Joris Ivens
1898-1989
Joris Ivens, the Dutch creator of more than 50 documentary films, many of them about revolutionary struggle, died Wednesday at Laennec Hospital in Paris. He was 90 years old. Mr. Ivens, who made a cowboys-and-Indians movie, ''Flaming Arrow,'' featuring his family at the age of 13, viewed documentaries as a way to improve the human condition and said they were ''deeper and more personal than newsreel truth.'' Early films by Mr. Ivens, a founder of the Dutch film industry, included ''The Bridge,'' a rhythmic 1928 study of the structure and functions of a Rotterdam drawbridge; ''Zuiderzee,'' a 1930 record of the Herculean task of reclaiming the flood plain for farming; ''Song of Heroes,'' a 1932 report on the construction of blast furnaces in Siberia, and ''Borinage,'' a stark 1933 account of a strike by Belgian coal miners. His early films tended to be experimental and lyrical while the later ones were more realistic, socially concerned and polemical. Spanish Civil War Film The film was made on battlegrounds and in a war-ravaged village on the Madrid-Valencia road with a movingly understated commentary written and spoken by Ernest Hemingway and a score of Spanish country music arr…
Films