Ardengo Soffici, Still life with red egg (1914).
After a critical review that Soffici wrote on the futurist exhibition in Milan (1911), Fillippo Marinetti and other futurists cornered him at a café in Florence. Later they turned out to be united in their admiration for Mussolini.
Free download of Living Dangerously. A Biography of Joris Ivens
This is the first book to survey the entire career of Joris Ivens, a prolific documentary filmmaker, who worked on every continent except Antarctica over the course of over six decades.
'The best book written on Ivens' (Prof. Ian Buruma, Bard College, Annandale (NY); former chief editor of The New York Review of Books).
'An essential addition to the literature on the documentary in English.' (Prof. Brian Winston in Viewfinder, London).
More on Joris Ivens, also in English: continue...
_________________________________________________
THE AVANT-GARDES ADAPTABILITY...
By Hans Schoots - Close Up 16: Schriften aus dem Haus des Dokumentarfilms (Stuttgart/Konstanz 2003) - The German filmmaker Walter Ruttmann and the Dutch dealer in photographic
equipment Joris Ivens met for the first time in the fall of 1927. At the time
Ivens was living in Amsterdam and had gone to Berlin to invite Ruttmann to
visit the Dutch Filmliga, an organization promoting film art of which Ivens
was a member of the board. On November 19 of that year, the German avant-garde
artist did indeed give a lecture in Amsterdam's Centraal Theater, showing
his abstract films OPUS 2, 3 en 4 for the first time in the Netherlands.
Speaking about his first encounter with Ruttmann, Ivens later said: 'From
our perspective in faraway Holland, Ruttmann was an artistic giant, but when
I saw him at close hand, wrestling with an old, poorly equipped camera, and
limited by a lack of craftsmanship, I realized that from a technical point
of view I was more than his equal.' This was a slight exaggeration. At that
time Ruttmann had owned a Debrie camera for years (between the wars a quality
outfit for any documentary filmmaker), he had developed his own animation
equipment , and above all: he had just finished his masterpiece: BERLIN, DIE
SINFONIE EINER GROßSTADT. Ivens had indeed received an education in
photographic and film technique at the Technische Hochschule at Berlin-Charlottenburg
between 1921 and 1924, but in 1927 he had not yet completed a film, and in
the beginning he would work with a Kinamo handheld 35 mm camera that was intended
for the use of wealthy amateurs.
Nonetheless, his visit to Ruttmann encouraged Ivens to make his first complete
film: DE BRUG (THE BRIDGE). Although Ivens valued the surrealism of the French
avant-garde, the new fiction films from the Soviet Union and the pure abstraction
of Richter, Eggeling and the early Rutttmann films, he was much more inspired
by the Neue Sachlichkeit of BERLIN, DIE SINFONIE EINER GROßSTADT. Ivens
was a matter-of-fact technician with a great belief in technological progress
and a natural orientation towards visible reality, and this film showed him
how to become an innovative artist. In DE BRUG he filmed the
reality of a modern industrial product according to the aesthetics of 'rhythm
and movement', the standing expression in the Dutch Filmliga.
Ruttmann also became the great example for writer Menno ter Braak, the leading
theoretician of the Filmliga. For him and his followers, BERLIN exemplified
true cinematic art. The magazine Filmliga wrote: 'Here, for the first
time, one could probably risk using the words "lasting value".'
It is no coïncidence that the first book on Ruttmann was published in
the Netherlands. In this modest 1956 publication, Walter Ruttmann en het
beginsel (Walter Ruttmann and the Principle), film critic A. van
Domburg explained that the artistic credo, as expressed in Ruttmann's work
as a whole, represented the definitive truth on film art. He still considered
Ruttmann 'the soundest filmmaker in the world'.
