The international documentary filmfestival in Lisbon, 'Doc Lisboa', presents a special programme on labour, called 'A Body of Work'. A rather neglected subject in mainstream cinema, because film was exactly ment to escape from the factory, from watching the world of labour and of workers. As part of this programme from 22 October to 3 November the film A Family, a Woman (1976) by Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan-Ivens is on-line available.
75 years ago, on 17 August 1945, Indonesia declared its independence as a nation. In support of the young republic Joris Ivens filmed in October and November 1945 the boycot actions of maritime workers (the Black Armada) from various nationalities in the harbour of Sydney: Indonesia Calling. On August 26th 2020 the Indonesian ambassador opened in the National Maritime Museum of Australia, situated on Sydney's waterfront, an on-line exhibition about the relationship between Austra ...
On Thursday 16th of January H.E. Mrs. Ngo Thi Hoa, Ambassador of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, conferred the Order of Friendship posthumously to Joris Ivens. Mrs. Annemiek Nooteboom received the Friendship Medal on behalf of the Ivens-family. She gave the medal and certificate to the European Foundation Joris Ivens to keep and treasure it forever in the archives.
On Friday 23 October a film crew of Chinese broadcasting (CCTV-9) shoot some footage in Nijmegen for a four-part series on Joris Ivens and China. Prof. Zhang Tong Dao from Beijing University Beida, teacher as well as filmmaker, is the director. Each episode will focus on one of the Chinese films Ivens made between 1938-1988. Dutch filmmaker René Seegers, who made Joris Ivens Old Friend of the Chinese People in 2008, assisted this film crew during the shooting.
Documents and photos from the collectio ...
On 30 and 31 October a delegation from Quang Tri province (central Vietnam) visited the city of Nijmegen, at the invitation of the municipality of Nijmegen, The Economic Board and the European Foundation Joris Ivens. Ms. Ngo Thi Hoa, ambassador of Vietnam in The Hague, attended the meetings. In Quang Tri the Ben Hai River is situated on the 17th parallel, where Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan-Ivens in 1967 shot the long documentary Le 17e parallele. The delegation was headed by mr. Hoang Nam, the vice-president of the Peoples C ...
Matera in the Italian region of Basilicata is this year’s European Capital of Culture. The exhibition ‘Visione Unica’ of the design group Formafantasma includes Joris Ivens’ documentary l’ Italia Non è un Paese Povero (1960) as part of a visual archive about the very rich patrimony of this region. The last decades Matera shows a remarkable switch from poor and subordinated region towards a spectacular cultural pinnacle, praised by UNESCO, the World Monuments Fund and used by many famous ...
On 16 November at IDFA Amsterdam the documentary Marceline. A Woman. A Century made by German director Cordelia Dvorak will be premiered. This portrait of the strong-minded filmmaker Marceline Loridan-Ivens (1928-2018) and fourth wife of Joris Ivens, saw its final editing two days before she passed away. In this film we see Marceline serving her guests coffee or vodka in her Paris apartment at the rue des Saints Peres.
At the occasion of the 120th birthday of Joris Ivens and the 50th anniversary of the debut of the film The 17th Parallel, The People’s War (Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan-Ivens, 1968) the VietNam Film Institute in collaboration with the European Foundation Joris Ivens are organizing an international Ivens-seminar in Hanoi on 22-24 November. Renowned (film) scholars from Vietnam, Canada, USA, Australia, Indonesia, China and The Netherlands will provide an impulse to the Ivens Studies around the world. Former Vietnamese co ...
On Monday May 28th the VietNam Film Institute presented a new documentary film about Ivens in VietNam at the occassion of a ceremony in Nijmegen celebrating 50 years of solidarity between Nijmegen and VietNam. Mrs. Ngo Thi Hoa, Ambassador of VietNam in The Hague, Mr. Hubert Bruls, mayor of Nijmegen, and activists from the 1960s and 70s supporting VietNam, attended this meeting. The theme 'Looking back for a better future' was illustrated with specialists presenting innovative technologies from Nijmegen in nowadays projects in Viet ...
The DEFA Foundation in Berlin released a new German DVD with Ivens-films in conjunction with the book Günter Jordan published about these films. DEFA already had launched a DVD with Song of the Rivers in and now presents The Wind Rose, Friendship Will Win and The Peace Cycle Tour Warsaw-Berlin-Prague 1952.
