The small independent publisher Bastante in Santiago, Chile, will soon release the first Spanish edition of Joris Ivens’ first autobiography, The Camera and I: La cámara y yo.
Vicente Braithwaite has been working on this publication since 2024. In Ivens’ first autobiography, he describes the period up to 1946, followed by a chapter that briefly covers the years 1945 to 1967. Because Ivens is not a historian but an artist, not all historical facts are entirely accurate; in particular, the description of *The Spanish Earth* is personal and fictional.
The genesis of *The Camera and I* is complex. The Ivens Archive contains typescripts from the years 1941–1944, when Ivens was residing in the United States. In 1939, Random House Publishing gently had rejected his proposal to publish his Chinese diary about The 400 Millions because his English was not good enough. During the war years, in between film projects, he worked on his memoirs, beginning with his youth in Nijmegen. He enlisted the help of renowned film historian Jay Leyda, then film curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and an Eisenstein specialist, and Hope Corey, the wife of actor and film director Jeff Corey. The individual chapters were bound in only a few copies in 1944, just as Ivens was leaving for Australia to carry out film assignments for the Dutch government. He gave one bound copy to André Deinum, born in Workum (Frisia, The Netherlands), but a film professor in the U.S. The book, which had progressed until Power and the Land (1941), remained unfinished for decades. In the late 1940s and 1950s, those involved in the U.S. faced difficulties with their work due to blacklisting by the U.S. government, in which their friendship with Ivens played a role. It was not until the end of the 1960s, when Ivens returned to the Netherlands and his archive was gathered in a permanent location at the Netherlands Film Museum, that the book could be completed, primarily by Jay Leyda. Incidentally, Leyda is not mentioned anywhere in the 1969 publication.
The book was translated from English into various languages, including Dutch, Chinese, Italian, and Japanese. In 1980, students at UNAM, the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos in Mexico City, translated the book into Spanish, but this was for internal use only. Thus, this marks the first time the book is being made available to the public in Chile.
The cover of the Spanish version of The Camera and I by Bastante publishers, Santiago de Chile.
The Italian, English and Duthjc version of Ivens' first autobiography.
