INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS

NEW WORLD
PAPERBACKS
NW-S-1
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Briefly,
ABOUT THE BOOK

This is an autobiography of a great docu-

mentary film maker. It is both a history
of documentary film-making and Ivens'
personal story. The great events which
shook the world for the past four decad
es
can be seen through his documentary cam-
era not as newsreel but in human terms.
Joris Ivens tells the story of the disco
very
of an art. It will interest cameraman
or
Sunday snapshot taker, student of
the
documentary film, director or
average
movie-goer. The volume contains
photo-
graphs ofshots from many of the films
that have made his name famous.
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2013

http://archive.org/details/cameraiOOjori
INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS
381 Park Avenue South New York, N.Y. 10016

JORIS IVENS
THE CAMERA AND I
Joris Ivens
International
Publishers
New York
The
Camera
and I
This Edition
is published simultaneously by
International Publishers, New York,
and Seven Seas Books Berlin 1969
Second Printing 1974
ISBN 0-7178-0016-4

Photographs from the Netherlands Film Museum

Amsterdam, Cover photo from Marion Michelle Coll.

Copyright (c) Joris Ivens

Cover Design by Lothar Reher
Printed in the German Democratic Republic
CONTENTS

9 The History of This Book

11 Holland
47 U.S.S.R.
79 Borinage
101 Spain
139 China
185 U.S.A.
207 A Few Observations, 1945-1967
233 Addendum
263 The Films
Illustrations
The History of This Book

After the international successes of The Spanish Earth

and Four Hundred Million Joris Ivens was offered work
among the new film activities of the U.S. government
under Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. His first
film on an American subject was Power and the Land,
for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and by the time it
was completed, the war had engulfed the Netherlands
and most of Europe. For the next five years Joris Ivens
was an emigre resident of the United States. From this
new base his two chief contributions to the war effort
were Our Russian Front and Action Stations!, the latter
made for the National Film Board of Canada.
Inevitably, in the wish to work more directly on films
to explain the anti-fascist war to American audiences, he
moved to Hollywood. But, not very surprisingly, Holly-
wood was a series of dissatisfactions for Joris Ivens. Lots
of offers and projects, but little to show for the wartime
years he spent there. His major hope, a project for the
Capra unit, entitled Know Your Enemy, Japan, came to
an end in 1943 when the 20-reel draft that he prepared
with Helen Van Dongen and Sergeant Carl Foreman
made it clear that the Japanese Emperor was a war crim-
inal. The next months were spent in writing, with
Vladimir Pozner and Salka Viertel, a script for Greta
Garbo (Woman of the Sea) and failing to persuade her
to make it. The only actual film that came from his Holly-
wood efforts was The Story of G.I. Joe, on which he
worked as writer and advisor. Amongst these frustrations
Ivens found the opportunity that he had long wanted, to
write-in English-an account of his varied film-making
career, an account that might be some help to younger
film-makers.
 By 1944 with the help of Hope Corey and Jay Leyda
he had completed the record as far as Power and the
Land (1940). In 1944 he was offered an extremely prom-
ising post, that of Film Commissioner for the Nether-
lands East Indies. Then he left for Australia to set up a
unit, preparing to enter Indonesia after it was liberated
from the Japanese, and the book was swept into the back-
ground, "to be finished someday soon."
At that time there were two typescripts of the half-
book, one he took with him to the Pacific and one he left
with an American publisher who was interested in it.
When the Ivens group, then in Australia, heard that an
Indonesian independence movement had declared their
country a Republic and had begun to fight the Dutch
army, Ivens resigned his Dutch appointment. His resig-
nation brought about, among other things, a swift decline
in his American respectability. He had aligned himself
with rebels against the colonial authorities, and the
American publisher suddenly lost interest in a book by
Ivens. His first chapter was, however, published by the
braver Theatre Arts Monthly, and for twenty years this
was the only fragment of the memoirs that survived the
disappearance of both typescripts. For in the author's
hectic life and journeyings after 1945, his copy was lost.
The other copy miraculously re-appeared in 1965 in the
forgotten file of a London literary agent. That copy ist the
text used for this first edition of The Camera and I.
The author has supervised the editing of the text and
has added documents on his career after 1940, with the
help of Jan de Vaal, director of the Stichting Nederlands
Filmmuseum, where the Ivens archive is now deposited.

SEVEN SEAS PUBLISHERS

10
Holland
One of my earliest memories is of my father taking me
by the hand and leading me to the top of the highest of
the five hills on which Nymegen was built. There, at the
top of Het Valkhof, under a clump of ancient trees, was
a tablet which my father read to me and which later I
often read to myself. Here in 10 AD., Claudius Civilis,
leader of the men of the lowlands, stood and looked
down tooth-grinding over the R£/>z£-watching the legions
of Rome march into his country, legions which had al-
ready conquered most of Europe. We too looked down
at the Rhine, flowing broad and deep into Holland.
And there, below us, was our town of Nymegen with
its bold silhouette and its square tower of St. Stephen's
not looking at all like a "real" Dutch town. No wind-
mills. No canals. A market town of eighty thousand peo-
ple. A link between the river transportation through GerJ
many and the seaport of Rotterdam. Leading down to
the river, the steep, narrow streets were crowded with the
buildings of many centuries-Romanesque, Gothic, Ren-
aissance, Baroque, today-just as if the pages of a
history of architecture had been scattered and replaced
all out of sequence.
When the rest of Holland thinks of our part of the
country, it thinks of fruit (we are the center of an orchard
district) and of warm emotions. Our churches are more
colorful than the whitewashed churches of the north. Our
carnivals are gayer and our parties are a little more
boisterous than the carnivals and parties of the west.
This is where my life started. My family have been
photographers for two generations. My grandfather had
started to make portraits with the invention that Da-
guerre had generously given to anyone who wanted to
work with it: those penetrating portraits of quiet people
where pose and expression counted for more than drama
and originality.
His son, my father, studied the further developments
of photography to establish a commercial base: selling
13
apparatus, photographic materials and beginning a chain
of camera shops. There was never any question but that
I would follow him in the business, so from my first hour
I was tied to photography.
Our favorite game was Indians, played on the hills
outside town. At eleven my favorite books were about In-
dians, books by James Fenimore Cooper and Karl May.
The latter, a German writer who had never been in
America, wrote about "good" Indians exclusively. That
was what we preferred.
There was a white elephant in my father's shop-a
professional Pathe cinema camera, wooden and hand-
cranked, that my father despaired of selling to the citizens
of Nymegen. It was not a difficult transition from playing
our Indian games outside the town to thinking up an
Indian film for our own fun. The old Pathe camera was
the spur. I organized my two brothers, two sisters, parents
and naturally myself, as a double cast of Indians and
whites. When playing Indian roles our make-up was good
Dutch chocolate powder. My headdress, as the Indian
hero, Flaming Stream, was made of stolen turkey feathers.
The landscape exteriors turned out splendidly with sand
hills and heather fields doing duty as the Mojave Desert
and the Rocky Mountains. An old white horse played a
romantic role in the sand hills. But we forgot to take his
close-up. This we had to do weeks later in the garden to
the rear of the house. I solved this, my first film produc-
tion problem, by bringing the big white horse to the gar-
den, leading him straight through the narrow marble-
floored corridor of our good burgher home, his old flanks
scraping the walls, the pictures and the gaslight fixtures
-resulting in broken tubes and escaping gas with an im-
minent explosion barely avoided. My mother had less
pleasure than the rest of us at the screenings of our
Flaming Arrow.
With my business future in mind my father was careful
to give my education a basis in economics and after high

14
school I was sent to the Rotterdam College of Economics,
the best school of its kind in Holland. It was 1917, and
I completed one semester before being called to arms. In
that war, Holland was mobilized but stayed out of the
actual righting.
I had to join the military reserve forces of the Dutch
Army, and became a lieutenant in the field artillery. I
learned how to shoot a pistol, a carbine and three-inch
gun. I learned to ride, the first three months, a blanket
serving as saddle. The job of our regiment was to guard
the Dutch frontier in the south and take away the rifles
from any German soldiers who deserted and came over
into neutral Holland.
The end of the war in 1918 saw a food shortage in Hol-
land and the newspapers reported "potato revolts" in
Amsterdam. Our battery was alerted for duty in Amster-
dam, there to restore "law and order." It occurred to me
that they should have called in the state troops for that
kind of job. Besides, it spoiled my week-end leave. I felt
that the people of Amsterdam were right to ask for food,
and demonstrate on the streets; but the economic and so-
cial issues of that First World War did not concern me
much. Peace was important mostly because it saw me
back at my studies.
Returning to Rotterdam and economics, I became chair-
man of the student fraternity which like most fraternities
in Dutch universities, had a conservative bent. But the
liberal and left attitudes among European students after
the war found expression in our school too. The editor of
our student paper was the outstanding leftist among us;
perhaps, because he was my friend I persisted in defend-
ing his progressive views and his right to freedom of ex-
pression against the reactionary faction in our fraternity.
Out of this conflict we succeeded in uniting into one as-
sociation all of the Rotterdam student organizations.
Subsequently similar associations were formed in the
other university cities: Leyden, Amsterdam, Utrecht,
15
Groningen and Delft. This became the Netherlands Stu-
dent Organisation. Our platform was general and liberal
-the unification of all students, the protection of eco-
nomic and intellectual rights. Its only specific plank was
an agitation for cheaper student living quarters. Through
the apparatus of the League of Nations we were linked
to similar student movements all over the world. Many
of them sent student members to Holland, so that for the
first time I met students from all European countries and
had good practice in my foreign languages-German,
French and English.
Two years at the College of Economics gave me a work-
ing notion of trade relations, international banking sys-
tems, the functions of trusts and cartels and, most of all,
the interdependence of all the countries of the world.
This was quite enough for handling the business problems
of my father's company. What I now needed was tech-
nical knowledge of photography.
For this I went to Germany, to the University of Char-
lottenburg, which in 1922 was almost unique in the world
for its emphasis on photo-chemical studies. Charlotten-
burg is a section of Berlin and when I evaluate those years
at the University I think of the tremendous impression
postwar Berlin made on me as much as I think of my
work in the University.
Four years after the armistice Berlin was an exciting
place to be, both in a good and bad way. There was in-
tense political activity, ranging from the fight and search
for a new permanent form of democracy to the bitter
reaction which became the basis for fascism. Upheaval
and conflict expressed in a vast cultural and artistic ac-
tivity, produced not one, but a dozen revolutionary styles
of painting. It was the time of Expressionism and Dada-
ism ; of the bitter uncompromising satires of George Grosz
and John Heartfield. It was the time of experiment in
architecture, in poetry, in theatre and in music. Piscator's
Volkstbeaterw&s the first exciting theatre experience I had

16
had. The names of Schonberg, Hindemith and Eisler were
known not just in Germany, but throughout Europe.
I was able to indulge in all this to the full because I
was richer than I had ever been before or since. I was a
Dutchman whose father had provided me with gulden and
I was in a Germany where my gulden could be turned
into thousands, millions and even billions of inflated
marks. My three-room apartment cost me two and a half
gulden a month, or the equivalent of about a dollar.
Everything else was equally cheap. Every day that prices
leaped the value of my gulden did too. You always had
to ask, "How much does this cost, today?" I could buy
everything I wanted and I did. It was almost ridiculous
to be paying no more than a couple of cents for theatre
and concert tickets and books that were changing my
whole life.
And there were academic upheavals in the University.
Einstein's new theories of relativity were forcing a new
approach to relations between matter, time and energy
in the study of chemistry. I was discovering new worlds
of feeling in Berlin and new worlds of knowledge in
Charlottenburg.
My studies expanded beyond anything I had planned.
Although I went there to learn about science as related
to photographic emulsion and to lenses, almost involun-
tarily my courses broadened into the whole philosophy
of science, giving a balance to the knowledge that I
gained then and later.
When inflation ceased and the Dutch gulden returned
to 4.20 German marks, I was no longer rich. My financial
situation became very tight and I had to leave the Uni-
versity. But I didn't want to go back to Holland just yet.
1 wanted to stay in Germany and learn more about cam-
era and lens construction. The best place to acquire this
practical knowledge was the factories.
My first job was in Dresden in the camera factories of
lea and Ernemann, where I was put on the workbench. I

2 Ivens, camera 17
began to understand physically what it meant to be a
worker, living within a smalt salary and working within
a huge organization. In the state of Saxony the labor
unions were having a tough struggle for existence. The
justice of their minimum demands was clear to me. I
marched in demonstrations in the streets of Dresden when
the protesting workers were shot at by the police. I knew
and felt strongly that the workers were in the right. They
were fighting the first German battles against fascism.
From Dresden I went to Jena to work in the famous
Zeiss factories. There my job was not that of a laborer
but that of an apprentice, doing scientific work on optics
and the mathematics of lens construction. The Zeiss fac-
tory was run on a quite different pattern from that of
Dresden. It was a sort of paternal cooperative in which
the workers were involved in the responsibilities and the
profits. At that time the first planetarium was being built
there and engineers and scientific experimental workers
from all over Germany had been attracted to Jena. There
was little of the cultural life that made Berlin nights ex-
citing and so we concentrated mostly on beer and music.
I saw a lot of films at that time-few from America but
a great many made in Germany; the first important work
of Murnau, and of Pabst; Der letzte Mann and Die
freudlose Gasse; realistic films, social films, "art films."
My interest in those days was that of an ordinary spec-
tator. Inever identified these complex productions of
studio and theatre with my own life.
When I returned to Holland in 1926 I was made man-
ager of the Amsterdam branch and head of the technical
department of my father's photographic firm "Capi." For
a while that took all my time and energy but when I grew
accustomed to the pattern of the work I became dissatis-
fied with it as a sole activity. Outside the job I should
have been making business acquaintances and advertising
contacts, looking ahead to a secure business future. In-
stead Ispent more and more of my evenings and free

18
time with the lively young intellectual and artistic and
student circles in Amsterdam.
This old, slow town may have taken its time in becom-
ing an art center of Europe, but its air of business and
realism served the very healthy purpose of filtering out
the imitations and caricatures that were the usual sub-
stitutes for real art in the art colonies of Berlin, Paris and
London. This old city with its quiet canals was slow but
intense.
Night after night I walked with Henny Marsman, our
best poet. We would settle down to drink in wood-panel-
led cafes where for two hundred years the wood had
never been painted but only scrubbed, and the furnish-
ings were a beer barrel, a table, some chairs and a single
light. Often only one other person was there-the silent
waiter who brought our beers. But our talks, our dreams
and our fantasies went beyond that tiny room, encompas-
sing the whole city and the whole world.
Sometimes Marsman and I would be joined by another
poet or by a sculptor or a painter. We would walk
through the dark wet streets of Amsterdam and cross
the narrow bridges of the quiet canals.
I was rather surprised that so many of our discussions
concerned a field in which none of these artists were
working. They talked of the art of the cinema as if it
were something almost sacred to their circle-sacred per-
haps because it was so mysterious. Films already seemed
to be influencing them in their own work but none of
them seemed hopeful of ever working in that new art
themselves. They envied my technical knowledge of
photography and questioned me constantly on its tech-
nical aspects. The attractiveness and mystery of films had
in their eyes illuminated an esthetic element of which I
had been unaware, and our discussions gave new scope
to the cinema whose technique I had mastered without
thinking of it as an art form.
We began to attend films together enjoying lively

2* 19
critical discussions that didn't give much pleasure to the
rest of the audience. We sharply considered the commer-
cial films we saw and grew enthusiastic about every ex-
periment, no matter how small; even a single unusual
effect in a commercial film was worthy of comment.
Those of us who went to Paris brought back exciting
reports of avant garde films made independently, not by
large crews in well equipped studios but by single indi-
viduals or small groups. There was even a Parisian theatre
dedicated exclusively to showing the films we heard and
dreamed about, Studio des Ursulines. Other reports told
of a whole new school of film making in Russia which
was producing exceptionally powerful and experimental
films.
The first Russian film to reach Amsterdam was
Pudovkin's Mother based on Gorki's novel, but public
showings were forbidden by the Dutch censors. This
piqued our group of young artists and intellectual Amster-
damers in their two most sensitive spots: the right to
freedom of expression and the wish to see experimental
films.
One night we got together in the Amsterdam club of
artists De Kring for an event which the conservative
Dutch press compared with the ]eu des Paumes in the
French revolution. I brought an American portable pro-
jection machine from my father's shop and ran off Pudov-
kin's film four times in succession. The police tried to
stop us and the mayor, who was having dinner with the
Queen at the Royal Palace that evening, was asked to
stop the performance. But the answer was, "If it's a
private show for artists it can't be so harmful to the
safety of the state."
The new possibilities for expression shown by Pudov-
kin in Mother enthralled us. The immediate result was
to organize further evenings for showing such films. And
so the Filmliga was formed. We had no great social urge
to show these films to large audiences, it was the selfish

20
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 esthetic.
Out of the arguments in cafes, bars, attics and studios
about styles and art forms came our first manifesto in
September, 1927:
Die Nibelungen, The Big Parade, Potemkin, Mother,
Meniemontant, Variete.
FILM IS AT STAKE
Once in a hundred times we see film, the rest of the
time we see movies.
The herd, commercial cliches, America, Kitsch.
In this arena films and movies are natural opponents.
We believe in the pure autonomous film. The future of
film as art is doomed if we do not take the matter into
our own hands.
This is what we intend to do.
We want to see the experimental work produced in
the French, German and Russian avant garde ateliers.
We want to work towards film criticism that is in it-
self original, constructive and independent.
We have therefore founded
FILMLIGA AMSTERDAM
for the purpose of showing to limited audiences those
films one does not see in the movie theatres or which
one discovers only by accident.
We have one advantage: good films are not expensive,
for the very reason that they are not in demand. Good
films lie profitless in the vaults of Paris and Berlin.
We will buy these.
During the 1927-28 season we will present in Amster-
dam:
12 SUNDAY MATINEES
each matinee will include the first showing in the
21
 Netherlands of a new feature-length film for those
people genuinely interested in film. Following the
example of the Studio des Ursulines in Paris, we will
revive such old films of Asta Nielsen and Charlie
Chaplin, which have unfortunately disappeared, along-
side a la Querschnitt films.
These will be shown in a hall to be selected later. In
case this is not possible we are making arrangements
for the use of a small theatre in the city. Outstanding
technical advisors will assist in arranging our pro-
grams. Ifyou believe in the film of tomorrow and if
you are bored with available programs, then join us,
all you need do is fill out the attached form. We ask
you to contribute

EIGHT GULDEN
(Which may be paid in two installments), which means
sixty-five cents for each matinee, less than the usual
price of a movie matinee.
On the next page is a tentative list of the films we
plan to show. Let us hear your choice. This will deter-
mine the final selection and help us to progress.
The Committee HENRIK SCHOLTE, Chairman
MENNO TER BR A AK, Seer. Treasurer
HANS IVENS, Secretary
CHARLIE TOOROP
L.J. JORDAN
CEES LASEUR
HANS VAN MEERTEN
ED PELSTER; Technical Advisor
JORIS IVENS, Technical Advisor

The response was tremendous, not only from painters,

writers and architects, students and the circles we knew,
but also from musicians, actors, lawyers, dentists, teachers,
reporters-and even the film critics showed a warm in-
terest. should
I point out that possibly because there was
no great film production in Holland and no great film

22
advertising contracts, the Dutch film critics showed un-
usual intelligence and integrity. The Filmliga was a suc-
cess. We expected a maximum of four hundred subscrib-
ers in Amsterdam. Twenty-five hundred responded and
there were demands for branches in The Hague, Rotter-
dam, Utrecht, Leyden, Groningen and later, Haarlem.
I was deeply involved in the organizational and tech-
nical departments of the Liga. Our shows were held every
Saturday afternoon in the Centraal Theatre. In addition
to these regular screenings there were the many trial
screenings during the week when we selected the pro-
grams. With my interests fully taken up by the Filmliga
my relations with my father and his business cooled con-
siderably.
Of the films we showed, the ones that impressed me
most were those that were extreme and experimental.
The European avant garde had as many film styles as it
had countries of origin. I was attracted by the abstract
films sent to us by Walther Ruttmann, Hans Richter and
Viking Eggeling from Germany. Then we began to invite
film artists to speak at the showing of their films.
Along with the pure abstractions of Ruttmann and
Richter we showed the witty, playful early work of Rene
Clzit-Entracte for example-and the atmospheric and
emotional etudes of Cavalcanti and Kirsanoff. Another
kind of avant garde film came to us from Paris-films of
psychological conflicts and Freudian symbolism, such as
Germaine Dulac's Coquille et le Clergyman.
A new Russian film on our program was always a
special event. In Turksib, a simple documentary film
about the building of the Trans-Siberian railroad, one
participated in the war against natural obstacles and in
the final joining of the two ends of the line. Even more
than in Mother, I could see how in a documentary film
one could achieve the emotions of tension, conflict and
happiness in the surmounting of difficulties.
Although in film history it is now easy to see the proper
23
place and proportions of Robert Flaherty's work, we
looked at his Nanook and Moana as something apart
from other films. These were certainly not experiments
or travelogues; nor were they simple documentaries.
These were films about real people leading their lives in
far-off countries, filmed by a great master.
Some of us took the opportunity to examine the films
that we received with as much care as was then possible.
I remember fixing a re-winder on my table at home, bor-
rowing the prints of Dovzhenko's Arsenal and Eisen-
stein's Potemkin and analyzing them shot by shot-in
length, rhythm, composition; I charted the editing of the
most important sequences of those masterpieces. This
analysis taught me a lot about elementary visual conti-
nuity. The novel effects created by extremely short shots,
on occasion as short as one or two frames, were at that
time great discoveries.
Personal contacts with the foreign speakers at the Film-
liga were revealing. Ruttmann, a total purist, refused to
allow any interpretation of his abstract films. He was as
much against identifying tall mountains and dancing
figures as a composer might be. Rene Clair showed us
the calculating mind that went into the production of his
light and apparently spontaneous films. I found more
poetry in the films of Alberto Cavalcanti, a former archi-
tect and film designer, than in the other films that came
out of France.
My technical work in the photo shop of "Capi" was
sometimes interesting because in order to sell microfilm
cameras I had to shoot some scientific films. Following
this work and my activity in the Filmliga it was the most
natural thing in the world for me to pick up a camera
and think about my own films. This process was so grad-
ual that I cannot even clearly recall this step and no one
else would remember because no one was amazed to see
me working with the camera. It was taken for granted
that I would.

24
 One of our old hangouts in Amsterdam was theZeedyk
in the seamen's quarter. Jan Heyens, a sculptor by day,
would put on a worn top hat at night and drive custom-
ers around in an antiquated carriage from one night club
to another, from the White Balloon to the Nine Virgins.
Heyens* mother was a marvelous old woman who owned
a bar in the Zeedyk. On the second floor of her establish-
ment, she maintained a convenient night lodging for the
tramps and drunks who wandered into her bar.
This locale was a typical slice of old Amsterdam along
one of its narrow black canals-full of people, full of
movement. And one Sunday morning without any plan
or outline I began to film in the bar of Juffrouw Heyens.
It wasn't crowded and I was able to move around with
comparative freedom. I moved a lot with my handcam-
era-too much-which is the usual fault of the beginner.
But some of the movement did help me to catch the
atmosphere and gestures of the men standing and drink-
ing at the bar. I remember one in particular: one of the
drunks who regularly became the King of Canada after
his second bottle of gin. This morning he felt so fine and
powerful that he grabbed the long brown ribbon of oily
yellow fly paper, coated with black, sticky flies, hanging
from the lamp-flung it around his neck with a majestic
swashbuckling gesture and, raising his bottle to his image
in the mirror, toasted the health of the King of Canada.
I managed to catch this in a walking shot, ending with
a close-up of the king's face in the mirror. Behind the bar
in a sitting room with an overall view of her establish-
ment sat Juffrouw Heyens, her legs rheumatic, her fingers
stiff-knotted, watching like a hawk from the security of
her fireplace of blue Delft tiles.
For me all this had the quality of an Amsterdam ver-
sion of the Lower Depths. When I projected the printed
footage I was surprised at how much of the quality of
rough fun came across and there was a certain pictorial
accomplishment, giving some of the intensity of old Dutch
25
paintings of dark interiors. I didn't edit the material be-
cause Irealized that this was a purely amateur achieve-
ment; but I had tested myself with a moving camera, and
the test had been conducted in an authentic setting.
The taste of this accomplishment made me hungrier
than ever for learning and experience. 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 movements of human beings. When my
friends heard what I was looking for-an inanimate sub-
ject with a wide variety of movement and shape- Van
Ravenstein, a railroad engineer, suggested that I look at
a railroad bridge over the Maas River in Rotterdam. 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 thousands 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 working without enough tech-
nical 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 colors, values, contrasts. If anyone
knew about the relation of motion on the screen he was
keeping it to himself and I would have to find out about
it for myself.
That Rotterdam railroad bridge was as full of motion
as I could wish. At one extreme were the fast trains from
Amsterdam to Paris, streaking across in a powerful drive
of black metal and white steam. At the other extreme
were the big slow ships with their gray smoke passing

26
beneath on the way out to sea, or back to port. The bridge
lifted with the straight vertical movement of counter-
weights, producing an enormous variety of action, turn-
ing wheels, trembling cables, rising masses. I got a pass
from the State Railroad to go on the tracks whenever I
wanted to work on the bridge, and every minute I could
spare from the store, or from work connected with the
store, I spent on the bridge.
At that time one of my outside jobs was making a
microscopic film at the University of Leyden. In the
morning I would be in the University; at twelve noon
I would rush to the Rotterdam bridge and put in about
two hours of work; later in the afternoon I was bent
over the University microscopes. I used a borrowed cam-
era from my father's store, a Kinamo with three lenses.
By practising certain economies at the University, I al-
ways managed to have enough negative film for my work
at the bridge. At night I developed the negative on a
one-hundred-foot frame and watched over the printing
at a small film laboratory in Amsterdam.
The Kinamo is a small spring driven automatic hand-
camera. It holds a magazine of seventy-five feet of
35mm film. I had worked on this very model in the
construction department in the lea factory. I had learned
all its advantages and also its weaknesses from Professor
Goldberg, the inventor of this practical little instrument,
so that when I took the Kinamo onto the bridge it was
already an old friend. My general plan for the film's
structure was to start out by clearly establishing the rail-
road bridge in the city of Rotterdam, and its function of
joining the two shores of the Maas River. Trains speed
across it; ships wait to pass under it; trains stop; the
whole middle section of the bridge is raised; the ships
pass underneath the elevated section; immediately after-
wards the middle section is slowly lowered; the railroad
tracks come into line and the waiting trains speed across.
It was a simple and even dry study in movement. It
21
was the definite beginning of a professional career. After
this, films would never be a hobby for me. The film was
amateur only in the sense that I did not make it to earn
money. It was conscious laboratory work that was origi-
nally not intended for a large audience. It was the work
of a research student. I put all my technical knowledge
about cameras, lenses, film exposure, development to
use-from now on this would be my profession. I finished
the shooting of the film in the winter of 1927 and the
spring of 1928.
The editing was a tough problem for me. I didn't even
know how to start. I made a rough sketch of every shot
on a file card with arrows indicating the movement within
the shot, and then arranged these cards before I cut any
precious film strips.
In the spring I showed my film, which I called The
Bridge, at one of the Filmliga program selection screen-
ings. The Filmliga program committee liked it and
thought that it should be tried out at the next showing.
The Dutch press gave it an unexpectedly warm reception
and one more film from yet another country was added
to the avant garde programs of Europe. Among my own
family the one who showed the greatest interest in my
new work was my brother Wim. He was a young doctor
in one of Amsterdam's biggest hospitals. He was a quiet
and somewhat cynical man but had a real inner warmth
that he never showed. He was always on hand to patch
up conflicts between my job and my career and bragged
to the rest of the family about the "young artist." When
I borrowed a camera or raw film he realized that I was
determined to follow my chosen profession.
The Bridge may now look like no more than a study
in movement but I got a great deal more out of it than
that. I learned many secrets about these movements in
relation to the camera. For example, I learned that when
you film repetitive movement such as the action of a
counterweight on the bridge, you have to observe this for

28
a longer time and with greater attention than you would
think. You will always discover something new, the
countermovement of a gliding shadow, a significant
trembling as the cables come to a halt, or a more telling
reflection at a more subjective angle. From the little glass
house below on the bridge the operator watched every-
thing Idid. When I came down the long iron ladder after
filming the huge cable wheel at the top of the bridge he
just had to tell me what was on his mind.
"You don't have to eat the bridge. You look like some
sort of tiger sneaking and creeping around that wheel. I
had to laugh when you suddenly stood up straight against
the sky with your camera. Did you get what you wanted?"
I did get what I wanted. What he had seen from below
was the long careful observation of all the elements, the
turning wheel, the gliding, sticky oily cable and the busy
traffic down on the dock. When I stood up I had finally
found the right moment for the shooting. That is, the "here
and now," the acid test of your sensitivity. With your hand-
camera you freeze at that critical moment-the moment
you find the right spot for your shot. Not two inches more
to the right or to the left or a little higher or a little
lower or closer or further away, not a split second later
or earlier-but here and now.
Of course you learn to give yourself leeway: you can
begin your camera motor shortly before that decisive
moment and stop shortly after that moment has been
completed; but you have to be sure that it has been
caught within your total footage.
I learned from The Bridge that prolonged and creative
observation is the only way to be sure of selecting, em-
phasizing, and squeezing everything possible out of the
rich reality in front of you. The film maker's discovery
that he was not smart enough the day before is more
depressing than in any other medium of art. He cannot
afford the psychological luxury of this esprit de Vesca-
lier-the smart afterthoughts that come to you on the stairs
29
as you consider all the clever things you might have said,
but at the time didn't. Last, but not least, I might add
that observation saves film footage too!
Whilst shooting The Bridge I became aware of another
lesson I had to learn: the direct translation in the mind
from the image seen in the camera-finder to the totally
different image seen on the screen. This isn't as simple as
it sounds, but in the end I learnt. Many great cameramen
have since confided to me that this is still one of their
big problems. It is an especially big problem when shoot-
ing on exterior location. You have to make a kind of
short cut in your visual imagination. It is easy to be de-
ceived into thinking that this little image in the camera-
finder, with all the brilliancy and heightened color and
charm of its miniature reproduction of the scene before
you, is the picture that will be projected on the screen.
Many a fond hope has been destroyed when the charming
miniature is projected onto the screen.
Space, light, height, wind and open air does not appear
in a shot of its own accord, it has to be put there. There
are lots of in between stages from shooting to public pro-
jection-developing, printing, editing, commentary, sound
effects, music. At each stage the effect of the shot can be
changed but the basic content must be in the shot to be-
gin with. The theatre screen is not a window through
which you look at the world, it is a world in itself.
In order to capture the total physical feeling of what
is seen in the finder the camera's angle and movement
must be controlled during shooting so as to achieve the
frame composition you want. Your choice of lens can
give a different and even a false perspective. Actual con-
ditions of atmosphere and actual relations of color can
be modified with filters in front of the lens. The filter
can also help intensify the texture and substance of the
material-the clean steel and the oily cable, for example.
You are master of the timing and, to a certain extent, the
lighting of your shot. In sunlight the opening of the lens

30
diaphragm controlling the depth of focus gives a very
great range of exposure.
As I said before, the later stages are open to many
types of interference and correction. Varieties in devel-
oping and printing can give different effects. Certainly in
editing the shots your interference is creative and often
decisive: finding the correct continuity, rhythm, juxta-
position, counterpoint, and so forth. Music and sound are
enormous values and commentary can deepen the impor-
tance of a shot and interpret its values by giving it dra-
matic and social sense. Let us see how this all worked out
concretely in the photographing of that wheel at the top
of the bridge.
There are not many psychological or dramatic involve-
ments in this case. It is simply a job of giving a particular
shot the fresh reality it needs for the screen. But even
within this simple aim there are a hundred possibilities;
yet only a couple of these are the right ones, and within
these limited possibilities, or within the discipline of
these, the personality of the film maker goes into action.
So, the camera is facing its subject at the top of the
bridge. It comes close to the wheel and that gives the
proper feeling of power behind the mechanism. As the
wheel turns it alternately hides and discloses the view of
the traffic far below. This helps the feeling that the wheel
is turning high above the crowd. In the following shot
I pan the camera from the traffic towards the wheel to
emphasize this relationship. But in this shot I will achieve
that with a slight downward angle of the camera. I choose
a 40mm lens to give me sufficient spread in the fore-
ground to get enough of the wheel in the frame showing
the rotating solid form of the whole mechanism. I must
not use a wide-angle lens. That would be too exaggerated.
I decide to film at the moment that the moving shad-
ows of the wheel spokes follow on each other giving the
whole mass of steel more plasticity. I filter lightly with
a yellow K-l filter so that the sky does not become too

31
important, avoiding the danger of over-dramatization. I
want to have full concentration on the wheel and its
function. The wheel is painted gray so I don't need a
heavy filter to give the feeling of iron. I have to close my
lens diaphragm pretty far down, to about f.16, to get
enough depth of focus including both foreground wheel
and distant traffic. I must pick the moment when the
traffic below is most dense which must also coincide with
the most favorable sun position for the shadows.
My control of the composition and timing of the shot
becomes more firm. The aim becomes clearer: the wheel
will turn in the left lower corner of the frame pulling up
the cables. This will clarify both its strength and its func-
tion in the bridge's mechanism. Intercut with this shot
will be shots of the cables that are elevating the bridge.
And far below, seen through the turning spokes, will be
the tiny shapes of traffic. I must be sure that there are
many trucks to keep the idea of Rotterdam as a port. I
leave the entire right of the frame open and airy to in-
crease the sensation of height. The calculation of this shot
was actually done with far less consciousness than I de-
scribe ithere but in time this sort of calculation becomes
identical with intuition.
The development and printing of this shot was normal
and needed no trickery. Mostly I had to be careful that
the print would be just dark enough to see the traffic
below clearly and if the wheel itself grew too dark in the
printing it didn't matter, for within the editing its loca-
tion at the top of the bridge would be emphasized within
many of the shots.*
In its final editing The Bridge became a ten-minute
film, a single reel. Intended as a completely personal
* The Bridge is a silent film but today the possibilities of the
sound track would help all the sensations that were aimed at in
this silent shot. Sound perspective would establish a relationship
between the distant traffic noises mixed with the close-up sound
of the smooth, sticky, greasy cables sliding over the wheel.

32
experiment, its favorable public reception amazed me.
Suddenly artistic film circles in Europe began to refer to
Dutch films as though they had a long tradition. Actually
the Dutch film industry up to this time had produced
little more than a branch office of the international news-
reel companies and some laughable screen reproductions
of popular stage dramas, which we called "movie
dragons."
The good Dutch movie critics finally had occasion to
display some national pride. At the time of The Bridge
only one other Dutchman was using film seriously or
sensitively. This was a lonely scientist in Haarlem,
Mr. J.C. Moll, whose scientific and microscopic films de-
lighted us as much as did avant garde work. Moll's
Crystallen, a microfilm on the growth of crystals, was a
positive contribution to the newly-born Dutch film. Man-
nus Franken also started his career as an independent
film maker at this time.
Stimulated by the Filmliga audience, I very much
wanted to apply the perception I had acquired in The
Bridge to a film with more content, action and people-
more material. I wanted to direct as well as to photo-
graph. Jef Last, a Dutch writer, approached me with an
idea he had for a simple love story of an unemployed
fisherman. Mannus Franken, another writer close to the
Filmliga group, took Last's idea and worked out a script.
Franken was a technical student in Delft and a writer of
outdoor pageants, he brought a valuable quality of poetry
and fantasy into our developing film group. Another
valuable new member of the group was Johnny Fernhout.
He was the fourteen-year-old younger son of Charley
Toorop, a famous Dutch painter. His older brother was
already developing into a fine painter and Johnny's
mother felt that joining our group would give Johnny
something useful to do and some direction for his ener-
gies. Although he wasn't interested in reading or in
abstract knowledge of any kind, he had a very practical

3 Ivens, camera
33
sense and a wonderful instinct for the nature and be-
havior ofeveryone with whom he came into contact. With
these personal qualities, Johnny began what was to be a
long and successful film career. Our whole unit moved
out to Katwyk, a fishing village, where we lived together
in a rented house by the seashore. We had found some
friendly amateur actors-the fisherman's daughter, for in-
stance, was played by a dancer, Co Sieger. Jef Last him-
self was the hero.
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 sea movement
with a violent quality that nobody had seen before on
the screen.
Mannus Franken did much of the direction for me. It
was good training to work with faces and human fea-
tures and with reactions so soon after the mechanized
movements on The Bridge. Creating certain moods of a
fishing community in a minimum of shots was a chal-
lenging problem for a young film maker: a lone dog in an
empty street; a sleepy pan-shot along the straight lines
of the tiny roofs; a single child in a spotless court; a line
of dignified fishermen walking stiffly in their black Sun-
day clothes against the white austere architecture of the
village church. For us Breakers was a good film-although
I remember that we thought the Filmliga audiences didn't
like it because they had become a bit snobbish.
My next film started from a far more trivial motive.
While on location for Breakers we needed the sun, in-
stead we got rain-those long days of rain that you have
in Holland. The idea-let's make a film about the damn
rain-came quite naturally.

34
 Although this idea arose almost as a joke, when I re-
turned to Amsterdam I talked it over with Mannus Fran-
ken who sketched an outline. We discussed and revised
the outline many times until it became a film for both of
us. Unfortunately, Mannus Franken lived in Paris, so the
shooting in Amsterdam was done by me alone. Franken
however, came to Amsterdam for a short time to assist in
the editing.
In making such a film of atmosphere, I found that you
couldn't stick to the script and that the script should not
get too detailed. In this case, the rain itself dictated its
own literature and guided the camera into secret wet
paths we had never dreamed of when we outlined the
film. It was an unexpectedly difficult subject to tackle.
Many artistic problems were actually technical problems
and vice versa. Film experience in photographing rain
was extremely limited because a normal cameraman stops
filming when it begins to rain. When Rain was finished
and shown in Paris the French critics called it a cine-
poem and its structure is actually more that of a poem
than the prose of The Bridge. Its object is to show the
changing face of a city, Amsterdam, during a shower.
The film opens with clear sunshine on houses, canals
and people in the streets. A slight wind rises and the first
drops of rain splash into the canals. The shower comes
down harder and the people hasten about their business
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, prog-
ress and end of this shower. There are neither titles nor
dialogue. Its effects were intended as purely visual. The
actors are the rain, the raindrops, wet people, dark
clouds, glistening reflections moving over wet asphalt,
and so forth. The diffused light on the dark houses along
the black canals produced an effect that I never expected.
And the whole film gives the spectator a very personal
and subjective vision. As in the lines of Verlaine:

3* 35
 11 pleure dans mon coeur,
Comme il pleut sur la ville.

At that time I lived with and for the rain. I tried to

imagine how everything I saw would look in the rain-
and on the screen. It was part game, part obsession, part
action. I had decided upon the several places in the city
I wanted to film and I organized a system of rain watch-
ers, friends who would telephone me from certain sec-
tions of town when the rain effects I wanted appeared.
I never moved without my camera-it was with me in the
office, laboratory, street, train. I lived with it and when
I slept it was on my bedside table so that if it was rain-
ing when I woke I could film the studio window over my
bed. Some of the best shots of raindrops along the slanted
studio windows were actually taken from my bed when
I woke up. All the new problems in this film sharpened
my observation and also forced me to relax the rigid and
over-analytical method of filming that I had used in The
Bridge.
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 to-
morrow as well as today; but you soon learn that this is
never true. I filmed those girls without a second's hesita-
tion. 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 inter-
related factors you get the feeling of shooting-now or
never.
Even in that ABC exercise of The Bridge I had had

36
a taste of the pure joy a film maker knows when playing
around with movements and actions. I was filming a train
engine waiting to cross the bridge, stopped by the red
signal arm. I wanted to photograph the front of the wait-
ing, puffing engine as if it were the impatient snout of a
powerful animal. As I released the motor, smoke came
out of the chimney and curled up in black and gray puffs
into the air. Instinctively I raised my handcamera in a
sort of syncopated swing with the lifting movement of
the smoke. The result was pretty good, an interesting
double movement within the frame that I might never
have been able to calculate.
It took me about four months to get the footage I
needed for Rain. To achieve the effect of the beginning of
the shower as you now see it in the film I had to photo-
graph at least ten beginnings and out of these ten make
the one film beginning. The rain itself was a moody
actress who had to be humored and who refused any-
thing but a natural make-up. I found that none of the
new color-corrective film emulsions on the market were
suitable for my rain problems. The old extra-rapid Agfa
film with no color 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.
It's remarkable how easy it is to forget the most basic
elements of your subject and how important those basic
elements are to your work. In Rain I had to remind my-
self constantly that rain is wet-so you must keep the
screen dripping with wetness-make the audience feel
damp and not just dampness. When they think they can't
get any wetter, double the wetness, show the raindrops
falling in the water of the canal-make it super-wet. I was
so happy when I noticed at one of the first screenings of
the finished film that the audience looked around for their
raincoats and were surprised to find the weather dry and
clear when they came out of the theatre.

37
 To give the rain its fullest, richest quality I had to
make sure that the sunlight that began and ended the film
showed its typical differences. You have to catch the dis-
tinction between sunlight before rain and sunlight after
rain; the distinction between the rich strong enveloping
sunlight before the rain and the strange dreamy yellow
light afterwards. I know that this sounds oversubtle but
it is important and you have to be aware of it and re-
member to catch these subtleties with your camera.
In addition to careful photography, these nuances in
light quality can be emphasized in movement. For ex-
ample, heightened
I the sharp quality of the sunlight that
precedes the rain by keenly defined movements of light
and shadow. The sharp dark shadow of a footbridge
rips across the wide deck of a boat passing swiftly under-
neath. This movement is cut off by immediate contact
with a close-up of another boat moving in an opposite
diagonal across the entire screen. As the rain begins I
added to the changes in light, a change in these move-
ments emphasizing the leisurely movement of barges, wet
puffs of smoke and waving reflections in the water. When
cutting these shots I was careful to avoid abrupt contrasts,
letting them build up leisurely on the screen.
Another interesting thing I learned about the values
of shots and movements was their relation to humor. 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 movement
continuity always got a laugh. If I had been a more skill-
ful editor at that time I would have made a more con-
scious 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 com-
municating the humorous movements around us.

