R.I.P. Helen van Dongen

[Reza]

London Guardian

Helen van Dongen
Pioneering film editor who left her stamp on a generation of early documentaries
Bob Mastrangelo
Friday November 10 2006
The Guardian


Helen van Dongen, who has died aged 97, was a vital, if largely unsung, pioneer of documentary film-making. As a film editor, she worked with such major figures as Joris Ivens and Robert Flaherty, and made a handful of films of her own before retiring in her early 40s.

The late 1920s and 30s was a period of great innovation for documentary film-making, with legendary artists such as Flaherty, Ivens, John Grierson, Dziga Vertov and Leni Riefenstahl dominating the medium as directors, writers and producers. Van Dongen was especially admired for raising the level of artistry in film editing and for her inventive approach to sound editing.

Depending on the sequence, her style could be dynamic or lyrical, graceful or raw. The critic and historian Richard Griffith once labelled the Ivens-Van Dongen films "a collaboration which has been one of the most fruitful in film history, but which has tended to obscure Helen van Dongen's own quite distinct talent". Just as important was her approach to sound tapes. She was notorious for deconstructing, and then reassembling, the soundtrack to give it greater complexity.

Van Dongen was born in Amsterdam to a Dutch father and a French mother. She first met Ivens in her late teens when she began working at Capi, an optical equipment firm owned by his father. Together, they helped to establish Filmliga, a Dutch film society, and Van Dongen soon became Ivens' key collaborator. Beginning with his classic cine-poems, De Brug (The Bridge, 1928) and Regen (Rain, 1929), she worked closely with him for more than a decade, primarily as his film editor, but occasionally taking on camera chores as well.

During 1930 and 1931, Van Dongen spent several months studying editing and sound recording technqiues in Paris and Berlin. Then, in the mid-1930s, she travelled to the Soviet Union to lecture on editing and to study with leading Soviet filmmakers, including Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and VI Pudovkin.

Emerging from the European avant garde in the 1930s, Ivens made a series of highly influential documentaries which all but established the genre of advocacy film-making: Borinage (1933), an account of striking coalminers in Belgium; Nieuwe Gronden (New Earth, 1934), a look at the once controversial transformation of the Zuider Zee; The Spanish Earth (1937), about the Spanish civil war; and The 400 Million (1938), on the Japanese invasion of China. These remarkable films were admired for their visual sophistication, and widely debated because of their overt political content. They also earned Ivens a worldwide reputation, and solidified Van Dongen's status as one of the most important editors of her generation.

Arguably, her most important credit during this period was The Spanish Earth. The film, with narration written and delivered by Ernest Hemingway, was largely shot on the frontlines, and almost 70 years later it remains a powerful testament to the devastating effects of civil war. The intensity of Van Dongen's editing is an important factor in the film's impact, particularly in the way it contrasts the horrors of war with the beauty of the Spanish countryside.

Although they were briefly married in the mid-1940s, the last completed professional collaboration between Ivens and Van Dongen was Power and the Land (1940). After that, she was soon recruited by Robert Flaherty, the so-called father of the documentary, to edit The Land (1942), his examination of the destructive effect of mechanisation on American farmlands. Even more significant was Louisiana Story (1948), Flaherty's classic look at oil exploration in the southern US state, as seen through the eyes of a Cajun boy. In addition to her role as editor, Van Dongen also served as an associate producer on the film, which was sponsored by Standard Oil.

She also had a noteworthy career as a film-maker in her own right. In 1936, she produced and edited Spain in Flames, a compilation film on the civil war narrated by the poet John Dos Passos, and she subsequently directed and produced educational shorts for a variety of sponsors. During the second world war she directed at least two more compilation films, Russians at War (1942), which consisted of footage shot by Soviet cameramen on the frontlines, and News Review No 2 (1945), which used combat footage shot on various fronts. Her final film, Of Human Rights (1950), which she produced, directed and edited, was made for the United Nations to celebrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 1950, Van Dongen married Kenneth Durant, left film-making and moved to Vermont. Over the decades, she wrote frequently about the art of editing and her work with Flaherty and Ivens, and in 1998 her extensive diaries about the making of Louisiana Story were published.

As Helen van Dongen Durant, or Helen Durant, she collaborated with her husband on a study of guideboats of the Adirondack region of New York state. Widowed in 1972, she continued the work, and in 1980 published The Adirondack Guide-Boat, which remains in print. She spent her last years in the Vermont town of Brattleboro, where she was active as a community volunteer.

Helen van Dongen, documentary film-maker and editor, born January 5 1909; died September 28 2006