The long awaited book (in German) about Ivens and his East-German films, written by thé specialist in this field, Günter Jordan, has been published by the DEFA Foundation. This beautiful book describes in 680 pages the triumph in the 1950’s, the condemnation at the end of the 1960’s when Ivens became persona non grata in the GDR, until the resurrection of Ivens’ DEFA-films.
Prof. Ariel Heryanto from Monash University in Melbourne lectured about Joris Ivens and Indonesia Calling in Djakarta. In his vivid presentation in Bahasa Indonesia (also a version with English subtitles is available) he discussed the tensed relationships between Indonesia, Australia and The Netherlands both back then and now. The opening sequence of Ivens' film showing an Australian society with diversity could be a model for their relationships. Since 22 October, when this film made by Jakarticus, was put on-line then thous ...
What are the greatest documentaries ever made? The international film magazine Sight&Sound publishes in the September issue 2014 a poll of 340 critics and filmmakers in the search for authoritative answers. In this list a remarkable number of 11 Ivens’films were voted.
The son of documentary filmmaker Leo Hurwitz created a beautiful website about the films of his father. Most of his unique social documentaries are available on-line now and proof their current value. Joris Ivens used excerpts from Hurwitz’ films in at least four of his documentaries, like the wellknown and shocking ‘looting & shooting’ sequence of policemen against steelworkers on strike in 1993 in Ambridge. https://leohurwitz.com/
Borinage and New Earth
In Borinage (1934), an iconic documentary about the economic crisis and a miners strike in Wallonia (Belgium), the two directors Joris Ivens and Henri Storck included footage from Leo Hurwitz’ compilation film The World in Review and America Today (1933-34). Hurwitz used scenes filmed by commercial newsreel companies and surpressed or only partially distributed. For instance the sequence, shot in Ambridge (Pa) in October 1933 of a picketline of the Steel and Metal Workers Industrial Union, which was attacked by armed policemen and armed ‘deputies’of the bosses. The same documentary of Hurwitz provided Ivens of footage for New Earth (1933), when he needed visual proof of the waste of milk during the economic crisis. Because it was too little, he re-enacted a scene with wasting food by throwing it away in the river Seine in France as an indictment against speculation with food at a time when millions suffered from hunger and starvation.
The Spanish Earth
The third film with an exchange of footage is Heart of Spain (1937). Leo Hurwitz was asked by Ben Maddow to make a film based on the footage he and Hungarian photographer Geza Karpathi made in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. It was about the blood bank of Canadian physician Norman Bethune in support of the soldiers of the International Brigades. However the footage was too little and too shaky and Hurwitz decided, together with Paul Strand, to extend the focus of the film to the struggle against fascism. The two partners of Frontier Films scenarized and edited the material in mid 1937. For this they needed footage made on the battlefield in Spain by Russian filmmaker Roman Karmen and by Joris Ivens and John Ferno for The Spanish Earth, Not only some sequences in Heart of Spain and The Spanish Earth are similar, also larger parts of the film score coincide, some folksongs and other music are the same. Ivens’ film with the commentary text of Hemingway was premiered on 12 June, while Heart of Spain was released three months later in the same film theatre (Playhouse on 55th street in New York).
Song of the Rivers
The fourth Hurwitzfilm with a relationship with an Ivensdocumentary is Native Land (1942), a film about the fight of the unions to organize and for liberty against anti-democratic forces, the conspiracy and violence that surpressed workers’constitutional rights. It took five years for Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand, directors of Frontier Films, to realize this docudrama. Although it is not sure when, Ivens received a 35 mm. print of this film in East-Berlin in 1954 and included excerpts from it in Song of the Rivers (1955). Both Ivens and Hurwitz and Strand were in favour of re-enactment, of staged scenes with either actors or non-actors. Another similarity between Native Land and Song of the Rivers is the opening sequence with the metaphors of the beauty of nature. Probably Native Land also inspired Ivens to ask singer Paul Robeson to sing for Song of the Rivers.
Leo Hurwitz
Leo Hurwitz (1909-1991), though not widely known today, was one of the important pioneers of the documentary film. Through this site https://leohurwitz.com/, you can experience the wide and exciting spectrum of his films (virtually all of his available work is streaming here); find out about the passion behind the invention of the social documentary on the part of Hurwitz and his colleagues; find out about the price they paid as progressive ideas and content were viciously repressed in America in the middle of the century; learn about the forefathers and mothers of our present documentary boom.