La pluie

Rain is the essence of earth's survival. Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens looked at rain not for its life's essence, but for its aesthetic qualities when it's photographed on the landscape. Two-years in the making, December 1929's "Rain," or "Regen" in Dutch, creatively captures images rain creates everywhere it falls. Ivens and colleague Mannus Franken not only produced a scientific polemic on what causes water to fall from the sky, but unfolds the beauty of rain as it lands on fields, trees, city streets and bodies of water. The visual effects have been interpreted as moving paintings. Instead of illustrating one moment in time like artists do on canvasses, the images filmed by Ivens show a sequence in time. His editing between clips creates a fluidity that static painting, sculpture and still photography have shown to be impossible to duplicate.

Loosely belonging to the cinematic 'city symphonies,' Ivens departs from the genre by avoiding humans in relation to man-made machines. He focuses instead on the environmental relationship of rain to nature and society. The documentarian, whose later fame was attributed to his series on the Vietnam War, has been praised by the avant-garde and the experimental film community by his unique perspective on rain. Much of his shots consists on the movement of water, through falling droplets of rain on puddles, ponds and solid objects. His unusual camera angles capture an element of rain normally not appreciated by people scampering to shelter to escape from being wet.