Valparaiso: The Vertical City
Valparaiso
Joris Ivens, the renowned Dutch documentary filmmaker, once said, “The film screen is not a window through which you look at the world, it is a world in itself.”
This idea is perfectly expressed in his 27-minute short film, Valparaíso. Released in 1963, the film still feels fresh. And still has the power to tell us something about ourselves.
The film was made on the back of a short-term teaching position he took up at the Cineteca Universitaria of Santiago, Chile. Ivens collaborated with the students to make the film that became Valparaíso.
He was fascinated by the dramatic possibilities offered by the city: “Valparaiso is a city, a port where the ordinary and extraordinary, the common and uncommon, exist side by side as an everyday experience… The ocean is present in the hills of the city, and at the water’s edge one senses the hills.”
Look beneath the surface
This is a ‘city film’ about Chile’s major seaport, whose commercial fortunes have fluctuated over the years. The city’s name comes from the Spanish for ‘valley of paradise’. The paradise reached by sailors after a rough ocean crossing. Ivens must have loved the irony, homing in on the deeply stratified society he finds there.
This is encapsulated in the relative wealth seen around the port and commercial centre. And the evident poverty of the ramshackle villages located on the steep hills surrounding the harbour.
The picturesque quality of the funicular railways – the vital lifelines connecting the upper and lower parts of the city – stands in sharp contrast to the lack of drinking water, sanitation and other essentials on the hilltops.
The higher you ascend, the starker the social division and the poorer the people. A reversal of the usual urban divide in cities built on hills.
Ivens films a city in constant motion as people descend and ascend the hills going about their daily business. He is clearly struck by the way people cope with the ever-present challenge of confronting life’s difficulties.
The camera as mechanical eye
The film opens with shots of waves crashing onto the rocky coast before switching to the busy harbour, with boats unloading their wares. He rapidly shifts focus to the hilltop villages. Taking in ordinary scenes of women hanging up washing, men winching up water and people carrying heavy items up the hillsides.
He had an eye for the absurd or unusual. A middle-class woman walking her pet penguin. Stairs ending abruptly in mid-air. Triangular houses, which are impossible to furnish.
The inhabitants of the villages cram into the cable railway cars and move ceaselessly up and down the stairs as they head to work, school or the shops.
The film asks the ever-pertinent questions. What price the desire to live? What price happiness?
But he doesn’t depict the people as passive victims. They are shown as having rich social lives, mingling in public spaces, at dance halls, at the circus. The children play football and fly kites.
And he highlights how empowering it can be for ordinary people to take control of their lives as citizens’ councils meet to discuss the problems of poor housing and the lack of clean water amidst state indifference.
Ivens touches on Valparaíso’s history of piracy, pillage and colonial oppression. But also shows how the city has overcome these challenges along with earthquakes and other natural disasters.
A key element of the film is the commentary by French filmmaker Chris Marker. This was written by Marker in post-production, based on a rough edit Ivens had sent him. It exemplifies the importance of collaboration in the filmmaking process. Marker’s meditative, ironic observations providing a perfect counterpoint to the richness of the cinematography.
Poetry can transform the world
Valparaíso is an exercise in visual poetry, offering a sharp observation of public life, deploying some striking montage and demonstrating a bold switch from black & white to colour towards the end of the film.
Some commentators thought he’d lost his earlier political engagement by reverting to a more lyrical style.
Quite the contrary. The film highlights the scope to make points about inequality and a lack of social justice without being didactic.
For Ivens, the poetry is not a goal in itself. But a way of talking about our society.
Years later, he remarked that, “What all my films have in common is that people are moved by something. Moved by their desire for freedom, moved by water, moved by the wind. I don't think there is any difference between Ivens filming the wind or Ivens filming revolutions.”
Engaging with reality
Documentary filmmaking has a long and honourable tradition, rooted in its ability to reflect the problems and realities of contemporary society.
Dziga Vertov, the godfather of the genre, noted that people had, “perfected the cinecamera to penetrate more deeply into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten.”
Ivens sought to capture the essence of Valparaíso. He wanted to create an impression of a city whose, “lie is the sun. Her truth, the sea.”
The film is a triumph of documentary filmmaking which situates the observer within the world he is filming whilst reflecting the universality of cinema. Ivens’ humanism gives voice to the ordinary people of the city. While his keen spatial sense draws us inexorably into the expressive power of film.