: Just after returning from his first trip to the USSR in 1931, Ivens was invited by the Philips Radio Company in south 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 as well as the step-by-step development of the product...I concentrated on achieving the highest technical perfection...exploiting every nuance of texture...At the Paris premiere, the critics detected this sensual emphasis and renamed the film Symphonie industrielle."