Joris Ivens and the Documentary Project

José Manuel Costa

Those who, like myself, have more closely followed the life and work of Joris Ivens over his last ten years, from 1979 to his death in 1989 ‑ his fight to film again, his unfinished or unrealised projects of that period ‑ could not but see his effort to regain his own beginnings. He consciously sought the origins, trying to close the circle and, at the same time, reopen it, out of a deeply rooted belief of Documentary as art and as a laboratory of the whole cinema ‑ a platform of immense formal liberty, a non‑conventional land, or, in his own terms, a creative no man's land. He wanted to go back and beyond, and in fact, while doing this, he not only 'came back to his beginnings' but was indeed unveiling the roots and nature of the whole genre.

Key unrealised projects of that period, like the Florence film, were the clearest sign of a larger concept, the concept of Documentary not so much as 1 a creative treatment of actuality' but more as a way of forcing reality to reveal its inner sense through a confrontation with it, and as a textual creation and formal invention arising out of this confrontation. Something here immediately reminds us of another 'dialogue with a City'‑...A VALPARAISO, (1963) ‑ a midway film that already pointed back to the origins of his work and of Documentary itself. ( ... A VALPARAISO, like the unrealised Florence film, was a key example of his unified concept of social meaning as both source and result of a formal approach. In this respect, one has only to think about the incessant movement of the elevators between the two social levels of the city, in that film, in order to understand how social commitment was one with the creation of form, and form actually seen as movement in the precise sense of the avant‑garde roots of the late twenties.)
In his later projects, and of course in his last film, joris Ivens was in fact making his own personal synthesis, building from his own remote origins, while also revealing them. But in that process what we may see are the larger roots of the Documentary movement as we still see it today, what one may call its paradigm.
	One peculiar feature of this last Ivens decade was, 1 believe, the way in which both the 'fight to film' in itself and the experimental mood proved to be an enduring force in his life's work. One may argue that those particular years could have been the last and definitive ideological crisis for a man forged in the strong, clear contradictions of the thirties, and therefore a period of puzzling and interrogation, where he too might have lost faith and gone back to a more formal search, to supposedly lighter subjects, and a ,pure' enjoyment of filming. That is not my view ‑ 1 see intense interrogation but also absolute resistance to any loss of faith in the process of social change ‑ and, if anything, such an argument shows something else, namely, an incorrect analytical framework. The idea that Ivens could be attracted by the act of filming, and also by 'form', because of any ideological disenchantment is not only objectively wrong but also as wrong as the previous ‑ also common ‑ idea that his cinematic experience had been set in motion primarily for ideological reasons. Some have theorised about his film work (and 1 quote Carlos Boker') as a 'rhetorical medium' and as something that found its primary rationale in Ivens's 'ideological commitment'. On the contrary, 1 believe that the concept of Documentary as a medium, as a means for expressing social commitment, is in fact inadequate to explain his work. What 1 do believe is that film work was, for Ivens, both a means and a drivingforce in itself ‑ and that we cannot only say that he filmed because o his social commitment but also that he even sometimes kept his social and political beliefs (at least longer than one would expect) in order to be able to go on filming. One does not need to diminish the major importance of his commitment in order to understand this. Moreover, one does not need to underestimate the articulation between that commitment and his contributions to the representational forms of Documentary, in order to understand it. However, in the late eighties or even after Ivens's death, what we have seen is the blindness of many film critics who were unable to understand this. Documentary, in the Ivens conception, was not exactly a medium to transmit ideology, or something that came out of ideology, but a global impulse where ideology played a structural role. And in order to understand this we must go back to, and appreciate, its very beginnings.

I have always believed that the discussion of the Documentary genre has nothing to gain from an excessive dilution of the concept in the general history of the film medium, out of an intended, but ultimately misplaced theoretical rigour. As much as we must be aware of the fact that Louis Lumière launched an embryonic documentary approach, to see this idea in its right light we should understand that his genial work was an embryo of different film paths where none had a specific identity. The Documentarist approach and the fictional approach were both there, in a latent way, indistinct and unified by a single coherent desire to seek the movement of the world. In the same way, as much as we have to pay tribute to some isolated pioneers of a realistic artistic film practice ‑ and especially to the greatness of Robert Flaherty (already evident in his work of the twenties) ‑ we should under‑ stand that they also did not achieve the differentiation of the Documentary as an approach.
