On demand: "A Tale of the Wind/Une Histoire de Vent"

In a 1929 short, the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens hymned rain in all its forms. Nearly sixty years later, with the climate changing and Ivens long established as the grand seigneur of the poetic documentary, he struck out for China in the hope of finding and filming fresh air. A circle had been fully turned in the meantime, and the resultant project, 1988's A Tale of the Wind, achieves a rare poignancy that goes beyond the fact this was, cinematically, its maker's last breath. (Ivens died the following year, aged 90.) What would appear the obvious images of wind (or the obvious images of wind to a Dutchman: the sails of a windmill, planes, washing billowing on a line) are dispensed with early on. Once production shifted East, Ivens resumed filming the kind of rapt, attentive non-fiction studies he'd been making since the silent era: tai chi practitioners using their hands to slice the air, helicopter sweeps over illuminated new towns, footage of kites and puffing steam trains. Yet he also folds in restaged or dramatised encounters that illustrate both the film's genesis - cf. Ivens sitting with headphones in the Gobi desert, listening to radio transmissions describing the rising number of freak weather events - and the toll of making a film in advanced old age in a place that slowly reveals itself as less than wholly welcoming. Throughout his stay, Ivens is stalked by a trickster figure who possibly represents death, scattering banana skins in its wake; at one point, he re-enacts his own collapse mid-filming; a fantasy sequence, intercut with the subsequent hospital stay, shows Ivens emerging from the mouth of a Méliès moon. A man who witnessed the birth of cinema is here observed approaching not just the movies' centenary, but the end of the world and line. There aren't many films with the vision, ambition and sheer life in them to show you that.

In many ways, A Tale of the Wind is unusual, in that the people and objects it records are less significant within the overall conceptual framework than the notionally blank space separating them, the channels, streams and air pockets Ivens determined to catch on camera and preserve on celluloid. (On-the-fly portraits of patterns in the sand dunes and uprooted trees themselves form an attempt to record that which has already long passed through.) "We are mad to be filming the wind," Ivens can be heard telling his crew at one stage. "But it's necessary all the same." A weary, wheezily asthmatic nonagenarian, never seen without his walking stick, apparently overheating in the jacket that would seem to have been his work attire for however many decades, the filmmaker is preserved on screen as a silver-maned, Vardaesque spirit: interested in everything around him (including that which is invisible and possibly unfilmable), propelled by a heightened sense of curiosity and discovery, a desire to see everything on this planet as though for the first time, or perhaps the last. He's given to a certain degree of self-romanticising, as Varda surely was in her dotage; he shoots himself posing at the top of a mountain, like a wanderer in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, to illustrate just how far he was prepared to go to pursue his theme. As a result, this Tale often has the feel less of conventional documentary practice than of one of those folk songs carried on the breeze from generation to generation: the legend of Joris Ivens, a man who went out into the world with a camera and microphone, showed us sights and wonders, and tried to bend nature to his will. In its cutesier stretches, the film merely ruffles the hair, as an old man might while telling children like you and I such stories. At its imaginative best, though - as in the stirring and elevating final sequence, in which a hardy veteran gets to determine the manner of his own leavetaking, as so few of us do - A Tale of the Wind truly, indelibly soars.

A Tale of the Wind is currently streaming via YouTube.