38
 However, Rain did teach me a great deal about film
emotion-much more than the emotional story of the
Breakers. In editing The Bridge I had discovered the
sad effect achieved by the rhythmic repetition of slow
heavy movements. In Rain I consciously used heavy dark
drops dripping in big pear-shaped forms at long inter-
vals across the glass of the studio window to produce the
melancholy feeling of a rainy day. The opposite effect of
happiness or gaiety in a spring shower could be produced
by many bright small round drops pounding against many
surfaces in a variety of shots.
To strengthen the continuity of Rain I used the repeti-
tion 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.
I shot the whole film with my old Kinamo and an
American De Vry handcamera. My assistant was a young
Chinese sailor, Chang Fai, whom I had met as a waiter
in a Chinese restaurant on the Zeedyk. Chang Fai had
jumped a large Indies liner in order to stay in Holland
and learn a profession before going back to Asia. His
main job as my assistant was to hold an umbrella over
my camera.
At that time I was living alone in the large attic of an
old Amsterdam house opposite the stock exchange. Any-
one who could bring some order to my Bohemian home
life was welcome. Chang Fai did not speak a word of
Dutch, but with a system of gestures we made the follow-
ing deal: he would keep house for me and cook and I
would teach him photography. He learned a great deal
more than holding umbrellas over a moving camera.
After a while he was able to buy his own camera and as
a parting gift at the end of our deal I gave him all the
39
formulae for fine grain development. I doubt if Rain
could have been made without Chang's carefully held
umbrella and his wonderful black soups that cured the
flu-a constant by-product of this film.
Made almost entirely as a cameraman's film, Rain
proved to be successful with audiences. It followed the
same distribution channels The Bridge had experienced,
and was shown in avant garde movie theatres throughout
Europe and in many cine clubs. One thing that spectators
always commented on was the film's identity with the
simple things of daily life-revealing the beauty in these
things. It was, I think, a new field for the close-up which
until then had been used only for passionate or dramatic
emphasis. These close-ups of every day objects made
Rain an important step in my development.
The most serious criticism against the film was its lack
of "content." In a certain sense this was an exact criti-
cism. Ifailed to emphasize sufficiently human beings'
reactions to rain in a big city. Everything was subor-
dinated to the esthetic approach. In a way I am glad
that I laid a foundation of technical and creative perfec-
tion before working on other more important elements.
I have since seen too many films so exclusively dependent
on content that the available means for film making have
been neglected with injury to the content itself.
When Franken and I finished Rain I had an idea about
a film of Amsterdam. I had been left dissatisfied with
Ruttmann's Berlin, I felt that a city film with human
interest and content could be done without Ruttmann's
virtuosity and superficial effects.
Anyone who wishes to make a film of a city sets himself
a very difficult problem, one that cannot be solved by a
mere concern with surface charm or purely sensual effects.
You must at least attempt penetration. I thought it could
be done in the same way as cheese is tested in Holland. A
long tube-shaped testing knife is thrust into the center of
the big cheese, it is twisted and drawn out bringing a tiny
40
cylinder of cheese which gives an idea of the quality,
solidity and character of the complete cheese. I have al-
ways thought that this cheese test might be the way to a
cinematographic approach to a city film. Although I
haven't done it yet I still think it's a good idea.
In the winter of 1928, I started two films which I did
not finish. One was a study of skating, a traditional Dutch
sport, which I enjoyed filming. I used my "subjective"
handcamera and filmed my own feet with the camera
looking down on them as they moved over the ice. I
couldn't complete Skating because our Dutch springtime
arrived too early.
The second film I started was called the / film. This
may be worth mentioning for anyone who wants to make
a real experimental film or attempts such a film. In
any case it's a fascinating subject to talk about: the
camera has to be completely subjective, not just moving
freely in space observing action as a third person. It must
be the first person, the protagonist of the action. The lens
becomes the human eye. It's as if the hero of a story
becomes the writer of the story.
Hans van Meerten, an actor member of the Filmliga,
worked with me on this unfinished experiment. We
financed it ourselves from our small salaries. The ex-
periment was finally stopped when we realized that it
would be too expensive to do it properly.
Our first experiment was: "I" drink a glass of beer. I
see the glass of beer on the table, I pick up the glass
with my right hand, I bring it to my mouth (the glass is
brought forward to a little below the lens-eye, the lower
half of the frame contains the upper half circle of the
glass), over the glass I see the cafe, I drink the beer (the
beer is poured out the same distance below the lens as
my mouth is below my eye). We thought the subjectivity
of this sequence could be increased by previously estab-
lishing the sensation of thirst; for example, shots of a hot
41
desert, of a man lying on the sand panting for water.
Followed by the "beer-drinking camera" this would
achieve a strong physical effect on the audience.
In my brother's medical library I found a book on
optics containing the exact graph of the forward rolling
curve of the eye of a walking person resulting from the
combined movements up, down and forward. We at-
tempted to reconstruct this curve with an eccentric plate
placed on the axis of a small wagon equipped with four
bicycle wheels. We mounted the camera on a vertical
rod attached to the eccentric plate which was to reproduce
the movement of a walker. We thought that when the
wagon rolled forward the lens-eye would then record
exactly the same image as is recorded by the human eye
in walking.
This experiment was a complete flop. One quiet Sun-
day morning we pushed our camera car through a narrow
Amsterdam street in the center of the city. It must have
been a strange sight: a tall pale actor and a stocky dark
fanatic pushing a weird contraption topped by a camera
on a stick moving like the head of a long-necked walk-
ing bird. The result on the screen looked as if the shot
had been taken by a drunken cameraman drifting down
the street in a rowboat. The exact opposite from what
we wanted. We tried again, this time with three people
walking in front of the camera and somehow the move-
ments of the camera and the people synchronized in a
natural way, eliminating the effect of swaying houses we
had before. This second attempt gave a new sensation
which I have rarely seen on the screen.
Our basic mistake was making a purely mechanical
transposition of eye-movement without considering the
senses, which of course correct these movements. We
should have spent our time discovering the psychological
factors of vision rather than using effects which attempted
to imitate the deceiving surface of nature. I believe that
much is still to be done in finding the means of making
the camera completely participate in the action. Fiction

42
films nowadays quite often contain attempts at this
participation.*

In the midst of all these rather groping experiments

I was visited one morning in 1929 by a Mr. Sino, the
educational director of the Dutch building workers' trade
union. He stated the problem at once.
"We have followed your film work with interest and
we read in the press that you are a good film maker. We
want you to make a long film for us. We are about to
celebrate our 25th anniversary. We don't see any point in
spending money for engraved gold watches for our char-
ter members and we don't particularly want to order a
statue for a union hall. We just want a film. Incidentally,
we plan to have a membership drive at the same time."
Here it was. Somebody really needed my work. Here
was a chance to give my work direction, purpose, fighting
qualities and here was also an opportunity to devote my
whole time to film making. My brother Wim and I
proposed to my father that a separate film production
department be set up within his "Capi" organization.
I sketched and submitted a project to the union De
Neder lands che Bowvak Arbeiders Bond. The central
theme was the professional pride of the building workers.
This was really the old guild idea: the pride and impor-
tance of a man who works with his hands, who builds
factories, homes, schools and dams. The pride of labor in
itself, in its results and its function in society, and the

* German films of the middle twenties often include such ef-

fects: In Variete the camera looks down at the ground below a
trapeze which is seen through the eyes of the character played by
Emil Jannings. The effect was also used in American films-usu-
ally ones with a macabre atmosphere: for example, in Mamoulian's
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the protagonist is introduced as the cam-
era as he enters a room and sits down to play the piano. In The
Lady and the Lake the whole picture is told by a camera hero who
is only seen when he looks in the mirror. 43
feeling of dignity, solidarity, and force that comes through
that pride.
The sketch ended with the construction workers carry-
ing on their long Dutch tradition of architecture and con-
struction into the new era and the fight through their
union for the rights of all labor. I had thought a lot about
many of these realities, now I had an opportunity to
state them clearly in the film and to learn more about
them by taking part with my camera in the daily life of
the building workers. I would be participating in the
growth of the country and enjoying the integration of an
artist in society. This would be different from commercial
films and it was a long step from the avant garde films
that I had been doing. 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.
I worked hard and visited building sites all over Hol-
land, where men were building houses and offices in
Amsterdam, factories in Rotterdam, chemical plants in
the south near Maastricht, dikes in the Zuiderzee. This
was to be a pioneer production in an unexplored field for
I knew no example of a film made by a union for a union.
The result was a full-length documentary film, seven reels
long, called Wy Bouwen (We are Building). It was still
a silent motion picture; no soundtrack, only subtitles. A
piano was played during the showing. Wy Bouwen was
given its premiere at the end of 1929 in the big audito-
rium of the Y.M.C.A. for the members of the Amster-
dam local. While the first reel was going through the
projection machine I was still busy cutting and splicing
the last reel-an emergency that couldn't happen with a
sound film for technical reasons. Everything went fine.
The audience was moved and enthusiastic and Wy
Bouwen turned out to be the greatest asset in the union's
membership drive.
I planned to include some special footage that I had

44
been unable to use to good effect in the full-length film,
in short films. The first of these was called Helen, a
rather impressionistic film about pile-driving. The city of
Amsterdam is built on swampy ground. No new building
can be erected before heavy wooden piles have been
driven down through the mud into solid ground. These
are the building's foundations. I went to extremes to
obtain the full physical effect of the rhythmic powerful
pounding. I even had myself tied to the driving hammer
to get a little closer to the sensation of the actual impact.
This was another expression of my constant urge to do
more than look at any action, even such a mechanical one
as pile-driving, and to make the camera-and through the
camera, the audience-take part in the action.
The second short, New Architecture, had a quite dif-
ferent purpose. It was to show what had been accom-
plished in modern Dutch architecture, already inter-
nationally famous for its simplicity and imaginative
functionalism. Dutch architecture is very close to Dutch
art in personality and spirit. This film was made almost
as much for the young Dutch architects, who were among
the most ardent Filmliga members, as it was for the union
members.
A third short, Zuiderzee, depicted the methods being
used in the huge project of draining the inlet for cultiva-
tion. This project had not yet reached its final stages so
that I continued to record the work on the Zuiderzee
while I made other films. I was assisted in this film by
the group that had formed itself around the Filmliga and
my union films. We never called ourselves a production
unit because we actually thought of ourselves as individ-
uals bound together by friendship and common ideals.
Those were the days when we made no distinction be-
tween a man who made films and a man who talked and
thought about them. I have already mentioned Johnny
Fernhout (professional name: John Ferno) and Mannus
Franken in connection with the making of Breakers and
45
Rain. A young woman working in my father's Amsterdam
store joined us as a cameraman and began to show an
unusually sensitive feel for editing. This was Helen van
Dongen. Huisken, a salesman in my father's shop, also
went with us to the Zuiderzee and other locations. Two
others who began their film work with us were Jan Hin,
a theological student and Willem Bon, a medical student.
Cameraman Elie Lotar came from France to help us.
As I had spent my spare money on whatever books and
technical magazines about films I could find, I had ac-
cumulated acomplete little film library. With the help of
Chang Fai I opened my attic studio as a library for the
use of Filmliga members and especially our film group.
The Filmliga became a mature audience organization in
its first two years of existence, stimulating film produc-
tion and beginning an excellent monthly publication. In
two years of film making I also had matured. I began
to wonder what my next step would be.

46
U.S.S.R.
At that time the Filmliga was one of the liveliest groups
in Europe. It had become an active member of a broad
international film-reveille which included not only the
avant garde Paris cinemas but also private societies such
as the London Film Society. Our film lectures were now
a regular feature and every two weeks our membership
heard distinguished film makers speak on film theory and
on their personal experience. Rene Clair, Cavalcanti,
Germaine Dulac visited us with their films. As the most
consistently avant garde of all film producing countries,
the Soviet Union sent us films that evoked our highest
admiration. The Filmliga's fight against censorship lent
an extra impetus to our enthusiasm for Russian films.
When the proper arrangements could be made with the
Dutch authorities as well as with the Soviet film pro-
duction schedules, we invited Russian film makers to
join our lectures. Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Vertov all
came when they could.
The visit of Pudovkin in January, 1929 had particular
significance for me. His films, Mother and The End of
St. Petersburg had made a deep impression on all sections
of our membership. When we invited him to lecture at
the Filmliga, the Dutch authorities regarded him as more
than a film director. Holland was then going through a
period of Russophobia, with no diplomatic relations be-
tween the two countries and the Dutch authorities per-
mitted Pudovkin to visit our country only long enough
to deliver one lecture, stipulating that it be given ex-
clusively for the Amsterdam members of the Filmliga.
The exact conditions were that he was to enter Holland
twenty-four hours before his scheduled talk and leave
Dutch soil no later than twenty-four hours after its
delivery.
This was my first glimpse of Russian energy in emer-
gencies. Not only did Pudovkin give our members their
first personal introduction to the realistic methods of Rus-
sian film direction in a thorough and unforgettable way,
I
4 Ivens, camera 49
but within his brief stay he managed to have personal
talks with all of the actual film makers among us, saw
our films and gave us valuable criticism. As I was the
only one in the Filmliga who had achieved some con-
tinuity offilm experience, my contact with Pudovkin was
close. I screened for him The Bridge, Breakers and an
uncut version of Rain. He showed particular interest in
the file-card system of editing I had used on The Bridge.
Probably that impressed him as an indication of my
serious approach to the visual continuity of film editing.
Even in the uncut version of Rain he found the constantly
lyrical quality of the photography praiseworthy.
On the morning after his lecture, just before his train
departed, Pudovkin and I had breakfast in the Schiller
cafe on Rembrandtsplein. It was a bone-chillingly cold
morning and we spoke about his work and about mine.
Almost casually he remarked, "It might be a good thing
for us if you would come and visit us in the Soviet

Union."
I said that it would certainly be good for me, "But why
do you ask me to come?"
"Because your films have qualities," he said, "which
many of our documentary directors lack-qualities of ten-
sion and emotion that are very valuable in factual films."
Naturally I thought that Pudovkin's invitation was the
usual vague gesture people make upon departure. Look
me up, they usually say, when you get to New York, Mos-
cow, or Shanghai. But as vague as I thought the invita-
tion, Iput a great deal of hope in it. I felt that such a
trip would be an event in my life. The single fact that
great experimental artists like Eisenstein and Dovzhenko
were unhampered in their film work by commercial con-
siderations made Moscow a cinema Mecca for young
avant gardists like myself.
I continued to work on the final shooting and editing of
Rain and began work for the Union of Building Workers.
I had almost forgotten Pudovkin's invitation when, three
50
months later, without warning, I received an unprepos-
sessing looking memorandum-brief but to the point: Why
dorit you come now? Your expenses from the frontier
will be paid. Be sure to bring your films with you.
It was on the letterhead of the Union of Film Directors
and was signed by Pudovkin.
Although the invitation arrived at the end of April in
1929 a number of months passed before I was able to act
on it. I completed WyBouwen for the Union and the three
separate short supplementary films, Pile-Driving, New
Architecture, Zuiderzee. In December, 1929, I made new
prints of these three films and of The Bridge, Breakers,
Rain, and also of the experimental footage I had made
for the / film, and Moll's scientific film on the growth of
crystals. Thinking I was going to Russia for a couple of
weeks I packed my films in three tin cases and left
Amsterdam like a carefree vacationist.
When I arrived in Moscow I was taken to Eisenstein's
apartment. Eisenstein had just left on his European trip
(including a lecture date at the Amsterdam Filmliga)
which was followed by his trip to America. For a film
enthusiast, the Eisenstein apartment was a wonderful
place to be. It was actually one large room crammed with
books in six languages and pictures from every century.
Not only was I given Eisenstein's apartment, but also
his assistant, Pera Attasheva, whose intelligence and di^
plomacy were invaluable in those first confusing days.
I was told that arrangements had been made for me to
show my films and to lecture on them. My first job was
to prepare Russian subtitles, with Pera's help, for all the
films I had brought with me. Once in a while we took
time off to look at Moscow. Whether it was Russia or the
Soviet Union, this place would have been an exotic and
attractive novelty for me. Certain sights like Red Square
were overwhelming in their drama and color. It was also
the first time I was in a country whose language I didn't
know. It may have been the very difficulty of listening

4* 51
to people whom I couldn't clearly understand, that
sharpened my powers of observation and forced me to
depend on their facial expression, vocal intonation and
gestures.
The first screenings of my Dutch program were in the
film studios for the studio artists and staff. For every
show I gave I demanded to see their work. I had seen most
of the important Soviet documentary films in Amsterdam
and Berl'm-Turksib, Shanghai Document, the early Ver-
tdv films. Now I saw Vertov's newest tour de force: The
Man with the Movie Camera, and a film called Spring by
Vertov's brother, Kaufmann, who had achieved a suc-
cessful blend of the incisiveness of Vertov with the gentle
humanity of a Cavalcanti. I also saw Eisenstein's ency-
clopaedia offilm technique-O/d and New, which he had
finished cutting just prior to leaving for his European
journey.
Before I went to the Soviet Union, I knew that it was a
country striving for economic stability and new social
relations. In the studios, I was confronted with a con-
crete example of this in the many different kinds of peo-
ple, artists among them, working together with a common
aim. I had never realized that such a group of workers
could be so creatively linked to the government and
cultural life of their country. Then, too, the parting in-
structions when I left Amsterdam had been to bring back
information. I was observing all these people and their
novel relations with great attention.
The projection of my films in Dom Kino (The House
of the Cinema) on Gorki Street, with a warm and per-
sonal introduction by Pudovkin was an unforgettable
evening. The Soviet audiences I talked to were made up
of film workers, scientists, factory workers, aviation
officers and many other groups. I often had no idea where
I was or who was asking questions. Sometimes I had to
give as many as two or three lectures a day. The films,
the translator and I were rushed by taxi from platform to

52
platform. And after the films would come the most sur-
prising questions and criticism. There are audiences who
look at your work on the screen and listen to what you
have to say and then leave. Not so the Soviet audiences-
they always want to know more. That was very satisfy-
ing, though wearing.
In the three months that I stayed in the Soviet Union
I must have given more than a hundred lectures. My tour,
which had started as a trip to Moscow, extended further
and further into the Soviet Union, with each new point en
route depending on invitations from people who had
heard about the Dutch film maker speaking in other
cities. From Moscow Kozintzev and Trauberg invited me
to Leningrad where I stayed about a week. The film
people there were using an entirely different method and
organization to that used in the Moscow film studios.
They were eager to show me how much different and bet-
ter their work sometimes was than that which I had seen
in Moscow. During this week I was able to leave the
film studios only occasionally to get some sleep-and to
be shown the historic monuments of Peter the Great,
Catherine, the October Revolution and the Rembrandts
in the Hermitage.
From Leningrad I was invited to Kiev. For the first
time in Kiev I became aware of the feeling of strength
produced by the Soviet Union's liberation of the non-
Russian nationalities. I was taken to the newly built
Ukrainian film studio where everyone acted and spoke
as if he was participating in a wonderful new discovery.
The great film figure in Kiev was, of course, Alexander
Dovzhenko. Sontseva, his wife and directorial assistant,
acted as interpreter, with French as the common language.
By the end of my stay in Kiev we were discussing the
hundreds of subjects that only lifelong friends discuss.
Later during a visit to Paris Dovzhenko talked to me
about large screen, and predicted this invention, which at
that time nobody had yet thought of.

53
 The film people in Kiev always showed a warm criti-
cism in discussing my films. This warmth of the Ukrainian
studios sometimes produced films that were over-violent
and primitive, but it also produced a Dovzhenko.
On one of our last evenings I again showed all my
films. It was then that Dovzhenko said that he would
like to give me a present-would I like to have a reel
from his new film Earth? I could take it back to Amster-
dam with me. As I had an extra print of Rain* I gave
him that in exchange. Earth is the most optimistic film
I ever saw. Although it begins with death and ends with
death it is a film about life, about the forces that produce
life. I think that Earth is one of the great works of art
based on a materialist philosophy.
In Kiev I received an invitation to go to Odessa where
a branch of the Kiev Ukrainian studio was being run
almost exclusively by Komsomols, the youth organiza-
tion. In Odessa my first duty as a film maker was to
visit the steps which had been made internationally fa-
mous by Eisenstein's Potemkin. In between the theo-
retical and political discussions with the young people
of the Odessa studio who were also learning to live and
work on the fields, I was taken out to see collective
farms. All the gaiety and color foreigners associated with
the Russian past-troikas, embroideries, choruses, dancing-
was kept alive on these farms. I went by ship from
Odessa to Batum and then on to Tiflis which was like
some sort of Paradise where all the most generous and
dramatic people had been collected. No Georgian ever
offers you a glass of wine. He hands you a bottle with a
wonderful complimentary speech about his reasons for
wanting you to have it. The Georgian audience was the
first ever to weep on seeing Rain and Moll's crystal film

* I doubt very much whether this reel of Rain stills exists in

Kiev or if the reel of Earth in Amsterdam survived German
bombing.

54
had its greatest Soviet success inTiflis. Afterwards I could
never make Moll believe that people had actually tossed
their hats in the air when the film ended.
In charge of Georgian film production was a young
man named Mikhail Kalatozov who showed me one of
his first films, Salt for Svanetia. Although a documentary,
it had an intensity and violence that would have been
worshipped by the European surrealists had they been
able to see it.
From Soviet Georgia to Soviet Armenia, Erivan. There
the translation problem was really tough. I could find no
one who could speak German and Armenian, so every-
thing Isaid in German was translated by one translator
into Russian and after that by another into Armenian.
I could watch the reaction to each of my jokes three times.
The first time from the three percent of the audience who
knew German; then from the seventeen percent who
knew Russian ; and a few seconds later, the eighty percent
who knew Armenian. Although there was a film studio in
Erivan, my clearest memory of that city is of its extensive
wine cellars. I was led through the cellars by an old man
who had the objectivity of a librarian, and who let me
taste a cognac of 1830 as if it was a hundred year old
edition of a famous book. I not only took back to Amster-
dam alecture on the Five Year Plan, but also ten bottles
of very old cognac from the Erivan cellar.
The last lecture I gave in the south was in Baku on
the Caspian Sea. Not much of a film industry existed
there, hardly more than a branch of the national news-
reel organization; but one of its motion picture theatres
had a dynamic and imaginative director who wanted his
audience to see new films from abroad, and to hear what
their first visiting Dutchman had to say.
When I left Moscow, some of the film people had been
afraid I would not be able to take the frank criticism
from the film professionals and general audiences. When
I got back to Moscow they were eager to hear what had

55
happened. The criticism I had received had been frank
and outspoken; but with it came so much understanding
and appreciation that you felt that these people cared for
the film maker. They would see the films and then listen
to the man who had made them. And because they were
genuinely concerned they would show their interest in
you and in your next films. So you couldn't help but be
eager for such understanding criticism no matter how
faultfinding.
Although everyone had something different to say it
was a collective opinion stemming from the same needs
and desires. The opinions may have seemed more collec-
tive than they actually were because they were all based
on a point of view that I had not heard expressed before
I went to Russia. When film makers saw The Bridge they
accepted it for what I had intended it to be-a workshop
film and the subsequent discussion centered around tech-
nical aspects of the film, the rhythmic editing, and so
forth.
However, when I showed The Bridge to a workers'
audience, the workshop aspect became unimportant. The
workers criticized it in a much more direct way. They
would ask-"Why don't you explain what cities this bridge
links? Why don't we see any people on the bridge?" And
I would reply that everyone in Holland knows these de-
tails and when I made the film I had not realized that it
would be shown outside that country. Nevertheless, these
questions stuck in my mind. This audience saw a train
going over a bridge and wanted to know much more than
the mechanical functions of the bridge.
This audience's reaction to Rain was equally healthy
and equally disturbing. It seemed to them that I had fallen
in love with reflections and textures. They said Rain
showed too little of human reactions and concentrated
too much on objects. One challenging remark was-"Why
are you afraid of faces? If you could look at a face with
the same frankness with which you look at a raindrop

56
you would be wonderful." This reaction made a deeper
impression on me than when audiences compared the
lighting and composition in Rain with that in Dutch
genre painting.
The film most appreciated by workers' audiences was
the Zuiderzee short. This was constructive and had an
immediate interest for a whole people then engaged in
construction. It showed the Dutch people fighting against
the sea-successfully fighting against a big natural obsta-
cle; and they were pleased to see more faces in the Zui-
derzee film. Still they insisted that this was not enough.
They wanted to see how the workers who were building
the dikes lived.
An invitation to show my films and to lecture at the
club house of the Metro construction workers turned out
to have a great influence on my future work. The workers
had been in Moscow about two months. An audience of
about eight hundred people filled the small auditorium.
Although I had seen my films about two hundred times
during the tour and wanted to stay outside the hall, I
had become aware that it was insulting to an audience
not to see the films with them. When the show started,
a man in the middle of the audience stood up and began
to read the Russian titles aloud-very loud. Surprised, I
asked my interpreter what this meant. "Oh, that's all
right," she said, "you see, about half these people cannot
yet read or write so this comrade is reading the titles for
his fellow workers."
It was the beginning of a wonderful experience. My
films were being seen by people who could not read. I
wondered how they would react. When the program was
finished the real business of the evening began. A dis-
cussion with an artist was a serious thing. A table and a
dozen chairs were brought and placed on the stage. The
audience settled down and nominated a presidium, a
chairman and a number of other people, to sit with me
on the stage during the discussion. The first hand from
57
the floor was recognized by the chairman. This first
speaker had a lot on his mind.
"Yes, these films we have seen are very interesting. We
have seen a strange country but we feel close to the peo-
ple. They do the same kind of work that we do. I think
the films are very well made but I should like to ask the
director about the men we saw working on that dike.
How much do they earn? How much butter are they al-
lowed each week? I also want to ask how much cement
is put into that rotating mixing machine? How much con-
crete can it make in an hour? And I want to know how
many workers were employed on the whole project."
I tried to answer him as best I could. I told him that
wages for that kind of work came to about thirty-two
gulden a week. Most of the workers would be using mar-
garine because butter was too expensive. I knew the
figures on the mixing machine because I felt I had to
learn technical details during the shooting of the film. I
told him that during the ten years of the draining project
about ten thousand men had been employed.
The next worker who got up, after some general com-
ments on The Bridge and on Zuiderzee, came to the
point.
"I should like to know a little more about Citizen
Ivens. What was he doing in 1917? Who is his father and
what does his father do? What kind of government does
Holland have? Is Citizen Ivens regularly employed in
this kind of work? How long has he been doing this kind
of work?"
These were questions that were usually only put to So-
viet citizens, in order to know their past: 1917, the year
of the Russian Revolution had a special importance.
My translator was much more worried by these ques-
tions than I was. She had been translating for so many
delicately balanced and sometimes egocentric foreign
visitors that she expected me to be embarrassed by such
frankness. I was much too excited by this new atmosphere

58
to be embarrassed. These questions were not asked out
of curiosity and were certainly not meant to be offensive.
The people simply wanted to know everything they could
about me, my life, and my work. I told the nervous
translator that I would be glad to answer the specific
questions.
I said that in 1917, I was finishing high school. Dutch
East Indies troops guarded the bridge in my home town
against possible German attack. The Boy Scouts in
Nymegen, to which I belonged, ran errands for these
Dutch troops.
'There was unfortunately no revolution in Holland in
1917. The workers of Amsterdam and some other towns
demonstrated for better work conditions. My father owns
and runs a chain of stores selling photographic supplies.
He belongs to the middle class. The Dutch government
is a constitutional monarchy, something like the British
government. I have been making films for three years but
it is difficult to make a living from it. I was a photo-
chemical engineer and now I am a motion picture direc-

tor."
After these answers my questioner arose again. "I
think," he said, "that Citizen Ivens is either a fake or a
liar." When this was translated for me I was puzzled.
The audience was now as excited as I was. I told the
translator to ask him for an explanation. He repeated,
"A fake or a liar."
"Could you put that a little more concretely?" I asked.
"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 or else you are a worker who's pretending to
be from the middle class-and that is certainly not neces-
sary here in a workers' and peasant state," he added
smiling.
I couldn't have asked for a higher compliment: The
59
film is exactly the way I see the work. I had no docu-
ments with me and I made no attempt to prove that I
was really a member of the middle class. Somewhat des-
perate, Itried 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 started 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 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 an-
other. Ifound 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 the chin. Those became
the two focal points for the action. Reality dictated the
photography, not my esthetic 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 laborer until
I found out the physical strain of his work."
My questioner was satisfied. "That is good, very good,"
he said.
After many other questions the meeting came to an
end with a resolution that was proposed and carried. I

60
don't have its exact formulation but it was something
like this : We hear that Citizen Ivens has difficulty getting
work in his own country. As he sees work as we see it
and knows how to make films of it we propose that Citi-
zen lvens be given film work in our country. This is to
be arranged by our union office.
This was one of the most significant evenings in my
young film career. That man had discovered a secret of
my working method which I myself had not fully real-
ized. 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. The showing that night resulted in an
invitation to stay in the Soviet Union and make a film.
But there were reasons for my giving up this opportunity
and returning to Holland. I was still technical manager
in my father's company and had already been away too
long. I had to complete Zuiderzee and I had to take back
all the information I had gathered about the Soviet Union
to Holland. I felt certain that some day when time and
circumstances were ripe I would return to Russia and do
a film there.
Less than twenty-four hours after my return to Amster-
dam Ireceived a telephone call from the publicity direc-
tor of the Philips Radio Factory located at Eindhoven
in the south of Holland. He asked me whether I would
like to come to Eindhoven and make a film about the
factory. They gave me a good contract and an adequate
budget. They left the choice of subject 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."
From the outset I was determined to avoid the cliches
that were already forming around the industrial advertis-
ing film. Instead of a heroic film parade of all the differ-
ent departments, I decided to concentrate on how people
work in a modern mechanized factory, showing the ac-
61
tual working conditions as well as the step by step devel-
opment of the product-in this case, radio appliances.
This seemed the most honest way to make this film-a
kind of Modern Times in documentary.
The glimpse of Russia had made me much more aware
of the social and ideological facets of such a subject.
While I knew that the Philips film could not possibly be
a work with forceful social implications, I felt that my
job was to concentrate on the people in the plant rather
than on the gadgets. But during the filming I met with
increasing limitations.
When I felt that it would be useful to visit the home
of the glass blower, or some other workman in the plant,
to show his personal life and what he did with his salary,
I was told that it could not be part of the film. The gates
of the plant were the boundaries. As the film progressed
I found the conditions and restrictions conflicting more
and more with my own convictions. It seemed to be get-
ting too far away from what I knew to be the true facts
of the situation. I knew that Eindhoven was actually a
company town, that the wages were low and that the
workers were far from satisfied. I felt that whenever I
got a true expression on a worker's face, or a true nerv-
ous gesture, I was getting what I really wanted to say
about this subject.
I shot a tremendous amount of material in the long
modern halls of the assembly lines; on the production
of radio appliances and loudspeakers; on the complex
glass-blowing machines with their grips and arms that
tremble and work just like human functions-but never
grow tired. I showed the deadly repetitious action of a
boy at a stamping machine where the machine seems to
do the thinking and the boy the moving. Sometimes I was
attracted by the fantastic appearance of some of the ap-
pliances, such as the pressure plastic machine with its iron
monster mouth, or the weird atmosphere of the hundred
million volt room. I tried to catch the nervous tension

62
of the hundreds of girls working along the endless con-
veyor belt; where nothing can stop the inevitable next
piece from arriving on the belt; where a girl would be
fired if she broke one of the thousand inexpensive bulbs
which she handled daily.
I completed the film in about four months. It was the
first real Studio Ivens film. The whole team worked on

it; Helen
ken. It wasvanthe Dongen,
first time Johnny Fernhout,
I had had a chanceKolthoff", Huis-
to use sound
so I played freely with real sounds and music, using no
commentary. Silent titles indicated a technical detail
about the sequence that followed. The musical score was
by Lou Lichtveld. It continued throughout the film,
mostly as a general emotional background to the visuals.
Laboratory work and recording were done in Paris-at
Tobis Studio at Epinay. At that time Rene Clair was just
beginning work on his industrial satire, A Nous la Lib -
erte, a film which treated modern industry in a fictional
and fantastic way. Since my film treated this modern in-
dustry in all its realistic and true aspects, Clair showed
it to his entire crew.
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. At the
Paris premiere the critics detected this sensual emphasis
and renamed the film: Symphonie Industrielte.
There was, at this time, a real danger which I didn't
realize-of becoming so glib and skillful in my work that
I could do this sort of film as easily as a juggler keeps
five balls in the air. This would naturally mean a sacri-
fice of realistic content.
In polishing Philips-Radio I learned a great deal about
structure, particularly the dramatic structure of a se-
quence. For example, in one sequence I wanted to show
63
the hard physical labor that still had to be done even in
such a highly modernized factory as Philips. I found
such hard labor 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 diameter 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.
I foresaw that many people would laugh at this effect,
so I deliberately repeated the glass-blower's puffed-out
cheeks in an even bolder close-up to obtain a more gro-
tesque effect, and then came even closer to the flesh of
his cheeks and intercut this close-up with the slow, care-
ful, 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.
Each type of audience reacts differently to the editing
of this sequence. When I showed the film to the long-
shoremen inAntwerp there wasn't a single laugh when
they saw the blownup sweating face of the blower. They
understand what physical work for a living means. A
large part of an average audience laughs at the beginning
of the sequence. There is less laughter and more under-
standing the second time they see the sweating face and
the worker's blownup cheeks and when the third close-
up comes, they get the idea. These glass blowers rarely
live beyond the age of forty-five and earn only ten per-
cent more than their fellow workers.
Philips-Radio was completed at the end of 1930 and
first shown publicly in 1931*. The last steps in its pro-
* One of the consequences of Philips-Radio was Philips' ex-
pansion of their use of film in advertising and public relations.
Subsequent productions in "Phillywood" were Hans Richter's
Radio Europa and George Pal's animated advertisement.

64
duction overlapped the first stages of my new film-an-
other industrial film, Creosote.
I was glad to get another film immediately because it
kept our team intact and we could go on making films-
our profession and our job. It also gave us a chance to
travel abroad because we had to show the manufacture
and use of creosote in several European countries. This
sort of popular science film resulted from a personal con-
nection, Frans Gips, an old student friend who had be-
come an engineer and manager of one of the biggest
Dutch lumber firms. We had worked together in the in-
ternational student movement immediately after the war
and now we were together again in another international
organization. This time it was a cartel, the International
Committee of Creosote Manufacturers, formed to control
and regulate the production and distribution of this
product.
Creosote is a a by-product from the coke ovens in iron
and steel plants, blast furnaces, gas works, and many
chemical factories. Germany, France, Holland, Belgium,
Poland and England were all involved in the creosote
cartel and each wanted to have his role prominently
treated in the international picture. This advertising
picture was to be disguised, as so many of them are, as
the story of a benefactor of humanity. The theme of the
film was to demonstrate that the wood and timber re-
serves of the world must be safeguarded and preserved.
And to whom could this sacred guardianship be trusted?
To the makers of creosote, of course!
I did not consider Johnny Fernhout sufficiently devel-
oped to carry the full responsibility for the camera work,
so I invited Jean Dreville, an experienced French docu-
mentary cameraman, to collaborate with Johnny on the
photography and with me on the direction. Our group
of three did a lot of fast documentary work on locations
all over Europe.
In Creosote we had to move quickly and get a great

5 Ivens, camera 65
deal done under difficult circumstances with a minimum
crew. In Belgium, technical reasons limited us to a week's
filming of a blast furnace and coke oven, one of the key-
sequences in the film. We learned to get acclimated
rapidly, working out a general conception for sequences
almost immediately, arranging all the necessary collab-
oration with the people on the spot, completing the out-
line and shooting schedule, shooting the necessary foot-
age and leaving for the next location where we repeated
the whole procedure. In the Rhineland we were to film
a chemical factory; in Paris a gas works, in Holland the
final process of manufacturing creosote.
Each country offered new difficulties. In Poland, south
of Warsaw near Lublin, we had to go deep into the for-
ests to show how the lumber is transported down the
river to the port of Danzig. We three, not knowing a
word of Polish, were escorted into the wilderness by
guides who knew no language but Polish.
In Berlin we ran into difficulties with UFA, the lead-
ing German film company, which maintained a large
Kulturabteilung-their educational film department. The
creosote trust had appointed me to produce the film and
to be responsible for the whole of it, while this depart-
ment of UFA was to supply the scientific and animated
cartoon work. Naturally the Herren Doktoren tried to
move in on the entire film, making it heavy and pompous
and hyper-educational. This problem was settled by a
couple of trips to my friend in The Hague.
Out of my work for this international cartel came an
interesting film about a complicated technical process
showing how the product was made and, sometimes, even
the people who made it. Creosote was a special help to
Johnny. It developed him both as a cameraman and di-
rector and equipped him for future independent work.
For me, Philips-Radio and Creosote had large material
compensations, as well as technical accomplishments, but
these compensations did not solve my own inner conflict

66
which went on throughout this period. I was torn between
the need to show social truth in documentary film form
and the impossibility of doing so in this slick kind of
industrial and commercial film.
However, Philips-Radio and Creosote mark a turning
point in my career. I could have continued the commer-
cial success and the technical facility which I achieved
with them. I could probably have become a successful
advertising film maker. But this artistic suicide was pre-
vented bya fortunate decision. I knew I had a standing
invitation to work in Russia. I knew I had not been for-
gotten-the Russians had ordered two hundred prints
each of The Bridge, Rain and Zuiderzee for distribution
in the Soviet Union. It was time for me to take up that
invitation and this was as good a time as any, my last
two films having earned enough money for "Capi" (my
father's company) to allow me to take a long leave of
absence.
In February, 1932, after finishing Creosote and putting
the "Capi" affairs in order I left for Moscow. On my
arrival I was told that millions of people had seen my
films since my last visit. Inasmuch as the film director
in the Soviet Union receives a percentage of the distribu-
tion profits, I had earned enough money to take a long
vacation in the Caucasus, if that was what I wanted to
do. I preferred to get a film into production immediately.
I felt too much responsibility to that construction work-
ers' audience of two years ago to take a vacation in their
country. I was given a wide range of subjects from which
to choose. The Soviet audiences needed films on various
industrial and agricultural themes and on the participa-
tion in Soviet life by women and children. They needed
films on the new territory being built up in the Arctic
Circle, and on the oil fields around the Caspian Sea.
They thought that I would be particularly interested in
the new lemon culture in the Southern Caucasus because
of the great scale of draining being done in the swamp
67
lands there. I finally decided upon participation of young
people in Soviet industrial and cultural life.
For two months I traveled throughout the country
visiting industrial projects on which young people were
working. I wanted to find those which would have the
most dramatic values in film terms and which would be
most closely related to the first Five Year Plan-it might
be possible to finish the film in time to celebrate the
completion of the Plan.
Wherever I went in that huge country I found the
dramatic values I was searching for-so much material,
in fact, that I needed an epic form for this magnificent
story of accomplishment. With this in mind, I mapped
out a script about the work of youth in every phase of
life in the Soviet Union. I showed it to Pudovkin. He
immediately told me what was wrong with my epic.
"You have at least ten films in the script. No one
would ever 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
that young people are doing here and that will simplify
the dramatic and pictorial problems of your film."
One industrial project did stand out prominently in
my all-embracing script, possibly because there young
people were doing the most heroic work in heavy indus-
try. It was the steel center of Magnitogorsk in the Urals.
This became the subject of my film. The Mezhrabpom
Studio, which was to produce my film put me in touch
with the Moscow office of the Communist Youth Organ-
ization. Their cultural department did everything to
facilitate my project, providing me with a quantity of
factual and other material, and arranging interviews
with young people who had been in Magnitogorsk.
I learned that one blast furnace was already in opera-
tion and that the young people were beginning the con-
struction ofthe second, to be named Komsomolskaya in
honor of the Youth Organization. The oldest engineer

68
working on this construction was twenty-three. This was
obviously the correct physical core for my film. Skliut,
a young writer from the Cinema Institute, was assigned
to me, and we began to put the reams of material I had
collected into some preparatory shape before going on
location. We were not encouraged to spend too much
time on preparation because everyone was in a hurry to
get the first Five Year Plan completed and, as this film
was regarded as part of the Plan, we wanted to be able
to finish it before the end of the year.
I thought it important that Skliut should be in Magni-
togorsk and work closely along with the rest of us. For
some time I had wanted to do a film in which the writer
was intimately involved in the production.
We formed an international crew. Only a few of us
were Russian, but we were all young. Alexander She-
lenkov was a brilliant, recently graduated cameraman.
A good-natured, but hard-boiled young man named
Andreyev joined our crew as representative of the Mos-
cow Youth Organization. He had been one of the thou-
sands of homeless children roaming through Russia after
the Civil War-besprizomi they were called. Now he
was a member of the educational department of the
Moscow Komsomol. He fitted in excellently as a member
of our unit, combining a deep understanding of people
with a forceful way of getting things done quickly. He
was able to break down the wall of red tape that sepa-
rated Magnitogorsk from our film project. Of all the peo-
ple Iworked with in the Soviet Union I believe it was
Andreyev who taught me most about socialist expression,
elan and socialist work-not particularly with words but
by his actions, his integrity, his optimism.* Besides the
* In 1935 when I revisited Moscow I examined the new sub-
way construction and was told that about 7,000 young people had
come from Siberia to work on it. I was taken to meet the man
who was leading and organizing these 7,000 untrained young men
and women. It was Andreyev.

69
production manager, the sound engineer, Nikitin, and
the sound assistant, our crew included Herbert Marshall,
a lanky, excited London boy studying at the Cinema In-
stitute. The only girl in our crew was Paya Haskelson,
our translator. After we had been working a month in
Magnitogorsk I wired the German composer, the late
Hanns Eisler, to come and write the music for our film
on location.
Magnitogorsk was the frontier between Europe and
Asia. Two years before, the railway station was one
stationary railway car. An airport was finished almost
before the station was completed. Kirghiz ponies, mod-
ern motorbuses, primitive barracks and a six story hotel
stand side by side. It looked something like a saloon-less
wild west: horses, no revolvers, plenty of portfolios,
brief cases. In the primitive tents of the Kirghiz tribes
the children who came to town taught their parents to
read and write. While some equipment was hammered
out by hand, the latest American technique was employed
in building the blast furnace itself. It was a new socialist
town, composed almost exclusively of young people of
all nationalities; even young American engineers from
Gary, Indiana.
It was the first time I had ever lived and worked with
a crew under conditions of real physical hardship. It was
more difficult than I had ever realized. At first we lived
in old, crudely constructed barracks, a cross between an
army barracks and the log cabins we associate with the
American frontier of a century ago. The barracks were
an emergency solution to a housing situation and each of
them sheltered hundreds of people. Plumbing did not get
much consideration in the emergency.
This was the legendary Russian steppe. No trees any-
where. Incredibly cold-a cold that taught you to be
grateful for those grayish-brown log cabins, stuffed at
the chinks with rough flax. The streets were streams of
brown mud, whose consistency depended on the temper-

70
ature of the day. This was a war to conquer the wilder-
ness and to exploit the vast natural forces of Magnito-
gorsk. The geographical center of our community was
the huge Magnitnaya mountain, less than three miles
away from our barracks. It is the largest iron mountain
in the world, with rock containing sixty percent iron ore,
and the compasses were going wild so close to this mass
of iron.
One of our biggest difficulties was the problem of
film supply and camera equipment. It might have been
possible to get along with one old-fashioned camera and
two handcameras under ideal location conditions; but
here everything inadequate multiplied its own inade-
quacy. The bulky primitive sound equipment seemed
twice as unwieldy as it would have anywhere else. 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. This was not
Philips-Radio on which I could use as much film as I
wanted. This was Magnitogorsk, part of a planned econ-
omy still in the making. Thinking back about this limi-
tation, now
I realize that it forced upon us a certain artis-
tic economy in our methods and in the finished film.
So-called protection shots were a luxury we could not
afford.
Neither could I generalize the theme as luxuriously
as I had in Philips-Radio. The Magnitogorsk film de-
manded 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 Kirghiz, named Afa-
naseyev. Here was a man who symbolized a people leap-
ing 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 Kirghiz tents to the blast furnaces of
modern socialized industry. Afanaseyev, illiterate and an
unskilled laborer, had come to Magnitogorsk to dig the

71
foundation for the blast furnace. He was encouraged to
attend a riveting class at a technical night school and
subsequently 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 foundry and steel production techniques.
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 necessarily
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. Faced with a story
problem that was new, not only to me but also to Skliut,
we tended to allow the film to develop very much as the
boy had done-rapidly and with few transitions from
stage to stage.
The supply problem affected not only our equipment
but every detail of our life in Magnitogorsk. The food
supply, like many others, was irregular. Our cameramen
worked under high strain. It was difficult to get a car, a
truck or gasoline when we needed it-difficult to get any-
thing, since everything was requisitioned for the building
of the blast furnace. In spite of this it was the first time
in my life that I felt integrated with my work, a part of
my environment. Our film crew was not an isolated,
strange group temporarily attached to a big industrial
project, but part of the project. I was sure that many
workers in Magnitogorsk felt the same way about us-
felt that it was just as important to have a good film
about the blast furnace as it was to build the blast fur-
nace. That made up for all the hardships. We were con-

72
scious of the fact that if the steel and iron output lived
up to the quotas of the Five Year Plan then more facili-
ties and comforts would be available the following year-
warmer coats, better boots, more food.
Our film unit had a fine spirit. We worked by plan-
a plan that was known to everybody in the unit. The
crew met regularly to discuss all the aspects of the de-
veloping production and to schedule our next stage-so
many sequences, so much footage, and this much film
economy.
With the air of veterans we enjoyed watching the
enthusiasm of Hanns Eisler coming directly from luxuri-
ous streets of Berlin to the barren Siberian mountains.
I must say he took it well. I gave him a pair of overalls
and we even found one of the only bottles of cognac in
Magnitogorsk for him. The small, bald, active man
climbed courageously around the blast furnace wherever
the rest of us went, getting the feel of the rough and
energetic atmosphere of this place of youth. He studied
the sound effects of the riveters, of the building and of
the regular explosions from the side of Magnitnaya.
One night he burst into our barracks announcing a
magnificent discovery. He had found an old Kirghiz
shepherd with an ancient flute. A typical Kirghiz instru-
ment. He brought in the old shepherd and we learned
that the ancient instrument was actually a modern iron
bedpost transformed into a flute. The shepherd apolo-
gized and said that the pitch was as true as that of a real
flute. Hanns even found an amateur opera composer
among the Russian engineers on the project and listened
night after night to the man's scores played on an old
piano, giving him advice and lessons in composition. The
chief result of Eisler's trip to Magnitogorsk was one of
the most forceful and original scores that he ever com-
posed for a film.
We stayed three months at Magnitogorsk working and
filming. Then we spent two weeks in Kusnetsk two thou-

73
sand miles to the east, in the middle of Siberia, to shoot
an essential sequence. Kusnetsk was the coal center that
provided the coal and coke for the new blast furnaces
at Magnitogorsk. And the workers at these two industries
of this coaWron shuttle, two thousand miles apart,
worked as a single unit.
On our arrival in Kusnetsk we received the very good
news from Moscow that our entire film unit had been
honored with the title of "Shock Brigade" in recognition
of our speedy, economical and efficient work. This made
us feel more than ever a part of an integrated economy.
We received our Shock Brigade books in Kusnetsk; these
entitled us to a slightly better grade of food at the public
restaurants and similar small but important advantages.
There was a barber shop, which was equipped with sev-
eral ordinary chairs, but had only one professional barber
chair. Our Shock Brigade books gave us the privilege of
sitting in this special chair for a haircut.
During the two weeks at Kusnetsk, Skliut and I ar-
ranged a useful division of labor. On those days when
the rest of us were filming, Skliut did the research needed
for the next day's work-talking to people, getting real
stories from them. By evening the camera crew and I
would be worn out, and Skliut, whose work was less
strenuous, would tell us the ideas he had heard from the
people in the plant and in the mine. Together we would
revise the script and plan the next day's shooting on the
basis of Skliut's material.
Back in Magnitogorsk we took the concluding episode
of the film, the new Komsomolskaya producing its first
white-hot iron on the promised day.
In Moscow the cutting and completion were done with
the same feeling of meeting a date. The finished film,
called Song of Heroes, was one of the ten films chosen
to celebrate the successful conclusion of the first Five
Year Plan.
For me, an interesting part of the film's reception in
professional circles was the discussion it started on the
distinction between the documentary film and the fiction
film. Many critics wanted to see a more gradual develop-
ment of Afanaseyev, to see why he took each of the steps
from digger to riveter and to feel the psychological rea-
sons behind those steps. In answer to this I pointed out
that in a documentary film you could show development
in a series of abrupt steps without showing in detail the
steps between each of these steps. A detailed develop-
ment requires a much more psychological and dramatic
treatment for which actors and an almost entire fictional
approach are needed.
This touches the constantly recurring question of the
limitations of documentary style-how far can it overlap
the fiction style? If you go deeply into personalization
and dramatization of the leading characters in a docu-
mentary you inevitably need trained actors to give satis-
factory expression to this treatment and you land in the
field of fiction film. It is only rarely that you can find
natural, untrained acting talents to portray such compli-
cated psychological roles; and in over-straining a non-
professional actor or actress you get an amateur quality
that destroys the force of conviction which is one of the
documentary's greatest assets.
The critical discussion also questioned the correctness
of including re-enactments of scenes in a straight docu-
mentary 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. For example, in Magni-
togorsk, the Komsomols often organized what they called

75
"storm nights." After dinner, all the young workers
would pile into trucks and with songs and flaming torches
go off to the project where they put in extra night hours
of work. These spectacular, volunteer night shifts were
characteristic of this period and we decided to use such
a sequence near the conclusion of the film. We might have
filmed this just as it happened, but sometimes the trucks
moved with great intervals between them. In actuality,
some of the trucks did not carry torches. All in all, 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 film-
ing purposes in order to emphasize its real meaning
and to communicate the healthy enthusiasm and solidar-
ity 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 haphazardly filmed on the road.
The distinction between letting the event dominate
the filming and the attempt to film an event with maxi-
mum expressiveness is the difference between orthodox
documentary (which today is represented by the news-
reel) and the newer, broader form of documentary film.
Naturally it is possible to go too far in such re-enact-
ments. They should always, if possible, be taken on the
spot where the real event happens and with the same
people. If you go beyond reality by staging the scenes in
a studio or back lot, with actors and extras emotionally
removed from the real situation you are on dangerous
ground and are apt to lose what I call the genuine docu-
mentary qualities of your film. You are discarding one
of the most essential weapons of the documentary form:
the feeling of authenticity. This is not only a matter of
matching light and movement. It is also a matter of
matching style and attitude.

