The film till now : a survey of world cinema (1960)

THE EUROPEAN CINEMA and some have not adequate technical equipment. They may create a new European cinema, distinct from the French and the Scandinavians, which can mean much. A great deal will obviously depend on the creative freedom offered the individual, as distinct from expressing party policy through group production. Holland has contributed much to world cinema, if not in terms of home-produced films then certainly in the production of artists. In the thirties, apart from the early films of Ivens, one recalls the over-long but very sincere Dood Wasser (1934) directed by Gerard Rutten, a storydocumentary of the impact of new methods on the farming community resulting from the reclamation of the Zuider Zee; and the disappointing Jubilee film of Queen Wilhelmina, by Edmond Greville, the Anglo-French director. But Joris Ivens, John Ferno and Helen Van Dongen are the three lustrous additions to cinema's roster from Holland. Ivens's masterpiece New Earth (1931-34) is one of the milestones of documentary. Begun as a reportage of the draining of the Zuider Zee and its conversion into farmland, a theme similar to that of Dood Wasser, it emerged as a passionate attack on the economic methods which permitted dumping the products of the new-won ground into the sea, thereby anticipating the messages of the Rotha films World of Plenty and The World is Rich. Brilliantly observed, and even more brilliantly edited for propagandist purposes, it summed up as the record of a tragedy typical of modern life, that of a project begun on an epic scale and ending in anticlimax. Ivens had previously made Philips-Radio (1930), an exploration of sound-film possibilities which was one of the first industrially sponsored documentaries, and later, in the Soviet Union, Komsomol (1932). Following an exposure of mining conditions in Belgium, The Borinage (1933) with Henri 6U