The Eye Above the Well

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

In 1984–85, Johan van der Keuken took his camera across the globe, from Amsterdam to New York to Hong Kong, ending in Geneva. The object of his investigation was money, in particular the maniacal drive to accumulate it in the era of Thatcherite/Reaganite neoliberalism.

A compilation of six standalone short films, each inspired by a contemporary Dutch music composition and created as part of a collaboration between Nederlandse film directors and composers for a Holland Festival presentation.

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Shot in Lebanon in 1975 just before the civil war. The director delivers a nuanced account of the complexities surrounding the Palestinian issue.

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

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.

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.