76
 The re-enactment introduces a very subjective and per-
sonal factor in making documentary films: the integrity
of the director-his understanding of and approach to
reality-his will to tell the essential truth about the theme-
his comprehension of his responsibility towards his audi-
ence. He is, as an artist, creating a new reality which may
influence the thinking of the spectators and stimulate
them to action by the truth of his film. No definition of
documentary film is complete without including these
"subjective" factors.

77
ge
 The B or ins (inhabitants of the Borinage, located west
of Mons) find work only in the coal mines. These mines
are an imposing sight, 500 meters underground; there
groups of working men, worthy of our respect and our
sympathies daily descend. The miner is peculiar to the
Borinage; daylight does not exist for him, and except on
Sunday he never sees the sunshine. He works laboriously
by pale, dim lamplight, in a narrow tunnel, his body bent
double. Often he is obliged to crawl, extracting from the
bowels of the earth that mineral whose great usefulness
we well know; he works among threats of ever-recur-
ring dangers

Shis is in the little Dutch geography book that Vincent

van Gogh read before going to the Borinage as a student
evangelist. That is where I went to make my next film,
not as a missionary to soften or treat wounds, but as a
film maker to reveal the wounds to the rest of the world
because I thought that my best way to help in their heal-
ing. My working conditions, morally and artistically, had
been wonderful in the Soviet Union; but, as much as I
enjoyed these conditions, I didn't feel that I was really
needed there. After Song of Heroes I returned to Hol-
land.
Had Philips have telephoned me then, I had learned
enough to turn down their offer. Fortunately the first op-
portunity that appeared after my return to Holland was
exactly what I was hoping for and needed most.
Henri Storck, a Belgian director, whom I knew to be
an honest and serious documentary film maker, came to
me with the idea, or rather, a definite need for a film.
He told me what had been happening in the Borinage
in 1932 while I was away.
In June the Belgian mine-owners had announced a
five percent cut in wages. On Monday the 20th, a meet-
ing was called by the Wasmes miners to strike the next
day if the cut was not withdrawn. On Tuesday the eight

6 Ivens, camera 81
pits of Wasmes were deserted and certain pits in Cues-
mes, Frameries and Quanegnon were stopped. By the
following Monday 15 000 miners were on strike in the
Borinage district, and by July 7, 30 000 were out in the
Borinage and 15 000 in the Centre and Charleroi. Mons,
Charleroi and Liege were put under martial law; ar-
mored cars patrolled the streets; bombers circled over-
head; the gendarmerie appeared in steel helmets with
fixed bayonets; armed soldiers were stationed through-
out the mine district; and the right of street assembly
was abolished-not more than five persons being allowed
to congregate.
Workers in other industries throughout the country
struck in sympathy with the terrorized miners, and the
Belgian government prepared for an imagined march of
the strikers on the capital. The empty promises and ora-
tory of the reformist leaders of Belgian labor brought the
strike to an end; but by July 21, less than 350 miners
had returned to work in the Borinage. Of the 100 000
miners who were on strike all over Belgium few re-
turned-or were permitted to return. The mine-owners
were to have their revenge.
The aftermath of the strike was terrible. Miners who
had taken an active part in the strike were black-listed
in all Belgian mines and were evicted from the com-
pany-owned houses. Whole ghost towns of company
houses were left behind by miners' families looking for
work elsewhere. The systematized terror grew broader
and deeper and the morale of the Borinage workers
dropped to a dangerously low point.
Storck said, "A few of us in Brussels, members of the
Club de l'Ecran, want to make a factual film about the
conditions in the Borinage now, which will help the work-
ers there by acquainting the rest of the world with their
real conditions."
This was exactly the film subject that I wanted and
needed. Storck and a Brussels lawyer immediately intro-

82
duced me to the Borinage by driving me there. In some
film subjects you have to search and dig to find the truth,
but here everywhere you looked, every word you heard
was a direct illustration of the Borinage truth. One of
the first men I met was a miner whose family had been
evicted and were living in the street. Although there
were bakeries two minutes away from the vacant lot
which he and his family now called "home," each day he
had to cycle to his parents to get a loaf of bread-two
hours there and two hours back.
Throughout the Borinage you could see detailed evi-
dence of exhaustion and discouragement, the aftermath
of the strike. Everywhere were small groups of jobless
workers talking only about their worries and their for-
lorn hopes. What would winter bring their families and
those people who were lucky and had jobs. There was
the funeral of a miner who had died in a mine accident
but no one was angry. Too often death and wretchedness
and misery were accepted as inevitable. Sometimes one
could see the Borinage despair in the senseless fights that
would flare up around the bars and cafes. It seemed as
if the lost strike had weakened the miners' protest. All
this seemed a long way from the Borinage Karl Marx
had pointed to as a classic example of proletarian strug-
gle, or Zola had written about in Germinal. Yet, some-
how, Icould understand why after living in the Borinage
Van Gogh stopped preaching and began to paint*

* Here are Van Gogh's impressions of the Borinage, excerpted

from his letters to his brother:
Most of the miners are thin and -pale from fever and look tired
and emaciated, weather-beaten and aged before their time, the
women, as a whole, faded and worn. Around the mine are poor
miners* huts with a few dead trees black from smoke, and thorn
hedges, dunghills, and ash dumps, heaps of useless coal, etc
"People here are ignorant and untaught, most of them cannot read,
but at the same time they are intelligent and quick in their dif-

6* 83
 My first impression of the district was its dark and
colorless uniformity-no bright thing, no happy thing.
Black, dusty-no whites. The lightest tone is gray. Even
nature seems saddened by the district's misery. The trees
and leaves could not breath through the old layers of
coal-dust. The dust filters everywhere-no house is safe
against it. A lack of decent plumbing keeps the men,
women and children of the Borinage permanently grimy.
The absence of bathing facilities strikes the miner harder
than it does any other worker. To work eight and ten
hours in the black shafts and tunnels is bad enough, but
to come up to the surface of the earth to find life there
just as black and filthy— this makes the twenty-four hours
of a miner's day an unrelieved horror. All these people
could work ten times better and more happily by just
having a clean house, a room that could be kept clean,
a shower or an ordinary kitchen-any place that would
be white in its cleanliness so that they could forget black
dust. In the Borinage I felt that miners, more than any
other group of workers, need light and air and color.**
Upon first viewing this district I felt the violent dra-
matic impact of the huge heaps of stored coal standing
idle but protected by barbed wire from the people who
needed it and had mined it. Their houses, when they had
any, and their families were cold-but they couldn't buy
a bucketful from these great stores because the owners
weren't interested in selling-the price for coal was too
low that year. The final brutality of this inhuman con-
cult work, brave and frank, of small stature but square-shoul-
dered with melancholy deep-set eyes. They are handy in many
things, and work terribly hard. They have a nervous temperament,
1 do not mean weak, but very sensitive. They have an innate,
deeply rooted hatred, and a deep mistrust of everybody who
would try to domineer over them.
** Two years later, when I made a Russian sound version of
Borinage, I emphasized this important psychological achievement
in Soviet miners' living conditions.

84
tradiction reached its climax when desperate miners were
shot by the police as they crawled under the barbed wire
to steal a few lumps of coal.
Storck had made some pleasant and sensative avant
garde films on such subjects as the atmosphere around
the seaside resort of Ostend, but he had never tackled
anything so serious as the Borinage. This was why, when
the Brussels people asked him to make a film that would
show the misery in the Borinage, he asked me to share
the directorial responsibility with him and go there to
live for a couple of months. His contribution to the film
was great. He was deeply moved by the terrible condi-
tions and his film sensitivity made him an ideal collabora-
tor. We agreed to share the duties of story and photog-
raphy while I took responsibility for the whole produc-
tion. As a Belgian citizen it was easier for him to move
around in this delicate filming situation.
That the mine-owners and operators gave no approval
to our film is understandable. When filming inside the
Philips factory it had been impossible to go outside; in
the Borinage it was the opposite-it was impossible to go
inside the mines. When our purpose became known,
everything was done to keep us out of the district. In the
beginning we behaved very much as a casual film unit
come to the Borinage to take a few stock shots, but in
two or three weeks our real objective became clear.
After that we had to carry on as if we were making an
underground film. We could stay no longer than a couple
of days in any one house; several times we had to move
at an hour's notice. Each day the film we shot was taken
to Brussels by a messenger so that no film could be dis-
covered, confiscated and lost.
As I was a Dutch foreigner we thought it safer never
to leave any of the equipment with me. Our precautions
were justified, for in Mons at 7:00 one morning, the mine
operator sent the Belgian secret police to investigate my
connection with the filming. They could find nothing in
85
too will end in believing and he will perhaps have
learned more than he can tell.

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 pre-
vent agreeable photographic effects distracting the audi-
ence from the unpleasant truths we were showing.
We often encountered this danger of esthetic pleasure,
lights and shadows, symmetry or balanced composition
that would undermine our purpose for a moment. In the
cramped and filthy interiors of the Borinage an agree-
able esthetic 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 pre-
caution there was always a danger that these tiny dilap-
idated barracks (sometimes covered with ivy) might look
picturesque instead of appalling. There have also been
cases in the history of the documentary when photogra-
phers became so fascinated by dirt that the result was the
dirt looked interesting and strange, not something repel-
lent to the cinema audience.*
The film maker must be indignant and angry about
the waste of people before he can find the right camera

* In my opinion, certain of the early British documentary films,

for example, Housing Problem, fell into this error of exotic dirt.
You could not smell those London slums. On the other hand there
have been instances in fictional films where the real feeling of
human misery in filthy surroundings was completely communi-
cated. For example, in some of the interiors of Chaplin films.
Some of the best documentary films are great because of their
very conquest of this particular problem, for example, Pare Lo-
rentz' Fight for Life and Storck's Maisons de la Misere.

88
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. I wanted the specta-
tors 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.
Throughout our picture of the growth of organization
and protest in the Borinage, we were always conscious
of the great tradition of class struggle in that region.
When you speak to a miner in the street he tells you,
"You see that house there, my grandfather was shot in
front of it. He was on strike then."
"Where's your father now?"
"He is black-listed because he participated in the last
strike." And the man to whom you are talking is work-
ing on a united front committee of socialist, Catholic and
communist workers with an immediate simple demand:
For every miner, one bucket of coal each week from the
coal reserves that cant be sold on the ?narket.
Showing these strikers' tactics and episodes of struggle
brought us again to the problem of re-enactment. For
example, we wanted to show the eviction of a miner's
family and the technique that the community had worked
out for resisting such an eviction: When a black-listed
miner can't pay his rent the Company sends a sheriff to
remove and sell the miner's furniture. As soon as any of
the miners hear about this they all rush to the victim's
house and sit down on all his furniture-on the table,
stove, bed, as well as the chairs. As the sheriff's orders
are to move furniture but not people, all the miners have

* Although all of Flaherty's work had a gentle humanitarian

approach, when he came to make The Land for the AAA in the
United States he became so indignant and angry about the waste
of people that he found, and the bad conditions that he saw in
agriculture, that he made a forceful, accusing film.

89
to do is to sit patiently for hours and hours until the
sheriff, afraid of a scandal in a heavy laden atmosphere
in the narrow street, finally leaves.
Such a typical action happened to Pierre Duclot, a
black-listed miner. We wanted to show this event in our
film and the only way to get it was to re-enact it in his
very house with his wife and his neighbors. We rented
two gendarme uniforms from an opera company in Brus-
sels and our first problem was to find two miners to play
the roles of the police, the enemy. Not being an actor,
no real miner was willing to portray the character of a
gendarme, accomplice of the mine-owner. But once this
objection was overcome we made an honest, straight
re-enactment of the sit-down action preventing eviction-
which found a very valuable place in our finished film.
We re-created another sequence to show the clever
way in which the workers held brief emergency meetings
in spite of the large numbers of police nearby. At first
there are many scattered groups of three and four work-
ers playing cards on the sidewalk. Then, at a signal, they
rush together and hold a one-minute meeting, quickly
dispersing again. When a policeman comes along to see
what's up, all he finds are a few innocent card players
here and there on the street.
Another important scene also had to be re-enacted. In
a miner's home in the village of Wasmes (where Van
Gogh had lived), I saw an extraordinary "primitive"
portrait of Karl Marx that the miner had painted him-
self, also pictures of the Virgin Mary and King Albert.
I couldn't help asking, why those three pictures? I was
given very sound reasons for the choice of subjects.
"If there is a serious accident here, and that happens
often because security measures in the mines are inad-
equate, King Albert comes and gives us some money,
that's the reason for his picture. You never know what
happens after you die so we thought we had better keep
a picture of the Virgin Mary, too. When we really want

90
something we take that portrait of Marx out in the
streets."
Marx had been painted as if he were a miner, with
dark, deep-set eyes and a beard of thick hair turning
inward, not outward like the philosopher's. A big gold
frame around the picture made the whole thing impos-
ing.
"How did you carry this portrait with you in the
demonstration?', I asked.
"Simple. The portrait goes first, carried by two strong
men, and then ten paces behind them three more men,
then a space, then four men and behind them two. We
found it was better to make such an irregular demonstra-
tion rather than marching in conventional closed ranks
with the portrait through the village. A closed rank
demonstration makes an easy target for the police."
This seemed an essential thing to show in the film,
one of the very small, persistent flares of protest alive
among the miners. I asked if we could re-stage the ir-
regular demonstration next morning just by bringing the
portrait out of the home and taking a short march with it.
"Let us do it before eight in the morning because the
police usually arrive at about nine."
So the next morning we waited before the door of the
house like a pair of newsreel cameramen. The portrait
was brought out and carried up the hill like some reli-
gious object by two miners, past the small scattered
blackened houses. We joined the procession with our
camera.* The people came out of their houses, raising
their fists, already a sign of protest in Europe. Little kids
and old women stood along the roadside with clenched
raised fists. It was very solemn and the people forgot
that it was for a film. Spontaneously, the whole com-
munity gathered and our staging turned into a real

* Marching, my camera pretended to be one of the marchers;

the experiment of the / film was finally being applied.

91
demonstration. Suddenly a group of police cycled towards
us. At once the workers showed their solidarity with
Storck and myself. One man grabbed the camera from
me and it traveled away to safety as fast as a bucket in
a fire brigade. The miners knew that if I was caught with
the camera I would be arrested and thrown out of Bel-
gium. We were all given a beating by the cops but in an
hour or so the whole thing was over.
There is another quotation from a Van Gogh letter of
his Borinage period that describes our development dur-
ing the production of our Borinage film: That is how I
look at it; to continue, to continue, that is what is neces-
sary. But you will ask: What is your definite aim? That
aim becomes more definite, will stand out slowly and
surely, as the rough draft becomes a sketch, and the
sketch becomes a picture, little by little, by working
seriously on it, by pondering over the idea, vague at first,
over the thought that was fleeting and passing, till it is
fixed.
Only a few months ago in Brussels we had planned
to go into the Borinage just to make a factual record of
a bad situation. But we became so involved and so close
to the people that the issue of getting the situation
changed became urgent. Thus the whole concept of the
film reached a new level and we felt ashamed to re-
member that we had originally come here to film facts.
Facts became engraved in our feelings. Our rough draft
became a sketch and our sketch became a picture related
to the people it concerned.
Storck and I edited the film in Brussels. Our first
Brussels screening of Borinage was attended by N. Van-
dervelde, the labor leader in the Belgian government.
The showing had a definite influence on parliamentary
discussion about the improvement of conditions in the
Borinage and some adjustments were subsequently made.
Borinage was never permitted regular distribution. It
was forbidden for general release by the Belgian censor

92
and the Dutch censor; it was shown only privately, at
meetings and at clubs. Although the Borinage was only
two hours from Brussels by train, I heard people in the
city say that such conditions could not possibly exist in
Belgium. I gave them the names and addresses of the
workers we had filmed. I suggested that they pay ninety
cents for a railroad ticket to the Borinage, and see for
themselves.
The reaction to Borinage in the Filmliga and of many
friends among the critics and artists was interesting. Al-
though the Filmliga had been born with the aim of pro-
moting artistic freedom and fighting censorship, a few
years had made a great difference. Serious strikes in Hol-
land split opinions about Borinage. Many questioned my
motives in touching such a vital question as living con-
ditions among miners. "Joris Ivens is now becoming a
propagandist," and Borinage was reviewed not as a work
of art, but as a work of politics. The new simplicity of
Borinage seemed particularly suspicious, "as his social
concerns go up, his artistic standards go down." That was
the connection.
While some critics disclaimed the documentary film's
right to take a fighting stand on social issues, others-
critics and friends whose opinions I valued-supported
the picture and its social implications and assured me
that I was on the right track. A Spanish film director,
Luis Burluel-whose surrealist films Chien Andalou and
L'Age d'Or I had always admired for their breadth and
intensity-at that time made a penetrating, realistic film
of human suffering in a remote poor province of Spain:
Land without Bread. Years later, John Grierson told me
how Borinage had influenced the style of British docu-
mentary film makers in filming slum conditions and in
showing the need for housing development.

I had filmed the draining of the Zuiderzee, an enor-

mous engineering project, over several years. New fertile

93
earth was added to the land surface of Holland. The
necessary sacrifice of certain tourist attractions around
the Zuiderzee was considered of no importance, rela-
tively. Years ago the colorful fishing village of Volendem
had become an ordinary inland town. The island of
Marken would be no more than a slight rise in the
drained land. Fields of wheat would replace the seas
over which Henryk Hudson and his Half Moon had voy-
aged on their way from Amsterdam to the New World.
For centuries, the draining process itself represented
a triumph of Dutch ingenuity. Fragment by fragment,
new land was added to the old Dutch coast. These frag-
ments were called polders. Willow mattresses were sunk
to pin the new dikes to the bottom. Then heavy facings
of blue boulder clay were put down and between these
facings the core of the dike was filled with sand. As
Karel Capek put it, "You take a part of the sea, fence
it in and pump it out and at the bottom is left a deposit
to which a respectable slice of Europe, by means of its
rivers, supplies its best swampy soil and the sea its finest
sand. The Dutchman drains it and sows grass there . . ."
The final closure on the first great reclaimed area, the
Vlieter, was made two minutes past one in the afternoon
of May 28, 1932. The total cost up to that moment was
one billion gulden. Ten thousand men, working in two
shifts for ten years had conquered new earth.
But the world had changed tremendously in those ten
years and history provided a surprise dramatic conclu-
sion, a third act. The natural ending of the film would
have been the triumphant first harvest on the newly
claimed earth. What actually happened was that the
economic crisis threw the thousands of men working on
the project out of work and dumped the first triumphant
harvest as one more "surplus" on a world market that
was already attempting to solve its problems by burning
coffee beans in Brazil and dumping grain from ships. The
best medium that could possibly analyze and show

94
vividly the strange and "logic" turn in history was the
film.
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 con-
clusion and then in the last quarter you pull a switch not
hinted at in the build-up. We show a tremendous engi-
neering work that conquered the sea, that is going to
bring happiness and prosperity to everyone concerned
and then we say, "But . . ."
The climax of the build-up is the closing of the dam.
The victory of man and land over the sea. As finally
edited, this sequence is actually the synthesis of many
small closings with the great closing on May 28. In film-
ing these closings I arranged that each one of us three
cameramen was emotionally attached to a different ele-
ment. One of our cameras was the land-camera and its
cameraman identified himself with the land's fight against
the sea. Another camera was the sea-camera. Its line in
the drama was, "No, you can't lick me. I am the sea. My
current is strong. I have been here for thousands of years.
I will be here after you give up and go away." The third
camera was identified with man and his machines, sure
to win his battle with the sea. Helen, Johnny and I be-
came so intense about our camera identifications that we
would sometimes lay bets at lunch-time. The land-camera
would say, "Today we are closing the dam." The sea-
camera would answer, "I don't think so. There was a
northwest wind and a strong tide is coming up which
would keep your clay away." But the man-camera would
tell us, "Pete is on the big crane this day shift. He can
get more clay to close the dam than any other machinist."
This special way of shooting proved valuable. Three
complete hubs were provided for the editing. In each
shot a special pull for its element could be felt. Out of
this struggle of land, sea and man you close your dam
and build the drama of your film in the cutting room. I

95
consider the 500 feet of this dam closing sequence the
most complex and successfully dramatic editing I have
ever done. Seeing the "closing" sequence you can never be
sure that man and land will conquer the water. The op-
posing elements have equal chances like two equally
matched boxers. The final victory seems real because in
every audience in any country where I have shown New
Earth I can always hear a sigh of relief at the moment
of the closing of the dam.
The methods and materials for the didactic switch in
the film were completely new to me. In all my previous
films I had used footage that was very carefully photo-
graphed and unified in quality and approach, taken either
by me or by my unit under my supervision. But in the
last part of New Earth I drew upon a great deal of stock-
library footage, mostly newsreels, and I couldn't depend
upon a carefully unified photographic quality to knit this
miscellaneous material together. Here I had to depend
on the uniting strength of the ideas in these sequences.
Up to this time my experience in idea editing had
been rather sparse. My earliest experience was sometime
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 interna-
tional 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 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 Japanese aggression in
Manchuria, making a general statement about injustice
which we would then localize with a current event in our

96
 W^^^^z'i

Rain
1929
and its filming
 Joris Ivens in 1926

Breakers
1929
co-directed with
Mannus Franken

»
 Zuiderzee
filmed in 1931-33
recut in 1934

:M%;,
Borinage

1933
co-directed wit)
Henri Storck
 I
The making of
Philips-Radio
or
Industrial
Symphonie
1931
 /
I> ^
K# ,4v^
4zafc=z
*^ii. *<^
i jg»„ftag
F ^
r-
: ct,:"

=^^^^ !§£"„

Lou Lichtveld's score for

Industrial Symphonie
in music and sound
Ivens and Eisenstein
in Paris, 1930

\
Creosote
1931
Song of Heroes
U.S.S.R., 1932
During the filming of
Spanish Earth:
Roman Karmen, Ernest Hemingway, Joris Ivens
Robert Capa,
John Ferno,
Joris Ivens while making
The 400 Million
Ivcns giving
a hand to
transport,
China 1938

The 400 Million

 ^fil

...

Power and the Land

1940
Joris Ivcns in 1943 [
Action Stations!
Canada, 1943
own country. Previously miscellaneous material was knit
together into a new unity, sometimes 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 newsreel
companies who were none the wiser! I doubt if the present
conclusion of New Earth would ever have been attempted
if these Sunday showings had not taught me how films
can bring together apparently unrelated social and
political events.
There were other experiences too. For example, I had
always been surprised at the skillful, dramatic use Esther
Shub made of old newsreel material in her edited films
about Tolstoy and the last days of the Romanov dynasty.
In the editing of Borinage I had explored the power of
such treatment and the contradiction it implied in the
sequence of coal piles enclosed by barbed wire juxtaposed
with freezing homes. The greater and crazier paradox of
the economic situation at the close of the Zuiderzee drain-
ing was an even greater challenge to me.
Following the climax of the closing of the dam we see
the draining, the new earth, the first constructions, the
sowing of the first seeds on what used to be the bottom
of the Zuiderzee. And then the first harvest is shown,
romantic and glorious, making one happy that at last the
sea has been conquered and the New Earth is producing
such wonders. Then the commentator sticks a pin into this
happy inflated image:
But the grain is not for food, but for speculation.
There is too 7nuch grain and not enough work.

The scope of the film suddenly expands to world di-

mensions, showing the stock markets of the world and
their gamble with the world's needs. The harsh voices of
the sound track form a dialectic counterpoint to the visual

7 Ivens, camera 97
footage. Over the abundance of the wheat fields we hear
the slogans of hunger marchers in London, Berlin, and
over the newsreel footage of the hunger march we hear
the yells of farmers, "We are being choked with grain!"
Over the pale face of a hungry child is heard the selling
prices of wheat on the stock market.
As the world picture widens and as the contradiction
grows clearer, the commentary and the visuals take bigger
jumps. "In Manchuria six thousand people are starving
to death. Mr. Legg, president of the American Farm
Board says, 'One active useful pig eats as much wheat as
a family of five. Give the wheat to the pigs. Wheat is too
cheap/ "
The following sequence of food destruction is intro-
duced by the snout of Mr. Legg's pig almost smothered
in wheat. And as the tragic absurdity of the situation
grows clear the final words of the film are in the form
of a satirical ballad:

/ would like to be in a country where

The wind from the sea ripples over the wheat.
In this land of fertile 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.

The sound track of New Earth, though made in Paris

with an absolute minimum of money and time, is par-
ticularly successful, in my opinion. Hanns Eisler wrote a
score for fifteen musicians. I read my own commentary
and in a Catholic church in Paris we found a Dutch choir
singer who would sing both the Dutch and French ver-
sion of the ballad for the same money at the same record-
ing session. Helen van Dongen composed a particularly

98
successful and realistic continuity of real sounds mostly
compounded of synthetic sound effects of her own devis-
ing.
The French censors, the first censor board to which the
film was submitted, asked me to come in and talk things
over with them. They were a group of very nice old gen-
tlemen and two sweet old ladies. They were distressed
and very much disturbed.
"Mr. Ivens, please consider our predicament if we al-
low this film to be shown in the suburbs of Paris, in Mont-
rouge or Saint Denis. Many poor people live in those
districts. After seeing this film they would get ideas and
march on the city hall and ask for bread."
Afraid that the discussion was getting too political, an-
other of the censors said, "We have seen your films,
Rain and The Bridge, and we know your distinction in
motion picture art and now you bring us this New Earth.
We cannot show this film, cest trop de realite"

99
Spain
The Spanish war began after I had reached America on
invitation of the Film Alliance in New York, and had
started work there on an educational film project for
the Rockefeller Foundation. Although there was every
good, sound, sensible reason for my not doing so, it was
inevitable that I should find myself in Spain, filming a
war where ideas of Right and Wrong were clashing in
such clear conflict, where fascism was preparing a second
world war.
My first step towards Spain was taken in a cutting-
room. My collaborator on the project, Helen van Don-
gen, had been asked to edit existing newsreel footage of
the Spanish war into a documentary whose aim was to
give the background of the war, and explain the issues
to the American public. Helen's job was not simple: most
of the newsreel footage given her turned out to be taken
on the Franco side, with the Franco point of view; the
costs of a feature-editing job were greater than the back-
ers expected. After watching a particularly painful ses-
sion in the cutting-room, and listening to the sponsoring
committee complain about results, I remarked that it
would be cheaper and more satisfactory in every respect
to make such a documentary film on the spot, instead of
being at the mercy of newsreel costs and newsreel atti-
tudes.
This resulted in another meeting at which Archibald
MacLeish, then editor of Fortune, proposed a new plan :
to complete the present film, now entitled Spain in
Flames, with a minimum of additional time and expense,
and then to raise a new fund to send me to Spain to
make a film there. We hastily got together about three
thousand dollars, and although I figured that we needed
closer to twenty thousand dollars I thought it better to
go then with as much money as we had. The war couldfn't
wait.
I sent John Ferno a long wire, telling him that some
well-known writers in New York had formed a corpora-
103
tion named Contemporary Historians for the purpose of
producing a film about the Spanish war; that nobody was
to receive any salary; that all of us would contribute our
work to the Spanish cause; that other people outside the
documentary field would contribute money to it; that
although we had no money, we at least could contribute
our labor; that there was a certain physical risk but if he
would like to come with me I should be very pleased.
John's answer was "Yes."
When I arrived in Paris in January 1937 to meet John
and make final arrangements, I had in my pocket the
only script idea, prepared by one of our committee in
New York:

Rough Outline: A village, if possible, on the road be-

tween Madrid and Valencia. The middle of the night.
A racing car roars down the road through the town and
stops beneath a light. A man in the car lights a cigarette
with a match; his face appears; it is King Alfonso. He is
seen by a man on the curb.
News of the car and of the abdication spreads through
the village. We see the trepidation of the landowner's
family, his devout aunts, his soldier son, his priest son,
the officers of the military post at their club, the money
lender, the Alcalde, the Cacique. We go through the vil-
lage from house to house. We see the amazement of the
peasants. The pharmacist, who is a liberal, has a few
ideas, the doctor knows a little more; in the inn, the
local union of agricultural workers is disturbed, bewil-
dered, hopeful; as are the workers in the olive oil factory
and the railroad works. Together with the schoolmaster
they seem to understand what all this may portend. We
come at last to our family, a family of peasants, ignorant
of the significance of the event but touched by the excite-
ment.
Time passes. The traffic on the great road changes.
Officials appear from Madrid bearing news of the new

104
agrarian laws and they harangue the workers. Young in-
tellectuals come with traveling theatres, reciting ancient
poems. The Cacique leaves the village, the landowner
becomes more and more suspicious, an outsider. The
cleavage between the villagers and the officers of the
military post becomes pronounced. Efforts to do some-
thing for the village center around the schoolmaster. In
the club used by the men of property, there is much dis-
cussion, much anxiety. The schoolmaster begins to build
a schoolhouse. Young men from Madrid come to talk
about the agricultural reforms. The peasants undertake
irrigation projects. Both the building of the school and
the digging of irrigation ditches create conflicts between
the new proposals and the old property rights.
Time goes on. It is the beginning of 1936. The school,
a solid stone building, is half built. It has no roof; the
schoolmaster teaches the children and the peasants in the
open room of the school. Our family, which has been
more or less incidentally engaged in the irrigation pro-
jects, has been drawn into the building of the school. One
of the sons of this family sent to the landowner's house
to request the loan of a tool, stumbles upon a cache of
rifles in a granary of the house.
The camera studies these rifles: they are German. We
glance at Berlin, a Foreign Office room, Spanish officers
and Nazi officials. We glance at Italy, perhaps at Portu-
gal. We follow these rifles into the hands of the fascist
group in the village, who drill with them. Thus we move
into the increasing fear of reactionary elements in the vil-
lage. Fighting begins at the time of the attempted coup
d'etat. Our family, almost against its will, is drawn into
the fighting. The father is killed, the house is burned.

Now the great road from Valencia to Madrid is filled

with bands of armed men, refugees, soldiers, lorries,
field pieces, stray implements of war. Our family, driven
out of its home in the village, drifts along the road into

105
Madrid. In Madrid it sees that the struggle of the village
is part of a great struggle which has shape and purpose.
Its education is completed there.
The boy who had discovered the rifles, joins a militia
column. He leaves Madrid and marches back along the
road by which he came. He comes with his column to his
own village, now held by the fascists. There is fighting
for the village. The film ends with the recapture of the
village schoolhouse, still roofless, the boy, rifle in hand,
on the walls he has helped to build, understanding now
the significance of what he was building.

This is the sort of documentary script you imagine can

be filmed-only when you are very far from the war-torn
country of your script.
We flew in to Valencia from Paris. The government
had been removed from Madrid to Valencia when the
capital was first threatened by the fascist rebels. After
our first talks with government and army people in Va-
lencia we realized that our New York script could not
be produced in Spain at that time. It was the first winter
of the war-and it was a hard winter. Yes, the fascist
troops had been stopped outside Madrid, but one of the
first results of this victory was that Germany and Italy
now fully comprehended the impossibility of Franco's
success without considerable and immediate aid. The
Axis sent increasing quantities of war technicians and war
material-and these were inevitably followed by units of
the two fascist regular armies. At the same time, the
British and French governments were making more and
more frantic efforts to ignore any "irregularity" in this
foreign intervention which was killing Spanish soldiers
and civilians every day. For three months after exhibit-
ing documentary proof of armed intervention on the part
of Germany and Italy, the Spanish government was un-
able even to purchase military supplies from countries
with whom it had diplomatic relations. Finally, disgusted

106
with this purposeful flabbiness of the League of Nations,
the Soviet Union announced its intention to sell arms
and equipment to Spain. Not long before we arrived in
Spain, a number of tanks and the first Russian manu-
factured planes had been flown in to join the handful of
antiques which were all the government had to send into
the air against the modern air armadas supplied by Italy
and Germany.
How could we ask people who had fought in the fields
and in the trenches around Madrid to help reconstruct
the atmosphere of King Alfonso's abdication? These
people were too deeply involved in their fight to think
about how a typical village had behaved before the war.
We felt shame at not having realized this. One could not
possibly ask people who were engaged in a life and death
struggle to be interested in anything outside that struggle.

There was another factor that turned us from our in-

tricate dramatic structure, requiring reconstruction. There
was no powerful Ministry of Information or carefully or-
ganized propaganda center. There was neither informal
nor organized propaganda into which a subtle half-fic-
tional, half-documentary film could be fitted. In his con-
sidered account of the entire course of the Spanish war,
the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alvarez del Vayo, wrote:

The work of propaganda was on the whole less satis-

factory. Inthis sphere the Spaniard has to fight against
his own temperament, for he is little inclined by nature
to attempt to win over contrary opinion. Convinced of
the justice of his cause, he finds it hard to realize that
it is not enough to have right on one's side, but that
one must also persuade others that this is the case. The
origins of the Spanish struggle and the predominant
fact of foreign aggression were so clear to the average
loyalist Spaniard that he could not understand why
such a tremendous effort should be necessary to con-
107
 vince the world of something as unquestionable as it
was obvious*

It is significant that in weighing up the effective or in-

effective use made of each propaganda tool-poster, radio,
leaflet, war communique-del Vayo never mentioned film.
The film unit would have to fit itself into the war-no
one was going to do our fitting for us. Our talks in Va-
lencia made it clear that our job was to go immediately
to the center of the war: Madrid. Everyone said, "Get
the hell to the front. The real thing is in Madrid if you
want to film something."
We got transportation to Madrid in an old car with a
nervous driver. Along the road we had the sensation for
the first time of being close to an enemy-and an enemy
in a war of "position" was just as much of an enemy as
one in "movement." We knew of at least one place along
the road where the fascists were only ten miles away. At
night that seems very close. But it isn't.
The road was well organized and under strict, disci-
plined control. Between Valencia and Madrid we were
challenged at least a hundred times to show our salvo
conducto-ox. so it seemed to us. It was more of a relief
than an irritation to see that the military posts were on
their toes. When we finally came into Madrid we felt
disappointed; being so close to the enemy wasn't really
exciting-no shells, no burning houses, no muffled ma-
chine-gun bursts.
In Madrid we were lucky enough to get ourselves at-
tached at once to the Fifth Regiment. Headquarters were
in Casa de Velasquez, and this old patrician house also
became headquarters for John and me. Dos Passos came
down, a little later, from Paris. We interviewed a lot of
people, seeking some line for our script. It was here that

* J. Alvarez del Vayo, Freedom* s Battle, New York, Alfred

A.Knopf 1942, p. 150

108
the connection between food and land reform with the
war became dramatically clear. We began to work out
an approach that would place equal accents on the de-
fense of Madrid and on one of the small nearby villages
linked to the defense because it produced Madrid's food-
potatoes, vegetables, tomatoes, olives. Our first active
stage was some scattered filming of the fighting around
Madrid alternated with location trips to find a village
that was extending its irrigation system (an idea that had
held on from the New York script) and also extending
the cultivation of fields as an immediate contribution to
the defense of Madrid-people working together for the
common good, the future as well as the present.
We saw several villages. Finally we chose Fuenteduena,
forty kilometers from Madrid. Fuenteduena was not a
"typically Spanish" village, but it had two things of im-
portance to our plan; first, it was on the Valencia-Madrid
highway, near the Tagus River, thus linking the village
directly to the defense of Madrid; second, the villagers
were working on land that had only recently been con-
fiscated from landlords who had used it for hunting pre-
serves, shooting any peasant who dared to walk on the
land. These former landlords were now fighting the gov-
ernment and supporting Franco. The villagers showed us
a wonderful tract that only awaited irrigation before blos-
soming and giving abundantly. When the waters of the
Tagus reach that soil-ah! For generations they had
dreamt of this scheme and at last they had a chance to
realize it.
On our first visit to Fuenteduena we heard this ex-
citement over the irrigation project, and felt its impor-
tance for us as well. In addition to the value of this pro-
ject to our theme, the excitement had another advantage.
In a place where events are closely linked with the theme
of the film you can be reasonably sure to find people
emotionally involved in the successful effects of the
events. Although this may be a peculiar image to use, Wiis
109
emotional atmosphere gives something to hook on to. If
scenes need re-enacting, the atmosphere of activity and
excitement is there to help.
We would sit in the inns and get acquainted with the
citizens, the villagers, learning more than just their names
and the names of their kids. We had to convince them
that we weren't trying to exploit them or capitalize on
their war jobs. Fortunately for us the Alcalde, the most
trusted man in the village, showed quick comprehension
of what we needed. Dos Passos acted as our translator,
as John and I hadn't even had time to pick up "camera"
Spanish.
The Alcalde installed us in a small, blue room attached
to the apothecary's shop. The villagers who came there
in their brief free time to talk to us about the film told
us, "You know, you are living in the room where we
paid for our lives, all our lives."
We learned that the village priest had used this room
as an office, where payments were made to the church
for every child born, every couple married, every person
who wore out and died. These were not real, but "spirit-
ual" taxes-and I think the people hated the force exerted
over their spiritual life more than any physical hardship.
Our visitors said how wonderful it was that this room
was now used by the foreign guests while they made a
film for the Spanish cause, helping the people of Fuente-
duena to secure a free land for their births, marriages and
future.
We never forgot that we were in a hurry. Our job was
not to make the best of all films, but to make a good
film for exhibition in the United States, in order to col-
lect money to send ambulances to Spain. When we started
shooting, we didn't always wait for the best conditions
to get the best shot. We just tried to get good, useful
shots.
After four weeks of shooting, I interrupted the work
the only time in our stay in Spain; I took the exposed film

110
to Paris, to supervise its development, and to see what
we had done. Everything was so new to me, there was so
much excitement, and all the changes that had taken place
in me as I witnessed my first war, a people's war, made
me unsure of this first footage-and the direction it indi-
cated. Ifelt so personally involved in the war, I some-
times lost sight of the fact that I had come to do a job
and that I would leave Spain when I had finished it-
whether or not the war had finished. For the first time
I was really seeing the destruction and death I had read
about. These sights change something in your thinking,
acting and your living. That was the main reason why I
wanted to go to Paris: to check on myself and to show
this new footage to people there who would tell me
whether I was making a film, or just newsreel shots.
In Paris I met Hemingway. We had a lot of drinks and
good dinners and Hemingway said that if there was any
way he could help he'd be glad to do it. That came just
right, for Dos Passos had left us in Spain. Hemingway
was on his way to Spain as a correspondent for NANA,
the North American News Alliance. He expected Spain
to be just another war, and that was the way he intended
to write about it. He had strong, personal, sentimental
relations to Spain; but he saw no particularly deep im-
plications inthis war, and was pretty sceptical when I
described it as the first test of fascism in Europe, fascism
on its first battlefield.
The footage looked more dramatic and unified than I
had expected, and a few film people and writers in Paris
to whom I showed it were encouraging. I went back to
Madrid and Fuenteduena a lot fresher than when I left.
Two weeks later I met Hemingway in his Madrid ho-
tel The Florida, He had found out a lot in that time,
and, being Hemingway, you could be sure that he had
found it out personally. He said that all the decent
people he had known before were working in the Peo-
ple's Front and fighting on the side of the government,

111
while all the crooks and unreliable people had turned
fascist and were over with Franco. He was beginning to
see the meaning of this armed line-up of the wrong peo-
ple against the right people, and the danger it implied
for Europe-and perhaps for the world. He found that
"Fascism is a lie told by bullies." I think it was a very-
important thing for Hemingway to think in those terms.
There were other people who had come to Spain as
a job, who collected more than their salary there. Any-
one with a normally decent set of values couldn't help
learning in Madrid-about people, about democracy,
even about their own faraway countries. I think a man
like Herbert Matthews, correspondent for The New York
Times, changed. Matthews never believed anything he
had not seen with his own eyes. He never saw his job as
reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and
read the handouts of the War Ministry-so many planes
shot down-all right, when will you take me out to see
them-and so forth. In his job, he got to know the deeper
political and human sense of this war. Before coming to
Madrid he had been stationed in Rome. At first he hadn't
seen any particular difference between the fascist salutes
of Rome and the People's Front salutes of Madrid. After
a few days he remarked that he felt more comfortable
among a crowd saluting with fists than he had in a crowd
saluting with outstretched hands. This distinction grew
wider and clearer. You couldn't stay neutral in Madrid.
Matthews reached the point of realizing that there was
no such thing as morale in an abstract sense, that the
morale of a fascist soldier could never be compared with
the morale of a consciously anti-fascist soldier. He real-
ized that there are fundamental values which make
morale.
Many a newsreel cameraman sent into Spain as part
of his day-to-day assignment changed from a romantic
devil-may-care adventurer into a careful, thoughtful,
courageous photographer. You could observe the same

112
sort of change taking place in the stunt flyers who signed
up to fight on the Loyalist side for the excitement of the
thing or for the ten thousand francs they received for
every plane they shot down. I met some of these who
came down to Spain with Malraux. Some replaced their
original reasons for coming with real comradeship with
the Spanish People's Army and real concern for the cause
and future of a democratic Spain.
I don't remember making any particular arrangement
with Hemingway-nothing of the I-do-this-you-do-that-
but one day he was part of our crew, helping in every
way he could. He remained with us until he returned to
America. And he made himself a help in many important
ways. There were the physical ways-carrying anything
that had to be carried; taking orders willingly; attach-
ing Sidney Franklin, the Brooklyn bullfighter, to our
group as a sort of Liaison Officer. Franklin, whose cour-
age and integrity had made him respected by all Madrid,
was a prize, eager to do anything to help Hemingway
and to help us finish the film. As Hemingway wrote later,
Sid bought us all our food, cooked breakfasts, typed
articles, wangled petrol, wangled cars, wangled chauf-
feurs and covered Madrid and all its gossip like a human
dictapho?ie
Hemingway was a great help to John and me. In con-
sulting and talking over how to film a battle, he helped
us with what you might call the general strategy of the
film. He showed a quick comprehension and understand-
ing of the documentary film and a very helpful humility
towards this new profession. A lot of writers imagine
that because they have worked in the field as correspond-
ents, they can pick up the documentary medium in an
afternoon. Hemingway went everywhere with us. He felt
that if he was participating in the making of a documen-
tary film, he had to stay with the crew no matter where
they went or how dull it might be at times.
He expected, and rightly, that out of the daily hard

8 Ivens, camera 113

repetitious work would come a real knowledge of what
the documentary film is. He stuck to the job and never
played visitor or guest. As a writer he was interested in
how such a crew is able to become so involved in actual
life-more involved than a writer who comes to a foreign
village and looks and looks and doesn't bother writing
when he doesn't feel like it. In us he saw hard-working
craftsmen of a motion picture unit, a team, doing intri-
cate and delicate work of camera and direction, simul-
taneously thinking and composing the subject in the same
broad terms as those used in a considered writing job.
I don't think he had ever met people like us before.
We watched and filmed the constant fighting in the
outskirts of Madrid, particularly the Loyalist efforts to
liquidate the fascist forces lodged in University City. Ten
minutes by streetcar and then a short walk and you were
at the front-line. But the first full-scale battle we went
to was on the Morata de Tajuna front-and later the
Jarama front.
As we drove in to a little valley village on our way
there, we suddenly saw hundreds of people with their
hands up, like birds, running towards the hills. We were
not yet experienced or we would have stopped immedi-
ately. In a closed car you do not see the planes coming
over, nor do you hear them. I didn't know what was hap-
pening. My first thought was that the Franco troops were
approaching from the other side. We went on for a half
mile and when our motor stopped we heard the motors
of heavy bombers. These villagers had no air-raid shel-
ters. Their only hope was to flee into the hills-hundreds
of distraught people with their hands in the air. We had
the sense to pull our car into the shadow. The village
was empty. We thought we had better stay there a while.
John took our cameras and entered a small courtyard-
just a roofed-over shady place. In a war anything looks
like protection, anything-particularly if it has some sort of
a roof.

