--- name: "Marceline Loridan-Ivens" canonical: "https://film.one/person/marceline-loridan-ivens" roles: ["Actor"] born: "19 March 1928" died: "18 September 2018" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 updated: "2026-09-17T04:41:40.029515+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Marceline Loridan-Ivens Actor. Born 19 March 1928 in Épinal, France. Died 18 September 2018. ## Details - **Work:** Actor - **Born:** 19 March 1928, Épinal, France - **Died:** 18 September 2018 - **Also known as:** Marceline Loridan - **Elsewhere:** https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q521115, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0520931/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/1090026 ## Streaming the US now - **The Criterion Channel:** [*Chronicle of a Summer*](https://film.one/film/chronicle-of-a-summer.md) (86) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Marceline Loridan-Ivens > She appears in one film, once, as herself, and the walk she takes across an empty Paris square in *Chronicle of a Summer* is as strong as anything in documentary. Everything she made afterwards, she made from behind the camera. She is the one who starts it. In *Chronicle of a Summer* (1961) it is Marceline Loridan-Ivens who first stops strangers on the pavement and asks whether they are happy, brisk and amused. Then Jean Rouch gives her the street to herself. She walks alone across a wide, empty square with a microphone hidden on her, talking quietly to her father, who was deported with her and did not come back, and the camera moves away ahead of her so that she grows smaller as she speaks. There is no music and there are no cutaways. We knew the scene by reputation and it silenced us anyway. What does it is the plainness: a woman speaking to someone who is not there, at walking pace, in daylight. Later, at a table, she asks Modeste Landry whether he knows what the number tattooed on her arm means, and he does not, and the film lets that sit. She said of the film at the time, "I do the easiest thing, I talk about myself", and the line is dry enough that we suspect she knew exactly how hard it was. That is the whole of her acting career, if it counts as acting, and it is why she has a page here. She had been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau as a teenager in 1944 and she never played anyone but herself again. Within a year of Rouch's film she was directing: *Algérie année zéro* (1962), co-directed with Jean-Pierre Sergent, on Algeria just after independence. Then came the long partnership with her husband Joris Ivens, ten films in all, among them *17th Parallel: Vietnam in War* (1968), shot in North Vietnam while the war was on, and the twelve-part *How Yukong Moved the Mountains* (1976), made in China during the Cultural Revolution. She later called the view of China in that series naïve, and she was in a position to know. She went back to the subject of the square only once. *La petite prairie aux bouleaux* (2003), her sole fiction feature as writer and director, sends a survivor back to the site of her deportation. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here, but it is the same story she carried through the square in 1961, and the interval is forty-two years. So the reader on the sofa has one film to see, and should. Rouch and Edgar Morin's experiment has its slack stretches, the seminar scenes in particular, and we have said so. Her sequence is not among them. If you want to know what testimony looks like on film, it looks like this: no argument, no montage, a woman talking and the camera getting out of her way. ## Biography Marceline Loridan-Ivens (née Rozenberg) was a French film director, writer and documentary maker. She appeared as herself in the cinéma vérité film *Chronicle of a Summer* (1961), directed by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. She married the Dutch documentary director Joris Ivens in 1963 and collaborated with him on several films, including work on Vietnam and China. Later credits include the feature *La Petite Prairie aux Bouleaux* (2003). She also published memoirs, notably *But You Did Not Come Back* (2015). Born in Épinal, France, on 19 March 1928, she died in Paris on 18 September 2018. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com, allocine.fr, jwa.org, independent.co.uk.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Chronicle of a Summer* (1961), Fi1m 86, as Self — [page](https://film.one/film/chronicle-of-a-summer.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/marceline-loridan-ivens