	Despite the very early tradition of the travel film and these isolated precursors ‑ and they were isolated ‑ the Documentary approach was in fact neither the first nor in many ways the earliest natural development of the film medium. On the contrary, it was an answer to it and even a denial of it. Early cinema had its first strong developmental momentum, and achieved its first artistic assertion and paradigm, by stressing its manipulative potential as opposed to its reproductive one. Cinema asserted itself as an art by learning its power to manipulate reality ‑ a power that it soon overasserted, or overestimated. By the second part of the twenties, however, precisely in reaching the peaks of manipulation, it had created room, and in fact a willingness, ‑for something else.
	The specific identity of the Documentary movement is part of a larger reaction to the manipulative peaks of the twenties, to the gulf between the filmmaker and normal daily life, and to the eruption of technical and organisational complexity that had already occurred by that time in the film industry. Rather than as a natural development of a supposedly inherent nature, Documentary was consciously created as a response to the previous evolution of cinema. Documentary began to appear at that uniquely rich moment, between the late twenties and the early thirties, when cinema looked upon its first extraordinary achievements and trends and opened up new (and so far underestimated) potentials. Rather than an aspect of the whole cinema (which it also is), rather than the continuation of the early travel or factual film, Documentary rose as a specific movement with a precise historical context and responding to specific needs. We cannot repeat this too often, because it is the only way to grasp the very identity of this movement and to understand its whole further evolution.
	Documentary is therefore not the innocence of cinema but, on the contrary, something that arose when cinema had already lost its primitive innocence. Documentary is not the lack of power in the face of reality but the assumption of it ‑ the wish to confront that already conscious power with the power of those who are seen by the camera. In its origins, Documentary was the establishing of a new creative balance between the filmmaker and the people who were filmed, and, in that sense, the first consistent movement (only later to be followed by fiction and by a new theoretical paradigm) to invest in that kind of creative tension between controlled and uncontrolled reality that is involved in any act of filming.'
	The cradle of Documentary as a movement is in fact the avant‑garde spirit of that precise period. Documentary is one of the many outputs of the artistic impatience of that time: it is a way of seeking the renewal of the language of film by coming out of the limitations of the studio, opening a new film practice, using reality ‑ and the opposing resistance of reality ‑ in order to achieve a genuinely new creative mood, one that is not overburdened by industrial conventions. In this sense, it uses the road opened by the genius of Flaberty, but it does so with its own new program, which includes confronting contemporary social reality and contradictions, the analysis of our present world. (In another sense, of course, it also uses the path opened by Vertov ‑ another precursor rather than a documentarist, given that his plunge into objective reality was reshaped by him in terms of the manipulative paradigm.) Therefore, we can say that Documentary is not only inseparable from the artistic context, even less something made against art, but precisely that it is something that arises at the very core of the evolution of film art. At the same time, as it seeks the renewal of that art by opening it up to the uncertainty of reality, the genre is in fact a crossover between the intrinsic evolution of cinema and the state of the Western world in the same period ‑ a world of growing social and political contradictions, a world of opposing and globalizing ideologies, a world between wars. 
	On the other hand, in order to characterize fully the emergent Documentary movement in the film context, one has still to add its coincidence in time with the exact period of the sound revolution. The handicap of early sound technology ‑ unable to cope with what would otherwise have been the natural tendency to catch direct sound ‑ had the curious, contradictory result of keeping the camera flexible and free to an extent that was then for bidden to fiction. So Documentary, having had from the start a somewhat contradictory nature, given that it came out of a formalist impulse but tried to face and integrate uncontrolled reality, found these contradictions further reinforced by this audio‑visual handicap. In that sense, Documentary in the thirties may be seen as a transitional corpus, almost an anachronistic one, and maybe the only one (except for the straightforwardly abstract cinema) where the avant‑garde of the twenties had a chance to develop a bit
further. In many of its formal terms, Documentary of the thirties was the avant‑garde of the twenties transported over the sound period. With its mostly separate system of sound ‑ except in the cases where sound recording actually limited the more radical adventures of the camera and led Documentary to reconstruction ‑ it meant that the new confrontation with reality could still go along with formal traces of the previous period. Documentary in the thirties was therefore a mix of past and future with all the contradictorv, but also rich potential which this brought.
