National Board of Review Magazine (Jan 1936 - Dec 1938)

Exceptional Photoplays Disjp&isTOaisKnf This department seeks to include all photoplays of outstanding merit in the artistic development of the screen, with the object of bringing such pictures to the attention of discriminating readers, under the headings of Exceptional and Honorable Mention. The opinions of a committee composed of trained students and critics of the screen are combined in an impartial review which aims to convey a comprehensive idea of the picture, covering both its excellencies and defects. SECRETARY AND EDITOR, James Shellet Hamilton COMMITTEE J. K. Paulding Chairman Iris Barry Otis Ferguson Arthur Gale Evelyn Gerstein Robert Giroux Henry Hart Beatrice W. Jaffe John A MoAndrew Mary B. Miller Frances Taylor Patterson Creighton Peet John Alfred Thomas Frederic M. Thrasher Frank Ward Joris Ivens IT is an event when we come for the first time upon an artist who has arrived at a sufficient mastery of his medium to express himself clearly and forcibly, and who has something to say. When, added to the power of clear and forceful expression, there is beauty — the beauty that is perceived under the surfaces of life by sensitiveness and sympathy and is recreated with such restraint that it pervades the man's whole work without ever obtruding or calling attention to itself — you have something very difficult to praise adequately. It isn't exaggerating to say that the appearance of a group of films made by the young Dutch director, Joris Ivens, brought to America by the New Film Alliance, is an event of this order. Ivens is what would be called a documentalist in the John Grierson-Paul Rotha vocabulary. In their terminology "documentary" has evolved from an adjective into a noun, and is used as one might use the word "poetry", as a category into which certain kinds of work fall. Flaherty's Nanook was one of the first films to which it was applied. The current March of Time series are also documentary. The opposite of fiction films, they go straight to actuality for their material, and they may range from national movements like Grass to so infinitesimal a thing as the functioning of a grain of pollen. Obviously, however factual the material, the question of selection and treatment has to come in, and that is where the quality of the director shows. It is where the quality of Joris Ivens shows, as an artist and as a man. The films Ivens has brought to America are all short, some of them mere fragments. Rain, almost his first, was made in Holland in 1929. Industrial Symphony was also made in Holland, two years later. Borinage was made in Belgium and put into its final form in Russia. Songs of Heroes (Komsomol) was made in the Soviet Union. New Earth, his last, was finished a little more than a year ago, and made in Holland. They are, in their different ways, all interesting in themselves, and additionally interesting as a record of his development. Rain is what the French call a cine-poeme. It might better, perhaps, have been named Rain in a City, because it has nothing of the abstractness and impersonality of mere rain. It is a lovely picture, lovely and restful. Nothing happens in it but a gentle shower — the premonitions of it in the wind, the first sprinkles, then the gradual, placid downfall, at last the breaking of the clouds and the sun again. It is as refreshing as a bit of spring, and it shows that from the beginning Ivens possessed that singular gift of seeming to get inside what he was photographing before he presented the outside of it. Without obviously poetizing or sentimentalizing he has managed to show rain as an almost living thing that comes to people in a town. The feeling of people — their homes, their streets, their canals — is never absent. Industrial Symphony was made for a radio corporation. The four fragments we