Their "8 1/2"s

"The director's life or career must be intertwined with the plot of the film we are watching. What I call a "meta" film,"
An interesting thread thanks london777... I am with you on 8½ a film that left me cold, Everything for Sale (1969) looks like a fascinating film to seek out.

 Une Histoire de vent (1988). Dutch born International filmmaker Joris Ivens (1898-1989) was one of the founding fathers of documentary film. An eternal traveller his career spanned over sixty years, his first film was shot in the twenties, this his last film was completed shortly before he died aged 90 in 1989. 

The film opens with a European child’s backyard fantasy playing out next to a spinning windmill, the little boy flies to far off, exotic China, in a plane that he has made himself. Switching scenes, we see an old man sitting in a chair at the top of a Gobi Desert dune, he waits for the wind, dreaming of the life that has brought him here.

An introduction reads...“The Old Man, the hero of this tale, was born at the end of the last century, in a country where man has always striven to tame the sea and harness the wind. Camera in hand, he has traversed the 20th century in the midst of the stormy history of our time. In the evening of his life, at age 90, having survived the various wars and struggles that he filmed, the old filmmaker sets off for China. He has embarked on a mad project: to capture the invisible image of the wind.”

Both poetic essay and meditative fiction, Ivens artistic creativity here is bound to the natural landscapes, cultural images and his personal memories. It is a film with many interlocking and interfacing histories, including the history of cinema. Entwined are a flow of memories from Ivens own long life.
He lived with only one functioning lung and was fascinated with the wind, physically and metaphysically, both as a natural phenomenon and as a metaphor for movements in society and history.


A Tale of the Wind is a profoundly touching and eloquent reflection on life and career, composed with his closet companion, his wife filmmaker Marceline Loridan.


             When the earth breathes, one calls it the wind. –Chinese proverb