On first sight, the story of Walter Ruttmann and Joris Ivens between the
wars can be summarized in the following manner. In the twenties they were
part of the international avant-garde movement; the work they did in the late
twenties belonged to the school of Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity. They
both had intensive contacts in the artistic circles of several countries:
Ruttmann was an active participant in the avant-garde movements in Germany
and France and also worked in Italy. From his base in Amsterdam, Ivens regularly
visited artists in Berlin, Paris and, from 1930, Moscow. It was partly due
to Ivens's many international contacts that, apart from Ruttmann, other leading
figures in the international avant-garde, people like Hans Richter, Germaine
Dulac, René Clair, Alberto Cavalcanti, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod
Pudovkin, made appearances at the Filmliga in Amsterdam.
Then in the thirties, Ruttmann and Ivens suddenly went completely different
ways. The former worked in Nazi-Germany from 1933, the latter became a member
of the Communist Party in 1931 and worked in the Soviet Union for three years
between 1931 and 1936. Ruttmann died in 1941, and in the forty-eight years
that Ivens outlived him, he never uttered a word about Ruttmann's work from
the thirties. Ivens must have missed most of it, but then, he never seems
to have wondered about it either: his former role model had gone over to the
enemy camp.
This résumé however does not do justice to the complexity of
what happened between the world wars, to the avant-garde, to documentary film,
or to the lives and work of these two filmmakers.
Avant-garde: social change by aesthetic means
Avant-garde remains a problematic term in the history of cinema. Illustrative
is the case of German expressionism in film, which, as Thomas Elsaesser argues,
was a use of stylistic elements to give industry an artistic image rather
than an artistic movement as such. Between this one extreme and the 'pure'
independent film, which is considered to be high art, lies the gray area where
Soviet innovators like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin operated within
the film industry of their country, and of French avant-gardists like Alberto
Cavalcanti and Marcel l'Herbier, who alternately worked within and outside
of the established industrial system.
Still, the term avant-garde remains useful, especially to indicate those experimental
filmmakers who considered themselves part of the avant-garde movement that
existed in the traditional arts as well, and that several of them originated
from, like the painters Walter Ruttmann and Hans Richter.
The cinematic avant-garde had its variations, stretching from the surrealistic
dream images of Germaine Dulac to the steel constructions of Ivens's DE BRUG,
just as in painting the mystic realism of Marc Chagall went with the stern
modernism of Piet Mondrian. The artistic avant-garde nevertheless had some
important unifying characteristics. First of all there was the general conviction
that new art had a task in creating a new society. Starting from aesthetics,
it would lead the way to a better world. Expressionists and surrealists thought
this could be done by fundamentally changing the mentality of the individual,
whereas futurism, constructivism and Neue Sachlichkeit celebrated a new industrial
future and tried to give it form. As Peter Bürger wrote in Theorie
der Avantgarde: 'The avant-gardists consider it to be the dominating characteristic
of art in bourgeois society that it is divorced from the practice of social
life. […] Therefore, the avant-gardists intend to liquidate art - liquidation
in the Hegelian sense of the word: art should not simply be destroyed, but
should be integrated into social practice, where it would continue to exist
in a different form. […] They try, starting from art, to organize a new
social practice.'
An unending flow of militant manifestos and pamphlets, an urge for sensational
public manifestations and, of course, a permanent desire to cross all boundaries
in art itself were expressions of a generally felt radicalism among the avant-garde.
Despite the regularly occurring sectarian confrontations that are by nature
a part of radicalism, the universal ambitions of the avant-garde went together
with interdisciplinary thinking and a strong feeling of international unity:
artistic disciplines became interconnected in the service of a greater vision.
Numerous contacts developed between filmmakers, painters, writers, photographers,
architects and designers, and many of them became active in several disciplines.
From the beginning this desire to change the world by aesthetic means, to
integrate art and social practice, did lead to a tendency to link up with
political and economic powers. Initially the idea seems to have been: as long
as the world is turned upside-down it doesn't matter how it is done.
