Regen, Joris Ivens (1929)

"The bad weather the crew experienced in shooting Breakers inspired Ivens next film, Rain. Or perhaps Rain reveals how much Ivens was fascinated by natural phenomena – almost forty years later he would set out to film the wind. How do you “know” the rain? Is it a hand stretched out to feel the first drops? Or holding an umbrella? The way the rain turns the pavement into a mirror, the splash when a car goes past or a downpipe overflowing? As in The Bridge Ivens uses images shot from almost every imaginable angle and position to explore the sense of a city passing from sun to rain and back to a clear sky with the birds returning to their perches on the railings.

These early films had been made using the resources of the family photographic business, often shooting at weekends. Further experimentation followed, notwithstanding the extremely positive reception of both The Bridge and Rain in avant-garde and cultural circles at the time. One uncompleted experiment attempted to see if a completely subjective film could be made. 'The camera has to be completely subjective, not just moving freely in space observing action as a third person. …The lens becomes the human eye… The experiment was finally stopped when we realized that it would be too expensive to do it properly'." (Peter Hourigan, Joris Ivens: Witness to the 20th Century)