Pour le Mistral
Directed by
Called by the sea, the Mistral comes down with force from the mountains to invade places and people, crosses the Rhone valley and Provence to reach the Mediterranean. Pour le Mistral (To the Mistral) is one of Ivens’ lyric poems, which completes a series of thematic works strictly bound to natural elements, started with The Rain and rose to fame with When the Seine meets Paris. This type of cinema, Ivens said, is “the other side of my film-making art: my poetic ambition”. The wind is explored in its essence, as a force of nature. This explains Ivens’ impossible subjective shots trying to follow the point of view and the corporeality of the Mistral. Filming the invisible becomes a dominant of Ivens’ poetics, the utopia of vision and of the cinema, which will be definitely resolved in The Wind and I, where the presence of the director legitimizes the possibility of representing an element the human eye can't perceive: the wind.
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