The 400 Million

Joris Ivens (18 November 1898, Nijmegen – 28 June 1989, Paris) was a Dutch documentary filmmaker and committed communist.

Born into a wealthy family, Ivens went to work in his father’s photo supply shop and from there developed an interest in film. He completed his first film at 13; in college he studied economics with the goal of continuing his father’s business, but an interest in class issues distracted him from that path. Originally his work focused on technique – some argue that it had that focus at the cost of relevance, especially in Rain (Regen, 1929), a 10-minute short filmed over 2 years which features impressive cinematography and a number of ‘characters’ (but no information about them aside from what was visible) and in The Bridge (De Brug, 1928), which showed a frank admiration of engineering and also featured a number of “characters” but again did not give any information about them.

In 1931 Ivens went to the Soviet Union to make Song of Heroes, a propaganda film on the new industrial city of Magnitogorsk. This city was mainly built by forced labourers, who however were portrayed by Ivens as communist volunteers. Ivens later referred to these forced labourers as “weed”.
With Henri Storck, Ivens made Misère au Borinage (Borinage, 1933) with, a moving and militant documentary on life in a coal mining region. In 1943, he also directed two Allied propaganda films for the National Film Board of Canada.

From 1936 to 1945, Ivens was based in the United States and made anti-fascist and other propaganda films, including The Spanish Earth, for the Spanish loyalists, narrated by Ernest Hemingway. In 1938 he traveled to China. The 400 Million (1939) depicted the history of modern China and the resistance to the Japanese invasion, including dramatic shots of the Battle of Taierzhuang. Robert Capa did camerawork and Hanns Eisler wrote the musical score. The Guomindang government censored the film, fearing that it would give too much credit to left-wing forces. Owing to the emerging ‘red scare’ on known or suspected Communists by the US government, Ivens left the United States.

In 1946, commissioned to make a Dutch film about Indonesian ‘independence’, Ivens resigned out of protest of what he considered ongoing imperialism, the Dutch were resisting decolonization, and filmed Indonesia Calling in secret. For around a decade Ivens lived in Eastern Europe, working for several studios there. His position concerning Indonesia and his taking sides for the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War annoyed the Dutch government. Over a period of many years, he was obliged to renew his passport every three or four months. According to later mythology however, he lost his passport for ten years, which is not true. From 1965 to 1970 he filmed life in North Vietnam during the war: 17e parallèle: La guerre du peuple (17th Parallel: Vietnam in War) and participated in the collective work Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam).

From 1971 to 1977, he shot How Yukong Moved the Mountain, a 763-minute documentary about the Cultural Revolution in China. Ivens was knighted by the Dutch government in 1989, and died on 28 June that year. Shortly before his death he made the last of more than 40 films Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind).

Joris Ivens was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize for the year 1967. —Wikipedia