The Conscience of Cinema: The Works of Joris Ivens 1912–1989, by Thomas WaughThe Conscience of Cinema: The Works of Joris Ivens 1912–1989, by Thomas Waugh

Abstract

This imposing volume is the product of decades of research by Thomas Waugh, the author and editor of several books in the fields of film studies, visual studies, and gay and queer cultural issues, who is also perhaps the most venerable and important English-language historian of documentary film politics. This massive work—nearly eight-hundred pages with filmography and illustrations, covering the entirety of Ivens’s almost eighty-year career—is itself a kind of career survey, a mashup of the author’s earliest mature work of scholarship, a Columbia University doctoral dissertation from the 1980s, and some of his latest research, employing newly restored films recently made available on a new DVD set beautifully produced (if selectively and somewhat tendentiously left incomplete) by the Ivens estate and foundation.

Keywords

• joris ivens
• documentary film
• left-radical documentary
• socialist realism
• lyrical essay film