The story of the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens is, in many respects, the story of the twentieth century. Born in 1898, Ivens is best known for documenting the twentieth century’s major geopolitical events. A magnetic figure, Ivens attracted many noteworthy collaborators over the course of a seventy-five year career. His 1937 film, “The Spanish Earth,” made in support of the democratically elected Spanish Republicans, was written by Ernest Hemingway and narrated by Orson Welles. “The 400 Million,” released a year later, documented Chinese resistance during the Second Sino Chinese War and was shot by Robert Capa.

In 1988, at the age of ninety, Ivens began work on a different sort of project. A lifelong asthmatic, he was advised by a spiritual healer to seek relief from his affliction by travelling to the Gobi desert in order to, “film the invisible wind.” The resulting picture, “A Tale of the Wind,” depicts the filmmaker’s quixotic trek into the Gobi Desert and his attempt to capture the ineffable.

The project marks a departure from the political ideology that was so critical to his best-known work in favor of a more spiritual and ethereal means of expression. However, this late career shift was not without precedent. “A Tale of the Wind” actually marks a return to Ivens’ very first subject: the Dutch coastline. The film is interspersed with clips from unreleased films Ivens made as a young man that depict a teenaged boy and a female companion frolicking at the edge of a turbulent North Sea. Ivens films the ocean and the desert in much the same way, contrasting solitary figures with the vastness of the natural landscape in a manner that recalls the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s, “The Monk by the Sea.”

A Tale of the Wind proceeds languorously as Ivens and his crew prepare for the wind’s arrival. When the weather proves fickle, they are approached by a local woman who claims to be able to conjure the wind. In exchange for her services, she demands two ordinary portable fans. Ivens graciously obliges and the woman begins work on a calligraphic design in the sand. Before long the wind miraculously picks up. As the crew frantically gather their equipment, Ivens sits perched on a wooden stool some distance from the camp, sand whipping around his ankles, a ninety-year-old man smiling the pure smile of a young boy not yet unacquainted with life’s disappointments and hardship.

Ivens achieves through his art what so few achieve in life: transcendence, and with it closure. Though he appears spry and engaged in the movie, he would live just a few months past its release. “A Tale of the Wind” is both a communion and a consecration: an opportunity for the artist to articulate his experience of the world and provide a record of this expression unto posterity.