A TALE OF THE WIND
With Ivens, Loridan, Han Zenxiang, Liu Zhuang, Wang Delong, Wang Hong, Fu Dalin, Liu Guillian, Chen Zhijian, Zou Qiaoyu, and Paul Sergent.
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It’s been four years since this prophetic and poetic masterwork was made, and it’s just arriving in Chicago. But I wonder if we’re ready for it even now. For starters, what do we know about Joris Ivens? Although he’s generally considered to be one of only a handful of truly great documentary filmmakers, history and politics have conspired to make most of his work unavailable and unknown in this country. I suppose some would argue that this was partly Ivens’s fault–because he had the bad taste to become a communist filmmaker, and to work for much of his life in communist countries as opposed to the “free world.” Unfortunately, the freedoms granted in our “free world” haven’t yet included the opportunity to see most of Ivens’s work. He’s made more than 60 films, including antifascist work, work supporting Indonesian independence (which led to the withdrawal of his Dutch passport), and work in collaboration with Ernest Hemingway, Jacques Prevert, Gerard Philipe, Lewis Milestone, Frank Capra, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnes Varda (the last five worked with him on the 1967 sketch film Far From Vietnam). He died during the early summer of 1989, just before most of the communist world in the West collapsed.
Thanks to the impact of his early work, Ivens was invited by Vsevolod Pudovkin to make films in the Soviet Union, where he was the house guest of Sergei Eisenstein. That wasn’t the only country Ivens was to work in, however; his subsequent subjects in the 30s included Belgian coal miners (Borinage), the Spanish Civil War (The Spanish Earth), and the Japanese invasion of China (The 400 Million); then came bouts of work in the U.S. (1936, 1939-’42, 1944-’45), Canada (1942-’43), and Australia (1945-’46). After the House Un-American Activities Committee identified him as a communist during the witch-hunts, he was no longer welcome to live or work in the States and made his documentaries in Prague, Warsaw, Berlin, and Paris; then came work in China (1958), Italy (1959), Mali (1960), Cuba (1961), Chile (1962-’64), the Netherlands (1964), and Vietnam and Laos (1965, 1967-’69). His longest stint in one place was probably in China between 1971 and 1976, when he codirected the 12-hour, 14-part How Yukong Moved the Mountains with French filmmaker Marceline Loridan; otherwise, it appears that his main home bases in Europe were Paris and, more briefly (1979-’83), Florence.
Early in the film, we learn that Ivens suffers from asthma and has only one lung. Indeed, changes in his health while the film was being made became part of its texture and substance, and in some respects Ivens’s project to film the wind, which forms the principal narrative thread, is a search for the wellsprings of life itself.
Ivens’s travels along the Great Wall–“built 200 years before Christ by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang,” reads a printed title–eventually lead him to the site of the army of 7,000 clay warriors that guard that emperor’s tomb. After he and Loridan seek in vain for eight days to receive official permission to film this site however they see fit (“I’m fighting for my art and for my freedom of expression,” Ivens declares to the authorities) and are told they can only film for a total of ten minutes from eight approved camera angles, Ivens finally gives up, purchases models of the warrior statues, and winds up creating yet another Melies sequence of his own–one of the most stunning, magical, and beautiful in the film.