From 1915 the Italian futurists around Filippo Marinetti supported Benito
Mussolini, hoping that in this way they would be able to realize their own
visions of a new world. In 1919 Marinetti became a member of the Central Committee
of the Fascist party. With similar expectations, the Russian futurists took
the side of the Bolshevik party in 1917. In Germany artists from the Dada
and expressionist movements, like George Grosz and Erwin Piscator, joined
the communists or radical socialists after the revolution of 1918, and the
French surrealists led by André Breton became members of the French
Communist Party in 1927. In the meantime other - and partly the same - avant-gardists
designed modern buildings, industrial products and advertisements for capitalist
enterprises and democratic governments, just as Walter Gropius did at the
Bauhaus and in the United States.
At this early stage, the avant-garde seemed to be compatible with fascism,
communism and liberal capitalism. National-socialism would follow.
A mixture of left and right
Despite all their political connections, avant-garde artists kept some kind
of political innocence for quite some time. They cherished the illusion that
they would be able to play a decisive role as equal partners of the political
'avant-gardes' in an alliance between new aesthetics and revolutionary politics.
In a process of years, the Italian and Soviet regimes in particular - the
latter with considerable international influence through the Communist International
- would succeed in making art serve their own ends. A section of the artistic
avant-garde came to accept the primacy of politics, in the continuing belief
that, despite everything, a common ground with the political leadership still
existed. In this sense, the events of 1932 and 1933, when socialist realism
became party doctrine in the Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler came to power in
Germany, were not the beginning of a new era for the avant-garde, but rather
one more step in a voluntary process of politicization that had been going
on since World War I.
In the second and third decade of the twentieth century, different political
and economic connections did not preclude contacts between artists. Russian
and Italian futurists continued their hearty relationships for a time, despite
the fact that they had linked up with communism and fascism respectively.
From 3 to 7 September 1929 representatives of at least ten countries met in
harmony at the International Congress for Independent Film in La Sarraz, Switzerland,
the most important international film avant-garde gathering of the decade.
Among them were Ruttmann and Richter from Germany, Eisenstein from the Soviet
Union and Dutch filmmaker Mannus Franken on behalf of the Filmliga. Enrico
Prampolini, who represented the cineclub movement in Italy, announced that
the fascist government would reorganize the movement and put it under the
leadership of Marinetti. Government film production would from now on be under
the aegis of futurism and have 'absolute independence', he further declared.
Nobody present seems to have questioned this premise.
In the artistic circles to which Ivens and Ruttmann belonged, left and right
were mixed in the twenties. Ivens, despite his own leanings to the left, collaborated
with the infamous Dutch Mussolini-admirer Erich Wichman in 1927-1928 on a
film called DE ZIEKE STAD (THE SICK CITY). The two had been friends since
the early twenties when they both stayed in Berlin. Wichman was the anti-bourgeois
artist par excellence and a popular figure among Dutch avant-gardists.
In Italy he had been in contact with Marinetti.
According to Wichman's scenario
for DE ZIEKE STAD, the film was to show that Amsterdam was doomed unless rightist
anti-democratic measures were taken. Ivens seemingly only shot some (now lost)
fragments of the never finished film. The Dutch expressionist poet Hendrik
Marsman, who had been among Ivens's intimates since his Berlin days, also
sympathized with Mussolini for a time. He was the author of the words that
became famous in Holland as an expression of the feelings of the avant-garde,
regardless of political boundaries: 'Spectacular and moving is the life I
want! You hear me, father, mother, world, charnel house!'
Among Dutch artists and intellectuals who wanted to remodel the world according
to their new aesthetic criteria, a tendency existed towards a vague, anti-democratic
elitism: of course the new world would not result from the decisions of the
gray majority, it would result from the power of enlightened minds.
Walter Ruttmann, in his turn, was a member of the board of honor of the left-leaning
Volksverband für Filmkunst, together with the communist theater director
Erwin Piscator. In 1931, two years before he cooperated on the national-socialist
film BLUT UND BODEN, Ruttmann still considered working for the Mezhrapbom
Studio in Moscow. That this did not materialize, seems to be due more to Moscow
than to Ruttmann. In the same year Hans Richter went to Mezhrabpom, to work
on his unfinished METALL, about the repression by Stahlhelm troops
of a steelworkers' strike in the German town of Henningsdorf.
