| The Film Museum has organised a large-scale programme in 11 cinemas from October till April under the title: The Antidote of the Film League, with 8 film programmes aboutof the avant-garde at the end of the twenties. On the opening in September a book was published ‘Het gaat om de film!’ (It is about Film), in which Céline Linssen, Hans Schoots and Tom Gunning describe a new view of the Dutch Film League. Joris Ivens belonged to the co-founders and was actively involved together with his brother Hans. In fact the beginning of the Film League offered him the opportunity to develop into a film maker. Tom Gunning, American film historian at Chigago University writes about Ivens: ‘The Bridgeand Rain are not only avant-garde masterpieces with a unique cinematographic language, they are also reflections on the future of a cinematographic view. Try to categorizecategorise them under any existing genre. They are clearly not feature films, neither are they abstract films. They are important films in the history of the documentary film, partly because they changed its form. As documentary films they created a new relation to what the Film League held in contempt: the ‘subject’.’ |
| Former board member of the Foundation and Ivens-researcher Bert Hogenkamp delivered his inaugural speech as professor in the History of Film, Radio and Television in the Netherlands at Utrecht University on 12 March 1999. In the past Bert Hogenkamp worked on among other things the travelling exhibition ‘Joris Ivens 50 years world film maker’ (Film Museum, 1978), together with Henri Storck published De Borinage: de mijnwerkersstaking van 1932 en de film van Joris Ivens en Henri Storck (The Borinage: the 1932 miners’ strike and the film by Joris Ivens and Henri Storck), De Nederlandse documentaire film 1920-1940 (Dutch Documentary Film 1920-1940) and led the restoration project of restoring the Joris Ivens nitrate films. |
| In the unique series of Film Music the Dutch Chamber Orchestra conducted by Alexander Liebreich plays ‘From Ivens to Haanstra’ in the Yakult Room of the Berlage Stock Exchange in Amsterdam on Saturday 11 March and Friday 17 March 2000. The programme includes Hanns Eisler’s film music accompanying Ivens’s film The 400 Million (1939). |
| In Milan on 27 April Ivens’ film L'Italia non é un Paese Poverowas shown in Milan together with the documentary Quando l'Italia non é un Paese Povero(1997), which Stefano Missio made as a result of the censorship the Italian TV exercised. A panel discussion followed. Stefano Missio has made a new documentary about Ivens on the basis of the film lecture Ivens gave at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 1977. |
| During writing a book about the anarchic artist Erich Wichman lawyer and art collector Joep Haffmans found three fragments of a film script by Wichman from spring 1927. In the hilaric, almost surrealistic script (also exhibited in the Ivens exhibition and reproduced in the catalogue) Wichmans and Ivens have the leading parts. A number of remarkable avant-garde film tricks occur, e.g. a self-operating camera. Of the script only the end has been filmed: the consuming of a drink in café Wildeman. The chapter on Joris Ivens in Haffman’s book has some inaccuracies and untruths, and forms of ‘wishful thinking’. The press labeled the script as being fascist and mistakenly concluded that Ivens co-operated in a fascist film. A reversal of some facts: the ‘inevitable’ Wichman was a proto-fascist, and many other artists of that period, like Charley Toorop, Arthur Lehning, and Hendrik Marsman, collaborated with him, without sharing his political ideas. Regarding Ivens’s contribution we only know that he filmed the scene of drinking the gin. As such, this film, which was never completed and has got lost since the thirties, easily links up with other bar films Ivens made in those initial years of filming (Zeedijk-Filmstudie, I-Films: Drinking Beer), in which bar types and new camera movements are central. |
| At the age of 92 the Belgian film pioneer Henri Storck died in Brussels. Just as Ivens, Storck began as a self-made filmmaker with a lyrical film about water and avant-garde experiments. Storck and Ivens met in left-wing circles in Paris where in 1933 the Belgian asked him to co-operate in the film about the consequences of a miners’ strike in the Borinage. The film Misere au Borinage(Misery in the Borinage) (1934) became Storck’s best-known film. It was shown on Belgian television as a tribute after his death. Two weeks later a documentary followed on the Wallonian station La Deux to pay tribute to Ivens and Storck, in which present-day poverty in the Borinage was pointed out. Ivens and Storck had co-operated in various organisations of documentarists and remained friends for life. On behalf of Marceline Loridan-Ivens and the European Foundation Joris Ivens, Jan and Tineke de Vaal and André Stufkens were present at the funeral. |
| Joris Ivens’s
first wife, the German photographer Germaine Krull, has led a remarkably
varied and adventurous life. Always on the look-out for sincerity and the
‘underdog’ thus tells Professor Kim Sichel of Boston University,
who has written a fascinating voluminous biography about her. It can be
ordered in English as well as in German. Kim Sichel describes Krull’s
Dutch period in two chapters. She shows that Krull’s relation to Ivens
was the longest and the most fruitful. During their relation the two made
a decisive step towards a new cinematographic language of both photography
and film by taking photographs and making films in the streets not containing
any message or without prejudice. In this way at least four films were made when they went out together (Zeedijk-filmstudy, Study of Movements, The Bridge, Rain). Krull and Ivens kept in touch with each other for the rest of their lives. The next eighteen months a retrospective with 200 photographs and 2 films and the biography will travel along museums in Germany, the Netherlands, France and the United States. Six photographs of the Joris Ivens Archives are part of this exhibition as well. |
| The English translation of Hans Schoots’s solid biography of Joris Ivens will be published in August 2000 by Amsterdam University Press. After six years of thorough research, Schoots filled the gaps in what we know about Ivens’s life, and unvealed some myths. Ivens’s films don’t change, but the image created of Ivens, especially in leftist circles in the sixties, will. |
| In 1948 the World Union of Documentarists was established, the first organisation of documentarists. Among them were the well-known first generation filmmakers: Joris Ivens, Henri Storck, John Grierson, Basil Wright, Paul Rotha. After contact between them disintegrated the organisation got a new impulse in 1964 by its continuation in the International Association of Documentarists. Marion Michelle took care of the news bulletin from 1968-1972. Two years ago, after the death of this generation of film pioneers, Storck and Michelle had already decided to discontinue the AID. It will be done so officially with a special film programme during the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam on Monday 29 November. Bert Hogenkamp and Myriam van Lier prepare a publication about the AID. |
