Johan van der Keuken

Face Value is a film combining a conscious approach with spontaneity, and contemplation with action. It presents us with the differing views of a region we call “Europe”, an imaginary Europe situated somewhere between London, Marseilles, Prague and the Netherlands.

Johan van der Keuken: 'We kept the ends of a lot of shots in Amsterdam Global Village: the camera leaves the subject and pans to the sound woman, who quickly taps the microphone. These taps later in the cutting become the references for synchronising picture and sound. This film is the rhythmic sequence of these taps, in which something of a story can be seen.

Detective Beauty undertakes an investigation into reality. He tries to understand a world he cannot grasp, to capture the things that escape him.

In his very first ‘independent film’, Dutch master filmmaker Johan Van der Keuken presents an image of Amsterdam in the sixties. He set out taking just his camera, without any pre-defined concept. The result is a poetic observation of Amsterdam by a deeply committed filmmaker.

Five portraits from the mid-seventies. The nouveau riches and the nouveau pauvres take their places. With Joop Uchtman, Claude Menard, Ome Joop Beaux, Doris Schwert en Jan van Haagen.

Rare fictional short, written by Remco Campert, in the veins of existentialism. About a young man who is in love with the girlfriend of his best pal.

In SPIRIT OF THE TIME (1968) van der Keuken presents a collage of "drop-outs," protesters (both left and right), musicians and "hippies." He organizes these figures around an idea of "mental readjustment," otherwise known as the counterculture. Acting upon a political and social withdrawal into self, they have tried to find new ways of living together.

Film essay about the slums of 1960's Amsterdam.

With the use of montage sequences, voiced over with the observations of the children, van der Keuken was able to use artistic expression to portray the sightless children’s unique perspective of the world.

This film is a playful and experimental film object. The images of several films by Johan van der Keuken are mounted in a rhythmic and circular way to emphasize the repetition and similarity of the gestures they give to see: the daily gestures of men and women at work, throughout the world.

It is an autobiographical fiction starring Ivens as an old man who has spent his life trying to "tame the wind and harness the sea" by capturing them on film.

BEPPIE is a moving and disarming portrait of an Amsterdam street urchin. Van der Keuken once described her as follows: 'She was ten years old and the joy of the Achtergracht, where I was living at the time. An Amsterdam child, sweet and crooked as a corkscrew.' He films her while she skims the city with some friends and knocks at strangers' doors. Her family has nine children and is not well off. In those days, a visit to the De Miranda swimming pool cost a quarter, but only ten cents if the weather was bad. At school, Beppie gets a poor mark because she is too boisterous, but when the whole class rattles off the multiplication tables, she joins in at the top of her voice. All of TV-watching Holland was wildly enthusiastic about this portrait, with which Van der Keuken even made the front page of the national newspaper De Telegraaf.

Documentary shows brass bands from Nepal, Surinam, Indonesia and Ghana.

The opening segment for a planned larger documentary by Johan van der Keuken. Unfortunately, this is all that was completed before his death. These are small portraits of people he met during his travels.

Johan van der Keuken's first film is a uniquely beautiful portrait of Paris at dawn.

A poetic depiction of life and ritual in the south Indian state of Kerala. We see how knowledge is passed down from generation to generation: within the family, through the village economy, and especially from teachers to students. Performance footage shows how song, dance, martial arts, and religion constitute the building blocks of a culture.

A 1958 French language short film written and directed by Costa-Gavras, starring Guy Mairesse, Paniaras and Jean Patrick.

"I am far away on a distant journey through my own city", filmmaker Johan van der Keuken says at the end of his four-hour portrait of Amsterdam. The city is presented as a place where people from all corners of the world live, who all exert their cultural influence on the life in the city. With a motor courier as his central figure, the filmmaker introduces the audience to birds of different feathers. We see diverse cultural expressions, like the house scene, the entry of St. Nicholas and a Ghanese mourning ritual. The binding factor in the film is the concept of 'travelling', in other words Amsterdam as a global village. The camera travels through the film in three ways: over land, over water (canals) and through the air.

A short TV documentary about the making of Straub-Huillet's Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.

Three-part film about the Dutch painter and poet Lucebert who died in 1994. Director Johan van der Keuken made three short films about his friend and inspiration Lucebert. The black-and-white film Lucebert, dichter-schilder was shot in 1962 on a very low budget. In 1967 Een film voor Lucebert was released. Unlike Van der Keuken's first film about Lucebert, this one had a political message. It is a film for an artist about the world. Lucebert died in May 1994. A reaction to his death is contained in Als je weet waar ik ben zoek me dan. In this film, shot in Lucebert's studio, the presence of the artist is evoked once more through his absence. In Lucebert, Time and Farewell, Van der Keuken puts the three films together into a new entity that exploits the tension between changing and standing still over a period of 32 years.

In the late sixties, the American saxophone player and living jazz legend Ben Webster lived in Amsterdam for a year. Webster, who was born in Kansas City in 1909, was a unique personality in the world of jazz and blues. In the thirties, he played with all the great names. During his Amsterdam period, he stayed with an elderly landlady, Mrs Hardloper, with whom he appeared on a national talk show. In conversations with Van der Keuken, he muses on the past; on the fantastic experience of playing in the renowned Duke Ellington band; or on one of his best friends, who was so deft at eating with a knife and fork. Short, fragmented remarks, which Van der Keuken has edited in a loose, improvised editing style.

Johan van der Keuken went against the grain in 1980: from Amsterdam (on April 30 with the coronation riots and squatting actions) via Paris, southern France and Italy to Egypt. He made his personal travelogue in three parts for VPRO television. Later, he fused the three parts into one long movie.

The film is put together as a collection of autonomous images which, once combined, make up van der Keuken's mental universe: family happiness, fragments of some of his earlier films, a homage to the saxophonist Ben Webster, two poems by the great contemporary poets Remco Campert and Lucebert, a portrait of the director's grandfather, who taught him photography at the age of twelve... 
"One of those small masterpieces one encounters by surprise..." Jean-Paul Fargier, Cahiers du Cinéma, 1975

During the shooting of this film, four long interviews were recorded by Thierry Nouel, marking out the different stages of the life and work of the Dutch director. Johan van der Keuken analyzes the relationships between art and reality, morality and the political, gives his conception of exchanges and conflicts between interiority and the outside world. He explains with precision this research which goes at all to the intimate, and which did not progress without rejections and moments of doubt. Shortly before his death, he had reviewed this document and wanted it to be shown as such, in its unedited state.