Joris Ivens

Georg Henri Anton "Joris" Ivens (18 November 1898 – 28 June 1989) was a Dutch documentary filmmaker. Among the notable films he directed or co-directed are A Tale of the Wind, The Spanish Earth, Rain, ...A Valparaiso, Misère au Borinage (Borinage), 17th Parallel: Vietnam in War, The Seine Meets Paris, Far from Vietnam, Pour le Mistral and How Yukong Moved the Mountains.

Born Georg Henri Anton Ivens on 18 November 1898 at Nijmegen, Netherlands, into a wealthy family, Ivens went to work in one of his father's photo supply shops and from there developed an interest in film. Under the direction of his father, he completed his first film at the age of 13: a silent short titled Wigwam (Shining Ray).

He studied first at the Rotterdam School of Economics (1916–17, 1920–21), before serving as a field artillery lieutenant in World War I. In 1922 and 1923 he studied photochemistry in Germany.

Returning to Amsterdam in 1926, he joined the family business, but left around 1929 after his first two films were met with acclaim.

Originally his work was constructivist in character, especially his short city symphonies Rain (Regen, 1929), which he directed together with Mannus Franken, filmed over two years, and The Bridge (De Brug, 1928). The latter was about a newly built elevator railway bridge in Rotterdam, shot in 1927, and shown in 1928 by the Nederlandsche Filmliga (Netherlands Film League) (1927–1933). This avant-garde cineclub, with its eponymous magazine, had just been established by Ivens, Menno ter Braak, and others, with branches in different Dutch cities. The Bridge was part of its first season of film screenings, and received critical acclaim. The Filmliga drew various foreign filmmakers to the Netherlands, such as Alberto Cavalcanti, René Clair, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov, who also became Ivens' friends. Through these connections, The Bridge was widely shown abroad, including the Soviet Union.^{[citation needed]}

In 1929, Ivens went to the Soviet Union after being invited to present a lecture there, and due to the success of The Bridge, he was invited to direct a film on a topic of his own choosing, which was the new industrial city of Magnitogorsk. Before commencing work, he returned to the Netherlands to make Industrial Symphony for Philips Electric, which is considered to be a film of great technical beauty.

He returned to the Soviet Union to make the film about Magnitogorsk, Song of Heroes in 1931 with music composed by Hanns Eisler. This was the first film on which Ivens and Eisler worked together. It was a propaganda film about this new industrial city where masses of laborers and Communist youth worked for Stalin's Five Year Plan.

With Henri Storck, Ivens made Misère au Borinage (Borinage, 1933), a documentary on life in a coal mining region. In 1943, he also directed two Allied propaganda films for the National Film Board of Canada, including Action Stations, about the Royal Canadian Navy's escorting of convoys in the Battle of the Atlantic.