Joris Ivens showed his last film, Une Histoire de Vent (A Tale of the WInd), at the 1988 Venice International Film Festival, where he received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement award. Filmed over a two year period, with his long-time collaborator Marceline Loridan, this marked the apex of sixty years of filmmaking for the "flying dutchman with a red heart." [whom the vagaries of our century always lured to places where cultural/peoples' destiny was being shaped by work or weapons]. Ivens was born in the Netherlands in 1898 and made his first film, a 7-minute western, at age 13. Among his early work were the impressionist films De Brug (the Bridge) and Regen (Rain), recording the struggle of men with the sea and the solidarity of striking miners in Belgium. He was invited to the Soviet Union [by Pudovkin] and in 1932 made a film about the construction of a steel plant in the Ural called Le Chant des Heros (The Heroes' Song). In 1936 the New Film Alliance invited Ivens to NY, where he started work on a project for the Rockfeller Foundation, but his stay in the US was interrupted by the Spanish Civil war. [He left for Spain and made Terre d'Espagne (Spain), "a film," as President Roosevelt said, "the world should see."] In 1938 Ivens went to China to bear witness against the Japanese invasion in his film The 400 million, and he spent the subsequent years of WW2 in the US and Canada. He worked on the Japanese chapter for the famous series What We Fought For./why are we fighting? directed by Frank Capra, though the American Military Authorities did not allow him to finsh editing the film, because they refused to consider the Emperor of Japan as a war criminal. Ivens was devoted to reporting and political documentary, and in the following years he became a citizen of he world, participating in various international projects. In 1945, while living in Australia, his support for the Indonesian struggle for independence cost him his Dutch passport, so for the next 10 years he made his home in Central Europe, living and working in Prague, Warsaw, Lodz and Berlin. With the cold war on the wane, in 1957 Ivens regained his passport, and moved to Paris to make his lyrical film La Seine a rencontré Paris, which received a Golden Palm at Cannes. He did not rest there long; in 1958 he made Early Spring in China and the following year he was invited to go to Italy by Enrico Mattei to make a sociological statement in the film Italy Is Not A Poor Country, for which Alberto Moravia wrote the text. He then traveled through Africa, documenting the process of emancipation and de-colonization in Chad, Senegal and Mali. He explored the same themes in Cuba and Chile in films which became increasingly lyrical without departing from his social concerns. 1964 marked a retrospective of his work in Holland, and the making of his long film-poem Le Mistral in France. From there he returned once more to Southeast Asia/the East, working on films in the war-torn Vietnam and Laos. His contintuing fascination with China led him there in 1971, and for the next 5 years Ivens and his collaborator, Marceline Loridan, documented daily life during the cultural revolution in their 12-hour series How Yukong Moved Mountains. A restrospective of his work in 1979 in Florence brought Ivens back to Europe for some years, and he lived in Italy and France until 1985; that year he received an official apology from the Dutch government. The following year, he returned to China with Loridan to make a project he had long dreamed of, Une Histoire de Vent (A Tale of the WInd). Many years in the [preparation and] making, this film poem delves into the mystical connection between earth, wind, water and cultural artifacts. It was to be his final film: intertwining reality and fantasy, it is an account of his life and work, entirely interconnected with each other (OR intertwining reality and fantasy, it portrays the fundamental fusion of life with his work). In it we see Ivens' intuition, courage, faith and hope, the philosophy of a man who was never an indifferent participant in the events of his century.
