Rain (film)

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Movie
German title rain
Original title rain
Country of production Netherlands
original language Dutch
Publishing year 1929
length 12 minutes
Rod
Director Joris Ivens ,
Mannus Franconia
script Joris Ivens,
Mannus Franconia
music Lou Lichtveld
camera Joris Ivens
cut Joris Ivens

Regen is a Dutch short film from 1929. The Views of the City of Amsterdam in the Rain are among the most famous works by the documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens , who directed Regen together with Mannus Franken. The silent film is considered an outstanding example of the European avant-garde film of the late 1920s and was included in the Dutch film canon . It was in 1932 dubbed , another musical arrangement by the Austrian composer Hanns Eisler was entitled to describe Fourteen Ways to rain known.

content

The film begins with a look at the canals and streets of Amsterdam. The busy life on the main streets and in the canals is observed. The sky is slowly darkening, a wind is blowing. The first raindrops fall and form rings on the water in the canals.

People open their umbrellas and close the windows of their houses, the rain gutters fill with water. While the downpour is getting stronger, the camera glides over puddles and looks through drip-covered window panes. The traffic in the rain is observed from a tram.

Eventually the rain subsided and the sky opened again. The sun is reflected on the wet pavement and in the canals. Life is returning to the streets.

History of origin

Besides the socially critical short film Brandung, Regen was the only collaboration between filmmakers Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken, both of whom were still at the beginning of their careers. Ivens and Franken had jointly founded the Dutch Film League in 1927 , with which they wanted to make European avant-garde film known in the Netherlands. Ivens, the son of a manufacturer of photo accessories, began making experimental films himself and in 1928 he completed his first publicly shown film, De Brug , in which he portrayed a bascule bridge in Rotterdam .

While Ivens stated later in his autobiography that to him during the filming of De Brug the idea of rain came, prove letters that Franken 1927 Ivens already in October subject had suggested. Ivens was enthusiastic about Franken's idea and immediately started recording. The first shots were shown in private at the end of 1927, but Ivens worked on Regen for two more years , during which he carried out other film projects in parallel. A handheld camera , a raincoat and rubber boots were always ready for the project and Ivens had instructed friends to let him know when rain showers were coming. The poor lighting conditions during the rain showers made special demands on Ivens. He could only get the images he wanted when the shutter on the camera was fully open . He used Agfa film material and dispensed with filters for color correction . For a total of four months, Ivens collected photos of Amsterdam in the rain.

In addition to waiting for rainy weather, the editing of the film was delayed, Ivens had increasing problems to cut the existing and still growing film material together, with Ivens and Franken doing without subtitles . Over the course of the months, they regularly exchanged ideas for the montage of the individual takes, but since Franken stayed in Paris during the time and rarely visited Ivens in Amsterdam, he was largely solely responsible for the camera work, the direction and the film editing. Franken felt pushed into the background, but Ivens affirmed that he had always emphasized Franken's contribution as a source of ideas during test demonstrations of the rough cut.

After rough versions of Regen were shown in Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin, the premiere of the finished film finally took place on December 14, 1929 in the cinema of the Film League, the De Uitkijk .

Despite the alienation while working on Regen and the parallel film Brandung , Franken and Ivens planned another joint project, which was ultimately not realized. From then on, both went their separate ways as documentary filmmakers.

Performance history

After the premiere of Regen in the theater of the Dutch Film League, the film was shown by numerous European film clubs and turned out to be a great success. Ivens, who had met the Soviet director Vsevolod Pudovkin in early 1929, went to the Soviet Union in January 1930 at the invitation of the All Union Society for Cultural Relations with Abroad (VOKS) , where he presented Regen , along with other Dutch films . The Moscow public reacted with interest to Ivens and his films, but mainly his socially critical films were discussed in the press. Screenings in Leningrad , Ukraine , Georgia and Armenia followed, and Regen proved to be a crowd favorite , especially at the screenings in Tbilisi . When Ivens returned to Amsterdam in April 1930, he had sold numerous copies of his films in the Soviet Union, and he also began to be interested in communist ideology.

In 1931 Ivens returned to Moscow for a longer stay. From there he commissioned the film editor Helen van Dongen and the composer Lou Lichtveld in 1932 to create a sound film version of Regen . Lichtveld had already provided the background music for numerous film screenings of the Dutch Film League. As part of the dubbing, some changes were made to the editing. However, Lichtveld's impressionistic music was not very popular; Ivens himself later distanced himself from the dubbing.

When Joris Ivens emigrated to the United States in 1936 , he was a welcome guest at screenings of his films. His early work was particularly the focus of interest. The New York Museum of Modern Art bought a copy of Regen from Ivens , the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences accepted Ivens as a member and dedicated a retrospective to him in 1941 .

Also in 1941 the Austrian Hanns Eisler composed another film score for Regen . Eisler and Ivens had previously worked together on various films, but the new composition for Regen was created during Eisler 's stay in New York as part of a film music project that he had developed with the support of Theodor W. Adorno . Eisler's composition, however, was better known as the chamber music piece Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain . As a sound version of the film Rain , the music was only performed twice during Eisler's lifetime (1947 in Los Angeles and 1948 in New York).