Even in the thirties political contradictions did not always weigh very heavily.
Right after making a promotion film for the Dutch capitalist electronics company
Philips, Joris Ivens rushed to Magnitogorsk in the Urals to film an ode to
socialist industry. Actually, Richter had also just made a film for Philips,
called EUROPA RADIO , before going to the Soviet Union for METALL. Pragmatic
considerations and self-interest must have played a role in all this. There
was however also an underlying feeling that made these seemingly incompatible
activities permissible even in terms of content.
The age of industry
Now that the era of great ideologies lies behind us, we can zoom back and
look at the years between the world wars from some distance and see that liberal
capitalism, communism, fascism and national-socialism, despite all their differences,
do have an important thing in common: a belief in progress through industrialization
and mass production.
In his youth, Joris Ivens learned from his broadminded liberal father Kees
Ivens that technology was the key to social progress. His father was an enthused
advocate of this vision in the Dutch city of Nijmegen. At the end of the nineteenth
century, the ancestral home was one of the first local houses where electricity
and other modern innovations were introduced. Ivens senior also initiated
the building of a large steel bridge over the Waal River and other modern
projects.
One could say that communism drove the liberal belief in progress to its limits,
just as Karl Marx developed his economic theories, based on 'the development
of the forces of production', partly from those of the liberal Adam Smith.
Lenin in his turn simply declared that 'Communism is Soviet power plus the
electrification of the whole country'. In his book The Fellow Travellers.
A Postscript to the Enlightenment, David Caute argued that much of the
attraction of the Soviet Union for artists and intellectuals from the West
derived from the feeling that Soviet communism 'signified a return to the
eighteenth century vision of a rational, educated, scientific society based
on the maximization of resources and the steady improvement (if not perfection)
of human nature…' Other authors, like the French historian François
Furet, also analyzed communism as an extreme variation on the ideas of the
Enlightenment. When Benito Mussolini was still a radical socialist, he could
be placed in this same tradition, and elements of this thinking remained during
his fascist period. In the twenties, Mussolini stressed the need for modernization
of the backward Italian society, using catchwords like 'dynamic', 'vitality'
and 'youth' that had much in common with the terminology of the futurists.
Adolf Hitler used a highly symbolic Soviet term when he introduced his Four
Year Plans (although the Soviet Union had Five Year Plans). Although economic
development in Germany was probably less planned and centrally-led than the
words 'four year plan' suggest, they still express the Nazis' desire to build
up a powerful, modern economy. And contrary to Stalin, they already had one
of the world's most developed economies at their disposal.
In the debate on cinema in Nazi Germany, several authors have pointed at the
reality of consumerism in Nazi Germany and the glorification of industry in
Nazi thinking, partly influenced by 'reactionary modernists' or 'conservative
revolutionaries' like Ernst Jünger, who saw industry as an essential
characteristic of the new society. Whereas the basic idea of Marxism was that
human progress is an unending struggle against nature, Nazi ideology
played on popular fear of an uncertain, ever-changing future by suggesting
that tradition and unspoiled nature would remain uncompromised despite modern
technology and mass consumption. But 'when ideology came into conflict with
economic facts, it was ideology that had to give way'.
Maximum industrial development was of course also a practical precondition
for the realization of other Nazi goals: an efficient war industry to conquer
Lebensraum and a strong German economy that was to be the motor for
a Großraum Europa, once conquered. Racism and the modern finally
met in Auschwitz and other camps, where the Jews were to be destroyed by rational,
industrial means.
'The cinematic expression of the twentieth century production
line manufacturer'
In the thirties Joris Ivens and Walter Ruttmann, although working under
communism or nazism, in many ways kept to the ideas of Neue Sachlichkeit,
which, like futurism and constructivism, idealized modern life and industrial
society, striving to integrate its spirit into the arts and, inversely, hoping
to aesthetically give form to this new society of industry, speed and dynamism.
Technology was progress, technology was beauty - it was an ideal and an aesthetic
practice in one.
