Spotlight on Director Joris Ivens ("Rain" and "The Bridge")
The documentary film maker that influenced me the most in my career as a director was Joris Ivens. He was born in Nymegen, Holland in 1898. Initially he studied photochemistry in Germany and participated in politics by attending various strikes and demonstrations by German workers. These political events influenced his films over the years. After his study, he moved back to Holland and played a role in founding Filmliga cine-club in 1927. Holland is famous for cinema clubs and theaters associated with them such as "de Kling" in Rotterdam which continues even today. This cinema club held lectures by people such as Eisenstein who was in many ways the founder of cinema. Others such as Pudovkin and Vertov also lectured to the members of Filmiga. The members did many unusual experiments such as "borrow" newsreels from movie theaters and re-edit them to fit Marxist thinking and then have discussions about them. Ivens greatest interest was in learning and analyzing montage techniques used by current Soviet masters of cinema.
It was with Ivens' goal of exploring montage that he made his first film, "The Bridge." This film was an abstract study of a bridge located in Rotterdam which crosses the Maas River. A British film journal (CLOSEUP) at the time of the first screenings called "The Bridge" a "pure visual symphony." Ivens writes in his book "The Camera and I" that the bridge was a "laboratory of movements, tones, shapes, contrasts, rhythms and the relations between all these." He stated that he knew "thousands of variations were possible and here was his chance to work out basic elements in these variations." A friend of his who was a railroad engineer suggested the bridge over the Maas river. It was a simple bridge, which allowed ships to pass by raising the middle part of the bridge between two towers. This caused this inanimate object to be full of motion. When viewing the film we observe various turning wheels, rising platforms and shaking cables. At the time Joris made this film, he considered himself an experimentor and not a professional filmmaker. He never expected his film to play for paying audiences. When shooting the various mechanical devices and platforms of movement, he struggled in finding the right movement for the shot. He called it the "here and now, the acid test of your sensitivity." He stated that when making the film with his hand held camera you must learn to "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."
The bridge operator stated the following after observing Joris shooting :
"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."
Being a student in effect of Eisenstein, he found project editing to be the greatest challenge. He made a drawing of each shot on a file card with arrows pointing the movement within the shot. He then arranged the cards to determine the edit order that best exemplified movement type Eisenstein so often discussed in his lectures and demonstrated in his films.
It was a great surprise to Ivens that the film gained distribution in Holland and abroad. His film club published a magazine and one of it's members, A. Boeken stated the following in an article reviewing the film:
'… like the best wrought prose delights the mind through the ear, this putting together of the most characteristic and most suggestive movements into a single visual phrase delights the mind through the eye, thanks to its composition, changes, transitions and pauses.'
In his biography, Ivens states that "Space, light, height, wind and open air does not appear in a shot of its own accord, it has to be put there." This statement reveals so much about what this first experimental film taught Ivens. Throughout his life I feel that Ivens continued to experiment and learn. I believe his humility as an artist truly raised the level of documentary to the level of art. Even if a film is a corporate or industrial documentary, according to Jorvis' vision, it too can be artistic. He stated in his biography that although this was intended as a silent film that the "possibilities of a sound track would help the sensations that were aimed at in the shot at the top of the bridge. He felt the sound prospective would be an aid. Possibly a Dutch reader might know if a version of this has been shown with a sound track.