The Song of the Rivers is a 1954 documentary film production by the East Germany's Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft

Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft

Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft, better known as DEFA, was the public-owned film studio in East Germany throughout that country's history.-History:...

 (DEFA). Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens

Joris Ivens

Joris Ivens was a Dutch documentary filmmaker and committed communist.-Early life and career:...

 was the leading director. The sprawling film celebrates international workers movements along six major rivers: the Volga

Volga River

The Volga is the largest river in Europe in terms of length, discharge, and watershed. It flows through central Russia, and is widely viewed as the national river of Russia. Out of the twenty largest cities of Russia, eleven, including the capital Moscow, are situated in the Volga's drainage...

, Mississippi

Mississippi River

The Mississippi River is the largest river system in North America. Flowing entirely in the United States, this river rises in western Minnesota and meanders slowly southwards for to the Mississippi River Delta at the Gulf of Mexico. With its many tributaries, the Mississippi's watershed drains...

, Ganges

Ganges River

The Ganges or Ganga, , is a trans-boundary river of India and Bangladesh. The river rises in the western Himalayas in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, and flows south and east through the Gangetic Plain of North India into Bangladesh, where it empties into the Bay of Bengal. By discharge it...

, Nile, Amazon

Amazon River

The Amazon of South America is the second longest river in the world and by far the largest by waterflow with an average discharge greater than the next seven largest rivers combined...

 and the Yangtze

Yangtze River

The Yangtze, Yangzi or Cháng Jiāng is the longest river in Asia, and the third-longest in the world. It flows for from the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai eastward across southwest, central and eastern China before emptying into the East China Sea at Shanghai. It is also one of the...

. Shot in many countries by different film crews, and later edited by Ivens, Song of the Rivers begins with a lyrical montage of landscapes and laborers and proceeds to glorify labor and modern industrial machinery. The musical score is by Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet Russian composer and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century....

, with lyrics written by Berthold Brecht, and songs performed by German communism's star Ernst Busch

Ernst Busch (actor)

Ernst Busch was a German singer and actor.Busch first rose to prominence as an interpreter of political songs, particularly those of Kurt Tucholsky, in the Berlin Kabarett scene of the 1920s...

 and famous American actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson

Paul Leroy Robeson was an American concert singer , recording artist, actor, athlete, scholar who was an advocate for the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the twentieth century...

 who also narrates. Song of the Rivers is an ode to international solidarity.

Popularity in communist countries

After World War II, Ivens spent several years in East Germany, where he edited Song of the Rivers , which is said to have been seen by 250 million people in communist countries. A tribute to international trade unionism, the film combines images of life along six great rivers: the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Nile, the Yangtse, the Volga, and the Amazon. Unlike the intimacy of "Power and the Land," another Ivens film, abstract grandiloquence is the keynote. The narrator Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson

Paul Leroy Robeson was an American concert singer , recording artist, actor, athlete, scholar who was an advocate for the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the twentieth century...

states: "Day by day with our hands — yellow, white, or black — we change the face of the earth and the future of mankind." Ivens’s editing gives the film a simple, cumulative force. The longing for unity expressed in Song of the Rivers is apparent throughout the documentary.