Joris Ivens

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Joris Ivens (1984)

Joris Ivens (real name George Henri Anton Ivens , born November 18, 1898 in Nijmegen , Gelderland ( Netherlands ), † June 28, 1989 in Paris ) was a Dutch documentary filmmaker and communist . He is considered one of the most important documentary filmmakers of the twentieth century.

Life

Ivens was born into a wealthy family. He worked in his father's photo supply store, and that is where his interest in film developed. He made his first film when he was 13 years old. He later studied economics and photography with the aim of taking over his father's company, but his interest in the class struggle made him take a different direction.

Joris Ivens (left) with Ernest Hemingway (center) and Ludwig Renn in the Spanish Civil War (1936)
Ivens with Queen Beatrix (left) and wife Marceline Loridan (right) in 1989

Ivens was initially particularly interested in the technique of film and experiment. Among his earliest films, the twelve-minute poetic short Regen , which he shot for over two years, and De brug [The Bridge] are arguably the best known. He was considered an important figure in the international film avant-garde.

In 1931 and 1932 Ivens shot a hero song in Magnitogorsk in the USSR . 1933 followed Misère au Borinage [misery in Borinage ], a moving and militant documentary about the workers in a mining region in Belgium.

Ivens lived in Moscow from 1934 to 1936, then in the USA from 1936 to 1945 . He has made anti-fascist and other politically active films, including The Spanish Earth produced by the Contemporary Historians in support of Republicans in the Spanish Civil War , commentary written and spoken by Ernest Hemingway , and 400 Million (1939), a film about the Sino-Japanese War ( Parts shot in China 1938) with Joseph Losey and the music of Hanns Eisler .

In 1945 Ivens was commissioned by the Dutch government to make a film about the liberation of Indonesia from the Japanese. But when Sukarno proclaimed Indonesian independence at the end of the war, Ivens declined further work for the Dutch colonial government. In Australia he made his own film in support of the Indonesian independence movement called Indonesia calling . This led to a conflict with the Dutch government. In addition, Ivens worked continuously in Eastern Europe between 1947 and 1956; the difficulties with his passport began in Prague in 1948 after the communist coup there . Until the late 1950s, he had to go to the Dutch embassy every three to four months to renew his passport. In 1985 the Dutch government offered its apologies for these actions. That his passport had been confiscated for years was a myth from later times.

From 1947 to 1956 he worked for the state film studios in various Eastern European countries. For DEFA in the GDR he made the film Lied der Strom . This film was shot in 32 countries; he received in 1954 at the International Film Festival of Karlovy Vary the Peace Prize.

Ivens lived in Paris from 1956. From 1965 to 1970 he shot in North Vietnam during the war and took part in the collective film Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam).

From 1971 to 1977 he worked with his third wife Marceline Loridan , whom he married in 1977, on how Yukong Moved the Mountain ( The Foolish Old Man moves mountains ), a 763 minutes long documentary about the Cultural Revolution in China.

Shortly before his death in 1989, the last of his more than 40 films was completed: Une histoire de vent [A story about the wind].

The Joris Ivens Award is named after Joris Ivens and was the main prize of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam until 2009 .

Documentaries (selection)

Joris Ivens (1971)
  • 1912 - The wigwam
  • 1927 - studies of movement in Paris
  • 1928 - The bridge
  • 1929 - rain ( La pluie )
  • 1931 - Philips radio
  • 1933 - Komsomol
  • 1933 - New Earth
  • 1934 - Elend in der Borinage ( Borinage , shot with Henri Storck 1932/1933, 33 min., Set to music in 1963)
  • 1937 - Spanish Earth (Commentary written and spoken by Ernest Hemingway )
  • 1939 - The 400 million
  • 1940 - Electricity in the countryside
  • 1946 - Indonesia Calling
  • 1952 - Friendship wins (over the III World Festival of Youth and Students)
  • 1952 - Peace Trip 1952 Warsaw-Berlin-Prague
  • 1954 - Song of the Streams
  • 1957 - The compass rose
  • 1957 - The Seine meets Paris
  • 1963 -… in Valparaíso
  • 1966 - Rotterdam Europoort
  • 1966 - The Mistral
  • 1967 - Far from Vietnam ( Loin du Viêt-nam , together with Chris Marker , Alain Resnais , William Klein , Agnès Varda , Claude Lelouch , Jean-Luc Godard )
  • 1968 - The 17th parallel
  • 1976 - How Yü Gung moves mountains: Pharmacy No. 3 in Shanghai
  • 1976 - How Yü Gung Moves Mountains: A Story About a Football
  • 1988 - A story about the wind

In 2009 André Stufkens published a five-part DVD collection of Iven's works under the title Joris Ivens. World filmmaker .

Awards

Memorial sculpture for Joris Ivens in his native Nijmegen

literature

  • Kees Bakker (ed.): Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context , Paperback edition, Amsterdam University Press, 2000
  • J.-P. Barbian, W. Ruzicka (Ed.): Poetry and Politics: The Documentary Filmmaker Joris Ivens (1898–1989) , Trier: WVT - Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2001
  • Wolfgang Bergmann (ed.): Yü Gung moves mountains. 12 films by Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan , Cologne: Neue Welt, 1977
  • Carlos Böker: Joris Ivens, film maker , Ann Arbor, Michigan 1981
  • Rosalind Delmar: Joris Ivens. 50 years of film-making , London 1979
  • Joris Ivens: The camera and me , Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974, ISBN 3-499-25047-0 .
  • Joris Ivens, Vladimir Pozner : Song of the Streams , Berlin: Tribüne, 1957
  • Günter Jordan : Unknown Ivens: Triumph, damnation, resurrection. Joris Ivens at DEFA and in the GDR 1948–1989 , Bertz and Fischer, Berlin, 2018, ISBN 978-3-86505-407-4 .
  • Wolfgang Klaue (ed.): Joris Ivens , Staatl. Film archive of the German Democrat. Republic u. the club of filmmakers in the GDR, 1963
  • Klaus Kreimeier : Joris Ivens. A filmmaker on the front lines of the world revolution , Berlin: Oberbaum Verlag für Literatur und Politik, 1976
  • C. Scherer: Ivens, Marker, Godard, Jarman. Memories in the essay film , Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001
  • Hans Schoots: Living Dangerously: A Biography of Joris Ivens , Amsterdam University Press, 2000
  • André Stufkens: Joris Ivens. Weltenfilmer , book in a 5-DVD box of the same name, European Joris Ivens Foundation, 2009
  • Hans Wegner : Joris Ivens. Documentarist of Truth , Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1965

Web links

Commons : Joris Ivens  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bert Hogenkamp: De mijnwerkersstaking van 1932 en de film van Joris Ivens en Henri Storck . Van Gennep, Amsterdam 1983. ISBN 90-6012-538-X .
  2. ↑ Joris Ivens, Windbildjäger. In: derStandard.at. December 10, 2009, accessed December 4, 2017 .
  3. ^ Joris Ivens highly honored , In: Neues Deutschland , November 26, 1963, p. 1
personal data
SURNAME Ivens, Joris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch documentary filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Nijmegen , Gelderland , Netherlands
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 1989
Place of death Paris