While this seems an appropriate epitaph
for Ivens’ subsequent career, he never made a documentary
film on the TVA. In view of his talents as a filmmaker and
the appropriateness of that topic in view of his earlier
work on New Earth, this was clearly a loss for
both Ivens, the TVA, and film scholars. But Ivens, having
made good contacts in Hollywood, had found sponsors for
a film on the Spanish Civil War. In The Spanish Earth
in 1937, Ivens, an avowed anti-fascist, repeatedly put himself
at risk in filming battle scenes. This film, which featured
commentary by Ernest Hemingway, was used to raise funds
to send ambulances to the republican forces. In 1938, Ivens
again put himself in the line of fire in filming the resistance
of the Chinese against the Japanese Army in Manchuria. The
final film, edited (as was the case with so many of his
early films) by Helen van Dongen, was released in 1940 as
The 400 Million.
These films brought Ivens’ work to
the attention of Pare Lorentz, the head of the United States
Film Service. In 1939, Lorentz had been asked by the Rural
Electrification Administration to make a film showing the
advantages of electrifying a typical farm. Rejecting an
earlier script prepared by a Department of Agriculture employee,
Lorentz developed a new outline based on a “dawn to
dusk” concept showing one day on a farm without electricity
and a second day with electricity. The REA apparently assumed
that Lorentz, who was already known as “FDR’s
Filmmaker,” would shoot and edit the film. But this
was not to be the case. Loretnz, preoccupied with the completion
of The Fight for Life and Ecce Homo and
securing continued funding for the US Film Service, asked
Ivens to take over the direction of the REA film. After
going over the outline of this proposed REA film, Lorentz
suggested to Ivens that he scout out possible locations
in the scenic rural countryside of southeastern Ohio. In
the summer of 1939, Ivens, accompanied by script writer
and photographer Edwin Locke, set out to find a suitable
farm and farm family.
 After
traveling through the Mid-West looking for a suitable location
and family, Ivens selected the Bill and Hazel Parkinson
farm near Warnock, Ohio. When Ivens and Locke first stopped
at the Parkinson farm, they met Bill and one or more of
the sons. Bill Parkinson, Ivens later recalled, seemed cool
to the proposal. Ivens and Locke then traveled on and interviewed
other farm families, but their thoughts kept coming back
to the Parkinson farm. When they returned after several
weeks, , they met Hazel, Bill’s wife, and were struck
by her gracious and dignified demeanor. Andre Stufkens,
the Executive Director of the European Foundation Joris
Ivens, believes, as noted in the documentary Power in
the Parkinsons, that Hazel reminded Ivens of his own
mother. Whatever Ivens’ motivation, he and his film
crew spent two months on location at the Parkinson farm
filming Bill and Hazel and their five children: Dan, Tom,
Jake, Ruth, and Frank (“Bip”).
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