De Brug

In Rotterdam port the newly built railway bridge connecting the two banks of the Mosa river is the subject of a study of rhythm, geometry, motion. This work marks Ivens’ start as a professional film-maker: “After The Bridge I felt more self-confident. I realized what I really wanted, it was time for decisions”. The film is orchestrated as a symphonic piece. The dialectics between the sea, technological progress and man's work is resolved by deforming reality, according to the avant-garde trends of the time, and turns into a harmonious relationship between industrial development, nature and men. The close bond between idea and object makes The Bridge one of Ivens’ most abstract films. “It isn't the idea of bridge, but it isn't the definition of an object by its form, its metallic material, its functions and uses either”. (Gilles Deleuze)

Hungarian scholar Béla Balázs mentions The Bridge as a brilliant example of absolute cinema: “Even when Ivens shows us a bridge [...]. The iron construction dissolves into immaterial images shot in thousands of different ways. The fact itself that a bridge can be seen in many different ways makes it somehow unreal [...]”.