Despite the opposite political directions they took, their work continued
to show many similarities well into the thirties. This applies first of all
to their films concerning industry and new technology. For Ivens these were,
starting from 1930: ZUIDERZEE/NIEUWE GRONDEN (NEW EARTH), PHILIPS RADIO, CREOSOOT
(CREOSOTE), PESN O GEROJACH (SONG OF HEROES) and BORINAGE. Ruttmann's films
in this field were ACCIAIO, METALL DES HIMMELS, SCHIFF IN NOT, MANNESMANN,
IM ZEICHEN DES VERTRAUENS, WELTSTRASSE SEE-WELTHAFEN HAMBURG, HENKEL-EIN DEUTSCHES
WERK IN SEINER ARBEIT, DEUTSCHE WAFFENSCHMIEDEN and DEUTSCHE PANZER.
How much they had in common becomes clear when we concentrate on a more or
less representative selection from these films: the Ivens films PHILIPS RADIO
(1931) and PESN O GEROJACH (1933) and the Ruttmann films METALL DES HIMMELS
(1935), MANNESMANN (1937) en DEUTSCHE WAFFENSCHMIEDEN (1940). At the time
Joris Ivens called his PHILIPS RADIO 'the cinematic expression of a, rather,
the twentieth century production line manufacturer'. PHILIPS RADIO
was not a socially critical film, it expressed what Marxists would call a
'classless' view of society. Nowhere in this film could any sign be found
of Ivens's communist beliefs, on the contrary, he emphasized the things that
linked him to capitalism: pure avant-garde aesthetics confirmed and
stressed the beauty of the industrial process. Later, Ivens sometimes suggested
that PHILIPS RADIO needed to be seen as an anti-capitalist film, but this
view is hard to uphold. The sequence that he invoked for this purpose, the
one that shows how arduous the work of glassblowers is, does not say anything
for or against their situation. The workers in Ivens's socialist PESN O GEROJACH
had to work a lot harder under worse circumstances and nevertheless these
were presented in a positive way, whereas Philips's glassblowers were shown
in a neutral mode. No wonder that most critics in Holland found that, although
Ivens had made a beautiful film, it lacked interest in working people. In
fact, the sequence on the glassblowers gave first of all a sympathetic view
of these workers because of their impressive skills, with the professional
peculiarity that, while blowing, their cheeks became extremely swollen: like
Dizzie Gillespie playing trumpet.
Even Ivens's PESN O GEROJACH could, despite the obvious communist propaganda,
be read as a great, archetypal ode to industrialization in general. This was
also recognized at the time by his ideological rivals at the main Dutch social-democratic
newspaper Het Volk. Its critic called PESN O GEROJACH 'the most beautiful
symphony on labor ever made' , that is, not of manual labor as such, but of
labor for the construction of an industrial society. A main theme of the film
was that peasants should leave their backward past behind for work in industry.
It has been rightly argued in various ways that Walter Ruttmann, especially
in his industrial films, kept to the same stylistic ideas that he had cherished
in the late twenties. Indeed, Ruttmann too could have called his MANNESMANN
'the cinematic expression of a, rather, the twentieth century production
line manufacturer'. Only one shot of a flag with swastika betrayed to audiences
that this film had been made in a factory in Nazi Germany, and some innocent
images showing the beauty of the forests, refer to that other aspect of Nazi-ideology:
the glorification of unspoiled nature. METALL DES HIMMELS, in unequivocal
avant-garde aesthetics, tells us that steel is useful everywhere, from kitchen
to battlefield. But which army, and whose battles were shown? Visually it
all remained abstract, only this time the commentary linked some of the images
to German revanchism. It is significant that, eleven years after the end of
World War II, Dutch author A.van Domburg could discuss METALL DES HIMMELS
in his book Ruttmann en het beginsel without any reference to a possible
political meaning.