114
 Then we saw three bombs being released from the
four Caproni planes. They were the first bombs we had
ever seen coming in our direction and John and I went
flat on the ground. They were such shining bombs. As
soon as the sun hit them, they were like matches being
struck. They fell about half a block from our courtyard-
five hundred pounders, we decided later. After the ex-
plosions there was complete silence in the village. We
thought the people would come back now. Then we
realized that they were listening to see if the planes
would return and bomb again. Silence between two peo-
ple may be dramatic, but you should hear the silence of
five hundred people after the crash of bombs. Then the
wounded in the village began to yell-maybe a baby, or
an old man who couldn't get to the hills in time. Still
the people didn't dare to come back.
We took the cameras out into the street to photograph
the first thing that appeared in front of the lenses. We
didn't know or care whether the shots were good or bad-
we didn't even know whether they were in focus. We
just shot. The bravest began to come back and John
filmed those first women wandering through the dust of
the explosions still hanging over the streets. The women
looked bewildered, their hands over their bellies in the
agony of shock-not yet knowing what had happened. We
filmed them not realizing that we were being brutal but
feeling we had to get those pictures. Nobody paid any
attention to us-until the first tensions had been relieved.
Then the town became more openly dramatic-we shot
scenes of running people; and then I began to think, how
do I cover this completely? There must be more to shoot.
Let's go around. Let's look. We found two women pick-
ing up a baby. We saw other women unconscious of their
movements, simply holding handkerchiefs over their eyes.
We filmed some dead. Women looking from a window.
Little kids playing with parts of a rifle. Now I was think-
ing more calmly and I began quietly stalking material

8* 115
that was to complete this sequence someday on a cutting
table.

Hemingway met us in the gray, olive-studded, broken

hills of the Morata de Tajuna sector, where I had gone
with Joris Ivens to film infantry and tanks in action,
operating behind infantry and filming the tanks as they
ground like ships up the steep hills and deployed into
action.
A high, cold wind blew the dust raised by the shells
into your eyes and caked your nose and mouth, and,
as you flopped at a close one and heard the fragments
sing to you on the rocky, dusty hillside, your mouth
was full of dust. Your correspondent is always thirsty,
but that attack was the thirstiest I had ever been in.
But the thirst was for water *
Four days later, on April 9, we went to another battle:
Since 6 o'clock this morning 1 have been watching the
government attack on a large scale that is designed
eventually to link up the forces on the heights of the
Corufia road with others advancing from Carabanchel
and Casa de Campo, cutting the neck of salient that
Rebel forces have thrust toward University City and
thus lifting the Rebel pressure on Madrid. . . .
At 5:40 a.m. the machine guns were hammering so
that sleep was impossible. Ivens came into the room
and we decided to wake up the sound- sleeping John
Ferno, film operator, and Henry Gorrell, United Press
correspondent, and start out on foot.
Hemingway led us to a height that he said he had picked
out for this purpose some days before.
Just as we were congratulating ourselves on having
such a splendid observation post out of the reach of
danger, a bullet smacked against a comer of brick wall

* This and the following quotation are from the Hemingway

dispatch that appeared in The New York Times, April 10, 1937
(reprinted in The New Republic, May 5, 1937)

116
 beside Ivens's head. Thinking it was a stray, we moved
over a little, and, as I watched the action with glasses,
shading them carefully, another came by my head. We
changed our position to a spot where the observing
was not so good and were shot at twice more.
J oris thought Ferno had left his camera at our first
post, and, as I went back for it a bullet shacked into
the wall above. I crawled back on my hands and knees,
and another bullet came by as I crossed the exposed
corner.
We decided to set up the big telephoto camera. Ferno
had gone back to find a healthier position, and he
chose the third floor of a ruined house. There, in the
shade of a balcony, with the camera camouflaged with
old clothes found in the house, we worked all after-
noon and watched the battle. . . .

There was always something in going to the front.

Traveling along the dry, dusty highroad by car at six
o'clock in the morning I sometimes thought, how will I
come back? Will I ever come back? No sentimentality-
just thoughts. You have so much time to think. It is such
a wonderful day, you are in a car going straight to the
front where you will film a very hard fight. You see
wounded soldiers passing in the other direction. You
wonder how you are going to come back and the air is
very clear. You're able to think very clearly about it be-
cause you are in a people's war in which you have taken
sides. There is no hesitation. You are not scared yet, that
comes a little later; later, just before you really go into
the battle. But on that ride to the front all your senses
are suddenly sharpened. Your observation intensifies.
You look at every detail along the road, seeing both de-
tail and whole-a red leaf, a big yellow dry hill.
My color sense was aroused by those trips to the front.
I learned a new feeling for landscape. A painted land-
scape had never had any particular personality for me.
117
When I went to Dutch museums I always headed straight
for the portraits and the pictures with people. Nature
meant little more than a setting for human activity. Even
Breughel's landscapes were to me just backgrounds for
the living, moving, dancing people in the foreground.
Ruysdaels and Hobbemas meant little to me.
Here was something I had missed all my life suddenly
made strong and alive-and the landscape revealed itself
afresh to me each morning. I had flash memories of
Dore's engravings for Don Quixote. I was surprised
when I considered that the visual mind I thought I had,
had such blank spots. The only such feeling I could re-
member from Holland was for long horizons-unbroken
horizons. I wondered if a Spaniard, like Bunuel, would
have his eyes opened in Holland as much as my eyes and
senses were being opened here. But Spain to a Dutchman
could have a very unpleasant significance
There was something else: I did not have so much the
feeling of let me get as much out of life as 1 can which I
had previously experienced just before going to the front,
but more a feeling of meditation. This had the special ef-
fect of sharpening you for the actual work at the front,
increasing efficiency and alertness in action-meaning you
have less chance of being killed or wounded, and so keep
the men with you from being endangered by your care-
lessness.
These military expeditions were the only part of our
film-making over which any government supervision was
exerted-and it was entirely local and military supervi-
sion. Apparently the government trusted us to do what
we said we wanted to do: make these trips to the front
line to see everything. This was also a help to Heming-
way, because as part of our crew he was given more con-
fidence and could go much closer and oftener to the front
than other correspondents. My unit had really become
part of the fighting forces, particularly with the units of
the International Brigades. I refer here to the many books

118
written after the Spanish war on the political and mili-
tary force of the International Brigades.
A year later Hemingway wrote of these battle jobs:
Afterwards when it is all over, you have a picture. . . .
But what you see in motion on the screen is not what
you remember.
The first thing you remember is how cold it was; how
early you got up in the morning; how you were always
so tired you could go to sleep at any time; how hard
it was to get gasoline; and how we were always
hungry. It was also very muddy and we had a cowardly
chauffeur. Nothing of that shows on the screen except
the cold when you can see the mens breath in the air
in the picture.
What 1 really remember clearest about that, the cold
part of the picture, is that I always carried raw onions
in the pocket of my lumberman s jacket and would eat
them whenever I was really hungry much to the dis-
gust of ]oris Ivens and John Ferno. No matter how
hungry they were they would not eat raw Spanish
onions. It has something to do with their being Dutch-
men. But they would always drink out of the large,
flat, silver flask of whiskey which was always empty
by four o'clock in the afternoon. The greatest technical
discovery we made at that time was to carry a bottle
to refill the flask with and the greatest non-technical
discovery we made was Werner Heilbrun.
After we met Heilbrun, who was medical officer for
the twelfth International Brigade, we always had
gasoline, his gasoline. All we had to do was to get out
to a brigade hospital to eat well and fill with gasoline.
He always had everything marvelously organized. He
furnished us with transport. He took us to attacks, and
a big part of the film that 1 remember is the slanting
smile, the cap cocked on the side, the slow, comic Ber-
lin Jewish drawl of Heilbrun . . .
119
 After the cold part of the picture I remember the hot
part very well. In the hot part you ran with ca?neras,
sweating, taking cover in the folds of the terrain on
the bare hills. There was dust in your nose, and dust
in your hair and in your eyes, and you had the great
thirst for water, the real dry mouth that only battle
brings. Because you had seen a little war when you
were young you knew that Ivens and Ferno would be
killed if they kept on because they took too many
chances. And your moral problem was always to get
clear how much you were holding them back from
necessary and just prudence, based on experience, and
how much was simply the not so pretty prudence of the
burnt monkey who dreads the hot soup. That part of
the film that I remember was all sweat and thirst and
blowing dust; and in the film I think that shows a
little *
In war photography you have to know when you should
take a chance, risking your life and that of the camera-
man, and when you should not take that risk. Sometimes
in battle you film exactly the same thing a newsreel cam-
eraman would and you are excited and eager for some-
thing sensational. But the documentary man must set him-
self a minimum and a maximum objective just as a mili-
tary commander does with his troops in his order for the
attack. Like the commander, you have to know what you
will risk to get to your objective, how many lives and
how much material you want to risk. And during the
battle you have to change your mind because the chances
change. Each member of your unit has to know all about
the day's work and the importance of the action and of
the shots you are going to take of that action. It has to
be worth-while-there is no sense, otherwise, in risking a
life, an arm or a leg for a shot that will later land on

* From "The Heat and the Cold," Verve reprinted as an

"Afternote" in The Spanish Earth (Savage, Cleveland, 1938)

120
the cutting-room floor. Every member of your unit has
the same right as every man of a machine-gun crew to
know where and when to go forward, who is on his flank,
what support he can expect from them, what there is to
be known about the enemy's position and the enemy's
strength.
In filming the fighting in Madrid we used much the
same tactics, except that we rarely got carried away as
could have happened in the excitement of a battle. This
too was a battle, a battle between German artillery and
the people of Madrid, but you didn't have to go looking
for the significant human detail-it was always staring you
in the face.
The way we looked at and filmed the shelling of
Madrid must have been the right way, the human way,
because six years later John Steinbeck, in gathering Lon-
doners' memories of their blitz, found that: In all of the
little stories it is the ordinary, the commonplace thing or
incident against the background of the bombing that
leaves the indelible picture.
This observation might well be a documentary film
maker's guide to camera observation of a tragedy. In
The Spanish Earth I use the sound of broken glass in the
sound track, and the slight crunching of it, around two
dead Madrid victims-two kids. This found its echo in
one Londoner's memory of his own experience: It's the
glass, the sound in the morning of the broken glass being
swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle. That is the thing I re-
member more than anything else, that constant sound of
broken glass being swept up on the pavements. My dog
broke a window the other day and my wife swept up the
glass and a cold shiver went over me. It was a moment
before I could trace the reason for it.
The ghostly swinging lampshade five flights up in a
bombed Madrid apartment house found its blitzed
London counterpart: Another points up at a wall, the
building is gone, but there are five fireplaces, one above
121
another, straight up the wall. He points to the topmost
fireplace.
"This was a high explosive bomb" he says. "This is
on my way to work. You know, for six months, there was
a pair of long stockings hanging in front of that fireplace.
They must have been pinned up. They hung there for
months, just as they had been put up to dry*

There were more than tragedies to film in Madrid.

There were also events. We filmed the meeting at which
the People's Army was officially founded. All the dif-
ferent regiments fighting in their own way on the Loyal-
ist side-the communist, socialist, anarchist regiments-
were fused into one Republican Army at a meeting at-
tended by delegates from all fronts. We didn't realize
it at that time, but we were recording a vital historical
document.
Besides keeping a strong central theme during the
making of a documentary film you have to keep on the
lookout for events that will illuminate that theme. These
passing events are sometimes too precious to your theme
to ignore them. You have to be something of a newsreel
cameraman, too. But you can't afford to judge events by
"news value." Events of apparently limited news value
may prove later to be focus points for your entire struc-
ture. They have to be weighed almost solely on their im-
portance to your film and theme. We could easily have
said of this People's Army meeting, it's just another meet-
ing-but this particular meeting helped us draw together
the two main lines of our film.
One of the keenest judgments that Pare Lorentz made
in the filming of The River was his decision to send a
film crew to the flood areas to shoot the direct reactions
of the people to the catastrophe. This did have news
value, but of far more importance was the immediacy of

* In a news story, cabled from London-N.Y. World-Telegram

122
this footage in giving the whole film a human focus. He
could have completed his film without this footage, but
it would have lost a lot. And John Grierson did an ex-
cellent thing in 1942 when he put his Canadian directors
and producers in a big room where a news ticker tele-
typed the hour-to-hour events of the war. This kept his
documentary film makers alert, prevented them from
relaxing in the artistic aspects of the documentary. That
was a wonderful idea-to place the very pulse and beat
of the war in the room where fighting films were being
conceived and produced.
Although I got neither much help nor hindrance from
the government, there were plenty of individuals offer-
ing assistance. Besides the Franklins and Heilbruns, who
helped us accomplish our work, there were others who
talked with us about the general problems of the film.
Two typical and contrasting attitudes were expressed by
Koltzov, a Soviet newspaper man, and Carlos, one of
the first commanders of the Fifth Regiment, which had
been our home in Madrid. Koltzov told me that a film
about Madrid should definitely have warmth. Sometime
we should film the happiness of laughing people wanting
to live. We should show the relation between the bistro
and the barricades. We should show the new theatre join-
ing in the fight, and also the continuance of normal life—
in the middle of a bombardment you see a professor
working in the public library on a study of Cervantes.
Commander Carlos stressed the points that he thought
the film should cover: Madrid is defended by all the peo-
ple-workers, peasants, the middle class, intellectuals.
They defend a democratic parliamentary Republic and
the independence of Spain. You could compare it with
the Civil War in the United States. We should show the
activity of the children's organizations. We should show
how Moroccans come over from the fascists to the peo-
ple's side. Definitely show the workers' living quarters-
and the "steel brigades" in the factories.
123
 These were two different attitudes that were both right.
Koltzov seems to have had foreign audiences in mind,
while Carlos's suggestions seem for a film that would
help in Spain itself. Carlos was thinking of the daily fight,
afraid that in filming the battles we might lose our sense
of proportion about the social and political gains being
made. Koltzov's emphasis was on atmosphere and activ-
ity. Both attitudes belong in the good documentary film,
and I think that we combined them successfully in the
finished film: doors are carried from bombarded houses
to support the walls of the trenches ; new leaders, like Car-
los himself and others are seen, laughing too; art is safe-
guarded; from a circle of sandbags the equestrian statue
of Don Quixote advances, a little Republican flag stuck
in his hand; children carry life forward.
Out of these talks came this outline, which still has
traces of our first plan:

People s Front. Madrid. A village. Farmer's family

there. Collective work on an irrigation project. Fight on
the front 25 kilometers away from the village. Bom-
bardment. A young soldier, a peasant boy, fighting
with his regiment in Madrid. The fascists fortified in
the university. This boy on leave, his family, his vil-
lage. He trains the village boys. Back to the front.
Parallel between the irrigation project being completed,
water to The Spanish Earth and the fighting for the
independence, the freedom of that earth.
I tried to get a thin continuity line with a peasant boy,
Julian, at the front and at home. But the general theme
of The Spanish Earth, working the earth and fighting
for the earth, dominates the film. We filmed Julian in a
trench in front of the university in Madrid. We re-en-
acted Julian's return on a truck to his village Fuenta-
duena. This re-enactment naturally developed into a
whole real scene of Julian's home-coming, with three
generations meeting him in front of their home, and Ju-
124
Han's little brother calling his father from the vine field.
The shoes in front of the house seemed a little stiff and
awkward (how we wished we had been there the day be-
fore when Julian really came home!) so I made sure of
having plenty of close-ups-just in case.
Before he left the village we took Julian's name and
the numbers of his regiment and division. We thought
that we would be able to find him at the front and to
film him as a soldier, not on furlough. We were think-
ing of an end for the film built around Julian in the
trenches-but we were counting too much on luck. When
we tried to find him later, he was completely lost-no one
could tell us if he had been wounded or killed. With our
chief "actor" lost I had no idea of how the film was to
end when I left Spain in May to return to New York.
Johnny stayed in the village to do some more shooting.
I gave him a list of seventy shots which were needed to
complete the film-and a final appeal to search for Julian.
Completing the film, which we now referred to as The
Spanish Earth, was no simple matter of editing. Helen
van Dongen put all of her professional skill into this
work. Looking for an effective distribution and then or-
ganizing a campaign to get money for the final editing
the film went on simultaneously with Hemingway's work
on the commentary (I think we wore a path in the con-
crete between the cutting-room and the projection
room!). At the same time Irving Reis and Helen van
Dongen were inventing sounds for the track and Virgil
Thomson and Marc Blitzstein were combing through
dozens of records of Spanish folk music, there were trial
screenings for individuals, interviews, arguments, letter-
writing, discussions and work.
I am still as proud of the cutting of The Spanish Earth
as I am of New Earth. While working on the Spanish
film I began to clarify for myself different levels of edit-
ing or cutting-I found three.
The first level is simple visual editing, as in the middle
125
part of New Earth, the closing of the dam, where the
continuity is based on the direct visual sensation of shot
after shot. The smoothness of transition from movement
to movement and the calculated regularity of punch usu-
ally deceive the spectator's sense of the actual number
of different shots he has seen in such a sequence. I have
asked people to guess the number of shots used in reel
two of New Earth, the final closing of the dam. Their
answers range from fifteen to two hundred. Actually there
are about one hundred and twenty-five. In this type of
cutting the general visual impression of the action as a
whole is more important than any single shot or detail.
On the second level of editing, this limited sensual aim
is broadened to include psychological factors rather than
purely physiological effects. The editing treatment of
Julian's home-coming aimed at an overall emotional
warmth, rather than at any story point that could be
isolated and identified. You don't hear the returning
soldier say, Hello father, hello mother, instead there is a
joyful chorus, while the close-ups we see of his mother's
face, his father's face, his brother's face are used almost
as short solo passages within the choral effect. Marc,
Helen and I had to measure these close-ups very deli-
cately in relation to the phases of the song and in rela-
tion to the affection one hoped to awake in the audience
towards these people-the mother, grandmother, father
and son.
The third level is higher-taking the emotional aim up
to a point of view-the personal, social and political point
of view of the film maker. This might be called empathic
cutting, pulling the spectator by his emotions from stage
to stage of an idea's development. In the fourteen shots
that compose the core of the sequence of the bomb-
ing of the village, the editing directly follows an emo-
tion-idea line: tension before the bombing; the threat;
the fright; the explosion; the destruction; the horror of
not knowing what it's all about; the running around of
126
the women; the start of activity, searching for victims;
the slight happiness of a baby; then the horror of corpses
and the accusation against the enemy-ending on a feel-
ing of young life, a preparation for the counterblow, and
then the blow itself. These fourteen shots could be ar-
ranged otherwise too. An editor interested in giving in-
formation alone, say in a newsreel, would omit many of
these shots. A more sentimental editor would give more
emphasis to the dead and be satisfied with a general ac-
cusation effect-holding longer on the shots of the crime.
We reinforced our image editing with an interesting sound
dissolve in which the inhuman airplane sound dissolves
into the human sounds of a chorus. There is even a short
passage of total silence before the last airplane sound. It
is this last sound that switches to humanity over the shot
of the unhurt baby.
This third level or editing method comes mostly from
a wish to deepen the relation of real things-to show what
is below the surface. This is an aim at variance with
newsreel or studio cutting. I think it is Dovzhenko's
work which has helped me most in finding and using this
method-Earth and Frontier and, most of all, Arsenal
have influenced my work more than any other so-called
"non-factual" films. I believe that Soviet documentary
films have also learned a great deal from Dovzhenko.
Evidence of emotional aims fused with idea aims can be
found in such films as The Siege of Leningrad and Day
of War.
In spite of the absence of Julian, the ending of the film
was cut almost as if he were there, replacing him with
an anonymous soldier whom we do not see elsewhere in
the film-and exploiting his very anonymity: The men-
who never fought before, who were not trained in arms,
who only wanted work and food- fight on.
The various problems of the commentary for The
Spanish Earth were almost all completely new in my
experience. At the start Hemingway and I agreed that
127
the commentary should be cut down to a minimum. Let
the film speak for itself, a few words of commentary at
the beginning of the sequences as a sort of springboard,
from where the audience starts to be involved in the ac-
tion, movement of the sequence, without interference of
additional commentary-a sort of awakening of the pub-
lic's active relationship with the film. For example, in
the sequence of the bombed village the only words of
commentary precede the explosion: Before, death came
when you were old or sick. But now it comes to all this
village. High in the sky and shining silver it comes to all
who have no place to run. No place to hide. This was
followed by three cries: Aviacion! (a commanding voice) ;
Aviacion! (a less calm voice); and then a shrill child's
voice, screaming, Aviacion!
I had tried to be as complete as possible in the film's
visual aspects-and the commentary's chief function was
to provide sharp little guiding arrows to the key points
of the film. These arrows had to be shaped very deli-
cately. The commentary had to avoid any overstatement.
To forestall any of the expected accusations of purveying
red propaganda, Hemingway had to be careful not to
use any tendentious material, providing, instead, a base
on which the spectator was stimulated to form his own
conclusions. Without any previous experience in this
work, Hemingway's commentary ("things you'd scribbled
in the dark in the projection room or on pieces of paper
in a hot hotel bedroom") was perfect.
When we came to record this commentary, there were
new problems. As proposed by Archibald MacLeish we
asked Orson Welles to read it and it seemed like a good
job; but there was something in the quality of his voice
that separated it from the film, from Spain, from the
actuality of the film. It is possible that Welles's voice,
coming directly from the rich, rounded periods of Mar-
lowe and Shakespeare, hadn't made the necessary adap-
tation to the "stripped" sentences of Hemingway.
128
 In any case, when I took the film to Hollywood,
the other people in Contemporary Historians-Herman
Shumlin, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker-sensed what
was wrong and suggested that Hemingway try reading it
himself. That was right. During the recording, his com-
mentary sounded like that of a sensitive reporter who
has been on the spot and wants to tell you about it-a
feeling that no other voice could communicate. The lack
of a professional commentator's smoothness helped you
to believe intensely in the experiences on the screen. This
sincere, direct commentary spoken simply by its non-
professional speaker-author has since had great influence
on other American and English commentaries for docu-
mentary films-for example those written and spoken by
Quentin Reynolds.
Although there were many emergencies to be met be-
fore itwas finished, the whole sound track was carefully
calculated. We had a wonderful team with Marc, Irving
and Helen working closely together. A complete log of
all tracks was prepared in several colors so that we could
execute even the most complex mixing with a minimum
waste of time.
With the assistance of Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitzstein
finally chose about forty records from the several Spanish
collections we used, including those brought back with
me from Spain. Under the supervision of Irving Reis, the
Columbia workshop at CBS worked out all the synthetic
sound. All the invented noises of battle, and so forth
were based on a combined reproduction from my memory
of them and Hemingway's. We told Irving, for example,
that an air bombardment sounds like a dog barking in
the night, and he would go off, bringing back a trial which
we would judge or correct, and so on. Shell explosions
that actually take one-fifth of a second we stretched out
five times as long. The only previously used track that
we incorporated in our track was a piece of earthquake
noise from San Francisco, which we ran backwards for

9 Ivcns, camera 12/

our effect during a bombardment. When we showed the
film in Hollywood, expert war-film makers like Lewis
Milestone and King Vidor wondered how he had man-
aged to get such emotional dramatic effects in the sound
track. Irving Reis's success with the track was also a
triumph for the radio medium where he had gained his
experience.
The first real trial of the finished film was made at the
White House. Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn and I
were invited there for dinner and for a screening of The
Spanish Earth afterwards. It was a quite intimate dinner-
the President, Mrs. Roosevelt, Jimmy Roosevelt, two
military advisors, a couple of other people. During din-
ner we talked mostly about the folklore of war, of the
Spanish war-personal things that had happened to the
crew-each of us talking only to his immediate neighbor.
After dinner we moved to the projection room and
about thirty more people arrived, among them Harry
Hopkins. The President asked me to sit next to him in
case he had any questions. The film started. Nothing was
said until the middle of the second reel, when he re-
marked, "That's very interesting. It holds up well even
without a story"-which I thought showed a good instinct
for documentary films. Most of the things he asked after
that were strategical. He knew his stuff very well.
In the reel before the final one a tank comes through a
gate.
"What kind of tank is that?"
"A French tank, a Renault."
"Were they any good?"
"No, they didn't stand up against the antitank fire of
the Franco troops."
He didn't ask how they got there. That was under-
stood. A bit later in the last reel a group of heavy tanks
came up. His question was also a statement:
"Those are not Renault tanks."
"No, Mr. President, those are Russian."
130
 "Were there many of them?"
He asked me if they had stood up well against the
antitank fire, and I said, yes, they had. He asked how
many men had taken part in the battle of Brihuega-and
so on.
When the film was over the President stayed a while
to talk, saying that he had liked the film very much, but
he could not commit himself in any way. We wanted to
hear some direct opinion from him on Non-intervention
and the "Neutrality" Act, but we didn't have the courage
to ask. However, he made one suggestion: "Why don't
you give more stress to the fact that the Spaniards are
fighting, not merely for the right to their own govern-
ment, but also for the right to bring under cultivation
those great tracts of land which the old system forcibly
left barren?"*
After the President left, Hopkins and Mrs. Roosevelt
talked with us enthusiastically about the film. I was in
the middle of saying something about if the Spanish peo-
ple lose, the whole thing would go-when Mrs. Roosevelt
interrupted me and said, "We in the White House think
that the Spanish people are not going to lose." Then
Hemingway and I began to talk about the embargo that
was on our minds-if the embargo would be lifted, Franco
wouldn't have a chance. Mrs. Roosevelt asked, "Do you
think the Loyalists will win?" We said yes because we
believed that strongly then, and because we couldn't be-
lieve that the embargo would not be lifted in time.
In her column the following day, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote
of The Spanish Earth and made this point: / think they
presuppose too much knowledge on the audience s part

* We incorporated this suggestion when Hemingway later re-

corded the commentary himself (the Welles' reading had been
used for the White House showing). When Hemingway said,
"For fifty years we've wanted to irrigate . . ." he added, hatefully,
"but THEY held us back."

9* 131
of old world conditions. Lillian Hellman also objected
that the film gave too little information, but we were
too eager for a wide theatrical release to risk being either
too "political" or too "educational"-and that would have
happened if we had built up the informational side of
the film.
Our second important screening-rather, group of
screenings-was in Los Angeles. The first of these was at
Fredric March's house. After the film Hemingway and
I each spoke for about a minute, saying we wanted to
send ambulances to Spain, and that we had arranged
with the Ford factory to buy chassis in Detroit which
would be sent to Madrid for completion. In this way, we
would get a lot of workable ambulances instead of a few
fancy ones. The seventeen guests there gave seventeen
thousand dollars. Then we gave a show at the Ambas-
sador for about two hundred people, as a preview for
the big show scheduled at the Philharmonic. The Phil-
harmonic screening had good spirit and we raised more
than two thousand dollars. But a good general release
had not yet been arranged. In reviewing the film Frank
Scully sounded this ominous note in Variety:
This can make money where any picture can make
?noney but it wont make it there. It wont make it
there, because it wont 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 was more right than we wanted him to be.
Creative people in Hollywood sent urging telegrams to
distributors in New York, but each of these had a differ-
ent excuse for not touching the film-it was too long, it
was too short; the most honest people said frankly, it's
too controversial.

The Spanish "Earth found itself back in the limited

channels of release available to documentary features-
132
channels we thought we could get out of this time. The
film opened at the 55th Street Playhouse, and then we
got a lesson in film criticism. Aside from seeing one's
films with audiences-which is always an experience in
real criticism-a film maker should study published
criticisms objectively, more so than most of us do.
Most film critics, especially in America, were at this
time so exclusively involved in the fiction film that there
was even difficulty in establishing a workable viewpoint
from which to criticize a documentary film.* I believe
that if these critics had worked out a solid esthetic for
the fiction film they would not have been at such a loss
before an unfamiliar film form. Thus, occasionally, they
talk about form, when they actually mean content, mak-
ing a complete distinction between picture and the com-
mentary. Even J.T.M. in the Times wrote: Technique is
that of the film document, but Hemingway s narrative
makes it definitely a propagandist effort. I was not really
surprised at the closing comment of the Motion Picture
Herald's review: The picture is too stark, bitter and
brutal to please the general audience. Its partisanship and
propagandists non-objectivity tend to vitiate whatever
message it may carry.
I was shocked by more fundamental gaps in critical
thinking than a mere ignorance of documentary method.
The Times paid me this curious compliment: They have
used it as a violent outcry against fascism. Ivens might
have made it lasting art as well. Nor was I clear about
Archer Winsten's meaning when he wrote in the Post:
Perhaps a theme so large and diffuse will not prove ex-
citing to the general public. The reviewer in Liberty
(Beverly Hills!) summed up this esthetic confusion by
labeling the film as too heavily colored with propaganda,
too bitterly conceived, to be classified as real art. And

* Song of Ceylon, opening the same week in New York, ran

into similar critical difficulties.

133
what can you make of this-from the Brooklyn Eagle:
Advance publicity suggested that The Spanish Earth might
be an artfully documentary film. Sympathizers who ex-
pect such a picture will be disappointed. But as a direct
chronicle of a nation split in two by war, Mr. Ivens's
cinema is worth seeing.
There were also technical comments. Dorothy Masters
in the Daily News found it without beginning or end,
without continuity or order, but she also says, The film
is too honest to be classed as propaganda. The Times
pointed out that, In the fields of Fuenteduena he appar-
ently had time to strive for composition and photographic
values. But in the more hurried work . . . he achieves
composition, cinema effect and dramatic impact as well.
On the other hand John Mosher in The New Yorker
said : ... no film yet has come so close to the people and
the places of its interest. I must say at once that so ex-
pert and beautiful is the photography, accomplished with
the most rudimentary resources, that the film would seem
to abolish the need of a studio and accessories forever.
I consider it valuable to quote rather fully from an
article, signed J.H.D., that appeared in the Sun:

However, this reviewer must take issue with the critics

who already have raised their voices in ecstatic praise
of the film. The Spanish Earth, in his opinion is not
particularly important artistically. Indeed, it is not
even compelling propaganda.
In the first place, though some of the photography is
beautiful, it is more commonplace than admirers of
the picture would have you believe The producers
have erred gravely in believing that pictures of soil,
Spanish or any other kind, make very exciting screen
fare. The soil looms large in The Spanish Earth for
the producers have given the film a fraudulent coher-
ence by harking back frequently to a group of farmers
who are digging irrigation ditches to raise food for the

134
 beleaguered residents of Madrid. The ditch digging
provided an excuse for the title of the picture but failed
to hold the reviewer's attention.
Accompanying the picture is spasmodic comment by
Mr. Hemingway in what is generally called a "stark"
narrative style. If his desire was to convince the audi-
ence ofthe virtues of the Loyalist, he would have done
better to use more flamboyant words. The restrained
style does not make for powerful propaganda.
I must confess that I had to strain to be objective about
this criticism.
The criticism also afforded some pleasant surprises.
Time came through with a review conveying its writer's
emotion:
Not since the silent French film, The Passion of Joan
of Arc, has such dramatic use been made of the human
face. As face after face looks out from the screen the
picture becomes a sort of portfolio of portraits of the
human soul in the presence of disaster and distress.
These are the earnest faces of speakers at meetings and
in the villages talking war, exhorting the defense.
These are faces of old women moved from their homes
in Madrid for safety's sake, staring at a bleak, uncertain
future, faces in terror after a bombing, faces of men
going into battle and the faces of me7t who will never
return from battle, faces full of grief and determina-
tion and fear.
James Dugan looked up an interview I had given in
New Masses in 1936 on the boundaries of the documen-
tary film:
All we can do with it is to accuse and show the way.
Unlike the acted film, there was no possibility of
identification with the actor, or emotional relationship
to the development of the plot. Thus we can never in-
dicate the future.

135
 In reviewing the new film, Dugan said, Spanish Earth
does everything Ivens maintained a documentary film
could not do.*
I doubt very much if I would claim such limits for the
documentary film today.
The British career of The Spanish Earth is a story of
extremes: It had more censor trouble and also more con-
sidered and less emotional criticism. After a screening
(at which von Ribbentrop was present) the British film
censor prohibited the first public showing in connection
with the British Congress of International Peace. The ban
was maintained until all references to Italian and Ger-
man intervention had been cut from the commentary. In
spite of this mutilation, the film was well received when
it finally opened at the Academy. The London critics, as
a whole, were more careful to weigh its political and
artistic significance than were its warmest New York ad-
mirers. Almost every British critic took occasion to praise
the new style of Hemingway's commentary, Basil Wright,
in The Spectator, saying: It is, in fact, hardly too much
to say that it is the first time a satisfactory commentary
has been attached to any film.
And on every hand, in both the United States and Eng-
land, there were demands for more "objectivity." I was
often asked, why hadn't we gone to the other side, too,
and made an objective film? My only answer was that
a documentary film maker has to have an opinion on
such vital issues as fascism or anti-fascism-he has to have
feelings about these issues, if his work is to have any
dramatic or emotional or art value. And too, there is the
very simple fact to consider, that when you are in a war
and you get to the other side, you are shot or put into
a prison camp-you cannot be on both sides, neither as
a soldier nor as a film maker. If anyone wanted that ob-

* But in England, Basil Wright called the story of the returned

Julian a blemish on the rest of the film.

136
jectivity of "both sides of the question," he would have
to show two films, The Spanish Earth and a film by a
fascist film maker, if he could find one.
This was actually done once: The London Film Society
showed two films of the Ethiopian war, side by side-one
made by a crew of Soviet cameramen, and the other by
an Italian crew. You were given the evidence against
any possible "objectivity" when you saw, in the Italian
film, the decorative, flower-like effects of the exploding
bombs as seen from the bombing planes, and, in the
other, the death, the maiming, the bleeding, and the
blinding caused by those same bombs.
I was surprised to find that many people automatically
assumed that any documentary film would inevitably be
objective. Perhaps the term is unsatisfactory, but for me
the distinction between the words document and docu-
mentary isquite clear. Do we demand objectivity in the
evidence presented at a trial? No, the only demand is
that each piece of evidence be as full a subjective, truth-
ful, honest presentation of the witness's attitude as an
oath on the Bible can produce from him.
I think that Ernest Hemingway, speaking at the Writ-
er's Congress shortly after our return from Spain, de-
fined the documentary film's job completely satisfactorily
in his definition of the writer's job:

A writer's problem does not change. He himself

changes, but his problem remains the same. It is al-
ways how to write truly and having found what is true,
to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of
the experience of the person who reads it*
I would like to add that a militant documentary film
has to reach further. After informing and moving audi-
ences, itshould agitate-mobilize them to become active
in connection with the problems shown in the film.

* The Writer in a Changing World, edited by Henry Hart, 1937

137
 I continue to make documentary films because I know
there is unity between what I believe and what I do. If
I felt I had lost that unity, I would change my profession.
A documentary film maker has the sense of participating
directly in the world's most fundamental issues-a sense
that is difficult for even the most conscious film maker
working in a studio to feel.

138
China
On the first night in the air on the way to Honolulu and
Hong Kong, I watched the crew of the "China Clipper"
tear up the walls and floor, looking for a flaw in the fuel
line. Through the hole I could see the broad, moonlit
Pacific ten thousand feet below. Finally we turned back
to Los Angeles to start all over again. If I had had a taste
for symbolism-or prophecy-I would have seen in this
incident the course of my next nine months: looking
through a peephole torn in a thick fabric of caution and
wartime suspicion, seeing beyond the fabric the broad,
endless China that I wanted to film, and turning back,
unfinished. I will go back some day to try again.
Those nine months in China had been thoroughly pre-
pared, financially and morally. This was to tell America
about a China which they had never before been told
about truthfully and completely.
From the viewpoint of straight coverage of historic
events, the Chinese film was the logical sequel to the
Spanish film. Friends in New York and I felt that it was
the same kind of fight: the people's war in Spain against
an aggressor, and the people's war in China against
Japan.
Practically the same people who produced X he Spanish
Earth took the initiative to make this Chinese film.
I planned a budget of about fifty thousand dollars on
the basis of my experience with the films I had previously
made. In such a project you have to calculate a time ele-
ment. You mostly miscalculate. It would take about six
months, I thought; it took nine. I knew I wanted a crew
of three people. Transportation from New York to Hong
Kong by clipper was about one thousand dollars. I
thought the expenses in China would be about five dol-
lars per day, per man. They turned out to be much less.
For the raw material-I knew I was going to overshoot
about seven times-for a six-reel film (6 000 feet) we
needed fifty thousand dollars. We knew the exact cost
of recording in New York. As to the crew of three, in

141
practice you always miss one man during the shooting
because he is preparing or organizing for the next day's
work. John Ferno was to do camera-work and help me with
the direction. Robert Capa came in to do the stills because
we knew they would have news value.
When we found out that we would not have enough
money for three people, we arranged for Capa to make
the stills for Life magazine. We would pay his expenses in
China ;Life would pay his passage. I had seen him do fine
work on the Spanish front. I had another reason, a personal
one, for taking Capa along. His wife, who was also a
war photographer, died at the front. She was killed on
a road by a tank. I felt it was my responsibility to get
him into work to distract him, and Capa had once told
me that he wanted to find out more about film making.
I went to Paris to talk to John and Capa. I wanted to
buy the right extra equipment for John's French camera.
I had to arrange everything with Capa. I also wanted to
see my family in Holland-I was going to China and you
never know what might happen. I did not know then
that it would be the last time I would see my brother,
Wim.
Hong Kong was set as our rendezvous. John was to
go by boat from Marseille with the equipment; Capa,
too. I was to travel from San Francisco by plane. We
would meet in Hong Kong-February '38. The Chinese
film had really elaborate preparations for a good unit
and equipment.
We felt it would be difficult to get fifty thousand dol-
lars either from Hollywood people or, as we had col-
lected it for Spain, from a number of writers. So we
thought it better to approach Chinese patriots in New
York.
One of the leading Chinese import merchants under-
wrote a considerable sum. He got the rest promised by
friends in China. I went to the Chinese ambassador in
Washington and arranged for the visa and diplomatic

142
introductions. The whole setup was finally agreed upon
during an exquisite dinner in the Port Arthur restaurant
in New York's Chinatown. Luise Rainer, who was fa-
mous and beloved among the Chinese because of her role
as a Chinese woman in the film The Good Earth, helped
us tremendously in starting the new organization, History
Today, Inc., which was to produce the film.
High as one's morale must be on starting a new film
project, there is no harm in examining all the possibilities
on the dark side. I wanted to anticipate the unexpected,
disagreeable surprises which always come up in a com-
plicated military and political situation. I wanted to rely
on official American or Dutch help-it might turn out
that a straight demand for help would not go through an
isolated post office in China or Japanese-occupied China.
So just before I stepped onto the "China Clipper" at San
Francisco I sent Helen a code to deliver to Herman
Shumlin, our producer:

John ill means: we are in difficulties, in jail, or some-

thing very close to jail. Send cables to the nearest
American or Netherlands consulates to help us.
John very ill means : get us out of this country as soon
as possible-tangling with the Japanese army or occu-
pation authorities.
Ferno ill means: John is really ill and needs medical
help or that I need another cameraman.

If I do not get enough help from official Chiang Kai-

shek people I will cable this openly if that is possible, or:
Made first stills means: it will be necessary for our
Chinese friends to send an official cable to Madame
Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Kung to give me ad-
ditional help with transportation, and so forth.

January 21, Friday: 4:00 p.m. in "China Clipper" 120

miles out from the coast on the way to Honolulu. . . .
The officials of the Pan-American Airways in San

143
Francisco asked for my cameras-their glass eyes had to
be closed. They are now sealed, a strange start for a
photographic and film expedition, and yet quite under-
standable. The secrets of the coast defense and the Ha-
waiian Islands are too precious to the United States-
everyone knows Japan's objectives in the Pacific. We are
going to film those foreign objectives more clearly on
China's shores and islands A flaw in the fuel line
forced us to turn back to San Francisco.

]anuary 23, Sunday: We fly back to San Francisco with

the same passengers on board. The one who seemed to
me a Spaniard turned out to be a Basque. A famous polo
player, for Franco, with a big business in the Far East.
Another is a Manila drug company executive; also big
business. The "China Clipper" becomes more familiar.
Long coastline, the Bay, San Francisco, Saint Francis
Hotel. Some telegrams to friends in New York, Paris and
Amsterdam, because God knows what the papers wrote
about our round trip to San Francisco.

January 24, Monday: A new start from San Francisco

to Honolulu Twice we met ships. We asked their
position. Each ship of every nationality always answers-
except Japanese. Again we pass a ship. We are eight
thousand feet up, no answer from the ship. The copilot
says: "It will be Japanese," and writes nonchalantly in
his logbook-tramp ship.

January 26, Wednesday: 7:30 a.m. Take off from Hono-

lulu for Midway. A Philippine doctor gets a tremendous
farewell from his followers, women and children. At five
thousand feet, sandwiches and coffee. Below, an island
with a half-sunken crater. Ideas for my new film in China
are going through my head, not yet ripe enough to be
written down. It is good to think about the coming work.
Guerrilla warfare, one of the most important things.

144
Maybe follow the activities of a guerrilla general with
the camera for three months When the people pro-
duce their 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.
I write to my mother on the clipper stationery. Looks
nice and shows the route at the top of the paper. I am
proud-she wrote me to be careful in China. Yes, I will,
and she understands
10:00 p.m. We return to Honolulu again. Something is
out of order. Slowly, heavily and unwillingly the machine
makes a turn. With national pride I write romantically,
something about the Flying Dutchman on the first day
of the clipper flight. It doesn't work any longer. The Fly-
ing Dutchman was condemned never to reach shore again
because he sailed on Easter morning. The only book on
board was a bible. The Flying Dutchman had to stay on
the eternal waves bringing bad luck to every ship he met.
With our ship it's another story. There is no bible on
board; Life and Time magazines lie around; Edgar
Snow's Red Star Over China. It seems that we are unable
to leave the shore. We want to badly, but we always seem
to be going back. First back to San Francisco, then Los
Angeles, now Honolulu. I am a bad Flying Dutchman. . . ,

January 28, Friday: We'll try to start again this morning

for Midway. On the way from the hotel to the airport we
pass many truck loads of silent natives on their way to
work in the sugar fields, mostly accompanied by one
tough white man with a tropical helmet. The taxi driver
tells me about a rich sugar man who built his dining room
in the interior of an aquarium, exceptionally large. For
the first time in my life I see a colonial atmosphere, and
the things I see are all pretty nearly as I worked them out
in my imagination when I helped make a cartoon on
colonies several years ago.

