"More exciting than rapid fiction, and twice as beautiful," is how American critic Otis Ferguson described the work of Joris Ivens (1898-1989), the Dutch documentarist whose vast body of work will be sampled this month at the Museum of Fine Arts. Some critics have seen a split between Ivens the romantic naturalist and Ivens the maker of left-wing propaganda. But Ivens himself always insisted that the roles of artist and of militant were not in contradiction. "The most elevated art form has the greatest propaganda value," he claimed.
A program of short films titled "Avant-Garde" (April 12 at 5:30 p.m.) represents the first phase of Ivens’s career. Perhaps the best known of his early works is "Rain" (1929; directed with Mannus Franken), a study of the various kinds of movement and various qualities of light embodied or unleashed by a daytime downpour in Amsterdam. A masterpiece of montage, "Rain" is an exceptionally beautiful film — though one that, in Ivens’s later view, is about nothing: "It rains, that’s all." It will be accompanied by four other early classics: "The Bridge" (1928), "Philips Radio" (1931), "New Earth" (1933), and "Borinage" (1934; directed with Henri Storck). This last was a special favorite of German critic Walter Benjamin, who saw proof of the democratizing power of film in Ivens’s use of Belgian miners to re-create their strike. As Benjamin wrote, "Borinage" records the historical moment when, for the first time, "any man might find even himself part of a work of art."
"Power and the Land" (1940; April 13 at 1 p.m.), one of several films Ivens made in the US, is a perfect realization of the emotional moviemaking he sought to achieve in the documentary form. The film is an idealized but totally convincing portrait of American family farmers — a group of people, the narrator tells us, who are dedicated purely to feeding America. They would do a better job of it, and have a better-quality life, if only they had electricity — which 75 percent of them lacked at the time the film was made.
Producer Pare Lorentz refused to let Ivens depict the struggle of farmers’ cooperatives against the utility companies, which not only refused to bring power lines to small farmers but fought them when they tried to put up their own lines. To compensate, Ivens focuses on the poetic and atmospheric areas of his subject: nature, landscape, family, the battle between light and dark. Above all, he concentrates on directing non-actors in re-enacting events from their everyday lives. The result is almost unbearably poignant in its faith in a traditional way of life that, 60 years later, the superpatriots who govern our land have declared a worthless throwback.
"Men cannot act before the camera in the presence of death," notes Ernest Hemingway, the narrator of Ivens’s stirring film about the Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Earth (1937; April 27 at 11:15 a.m.). Amid sweeping landscape shots and celebrations of the Republicans’ solidarity, Ivens concentrates on the helpless gestures and shocked looks of persons bereaved by war: a large woman wiping her face with a handkerchief and waving her arm helplessly while clutching a little boy’s hand; a group of women pausing to stare amazed at their neighbors’ corpses before turning and moving on.
After World War II, Ivens spent several years in East Germany, where he made the Communist blockbuster Song of the Rivers (1954; April 19 at 5:45 p.m.), which is said to have been seen by 250 million people. A paean to international trade unionism, the film combines images of life along six great rivers: the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Nile, the Yangtse, the Volga, and the Amazon. Instead of the intimacy of "Power and the Land," abstract grandiloquence is the keynote. The narrator states: "Day by day with our hands — yellow, white, or black — we change the face of the earth and the future of mankind." Dmitri Shostakovich’s dry, emphatic music seems to impose itself on the footage rather than work with it, but Ivens’s editing gives the film great, if simple, cumulative force. The longing for unity expressed in Song of the Rivers may now invite ridicule rather than sympathy, but before rejecting this movie, you might ask yourself: how many Hollywood films ever show people working?
