Cinema Without Borders: Films by Joris Ivens
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I have to confess that my acquaintance with Ivens’s work has been spotty, and it remains so, even though I recently crammed in several videos; 16 of his films will be showing in brand-new prints at the Gene Siskel Film Center over the next three weeks, part of a traveling show that started in New York and will end in Vancouver. One Ivens film–his last, A Tale of the Wind (1988)–easily made my list of the 15 best films of the 80s, but I’ve seen only a few other works, and at such scattered intervals that I scarcely know how to put the pieces together. It hasn’t helped that many of his major works in the Film Center series weren’t available for preview, that most of those that were weren’t subtitled (though all the publicly screened prints will be), and that some major works aren’t even included in this retrospective–none of which is surprising given the dimensions of his oeuvre.
You won’t find an entry for Ivens in the long-out-of-print Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (1980), an invaluable collection edited by Richard Roud that sums up what American, English, and French film critics were doing in the 60s and 70s better than any other comparable compilation that comes to mind. But you can find a detailed entry in World Film Directors (1987), edited by John Wakeman and still in print. The life it outlines is staggering–making a Marxist globe-trotter like John Reed (1887-1920), who admittedly lived only about a third as long, seem like a couch potato.