DEUTSCHE WAFFENSCHMIEDEN, with its 'soldiers' fighting the same struggle on
two fronts, in industry and on the battlefield, brings to mind Ernst Jünger's
'reactionary modernist' vision of future society as described in his book
Der Arbeiter (The Worker): a society organized as an army, in
which workers are soldiers and soldiers workers, in which state and factory
are integrated like a beehive, and everybody is ready for battle. Just as
in Ruttmann's other war propaganda-film DEUTSCHE PANZER, however, the aesthetics
of Neue Sachlichkeit did not combine very well with the film's political aims.
Ruttmann's usual abstract images of industry and his lack of interest in the
workers' and soldiers' emotions cannot have had much propaganda impact on
the audience. Just as Martin Loiperdinger writes in his analysis of the film:
'All enthousiasm is lacking', and:'Thus, as an artistic end in itself, formalism
comes between those who commissioned the film and the audience'. His conclusion:
'In METALL DES HIMMELS and DEUTSCHE PANZER Neue Sachlichkeit and National-Socialism
did not become very close after all,' is not, however, fully satisfactory.
Even if ineffective, these Ruttmann films remain propaganda. They at least
try to express a political view and the heroic workers' and soldiers' faces
suggest that Ruttmann was doing his best. In earlier work, such as his city
films on Stuttgart and Düsseldorf, he had been more succesfull in combining
his modern style with less modern demands of the prevailing ideology. Rather
than showing an incompatibility with Nazism, his 'war-films' seem to expose
the difficulty he faced in uniting various aspects within Nazi-ideology.
The Neue Sachlichkeit we find in films under liberal capitalism, Nazism and
communism, emphasizes the similarities in social systems that were so different
in many other ways. Industry, mass production, 'the twentieth century
production line' and the speed of life were a dominating force in all of them.
Authors under commission
In the thirties Ruttmann and Ivens both made their films under commission
from a great variation of institutions. Ivens worked for, among others, the
Dutch social-democratic construction-workers union, the Philips company, the
European timber industry, the Mezhrabpom Studio in the Soviet Union, several
communist-led committees in America, and the United States Department of Agriculture.
Ruttmann worked for, amongst others, a studio in Mussolini's Italy, the German
Advisory Board for the use of steel, the German Lifeboat Association, the
Mannesmann, Bayer and Henkel companies, the Warehouse Association in the port
of Hamburg, several German city councils and the German state. Most of these
ordered their films at Ufa Werbefilm, where Ruttmann was employed from 1935.
In Claiming the Real Brian Winston writes - referring to John Grierson's
definition of documentary as 'the creative treatment of actuality' - that
the main aim of his book is 'to argue that running from social meaning is
an inevitable structural flaw in any film which creatively treats actuality
in the name of public information, education, social purpose, or what you
will - whoever makes it. That is why wherever and whenever such work has been
undertaken it has almost always reproduced on the screen the facile attention
to surface detail, and little else, which characterizes the Griersonian oeuvre.'
He supports his proposition with, amongst other things, a convincing comparison
of British, American, German and Soviet documentaries, which turn out to possess
in many ways the same flaws that he notes in Grierson's. An obvious reason
for this is, of course, that the filmmaker was subservient to whoever commissioned
his film and tended to leave out things the commissioning person or body objected
to.
Nevertheless, many of these documentarists remained convinced of their own
independence, and even those who commissioned the films spoke in similar terms.
The Italian representatives at La Sarraz in 1929 could announce in one breath
that the fascist state was going to reorganize their cineclub movement and
that state filmmaking would have 'absolute independence'. In the twenties
Walter Ruttmann himself had set his hopes on the state for defending independent
cinematography, but he became disappointed by the inactivity of the German
government. In another Germany, in 1942, the Reichsfilmintendant Dr.
Hippler left no doubt that 'Gesamtplanung' was necessary, while immediately
adding: 'There is no other artistic discipline, where it is more difficult
for the loner, the avant-gardist, the pioneer, the man with new ideas, to
succeed, than in film. But within film, he doesn't have better chances anywhere
else than in Kulturfilm.'
