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38 A Tale of the Wind Joris Ivens’s Last Testament ‘‘The Old Man, the hero of this tale, was born at the end of the last century, in a country where man has always striven to tame the sea and harness the wind. Camera in hand, he has traversed the twentieth century in the midst of the stormy history of our time. In the evening of his life, at age ninety, having survived the various wars and struggles that he filmed, the old filmmaker sets off for China. He has embarked on a mad project: to capture the invisible image of the wind.’’ That’s my translation of the French opening title of A Tale of the Wind. It follows the credits, which accompany shots of a plane flying through the clouds and Michel Portal’s primitive-modern jazz score for woodwinds and percussion. After the opening passage the giant blades of a Dutch windmill fill the screen, followed by shots of a little boy in an aviator suit on a windswept lawn, apparently preparing to fly away on a small plane to China, calling to his mother. Finally we see the filmmaker, Joris Ivens, at age ninety, sitting on a simple wooden chair in the middle of a vast Chinese desert, with a Chinese film and sound crew close at hand, waiting for the wind to arrive. 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 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 his 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 sixty 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 Prévert, Gérard Philipe, Lewis Milestone, Frank Capra, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès 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. A word of advice to film artists who want to get ahead: don’t move around too CLASSICS 39 much. Film history often gets subsumed under national film history, so filmmakers who keep moving risk getting lost. And stay out of politics, since getting into them invariably puts you on either the winning side or the losing side. If you’re on the losing side, many national film histories will write you out entirely; if you’re on the winning side, chances are your film will date faster than last week’s newspaper. As critic David Thomson once put it, Ivens ‘‘is like one of those long-serving suitcases held together by the labels of a lifetime’s travel,’’ and his lifetime’s travel virtually constitutes a twentieth-century history of socialist aspirations. Born in 1898 to a Dutch family heavily involved in still photography, he fought in World War I, became a student radical in Germany, managed his father’s camera shops in Amsterdam, and made his first professional films, The Bridge and Rain, around the age of thirty. Judging by the international reputation of these two films and of Philips Radio (1931), his first sound film, he comes from that heroic period in filmmaking when radical leftism, avant-gardism, abstraction, and formalism were wholly compatible and even complementary traits. 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...

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