The Redundant History, The Pacing Haunter

--- How to look at history，or how to penetrating reality through the mirror of history?

This is a narrative where imagination and documentary overlap, based on two real people in historical reality. One of these two characters is the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, and the other is the spy named Pieter Boevé.

Joris Ivens, who was born into a family business dealing with advanced optical instruments, and who early on became passionate about visual observation and optical experimentation. After a period of technically oriented visual tradition early in his career, he gradually became more of an advocate of rooting visual experience in the material body, that is, in the direct involvement of human physical movement in the reality in front of the camera. This stance of formal language led to more direct political involvement in the real world, such as his involvement in workers’ movements and agrarian movements in several countries, his support for the Indonesian independence movement, and his becoming a committed communist. He has edited newsreels for the Dutch Communist Party to convey the revolutionary message, and has also made propaganda films for the Soviet Union and Chinese communist societies, especially in 1976, when he made a series of films about Mao's "Cultural Revolution" How Yukong Moved the Mountains, throughout which he tried to remain faithful to his own subjective feelings, making every effort to keep the shots independence. In his later years, however, Ivens realized that he did not fully understand the complexity of the events he was documenting, and had even inadvertently played a complicit role in the historical tragedy, and that some of his films seemed to betray his original intention of using the camera to present the truth.

Pieter Boevé, alias Chris Petersen, who originated from a historical political event that came to light in the memoirs of a former Dutch intelligence chief. In 1968 the Dutch Secret Service, in cooperation with the US CIA, developed an operation codenamed "Red Herring”. They set up a fake "Marxist-Leninist Party" in the Netherlands and chose a mathematics teacher who had been to China to play the role of the head of the party in order to spy on high-level Chinese intelligence. The organisation had only a dozen or so actors, and they easily fooled the Chinese Embassy in the Netherlands by relying on a fictitious membership list and publications, becoming "old friends of the Chinese people", and peter, as a representative of the Communist movement in developed capitalist countries, established contacts with the Soviet Union, Albania and the Chinese government, and as a result was received by leaders of communist countries such as Mao Zedong and Khrushchev. He visited China a total of 25 times during his career as a spy, each time bringing back revolutionary funds granted by the Chinese, totalling more than a million pounds, until the late 1980s, after the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe. During each of these visits, he used a small portion of the revolutionary funds to travel around different cities and places in China, and enjoying taking photographs and keeping a diary to record his foreign experiences.

These two events and figures may seem unrelated, yet there is an underlying connection in the relationship between individual destinies and the national political-historical flood, and this connection has been involved in shaping the collective memory. It could be argued that both figures lived part of their lives in a socialist time (or image) that belonged only to them, and that this is the reason for their coincidental interest in Chinese Taoist philosophy in their later years, which cannot be reduced to the mere act of attraction of some exotic cultural symbol from the far East to the two ‘others'， but rather ‘Disparation’(tension or differentiation) that drives the individuals to a state of supersaturation, thus to a new trans-individual relationship, that is to say, entered a ‘Intersection time'.

At the same time, the camera acts as a dark line, a medium and a technical object that runs through these historical episodes, transcending the limits of its manipulator and creating a reality that is independent of the time and space to which it belongs - the use of the medium, that is, the process of filming, is at the same time a process of individuation.

All of the footage in this film was taken from Ivens' films and then re-edited and rebuilt to create a new narrative structure. For example, in one of the chapters , “The Wind," wind as a natural element appears in many different periods and genres of Ivens' work, and these shots of wind are used, either intentionally or unintentionally, in a range of time periods from his early prose films to later left-wing documentaries. These shots of wind also originate from different spaces and times, different countries and regions, yet as the purest, steady state elements of his films that do not contain ideology or intention, but at the same time may contain some underlying emotion or spirit. In short, by re-editing and reorganizing these existing images and histories, I want to present a kind of complexity as possible, which is a manifestation of the intertwined history, politics, and individuals, and try to sort out a new or obscured viewing path and thread from these relationship.