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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		The 17th Parallel Le Dix-septieme parallele 1968 / France / B&W / 113 min / 16mm Directors: Joris Ivens, Marceline Loridan Production company: CAPI Films, Argos Films Ivens's first 16mm film with synchronous sound, made together with Marceline Loridan, takes place on the demarcation line between North and South Vietnam, the seventeenth parallel. Like The Spanish Earth (1934), this film shows the daily lives of people and their struggles against aggressors. The Vietnamese people are shown living underground, emerging only at night to work on the land. The film shows the horrid situation by depicting a combination of the banalities of daily life and the constant bombing by B52s. In the space of a few weeks more than twenty thousand tons of bombs were dropped in this area. In relation to his other films The 17th Parallel is marked by longer sequences, direct sound combined with synchronized sound, and less dramatic montage sequences. Although not innovative, the film is a masterpiece, like The Spanish Earth (1937), and shows a professional use of modern techniques, largely due to Marceline Loridan's influence, especially with regard to sound. 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