Rain

More stuff from Kino's first "Avant-Garde" collection, this was my introduction to the work of celebrated Dutch documentarian Ivens and two more of his films would follow in quick succession. Unfortunately, it would seem that "artists" dabbling in film during the 1920s were hung up on the element of water (in all its forms and sources) since this is the sixth such short I have watched over the last few days, following in the footsteps of Man Ray, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Ralph Steiner, Herman G. Weinberg and Pare Lorentz! As had previously been the case, this is one of those experimental "cine-poems" that were the order of the day in artistic circles at the time they were made but which are more often read about – in fact, this is also included in "Wonders In The Dark's All-Time Top 3000 movies" list I am currently perusing – than actually seen and which nowadays offer precious little instructional or entertainment value.

This early dutch short film will confuse everyone who thinks cinema is a medium only fit to tell stories. Predating some of the most interesting --and lyrical-- documentaries of recent times, devoid of spoken words or any logical discourse, "Regen" offers a few, brief impressions of a rainy afternoon in Amsterdam; they do not form a sequence, they do not tell anything, but they definitely convey a sense of melancholy and quietness. If a conventional movie is the equivalent of a novel, or a short story, this should be regarded as a poem: it is concerned not with what's next, but with what's there, with perceptions of things.

Fans of Ron Fricke's "Baraka", Godfrey Reggio's "Powaqqatsi", or Peter Greenaway's "Prospero's Books", should try to find this relatively unknown film. The poetry of its images, underlined by its beautiful score, is truly memorable.

I watched Regen yesterday, for the first time. I had read a lot about it and was expecting a masterpiece. Something was not there - something was missing - or something was too much. I saw it for the second time. The images were fantastic - but something was impeding me to feel the masterpiece.

I thought that I was too tired - Regen was coming after two hours of watching other short movies, by Epstein, Eisenstein, Weinberg ... So I was definitely tired.

I took a break and went to the kitchen to eat something, then I came back. I saw it once more. I had an idea - I cut the sound - and I saw Regen again - and now I felt the masterpiece! It is a masterpiece. Only in its simplicity it has a grandeur, a greatness - and the music (which is fine) is not at the same level of greatness - of simplicity and greatness.

I saw it then several times - it is like a spell, it is binding you.

The above review strikes me as particularly unhelpful for people who are actually interested in avant-garde, and poetic cinema. Yes it is slow, if you were expecting an action movie, and yes it is a silent film, but there are very few silent films which explore the poetry of the banal, the sublime everydayness of existenz. To me, it is one of the most beautiful and subtle films of all time, and is one of the first genuine "poem" films (along with H20 by Ralph Steiner, Manhatta by Paul Strand, Berlin: City of a Symphony by Walter Ruttman, and $24 Island by Robert Flaherty among others).

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (in his book on cinema, The Movement-Image) gives a wonderful reading of this film in which he argues that the film is no longer a representation of rain, but is attempting to give the viewer the feeling, or pure "quality" of rain, called a "qualisign". The editing is not unlike Robert Bresson in the fragmentation and use of what Deleuze calls the "any-space-whatever". In Rain the shots do not have a signed linear sequence, and have no forward movement in time (there is no character moving through the spaces, nothing to make one shot "before" or "after" another one in time). This means that all of the shots could have happened all at the exact same time, theoretically. This is one of the qualities of an any-space-whatever, a space in which the spatial and temporal potentials are de-connected (unlike a fiction or documentary film which has cohesive spatial and temporal dimensions).

Amazing movie which has gone on to influence many great poem-film-makers like Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, Joanna Margaret Paul, Nathaniel Dorsky, Alexander Greenhough, myself and many others.

I just recently found out about Joris Ivens and is awe-inspired by the amount of pieces he made.

This piece is a study about RAIN in the city. It is a beautiful montage of images,reflections,closeups,and people in the city.

His work reminds me of Georgia O'Keefe's, work as an artist. Her work was based on bringing hidden details out into the open, I feel much the same way about Ivens. The slowness of the film gives one time to think about the images, and I like that. Unlike most films today, in and out as quickly as possible.

A must see by any image loving artist.