#ivens

Ivette Ivens captures the bond between generations

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Ivette Ivens is most famous for her images showing the bond between baby and mother through breastfeeding.

In her new series, ‘Generations’, she goes closer to home to explore a different bond, the one between grandparents and grandchildren.

Since moving to the US, she only sees her parents once a year.

As her parents get older, she wanted to capture the close relationship between her…

Tierra Española Joris Ivens 1937 

Documental histórico realizado en la propia guerra, durante la batalla de Madrid y la batalla del Jarama. Una filmación a pie de trinchera, que exalta la voluntad de resistir y vencer del bando republicano, no sólo con las balas sino también con el trabajo colectivo en el campo arrebatado a los terratenientes.

His masterpiece was considered to be ''The Spanish Earth,'' a compelling 1937 study of the struggle of Spanish Loyalists to preserve new liberties threatened by the Falangists and to reclaim farmland neglected by generations of absentee landlords. Speaking about the feature-length documentary, which he produced for less than $10,000, he said the civil war in Spain was not essentially for ideology but for ''melons, tomatoes, onions.''

In regards to my own practice my initial prompt evolves through the combined processes of making, reading and writing happening simultaneously in the context of a practice-based PhD. This is very much the case in the third K-Film I am currently making. When I arrived in Leeds I began with a simple prompt of filming when I woke up in the morning, at 12pm, 4pm and 8pm. I used the Vine video capturing app on my phone to film these time-based moments. The Vine video capturing app limits your filming to brief eight second videos. I chose using Vine, simply out of convenience - I could capture on the move, and was provided a constraint of eight seconds to film to. This time-based prompt and contraint was used to get me to film consistently when I arrived in Leeds. After about a week of filming I was mostly drawn to the footage I captured when I woke up. These wake up shots were taken out of the skylight of my room, when I opened it in the morning. I became fascinated by what the weather would be like; would it be sunny, rainy, foggy, would there by snow? I realised that these clips were becoming a collection of sorts, capturing droplets of water glimmering on the window, droplets of rain falling on the window, fog starting to clear from the surface, or sometimes just utter greyness.

Meanwhile, I was reading articles about and written by Ivens, Ruttman, and Wiseman, as suggested by my current supervisor in Leeds Kate Nash. I came to her with the question of figuring out why my researched mattered, as I wanted to figure out what Korsakow could offer to documentary footage that was different, specific to the qualities of the network? Nash did not take for granted that Korsakow makes completely different films. She told me to look at the writings and films of Ivens, especially his early work in Rain and The Bridge, in conjunction with Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Wiseman’s films, especially High School. She saw these films as almost being the same as K-Films, and that it was important, if I was calling my films interactive documentaries, to contextualise them within documentary tradition.

I became particularly drawn to the early writings of Ivens on his films Rain and The Bridge. Particularly, Rain - a 14 minute short abstract documentary of quickly edited sequences of a storm hitting Amsterdam. The film is bookended by a storm building, and ends with the rain clearing. Ivens discusses the intention behind the film as to capture the experience of rain; an accumulation of images which amount to an impression of what rain is like, and how rain effects a city. As Iven’s notes “the rain itself dictated its own literature and guided the camera into secret wet paths we had never dreamed of” (76). Further, Ivens describes Rain as a “film of atmosphere” (35).

In between this fascination with how rain, frost, sunshine, clouds, and wind appeared outside the skylight of my bedroom every morning in Leeds and Ivens’s Rain as a film “of atmosphere” my initial prompt of filming at certain times every day evolved into something more specific. I thought about my experience of remixing Sunless, and it’s lack of authorial voice, and how what I was essentially doing right now was capturing the weather in a similar way to Ivens capturing the atmosphere of Rain. I then shifted my prompt to continue capturing these eight second moments of weather outside my skylight, with the potential to remix them with Ivens’s Rain. Further, expanding my filming to capture other significant moments of weather, and rain. Therefore, my prompt became less rigid from time, and more focused in a sense, yet also more free, to capture moments of noticed weather, rather than being dictated arbitrarily to capture something that perhaps didn’t interest me.

This shift and evolvement of my creative prompt emerges through the combination of practice and theory which is productive in the context of practice-based research, allowing the practice and theory to remain close. The project, opens up potential questions relating to my practice, such as if my practice seems heavily aligned to Ivens and the like, what, if anything do the qualities of multilinearity do to documentary content? Or am I reviving a form of documentary practice?