[2] From the intimate realism of the Dutch Masters to Impressionism, Pointillism, and De Stijl, the Netherlands have a rich history of skilled and pioneering artists, including such household names as Rembrandt, Van Gogh and M. C.
[5] Its subjects are numerous and anonymous, and few shots identify the setting of the film as Amsterdam, focusing instead on raindrops, clouds, and other small details of the rain's interaction with the city.
Though Ivens mostly produced Regen by his own means, his involvement with the Amsterdam Filmliga was key to his studies of good practice and interest in formal experiments.
[1] Ivens's practical knowledge came not only from these home editing experiments, but also from his inheritance of his family's photography business, which had allowed him to study under several celebrated manufacturers of photographic equipment.
[1] One such manufacturer was Emanuel Goldberg, inventor of the Kinamo camera, which derived its name from Greek and Latin: "kine" and "amo", meaning "I love movies".
Trust in the divided government only worsened as the Deutsche Mark's value dropped drastically against the dollar and Ivens' Dutch Guilders, the increasing value of which helped him to enthusiastically subscribe to the darkly carnivalesque sociocultural atmosphere of the Weimar era.
After a day of classes (in which he recalls a professor openly snorting cocaine before beginning a lecture), Ivens and friends—artists, publishers, poets, anarchists, Marxists, radical Communists—might see a revue at the Apollo Theater or go to the cinema to see an expressionist film by Wiene or Murnau.
[1] Though the Weimar lifestyle did not suit Ivens for very long, features of expressionism and its parent and predecessor, the avant-garde, are clearly visible in Rain.
They believed a film could create its own world, whether through thought–provoking Absurdism in a piece like Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou or purely through form, as in Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera.
The short film focuses primarily on composition and rhythm, visually following the patterns of raindrops and people as they try to negotiate with each other in their movements through the city.
Ivens's efforts to create what amounts to a visual poem, or perhaps a moving painting, led to his being termed a poet-engineer by fellow Filmliga members.
[7] City Symphonies like those created by Ruttman, Cavalcanti, and Vertov vary, evidently, in the cities featured, but also in their treatment of their subjects and the prominence of the director's voice in the piece: Ruttman's film made Berlin itself the main character, while Vertov's film is highly reflexive, often featuring the director and his brother working the camera through stunts and trick shots.
Next, the viewer is presented with an incident: slowly, raindrops begin to send minuscule ripples through a canal, a breeze picks up, birds take flight.
As the streets clear (the film was shot over months but we are made to feel this is all happening over the course of an afternoon), focus shifts to rain's interaction with nature and architecture—filling the dams, flowing through gutter pipes, obscuring the view of Amsterdam's rooftops.
Silhouettes pass upside down across the top of the screen, women with shopping carts are seen through the puddles they step over, a man stretches and slides across the sidewalk through his circus-mirror reflection in a chrome wheel well.
In spite of the influence of Modernism, Ivens leaves worship of the machine to Vertov and steers his film in the direction of a more romantic subject: nature.