When Joris Ivens went from Moscow to the United
States in 1936, he got orders from the Mezhrabpom Studio 'to stimulate independent
film production and the film movement for the popular front', in which 'independent'
and 'popular front' were considered almost interchangeable terms. 'Popular
front'-organizations were generally led by the communist party, sometimes
with Ivens himself as its main representative. The conviction of filmmakers
of being independent had its roots in the avant-garde of the twenties, which
wanted to make film into art by becoming independent of the entertainment
industry. Even in 1942 Dr. Hippler kept this feeling alive by making a
sharp distinction between Kulturfilms and fiction films: 'In contrast to the
latter, the great Kulturfilms however were usually the work of an obsessed
and fanatical loner'. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels too saw an antagonism
between the commercialism of 'Rentabilitätsbonzen' and individual
film artists, and wanted to strengthen the position of the latter… by
rigid state control. Filmmakers, especially in documentary, had a false feeling
of independence because those who commissioned their films allowed them to
continue working outside of the entertainment industry. In describing the
position of Leni Riefenstahl in Nazi-Germany, Rainer Rother summarizes this
two-faced situation in the expression 'Autorin im Auftrag': author under commission.
As we have seen before, there is a third side to the matter: filmmakers like
Joris Ivens and Walter Ruttmann actually had many ideas in common with those
who commissioned their films, stretching from a common belief in industrialization
to complete political and ideological agreement. Ivens cherished deep communist
convictions. Ruttmann's case is less clear, as up till now, biographical information
on his life in the thirties is scarce. But information in Jean Paul Goergen's
Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation, and of course some of Ruttmann's
films, and the content of his initial work on TRIUMPH DES WILLENS, do suggest
that he more or less sympathized with Nazism. This is, as we can now see,
not as contradictory to his avant-gardism as was thought in the past.
The fact remains that 'running away from social meaning' applies to most of
the films from the thirties by both Ivens and Ruttmann, not only because they
were commissioned films, but also because their makers omitted things that
did not fit into their own convictions. In Ivens's PESN O GEROJACH, the 35,000
forced laborers in Magnitogorsk, who had been deported for resisting collectivization
or for practicing their religion illegally, remain unmentioned, although Ivens
admitted knowledge of their presence fifty years later. The complete lack
of a critical note in Ruttmann's war propaganda may just as well have been
caused by his own convictions as by orders from above.
The 'facile attention to surface detail' that Winston points out has another
aspect as well. In the case of Neue Sachlichkeit, special attention to the
surface was not only a matter of superficiality. It also expressed the belief
of Ivens, Ruttmann and others that the external beauty of the modern world
was a result of its inner qualities.
Undermining Neue Sachlichkeit
Despite the continuities, it would of course be one-sided to suggest that
Ruttmann and Ivens went on in the thirties just as before. As the decade passed,
they became more and more immersed in the communist and Nazi worlds they were
part of. Where their modernism lasted, it was in specific variations consistent
with Nazism and communism. On the other hand, in many ways, their modernism
did give way to the 'anti-modern' elements present in both ideologies. One
could add that in liberal capitalism, Neue Sachlichkeit had to adapt to specific
demands too. Its artistic purity was inevitably lost as soon as it tried to
integrate in social practice, wherever it was.
Although in the work of Ruttmann, Neue Sachlichkeit remains prominent until his death in 1941, even in downright war propaganda, there still was also another tendency present in his work from 1933 onwards. The films that Ruttmann was involved in during the first years of Hitler's rule, BLUT UND BODEN (1933) and ALTGERMANISCHE BAUERNKULTUR (1934), were typified by William Uricchio as his 'initiation films': they seem to be meant to prove his loyalty to the new regime. 'In BLUT UND BODEN Ruttmann keeps to his dynamic vision of the city as rhythm, but in his narrative context, this serves as an explicit criticism of urban life - as compared to the extensive images of peaceful country life. This recanting in technical presentation as well as in his extremely positive vision of the city goes for his next city films as well,' writes Uricchio. In accordance with Nazi ideology, Ruttmann tried to show in these films that, although the modern city had become a fact of life, harmony and tradition prevailed.
