
At the age of 30, my mother's first cousin, Marion Michelle, met and fell in love with the famous left-wing Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens while both were working in Hollywood in 1944. In an unexpected turn of events, Ivens was appointed Film Commissioner of the Dutch East Indies, a 350-year-old colony from which the Dutch had been driven by the Japanese during World War Two. By 1944, it was clear that the Axis powers would ultimately be defeated and the Japanese would eventually relinquish their conquests. Ivens thought he was being hired to film the liberation of the islands from all colonial rule, but the goal of the Netherlands was to return to status quo ante. The "natives," though nobody had asked them, declared an Independent Republic of Indonesia, triggering an inevitable invasion of colonial reconquest. Ivens and Marion were preparing crews and equipment in Sydney, Australia, home to the Dutch East Indies government-in-exile when they heard that Indonesia had revolted. Ivens lost no time throwing in his lot with the revolutionaries and redesigned his position, thereby losing his access to film equipment. On the Sydney docks, two blocks from the apartment where Joris and Marion lived, Dutch shipments for a war of reconquest were being prepared. Waterside workers and crews began a boycott in support of the Republic. Ivens decided to make a short agitational film about the boycott with cooperation and a little bit of funding from the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Because of his notoriety, Ivens could not be present at any of the filming. He had to rely on Marion to shoot on a half-broken camera using disparate pieces of film scrounged up by left-wing supporters (Kodak refused to sell them any stock). She was on the ground, making the shot choices, running the camera and the risk.
The picture editing was barely completed when Ivens was hospitalized with serious asthma and bronchitis. Marion and the Australian screenwriter, Catherine Duncan, had to take over the post-production editing. This was a film that would never have seen the light of day without the women on its team.
In spite of the odds, INDONESIA CALLING, premiered in Sydney on August 9, 1946. Eventually a Malayan-language print was smuggled through the Dutch blockade where it was widely shown as motivational propaganda. Subsequent international screenings of the film always had political ramifications. Being for or against “Indonesia Calling” was a stand-in for a pro- or anti-colonial ideology. When the Dutch government finally recognized that Iven’s worldwide reputation as a documentary filmmaker was an asset to the country, the Minister for Cultural Affairs confessed in 1965, “history has agreed with you.”
And most probably, "Indonesia Calling" is an early example – perhaps the first –of guerilla documentary filmmaking, although the term hadn’t yet been coined because the genre itself hadn’t been invented. If it’s true, my cousin Marion made film history. Of course, she’s only a footnote, a sidekick, a paramour, an adjunct. She herself accepted her marginalization. After all, she had been raised in a Cleveland bourgeois Jewish family. Making socialist documentaries in Australia and Eastern Europe with a notorious Dutch filmmaker (not to mention the out-of-wedlock relationship) was already miles off the beaten path.
She eventually settled in Paris, and when my family came to live there in 1962, Marion had just wrested control of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) from the famous and imperious Henri Langlois, whose derelict leadership posed an existential crisis. But that, as they say, is another story.
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