After his involvement in the foundation of the Dutch Filmliga (Film League), Joris Ivens (1898–1989) made De Brug (The Bridge, 1928) and Regen (Rain, 1929), two important contributions to the city symphony genre. After the Second World War, Ivens continued making poetic documentaries on cities, including La Seine a rencontré Paris (1957), À Valparaiso (1963), and Rotterdam Europoort (1966).
In the late 1920s, Ivens had praised Ruttmann’s Berlin, Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures, and several “other city films”—some of which were screened at the Filmliga. It comes as no surprise, then, that Ivens started his film career with several city film projects, both realized and unrealized. One of these experiments was Études des mouvements à Paris, made during the summer of 1927 upon visiting photographer Germaine Krull in the French capital. Not coincidentally, the film shows similarities with Krull’s photographs—many of them included in her 1929 book 100 x Paris. An opening panning shot of rooftops is followed by a high-angle shot of a traffic intersection, emphasizing the graphic patterns of the street layout and the tram tracks. Suddenly, Ivens switches to street level, showing a series of shots of bustling traffic and street life. Switching between the Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries, and the environs of the Opéra, Ivens demonstrates that Haussmann’s boulevards have turned Paris into a city of rapid circulation, as well as traffic jams.
However, Études des mouvements does not only deal with the movements of speeding traffic, it is an exercise in camera motion and montage rhythms as well. The film can be seen as almost a literal illustration of an article Ivens published in the first issue of Filmliga on the sequencing of film images. In contrast to the more observational The Bridge and Rain, Études des mouvements is first and foremost conceived in terms of the notion of cinéma pur. As in Henri Chomette’s Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (1925), the urban environment evaporates into a pure optical spectacle. Shots of vehicles shifting behind one another are reminiscent of similar footage in Ruttmann’s Berlin and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. In the Rue de Rivoli, the camera catches a car driving from left to right until it spots a vehicle approaching from the other side of the frame and follows it in opposite direction. Ivens’s Paris film presents itself as a cinematic equivalent of the mobile and restless gaze of the flâneur. Top shots of speeding cars alternate with extreme low-angles showing feet of pedestrians. Constantly panning and tilting, Ivens’s small handheld Kinamo camera is turned into a participant in the traffic, showing the city from the viewpoint of a moving car.
In contrast to The Bridge and Rain, hardly any information on the first screenings and the reception of this film is available. It is also hard to tell if Ivens himself considered it finished or not, saw it as an independent work, or whether he only saw it as a preparatory sketch for films to come. Its status is probably best indicated by its title, which has, like the term “symphony,” musical connotations. Particularly used by nineteenth-century composers, such as Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy, an Étude is an autonomous instrumental composition usually designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular skill. While Ruttmann’s Berlin might be considered a symphony for a large orchestra, Ivens’s film on the streets of Paris is a modest étude for the solo instrument of the camera.
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Bakker, Kees (ed.), Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999).
Ivens, Joris, The Camera and I (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1969).
Ivens, Joris, “Filmtechniek: Enige notities over de opvolging van de beelden in de film,” Filmliga 1 (September 1927): 40–1.
Ivens, Joris and Destanque, Robert, Aan welke kant en in welk heelal: De geschiedenis van een leven (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1983).
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