10 Ivens, camera 145

 7 :00 a.m. At the airport at Pearl Harbor in the middle
of palm trees. At the last moment they tell us there will
be another twenty-four hours' delay. Bad weather, but not
here on Midway. In front of the hotel at the Waikiki
beach I swim and grow more and more nervous about
reaching China. We will have to make time.

February 3, Thursday: Departure to Midway with the

"Hawaiian Clipper". It is exactly the same as the "China
Clipper" which went back to Alameda. A new crew. Flat
sea. Seventeen passengers, thirteen days since we left San
Francisco the first time. I am reading more about the Far
East now. I read Article One of the Nine Power Treaty,
signed by the United States, Belgium, England, China,
France, Italy, Portugal and Japan. Japan has violated
every point. It says: The contracting powers, other than
China, agree to respect the sovereignty, the independence
and the territorial and administrative integrity of China.
Still two hours to Midway. The only Chinese passenger
sings half aloud his poems about clouds, sea and light. I
made his acquaintance in Moana Hotel in Honolulu. He
would like to have all the old things of China back. He
will have a hard time

February 4, Friday: Passing international date line at

8:15 a.m. Suddenly becomes Saturday February 5. Here
is a split in time. Today is tomorrow here; there is never
a now. On the radio you hear what is happening yester-
day in San Francisco. You skip a day in your life, and
you get it back only when you return. (I remember some-
thing in Peer Gynt about the time becoming plastic.)
Everyone talks suddenly: skipping a day in your life
is something. A gray, correct gentleman (oil) travels so
much by air that he no longer uses ordinary flat maps he
uses two halves of a tiny globe. The Chinese poet-general
(I think he is a general in plain clothes) feels his future
one day nearer and tells me all the secrets of cooking the

146
fine fish he is going to eat in Hong Kong as soon as he
arrives. Very soon now. Two new passengers who joined
us in Honolulu are going to hunt big game in French In-
dochina. They will meet their wives there; lions, too, they
hope. The Philippine doctor is also on board and when-
ever there is a lull in the conversation he says: "Lots of
fun, boys." Always in the middle of a painful silence. He
is the flying ambassador of his country and a great amus-
ing fellow. Baker, an American aviation mechanic, who
also came aboard in Honolulu, smiles quietly. He is on
his way to China, but he doesn't want to talk about it.
Neither do I, so we have an excellent conversation.
Sugar and drugs, both from Manila, are talking about
their harvest. We land at 3:00 p.m. at Wake Island, and
it is Saturday, February 5.

February 6, Sunday: From Wake Island to Guam. ... I

had counted on being there January 26. Lost thirteen
days, five by the fuel-line trouble and eight by bad
weather conditions. Guam. Twenty thousand inhabitants.
In the hotel of the Pan-American airlines, no liquor. Find
some brandy in the little native village near the airport
in a dark cafe. We get acquainted with a sunburned
American marine policeman, tough and nice, and his girl,
the strange barmaid. The Philippine doctor did not want
to give his right name. Manila was the next stop and he
felt it was too near home. He is now Don Amigo, and I
am still Joris Ivens.
Afterwards, we go with the Chinese general to visit the
only Chinese family in the village. He speaks at length
to the old Chinese father of the family. Uses his hands
a great deal closing them together tightly when he men-
tions important things about China ... the united front?
I like him better now.

February 8, Tuesday: From Manila to Hong Kong.W.

The clipper lies with her four thousand horse power nose
on the quiet water of the bay, her tail slightly raised, very

io* 147
content, very quiet, and is anchored with ropes, like an
ordinary sea ship. We are in the Orient.
The Chinese general is met by his wife and children
and officials. He says to me in his English: "Good for
China, you do film." Before me: Hong Kong on an island;
it is a rugged mountain; on the terraced slopes broad
houses with their long rows of porches and windows.
At last in the Far East I'm in the ring now, and no
longer nervous.

The arrival in Hong Kong and the assembling of the

crew: I arrived first; John and Capa about ten days later.
My first job was to secure plane passages for the three
of us to Hankow.
In Hong Kong I met a very important man who really
saved our lives, a Dutch engineer, named De Booy. He
pointed out that I was not only about to make a film but
had to become an expedition leader as well, because we
had to be equipped like a real expedition. He had worked
for the League of Nations in China on canal and road
building and had great experience in the Far East. I met
him at the Dutch consulate. The Dutch consul and his staff
were very helpful to us. I never saw them again, but if
they ever read this book they will know how thankful
I am. With De Booy we bought all kinds of cots, special
bags, chemicals, medicine. We spent about three thousand
dollars. This was one of the "unforeseens" of the budget.
In Hong Kong I got to know the English colony
atmosphere, especially around the horse races. The town
bars teemed with the gossip of the correspondents sitting
around. North China, including Shanghai, was in Japanese
hands so a lot of bad elements and White Russians had
drifted down to Hong Kong. It was really a hot spot.
Here was the atmosphere of a mixed Chinese and colo-
nial city, in a country that was at war. But the war itself
had not touched the town, not even with a bombardment.
A stream of Chinese officials from Hankow flew in and

148
out of the city. All the banks and international ties of
China were in Hong Kong.
I walked around, a serious sightseer. That helped me
later in Hankow. Hong Kong is not really a Chinese city.
It is only a taste. It smells like China if you come from
Hollywood, but you would have to be crazy to draw
conclusions about China from Hong Kong.
The most exciting and important person I met was
Madame Sun Yat-sen. I visited her, and when I went
back, I saw her again. She was in a rather strange posi-
tion at the time. She could not be in Hankow because of
differences between her, the government officials and her
two sisters: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Madame
Kung, the wife of the director of the National Bank of
China. I think a book should be written about those three
sisters: two of them believing in a capitalist China and
one, Madame Sun Yat-sen, in a socialist future of her
country. Madame Sun Yat-sen was one of the most won-
derful women I ever met in my life. You came to feel a
whole people and suddenly you saw the best expression
of the people as a Chinese, as a woman, and as a phi-
losopher and fighter. Strange to see her against the dis-
torted and unreal background of Hong Kong. I knew
more about Sun Yat-sen than I knew about Chiang Kai-
shek. She told us about the whole history and the fight
for the independence of China. She also told us how to
deal with all the different peoples in China.
Madame Sun Yat-sen had real understanding for what
the film could do for China. Knowing The Spanish Earth
and my documentary record of the last ten years, she knew
that I could be trusted with the film. When I left she said :
"Oh, you are going to do a wonderful thing for China."
On my way back to the United States seven months
later, we filmed Madame Sun Yat-sen. It is difficult to
grasp in a picture the dignity of the Chinese people, their
deeper happiness, expressed in her personality, but it is
there.

149
 We were anxious to leave. All the equipment business
was done thoroughly because we were going to be far
from repair shops or drug stores. I arranged with the
Dutch consul Van Woerden for the forwarding of raw
material by ship from San Francisco to Hong Kong-and
also for sending the outgoing shipments of the film we
would shoot in China to Hollywood for developing.
In Hong Kong it was quite clear that no unity existed
between the population and the English government.
This city was so out of joint. The whole society was in
layers; the more powerful your social status, the richer
you were, the higher you got up hill, with the governor
and his gardens on top.
I had not realized what going into China for nine
months would mean. In New York I had read much
about Chinese art. I went to see what the Chinese artists
had done with their landscapes, their people, their lives
and their movements. On the clipper my reading ranged
over political and social questions. In Hong Kong I got
down to concrete examples.
Hankow was the capital of China in 1938, after Peking
and before Chungking. At that time it was the center of
China. We got two rooms in the Lodge Hotel, a small
hotel facing the broad and yellow Yangtze. After a
couple of days Dr. Hollington Tong, Press Chief of the
government, arranged a tea with Madame Chiang Kai-
shek. Madame received us in her home on the other side
of the river. We talked about the film project. She
ordered Major-General Huang, personal liaison officer
of the Chiang Kai-shek family and head of the New Live
Movement, to give us all the help we needed. Madame
gave us the impression of a charming, energetic woman.
The charm was mixed Chinese and American-she had
been educated in an American college. We were also pre-
sented to the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek who lis-
tened to our plans without saying much-his mind and
pose being that of a very military man.

150
 I never completely understood why Colonel Huang
wanted to do more than put me in contact with the army
and censorship and get me passes to the front. He ques-
tioned our plans, our script, and the professional com-
position ofmy unit. Naturally, I wanted to work closely
with the brave people of the Chinese motion picture in-
dustry; but Col. Huang did not think this was a good
idea. It was difficult to see clearly through the political
labyrinth in which we found ourselves with our film pro-
ject. Anyway, Col. Huang seemed to have tremendous
influence. Also, moviemen who had been there before
told me that he was the man who arranged "everything."
We felt that he continually followed and controlled our
movements, a sort of delicate police action. Every for-
eign film company coming into China had to work with
his office. Every Hollywood film unit that went there on
location had to go through his office. I got the feeling
that they used the censorship office not only to censor but
also to keep their fingers on every detail of production.
General Tu, who had been technical advisor on The
Good Earth film, was assigned to go with us to the front
as the representative of Col. Huang. On a second, later
trip, I refused to take him along. His main interest was
the possible chance our project might afford him of be-
ing sent to Hollywood.
The four weeks in Hankow were really a battle for
freedom of action for my unit, and for passes to the front.
Fortunately the front situation got very hot near Taierch-
wang north of Hankow. I had to go there then, or it
would be too late. If I hadn't put up a four-week's fight
for permission to go there, the historical battle of Taierch-
wang, the only victory of the Chinese government army
in 1938, would not have been filmed.
Madame Chiang limited the functions of Col. Huang to
facilitate my work in Hankow, transportation to the front,
and to enable me to get an assistant of my choice from
people in the motion picture industry working for the

151
National Military Council. That didn't work. Col. Huang
had it his way. He got the Generalissimo to appoint a
committee of control which had to be obeyed. I was
counseled by Mr. Donald, at the time personal advisor
to the Generalissimo and Madame, to do nothing. Also,
the American ambassador told me that in four weeks I
had accomplished more than a League of Nations Com-
mittee had in six months. China's governmental ways
were as complicated as Chinese writing, but less beauti-
ful. What kept me going was the hope that in the prac-
tical work on the front we could get rid of the inter-
ference.
It was a vain hope. Col. Huang had on his side the law
and the censorship restrictions covering foreign companies
or units filming in China. For years these had done a
poor job and had shown the Chinese people in a bad
light-making fun of them, the women's bound feet, their
pigtails. I agreed with these restrictions and with the laws
against any such distortions.
In order to control foreign commercial filming, Col.
Huang assigned a man to say whether or not the film
could be made, and whether or not the film had to be
developed in China. But we weren't a commercial outfit,
we were a non-profit volunteer unit, eager to make a
film to help China. This helped us no more than did the
fact that in all my films I had always fought against the
kind of patronizing and insulting trends of which com-
mercial film companies in China had been guilty. Never-
theles , got
I all their sins on my back, and had to say
to the Chinese, "You are right!"
The problem was further complicated by the question
of our expenses. Because Col. Huang mixed up every
detail, I showed him the budget I had made in New York.
From it he saw that John and I got a salary of fifty dol-
lars a week, and a minimum of five dollars a day living
expenses.
It was no use trying to explain that we were artists,

152
friends of China, doing this work at almost no salary
and at the possible risk of our lives. There had been no
precedent for this. But this non-commercial character is
the very essence of this kind of documentary film making.

The integrity of our group's approach to their work

was completely misunderstood by the Chinese officials.
Strange, because the Chinese cause badly needed a docu-
mentary film. But they could not imagine anyone going
to all that trouble to make something China needed
without getting anything out of it for themselves. Busi-
ness as usual, even in wartime. They thought like bank-
ers, in terms of pure money.
Fifty dollars a week was incredible to Col. Huang and
his committee. People who received that little couldn't
be more than third-rate artists who couldn't get a job in
the U.S.A. or Europe. What added to the confusion, was
the fact that we had the official sanction of Madame
Chiang Kai-shek and Dr. Kung. . . , History Today, Inc.
was some new group, not an established company like
Paramount. . . . We were negligible. Also, we were sus-
pect: what kind of people do dangerous work for fifty
dollars a week?
I wired Luise Rainer in Hollywood:

Please state by wire that I am internationally well-

known, signed by famous directors as Milestone and
others, say that I am not a beggar needing work.

It was all very embarrassing, but there I sat in the middle

of China, wanting to do a good job.
We got out of Hankow two weeks earlier than any
old China hand would have believed. I took John Ferno
along to all those transactions and pourparlers. That was
also to make the Chinese realize we had equal standing
in our unit, he was not just the man with the camera.
John was difficult in the diplomacy game; he bucked
that three-thousand-year-old bureaucracy with a straight

153
Dutch approach. Mostly he said the right thing without
even listening to the Chinese arguments. In a way it was
good. Sometimes it was very good, but it often created
a new situation in which I had to start all over again
because I was loyal to John. Capa mostly went around
with the international reporters, so he found his own
way.
Hankow, February 25, Friday:
HISTORY TODAY INC. NEW YORK. LEAVING HAN-
KOW APRIL FIRST STOP START PICTURE SHANTUNG
PROVINCE STOP ENOUGH TECHNICAL HELP BUT
HEAVY CENSOR CONDITIONS STOP COMING MONTHS
NO POSSIBILITY OF COMMUNICATION STOP WIRE
RECEIPT OF THIS TELEGRAM REGARDS JORIS
I mentioned Shantung province. The people in New
York could figure out on a map that it was on the front
line and that once there, we might be cut off from com-
munication.
Hankow, April 1, Friday: I sent my diary to Helen in New
York. It's as good as a long letter: You never know what
may happen at the front 4:00 a.m. I cannot find John
in his room. He is in the bathroom where he slept in the
water from two till four. He must have had a good time
before that somewhere else. Downstairs, twenty-two
"coolies" carry all our equipment and luggage to the truck.
I leave seven cases: the film stock and our sound equip-
ment, in the air-raid shelter of the Central Bank of China.
The President of the Bank of China, and the high offi-
cials use this solid dugout during air raids, so it must be
safe.
I leave instructions at the bank about the luggage in case
we don't come back soon or are cut off by the Japanese.
7:00 a.m. The train leaves Hankow for Chen Chow.
I have given two big packages of money to Jack Young,
our Chinese business manager, for the trip to the front-
a nice fellow; a young Chinese educated in America,
knows English very well, had been in several expeditions

154
in the Chinese interior and the Himalayas for the Museum
of Natural History in New York. He brought the first
panda out of the interior; later, on my way back to the
States, he gave me a skeleton of a very interesting ape
to take to the Museum of Natural History.
The money I gave him amounts to twelve hundred
Chinese dollars in ten-cent bills, twelve thousand small
bills because it is difficult to change one-dollar and five-
dollar bills at the front or in the villages.
Tsao, a civilian from the motion picture industry, has
suddenly become a colonel. I had asked for several like
him, but he was the only one Col. Huang okayed to go
with us. He is a small guy and looks very important in
his military uniform, his mufti hat, his canary-yellow
cane-that is the man with whom I have a good under-
standing and friendship. He is our man, the only one.
In the dining car we meet four cameramen on their
own assignments, each with a girdle of bullets. We are
on our way to the front. At last we can leave this town
where we have wasted too much time with the civilian
censorship. A long line of red tape (red tape always
makes it difficult to blame any one person. You can only
get angry at yourself for losing four precious weeks)
We are seven: John, Capa, myself and our Chinese
friends: Jack, the business manager; Chuck, the censor-
ship assistant with his 16 mm camera; Tsao, my personal
assistant; and one servant Piao, carrying a short gun in
a big wooden case. General Tu, Col. Huang's represent-
ative and the censorship in the field, went ahead of us
a couple of days ago in order to prepare the way. We
are lucky, it is gray weather, giving the Japanese little
opportunity to bomb our train.

April 2, Saturday: We arrive at Chen Chow at 8:00

a.m. The station shows traces of bombardment. A small,
overcrowded hotel was hit, two hundred were killed.
There seems to be little life here. All the stores are closed.

155
Afraid of more bombardments. Bad morale for a popu-
lation inwartime. Would be better to have good dugouts
and a good alarm system and keep the people in touch
with the whole war outside the city. I don't see any post-
ers or any visible attempts to make an educational mass
appeal that life has to go on even if the enemy threat of
bombardment is close. Spain did this better
After lunch we see General Ho, Chief of Transporta-
tion. He immediately arranges places for us on a train to
Hsuhow and we are very grateful. While loading the
train, one of the "coolies" bangs the lens case on the
ground. Both John and I swear vigorously in Dutch and
promptly the train conductor speaks to us in perfect Dutch.
He comes from the Dutch East Indies; has been on this
line for twenty years.
At the station we meet the rest of the correspondents
who have been permitted to visit the front. Mr. Steele
from the Chicago Tribune; Mr. Epstein from the United
Press-, Bossart, explorer and photographer, and Captain
Evans Fordyce Carlson of the United States Marines.
Often the Japanese army is not more than twenty-five
miles from the railway line. Everything looks peaceful
but no one knows for how long. We discuss the prospect
and decide there must be a battle near Hsuhow, and that
must be the battle we are heading towards. We travel all
night.

April 3, Sunday: Hsuhow. . . . Arrived here at 6:00 a.m.

Four dead lying on the platform. Civilians. One still
moves a little. I see their faces. This is the first time I
face death since Spain. Seeing it brings many thoughts.
I am not a writer. I can say more with a picture. I would
try to express what death meant to me, not merely with
shots of the dead bodies, but in a whole sequence. Death
always involves so many more people than just the one
who dies.
There is not as much to see here as one would expect

156
from a military center so close to the front. Of course the
different divisions in the front line have to be more self-
sufficient here than in any other country's army. The lines
of communication are difficult and long. We get good
news. We are to proceed soon to the front. Maybe today.
After a solid lunch we got to General Li Tsung-yen,
commander of the fifth war area. He is short, stocky and
bright. We have a whole hour for our interview. He ex-
plains the situation, draws a map on the table. Evidently
we have arrived just in time. The Chinese army is sur-
rounding the Japanese near Taierchwang. General Li
promises us every aid. As Capa photographs our group
at table I consider this unique situation in this war for
independence. For the first time in China's history all her
armies are united, all are responsible to one general staff,
the National Military Council.
General Li has to arrange three different groups of
visitors in what he feels is their order of importance. A
peasant delegation has brought him twelve fat pigs be-
cause he saved the province from Japanese invasion;
Steele and Epstein are waiting for an exclusive interview
promised them; and the film groups wait. Which will be
first? This is a very important question in China. We say:
we traveled three days in order to get permits to go to
the front. The peasants say: they carted the pigs for three
days on wheelbarrows over mountains and through val-
leys. The reporters say: we have an appointment at 3:00
p.m. for the exclusive interview. Many polite Chinese
laugh at the situation, but General Li orders the follow-
ing arrangement: first the peasants, then us, and then the
impatient reporters.
Back at the hotel. We hear that the train is to leave in
ten minutes. If we don't catch it we may have to wait for
days. We pack only the most necessary things: the cam-
era, toothbrush and a towel. But on the platform no one
seems to be in a hurry. Several military bodyguards are
there. Mausers with large wooden grips. Fingers on the
157
triggers for the past hour. These bodyguards are for Gen-
eral Li and General Pai Chung-hai, Chief of the Opera-
tion Department of General Headquarters, and con-
sidered one of the best strategists in China.
Our train goes straight to the front without stopping.
After a while all lights have to be extinguished. General
Tu, the external censor, had joined us at Chen Chow. He
is nervous and talks too much. Some of the soldiers busy
digging trenches along the tracks are delegated to help us
carry our stuff to Yang Chalou, field headquarters of
General Sun Lien-chung. We locate him in an old farm at
three o'clock in the morning. During the walk I keep an
eye on the soldier who is carrying the battery for the cam-
era motor-I carry his big sword for him on my back, less
weight than a battery. You can hear heavy shooting far
away.

April 4, Monday: Field Headquarters of General Sun. . . .

This morning we talked with General Sun, commander
of the 26th Route Army, in the farmyard. He is an old-
school military man. He explained the complete situa-
tion at the front. He was sent to this part of the front
because he is particularly able in tough fighting and has
direct and quiet methods of work.
Later we go up to the artillery observation post on a
hill a mile southeast from headquarters. We look through
the special artillery glasses into the Japanese lines about
four miles away. They seem to have noticed this new
activity and begin shelling very near to us, so the post
has to be moved. We go back to have tea with the Artil-
lery Commander and Chinese pilot and afterwards, after
dinner in an old barn, each of us sings songs from his
country. John and I sing old Dutch songs, sailor songs
and love songs. Captain Carlson plays Working on the
Railroad on the harmonica. In a hoarse, melancholy voice
Capa sings songs of the Hungarian plains and then we
all sing a Chinese war song we have learned : Cbi-Lai.
158
 General Chiu, an officer of General Sun's staff, talks
about his observations, especially of the last seven months
of fighting against the Japanese army. He says that Japan
always has an elaborate build-up at the beginning of a
new war. They say everything will be arranged and set-
tled peacefully by diplomatic channels, but in the mean-
time they mobilize and strike suddenly.
Their methods of fighting follow the military textbooks
to the letter. Every situation can be referred to on page
so-and-so in their little book. Their equipment and train-
ing are perfect, and technically superior to the Chinese. It
means, he says, we have to avoid every big showdown
or battle because then they would be able to use their
whole mechanical equipment. He is confident in the
ultimate victory and sure of success at Taierchwang.
Tomorrow, General Chiu will complete the picture of
the whole situation for us; in order to make our film his-
torically correct and also for our own safety, we must
have exact knowledge of the movements of the Japanese.

April 5,Tuesday: Good weather, bright sun. At 8:00a.m.

we go with fifteen soldier-carriers to a small village
where a battery of two guns, fifteen centimeters, are
placed. This is our first foot of film on the Chinese pic-
ture. We have accumulated a very international group:
Jack, a Chinese; John and I Dutch; Capa, Hungarian;
and our amateur helpers: Carlson, an American; Epstein,
a Pole. The group language is a mixed English and Chi-
nese. Epstein, the newspaper man, does fine work with a
reflector during the shooting. We completely lose the
Hankow atmosphere.
The observation post is far forward on a bare stone
hill and is sometimes under fire. The young Chinese of-
ficers make a good impression. They know their stuff.
Capa gets his first lesson as a second cameraman. The
censorman, General Tu makes himself very important by
forbidding a close-up of the gun, which is nonsense, be-
159
cause it is a German gun, made in '33, and well-known.
The military authority takes our side, so we shoot the
picture. . . .
Back in the field headquarters in the evening, General
Chiu gives us more details about our situation. The Chi-
nese attack has affected the morale of the Japanese army.
Their confidence is shaken and their actions have be-
come passive
Today we took five hundred and eighty-five feet of
film, about eighteen set-ups. Practically no retakes. You
can't do many retakes at the front.
We try to get some more story or personal angle on
the development of the battle from General Chiu. Many
military people do not think in those terms. Too dry or
too cagey. Our liaison and censorman, General Tu, does
his utmost to stop us getting close to the officers or men.
He is not interested in our film or our work. He wants
to get away from the battlefield as soon as he can-so he
evades every involvement. I start to hate him slowly.
Difficult to pin him down. I don't know if the battle of
Taierchwang will fit in the main continuity of our film,
or whether it will be a separate sequence.

April 6, Wednesday: Two days ago I gave a detailed

list to the General of what we should take to the front.
Suspect General Tu of not pushing it. No answer yet, but
we can still work today. We go with a truck and six car-
riers a couple of miles further on from where we were
yesterday, over a barren open field, scattered with stones
and rocks, making very difficult terrain. We find a field
battery of four guns, seven and a half centimeters under
low trees on the outskirts of the village. We pass rein-
forcements marching along, long lines of soldiers in soft
shoes, very well equipped
The battery fired twelve shots especially for us and
those shots sent a Japanese-occupied city up in flames,
but it is too far away to film.

160
 During a lull in the firing we learned our first Chinese
words: Bu Yao Kan - Don't look at the camera.
The general staff has announced the slogan : We have
to fight here, because there is no other place to die.
Tomorrow we hope to go closer to Taierchwang. Near
actual fighting at last. We made fifteen shots today, three
hundred and eighty feet.

April 7, Thursday: Good news. At 6:00 a.m. General

Chiu comes in, dancing with excitement, bringing the
news that Taierchwang has fallen into our hands. Our
previous schedule for the day is dropped. Taierchwang
is our objective. We are half crazy, waiting for the truck
till about 11:00. En route we hear that the ammunition
depot was hit and exploded and there were six or seven
hours of furious night attacks.
The Japanese have lost not only the town but also
their strategic position ten miles north of the town. We
see a Japanese plane bombing the hills about two miles
northwest of us. Now he is coming in our direction. 'We
jump out of the truck with our cameras and scatter in the
field. Carlson, Jack and I are behind the small sand heap
of a grave. John and Capa are lying behind another
about fifty yards away. The truck is empty and stands
alone on the road. Maybe he'll hit it. Behind us I see the
slow, heavy movement of the armored train as it comes
to a stop. We lie close to the ground with our faces
down so that the Japanese pilot cannot see the skin of
the face which is so easy to spot. But he seems to have
found us anyway for I hear him begin circling above us.
I feel as if he is aiming at me personally. Perhaps he will
hit my arm which is protecting my head. And yet the
field seems so vast, with so much space that the bomb
may never find me.
The earth smells good and is full of life. From the
direction of the armored train I hear anti-aircraft fire and
I look up to see the plane circling and flying away

II Ivens, camera 161

 4:00 p.m. We meet with the commanding officer, Lt.
Col. Wang Loung Woo, happy and satisfied, speaking
with a hoarse voice, which must have worn itself out the
day before. He is from the thirty-first division and draws
the following conclusion for us: the battle of Taierchwang
has created new self-confidence among the Chinese sol-
diers. The experience of street fighting has taught them
that in modern warfare planes are not as terrible as
heavy guns; heavy guns are not as effective as hand
grenades; and hand grenades are sometimes not as good
as big swords. He also asserts that the soldiers consider
street fighting the best, because then all the enemy's
mechanized units become useless.
Another fact: the Chinese armies always try to fight
the Japanese army at night, because this prevents the
Japanese from making full use of their superior technical
equipment.
Col. Wang tells us something more: the Japanese often
hire young boys for spy work. But these boys come to
our lines and tell us in detail the situation behind the
enemy's lines and take lies back to the Japanese. They
say Chinese should not attack Chinese At Taierch-
wang there are many new recruits in our lines but no one
runs away.
In his new office in a shelled house Col. Wang has col-
lected trophies of the battle-gas masks, helmets, machine
guns, flags, charms, poison-gas tubes and an iron pot
about six inches in diameter. I find a Japanese diary for
Carlson, the only trophy he wants. A bullet has pierced
it, leaving blood in crisp edges where it has been burned
through. In a modern war you don't see the enemy, you
only feel him, get to know how he attacks, when he rests.
But you would like to know him because war is not only
a killing process, and now at last we have something of
him, the trophies. We go over them carefully. . . .
Wandering with John around this village looking for
new material, I see more devastation than we ever saw

162
in Spain. The houses are not so strong to begin with,
mostly clay. The trees at the foot of the wall surrounding
the town are torn and leafless, shooting out of the earth
like dead hands. They are naked, the bark stripped in
flakes. Must have been a hell of a fight.
The American Presbyterian mission is on a narrow
street. It has a sign saying: Please don't molest. Behind
the sign, the mission has been totally destroyed.
The destruction is terrible. Hardly one roof left. Some
women wander down what was once a street. One sits by
herself among fragments of clay and board. We ask her
what she is doing here. She answers us as though we
should know, "This is my house." There is nothing there.
Reporter Epstein came with us. His job will be finished
tonight. He kicks fragments on the road. A funny look-
ing yellow cylinder lies in his path. He kicks it. I jump
on him. It could have meant his death. Unexploded
Japanese hand grenade. Now he knows better. . . .
We take our camera down another street and we pan
the camera along three corpses: a duck, a boy and a little
pig. This is the footprint of the Japanese army. Huddled
nearby are three old women. One of them looks at the
dead child as if it were hers. She thinks our camera is a
gun, that we mean to kill her. When we point it at her,
all three hide their faces behind their hands and scream
and plead for their lives. No wonder. The camera does
seem like a rifle and Jack is wearing a trophy: a Japanese
cap which he found.
As night comes, one of the officers up front on the road
starts a song, another picks it up, then a third, and then
we all sing. It is a volunteer song of North China, a war
song. Behind Taierchwang are the yellow flames of two
burning villages. Within the city we can see a long slender
chimney furiously puffing smoke. It could be a furnace
of one of the factories the Chinese have recaptured. All
of this makes a tremendous impression on me. Got six
hundred and fifty feet today.

11* 163
April 8, Friday: Very early we return to Taierchwang
and this time we take our heavy cameras because there
is no chance that the Japanese will retake the city today.
The first day we only had the handcameras. The first
day we weren't sure and the second day we are: the Jap-
anese have left for good.

April 9, Saturday: We take pictures of soldiers drilling

behind the lines. All the people in our group are still un-
der great tension and are quite irritable. The letdown
now is good. It proves that our sensitivity has not been
cut off by the war.

April 10, Sunday: Today as every day I ask to be allowed

to go to the front lines. But still no success and only a
lukewarm response. We go to the Taierchwang station a
little outside the town and meet good old Steele of the
Chicago Tribune along the tracks. He has some of Cap-
tain Carlson's laundry under his arm which he forgot in
Hsuhow. I think we shall collect our share of laundry
from Spain and China when the wars are over.
We accomplished a lot of fine work in Taierchwang
today. Three hundred and fifty refugees have returned to
the places where their houses once stood. Out of three
thousand that once lived here 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 them-
selves. 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 We film an outside wall with
the proud Chinese flag on it. For this shot we have to
place our cameras in an innocent looking corn field but
we are extremely careful because there are unexploded
shells all over the place. Eppie (Epstein) goes back to
Hankow today and I give him some letters to send from
there. Worked hard and went to bed early.

164
April 11, Monday: Up early this morning. We hear a
heavy artillery duel to the west. It is as if the powerful
artillery sound waves also carried the sharp staccato
machine-gun sounds to us. I recall our sound effect prob-
lem on The Spanish Earth. I remember how Irving Reis,
Hemingway and I had to sweat out making noises and
yelling at each other to get the exact synthesis and effect
of shellfire. We found the usual sound effects that film
and radio use conventional and unsatisfactory. Careful
analysis and synthetic composition give a much truer ef-
fect, more impressive than the actual recording of the
original sound would be.
We meet a refugee family on a wide trail at the foot
of a bare hill. We leave our horses on the other side of
the hill and go to them. It is a family of eight. The father
is wounded in the upper arm and shoulder. Looks very
bad, and has the dark brown color of blood and dirty
bandage left too long on a wound. They don't say much;
it is a pity I don't speak Chinese. Carefully I try to guide
the translator, not so much in his language but more in
his approach to them. I got it. The father tells us slowly
that he lived in a village about ten miles from here and
that when the Japanese came they forced him to carry mu-
nitions for them. When they had to leave his village be-
cause of the advancing Chinese army, he was sitting in
front of his house and they threw a strange thing with a
tail at him. It burst and flew into his arm. While talking,
he sits on the ground, eating quietly and with great
dignity. Suddenly from this same dignified position, he
imitates the impertinent look of the Japanese officer
who swore at him after he was wounded by them.
His voice becomes abrupt. Suddenly I associate Japan
with Germany. It is the hard, guttural sounds of a
Nazi officer or Hitler's speech. Certainly this is not for
us.
I detest such strained, fanatical ways of talking and
the mentality that goes with it; I detest both military

165
and moral aggression. And people everywhere who share
the same feeling know they must unite to destroy these
cliques. The lines of the battlefield of Taierchwang are
longer than you think. They reach out into each country.
Simple statements and slogans are formulated in every
language to express for us and for those at the front that
humanity and liberty is on our side. A man sitting on the
ground in the middle of China becomes the symbol of
what is happening to millions of other people. A symbol
bearing the slogans of the reality of freedom, sorrow and
the will to live.
After finishing the sequence of the wounded farmer's
family we return at a gallop, the camera cases bouncing
on our backs. We have a long way and it is already late
and getting dark, but the horses are fine and do not tire.
These are the rugged tiny horses on which the army of
Genghis Khan conquered all of Asia and some of Europe.
Sometimes in the dark we lose each other. Galloping at
full speed Capa suddenly imagines he is really Genghis
Khan and yells war cries to us. From the rear he looks
more like Sancho Panza. His squat silhouette bounces up
and down in the saddle-he is riding for the second time
in his life.
At headquarters I ask again to go to the front. This
time speaking only for the three of us, not the whole unit,
maybe that will work. An hour later I propose to go for-
ward with the armored train. God knows if they will let
me do it.

April 12, Tuesday: I am still sitting outside on the stone

wall of our headquarters' farm. I can hear the sentinels
a little further along. I can also hear the Chinese army
fighting. I saw them marching to the lines today. I can
hear the sounds at the front about six kilometers from
here, but the generals won't let us go to the front. We
are their only guests.
At dinner they tell us, "The Honorable Guests have
166
come from far. The Honorable Guests are welcome and
we admire their courage. Unfortunately we cannot enter-
tain them as splendidly as we should like to. The Honor-
able Guests are most welcome but we can't possibly al-
low our guests to be in danger." Well, I suppose they are
right. They are clearly afraid of any international com-
plications that might arise. They feel personally respon-
sible for our safety. But they are fighting men and they
should understand our way of fighting. We have a mis-
sion. We are here for the sake of American audiences.
All we can say is that the Honorable Guests understand
the Honorable Generals-but Listen\ We can't convince
them. It is exactly as if we had to make a picture about
New York and were allowed to see only the coast on a
quiet night, the only sound that of the tugboats in the
harbor, and surrounded on all sides by polite people.

Now we concentrate on listening, Capa and I. John is

asleep. Far away in the night we hear heavy shots in the
low foothills; it is like the regular beating of heavy
blankets, something you might hear in a fever. There is
a gong sound, mixed with machine guns and sometimes I
feel nervous. We listen intently. That's where we should
be. Now we try to analyze what we hear. That sounds
like more than a five-inch gun. That must be the heavy
Japanese gun that the fighting general wanted to get to-
day. He was very angry that his soldiers didn't get it.
Tonight he is going forward himself. There is a long si-
lence. Through the young green corn fields near us an un-
broken line of panting soldiers trot quickly on their way
to get the heavy gun. But we are not allowed to go with
them
Tomorrow there will be a full moon and they will
bomb Hankow again. What will happen here we don't
know. The Japanese are silent. The front is silent. You
feel that hundreds of men are creeping somewhere at the
bottom of those hills. The night has become a medium
167
for camouflage. Real night has gone somewhere else.
Somewhere where there is peace.

April 13, Wednesday: After the daily bombing at the

station we go there and find a group of about twenty
students from Peking University. The students follow
closely behind the troops and organize transport and care
of wounded among the peasants. They are a great help
in organizing propaganda festivals and general entertain-
ment for soldiers and wounded. They work well with
this division. After the bombing they are resting at the
station; they ask us, as experts from the Spanish war, to
judge how heavy the bombs were from the craters they
made. We guess, but are not sure of being exact, they
seem to be three hundred pounders. In any case the
Japanese haven't landed a perfect hit. On the Lunghai
railroad line they have wasted more money on bombs,
gas, oil and lost bombing planes than they would have
spent on building the whole railroad line. These are the
economics of war. They have such wide misses in this
district that the best thing to do when a plane comes is to
stay on the tracks.
It reminds me of the time we tried to find the safest
place under shellfire during the battle of Morata in Spain.
When we thought we had found it we left the cameras
there and took ourselves to another "safest" place; after
three minutes we switched places with the cameras. You
never know in a war.
About a hundred badly wounded soldiers arrive at the
station. They are on stretchers quickly put together from
fresh branches and ropes. The ambulance corps does not
have enough stretcherbearers so the village peasants work
in relays taking the wounded from their village to the
next where other peasants take over, and so on for hun-
dreds of miles to the base hospital. There are no roads
here.
We decide to film this in detail. I asked Jack to try

168
and have the bearers and wounded not look too obvi-
ously at the camera. He doesn't respond in his usual man-
ner 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.
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 hrs 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. Of course, objectively, it seems indiscreet and
shameless to probe so deeply into sorrow and private life
and emotions but in Spain, and in working with the coal
miners in the Borinage we learned that this is what you
have to do.
It is difficult. I can understand Jack. After filming the
wounded soldiers, and the terrible things that occurred
in the villages, one is deeply moved and the feeling of
indignation against the Japanese army responsible for all
this becomes even stronger. And with that strength comes
the will to do something about it. That is part of the ten-
sion you recover many months later in the cutting-room
in New York, alone with all this film material, when you
have to shape it into an artistic form which will make

169
absolutely clear to everyone in the audience what you
have to say.
Jack begins to feel that we are not so cruel as he
thought. In the evening we play poker with him and the
generals at field headquarters. I would ten times rather
talk with the wounded sentinel at the gate and the
wounded soldiers we met this afternoon. It would have
been better for the work.
The courtesy of the general is a little suffocating and
wears on my nerves so I stop playing poker and talk to
John about the script. Maybe we could have a construc-
tion like a movie triptych. First a broad general sec-
tion 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 formulated in 1927 in the Ta-
naka 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
Taierchwang and future battles. Out of that must come
the third section, a personal story of a young Chinese de-
fending his country.
In connection with this, we talk about finishing here
because it doesn't seem that remaining will give us any-
thing more. The developments on this front seem to be
slowing up. Also with General Tu around we can't do
much. One doesn't feel inclined to blame either the gen-
erals or the government. I guess tomorrow we had better
film the way the field headquarters functions and then go
back to Hsuhow.
We now have 5826 feet-most of it made with the big
camera, about thirty percent with the two handcameras.

April 14, Thursday: We prepare to leave tonight I get

really angry because I hear that Fen Shei-tien, corre-
spondent for one of the most important papers in Han-
kow, was allowed to go to the front today. We saw him

170
several days ago. He is a fine fellow. Carries a big
Japanese revolver outside his coat. He always seems to
be around when it gets hot. He promised us some written
material about the battle. . . . •
We are packing. Up to now we have been hoarding
our cognac, chewing gum and chocolate because such
things are very valuable at the front. But we are not go-
ing there so what the hell.
Evening. Surrounded by our luggage and cameras we
have just left the bombed station of Taierchwang in an
old train. . . . More and more people pour into the train.
We can no longer lie down. John and I sit in the corner.
Capa sleeps on the floor of the car on the reflectors.

April 16, Saturday: We eat in the Chen Chow hospital

with the American and English doctors and for the first
time in three weeks we hear news from the radio. In France,
Daladier is premier again-the Spanish situation sounds
a little better. That means a great deal to all of us. Many
people we know are there and we still feel very close to
that war
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 at-
tempt anything spontaneous and then we discuss away
the freshness. Discussions with censors and lightmeters
are dangerous.
We had wanted to shoot the trains with the refugees
on the roof but Johnny kept saying, "Let's take it tomor-
row. The light will be better then."
The next day we saw more refugees, but we said, "To-
morrow the dust on the tracks will be better. Let's wait."
We thought we could wait until we had the exact hun-
dred percent shots we wanted. But that is the way to lose
a lot of very good shots.

171
Raster Sunday, April 17: Part of my group has gone to
Hankow. I stay behind because one of the officials, Ma-
jor General H.L. Huang, who is especially interested in
our film, is coming from Hankow to Chen Chow today.
I have given John a wire to send to New York from
Hankow. He has also taken the exposed film with him:
our battle of Taierchwang. I gave him a resume to be
sent to New York consisting mostly of a short list for
future reference. This is by no means a cutting list for
the battle sequence. Out of this footage we must use at
least one thousand feet to show the victorious and heroic
fight of the Chinese against the Japanese invaders. Very
important. How it will be worked into the finished film
I am not yet sure. Perhaps it would be best to use it for
the story of a Chinese soldier who fought in this battle;
or perhaps for the story of the wounded farmer we found
on the road far away from his home.

April 18, Monday: Still in Chen Chow. 3:00 p.m. Huang

hasn't come. I try to write letters which didn't go very
well, so start to read a history of China. I read about the
Liang dynasty when all libraries were burned in order
to destroy the cultural heritage of the people. It sounds
like Hitler. The books were bamboo rolls and burned
even better than the German ones. It is a fantastic story.
Almost fifteen hundred years ago Again, I'll go back
to Hankow to fight my little battle for the autonomy of
our film. Before going to sleep I write a long letter to my
Hollywood friends about the good work as well as our
difficulties.

April 19, Tuesday: Our train passes open cars full of fine
young soldiers, new machine guns, good rifles and anti-
aircraft weapons. The soldiers are singing. We must get
closer to the soldiers and to life in our film. I am afraid
that even near the front we still maintain too tourist a
mentality. It will be better on the next trip. . . .

172
 Looking through the passing trees, white with blossom,
I see green foothills in the distance and looking at the ho-
rizon wonder if it really is different from Europe and
America, or is it just my imagination that makes it seem
so. Is it because I saw so many fine Chinese prints before
leaving New York? These made me feel the way the most
sensitive Chinese, the artists, had seen their hills and their
country, and there was always something very special and
very different about it.
Here the green foothills, the villages, and the trees
don't seem very different 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 un-
expected 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 colors. I lean out of the window and soak myself in
it

In Hankow I learned that by going northwest I would

find much more understanding with the Eighth Route
Army on the function of the documentary film; I knew
too that I couldn't go there with the same General Tu.
So my main attack when I came back to Hankow was to
get General Tu out, and with a lot of face-saving, that
was done. Instead I got a former teacher from the birth-
place of Chiang Kai-shek, Mr. Teng, a softer, smoother
and more understanding man, but who proved to be as
bad as General Tu.
The city of Hankow was much better when I came back
because of the victory of Taierchwang. There were big
parades. Everyone felt this was not a single victory, it
could be the beginning of many. Unfortunately, it did not
turn out that way. From our point of view, the film work
should be easier. As soon as you are with a victorious
army everything goes better, and everyone helps with the
work.

173
 In Carlson's book Teng quotes the opinion of General
von Falkenhausen, the Generalissimo's military advisor:
/ tell the Generalissimo to advance, to attack, to exploit
his success. But nothing is done. Soon the Japanese will
have eight, ten divisions before Hsuchowfu. Then it will
be too late. Now they can destroy this small Japanese
force, for the morale is low. The blow would shake the
confidence of the people at home. He threw up his hands
in despair. Well, this was China and it was China's war.
China would have to fight it in her own way. But I had
the impression that Chiang Kai-shek did not want to fight
this war to the bitter end.
Our film was closely linked up with the political con-
tradictions inChina at that moment. I asked for permis-
sion to go to the Northwest. There was terrific pressure
from the general's committee to get a full script of our
film. The atmosphere at Hankow was so bad that I
wanted to leave as soon as we saw the Taierchwang bat-
tle was not going to be followed up. Carlson and others
wanted to try to get to the Northwest, the Communist
area. And I knew that once there I could get a better
story, emotionally. Negotiations took time, but we went.
The trip to Sian towards the Northwest was pretty ir-
regular. We traveled by train most of the way and were
under fire once. In Sian the censorship situation started all
over again on a smaller scale. Chiang Kai-shek had cen-
tered all the conservatives and his military friends in the
city of Sian. In Sian I asked for liberty to go around, and
for a truck to go to the Northwest to the Eighth Route
Army. This was refused in a polite way. Then I found out
that the Great Wall went straight through the Northwest.
So I asked for the Great Wall. They agreed to take me to
it. But they brought me to a point west, not northwest.
There, the Great Wall was hardly more than ruins, sand
dunes. But since we had spent three days by truck reach-
ing it, I decided to photograph it anyway, which is al-
ways a good idea. It was useful later for the film editing

174
in building the sequence about the crumbling and declin-
ing forces of China.
Then I had an exchange of telegrams with Hankow:

May 11 important event calls for filming cancel all en-

gagements and return hankow not later than eighteenth,
hollington tong j.l. huang.
May 11 hollington tong j.l. huang. returning hankow and
back again here extremely difficult and inefficient puts work
and my group in impossible position means loss of three
weeks understand importance of event but that should
not break up conception and plan about yellow river
shansi guerrilla great wall pinghan line stop these are es-
sential story elements stop cannot take responsibility for
story picture with three weeks interruption stop propose
studio military council film if possible important event
for our use later stop ask you let us work freely follow-
ing our original program, joris ivens.
May 12 wire received please consult teng stop we just
wired him our decision stop per agreement we never in-
terfered your artistic filming stop for your information
madame has already answered your american friends,
hollington tong j.l. huang.