	Now, if we accept this, we cannot but acknowledge that Joris Ivens was in fact one of the main proponents of the genre ‑ an inventor. Throughout the whole decade of the thirties, in parallel with other genuine but different approaches (mainly, the Grierson approach and eventually the Pare Lorentz contribution), he led the way and progressively helped to define the concept. Moreover, his specific path was the one which most clearly embodied the shaping process of that concept from the late twenties to the late thirties, when in many ways it finally reached the representational mode that we still call Documentary.
	All those three matrices (Ivens, Grierson, and Lorentz) were responsible for a common pattern of artistic search and social concern that has been definitely associated with the genre (the latter being what we could call a pattern of social productivity). But neither the Grierson public education approach nor the lyric Rooseveltian approach of Lorentz identified as clearly as did joris Ivens with the very boundaries of that process and with the process itself ‑ that is, the assumption of the avant‑garde spirit and its progressive assimilation into a social, political, and historical intervention.
	Many have said ‑ and the filmmaker himself seemed to ratify it, when talking about the turning point of BORINAGE ‑ that what Ivens did was to go from the avant‑garde basis towards the political engagement. This is true up to a point (even if the preciseness of the turning point is more questionable) but, again, it still implies a sense of dichotomy and succession (first the avant‑garde, then the political assertion) that allows us to only touch on the surface of a more complex process. The uniqueness of Ivens's work of the thirties, in comparison to the other major trends of the same period, was that he went further in both directions ‑ art and militancy ‑ and also that he built one new practice and one new concept out of both.
	There is no better example for understanding this than THE SPANISH EARTH (1937). In Madrid, Ivens totally changed what was then the normal approach to the war film. 1 believe that for the first time in the practice of non‑fictional cinema, an artist came to the front himself and conceived the film there, while he was shooting. The episode of the abandoned Lillian Hellman fiction script, and all the subsequent experience at the front, was, however, not just the confirmation of the Documentary path, or the opening of a new kind of war film, but something of a larger consequence. Ivens himself wrote and talked extensively about the extreme uncontrolled situations that one had to face in that kind of film. More precisely, he frequently expressed the challenge of war, saying that, in Spain, 'the enemy was co‑director', because only the enemy knew exactly when and how he would attack, therefore playing a decisive role in the very basics of the shooting experience. This was the experience, certainly more than anything ever before in his career, that gave him the final touch in the awareness of Documentary as the representational mode that structurally has to integrate another source of control, and that is actually built upon that kind of confrontation, or, simply, on partial lack of control.
	Behind its very pragmatic lesson on the filming of war, the practical and conceptual experience of THE SPANISH EARTH can in fact be seen, metonymically, as a decisive point in the larger development of Documentary. By now, for the first time. Documentary was taking shape as a new form, where the personal authorship itself, no matter how strong it was, worked and expressed itself under new rules, demanding a new analytical frame. At last, the avant‑garde, crucible had become something else, something more definite. but something where the formal search was displaced, rather than overtaken. Formal construction ceased to inhabit the more definable area of style, at least as one is used to analyzing it in fiction, being displaced into what we could call a global attitude, a mix of action and reaction. an ethical and aesthetical, unified, semi‑automatic construction.' The strong, assertive. visual construction of the avant‑garde, or the straightforward constructivist mood in the use of the camera and in montage were displaced into a personal way of confronting and penetrating an evolving situation. Formal construction identified itself with a drifting process, which could thereafter be the result of plainly uncontrolled situations (THE SPANISH EARTH) or the drifting penetration of a complex urban and social reality ( ... A VALPARAISO). Documentary, once a mixture of past and uture linguistic elements, was finally detaching itself from its past conceptual components, even if still strongly influenced by them. That is exactly what makes the difference (and at the same time the common bond) between THE BRIDGE (1928), or RAIN (1929), and ... A VALPARAISO (1963).
	Documentary eventually had its second great momentum, and certainly its only important major mutation, in the sixties, with the direct sound revolution. Then, Ivens was not an inventor, as in fact he could never have been. coming as he did from the original crucible where visual construction played a dominant role. Taking advantage of the new partnership with Marceline Loridan, who started to work in film with the synchronous mi~rophone in hand' (a combination that he used significantly to remember as 'the marriage of image and sound'), Ivens entered the new system only in the second half of the decade with LE 17ème PARALLÈLE (shown 1968), in which he made the jump simultaneously to codirection' and to the new 16mm. medium.
