a metaphor? You could not tell because Ivens never explained his work, but
what you can tell is that the director’s effort to tell a story is about man’s interaction with the
nature and Amsterdam’s interaction with water; the water can either hurt or help the city
(Cowie 1979).

The structural approach in Rain is a silent black and white documentary film, made with a
handheld 35mm camera. Ivens originally collaborated with Mannus Franken during the pre-
production of Rain, but they became estranged and Franken’s contribution was only as an
assistant director and a script assistant. Ivens directed the film by himself, drifting away from
Franken’s vision (Schoot, p. 57-58). Most of the shots are static. Shots varied from different
locations, such as trams, rooftops, cars, streets and canals; each of them presents various
perspectives of the cities. Each shot is connected with jarring cuts that sometimes teleport to a
different location. Ivens also made shots that visually looks similar, which is the people with
their black umbrellas and the canals, which the droplets showered them (Delmar 1979, p. 15-
17).

Ivens’s dialectical approach in Rain is the Kuleshov’s effect. In Rain, we see that the
inhabitants and nature are two different aspects and therefore, isn’t related to each other.
Kuleshov effect proved that if an audience watches two different shots in succession, they will
assume that the shots are related (Pudovkin 1974, p. 184). In Rain, there are two examples of
the Kuleshov effect: The first scene is the rain steadily falling into a canal, then we moved to a
man to get his groceries indoors, he moves quickly. From that sequence, we can figure it out
that the man has sensed the rain and therefore, he must move faster. The second scene is a
woman step on a tram, then the next shot is the street-passing below. We can assume that the
shot of the street is taken from the woman’s point of view from where she sits. Ivens wanted
us to imagine how a person see/interacts with a nature during a rainstorm. This is what Ivens
wanted us to understand that the people and nature are complementing each other. This
approach remained important to him for his future works. Later, he used the same effect when
he directed 17th Parallel: Vietnam in War.

In the end, Joris Ivens remains an important figure in the documentary filmmaking. His
contribution as a documentary filmmaker remains one of the most important work ever existed
and he himself became an influential figure in the history of documentary filmmaking. In a
career that has been spanned more than 50 years, Ivens managed to introduce a socialist method
of filmmaking while he avoids being too political himself.

References

- 17th Parallel: Vietnam in War 1967, film, Argos Films; Capi Films, France
- Balazs, B 1952, The Theory of the Film, p. 175-176. London: Denis Dobson.
- Cowie, P 1979, Dutch Cinema: An Illustrated History. London: Tantivy Press.
- Delmar, R 1979. Joris Ivens, p. 15-17. London: Educational Advisory Service, British
Film Institute.
- Ivens, J 1969, The Camera and I, p. 212. New York: International Publishers.
[Accessed via Deakin Online Library]
- Man with a Movie Camera 1929, film, VUFKU, Moscow.
- O’Pray, M 2003, Avant-garde film: forms, themes and passions, p. 41-42. London; New
York: Wallflower.
- Pudovkin, V 1974, Sobranie Sochinenii, volume I, p. 184. Moscow: Kinopechat,
- Regen 1929, film, Capi-Holland, Netherlands
- Schoots, H 2000, Living Dangerously: A biography of Joris Ivens/ Hans Schoots, p. 11,
14, 34-38, 57-58. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press