May 21 letter received glad to see your story taking bet-

ter shape and you are filming great wall stop may 11th
decision made with madames collaboration we carefully
considered your proposal its long and communicatively
uncertain journey dont warrant your efforts guerrilla units
can be found anywhere stop madame wants me to inform
you china has only one army under generalissimos com-
mand in your production you are cautioned not to pub-
licize any particular unit but give prominence to the Chi-
nese army stop July and august very hot for hankow film-
ing hope you take full advantage of June weather here . . .

On May 12, we went to Lanchow instead of the North-

175
west. That is also the road to the Soviet Union. It runs
parallel to the old Silk Road, the way Marco Polo came
to China.
John, Capa and I decided to make the best of it and
do some shooting as it was a part of the country which
had never been filmed. Especially since we were on the
road to the Soviet Union. That and the Burma road were
the only two life lines to China. On our way we filmed
the building of the road. It was difficult to get close to
the people because we were still surrounded by our Chi-
nese censorship. The country, especially around Sian,
was particularly picturesque, it looked as you imagined
China to be. Little Buddha churches, pagodas and little
bridges. I did not film much because people had seen
enough of that in travelogues. The movie audiences al-
ways get the wrong impression, so I concentrated more
on the less exotic things.
They took us to the place where Chiang Kai-shek was
kidnapped, a kind of Lourdes for them, where people
have to go to admire the Generalissimo. He was such a
hero, he escaped over the wall in his night shirt and was
caught in the hills. Chinese characters on the rocks dis-
close the acts of the Generalissimo. We wanted to shoot
it with two children looking up at the writing, we thought
it pretty impressive. That was no good. The children were
taken away by Mr. Teng, and he put three stiff soldiers
in their place. We said, "No, we can't film that." And
we didn't.
One of the greatest crimes of the censorship, and a
good lesson for us, took place in Sian. I was standing on
the rocks up in the hills where Chiang Kai-shek was kid-
nap ed, athousand feet below lay a typical little Chinese
walled city. In a square in the middle something was
happening. When John and I saw people coming out of
the little stores and houses and going to the market
square, we tried to get to the village. It looked much
more interesting than the rocks of Chiang Kai-shek.
176
 We were allowed to go down and what we saw was
tremendous. Four students stood outside a small Bud-
dhist temple. They had a primitive sound relay system
and soapboxes for a home-made loudspeaker. They were
singing songs agitating the people in the fight against
Japan. Men, women, soldiers, children, chickens, pigs
comprised the audience. 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. Itwas a great manifestation. But we were not al-
lowed to film it because it would give the impression that
the Chinese mass was dirty and not well organized! We
argued with the censor. No luck. The arguments became
stronger. The censor put his hand in front of the lens.
A very conclusive argument.
Then we went back to the hotel at Sian. A famous ho-
tel-all the officers of Chiang Kai-shek were held there
during his kidnapping. 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 ten thousand people. All nicely arranged.
Children with children, men with men, bicycles with bi-
cycles. Four shiny loudspeakers and forty students in-
stead of yesterday's four were facing the crowd. "Here's
your chance," they said to Johnny and me. "This is dif-
ferent from that little scene you wanted to film yester-
day on the market place."
John and I didn't want to film it at all, it was such an
organized show compared with the "little" thing yester-
day. Our hypocritical censors believed it was better prop-
aganda to show those ten thousand people. We said we
wanted to show both meetings. The big meeting occurs
later in the film as a great demonstration of unity. It ap-
pears in the film where I cut in Madame Sun Yat-sen. She
was filmed in Hong Kong. But in spirit and in the edit-
ing she is there, with her people.

12 Ivens, camera 177

 The trip from Sian to Lanchow was done in dust
storms. We wore mouth and nose protection. A towel
covering the face with a narrow slit for the eyes.
We got closer to our Chinese friends. We were not al-
lowed to go by train because Chen Chow was in danger
of being taken by the Japanese. It actually did fall and
to the same Japanese army that had tried to wipe out
China at Taierchwang. The Chiang Kai-shek gang suc-
ceeded in preventing us going to the Northwest. It was
important not to make an issue of it. That would have
meant the end of our picture.
I had to remain behind in Sian with John because I
got the mumps. A Belgian missionary took care of me
for about a week. Capa meanwhile had gone ahead to
Hankow. John and I stayed for three weeks and then had
to wait a few extra days because of the Japanese threat
to the line.
In Hankow, real censorship developed. Everytime I
took a shot, one of the Chinese censor people took ex-
actly the same shot with a 16 mm camera. The 16 mm
print was sent to Hong Kong, developed there by Kodak,
flown back to Hankow and seen by the censor before we
were allowed to send the identical 35 mm film to Holly-
wood.
Having recovered entirely from the mumps, I asked
for permission to go to Canton. After Hankow, I saw
that we didn't have enough on heavy bombardments, and
the most bombed-out town was Canton. In Canton, I
would have the Northwest as center, and the south of
China as well.
We traveled there by train. We did some good shoot-
ing in Canton. We lived in the one skyscraper hotel-it
had fourteen floors and we were on the fourteenth be-
cause it was the cheapest. We paid two dollars and a
half for about five rooms, with windows on all sides. We
set the camera on a tripod and just waited, and read.
We felt very proud of ourselves for our professional ap-
173
proach. We found out later that we were in the safest
place, because the Japanese wanted that building for
their General Staff. Later we filmed not only from the
window of our hotel rooms, but also on the streets after
the Japanese bombardment.
We left Canton and returned to Hong Kong. There I
saw Madame Sun again. Filmed her this time. Capa
stayed on in China, went back to Hankow and got to
Chungking as a Life correspondent. John returned to
America on the clipper with me and Dick Watts, the
New York drama and film critic. Our trip was fast, with
no difficulties, straight on to San Francisco. We started
to cut the film in Hollywood.
Here we assembled the material and got a good idea
of it, with Helen van Dongen doing most of the editing.
After a month or six weeks, we moved to New York,
mainly to reduce the cost of editing and recording.
Dudley Nichols, well-known Hollywood script writer
worked in New York. He gave up jobs in Hollywood in
order to take on this one for us. He worked without pay.
The film had been pretty well cut when he saw it, so that
he didn't really have much to say about its structure. He
later suggested a change in some sequences. By that time,
he had read the books about China which I had listed
for him. Then he wrote the commentary-rewrote it about
four times, because in the first version, he had under-
estimated the pictorial force of the film. Every writer al-
ways underestimates this and the commentary is either
too descriptive or too subtle, or sometimes not subtle
enough.
The musical score also began at this time. I showed
more to Hanns Eisler (who was now in America, an exile
from fascist Germany) than I had shown Nichols. I think
he started earlier. What I would say was, "Here is the
battle scene. In the battle scene we want to point out the
heroic fighting but also at the same time, that modern
war is a kind of butchery which you don't want on your
12* 179
conscience. A lot of bad things in the war lead to the big
victorious things; there are just wars and unjust wars."
Eisler wanted to use Chinese music and his own. The
Chinese blended into his. He did not compose the tradi-
tional loud music for a battle. In every sequence his
music had a different function, and helped to push the
film forward as if leading to a final victory.
Fredric March spoke the commentary. In his first per-
formance hewas too emotional. He had the same trouble
as Nichols had in his approach to the material. Too
emotional, too personal. It was the delivery of a speaker
who thinks he is seen on the screen, rather than one be-
ing heard. Yet you couldn't compare it to radio speech
because the commentary does not necessarily describe the
things being shown on the screen. On radio when you
say, "This wide open plain," you have to make it wide
and open. For the film commentary it is different. The
picture shows that the plain is wide and open. Of course
the commentary text must follow the style of the picture.
When I undertook a film like New Earth, where I really
became indignant about terrible economic and social
situations, I could speak out freely; but the text has to
be written with that in mind. In The Spanish Earth
Hemingway used a definite style for his commentary:
understatement. There is never any outward emotion-
all is a concentrated and inner emotion. No loud or angry
talking. The commentary of The Four Hundred Millio?i
is more descriptive and explanatory.
We had difficulties with the final recording for our
China film. A certain amount of money was needed to
complete the film. We thought we would have about ten
thousand dollars-we only had three thousand dollars.
Help came from the New Friends of Music, the Group
Theatre and Hanns Eisler. It was not too difficult to line
up those forces because ours was a non-profit film, and
none of us who worked on the film took salaries in
America.

180
 The title was a problem. Shumlin was especially wor-
ried about it. So we mobilized Lillian Hellman, Dorothy
Parker and Dashiell Hammet-the best people to find
titles. Our working title had been China; our final title
was The Four Hundred Million.
At last the print was ready to show. I tried it out at a
Hollywood screening for the American Friends of the
Chinese People. The most interesting reaction to this
screening appeared in The Trans-Pacific, dateline Tokyo,
December 1, 1938:

Anti-Japanese Film Gets Atrocity Movie,

Allegedly Sponsored
Secret Hollywood Show
by Comintern,
Used to Raise
Money for China

A secret preview of an anti-Japanese atrocity film was

held recently in Hollywood, California, for a select
audience, including representatives of the film industry,
under the auspices of American Communist organizations,
to raise funds for the Chiang Kai-shek Government,
Domei says.
The film is alleged to have been sponsored by the
Comintern and produced by an American party, headed
by a certain Mr. George Evans, which photographed the
activities of Chinese armies.
The preview, which aroused indignation among mem-
bers of the audience, depicts atrocities claimed to have
been performed by Japanese soldiers, who Domei says,
are Chinese soldiers in disguise. "Plans are being made
to exhibit the same film to select audiences in various
parts of the United States in order to raise money to bol-
ster the Comintern s assistance of the National Govern-
ment, according to the news agency.
Our attempts to find theatre distribution ran into snags
that surprised even us. As the manager of the Fox West

181
Coast Theatres put it, "There are always two sides to the
Chinese issue. Maybe the Japanese are right."
Our film was released on March 7, 1939. The reviews
were not bad; in fact they showed more understanding
than those on The Spanish Earth of a year before (a year
is a long time in the development of anyone connected
with films-even film critics). It was just that the potential
audiences for whom the film had been intended stayed
away and didn't give the film a chance to tell them any-
thing. The Nazis had just marched into Prague and the
public didn't realize that this was the same war as the
one we were showing in our film-or they didn't want to
realize it. The only group who came en masse to the first
New York theatre showing was the Chinese-Americans-
who didn't need to be told.
This experience proved to me once and for all that a
documentary film takes its force from its content. The
film went to other countries, and there it found new
obstacles. The first French audience of The Four Hun-
dred Million had no trouble, because it was an enthusi-
astic private screening in Paris in the Palais de Chaillot.
But then I received a letter from G.L. Georges from
Paris dated August 1, 1939-a date that provides an ex-
planation for the mysterious behavior of the French
censors:

After such a brilliant beginning, unfortunately there

developed a hitch: the censors don't want to give us a
permit for public showings. They don't refuse it out-
right, nor do they ask us to cut scenes, or shots which
they deem objectionable-not at all. They simply give
us the run-around, telling us the decision has not been
reached, asking us to come back next week. It is now
the third ti?ne, and the fourth week that this little joke
has lasted and we are sore as hell.
We had a meeting at Cine-Liberte, in order to de-
cide what to do and what steps to take. It was decided

182
 that during August we had better wait, for nobody of
influence is in town, and that in the first days of Sep-
tember, we'll ask Herriot, who is connected with the
French Friends of the Chinese People, to intervene and
force the censors to grant us the permit. In spite of my
desire to see things move faster, 1 am convinced that
there is nothing to do right now but wait. We still hope
that we finally will get the permit, but we'll have to
fight for it. Of course this situation is quite easy to
under stand-France has just signed a commercial treaty
with Japan.
In the U.S.A. we had the usual censor trouble. The
film was prohibited in the State of Pennsylvania, and the
ban was not lifted until October 7 by Governor Earle.
Then on October 23, the London censors banned it. On
November 9, 1939 it was released but without any ref-
erence to fascism!
Of course I could write many pages about the political
aspects of the period of the Japanese army's aggression
against China. But that I have done in the film The Four
Hundred Million.

183
%3u 3m Mi
Pare Lorentz, who made an excellent documentary film,
The River, one of the first to be made in the U.S.A., was
head of the United States Film Service. He was busy
shooting Fight for Life, and asked me to make a film for
the Department of Agriculture about Rural Electrifica-
tion. Ithad to be a film for general release to show peo-
ple in towns and on the farms, the importance of rural
electrification, and how it develops the prosperity of the
American farmer. I liked the subject, a constructive
government project in the interest of American small
farmers. It turned out to be a mental rest after the two
strenuous assignments in Spain and China. I did not
realize at that time that I was also going to get to know
the United States-not just New York and Hollywood
which are interesting, but not the sum total of America.
As I had to work with and build up a whole new unit
for this project, some idea about the making of documen-
tary films and the collaboration in a documentary film
group crystallized and became clearer.
Pare Lorentz had done all the preliminary talking and
research with the government people. I came in hurriedly
and caught up later with the more basic knowledge of
the subject. Certainly, Lorentz had the right approach. He
suggested that to avoid loss of time at this stage of the
production, we stay away from Washington: too many
details will drive you crazy anyway. So I thought, I will
go into the field and later I can talk to the boys in the
Capital.
Where to go? What state? What kind of farm? We
decided it should not have a definite atmosphere like a
southern farm. It should be an ordinary farm with no
particular aspect I didn't want a film that would be
typically north, or California, or New England. But I
did want a sort of rolling country. I didn't want to have
it too flat That placed our location in the vicinity of Il-
linois, or Ohio, or West Virginia.
Then we asked Washington in what counties the pro-
187
ject was hot. Where were they putting up poles and lines
now? In a documentary always try to find the place where
the situation is actual. Do not try to reconstruct some-
thing that might be happening next door. We got a list
of about fifty counties where, so Washington wrote, we
would find what was wanted. I asked Washington to
send a letter to each county agent of the Department of
Agriculture to say that I was looking for a farm not too
poor and not too rich, preferably one worked by the family
living on it. We finally whittled it down to fifty county
agencies. I visited the farms suggested with the writer
Ed Locke, with whom I had previously drawn up a gen-
eral outline in Hollywood, and with the cameraman Ar-
thur Ornitz.
At each different location we had to explain the whole
thing to the county agent. Sometimes he was disinterested
or impractical-sometimes too cooperative, telling us ex-
actly what to do-having a script all ready for us the next
day. When it came to the farmers, we needed great pa-
tience. We pointed out that we weren't Hollywood, that
we didn't want to disturb his life, but that we did want
to do this and that. Inspecting the farm got us nowhere.
We had to do more than look around. We were going
to tell a great story on the farm we picked, and we had
to think deeply and seriously about it. That was particu-
larly interesting for me because it was the first time that
I really saw America outside New York or Hollywood.
I learned a lot about the American farmer.
About the third day I touched on the Parkinson family
in East Ohio, near St. Clairsville. I did not see the whole
family, but I talked to the farmer and one of his sons
and they gave me a short description of Mrs. Parkinson.
Ed Locke and I thought them a pretty good possibility.
But as usual, we were not satisfied and thought maybe
we could get something better; so we shopped around
for two weeks longer. But every three days we compared
our notes and said: Should we go back? We imagined

188
how Mrs. Parkinson would look. Bill Parkinson had acted
pretty cold about the whole thing.
We then tried to construct a synthetic farmer family.
We found an old man, alone on his farm, perhaps some
neighbors and a few little kids were there. But that fell
through. So after ten days we decided to go back to the
Parkinson's farm, to our old love so to speak. We saw
Mrs. Parkinson this time, a quiet dignified woman. \7e
decided: This is it and we immediately started prepara-
tions for the shooting. The second day we began filming.
The first big problem that came up was the farmer's
question of confidence. On the third day he suddenly be-
came cagey. I could feel his resistance and I approached
him directly.
He told me his neighbors called him a sucker. "Those
movie people are making this film here. Maybe they are
from Hollywood. You work and you only get five dollars
a day, why don't you ask for more?" Five dollars was the
maximum we could pay under government regulations,
we told him.
Parkinson said, "I think maybe I can trust you but I
feel badly about the rumor going around." Then we
showed him additional credentials and convinced him we
were a government outfit.
The first day before the shooting period the script-
ideas have to be evaluated with the reality. In Holly-
wood we had written into the script a little boy who was
interested in mechanical things. We thought we could
have intriguing gadgets and develop his hobby in a more
intensive way when electricity came to the farm. But we
found that the Parkinson's boy, Bip, had poetry more at
heart than mechanical toys. I suggested cutting the se-
quence about his technical interests and instead show him
running around the tall corn fields playing with a big sun-
flower. This helped the boy to be natural and himself.
You always have to be flexible according to the reality
facing you during the shooting.
189
 The farm and the work did not require much change.
Seventeen cows were the main source of income. The
milk production was the most important thing, so we had
to adapt the script toward the use of electricity in the
barn. In the field there is a tractor and horse; with elec-
tricity the farmer is not so tired the next morning.
The original script showed a day's work on the farm
without electricity. The Department of Agriculture wanted
this as a historical record of the work of the farmer be-
fore the Rural Electrification Administration brought
electricity. This made us see the film as a simple before-
and-after story; done with enough color and delicacy, it
would work out. When I realized that I could not include
the drama of the conflict between farmers and the private
utilities, this before-and-after story was the best alterna-
tive. Getting the electricity would be a kind of simple
transition. We indicated somewhere in the commentary
that before the coming of electricity, there were fights.
The documentary film has always one great force, in-
dividual styles notwithstanding-that is, that it is taken
on the spot This gives an authenticity it must always
have-too much emphasis on re-enactment can be hazard-
ous. Sixty percent of a normal documentary film has
nothing to do with acting. New Earth had no acted-out
sequences; Borinage had only a few brief ones. There
will always be certain themes which will be best carried
out in a purely documentary style. There are others that
demand considerable re-enactment, and by re-enactment
I mean the reconstruction of an emotional situation, not
merely recreating a familiar act.
Here we come to the problem with which I have fought
for many years : the handling of non-actors. In re-enacting
a situation with a group of extremely pleasant persons,
who for your purpose have become actors in a documen-
tary film, there is the danger of falling back into an easy
naturalism if the non-actors are allowed to do what they
like. As location work progresses, the non-actors become

190
the central figures in the film, creating problems that
temporarily force all the others into the background. The
Rural Electrification film Power and the Land depended
largely on the non-actor and upon re-enactment. I should
like to note some of the problems that came up, with our
attempts to solve them.
Our farm film presented material that seemed to de-
mand re-enactment. The ease with which the subject took
shape as soon as we decided on this re-enactment treat-
ment seemed to prove that we were right. In choosing
the people who were to play the roles (the farmer as the
farmer, his sons as the farmer's sons, and so forth) the
first visual impression of the people is very important.
Casting of non-actors has its own difficulties too. A fa-
ther and a son may work well separately, but badly when
they are together in a scene. To get close enough to these
people, to work with them, the director must be aware
of these family and personal relationships. In general, I
feel a certain knowledge of psychology is demanded of
every member of the group, for all must watch and sense
delicate situations with non-actors during the shooting.
The script writer must employ his imagination to ma-
nipulate the real, personal characteristics of the new ac-
tors, probing for them with seemingly casual observation.
He must learn thereby that the farmer takes special pride
in the sharpness of his tool blades, and therefore suggest
a tool shed scene which will make use of that fact. The
key to this approach, I think, is that a person acting
himself will be more expressive if his portrayal is based
on his actual characteristics. And sometimes a man's hob-
bies are a clue. He has a good imagination. He likes it.
My experience in directing non-actors who are playing
together has shown that it is sometimes desirable to ex-
plain the action to each of them individually, so that a
certain amount of unrehearsed reaction and surprise can
be counted upon. To get natural reactions we played
tricks similar to those Pudovkin describes in his book

191
Film Acting. In our picture the father was filmed receiv-
ing a notification from the dairy that his milk is sour: he
expected to unfold and pretend to read a blank piece of
paper. But instead he read a startling message from me
on the official stationery of the creamery department,
complaining about his sour milk in no uncertain terms.
In general my method was to give precise directions
to the non-actors, telling them what had to be done with-
out acting it out for them. Farmers act and move differ-
ently from town people, to show them precisely how to
play a scene would set them off on a wrong track. The
farmer has his special way of doing everything-entering
a room or moving a chair, and his way is usually a good
one. The director should not try to show him. City move-
ments are too fast, too smooth, the farmer would try to
imitate them and then everything would be wrong.
Overcoming self-consciousness is the greatest problem
with the non-actor, no matter what his background.
Working for months with the same persons, you can
gradually expect to find more acceptance of themselves
as actors. The non-actors become more flexible and
adaptable, and greater demands can be made on them,
they can be taught something of the film's technique.
When Bill Parkinson couldn't understand why he had
to repeat an action more than once while the camera was
shifted about for a total shot, medium, or close-up, I took
him to see a movie at the local theatre at St. Clairsville,
a gangster film with James Cagney. I pointed out how
an action in a finished film was made out of long shots,
medium shots and close-ups. From then on he understood
our editing and continuity problems and gave very useful
assistance.
I don't think it advisable to show non-actors the rushes
in which they appear. I waited till the last few days of
the shooting before showing our farm family themselves
on the screen. When he saw the rushes, Parkinson said to
me: "If I had known that, I would have acted much bet-
192
Indonesia Calling
Australia, 1946
The First Years
1949
Simonc Signoret in the French episode of
Die Windrose
G.D.R., 1956
Andrew Thorndikc The co-directors of
and Joris Ivens on location for Till Eulenspiegel
Freundschaft siegt 1956
1952 Gerard Philipe
and Joris Ivens
La Seine a rencontre Paris
1957
Italy Is Not
a Poor Country
I960

Ivens and
Tinto Brass
Demain a Nanguila
Mali, 1960
Filming in Cuba
1961

):
Le Petit Chapiteau
Chile, 1963

The filming of
Rotterdam-Europoort
1966
Le del, la terre
Vietnam, 1965
17th Parallel
Vietnam, 1968
17th
Parallel
ter." What he really meant was that he would have
"acted," which I don't think would have satisfied any
of us.

I used another technique to work with Bip, Bill's eight-

year-old son. Early in the morning I went alone with Bip
to the corn field where we were to shoot an action with
his father and a sunflower in the afternoon. As a kind
of secret between us, Bip and I acted out the scene which
would later be filmed with his father. All the directions
were given with nobody around. For the actual shooting
in the afternoon I didn't need to tell him what to do, or
how to do it-he felt relaxed and sure of himself. Had I
given the directions with the others around "now you
have to go to the right, pick up the flower" and so forth,
he would have resisted completely or acted badly. The
kid and I poked fun at the cameraman who took every-
thing so seriously-we even conspired against him.
Another thing: do not fool with a man's professional
pride. Don't ask a farmer to milk a cow that has been
milked, even though it's just for a close-up. He fights
such an idea because to him it is false.
During the shooting of the film I had asked the teacher
to release Bip from school duties on the days we would
need him. The teacher was very nice about it and said:
"By staying away from school, and being with people like
you, he will learn more than I can teach him."
Thinking about the time I spent on the Parkinson farm,
I see how much they taught me. They had a direct feeling
about the earth, a feeling about their own land. In the
evenings, sitting around the fire I talked about Russia
and about the wars in Spain and China where the people
had to fight for their own land.
Mrs. Parkinson was a remarkable woman. Once a week
she turned the radio off and read stories to her family
about Marco Polo or other travelers. For them it was
important that I was there making the film, a sort of mod-
ern traveler. The whole relationship became closer and

13 Ivens, camera 193

closer. Saturday nights we went dancing in the Union hall
of the miners.
Our business manager was an excellent shot and on
Sunday afternoons we got the guns out and did sharp-
shooting, aiming at tin cans perched on the fence.
The story that I was a spy also went the rounds. I had
a Dutch accent, and Peter Sekaer, our still-photographer,
was a Dane. His English also suffered from poor pro-
nunciation. Between the farm and St. Clairsville, where
we went often for lunch, was Warnock, a tiny village of
about four hundred people completely Republican. They
hated the Democrats and Parkinson was a Democrat, and
the state organization we filmed for, the Rural Electri-
fication Administration, was a New Deal project in the
Roosevelt administration. All very suspect to the Repub-
lican Party members. We rushed to St. Clairsville in
our open Packard with the heavy camera tripod in the
middle of the car; and later back to the farm. The rumors
started in that strange ghost town: we were Germans,
spies and the set-up in the car was for a machine gun and
they had seen us taking pictures from the hills of the
little bridge spanning a little stream. That stream, in their
minds, was of great strategic importance for the Middle
West. They reported that we had taken photographs of
the bridge.
Suddenly the sheriff appeared at the Parkinson farm,
while I was shooting in the corn fields. He looked at our
licenses. He happened to be a cousin of the Parkinsons.
He said: "Bill, if you need any protection against these
strangers, we will help you to get rid of them." Bill
chased him off his land, saying: "I know who I take in
my house; you better get off fast."
Bill was elected for jury duty for a week so I had to
go with him to the judge to get him off. I explained that
we were making a film for the government and that we
needed Bill during that week in order to finish our work.
The judge said: "Is he as good an actor for you as he
194
is for me?" And as we left he said to me: "By the way,
are you that German spy?" He had received a pile of
letters, denouncing those dangerous people with the open,
1929 Packard
Back in the cutting room with all the film material shot
there is a new set of problems and several new collabora-
tors, each one with new ideas of what the film must show.
This is how I handled that difficulty for the Rural Elec-
trification Administration.
We found six or seven new sponsor's assistants from
the Rural Electrification Administration to tell us what
the film needed. But I had already fought most of them
in the field. The farm had often been visited by men from
the REA who were only interested in hot water in the
barn, or who thought the most important factor was pro-
tection in the field-an electric fence. The worst was the
lady who was instructing the farm women on the use of
electric stoves. A nice woman, but it was too much. I wired
the REA in Washington to confine visitors to the farm
to people who had nothing to do with the film.
During the shooting I saw the head of the REA. He
definitely had in mind the broader vision of the implica-
tions of farm cooperatives : electricity not being a matter
of electricity for electricity's sake. If electricity could
develop the life of the farm, could bring an easier, bet-
ter life to the farmer, the result could mean the coopera-
tion of a community. There was not enough of this in the
film. I thought I anchored it when I showed ten farmers
getting together on a single farm and harvesting as one
man. They just interchange labor. A good dinner is the
payment on every farm. In the original script I had much
more feeling of working together. We filmed an old farm
in flames and a bucket brigade of many farmers who got
together in no time and extinguished the fire. Then the
commentary.
The poet Stephen Vincent Benet made the usual mistake
in his first commentary and wrote about fifty percent too

13* 195
much. The only way of convincing a writer is not by dis-
cussion, but by projecting the picture and asking him to
read his own commentary. Benet was quick to see what
could be taken out, what to re-phrase, what to shorten.
I think his training as a poet helped him; it gave him an
advantage over the man who just writes prose. In this
farm film I preferred the kind of commentary where the
audiences could miss an occasional word. In so many
documentaries the commentary is ponderous. You hate to
miss a word. I wanted the commentary to simulate the
impression I had received when I walked with the farmer.
He talks about the road, the corn and the harvest. If you
miss a word it doesn't matter. Benet's commentary was
longer than usual. I kept it easy going, deliberately
casual-a man walking along and talking about electricity.
I didn't want to make too many suggestions for the text,
believing that it should flow from Benet's personality. I
liked parts of it less than others; but I thought it better
to keep Benet's writing style intact. That is also why I
was very careful about casting the voice. The REA peo-
ple wanted the famous Frank Craven voice, but he was
not available at that time. I wanted a voice which sounded
like someone from the country. It should not be too in-
tel ectual, itshould sound more or less unrehearsed. I
listened to about forty-five people, mostly radio actors,
before I decided on William Adams.

Let us see how the outline for Power and the Land
developed into the script, the shooting script and so on-
a procedure that could not be followed in the unpredict-
able and hectic ups and downs of war documentary film-
ing; but which can be applied to the stable and peaceful
farmers' lives in Ohio. Here are some notes and docu-
ments of the successive stages of the production. I do not
think it is necessary to give complete detail of the sev-
eral stages. A fragment will be enough to show the devel-
opment and how we achieved it.

196
First stage:
This is the short outline we made in Hollywood, based
on the documentation, literature, pamphlets and stills
from the REA, Pare Lorentz' original concept, script
writer Ed Locke's knowledge about the subject and his
previous work with Roy Stryker in the photo archives of
the Farm Security Administration. The part I reprint here
is only the first reel of the film. We planned a three-
reeler. The detailed descriptions are more or less forced
until you see the unity of a location; but they give the
director an idea of what he will be up against, and enable
him to estimate the accuracy of his shooting schedule and
his budget. For the sponsor it affords a kind of sample
of the film that is to be made. A lot of the detailed de-
scriptions turned out to be off balance later; but they are
like setting-up exercises in relation to the real movement
in the field.

Hollywood, June 1939 . . . Introduction to the First Part

of the Film:
The first part is a study of a farm day, from dawn to
dusk. The entire sequence, which takes ten minutes on
the screen, is developed quietly and carefully and will
give the feeling of working and living on the land. It
will show the beauty of a rolling farm country, but it
will also be a documentation of fatigue (without elec-
tricity). Men, resting in the hoe-pose and swabbing
away sweat, have been seen on the screen before, but
no one has shown how weariness overtakes people dur-
ing a hard day's work; it affects their faces and their
movements. On Location: The Parkinson farm near
St. Clairsville in Ohio. . . . We worked out a shooting
script after staying a week with the Parkinsons, based
on an outline we had made in Hollywood but shaped-
up by the things we really found and felt at the farm.
We were very careful about small things and the con-
tinuity acting, because we wanted to be right in every
197
 detail of a farmer's life. The film was going to be seen
by the most critical and expert audience: the farmer
himself. And if you want your big statement-Rural
Electrification brings prosperity-to be right, you have
to be right in the little things which he can check.
In the morning sequence a lot of things from the
detailed outline were omitted and new things inserted
giving the film the right start into the long busy day
of a farmer.

U.S. Film Service. Script for Production 5, Power and

the Land
End of July 1939
St. Clairsville, Ohio.
Morning scene: Just before daylight Bill Parkinson
and his two boys come down from the house to the
barn. Bill is carrying a lantern which casts light on his
legs and on the ground; the boys are dark, indistinct
figures.
The interior of the cow barn is dimly lighted by two
lanterns hung on beams behind the row of cows. Bill
is at the feed bin in front of the cows, filling a large
bucket which he holds in his left hand. He walks along
the row of stanchions, throwing a scoopful of feed on
the floor in front of each cow. The cows' tongues rasp
on the cement floor. As Bill reaches the end of the row,
the boys start milking; the jets of milk hiss and ring in
the empty pails.
Bill comes around the end of the stanchions with
pail and lantern. He sets his lantern on a shelf and
takes down a milking stool. Walking down to the
middle of the row he pushes two cows apart and sits
down to milk.
We look down at Bill's hands as he milks; we look
up at his face.
We look along the row and see Bill's sons, Tom and
Jake. Tom gets up and carries out a full pail.

198
 As Tom returns, Bill gets up. Tom, in making way
for Bill, brushes against a hanging lantern. The
lantern swings. Close-up of swinging lantern.
Interior of kitchen in the dim light of a single oil
lamp standing on the table. Mrs. Parkinson takes a
pot of oatmeal from her twelve-year-old daughter
Ruth, and hands her a dish of boiled potatoes to slice.
The mother then kindles a fire in the stove and puts
the kettle on to boil. Bip, her youngest son, comes
in with an armful of wood and sets it down by the
stove.
Out in the farmyard, before the sun has risen, we
see Mrs. Parkinson coming down to the milkhouse
pump for water. She has a bonnet on, and a blue
denim jacket over her dress. We see that she is cold
and sleepy.
The sun is not yet up. The team of gray horses graze
in the misty pasture. Dense fog lies in all the hollows.
Dew is on the grass, on the corn, on the sunflowers, on
a spider web that hangs on the pasture gate.
The first weak sunlight, slanting into the cow barn,
finds the farmer and his sons still milking.
Tom, the eighteen-year-old son, comes out of the
barn with a pailful of milk and carries it into the milk-
house. Coming out of the milkhouse he connects the
pump to the cooling vat with a piece of pipe and starts
pumping to cool the milk.
The morning sun is striking across the side of the
barn as Tom continues to pump. Bill comes from the
barn with his pail, goes into the milkhouse and strains
the milk into a 10-gallon can. Jake, his sixteen-year-
old son, comes out with his pail and hands it to Bill.
It is the last pail. When Bill has emptied it, he sets the
can down in the vat and stirs up the milk. Hanging up
the stirring rod, he signals to Tom, showing him that
the water is near the top of the vat. Tom stops pump-
ing and disconnects the pipe as Bip runs up to pump
199
 himself a cup of water. Bill carries the previous night's
can up to the driveway.
Night scene: The farmer and his sons are washing up
on the porch as Mrs. Parkinson sets the supper-table.
Outside it is growing dark. Mrs. Parkinson lights a
kerosene lamp as the men sit down to eat. Everyone is
weary; they eat slowly and there is no conversation.
Out in the farmyard we see the lighted window of
the house and the faint glimmer of the wash on the
line. We seem to be taking leave of the farm with a
feeling that the day is done.
But we hear the slamming of a screen door and Bill
comes out with Tom and Jake. Bill and Tom have
lanterns, which shine on the wash as they walk from
house to tool shed.
Interior of tool shed by lantern light. Bill is riveting
new blade on mowing machine knife bar, last three or
four strokes of hammer. Jake sitting on grindstone.
Tom holding lantern close to father's work. Other
lantern suspended from beam. Bill takes knife bar to
grindstone as Tom follows with lantern. Grinding
begins. Tom holding lantern close to work. Sheen of
water over stone. Sound of grinding established.
Exterior of farm from rear garden. Light in kitchen
and light shining through open door of tool shed.
Sound of grinding very plain. Crickets, tree toad.
Mother taking in wash. . . .

The shooting script of the morning scene does not look

so elaborate as a Hollywood shooting script but I found
it a handy form for my unit, born of experience; also it
did away with a lot of surplus paper, numbers, files. As-
sembled inone place are the instructions and indications
for the director (and later the cutter), the cameraman,
the assistant and the prop man.
On the left side are the necessary data for the pro-
duction. The date of shooting. Reference page to script.

200
Slate number at shooting, essential length during shoot-
ing. The day report of the shooting gives all the details,
such as lenses used, retakes, notes for the editor and so
forth. On the right side the shots are described more or
less in detail. When dialogue is to be used, the dialogue
is written down, or the commentary.
In Power and the Land the commentary is not in the
script-it is just indicated. Many young documentary film
makers start with the commentary on the right side and
later fill in the visual part which will illustrate the com-
mentary. This can be done only in exceptional cases
when the film has to give exact instructions or informa-
tion which the commentary must express. In that case the
commentary stands by itself; even without the picture, it
brings out the point it wants to make. The commentary
is the star, is Number One, and the picture is there only
as a support for the commentary.
This is a dangerous method for documentary film
making because it leads to the easiest way out. You can
always write or say what you want, but in film making
you have primarily to show what you want to say. Only
then will the picture get its impact, and express what you
want to say in a way no other medium could. Why make
a film when you are a brilliant writer? But in film mak-
ing the writing, the words, are part of an interplay with
pictures, sound, music, brought together in an editing
that changes the qualities of every component. In unsuc-
cessful documentary there is a fight between the picture
and the commentary or the music; like a movie star, each
wants to steal the scene. The director must be the judge
in this and his job is to "direct" the components.
To come back to the shooting script-it has another
angle. I always note at the beginning of a sequence and
at the end of its last shot the sequence to follow. This
insures the fluid continuity which a documentary film
must have. You know where you come from and where
you are going. It can be argued that you always refer to

201
the previous or following script pages-but you don't
somehow. I offer it as a practical hint.
In the "notes" to the sequence I detail everything that
has to do with the physical organization of the sequence.
The persons (actors) and their costumes; location data;
prop lists; light and camera details. And as a last item
general indications of the mood and tempo and purpose
of the action.
The frame sketches and mis e- en- scene sketches belong
to this third stage of the preparation. These will help
the cameraman, especially when he has a difficult lighting
problem as in the barn. The movements of the "actor"
with the complicated light set-up has to be more carefully
planned than with outdoor shooting. The frame and
mise- en- scene sketches help make the shooting efficient
and smooth and give the team the feeling that the
director knows what he wants. New details creep in;
you get to know the barn and the cows. I used to number
them but later came to the conclusion that it was more
appropriate for the Superhuman Documentary to call
the cows by such names as Marlene, Dorothy, Betty.

The growth of commentary is interesting. Here are

some examples to illustrate this: first a part of the com-
mentary as conceived by an official of the Rural Electri-
fication Administration in Washington.

Suggested Commentary by Sponsor for Power and the

Land
Part I
Sequence: Early morning. Birds over the farm.
2. Barn sequence: Man and lantern, cows, fodder,
early morning. As Bill's face first appears:
"Bill Parkinson has always been a farmer.
And his father before him.
This is the new cow barn-but a hundred years
ago his grandfather built the first one, when he

202
 came out from Massachusetts to Ohio, and settled
the farm.
He was a blacksmith-a blacksmith turned farmer.
Every morning someone has fed cows on the farm,
and watered them.
Every morning some Parkinson,
for nearly a hundred years.
A lot of things you do on a farm, the way they've
always been done."
3. House sequence: Mrs. Parkinson and youngest boy
and girl preparing breakfast:
"Mrs. Parkinson comes from farm people too.
They have five children.
Bip is the youngest.
Jennie is the only girl."
4. Second barn sequence: Later, man blows out lan-
tern. Milking and pumping:
"Bill has more cows than his father had.
Old Mr. Parkinson died five years ago, when Bill was
forty-five.
He's the boss now.
He's taught the boys the value of a good herd.
And how to look after it.
Water.
The farm uses more water than a pulp mill.
This is a seven men-and-women-power-farm. There
are seven Parkinsons. Between them they pump or
tote sixty-one tons of it a year.
(As you see it is used for milk-cooling.)
More in summer than in winter."

The following is part of the commentary as Stephen Vin-

cent Benet wrote it finally. The difference is frappant and
clear.
Many writers are fussy about cutting out some of their
fine writing, but the director has to see the composition
of the total: picture, words, music, their interrelation,
203
their interdependence and continuity. That makes it
necessary sometimes to cut phrases which in themselves
are right, but which do not give the required effect when
put to the picture. Hemingway, Nichols and Benet were
very generous and understanding about those cuts,
especially when they heard and saw the final effect.
Stephen Vincent Benet 's Commentary jot Keel one
(bracketed phrases omitted in final recording.)
The long day's work begins.
It's from dawn to dusk and after.
That's the way things are on a farm.
Summer and winter go by. (But you've to get up and
do the chores and feed the stock. You can't tell corn
to grow next Tuesday because you're busy today.
You've got to be there.)
(It isn't a time-clock life and you can't hurry it.)
It may be dark in the barn, but you've got to milk,
just the same.
It may be hot or cold, but the feed has to go to the
cattle.
A farmer works at a dozen trades through the day.
And so do his wife, his sons and his daughters. For
Bill Parkinson, the long day's work has begun.
Everybody has to help. If you marry a farmer, that's
the first thing you learn. Summer and winter go by,
but the water has to be pumped and the fire lighted.
The farm woman's day is long. They don't complain,
the women like Hazel Parkinson. But they know on an
August morning how hot the stove is going to be at
noon. They may not say much about it, but they wish
you could just turn a faucet to get your water-the way
you can in town.
They know-and their children know-the work that
goes into raising food for a country.
(Put the kettle on. The long day's work has begun.)
It's good land here, not prime, but good-long settled
204
 land. Bill Parkinson was born here in 1889-the year
his father bought the farm. Bill's carried it on, im-
proved it, changed with changing conditions two
hundred and five acres. He used to do general farm-
ing, but the land got worn out. Now Bill and his sons
cultivate about thirty acres. He rotates corn and oats,
red clover and grass, alfalfa. Not the best land, not
the worst-but it has raised five healthy Americans, and
Bill and Hazel. That's something for land to do

This is the time when the commentary gets its definite

form and every detail has to be coordinated in a tight
schedule to meet the deadline of delivery of the master-
print.

The first showing of Power and the Land was in the

village of St. Clairsville, Ohio. I sat with the Parkinson
family. In the beginning, when they saw their daily life
on the screen, accompanied by very nice music, they had
to laugh. It was strange to see their own everyday life
on the screen in a movie theatre-getting up, shaving,
getting to the barn. But after about three minutes the
Parkinsons became accustomed to it and were fully ab-
sorbed. Bip was sad because the film was finished and he
would not get any more free time from school.
At Christmas, I received a card and a letter from the
Parkinsons. The card had this quotation from the Bible:
Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.
And Mrs. Parkinson wrote :
Dear Dutchy,
We certainly were surprised to receive such a won-
derful gift from the crew and I find it very difficult to
express our appreciation in words. (The gift was an
electric mastermixer with all the gadgets that belong
to it.) We sincerely hope you will come back some-
time and help us eat some of the things I intend to
prepare with it.
205
 The boys had a wonderful time in New York.
(Bill and his two sons came to New York for a week.)
They thought you and Ed were good entertainers. The
neighbors have all asked about you and they all have
a word in your favor. The compliments vary from
"Mr. Ivens is a mighty fine man" to "well, he is a
damn good Dutchman" Bip thinks school is rather dull
after being in such good company all fall. He brought
his average from 61 up to 12 and I think he will do a
little better this time. He and Ruth often speak of you
and wish you were here. In fact we all do. I am sure
Bill would like to see the warm fire in the grate with
you tonight but you are probably doing something far
more interesting than talking to farmers.
There is a separate meter on each piece of electrical
equipment and I am keeping a record for the Rural
Electrification Administration. How many pieces of
washing each week, the number of persons for each
meal, amount of and so forth, so by the next meeting
our friend Mr. MacAllister will be able to tell exactly
how much it costs to have a clean shirt or make a pot
of coffee. They put the outside meter on yesterday.
We all join in sending you our best wishes for a
Merry Christmas!
Sincerely,
The Parkinsons

206
A Few Observations
Part 1: 1945
Part 2: 1967
Part 1: 1945

In China, en route to the Northwest, jogging along on

Manchurian ponies and in tents at night, I had plenty of
time to do some thinking I had been postponing for a
long while. What was the relation, or distinction be-
tween the documentary and the newsreel, the doc-
umentary and the travelogue?
In Hankow I met H.S. Wong, the newsreel camera-
man who works for American companies.* A brave and
capable cameraman. He is a good example of the dif-
ference between newsreel and the documentary film. The
newsreel covers the direct and sensational happenings of
every day. The main thing is speed and surface quality
and not a deepening of the background of the events.
Further, the newsreel does not need to tie events together
or reveal their interrelation. That means that the quality
of the newsreel is dependent on the alertness of the
cameraman, much more so than the documentary film.
Most newsreels come out weekly but if you compare
them with the press, their technique is not related to
magazines but much more to the daily newspaper or the
daily coverage of television news. The newsreel tells us
where-when-what; the documentary film tells us why,
and the relationships between events.
For example, the bombardment of Canton was
covered by a newsreel cameraman and sent immediately
to the United States. The documentary film would follow
that up a couple of months later by relating this bom-
bardment to the general strategy of Japanese aggression
and also to the deepening of the consciousness of the
audience on the cruelty and criminality of that aggres-

* In Four Hundred Million I used one of his most famous

shots, the baby in the middle of the bombed railway station.