	It may be that LE 17ème PARALLÈLE was another turning point in his career but it was not necessarily linked to this return to war, and to another extreme, and extremely symbolic, war context. And yet, one sees how close this film was to THE SPANISH EARTH and how evident again is the link between the paroxysm of the situation and the conceptual step forward that it required of Documentary. On a primary, analytical level, LE 17ème PARALLÈLE is the same film as THE SPANISH EARTH, absolutely coincidental in its subject matter: the people and the war, the challenges of daily life behind the war, the food issue ‑ be it bread or rice ‑ under circumstances of war. On the other hand, it is precisely their amazing similarity that makes it easier for us to identify the linguistic evolution from one to the other and how the pair of Ivens/ Loridan finally entered, at least partially', the new direct cinema experience. Once more, the evolution had a larger relevance and it came out of the concrete response to the circumstances.
	As it had been in the thirties, Documentary in the sixties was again a laboratory of the whole cinema experience, now both embodying the new theoretical paradigm of the late forties and fifties and developing it further, running parallel to the new fictional trends. Once again, the taking over of old formulas and the trial of new ones was more easily done in this less conventional land (the Ivens no man's land), where less controlled shooting was an antidote to convention. In particular, the exploration of synchronous sound in Documentary was the platform for a change in the concept of image duration, direct sound having decisively taught the image to wait and to prolong the act of looking, therefore also leading to new subject matter. With it, cinema went deeply and decisively, as never before, from the exploration of space to the more complex exploration of time ‑ something that it has continued to do for the rest of the century. This being so, when we look back to that otherwise fabulous momentum of the early direct cinema (Drew, Leacock, the Maysles, and even the French Rouchian side to some extent), we cannot but feel that somehow its real object was the shooting experience in itself, the pleasure of that new experience, the playing with the camera and the microphone. No matter how exciting it was, early direct cinema included an obvious fetishism of the equipment, addressing its own film universe.
	Naturally, by this time, that sheer pleasure would have been strange and insufficient to the militant Ivens. But again we should not be misled by an artificial separation between the moment of formal exploration and the moment of militancy, for the one did not work against the other; the latter being rather the way to develop, and in that sense to consolidate, the embryonic mutation of the former. In Vietnam, under the permanent bombing, any insignificant gesture had a completely different, unique value. Therefore, in a partial use of direct cinema techniques and the new awareness of duration, Ivens clung to those small, anonymous gestures precisely expressing their uniqueness. As the inventors of direct cinema had done, he looked into the other side of normal action (the moments in between), only here ‑ again facing the paroxysm of another special war ‑ he was destined to deepen the method, to digest it, and to reach a new synthesis. In that sense, LE 17ème PARALLÈLE was in the late sixties, like THE SPANISH EARTH in the late thirties, a moment of consolidation of a new representational form ‑ a structural step. In fact, until now, Documentary never ceased to evolve from that exploration of direct techniques. And never again did it remain concentrated in its own film universe as much as it had done earlier in that decade. Once more, joris Ivens was a decisive part of a larger mutation, and by no means only on the subject of war or political Documentary. (See Wiseman, Kramer, and all those who developed the method from that earlier platform on, starting precisely towards the end of the sixties.)
	One may remember a very concrete moment of LE 17ème PARALLÈLE in order to understand this, and, as a matter of fact, something well beyond it what 1 would call the very system of the entire Ivens oeuvre. 1 am referring to the scene where a group of Vietnamese girls come out of the subterranean quarters to wash and comb by the well. On the level of the soundtrack (the loose conversation about the planes and the noise of a sudden bomber coming very close to that spot), Ivens deals with that precise historical context. But on the level of what we actually see during the first part of the scene (before the approaching bomber compels them to lower and protect them selves, in the continuity of the shot), he makes us concentrate on what are, in fact, normal gestures of daily life, those insignificant human gestures of anyone, in whatever place or whatever time, to which the specific context adds such a strong relevance, beauty, and value. So, the true meaning and intensity of the scene does not lie in one or the other of those two levels but rather on the contradiction between them. Suddenly, out of that absurd contra diction, the film arises from a localized meaning to something of universal stature, and what we have in front of us are not only ‑ or not anymore ‑ the historical facts of the Vietnam War, but larger features of human nature. By then, what Ivens is really talking about is not just Vietnam, but the ability to survive in whatever circumstances, the need to act as much as the need to forget, human resistance or human endurance in general. 
		The work of Joris Ivens stands as a unique document of some of the historical events, struggles, contradictions, 
and human dreams of this century. His real subject was, however, History itself, Time, Man; and it is precisely this which enables us to appreciate the unity of that long and diverse work.