Regen is a short film by Joris Ivens (1898–1989) about life in Amsterdam on a rainy day that was made in collaboration with Mannus Franken (1899–1953), who had made a short on Paris’s Jardin du Luxembourg (1927). A masterpiece of Dutch avant-garde cinema, Regen is an impressionist and lyrical example of a city symphony. Moreover, alongside Études des Mouvements à Paris (1927) and De Brug (1928), it stands as Ivens’s third city film.
Regen shows the effects of a natural phenomenon on the modern city with its motorized traffic and crowds, and reveals the transformative and aesthetic qualities of this everyday event by depicting the city before, during, and after the rain. In a poetic play of light and shadow, reflection and refraction, the film explores urban textures and semi-transparent surfaces such as skylights, tram windows, and canals. During the rain shower, the entire city is covered with a second, semi-reflecting surface, generating a new and modern mediated vision not unlike cinematic perception. Reflected images appear on rain-soaked streets, puddles, and canals. The city becomes a screen that Ivens’s camera self-reflexively uncovers and doubles. In addition, the rain as all-covering element emphasizes simultaneity across the urban space. It took Ivens almost two years to shoot enough material for the film. He organized a system of “rain watchers” spread all over the city, who would call him in case of a rain shower.
In 1932 Ivens asked Lou Lichtveld (also known as Albert Helman) to write a score for the originally silent film that Helen van Dongen partly re-edited in accordance with the music. In 1941, a second sound version was made by Hanns Eisler, who titled his composition “Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain.”
Eva Hielscher
further reading
Dähne, Chris, Die Stadtsinfonien der 1920er Jahre: Architektur zwischen Film, Fotografie und Literatur (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013).
Ivens, Joris, The Camera and I (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1969).
Nichols, Bill, “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27, 4 (2001): 580–610.
Waugh, Thomas, Joris Ivens and the Evolution of the Radical Documentary 1926–1946 (Ph.D. Dissertation, New York: Columbia University, 1981).
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