14 Ivens, camera 209

sion. So sometimes the same shots are used in a doc-
umentary film but in a different way. The newsreel forms
a tremendous archive for factual, documentary films to
be made much later-ninety percent of such films as
Prelude to War are built up out of newsreel material. So
that you can call that a second life of the newsreel or the
resurrection of the newsreel: giving them their historic
perspective and sometimes also giving us the opportunity
to juxtapose our own and enemy newsreel on the same
incident. An excellent example is the Battle for Russia
made in the Capra unit which used German material
about the invasion, and Russian material about fighting
against the invasion.
The travelogue is a kind of eternal freak. It was one
of the first forms of factual film which has never
developed. It always comes down to general shots: the
market place, close-ups of embarrassed people, some
pictorial street shots, historic or funny things in those
streets and then the traditional sunset ending over a
happy people, to whom we say: good-bye Farewell. The
most interesting travelogues I have seen were 16 milli-
meter films made by intelligent amateurs.
Grass wasn't a travelogue. It was a travel film, an ex-
cellent one. The travelogue I have been criticizing is the
typical Fitzpatrick picture. The audience sees a news-
reel, a cartoon, a travelogue and one or two fiction films.
For a lot of people, the only step towards the documen-
tary is the travelogue. Broader travel films like Grass or
Black Rapture are good informative documentaries on
simple lines. They go from one point to the next. What-
ever comes in between lies within that general line. This
means the absence of any great dramatic tension.
I did a lot of thinking that trip, mostly about the per-
sonal angle in documentaries; how to weave in a per-
sonal story. For several reasons, it is important to per-
sonalize the documentary. We would never break into
commercial distribution without it. For years and years

210
we tried, only to meet with the same complaint from
movie theatre owners: if you just pointed to one or two
persons, the film could be a story, not necessarily a love
story, but some little story.
To us, the logical development of the documentary
is personalization while penetrating and interpreting the
facts; achieving a real interrelation between the particu-
lar and the general; between the personal and the overall
movement of a film. There are exceptions. In a film with
the great movement of a brilliant military campaign, such
as Desert Victory, the situation pushes itself forward and
you do not mind the personalization. There are different
documentary forms for this particular film-but if only
one film can be made, as in this case, then Desert Vic-
tory is the right form.
And in China I always thought about the cutting
room. I knew how difficult this film would be in the
cutting room. I had to say so much about a nation about
which few in America knew anything. It would really be
a hard editing problem. In the documentary film the
editing is the most difficult. It is more than placing
pieces of film together. It is an editing of different feel-
ings, of different psychological impulses on situations, on
changes of atmosphere. We could take lessons from ser-
mons in the Middle Ages when a preacher would build
an idea-continuity in his sermon, starting by saying you
are damned and you are not worthy of life. Your ances-
tors sinned. Then he let you see a little light, and then
a very bright light but you can't have it. First you have
to go through this, deny yourself that, get in a trance
about the God idea, the promise hangs before your eyes.
You are bad-but you can be saved and so forth. Film
editing is a similar process.
In editing the village bombardment in The Spanish
Earth I used this process to show violence leading to
tragedy; from sentimentality over a baby to the fear of
people killed; the tenderness of a mother leads to the

14* 211
innocence of children; the heroic response and the
optimism of a man who cleans his rifle, to the shooting
down of an enemy plane. That is all right in one se-
quence, but if you do that throughout the whole film you
end with a sermon, which is exactly what you don't want.
It would be too dry, too doctrinaire. In fiction films the
dramatic conflict of characters pushes the story forward.
The audience really is sucked into the good story and is
at one with the action on the screen. Nobody knows
who's sitting next to him, so complete is the identifica-
tion with the characters, the wish to be the hero or the
heroine. With famous, established stars and a weak story
you can be sloppy in a fiction film and still get that kind
of audience identification. A medium or bad fiction film
produces itself easily. If the demands were made clearer
the aims would be deeper.
Such thoughts accompanied me on that trip. I knew
that in China I could never make a documentary film
with a personal story. But after seeing the film you could
think you know one or two Chinese; you could like them
or dislike them. For years this idea of more story has
been mulled over by all documentary film makers. It is
not a question of having hasty and attempted identities
now and then walking through a documentary. The story
angle has to be done subtly, or not at all. I don't think
that personalization in the documentary film will win a
quick success. It will have to come logically out of the
medium of the film.

The day of the one-man documentary is over. The

problems are too manifold and the processes too complex
to be handled satisfactorily by a single man or a team
of two or three. The director in a larger unit still has the
responsibility for the film as a whole. The initial con-
ception ismost often his, and his constant concern over
all the processes will inevitably give the film the color
of his personal style.

212
 Nevertheless, the director works with a group as adept
in their individual skills as he is in his, and his leadership
over them is only temporary. It exists in a realization of
his dependence upon them and of the interdependence
of the members of his group. An understanding of the
relationships within such a group is of vital importance
to the profundity and quality of documentary films. You
make a film, not by the belt system, but by teamwork.
In saying this I do not believe that I am talking only for
myself. The underlying principle to the documentary
seems to dictate this approach. But generalizations are
not much use to the young documentary director. Let us
be more specific and follow the course of production dur-
ing the shooting period.
There is little opportunity for complete re-evaluation
during shooting on location but there is an important
point where a new evaluation is inevitable. That comes
after the first days of work on location. Here is the first
clash of fact with the early concept written into the script.
One feels that more imagination than knowledge of the
real subject has gone into the making of the script. This
is naturally more of a disappointment for the young direc-
tor than for the older documentary film maker; the
former has not yet become hardened to expect this dis-
appointment which actually stimulates the latter.
The film maker must be extremely sensitive to this
clash with reality. In it lie the several directions (bad
as well as good) that his film can take. It is possible to
keep the content aloof from the world around it, but this
can only do harm to a documentary film-even one that is
reconstructing the past. In making documentaries there
can't be four protective walls around your set. Your set
is the world and you have to look all around before
focusing your camera on a corner of it. Even if you
wished to keep aloof, life has a way of making your film
a part of it.
A documentary film about a war, for example, is very

213
closely connected with the mood of the people fighting
that war. In China we found that the concrete day-to-day
shifts in the political and military situation affected the
course of our production. In Spain, the same thing-but
in an additional sense, for there the enemy regarded a
man with a camera as a distant target no different from
any other, and was just as eager to blow him and his
enemy to bits. In our film on farm life in Ohio, far from
the danger of shrapnel, we began by being deeply in-
volved in the process of film making, while the farmer
was still most concerned with the harvesting of his crop.
When we ended, months later, the situation was neatly re-
versed the
: farmer was much more interested in our film,
but we were more concerned about the harvesting of his
crop. A summer afternoon when the radio weather fore-
cast announced rain for early tomorrow I said to Bill
Parkinson: "Let's get the alfalfa in." His answer was:
"Don't worry Dutchy, get your picture."
All large mutual readjustments between the location
and the script should be made within the first few weeks.
Once the director and the writer have fixed the general
construction, the line of the shooting should be kept
steady, but the details must and will continue to be af-
fected by the reality of the subject, place and people.
These are facts not usually realized by the layman.
The first layman to be affected by this early clash be-
tween concept and reality is the sponsor. Before leaving
for location, director and sponsor have agreed on a script
(after the natural struggles of that stage). Then on loca-
tion, this earlier concept has to undergo changes. Straight-
ening this out is sometimes difficult because the sponsor
is not in contact with the real thing which the director is
experiencing.
If yard-long telegrams (which never resolve the dis-
agreement anyway) are to be avoided, the sponsor must
have confidence in the director's experience, honesty,
knowledge or prestige. If his trust has not been won be-

214
fore the film is begun, there is little point in beginning
the film.
Often there is no fundamental disagreement with the
sponsor. The most obvious example of such a situation is
when the film maker is part of the sponsoring body, as in
History Today, Inc., producer of the China film The Four
Hundred Million. There are other cases where this is also
true. In Borinage, the real sponsor, the Belgian Mine
Workers Union, was constantly pushing Storck and myself
deeper into the material, asking us to give more reality
since the aim of the film was to better bad conditions.
Not every film has, or ought to have, any special spon-
sor difficulties. Films on wood sculpture, or on the opera-
tion of a bridge should have no trouble in touching the
reality of their subject. But films on larger, more impor-
tant themes require a deeper approach.
In my opinion it is necessary to find the social reality
first, and then to find the essential drama of that reality.
If this drama cannot be made the chief line of the film
for political or tactical reasons, another real drama must
be found, or must be compressed into some portion of it.
There must be a place in the film where the maker and
the audience become emotionally involved in the subject,
where happiness and anger, love and hate enter into the
picture.
For example the real drama of rural electrification in
the United States is the conflict between the farmers and
the private utilities. The utilities refuse to put up long
lines to isolated farms because there is less profit in this
than there is in lines to the towns and villages. They will
fight any attempt of the farmers to cooperate with govern-
ment help to put in their own electric set-up. In our film
on this subject this natural drama could not find its place
for political reasons, so it did not become the main line
in the picture; it is only mentioned in the short, passion-
ate speech of an angry farmer at a gathering around the
pump.
215
 If the essential drama is ignored, the film will lack
color and, more tragically, conviction. To deliberately
walk away from this drama is to walk toward formalism
and mysticism, harming the work of each member of the
group. Only as long as the subject is firmly connected
with the dramatic reality can the film become a good
documentary. Further, you and your co-workers will have
more satisfaction in making it and you will develop as
craftsmen and artists.
Maybe we should point here to the English school; it
became somewhat stale in avoiding the real drama before
the war. Yes, a bit on the soft side I would say, if you
compare a film like Borinage or Maisons de la Misere
with the London housing film, Housing Problems, With-
out wishing to generalize, I think that the English trend
was away from realism. If the British films could have
been sponsored directly by social organizations fighting
the bad housing conditions, instead of by a gas company,
they would have closed in on such dramatic reality as rent
strikes and protest movements.
How lucky the film whose sponsor has some understand-
ing of the medium and method of film making! I think
that most sponsorship troubles can be overcome if a single
responsible person, appointed by the sponsor, could keep
a constant and close contact with the group. Someone the
group could talk to, get quick decisions from, and some-
one to cut red tape. The director would not be involved
in any inner conflicts between various members of the
sponsoring group. Such a person should also have good
taste-an extremely valuable asset in the liaison man. If
it is not possible to obtain this single individual, it is
worth the usual sponsor-director conflicts to discuss with
the sponsor himself his needs and aims, before shooting,
rather than getting them later second-hand.
And finally, the sponsor should have no secrets about
the subject you are filming. If his secrets concern an es-
sential part of the subject, they will be uncovered, be-

216
cause film making is, in a way, a search for the truth. A
secret will pop up somewhere and there is the question:
"Should we treat it or shouldn't we?" The whole structure
of the film can be endangered if the secret is exposed in
a late stage of the production. Let the sponsor beware of
secrets! Let the director be sure the sponsor has none!
A typical documentary crew working continuously on
location should include: director, writer, cameraman, as-
sistant cameraman and business manager. If necessary,
and where the budget is severely limited, more than one
of these functions can be held by one person. For
example, the director might also be the writer, or the
writer might take on the job of assistant cameraman.
Inevitably, these four or five people, even if they do
not have personality difficulties, are different when they
are away on location or on an expedition. They are
separated from their friends and wives and accustomed
routine. The director must not only be an artist and the
creative source of the film, and an engineer who can
superintend the various techniques, but also a commander
and diplomat, ironing out differences.
The writer of a documentary film can be chosen for any
one of a wide variety of reasons-good reporter, good
script writer, special interest in the subject; but there is
one all-important factor: will he be able to accompany
the crew on location? His presence there has repeatedly
proven to be of such value that I now consider it a neces-
sity, especially where the film has an elaborate theme.
Working under the pressure of being in the field is a test
of the writer's viewpoint and imagination, and is of the
utmost importance to the progress of the film. Shaping
reality into the dramatic structure of the growing work,
and becoming interested and involved in the economic,
personal, social and political and even seasonal changes
in the environment, are constant factors, and a documen-
tary film writer's work is never done till the film is done.
Hemingv/ay did all this during our collaboration in Spain
217
and later during the finishing of The Spanish Earth. The
writer can take over a large part of the director's respon-
sibilities byhelping him with the conferences that keep
the other group members in touch with the changing
situation on location, with the home office and with the
rest of the world. The director and the cameraman are
usually dog-tired at the end of the day. The writer can
assist by helping to keep the group happy-a point which
will be understood by anyone who has tried to do film
work in a glum atmosphere, which gets glummer when
neglected. This may sound overly subtle. It does not
apply to war-movie crews where personal trials are neg-
ligible incomparison with the immense hardship of war.
Outside influences affect the cameraman too, and the
writer and the director must protect him from every-
thing that makes his job any more physically exhausting
than it is, even to carrying the camera. The cameraman
should have an assistant, if at all possible, to keep the
work moving quietly and to relieve him of a quantity of
technical detail-loading of magazines, cleaning the mech-
anism and lenses-which would otherwise make a hard
job harder.
Whether the cameraman has been hired for one film or
whether he is a team mate who has grown up with you,
as the director you must know his job well enough to help
him daily with all his camera and light problems-a
directorial function which is not usual in Hollywood. It
hardly seems necessary to point out that he should be
ready for any emergency, favorable or not, and a sense
of humor is always helpful. He should of course have a
special feeling for this particular film form, the doc-
umentary.

As I worked on the Ohio film, 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

218
rehearsals and shooting. Use yourself or anybody as
stand-ins during the setting of the camera and lights to
keep the non-actor from exhaustion or self-conscious-
ness. On the other hand, if the period of filming a re-
enactment is short or very rushed, there can be less care
in humoring him, and a greater dependence on the
camera's ability to break up the action into useful close-
ups.
The cameraman has to understand the special dif-
ficulties in working with non-actors. The director and
the cameraman must sometimes invent dramas or inter-
ludes ("What good is all this fooling with 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.
Keep discussions away from him. He begins to feel that
these long, visible, but inaudible conversations are about
himself and his acting-and he is usually right. We
learned to use a code. Whenever the cameraman said,
after a shot: "Very good," I knew he meant, "It's not so
hot, try it some other way."
Relaxation, I feel, is of the utmost importance. Avoid-
ing a tense atmosphere on location or on the set is a job
the documentary director and cameraman must con-
stantly keep in mind.
The surest way to avoid loss of time with retakes is
to know and anticipate the gestures of the man so as to
catch the regular rhythm of his normal action. The whole
action should be watched (away from the camera) be-
fore breaking it up for filming. And the breaking-up and
covering shots should absolutely include beginnings of an
action, endings of the action, not just other angles of
the most exciting sections of his movements-and of
relaxed periods between the actions. Thus you get mate-
rial for good human expression. Covering shots should
also include the medium shot; so as to have both face
and action within the frame.
219
 Once upon a time most of us were interested in photo-
graphing gadgets and when we photographed the move-
ment of people, they looked like gadgets too. This is
seen in some passages in my Industrial Symphony. Now
I try to reveal the human being's relation to the objects
around him-and to each other. It means again that the
documentary director has to know about the people he is
filming and their profession.
Actually on a farm we had to know about the family,
the neighbors and a lot about farming. In working on the
ship we used for Action Stations! it was helpful to know
about the towns and villages the sailors came from as
well as navigation and gunnery. Not too much, but
enough to know what is going to happen, where and how
a man acts, how he finds his relaxation and the relation
between people in their work. You have to know what the
work is and what it is all about. I have told in some
detail my own transition from gadget filming of the
Industrial Symphony to the human problems in New
Earth. I just want to repeat for the reader that there is
no limit to what one must do to make documentary films
more human and closer to the basic subject: people. No,
it does not look as if one can ever reach a point where
there is nothing more to say.
And finally, the first day's work will be the crucial
test of the business manager. If it runs smoothly it's to his
credit. He is also the group economist and the group
absorber of all the prop and money problems.
When the rushes are ready, the first problem is often
the sponsor again. Unless he has worked closely with the
film up to this point, or unless he is familiar with the
entire process of creating a film, seeing the rushes will
do harm-particularly if the sponsor is not an individual
but a group of people with a variety of approaches. The
rushes usually have a frightening effect. Each thinks of
ten other things that should have been shot. No one
realizes the importance of the cutting, sound and music

220
that will complete the film. The newcomers will fight
among themselves, each one stressing the factors that
concern him personally, or his department. It is as if all
the department heads of General Motors were to be con-
sulted on a color for the office walls.
The rushes, plus the original script, can give an ex-
cellent idea of the film as it will appear when finished-
but only to an experienced film professional. The spon-
sor's confidence in the director is subjected to a hard
test at this point as Eisenstein learned to his grief on his
Mexican film. My recommendation is to make a specially
prepared cutting of the rushes for the sponsoring com-
mittee, anticipating the degree of interest and informa-
tion of the sponsors.
When the rushes are fully cut, and the commentary
and music can be indicated roughly, then the sponsor
might be invited to see the film he has sponsored, but
any showing before this time is a risk.
The editor is a new member of the group after the
shooting period. His or her work with the director (un-
less the director prefers to do all the silent cutting him-
self) requires as much team work as that between the
director and the cameraman in the field. Although the
first job of the editor on a documentary film is to follow
the director's directives, the editing process is not
merely technical work-it is as creative as the function of
the cameraman or composer on the documentary film.
Here the editor must have a surer feeling for film rhythm
than an editor in fiction films because the documentary
film cannot depend on dialogue, a star, or a smooth story
line to hold the audience's interest.
I'd like to suggest another function for the editor while
the crew is still on location. If the director in the field
knows that one person is personally supervising the
group's laboratory work-arranging and shipping the
rushes-it would mean a lot to his peace of mind (espe-
cially since we are not big enough customers to com-
221
mand the lab's individual attention). Such an editor
might easily work for two or three groups simultaneously.
Such work, plus his cutting after the group's return would
keep an editor busy the year round, rather than the four
working months of the year that an editor now has.
If there are any weaknesses in the material, the
director must say so, openly, to the editor, who is the
only one who can help to correct any basic faults. Secrets
kept from the editor risk the coherence of the finished
film.
Contrary to the practice I recommend with the spon-
sor, Ibelieve all the rushes should be shown to the com-
poser before the cutting has actually begun. To see the
material at this time gives him a broad idea of it and
also gets him started on the key musical ideas. He sees
a journey, a sandstorm, a battle, a pastoral episode that
certainly needs music. And while the director and editor
are bringing the uncut material into clearer shape, the
composer is roughing out his thematic material.
Also tell the composer: "Here the music will be
crushed down by airplane noise and other sound effects."
In that way he knows about the sound track. Often the
score and the sequences demand editing and re-editing
of the picture, as inT 'he Four Hundred Million orphanage
sequence. Also the music can anticipate the mood for the
next sequence. Sometimes, even up to twenty seconds
before a new sequence, the music can prepare the audi-
ences emotionally.
Douglas Moore, head of the music department of
Columbia University, followed the action and moods of
the Ohio film very carefully. The music in Power and the
Land just illustrates the scenes. It is not very typical. The
music did not have any complicated function. For ex-
ample, compare it with the music of Hanns Eisler in The
Four Hundred Million where the dust storm indicates
the decay of China: it broadens the physical aspect of the
storm. In the music for Power and the Land when the

222
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 ex-
perimental composer.
The silent cutting has to be complete before the com-
poser can be asked to write and time the music for the
film, although small adjustments have to be made both
by director and composer after the writing and before
the recording of the music. Even after the recording,
there are sometimes possibilities for further accenting the
music by shifting shots during the sound editing. Al-
though my saying so may seem heresy to the music
departments of Hollywood, I believe that the composer
can be a great help with his suggestions for the editing
and timing of the visuals.
The writer of the commentary (not necessarily the au-
thor of the film) is working during the various editing
stages. He had best keep his nose close to the moviola
(the editing machine in the cutting-room), and derive his
ideas as much from the film as from the script. Ben Mad-
dow, in a brilliant paper on "The Writer's Function in
the Documentary Film,, at the 1943 Writers' Congress,
spoke of this final stage of commentary writing:

Now, when the editing is nearly completed, the

writer goes into the cutting-room, takes over the cut-
ting script and moviola, and goes to work on a narra-
tion. He will have with him a complete log, with the
length of each shot indicated. When he has finished a
couple of minutes of narration, let him read it aloud
and watch the film on the moviola, going back over it
again and again to make adjustments and corrections.
This method will allow many technical innovations.
There is no time to describe all the possibilities: how
grammatical structure can be made to follow the
movement of the image, how words can add color and
111
 scent and temperature, pick out a detail or conceal it,
retard or increase the tempo.
But the result of this method is extremely important:
its aim is to combine the words and the image so as to
form a single indivisible impression. Let's take the
image of an armed sentry silhouetted against a moon-
lit sky. Over this one image we can say, "The enemy is
very close" or we can say, "The danger is over" or we
can write, "He can hear the sound of shellfire in the
valley" or equally well, "He hears nothing but the
movement of the wind." Which words do we write?
We choose those words and phrases which move with
the basic pattern of the film, and we use them only
where they are functionally necessary.

And so finally you take your precious silent reels to

be recorded. The director's relation to the sound en-
gineer up to now has not been entirely satisfactory. The
director lives with his group on location for many weeks
at least, but he is with the sound engineer only for a few
hours.
The sound engineer of the present (but not of the
future) is solely interested in his mechanics (there are
some good exceptions) and does not object to being char-
acterized as a man who lacks imagination and refuses to
risk imaginative ideas. The development of a new gener-
ation of sound engineers began despite the considerable
expense of sound experiment.
But we must remember that once upon a time we were
told that films cost too much for experimentation. Sound
experiment and new sound engineers must receive the
same encouragement that has benefited films in many
philanthropic foundations.
A documentary film maker is not working because he
wants money. He is not the person who if he cannot get
rich with the documentary, will drop it tomorrow and
begin writing scripts, selling cars or become a commercial

224
agent. No, documentary film making is a combination of
an art, a profession and a belief. The cameraman Mate
once told me he thought a documentary film maker must
have money of his own or be an idealist. Perhaps so. But
a healthy economic situation would let him make a decent
living out of his work, and it wouldn't kill his "idealism.':

15 Ivcns, camera 225

Part 2: mi

While I was in the German Democratic Republic for

the Leipzig documentary film festival in 1966 I had an
opportunity to read through this book once more before
turning it over to the publisher. Perhaps because there
were so many new documentary films on display at Leip-
zig by young film makers, or perhaps because I had
brought my own latest film to be shown there, I was
newly aware of the many years-more than twenty !-that
had passed since I wrote these pages.
It was the observations made in 1945 that particularly
struck me. Would I make those same observations today?
Surely the world, the world of films, and I had changed
so much that these should be omitted from the book? In
some matters I found myself in agreement with the film
maker who made those observations in 1945, and in
others I wanted to argue with him. I finally decided to
show the reader both agreements and arguments by not-
ing some observations from my viewpoint of today.
For example, in 1945 I stated, perhaps a little too
categorically for someone who started out with nothing
more than a wish and a handcamera, that "the day of the
one-man documentary film is over." What a number of
contradictions today collide with this remark! But even
though technical and artistic inventions have brought
advances and apparatus that once again place total phys-
ical control in the hands of a single, solo film maker, it
is still my opinion that any film, including any documen-
tary film, has so many sides to its content and its expres-
sion that its ideal author is a team, a collective of people
who understand each other. Such a team is quite different
in my mind from a crew formed by a producer who
wants to bring certain names and talents together.
Yet plenty of films have appeared in recent years to

226
prove me wrong. Richard Leacock doesn't seem to need
anyone else (except a sponsor) to make his extraordi-
narily coordinated and coherent observations of a person
or group at work or in crisis, and the work of the Maysles
brothers has also shown that 16 mm film is a profes-
sional, easily manipulated sound film. In France we have
seen Jean Rouch and Ruspoli make literally one-man
films of notable importance. The new shoulder-carried
cameras, with synchronized sound, easily adjusted view-
finders and a wide range of emulsions have attracted
professional people to extend their range, for the prob-
lems of enlarging 16 mm film to the theatre size of
35 mm has also been eased since the war. The new
cameras are silent, with minimum disturbance to the peo-
ple they are photographing-even without concealing the
apparatus people often do not know they are being
filmed. This is certainly the direct cinema, the cinema
verite that Dziga Vertov dreamed about. I used this
equipment in making Europort Rotterdam, though it was
Etienne Becker who carried it on his shoulders. I can see
how all the functions of a film crew could be reduced to
one camera operator. Here is a possibility for an artist
who wants to take on the multiple jobs of cameraman,
director, writer-so one cannot say, today, that the day
of the one-man documentary is over.
Though this new apparatus is expensive, even to rent,
by making some adaptations young people in capitalist
countries and in the new film-producing countries of
Africa and Latin America, will be able to skip the whole
heavy stage that we went through. In these countries tele-
vision isintroducing the new apparatus, and that way if
may spread faster to young film makers. Of course the
one country that needs it most, Vietnam, has very little
television equipment and few television film makers-they
will have to take a different road to the modern methods
of the documentary film.
Another element that has been transformed by the

is* 227
new, portable 16 mm sound cameras is the use of sound
itself. In older documentary films the voice heard was
always the voice of a commentator, outside the film. The
new apparatus gives us the chance to hear the people in
the film speak for themselves, and adds another dimen-
sion of physical reality to our films. Even if it is a for-
eign language, the voices bring the film's subject closer,
and give more evidence to judge what sort of man or
woman is speaking. The individual intonations of a voice
can be as revealing as the look of the eyes.
Eyes and voices make me think of a problem that is
more important today than before the war-the problem
of staging sequences within a film or arranging a se-
quence by directing the non-actors in their actions and
behavior. 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 Fight for Life or in my Power and the Land,
but today many documentary films seem completely
staged, in spite of the real indigenous people and the
real places they show us. This brings up several questions
of authenticity and belief that touch the very center of
documentary film principles.
To begin with, neither authenticity nor the audience's
belief depend on not interfering with the real thing in
front of the camera. No film, not even a newsreel, could
be made without some degree of artistic manipulation.
The film's art begins when you choose where to place the
camera. And staging begins when you say to the man,
"Don't look at the camera." It is when you go to the
other extreme and say to an actor, "You play the role of
a peasant," that it's really time to worry about the kind
of film you're making. In between these two extremes are
many choices to be made. Bob Flaherty always tried to
postpone this as long as possible, taking huge quantities
of material in order to have the widest range of choice
during the editing. Of course we all like to have plenty

228
of choice at that stage, but most of us have to make our
decisions earlier. In filming his masterpiece, Finis Terrae,
Jean Epstein made his choices immediately, on the spot,
just as if his camera was set up in a studio. But the
"documentary staging" to which we are becoming too
accustomed does not have Epstein's rationale. More
often than not it is mere laziness that has determined the
staging: I detect a habit of not bothering to get the cam-
era to an actual event because "we can always re-
construct it-and better, too." This reduces the film
maker's alertness and sensitivity to the reality of his sub-
ject. Lack of contact with his subject will weaken his
whole work.
Nor do I believe that many film makers realize how
intelligent and sensitive the audience is, and how quickly
their suspicions are aroused when they feel they are be-
ing deceived in too many small ways. Among the many
challenges television poses for today's documentary film
makers is an increased sensitivity of the viewer. In
spontaneous television interviews the speaker usually
reveals whether or not it is genuinely spontaneous by un-
planned little movements of his face and hands, sudden
quick movements of his eyes, unconscious wrigglings of
the nose, emphatic turns of the head, and so forth. What
I really mean is that re-enactments have to be done with
great and professional perfection. If you steal, steal well !
There was very little of such "arrangement" in the
film I made in Vietnam in 1965, he ciel-la terre. By now
I've had enough experience in guerrilla warfare for the
re-enactment of such scenes-which in actuality usually
take place at dawn or dusk when filming is out of the
question-to be done with as much care as is given to a
military operation.
While making People in Arms in Cuba we had to re-
enact the capture of some anti-Castro bands that had
been rounded up at night in the Escambrai Mountains by
the army and the peasants' defence. When we proposed
229
this to the actual prisoners the next morning some
agreed, some didn't. So we were able to reconstruct the
night event in daylight, in the same place, with the same
captors and the same prisoners. I was careful to keep
the cameras at the same distance that they would have
had to be if the event had been real. (While doing it I
recalled the procession in Borinage with the portrait of
Karl Marx.) Another care: I had to keep in mind that in
the final cutting this reconstruction would have to blend
with the real events that came before and after it.
Two films shown at the 1966 Leipzig festival are good
examples of reality so carefully and delicately supported
by some re-enactment that the audience is never dis-
tracted from the films' main aims. One is Riochiquito,
made by the young French director, Jean-Pierre Sergent,
in the mountains of Columbia; the other is Labanta
Negro, a reportage by an Italian crew about guerrilla
training and operations on the border of a Portuguese
colony in Africa. Both films carried the sophisticated
film-conscious audience at Leipzig, and I can imagine
that the people who appear in both films would also
endorse them as reality.
In 1945 I tried to make some clear distinction between
documentary and story, but since the war there have been
so many good uses of documentary techniques to tell
stories that the distinction grows less and less clear. The
big explosions of Italian "neo-realismo" and of the
French film critics (chiefly from Cahiers du Cinema) who
went into film making in the 'fifties have been followed
by many fine fictional uses of reality-the first that occur
to me are the Cuban Manuela and recent films from
Canada. A friend has suggested that we are heading for
a synthesis of all film methods and genres, and that soon
the term "documentary" will have only historical interest.
He says that film developments since the war have made
"documentary" a useless label. I don't agree with him,
and I believe that more is at stake here than a term or a

230
definition. Fiction and documentary might be better
thought of as two currents between which most of our
films are pulled, with one of the currents stronger than
the other each time. I am tempted to risk a comparison
with another art (though the muses don't dance to-
gether!)in
: literature we have prose and poetry, with the
great modern works of literature pulled in both direc-
tions. Because I love documentary film so much, I think
of it as the poetic pull, and fiction as the prose pull of
our films.
Le Mistral, the new film I showed at Leipzig, is for
me a clear example of the difference between documen-
tary and fiction. Though a Godard film-say, Pierrot
le Fou-uses elements of reportage and documentary,
there is a compositional shape to its photography and
editing that could not have been applied to the Mistral
film, without sacrificing the open flow of images that I
wanted. My subject needed that-for each subject and
each artist's particular talent will dictate how much fic-
tion and how much documentary goes into each film. John
Ford would not make a film about the mistral, and I
would not make The Long Voyage Home.
Television has both complicated and simplified the
documentary film maker's situation since the war. As I
said before it has sharpened the powers of its viewers to
absorb a quantity of images, and this increased visual
capacity is a good challenge to us. Some of the tasks of
the pre-war documentary film, such as news interpreta*
tion and information, have been taken over entirely by
television. This narrowing of our special tasks should
tend to deepen them. It has already changed the style of
our films. We no longer choose a subject because it is
something that must be recorded-that's now a job for
television. I often wonder if we would have made better
films about the Spanish war if there had been television
then. Certainly it would have done a better information
job than the newsreel companies did in Spain.
231
 But television is still too easily content with naturalism
and surfaces. That may be why I pushed Europort Rot-
terdam away from reporting and also away from work
as a theme, at least in the way I had analyzed work in
New Earth and Song of Heroes. It's the meaning of a
port, the depersonalization of a great city that are the
central themes here, and the workers we see tell us, al-
most epigrammatically, what they think of this.
Yes, it would be a backward step for documentary film
to duplicate television's job of swift reporting and mere
connective interpretation. Our job is to show the com-
plicated, deeper aspects of the events we depict. For
example, in filming the Vietnam people in their fight
against American aggression, we have to find ways to ex-
press their wonderful revolutionary elan, their incredible
moral force, their political consciousness and their re-
sistance, with every fiber of their being, to an enormous
military machine. Deeper feelings, psychological revela-
tions, ideological re-enforcing the complicated under-
tones of an event-this is the forward step for the doc-
umentary film.

232
Addendum
Addendum: A Montage of Documents, 1940-1967

After Power and the Land Ivens attempted two more

films through official American institutions. One of these,
New Frontiers, was initiated through New York Univer-
sity's Educational Film Institute, whose director, Spencer
Pollard, wrote to lvens on 24 March 1940:

All of our pictures except the Frontier picture must say

that the specific remedies they suggest depend for ef-
fectiveness upon the return of a fairly well-maintained
prosperity. They do not say how this prosperity can come
about or on what it could be based. I had thought of the
Frontier picture as filling this gap for all our films com-
pleted before it appears. This means that the film would
pose the problem of unemployment as the location of the
country's frontier [italics by J.I.]
It seems to me that the outline which you and Mr. Ro-
senfelt 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.

With Floyd Crosby as cameraman, filming on New Fron-

tiers began in 1940 for the Sloan Foundation. Work was
halted when producer and director no longer agreed on
the scope of the film. The unedited footage for this film
has been lost.
The other film was to be about Bolivia. The Rocke-
feller Committee on Latin- American Affairs appeared
ready to support a project for the Bolivian Government,
lvens' plan for a more personally centered film resem-
bling the first outline of The Spanish Earth and the com-
235
pleted Power and the Land was set forth in a letter to
the Bolivian Minister dated 19 January 1941:

The film will 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 miscon-
ception which the United States may have about the peo-
ple of your country.
I believe that such a film can best be made in the coun-
try itself, deriving its power to convince from the facts
and conditions of real life itself. As a suggestion, I would
like to open the film with an old Inca legend to show
Bolivia as the cradle of the Inca civilization and its his-
toric background.
After that opening I intend to show the immense natu-
ral beauties-the famous ruins of Tiahuanaco, Lake Titi-
caca-and the tremendous resources of your country and
the importance of these resources for hemispheric defense.
At the same time it will be evident from the film that,
while the activity of acquiring these resources is great,
the technique in many instances is still inadequate.
At that instant the film could narrow down to a few
people, for instance, I could show a young Bolivian en-
gineer who studied and received his degree in the 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 tech-
nological improvements for the exploitation of the mine.
We can show him during his work and with his family,
interweaving the dramatic 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
hemispheric collaboration between the American repub-
lics.
The focusing down on one individual and his family
offers opportunities to portray the life of the Bolivian

236
family in a sympathetic and personal way. I have used
this method in my work and find that it carries more con-
viction and makes the story richer than the exclusive use
of the kaleidoscopic and generalized method.
I don't like to work out the complete story now be-
cause my method lies in writing the sequences after I
have seen the location and know the people we will work
with, achieving in this way a greater truth and richness
in my story. But I hope that in any case I have given you
an idea of the picture I want to make.

Both the Bolivian Embassy and the Rockefeller Commit-

tee insisted, however, on seeing the film project in more
detail on paper and Donald Ogden Stewart prepared
various outlines for Ivens. Correspondence continued on
this project through the first half of 1941 without reach-
ing a decision.
Ivens' next film, Our Russian Front, a collaboration
with Lewis Milestone, was begun soon after the German
attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941:

Artkino presents
OUR RUSSIAN FRONT

photographed by
Ivan Belakov Arkadi Shafran
Roman Karmen Mark Troyanovsky
Dmitri Rymarev Vladimir Yeshurin
and other cameramen on the Russian front

produced by Lewis Milestone and Joris Ivens

under the auspices of Russian War Relief, Inc.
commentary by Elliot Paul
musical supervision by Dimitri Tiomkin
excerpts from works by Shostakovich and Eisler
songs by the Red Army Chorus

23?
 assistant producer: George L.George
film editor: Marcel Craven,
assistant editor: Albert Nalpas
musical adaptation: Arthur Morton
commentator: Walter Huston

During the final work on this compilation the Japanese

attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States came fully
into the war against the Axis. On the last day of Decem-
ber 1941 Ivens sent a memorandum to Archibald Mac-
Leish, proposing a broad program of propaganda films:

I will try to outline some ideas about film making for

the Office of Facts and Figures. Not knowing exactly
what your office considers the most urgent facts that have
to be brought to the public I concentrate more or less on
the form how to popularize those facts. . . .
I have thought of three possible ways to make films for
the Office of Facts and Figures:

Letters to the President

A Day in the United States
Film Reports
Letters to the President
The Office of Facts and Figures could supervise or pro-*
duce during 1942 twelve short films of 10-20 minutes
each . . . They are letters from citizens of different realms
of life, not written on paper but on film-form. Those peo-
ple will send their film letter to the White House intro-
ducing themselves on the film and telling their story, how
their life is integrated with and affected by the war ef-
forts. . Such a letter would be human and subjective,
away from the impersonal third-person commentator . . .
Such a "speaking" letter could be sent to the President by,
for example:

238
 1. An air-raid warden in Boston
2. A farmer in Ohio
3. A welder in Pearl Harbor
4. A refugee from Holland
5. A Philippine in the Manila Army
6. An engineer from a plant converted to war material
7. A soldier from the Army camp in Texas
8. The Admiral of the Pacific fleet
9. Carl Sandburg
10. An officer of the Iceland patrol
11. A sailor on convoy duty to England
12. A housewife and her family
13. A secretary in the Department of Agriculture
14. A composer
15. A roving cameraman
16. A woman in an airplane assembly plant
17. A poster designer. . . *

One of these "film letters" was produced, not by any

United States office, but by the National Film Board of
Canada: Grierson employed Ivens to make a film on the
work of the Canadian escort vessels and crews, accom-
panying the transatlantic convoys. The finished film was
entitled Action Stations!
Based in Hollywood the Capra Unit of the U.S. Army
suggested that Ivens make the Japanese compilation for
their Know Your Enemy series, and he moved to Cali-
fornia. While inspecting the mass of newsreel and fic-
tional material, Ivens and Sergeant Carl Foreman worked
out a scenario. The following is the opening of a "sim-
plified outline" by Ivens and Helen van Don gen:
Reel 1. Fighting in the Pacific
Reel 2. Aleutians
Threat to U.S.
Dominates Far East
Map of Japanese Empire
239
 Division of World
Global strategy-Hitler-Tojo
Reel 3. The rulers:
To jo and Militarists.
They hide behind Emperor-they bow-they
march towards their goal-Empire Conquest
Tojo and Politicians.
They hide behind Emperor-they bow-they
march towards their goal-Empire Conquest
Tojo and Monopolists.
They hide behind Emperor-they bow-they
march towards their goal-Empire Conquest
They can reach their goal only by making the people
bow and by driving them towards this goal with ruth-
less lies
They again use the Emperor-who is God-to cover
their deeds-Use religion-People bow for the Em-
peror

But neither this project nor a film intended for Greta

Gar bo (written with Vladimir Pozner and Salka Viertel)
was realized. When Garbo finally said No to Woman of
the Sea, Pozner and lvens wrote to her:

Dear Miss Garbo:

We hope you still remember the kind of reputation
Hollywood has all over the world. When a critic review-
ing abook wants to imply that it is a cheap and conven-
tional job, he writes that it "smacks of Holly wood."
When a newspaperman reports a fantastic adventure story
with a happy ending, he adds that it would make "good
screen material." When people discuss a situation, a
human relationship, they say either "it's real" or "it's
Hollywood" and everyone understands.
We knew all that before coming to Hollywood. We
also knew that there were very good people in Holly-
wood, people full of talent and ideas, who were fighting

240
for a more adult and honest approach to the film. How-
ever, they were seldom successful-they had against them
a powerful industry with all its taboos and superstitions.
Two persons only had been able not to compromise and
not to surrender, two persons respected all over the world
not only because they were great artists but because they
also were honest and serious artists. Even people who
despised the movies never missed a single one of their
pictures-which were not so many feet of entertainment
but a new emotional and artistic experience. They rated
with the best in modern literature, theatre and art. Two
persons only-Chaplin and Garbo.
What people knew of you personally made you even
more likeable in their eyes. You fled publicity, did not
attend Hollywood parties, dressed, behaved and lived as
you pleased. You can't imagine how grateful people felt
to you for not letting columnists sneak in between your-
self and their admiration for you.
You understand now how enthusiastic we felt when
we began working on the Norwegian Merchant Marine
story. Since we do not belong to Hollywood and have
not the slightest intention of making a local career, we
did not consider it as what this town calls, "a good break."
But we were proud to participate in what we thought and
still think is a tremendously important venture.
The war will soon be over. Millions of enslaved peo-
ple will be free again. They'll be very busy at first, bury-
ing their dead, feeding their children, learning what was
happening in the world while they were being kept in
ignorance. They'll be eager to learn everything, but they
will not accept everything.
They'll see the pictures made in England and Russia
during the war-and they'll recognize reality. They'll see
Hollywood "entertainment" in glorious Technicolor-and
they'll recognize Hollywood. Then they'll want to know
about those whom they had admired and respected be-
fore the war-what had they been doing? They'll see The
16 Ivens, camera 241
Great Dictator, and they'll know that Chaplin was and is
with them-as always. They'll ask about Greta Garbo.
The story of Dagny would have been the answer-
Dagny who could be French or Chinese, Spanish or
Polish-Dagny who stands for millions of women righting
today so that their children might be free-Dagny whom
we wanted to have your face and your voice.
We are sorry you have decided otherwise. We, too,
have a great admiration for Greta Garbo.
Vladimir Pozner Joris Ivens

It was his native country, Holland, that offered Ivens

his next job, a big one that was described in the hand-
out for a New York press conference on 17 October
1944:

Joris Ivens, Dutch director and producer of internation-

ally recognized documentary films-the man "whose
studio is the worlds-has recently been appointed Film
Commissioner for the Netherlands East Indies govern-
ment. One of Ivens' last assignments, before becoming
Film Commissioner was the production of a film dealing
with the Far East, for the Special Service Division of the
United States War Department (Capra unit).
The first task Ivens will undertake as Film Commis-
sioner will be the organization of film units which will
make war report films and documentaries on the vital
part played by the Dutch Army, Navy and Air Forces in
the overall picture of the United Nations fighting in the
Pacific. The liberation and the building of future Indone-
sia with Dutch and Indonesian working on a footing of
complete equality, will be the subject of the feature
length documentary Ivens will personally direct.
Another part of Ivens' work will be the production by
one special unit of short, hard-hitting 16 mm films shot
and projected right up behind the front lines, and spoken
in the various Indonesian languages, to stimulate the
daily fight against the Japanese,

242
 In the Pacific war theatre, Ivens plans of course a close
collaboration with the United States Signal Corps and
the motion picture units of the Navy, Air Force and
Marines which have done such a courageous and ex-
tensive coverage of the fight in the Pacific. As the islands
are liberated, the center of his production will move
along right behind the troops. Portable equipment for
this purpose is being purchased in this country.
Ivens will find in Australia, his first operational base,
a capable but too small unit for his extensive work. His
units will be expanded by forces from America like Miss
Helen van Dongen, film producer in the O.W.I. Motion
Picture Division; and after the liberation of Holland he
hopes that the Dutch film director, John Ferno, will join
him. Ivens will also include in his group several Indo-
nesian writers and photographers.
After the liberation all these units will work in an im-
portant educational film program to cover social, hygi-
enic, agricultural and other aspects of Indonesia.

By a year later, however, the struggle in the Pacific had

changed its character so completely that another press
conference, in Australia, had a different decision to an-

America: nounce; a cable was sent to trade unions in "England and

FOLLOWING PRESS CONFERENCE STATEMENT

NOVEMBER TWENTY-FIRST SYDNEY QUOTE JORIS
IVENS RESIGNED TODAY AS FILM COMMISSIONER
NETHERLANDS INDIES GOVERNMENT STATING
HIS PREVIOUS DOCUMENTARY FILMWORK OTHER
COUNTRIES CONSISTENTLY SERVED IDEALS
FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY STOP HIS CONTRACT
NETHERLANDS INDIES GOVERNMENT STATED HIS
FILMS SHOULD QUOTE DEMONSTRATE BUILDING
OF FUTURE INDONESIA IN WHICH DUTCH AND
INDONESIANS CAN AND MUST COOPERATE ON
FOOTING OF COMPLETE EQUALITY MUTUAL

16* 243
 RESPECT AND APPRECIATION TO SERVE GREAT
WESTERN IDEALS OF FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY
UNQUOTE IN RESIGNING JORIS IVENS STATED
SUCH IDEALS EXPRESSED IN ATLANTIC CHARTER
WHICH RESPECTS RIGHTS OF ALL PEOPLES TO
CHOOSE FORM OF GOVERNMENT IN WHICH THEY
SHALL LIVE AND HE CANNOT RECONCILE
NETHERLANDS GOVERNMENTS PROMISES OF SELF-
GOVERNMENT TO INDONESIAN PEOPLE WITH
ATTITUDE TAKEN BY THAT GOVERNMENT IN
PRESENT SITUATION AND FEELS HIS VIEW SHARED
WORLD OVER BY DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE STOP
IVENS STATED QUOTE ... I FEEL THAT PRESENT
ATTITUDE OF NETHERLANDS INDIES GOVERNMENT
CAN ONLY SERVE SMALL GROUP IN NETHERLANDS
UNQUOTE IVENS FURTHER STATED QUOTE THERE
IS A ROAD TO FREEDOM FOR ALL PEOPLES IN THE
WORLD THE DOCUMENTARY FILM SHOULD RECORD
AND ASSIST THE PROGRESS ALONG THIS ROAD
UNQUOTE

Sydney was the setting for his next film, Indonesia Call-
ing. His following introduction to its first screenings de-
scribes the aim and production of the film:

During the Second World War after the Japanese inva-

sion of Indonesia the Dutch colonial government estab-
lished itself in Australia. Many Indonesians, mainly
seamen, driven from their home country, lived also in
Australia.
After the defeat of Japan in August 1945 the 80 mil-
lion people of Indonesia proclaimed their independence
and founded their first republic. The Dutch and English
colonial rulers answered this independent movement
with bombardments and armed intervention. For this
purpose the Dutch had concentrated a great number of
ships in the Australian harbors which were manned with
Indonesian seamen and with arms and ammunition to
attack Indonesia,

244
 The Indonesian seamen struck-they refused to sail
Dutch ships to Java. Fourteen Australian Waterside
Workers' Unions refused to work on the ships. Then the
Chinese, Indian, Malay and Australian Seamen's Union
joined the strike; an international solidarity for the
independence fight of the Indonesian people. The result
was that for over a year the Dutch ships did not sail from
Australian harbors to Indonesia and this meant an
immeasurable help to the country's independence
struggle
It is understandable that this documentary film was
produced under the most difficult circumstances. It was
made with little money by a unit of three people with
the help of Sydney's dockers, who helped to hide the
handcameras from the Australian police and the Dutch
agents.
An Indonesian version of the film was made and sent
through the Dutch blockade to Java. Night after night
the film was shown in the open air to tens of thousands
of Indonesians and became a direct weapon in their
fight for independence.