In communist thinking, industrialization was considered the basis of social
progress. This did not mean, however, that modern art had more freedom under
communism than under Nazism, at least not in the thirties. Stalin needed the
support of the average worker and farmer. Avant-gardism had seldom appealed
to the broad masses of the population in any country. Despite the wishes of
experimental artists to play a role in society, they hardly ever succeeded
in (or were even prepared to try) expressing themselves in a language that
was understood by what one used to call 'the masses'. Although Stalin's turn
to socialist realism may have coincided with his cultural tastes, a more important
factor must have been his need for a culture that could bind a large part
of the population to his regime.
Categorical conclusions on Soviet non-fiction
film in the thirties are impossible, as very little research has been done
on the subject, as far as it concerns the period of the domination if socialist
realism. The aesthetics of Neue Sachlichkeit, as used by Ivens in PESN O GEROJACH,
probably influenced later Soviet-documentaries (Russian: kul'turfil'my) and
newsreels, especially on industrial and technological themes. But even in
industrial films, a narration inspired by fiction film was now demanded, as
Ivens experienced when his PESN O GEROJACH was criticized as being too formalistic.
Mainly influenced by discussions at Mezhrabpom in 1932-1933, Ivens declared
in 1934 that he had gone over to 'socialist realism'. He considered BORINAGE
(1934), co-directed with Henri Storck, to be the turning point. As his other
films of the period 1934-1936 are lost, it is difficult to say how he developed
stylistically in those years. His later work from the thirties, THE SPANISH
EARTH and THE 400 MILLION, made in the Spanish and Chinese wars, were certainly
social realistic documentaries with a political purpose. In SPANISH EARTH
the main subject was, apart from warfare itself, the irrigation of the land
of a relatively primitive agricultural cooperative, shown in a way that expressed
a belief in social and technological progress in the countryside, but in a
cinematic language that had left avant-gardism behind.
His break with avant-gardism in a way was less radical than he himself claimed.
He had made plain (social-)realist films in the twenties too, especially DE
NOOD IN DE DRENTSCHE VENEN (POVERTY IN THE BOGS OF DRENTE, 1929) and several
of the separate parts of his 141 minute trade-union film WIJ BOUWEN (WE ARE
BUILDING, 1930). Almost from the very beginning a social realistic and an
avant-gardistic mode were alternately present in his work.
Ivens has always used avant-gardism in a more pragmatic way than many of his
colleagues. He was a practical man, that is one of the reasons why Neue Sachlichkeit
appealed to him in the first place. Probably more than any other current in
the avant-garde, Neue Sachlichkeit was linked to utilitarian thinking. For
Ivens, it was not a big step to use a different style when social or political
circumstances seemed to require it. He himself had noted critically at an
early stage that the avant-garde remained largely isolated from 'the masses',
and especially in later years of ideological and political escalation, it
must not have been difficult to convince him of the advantages of social and
socialist realism.
Walter Ruttmann was, and stayed, more radical in his avant-gardism than Ivens
has ever been. The utilitarian side of Neue Sachlichkeit nevertheless turned
out to be part of his thinking too. The continuity in modernist content and
aesthetics in the work of Ruttmann, and to a lesser extend of Ivens, went
together with a preparedness to undermine these when it seemed useful.
Despite the smooth development of their work, from the twenties into the thirties,
a fundamental change had nevertheless taken place: starting out as avant-gardists
who wanted to change the world by aesthetic means, they had become 'authors
under commission'. Their art had become an instrument in the service of politics
and economics of the industrial era.
© Hans Schoots. This article (with notes) was published as Zooming out. Walter Ruttmann and Joris Ivens in: Peter Zimmermann und Kay Hoffmann (Hg), Triumph der Bilder. Kultur- und Dokumentarfilme vor 1945 im internationalen Vergleich. Close Up 16, Haus des Dokumentarfilms, Stuttgart / Konstanz 2003.
The book was published after the international film history congress 'Triumph der Bilder' in Berlin, 2000.
Haus des Dokumentarfilms: www.hdf.de
