The Bridge

The theme of this film is the movement. The movement on and of the lift bridge across the 'Koningshaven' in Rotterdam. The middle part of this bridge can be lifted to allow ships to pass. Trains ride across the bridge. Ivens 'steals up on' the bridge with a simple hand camera, thereby reducing the art of filming to its essence. "For me, the bridge consisted of a laboratory of movements, tints, forms, contrasts, rhythms and the relationship between all these phenomena", Ivens wrote in his autobiography. "What I wanted to achieve was finding a set of general rules, laws of continuity in the movements." Ivens's most aesthetic film was successful at home and abroad. The film critic L.J. Jordaan wrote in a monograph (1931): "De brug bears characteristics of the greatest possible economical limitations, and at the same time of a complete artistic licence. These combined motives inevitably had to lend it a fundamental force, a responsible seriousness, a wealth of fantasy and strict brevity, which was difficult to equal in later films." Preserved from a nitrate copy of the MOMA. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)