His first film on returning to Europe encountered a series

of unexpected difficulties, caused chiefly by the political
tensions of the late forties. The idea for The First Years
required the collaboration of four newly socialist coun-
tries. Ivens wrote how the film began and progressed:

In May and June 1947 the nationalized film industries

of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Jugoslavia
decided to start a combined production on a feature-
length documentary film about these four new democ-
racies.
The financial basis was simple: each country pays the
production costs in its own territory and 25 percent of
the general mutual costs of the production. Any profits
would be divided equally among the four partners. For

245
technical reasons Czechoslovakia was chosen as admini-
strative and technical center of the production. As a pro-
gressive and internationally known documentary director
I was invited to assume the direction and organization of
the production.
June-September 1947 I worked with a Bulgarian unit
in Bulgaria.
October-November 1947 the Jugoslav episode was
filmed.
January-May 1948 the Polish episode was filmed.
June 1948-1949 the Czechoslovak episode was filmed
and the whole film edited, music and commentary
prepared.

But in the summer of 1948 Jugoslavia's break from the

East European group of socialist countries made it neces-
sary to drop the Jugoslav episode of the film. The next
difficulty occurred when the administration of the Czech
film industry was transferred to persons unacquainted
with and uninterested in the film's idea; "our film became
a kind of illegitimate child" and production was de-
layed. The Czechoslovakian episode was finally com-
pleted, and while the three remaining episodes of The
First Years were being edited and recorded, the Bulgar-
ian authorities suddenly decided that their episode could
not be shown. Ivens9 most persuasive arguments could
not alter their decision, and the film that began with four
new People's Democracies, when finished, showed The
First Years of Poland and Czechoslovakia only.
His next seven films were also all made for European
socialist governments. To prepare Peace Will Win for
Poland, in collaboration with Jerzy Bossak, Ivens sent
the following letter from Paris, 23 June 1950, to Jean
Komgold:

246
Dear Mr Korngold,
The following will serve you in Warsaw as a basis of
discussion for the peace film project:
1. The Proposal
I have proposed to the Executive Committee of the
Partisans of Peace in Paris that they should urge all
member organizations to encourage the filming of peace
activities in their various countries, especially at present
the activities surrounding the signing of the Stockholm
Appeal. In this way production of short documentary
films, of general documentary material, and of newsreel
material will be stimulated throughout the world. The
tremendous political importance and the vital need for
such material in the fight for peace is clear.
2. Use of this Material
The material will be used in two ways. First, in a
quickly assembled form to be shown at the forthcoming
International Peace Conference in October, to illustrate
the strength and scope of the fight for peace, and to rein-
force and broaden this fight. Secondly, this material will
serve as the basis of a great documentary film which will
follow several months later, and which I see as a fresco
of the unity and strength of the world movement for
peace. Depending upon the material that will be pro-
vided, and which, of course, will follow by its very char-
acter the methods and tempo of the fight for peace, I
envision this film as perhaps consisting of six major
episodes. . . .

Then Freundschaft siegt, recording the 1951 Youth Con-

gress in Berlin, was a co-production of Mosftlm and
DEFA studios, and Ivens shared its direction with Ivan
Pyriev. Friedensfahrt 1952, a co-production of the Polish
documentary studio and DEFA, gave some substance to
the usual newsreel filming of the annual cycling race
through socialist countries. Song of the Rivers for DEFA,
however, aimed at a grander international scale than any
247
of these. Its scenarist, Vladimir Pozner, with Ivens,
issued a book of this title in 1951, after the films com-
pletion, to show the evolution of the scenario and the
world-wide gathering of its raw material (a development
of the plan for Peace Will Win). As this book also ap-
peared in an English translation, a document of the final
editing representing Song of the Rivers is included-the
prologue, in images (numbers indicate in meters points
where each shot begins) and commentary:

6 Broad landscape shot Yes, nothing is more

of a great river
beautiful-
in China
7 Landscape with masses than the work of people-
of people
8 Engineers in discus- the work of people and their
sion creative force.
13 Laughing dredger Like a plaything-
operator
15 Laughing dredger Tomorrow a river will flow
operator here.
20 Welder Yesterday this was a desert.
21 Welder We have done all that.
22 Close-up of a worker's We-all together.
face
26 Close up of a tractor If I had my way no one in
drivers face the world would ever be
hungry again.
28 People working with We'll build houses, ship-
saw yards and ships from these
forests.
43 Two bricklayers at If we had our way no one
work in the world would be
without a roof over his
head.
47 A man climbing up We built that.
49 Laughing workers We-all together.

248
 57 Miners If we had our way no one
in the world would
freeze.
76 Two blacksmiths We are all workers. We
create all the riches of the
world. With our hands-
yellow, white, black
hands-daily we change
the face of the earth and
the face of mankind.
101-
122 General shot of a (The first stanzas of "Song
textile mill of the Rivers")
123 Broad general shot If we had our way all peo-
of a river pie would be happy.

In 1955 Ivens began the supervision of two films (both

produced by DEFA) for the International Democratic
Women's Federation, Mein Kind and Die Windrose. The
latter was a difficult project of five episodes made in five
countries. Ivens explained the plan when introducing the
film in Peking on International Women's Day in 1958:
As film makers we ask ourselves, after having lived with
this film work for so many months, if our intentions will
be understood, if the telling of the five stories of women
in various countries will help in a modest way the inter-
national women's movement.
Every one of us, film makers of five different coun-
tries, working on this film constantly felt our great re-
sponsibility towards the international audiences of our
mutual work. The feeling of the artist's responsibility is
essential to a socialist form of art.
In order to produce this film for the Women's Inter-
national Democratic Federation I made an appeal in
1956 to my film colleagues of five countries: China, the
Soviet Union, France, Italy and Brazil.

249
 The production center was to be the documentary film
studio of DEFA in the German Democratic Republic. . . .
The film workers of the five countries came to Berlin. We
discussed the project and decided on a co-production of
a fiction film composed of five separate short films. . . .
Each part should be done by a national group of film
workers in their national style of film making. This was
a new concept of co-production, a daring one. . . . To
avoid duplication of theme we decided upon a different
central theme for each country's contribution. Each na^
tional group should be autonomous in its own produce
tion. Each would develop its own script and production
plans.
Several months later the film directors of the different
countries were sitting again at the long conference table
in Berlin-Wu Kuo-yin of China, Sergei Gerasimov of
the Soviet Union, Gillo Pontecorvo of Italy, Yannick
Bellon of France, Alberto Cavalcanti of Brazil. . . .
The order and content of the five sequences were
decided. First Brazil, telling the story of Estella [played
by Vanja Orico], an agricultural day laborer. Then in the
Soviet Union Nadezhda [played by Zinaida Kiriyenko],
a girl from a collective farm who is leaving for the south
to help cultivate the new land. Third would be Italy with
a strike by textile workers [one of the workers played by
Klara Pozzi], In France the struggle of a progressive
woman teacher [played by Simone Signoret] and in China
the position of women in the new co-operatives in the vil-*
lages [the protagonist played by Yen Mei-yi].... The
task given to me in Berlin was to help in defining the
final form of these national productions and to co-ordi-
nate all the artistic efforts.

This taste of working with personal and dramatic prob-

lems gave Ivens the courage to tackle a film he had al-
ways dreamed of making, an adaptation of Charles de
Coster s novel Till Ulenspiegel. The first attempt at

250
adaptation was made by Jan de Hartog. Following are
Ivens notes subsequent discussion at DEFA:

Composition. Lacking a general line, most of the connec-

tions of sequences as well as order of sequences, give
a haphazard impression. He relies too much on the
idea of the four seasons, without taking into account
the continuity of sequences within these seasons.
Till's sequences and his stratagems do not show his devel-
opment.
Till's stratagems are successful-he never fails.
These stratagems (or hoaxes) are not related to the his-
torical or actual conditions of the period. For example,
the duel grows out of the general atmosphere of the
Kermesse, and is not directly related to the Resistance.
Some sequences are good: the windmill, the bees, the
duel.
Albe and Guillaume looking for Till. The boats. The
skating.
Sometimes he misses a dramatic situation, i.e. the execu-
tion of Claes.
Some comments on the characters:
Claes is shown too simply. He merely symbolizes the
wretchedly brutal and primitive.
Nell is not developed at all.
Hartog forgot to introduce such nobles as Egmont and
Brederode, and he completely forgot the role of the
people, of the peasants in the Resistance.
Till's character: Till is seen from a twentieths-century
point of view. He has the psychological development
of a hero-his drama-his defeat. He refuses the destiny
created by the legend. But one must not forget that the
legend exists only through his having lived; it was he
who saw the oppression of his people and gave his aid
and sympathy. Hartog does not make use of the
strength of historical fact that Till is tied to the
struggle for the independence of his country.

251
And he does not seem to have made use of de Coster's
book.
He should realize that Till's image in many countries
is based entirely on de Coster and that this book be-
longs to world literature.
Our script must refer more closely to de Coster's book,
with its dramatic situations and excellent dialogue.
The Winter sequence: This sequence is impossible. I am
convinced that Till must live to the end, as we still
have evidence of Till today. Despite himself he be-
came a hero of the people. Naturally, it is only after
the death of Claes that he joins the true Resistance. He
was born of the people and he remains part of them.
The people know and protect him. His strength of char-
acter increases as the war of independence develops.
In this war it is Till who announces a new era for his
country. It is the end of feudalism and the birth of in-
dependence for his land.
One finds little of the social and political conditions of
the time in the script. Where is the Inquisition? Where
are the tithes (impot des dixiemes)? Where are the
mercenaries? The Resistance appears to be a group of
men fighting aimlessly in the swamps.
Only the dialogue connected with the scene of William
of Orange gives for a moment an idea of the situation
in Flanders and Holland, but this is quite insufficient.
The occupation force appears quite pleasant; one never
feels their cruelty or the real sufferings of the people
of Flanders-and due to this, Till's stratagems never
really have great significance.

Out of this criticism came the final and working scenario

for The Adventures of Till Ulenspiegel, with Gerard
Philip e as Till, and Philipe and Ivens collaborating on
the direction (an experiment for each of them). It was
filmed at the Nice Studio for DEFA and first shown in
Paris in November 1956.

252
The next film was also a collaboration with French
artists. The idea for La Seine a rencontre Paris came from
Georges Sadoul and the poem (the film's only com-
mentary) was written by Jacques Prevert.
In 1958 Ivens visited China for the first time since 1938.
He helped edit a newsreel film called 600 Million Peo-
ple Are With You and began the direction of a group of
film letters (a form he had wanted to try in 1941) that he
eventually combined into a single film, Early Spring. On
one occasion when he was in hospital and could not ac-
company the cameraman, Wang Teh-cheng, to a village,
he made out a list of "reminders" for Wang to keep in
mind:
Direction
Color
Close-ups
Standpoint of camera
Natural action
Earth is a star
In case of doubt two shots
Reference shots
Background action
Buds
Early light
Footage-alert!
What have we shot [already] ?
Birds-Ducks?
Quick movements
Yellow flowers (first sign Spring!)
Develop [quantities of] green in shots
Color surprises
Not romantic. Hard work.
No Spring yet!
Clouds

The producer of his next film was Mattei of the Italian

oil monopoly, E.N.I. (Italian National Oil and Natural

253
Gas Company), who gave Ivens a free hand in making
a series of three films for television, Italy Is Not A Poor
Country. Some of Ivens' best work is in these films, which
have never been generally exhibited since their single tel-
evision showing. At the time it was estimated that 14 mil-
lion viewers saw them. This was followed in 1960 by an
assigned film of less interest to &/«-Demain a Nanguila,
made in the new republic of Mali.
In Cuba his next two films were regarded as lessons in
film making as well as historical documents of Cuba
1961: Carnet de Voyage and Cuba, Pueblo Armado (An
Armed Nation), filmed in Cub a and completed in France.
They begin a newly youthful period of J oris Ivens9 work
(first seen perhaps, in the flexibility of form and treat-
ment of the Seine film) which has continued through his
subsequent films.
After Cuba he accepted the invitation of an experimental
film group at the University of Chile, at Santiago. They
wanted to learn through working with him, and the two
films that came from this experience were ... a Valpa-
raiso and Le Petit Chapiteau, both shown first in Paris in
June 1963. The Valparaiso showings were delayed for a
year, but after the premiere Ivens received the following
letter:

Valparaiso, September 25 1964

Dear Mr Ivens,
Yesterday, at last, your film Valparaiso was presented
here by our Cine Club. The place was crowded, every-
one wanted to see how you had seen our city. Had you
caught the essence of it? Was it a distorted vision of
poverty, laziness and exoticism? Many snobs and chau-
vinists came with their phrases prepared for the Forum
(analysis) that was to come after the film. Also many of
us had the conviction that your film had to be a pas-
sionate and poetic and virile work.
The lights went down. . . ,

254
 During the next twenty minutes I rediscovered Val-
paraiso. do
I not live in the hills, I live in Vina, but once
in a while I like to go up the hills, walk the streets and
see the intimate life of Valparaiso with a strange and
fascinating feeling of being indiscreet. I saw all these
things again yesterday recreated with love, poetry and
excellent cinematographic language.
The Forum was very animated. The person with a
dry soul complained: "He could have shown the pretty
places"-"Valparaiso is also a commercial city"-"There
are no ladies walking their penguins on the street" etc.
etc. But we talk more and better. I want to mention to
you the formidable defense made by Mr del Val one
of our best cine commentators, a crippled, deformed
Spaniard with fire in the heart and ice in the brain. Re-
member him?
All the friends that appeared in small shots were there,
even the girls from the "7 espejos." It was a wonderful
premiere.
I would like to have written in Spanish in order to ex-
press myself better.
Your film has encouraged us to try to make our own
films about this absurd, sentimental and fascinating city,
full of small everyday heroes and villains. Should any-
thing worthy come out we will let you know.
Thanks again and best wishes for you
G. Undurraga A.
P.S. I am the one that entered the "ascensor" riding a
bicycle.

By the time Ivens received this encouragement from

Chile he was deep in a subject that offered the most to a
film poet and at the same time presented the roughest
financial problems. Le Mistral-^ film about a wind-was
not a subject to excite a film banker. For the film of
Southern France's annual combat with nature Ivens
steeped himself in the poetry and painting of that wind-

255
torn land. Among his other preparations he drew up an
outline of the mistral's "personality" :
Personnalite du Mistral
II dort
II se reveille
II se bouge
II se met en route dans les airs
II reveille les gens-les animaux-la nature
II change les gens-les animaux-la nature
II met tout en mouvement
II irrite les gens
II change les couleurs
II enerve les gens
II est froid
II est salubre
II apport la sante
II est attendu
II est desire
II est le bienvenu
II devient irritant
II est maudit
On veut le voir disparaitre
II desseche
II gene
II fait du bruit
II est faible
II est fort
II pousse des pointes
II se calme
II s'amuse
II dehabille
II secoule
II pique
II lutte avec les images
II chasse les oiseaux
II aide ou gene les travaux agricoles

256
La population le redoute
La population se defend contre lui (dans les maisons)
II influence l'architecture
Les oiseaux s'envolent
II influence la langue, la poesie [and each art]
II effraie les pecheurs
II provoque de grandes vagues en mer
II freine l'essor de l'industrie
II provoque des incendies
II attise les incendies
II pertube les transports
La Provence lui doit sa salubrite
II est a l'origine des marais de Camargue
II se moque
II joue
Les villages se nichent dans les creux pour s'en proteger
Les habitants s'abritent du vent

But the wind is a capricious actor to employ and film

bankers have their caprices, too-so production on Le
Mistral had to be halted while Ivens made two other
films.
In 1965 Ivens made the first of his Vietnam films,
Le ciel, la terre. On his return to Paris he gave an inter-
view about films in progress which appeared in Image et
Son. Here are some of the points discussed:

C. Joris, we'd like to hear from you what's going on in

North Vietnam-and not only in connection with films.
I. Nevertheless that's what I went to Vietnam for. The
Vietnamese film people have been asking me for some
time to work with them. I concentrated on living
conditions in Vietnam today and out of that has come
a sort of film diary of a journey much like the one I
brought from Cuba.
Upon my arrival it was suggested that I travel
through the country right up to the 17th Parallel. I

17 Ivens, camera 257

 didn't get quite so far. I was asked more than once if
I minded being accompanied by a cameraman. Even
though many technicians were busy at the "front"-
that's to say where American aggression was most
likely to hit. Despite this my Vietnamese cameraman
supplied me with good material. My film will show
scenes from life in North Vietnam today, and with
new material which has been obtained from the other
side of the 17th Parallel, will also show what's hap-
pening in the South. My aim is to help people under-
stand the situation in the North as well as in the
South, and that the Vietnam people want to achieve
unity again.
I met Pham Van Dong, the Prime Minister, who
asked me to come back to Vietnam. And I really
intend to return next year. I do not visualize a film
similar to The Spanish Earth; probably a reportage,
something like a television film, especially if in the
meantime the country has been still more tragically
devastated by the war.
The elan, the courage, the heroism of a whole
country impressed me deeply . . . One has the feeling
of an absolutely united people. I think that's because,
to a great extent, they have been openly fighting for
twenty years and have experienced victory. The Viet-
namese have beaten powerful enemies-the Japanese,
the French colonial army. They know that one can
beat an enemy, even if that enemy has better weapons
and equipment
So after twenty years of war you didn't detect signs of
weariness?
On the contrary. In an interview I had with Ho Chi
Minh at seven in the morning he more than once drew
attention to the possibilities of resisting an army or
air force like the Americans because of the moral
strength of the people. And it is a fact that one feels
the same determination in the young, the old, the men

25%
 who carry responsibility, as well as in every worker
and peasant. This is not a sentimental or abstract
patriotism. After 1954 the fight against illiteracy
brought education and political knowledge to the
people. In the smallest village peasants with whom I
spoke knew who their enemy was-it was not "an
enemy from the heavens." They knew why the planes
were bombing them. They saw hope-even though it
might take years before they reached their goal-and
even though they will have to pay a high price.
C. How did you work there? Did you have your own
personal equipment?
I. No. My cameramen often had to work with old or
inadequate materials. For instance they had 16 mm
cameras and very sensitive film with which normally
they could have worked anywhere, even in really
bad light conditions. However, when the light was
too strong it was necessary to use a gray filter in order
to tone down the intense light. But they had none and
had to wait till the light was weaker. In Paris such a
filter can be bought for only two or three francs from
any photography shop on the corner.
In Hanoi there is one single cutting table for two
feature films, five documentaries and newsreels in
production. This table is in use round the clock, and
there's always a queue for it. In Europe, on the other
hand, there are cutting tables no longer being used
which when repaired, could be bought for a song.
C. Were you able to film with synchronized sound?
I. There were only enough tape-recorders for the radio
reporters. When filming a peasant woman who had
been made a "Heroine of the People" for shooting
down an enemy plane with a gun, I was able to photo-
graph her gestures and facial expressions, but had to
make notes of what she said.
C. To go to another film : how far have you got with he
Mistral^ Would you say that Le Mistral is a summary

17* 259
 of your experiences as a documentary film maker? On
the one hand a kind of lyrical film about nature with
its own dynamic-I am thinking of the "rushes"
photographed by Dumaitre which were shown two
years ago in Cannes-and on the other hand, the se-
quences of "Cinema direct" in which the people of
the Midi speak?
I really think that I could not have made Le Mistral
in my youth. With all that I've experienced and
learned since then I incline towards confronting cer-
tain epic and lyric forms with the concrete. This time
I want to express without any symbolism the vital,
cosmic force of wind, and at the same time, show
what the wind means in the life of an individual-
happiness, difficulties, or perhaps-seen subjectively-
one's youth. And why not also the breath of revolu-
tion which brushes everything aside
In your opinion do modern methods of filming "Cin-
ema direct," television reportage, rule out documen-
taries in the classical form and above all, written
commentary? Would you say that the commentary is
a voluntary addition to a film's effectiveness? such as
in ... a Valparaiso, where Chris Marker's "literary"
text is all the more powerful as an active mental
image of the visual material?
Our technical possibilities today have increased enor-
mously. During the thirties when we tried to show
reality and truth our honesty and integrity were
identical with those of present-day documentary film
makers. My generation used light, easily manageable
cameras, but now technique, thanks to synchronization
of sound and photography and highly sensitive film
material making lighting superfluous, allows even
greater authenticity-although no greater truthfulness
of the filmed material. I think that with a responsible
author material authenticity is only one element of
the fundamental truth of the work.

260
 After much experimentation and some difficulties
Marker, with his Le Joli Mai, has gone far in this
sense. He wrote the commentary to ... a Valparaiso
independently after seeing the film alone a number
of times, using notes I had brought back from Chile
as a basis.
I'm convinced that "Cinema direct" is both indis-
pensible and insufficient-indispensible because it
gives material authenticity to certain parts of a film;
but insufficient because only commentary can express
the complete, responsible personal action-the involve-
ment of the author, director or commentator.

Since Ivens' return to Europe after his resignation in

1944 as Film Commissioner of the Netherlands East
Indies, he had not visited his native country. The Neder-
lands Filmmuseum repaired this by inviting hi?n to
Amsterdam for a retrospective of his work, and he was
received there as a great Dutch artist. His family and
friends and country again-and a film to make. The
City of Rotterdam commissioned a color film, Rotter-
dam-Europort, which Ivens immensely enjoyed working
on. Just as he arranged the home premiere of Rotterdam-
Europort he had to make a hurried trip to Venezuela. As
a substitute for his attendance he sent ]. Bax (an official
of the city concerned with the success of the film) a
hearty letter of satisfaction with the finished work:

[Paris, 6 March 1966]

... It is too bad that I can't be there. But I am sure you
will be satisfied. It may be my best film, for I am very
happy with it. It's good and tough, with a powerful style
-quite new in the form of its expression. It has become
stronger and more compact than I expected-it gives the
city and harbor a deep tone that is needed for films in
these times.
You might call it an ode to Rotterdam, the power of
261
the harbor and the city is in it-and other elements are
touched, such as urban depersonalization and unity of
form . . . which Rotterdam shares with any modern city.
As you see, I don't try to classify it-that can be left for
the writers and reviewers. It is one cineaste's vision (a
very personal one) of Rotterdam, its city and harbor.
Fantasy and reality melt into each other.
Whatever technical matters of importance you have
can be discussed with my assistant, Mirek Sebestik-I
have given him some ideas for the premiere. As for cop-
ies, etc. you'll have to speak to Landre. Remember that
it will take at least three weeks before the first copy is
ready-that London laboratory takes time.

In 1961 he kept his promise to Pham Van Dong and

returned to Vietnam to make the long film he had
planned, 17th Parallel. In mid-production, however, the
group of independent French directors then ?naking their
declaration, Loin de Vietnam, asked him to join them
and to contribute sequences showing Hanoi and its
citizens. That done, he completed 17th Parallel, which
was shown at the Leipzig Docu??7entary Film Festival in
1968.

262
The Films

De Brandende Straal- Holland 1911

V laming Arrow
Ivens' first attempt at filming. The complete Ivens family
took part in the film.

Zeedijk-Filmstudie-Zeedyk Holland 1927

Film Study
A study of a section of old Amsterdam.

De Brug-The Bridge Holland 1928

Production: Capi-Amsterdam
Director, scenario,
camera and montage: Joris Ivens
Premiere: Filmliga Amsterdam, May 1928
A study of the Rotterdam railroad bridge over the Maas
River.

Branding-Breakers Holland 1929

Production : Capi-Amsterdam
Directors : Mannus Franken, Joris Ivens
Scenario: Mannus Franken after an idea
by Jef Last
Camera and montage: Joris Ivens
Score: Max Vredenburg
Premiere: Filmliga Amsterdam, February
1929
A simple love story of an unemployed fisherman filmed
in Katwyk, a small coastal fishing village.

Re gen-Rain Holland 1929

Production: Capi-Amsterdam
Directors and
scenario: Mannus Franken, Joris Ivens
Camera and montage: Joris Ivens

263
Score: Lou Lichtveld (1932)
Premiere: Filmliga Amsterdam, December
1929
A rain shower in Amsterdam.

IK-Film-'T Film Holland 1929

Production: Joris Ivens
Directors: Joris Ivens, Hans van Meerten
An experimental film, using the camera as the first per-
son. The film was brought to a halt when Ivens' finances
ran out.

Schaatsenrijden-Skating Holland 1929

Production: Joris Ivens
Director: Joris Ivens
A film on skating which could not be completed because
spring arrived too early.

Wij Bouwen-We are Building Holland 1929/30

Production : Capi-Amsterdam
Director: Joris Ivens
Scenario: Joris Ivens together with the
Dutch Building Workers' Trade
Union
Camera and montage: Joris Ivens
Premiere: Amsterdam 1930
Commissioned by the Dutch Building Workers' Trade
Union as part of the union's 25th anniversary celebra-
tions.

Ivens used footage not included in We are Building to

make three short films:
Hei en-Pile-Driving: Building foundations in Ams-
terdam
Nieuwe Architectuur-
New Architecture: Modern Dutch architecture
Zuiderzee: Methods used to drain the
Zuidersee

264
 Holland 1931
Philips-Radio also known as
Industrial Symphony
Production: Capi-Amsterdam, Philips
Eindhoven
Director and
scenario:
Joris Ivens
Camera : Joris Ivens, John Fernhout,
Mark Kolthof
Montage: Joris Ivens, Helen van Dongen
Score: Lou Lichtveld
Premiere: Amsterdam 1931
A documentary commissioned by Philips Radio. This was
the first Studio Ivens film.

Creosoot-Creosote Holland 1931

Production: Capi-Amsterdam, International
Committee of
Creosote Manufacturers
Director and
scenario: Joris Ivens
Camera : Jean Dreville, Eli Lotar, John
Fernhout
Montage: Joris Ivens
A documentary-cum -advertising film showing the manu-
facture and uses of creosote.

Song of Heroes U.S.S.R. 1932

Production: Mezhrabpom Film, Moscow
Director: Joris Ivens
Scenario: I. Skliut
Camera : Alexander Shelenkov
Montage : Joris Ivens
Score: Hanns Eisler
Premiere : Moscow, October 1932
The construction of a blast furnace in Magnitogorsk in
the Urals. Song of Heroes was one of the ten films chosen
265
18 Ivens, camera
to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Moscow
Komsomol Organisation.
Zuiderzee Holland 1931/33
Production: Capi -Amsterdam
Director and
scenario: Joris Ivens
Camera: Joris Ivens, John Fernhout,
Joop Huisken, Helen van Don-
gen, Eli Lotar
Montage: Helen van Dongen
A combination of material from We are Building and ad-
ditional material shot over a period of three years, end-
ing with the completion of the drainage project.

Borinage Belgium 1933

Production :
E.P.I., Club de l'Ecran,
Brussels
Directors, scenario,
camera and montage: Joris Ivens, Henri Storck
Montage of the Rus-
sian version: Helen van Dongen
Score of the Russian
version : Hans Hauska
Premiere: Brussels, January 1934
The aftermath of the 1932 miners' strike in the Borinage.
Nieuwe Gronden-New Earth Holland 1934
Production : Capi-Amsterdam
Director and
scenario: Joris Ivens
Camera: Joris Ivens, John Fernhout, Joop
Huisken, Helen van Dongen
Montage: Helen van Dongen
Score: Hanns Eisler
Premiere: Amsterdam 1934
Ivens combined material shot during the reclamation of
the Zuidersee with archive material to show the effects of

266
the economic crisis which occurred after the completion
of the drainage project.
The Spanish Earth U.SA. 1937
Production: Contemporary Historians Inc.
Director and
scenario: Joris Ivens
Camera : Joris Ivens, John Ferno
Montage: Helen van Dongen
Commentary: Written and spoken by Ernest
Hemingway
Score: Compiled by Marc Blitzstein,
Virgil Thomson
Premiere: Hollywood, July 19, 1937
The story of a small Spanish village near Madrid during
the Spanish Civil War. The villagers' plans for irrigat-
ing their newly acquired land shown parallel with Spain's
fight for freedom.
The 400 Million U.S.A. 1938
Production : History Today Inc., New York
Director and
scenario: Joris Ivens
Camera : John Ferno, Robert Capa
Montage: Helen van Dongen
Commentator: Dudley Nichols
Score: Hanns Eisler
Premiere: New York, March 7, 1939
The fight of 400 million Chinese against the Japanese in-
vasion in 1937. Shot whilst on location in China.
Power and the Land U.S.A. 1939/40
Production: U.S. Department of Agriculture,
Washington
Director: Joris Ivens
Scenario: Joris Ivens, Edwin Locke
Camera: Floyd Crosby, Arthur Ornitz
Montage: Helen van Dongen
Commentary: Stephan Vincent Benet
267
18*
Commentator: William D. Adams
Score: Douglas Moore
Premiere: St. Clairsville, October 1940
The importance of rural electrification and its advan-
tages to the American farmer.
New Frontiers U.S.A. 1940
Production : Sloan Foundation, New York
Director and
scenario: Joris Ivens
Camera: Floyd Crosby
The opening up of America's Far West. Filming halted
because producer and director no longer agreed on the
film's basic theme. Unedited footage has been lost.
Our Russian Front U.S.A. 1941
Production : Art Kino-New York
Directors: Joris Ivens, Lewis Milestone
Camera : Soviet camera team
Montage : Marcel Craven
Commentary: Elliot Paul
Commentator : Walter Huston
Music supervision: Dimitri Tiomkin
Music- Dmitri Shostakovich and Hanns
Eisler
Premiere: New York 1941
Filming started soon after the German attack on the So-
viet Union in June 1941.

Oil for Aladins Lamp U.S.A. 1942

Production : J. W. Thompson, Shell Oil Co.
Director:
Joris Ivens
Action Stations! Canada 1942/43
Production : National Film Board of Canada
Director and
scenario: Joris Ivens
Camera : Oscar Borrodaille, John
wood, Francois Villieux

268 Nor-
Montage: Joris Ivens
Commentary: Allen Field
Premiere: Canada 1943
Canadian escort vessels and their crews accompanying
convoys across the Atlantic during the war.

Know Your Enemy: Japan U.S. A 1943/44

Production: U.S. War Department, Special
Service Division
Director: Joris Ivens
Scenario: Carl Foreman, Joris Ivens
Montage: Helen van Dongen
The film was to combine newsreel and other material on
Japan and the Japanese war in the Pacific area, but it
was not realized.

Woman of the Sea U.S.A. 1944

Production: Lester Cowan, Hollywood
Scenario: Vladimir Pozner, Joris Ivens,
Salka Viertel
A story of the Norwegian Merchant Marine and a wom-
an who worked with them. The role of the woman was
intended for Greta Garbo. The film was not produced
because Garbo refused the role.

Indonesia Calling Australia 1946

Production : The Waterfront Union of Aus-
tralia, Sydney
Director and
scenario: Joris Ivens
Camera : Marion Michelle
Montage : Joris Ivens
Commentary: Catherine Duncan
Commentator Peter Finch
Premiere : Sydney, September 8, 1946
The solidarity of the Australian dockers and sailors with
newly proclaimed Indonesia.
269
 1949
The First Years
Production: Statni Film, Prague; Vytvornia
Filmov Dokumentalnich, War-
saw; Bulgarian State Film, Sofia.
Director: Joris Ivens
Camera: Ivan Fric (Czechoslovakia)
Zachari Shandoff (Bulgaria)
Vladislav Forbert (Poland)
Scenario: Marion Michelle
Montage : Joris Ivens, Karel Hoeschl
Commentary : Catherine Duncan
Score: Jan Kapr
Premiere: Prague, December 1949
Intended to show The First Years of four newly socialist
countries.

Peace Will Win Poland 1951

Production : Vytvornia Filmov Dokumental-
nich, Warsaw
Directors : Joris Ivens, Jerzy Bossak
Scenario: Jerzy Bossak
Camera : V. Forbert, K. Chodura,
S. Kruszynsky, F. Sprednicky,
F. Fuchs, S. Sprudin,
K. Szczecinsky
Montage: Johanna Rojevska
Score: Jerzy Gert, Vladislav Szpilman
Premiere: Warsaw 1951
The International Peace Conference in Warsaw, October
1950, and the demonstrations which took place in War-
saw during the congress.

Freundschaft siegt- U.S.S.R./G.D.R. 1952

Friendship Triumphs
Production: Mosfilm Moscow; DEFA Doc-
umentary Films, Berlin

270
Directors: Ivan Pyriev, Joris Ivens
Scenario: Ivan Pyriev, A. Frolov
Camera: V. Pavlov, V. Mikosha,
I. Manglovsky and others
Montage: A. Kulganek, K. Moskvin
Commentary: S. Antonov
Score: Isaak Dunaievsky
Words to music: M. Matussovsky
Premiere: Moscow 1952, Berlin April 31,
1952
The 1951 Youth Congi •ess in Berlin.

Friedensfahrt 1952- Poland/G.D.R. 1952

Peace Tour 1952
Production:
Vytvornia Filmov Dokumental-
nich, Warsaw; DEFA Docu-
mentary Films, Berlin
Director and
scenario:
Joris Ivens
Camera: Karel Szczecinsky, Walter
Fehdmer, Jerzy Pyrkosz, Erich
Barthel, Hans Dumke, Ewald
Krause
Montage: Krystyna Rutkovska
Commentary: Eva Fiszer
Score: Wernfried Hiibel
Premiere: Warsaw 1952, Berlin 1953
The annual cycle tour through Poland, the G.D.R. and
Czechoslovakia.

Lied der Strome- G.D.R. 1954

Song of the Rivers
Production: DEFA Studios for Newsreel
and Documentary Films, Berlin
together with the World Inter-
national Trade Union
Director: Joris Ivens
271
Scenario: Vladimir Pozner, Joris Ivens
Camera: Erich Nitzschmann and others
Montage: Ella Ensink together with
Traute Vishnevsky
Commentary: Vladimir Pozner, Maximilian
Scheer
Score : Dmitri Shostakovich
Words to music: Bertolt Brecht, Semion Kirsa-
nov
Singer: Paul Robeson
Premiere : Berlin, September 17, 1954
Dedicated to the e who work on and around the
world's six great rivers.
peop'
Mein Kind-My Child G.D.R. 1956
Production: DEFA Studios, Berlin
Director: Alfons Michalz, Vladimir Poz-
ner
Scenario: Vladimir Pozner
Montage : Ella Ensink
Commentary: Vladimir Pozner
Commentator: Helene Weigel
Artistic supervisor Joris Ivens
Premiere: Berlin 1956
Commissioned by the International Democratic Women's
Federation the film deals with the role of motherhood
uniting women all over the world.

Die Windrose-The Wind Rose G.D.R. 1956

Production : DEFA Studios, Berlin
Artistic supervisors: Joris Ivens, Alberto Cavalcanti
Montage: Ella Ensink
Commentary: Vladimir Pozner
Commentators : Helene Weigel, Angela Brunner,
Elisabeth Goebel, Christa Gott-
schalk, Angelika Hurwicz, Betty
Loew^en
272
Score: Chi-Min, Wolfgang Hohensee,
Anatoli Novikov, Mario Zafred
Five episodes shot in five countries :

Brazilian Episode
Director: Alex Viany
Scenario: Jorge Amado
With: Vanja Orico

Soviet Episode
Director: Sergei Gerassimov
Scenario: Sergei Gerassimov
With: Zinaida Kiriyenko

French Episode
Director: Yannick Bellon
Scenario: Henry Megnan
With: Simone Signoret, Yves Montand

Italian Episode
Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
Scenario: Franco Solinas
With: Klara Pozzi

Chinese Episode
Director: Wu Kuo-yin
Scenario: Lin Yen
With: Yen Mei-yi
Premiere: Berlin, March 8, 1957

Commissioned by the International Democratic Women's

Federation, each episode tells the story of a woman and
her role in society.

Les Aventures de Till UEspiegle- France/G.D.R. 195(5

The Adventures of Till Eulenspiegel
Production: Films Ariane, Paris; DEFA
Studios, Berlin

273
 Directors: Joris Ivens, Gerard Philipe
Scenario: Rene Wheeler and Gerard
Philipe after the novel by Char-
les de Coster
Camera: Christian Matras
Score: Georges Auric
With: Gerard Philipe, Jean Carmet
and others
Premiere: Paris, November 7, 1956
Berlin, January 5, 1957

La Seine a recontre Paris France 1957

Production: Garance Films, Paris
Director: Joris Ivens
Idea: Georges Sadoul
Camera: Andre Dumaitre, Philippe Brun
Montage: Gisele Chezeau
Poem: Jacques Prevert
Spoken by: Serge Reggiani
Score: Philippe Gerard
Premiere: Paris, November 20, 1957
A poetical documentary about the Seine in Paris.

Early Spring China 1958

Production : Central Studio for Newsreel
and Documentaries, Peking
Director and
scenario: Joris Ivens
Camera : Wang Teh-cheng, Shih Yi-min,
Chao Tse-lin
Montage: Joris Ivens
Commentary: Ho Chung-hsing
Premiere: Peking 1958
Winter, early spring and Spring Festival, filmed in vari-
ous parts of China.

274
600 Million People are with You China 1958
Production: Central Studio for Newsreel
and Documentaries, Peking
Director and
scenario: Joris Ivens
Camera : Staff of the Central Studio for
Newsreel
Peking and Documentaries,

Montage : Joris Ivens

Premiere : Peking 1958

The massive people' s demonstrations which took place all

over China in 1958, culminating in a mass demonstration
in Peking.

Lf Italia Non E Un Paese Povere- Italy 1960

Italy Is Not a Poor Country

Part 1 The Fire in the Padana Valley-

Part 2 Two Towns ; Two Trees
Part 3 Meeting in Gela
Production: Proa Rome
Director : Joris Ivens
Assistant director: Tinto Brass
Scenario: Joris Ivens, Valentino Orsini,
Paulo Taviani
Camera: Mario Dolci, Oberdan Troiani,
Mario Volpi
Montage: Joris Ivens
Commentary: Alberto Moravia
Score: Gino Marinuzzi
Premiere: Italian Television 1960
A television documentary commissioned by E.N.I. , the
Italian State Oil and Natural Gas monopoly. Part 1 is set
in Northern Italy, Part 2 in Southern Italy and Part 3
in Sicily.

275
Demain a Nanguila- Republic of Mali 1960
Nanguila Tomorrow
Production: Societe Franco-Africaine de
Cinema
Director: Joris Ivens
Scenario: Catherine Varlin
Camera: Louis Miaille, Pierre Gueguen
Montage: Gisele Chezeau, Helene Arnal
Premiere : Paris 1960
Made on location in Mali. A nineteen-year-old youth
shows the people in hiis native village how to irrigate
their land.

Carnet de Voyage Cuba 1960/61

Production: I.C.A.I.C., Havana
Director and
scenario: Joris Ivens
Camera: Jorge Frage, Jorge Herrera,
Ramon Suares
Montage: Helene Arnal
Score: Harold Gramatges
Premiere : Havana 1961
Daily life in Cuba after the Revolution.

Cuba, Pueblo Armado Cuba 1960/61

An Armed Nation
Production : I.C.A.I.C., Havana
Director and
scenario:
Joris Ivens
Camera : Jorge Frage, Jorge Herrera.
Ramon Suares
Montage: Helene Arnal
Commentary: Henri Fabiani
Commentator: Serge Reggiani
Score: Harold Gramatges
Premiere: Havana 1961
The readiness of the entire Cuban population to take up
arms and fight for their island.

276
. . . a Valparaiso Chile/France 1963
Production : Argos Films, Experimental de
la Universidad de Chile
Director and
scenario : Joris Ivens
Camera : George Strouve
Montage : Jean Ravel
Commentary: Chris Marker
Spoken by: Roger Pigaut
Score: Gustave Becerra
Chanson sung by: Germaine Montero
Premiere : Paris, June 1963
Valparaiso and its port. Ivens worked together with an
experimental film group from the Chile University.

Le Petit Chapiteau-The Chile/France 1963

Little Circus
Production: Argos Films, Experimental de
la Universidad de Chile
Director: Joris Ivens
Camera : Patricio Guzman
Montage : Jean Ravel
Commentary: Written and spoken by Jacques
Prevert
Premiere : Paris, June 1963
The reactions of a children's audience at a circus.

Le Mistral France 1965

Production :
Centre Europeen Radio-Cinema-
Television
Director: Joris Ivens
Assistant Directors: Jean Michaud, Ariane Litaize
Scenario : Joris Ivens, Rene Guyonnet
Camera: Andre Dumaitre,
Pierre Lhomme
Assistant camera: Gilbert Duhalde
Montage: Jean Ravel, Emmanuelle Castro
277
Narration: Armand Gatti
Score: Luc Ferrari
The Miscral wind and
its effect on people's lives.
Le del, la terre-The Sky Vietnam/France 1965
and Earth
Production: Franco-Vietnamienne
Director: Joris Ivens
Camera : D. Hoa, Robert Destanque, Thu
Van
Commentary: J. C. Ulrich
Commentators : Joris Ivens, Serge Reggiani
Editing: C. Dourgnon, F. Beloux
Daily life in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and
South Vietnam.

Rotterdam - Europoort Holland 1966

Production: Nederlandse Filmproductie Mi j,
Argos Films
Director : Joris Ivens
Assistant Directors: Mirek Sebestik, Marceline Lori-
dan
Camera : Eduard van der Enden, Etien
Becker
Montage: Catherine Dourgnon, Genevieve
Louveau, Andree Choty
Music: Pierre Barbot, Konstantin Simo-
novitch
Commentary and
narration : Gerrit Kouvenaar
Rotterdam-its harbour and the city.
11th Parallel Vietnam/France 1968
Production: Capi-Films, Argos Films
Director: Joris Ivens
With the cooperation
of: Marceline Loridan, Bui Dinh
Hac, Nguyen Thi Xuan Phuong,
Nguyen Quang Tuan, Dao Le

278
 Binh, Pham Don,Lilliane Korb,
Maguy Alziari, Phuong Ba Tho,
Jean Pierre Sergent, Dang Vu
Bich Lien, Jean Neny,
Antoine Bonf anti, Pierre Angles,
Michel Fano, Harald Maury,
Donald Sturbelle, Andre v.d.
Beken, Bernard Ortion, Georges
Loiseau
Premiere: Leipzig, November 1968.
Life continues in Vietnam in spite of war and bombs.

This list has been compiled with the assistance of the

Netherlands Film Museum, Amsterdam.

279
Briefly,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joris Ivens was born in 1898 at Nymegen,

Holland. He comes from two generations
of photographers. With Daguerre's in-
vention, his grandfather began making
portraits; his father studied subsequent
developments in photography and estab-
lished a chain of camera shops. There
was never any question that Ivens would
follow in the paternal footsteps. "From
my first hour," says Ivens, "I was tied to
photography." He served in the Dutch
army from 1917 to 1919 and studied at
the Rotterdam Commercial College and
the Berlin Technical College; he did his
postgraduate work at Dresden and Jena.
In 1926 he took over his father's business
and in 1927 started filming profes-
sional y.*. . In this, his personal story,
the reader can follow the life and work
of the man who achieved a unique place
in the annals of the documentary film.
Karl Marx • POLITICAL ECONOMY • Frederick Engels
W.E.B. Du Bois . G.V. Plekhanov . WORLD HISTORY

THE ARTS • Cheddi Jagan . Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Herbert Aptheker • CURRENT AFFAIRS • John Reed

William Z. Foster • Ernesto Che Guevara • Hyman Lumer
Kwame Nkrumah William Pomeroy

Claude Lightfoot Antonio Gramsci

Henry Winston PHILOSOPHY

Ho Chi Minh Mark Twain

LABOR Le Duan

Gus Hall V.I. Lenin

Victor Perlo Fidel Castro

Yvonne Kapp
Philip S. Foner

Sidney Finkelstein • Desmond C. Greaves • BIOGRAPHY

LIBERATION STRUGGLES • Kim II Sung • Walter Lowenfels

Alex La Guma • Ivan Pavlov • Maurice Cornforth

William Patterson . MARXIST CLASSICS • Benjamin Davis

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... In the gray, olive-studded, broken hills of
the Morata de Tajuna sector, where I had gone
with J oris Ivens to film infantry and tanks in
action, operating behind infantry and filming
the tanks as they ground like ships up the steep
hills and deployed into action . . . This is how
Ernest Hemingway described the scene

* in Spain in 1937 when Joris Ivens was

filming Spanish Earth. "I don't remember
making any particular arrangements with
Hemingway — but one day he was part of
our crew, helping in every way he could/5
writes Ivens in these personal memoirs of
his life and his career — a career that has
taken him around the globe where he and
his camera have always been in the right
place at the right time . . .

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