beforenext
Wigwam (Shining Ray) The Bridge Breakers Rain We Are Building Philips Radio Creosote Komsomol (Song of Heroes) New Earth Borinage The Spanish Earth The 400 Million Power and the Land Indonesia Calling The First Years Song of the Rivers The Seine Meets Paris Before Spring Italy Is Not a Poor Country Travel Notebook A Valparaiso The Mistral Pour le Mistral Far from Vietnam The 17th Parallel How Yukong Moved the Mountains A Tale of the Wind Magnitogorsk, Forging the New Man		Borinage Misére au Borinage 1934 / Belgium / silent / B&W / 34 min / 35mm Directors, Script, Editors: Joris Ivens, Henri Storck Camera: Joris Ivens, Henri Storck, François Rents Production company: Club de l'Éran, EPI In 1933 Henri Storck, one of the leading figures in the Belgian film avant-garde, asked Ivens to help make a film about the social consequences of the previous year's miners' strike in Borinage. Arriving at the mine region Storck and Ivens were so taken by the situation they encountered that they forgot all about aesthetics. As Henri Storck tells it, "We stopped thinking about cinema and how to frame shots and instead became obsessed by the irrepressible need to produce images as stark, bare, and sincere as possible to fit the cruel facts reality had thrown at us." The film confronts the spectator with sobering images of misery: miners unemployed or exploited by the mine companies, with entire families evicted from their homes because they couldn't afford the rent. Ivens used dramatic re-enactment to incorporate the events of the mine strike of 1932 into the film. A TOPICS A Bird's Eye View of a Documentary Career HELEN VAN DONGEN Kees Bakker beforenext COPYRIGHT:Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival Organizing Committee