ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the film Regen directed by Joris Ivens. Regen is a short film by Joris Ivens about life in Amsterdam on a rainy day that was made in collaboration with Mannus Franken, who had made a short on Paris's Jardin du Luxembourg. A masterpiece of Dutch avant-garde cinema, Regen is an impressionist and lyrical example of a city symphony. Regen shows the effects of a natural phenomenon on the modern city with its motorized traffic and crowds, and reveals the transformative and aesthetic qualities of this everyday event by depicting the city before, during, and after the rain. It took Ivens almost two years to shoot enough material for the film. He organized a system of "rain watchers" spread all over the city, who would call him in case of a rain shower. In 1941, a second sound version was made by Hanns Eisler, who titled his composition "Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain."
