The Bridge (De Brug) (Joris Ivens, The Netherlands, 1928). With its stark montage and fluid camera, this landmark abstract study of a massive iron bridge in Rotterdam was described in the British journal Close Up as a "pure visual symphony." (11 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)

Rain (Regen) (Joris Ivens, The Netherlands, 1929). Ivens creates a beautiful and evocative portrait of Amsterdam. Together with The Bridge, this early film established Ivens's international reputation as a visual poet of the cinema. (12 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)

Philips Radio (Joris Ivens, The Netherlands, 1931). Invited by the Philips Radio Company in southern Holland to make a film about their huge factory, Ivens consciously worked against the clichés of the advertising film. "Instead of a heroic parade of all the different departments, I decided to concentrate on how people work in a modern mechanized factory, showing the actual working conditions (and) exploiting every nuance of texture....At the Paris premiere, the critics detected this sensual emphasis and renamed the film Symphonie industrielle." (36 mins, In Dutch with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

New Earth (Nieuwe Gronden) (Joris Ivens, The Netherlands, 1933). New Earth documents the final phase of the monumental engineering project of draining the Zuiderzee, and shows in a brilliantly edited sequence the final closing of the dam against the North Sea. The exhilaration is deliberately subdued by the last part of the film, which shows the economic results: unemployment for thousands working on the project, and the first rice harvest, a glut on the depressed world markets. The film's extraordinary soundtrack includes a song written by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler. (30 mins, In Dutch with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Borinage (Misère au Borinage) (Joris Ivens, Henri Storck, Belgium, 1934). Combining actuality with dramatic reenactment, this film portrays the painful aftermath of the revolutionary 1932 miners' strike in the Borinage region of Belgium. As codirector Henri Storck tells it, "We stopped thinking about cinema and how to frame shots and instead became obsessed by the irrepressible need to produce images as stark, bare, and sincere as possible to fit the cruel facts reality had thrown at us." (34 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)