At the end of the 1970s, musicologist Berndt Heller attempted a reconstruction of Regen with Eisler's film music. Since the Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam only had a collection of fragmentary versions, Heller looked for more complete versions. The Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels owned the 1932 version with Lichtveld's music, but Heller ultimately used the even longer original version from 1929 for his reconstruction, which was kept in the Museum of Modern Art and the Moscow Film Archive, among other places. It turned out, however, that the reconstruction published in 1980 was not synchronized with the image and sound . Only after the original music recordings from 1941 were rediscovered in 2002 was it possible to prove that Eisler had chosen not the original version but the arrangement from 1932 as the basis for his music. Regen was restored again , and in 2005 the restored original version from 1929, the adaptation from 1932 and the reconstructed version with Eisler's film music were jointly released on DVD by the European Foundation Joris Ivens.

reception

Although rain was just the beginning of the 60-year career of the documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, it is now one of the Dutchman's most famous films. Regen differs fundamentally from Ivens' later work, which addressed political and social issues. For the film historian Charles Musser, Ivens' development from avant-garde filmmaker to politically committed documentary filmmaker is representative of the entire development of the film genre in the 1930s.

Contemporary reviews described Regen as a "ciné poeme", as a cinematic poem. The France correspondent for the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Couran compared the impression of rain during a screening in Paris with the intoxicating effects of opium . A few days before the official premiere, De Nieuwe Rotterdammer praised Ivens' and Franconia's "exceptionally beautiful and sharp, often witty view" on the subject of "rain". Marxist film critic Harry A. Potamkin, on the other hand, described Regen as the most interesting objective study of sobriety he has ever seen.

Film critics saw Regen in the tradition of the New Objectivity , whereby Ivens, in the opinion of his companion Henrik Scholte, acted more as an engineer than as a poet. The Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs described Regen in his book The Spirit of Film , published in 1930, as an example of an absolute film in which only the optical impression, not the facts, are decisive. The rain shown in the film is not a specific rain that fell somewhere. “No conception of space or time holds these impressions together,” says Balázs. Only these impressions are important, and only the picture is the reality.

The Dutch film critic LJ Jordaan, on the other hand, saw the influence of the poet Mannus Franken, which is expressed in the subtle romanticism of the film , in addition to Ivens' flair for technical subtleties in the implementation of Regen 30 years later .

Modern film scholars place Regen as part of the European avant-garde movement in line with other “big city symphonies ” such as Walter Ruttmann's Berlin - The Symphony of the Big City or Dsiga Wertow's The Man with the Camera . According to the film historian Richard M. Barsam, Ivens and Frankens Regen should be viewed more like a sonata than Ruttmann's Berlin Symphony . Rain offers a lyrical, impressionistic picture of a city. For the historian Erik Barnouw finally rain perhaps the best example of a "painter-as-documentarian film" (painter as documentarist) .

In 2007, Regen was included in the Dutch film canon as one of 16 films. The selection was made by a commission of experts headed by politician Jeltje van Nieuwenhoven . Rain is the oldest of four documentaries on the list and Ivens' only film to be included in the film canon.

literature

  • Joris Ivens: The Camera and I . International Publishers, New York 1969.
  • Hans Schoots: Living Dangerously. A Biography of Joris Ivens . Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2000, ISBN 90-5356-388-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joris Ivens: The Camera and I , p. 34.
  2. ↑ Hans Schoots: Living Dangerously. A Biography of Joris Ivens , p. 54.
  3. ^ Joris Ivens: The Camera and I , p. 36.
  4. ^ Joris Ivens: The Camera and I , p. 37.
  5. ↑ Hans Schoots: Living Dangerously. A Biography of Joris Ivens , p. 56.
  6. ↑ Hans Schoots: Living Dangerously. A Biography of Joris Ivens , pp. 59-60.
  7. ↑ Hans Schoots: Living Dangerously. A Biography of Joris Ivens , p. 64.
  8. ↑ Hans Schoots: Living Dangerously. A Biography of Joris Ivens , p. 66.
  9. ↑ Hans Schoots: Living Dangerously. A Biography of Joris Ivens , p. 173.
  10. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Hanns Eisler: Composition for the film . With an afterword by Johannes C. Gall. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-518-58461-8 , p. 178.
  11. ↑ Berndt Heller: The Reconstruction of Eisler's Film Music: 'Opus III', 'Regen' and 'The Circus' . In: Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television , Vol. 18, No. 4, 1998, pp. 541-559.
  12. ^ Johannes C. Gall: A Rediscovered Way to Describe Rain? On the Trail of a Sound Version, Unseen and Unheard for 57 Years . In: European Foundation Joris Ivens Newsmagazine No. 10, 2004, pp. 3-8.
  13. ^ Charles Musser: Engaging with Reality . In: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Ed.): The Oxford History of World Cinema . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996. ISBN 0-19-874242-8 , p. 322.
  14. ^ Joris Ivens: The Camera and I , p. 37.
  15. ^ Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, February 11, 1930; quoted in Hans Schoots: Living Dangerously. A Biography of Joris Ivens , pp. 56-57.
  16. ↑ a b quoted on the website of the European Foundation Joris Ivens (accessed on June 24, 2011).
  17. ↑ Henrik Scholte: Joris Ivens . In: Filmliga , December 1929, pp. 22-23.
  18. ^ Béla Balázs: The spirit of the film . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-29137-8 , pp. 86-87.
  19. ↑ LJ Jordaan: 50 jaar bioscoopfauteuil . Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1958, 149.
  20. ^ Edward S. Small: Direct Theory. experimental film / video as major genre . Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1994, ISBN 0-8093-1920-9 , pp. 34-35.
  21. ↑ Richard M. Barsam: Nonfiction Film: A Critical History . Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1992, ISBN 0-253-20706-1 , p. 63.
  22. ^ Erik Barnouw: Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film . Oxford University Press, New York 1974, pp. 78-80
  23. ↑ NRC Handelsblad : Zestien films in Canon van de Nederlandse Film ( Memento of the original from March 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / vorige.nrc.nl archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , September 12, 2007 (accessed June 24, 2011).