1971-1980ArthouseDocumentaryJohan van der KeukenNetherlands

Johan van der Keuken – Dagboek AKA Diary (1972)

North/South Triptych – Part I. The impending birth of the director’s youngest child motivates him to explore the society in which it will have to live. Shot in the Cameroons, Morocco and the Netherlands, this film, the first of a series of three, attempts to define, from hoe to computer, the relationship between the poor, developing countries of the South and the rich, industrialized Northern countries.

Situations in a film don’t really explain anything. What counts is that they have come about by way of participation. And it is only by way of participation that they can come to mean something to the viewer. Since I am unable to see things in pure isolation, I have also introduced a destructive emotion. Life erodes every statement you make. If you operate on that wavelength you create prototypes of reality. This can be done in very simple everyday images. I would rather not have power over specialized technical machinery. Film is more a way to put things into a context than to create a story. An innovation of the eye.

As soon as a person has been filmed, he is no longer a person but a piece of fiction, filmed material. And yet, at the same time, he goes on living. There is a great amount of tension in this double movement. Discovering a form for this tension means projecting an imaginary world and describing the human struggle within it. By linking the approach of the painter to the love of music, I am gradually entering the realm of poetry.

As a filmmaker, I thus inhabit the world of the image, a world halfway between myself and reality. I believe that, ideally speaking, the film viewer is in a comparable position. For a variety of reasons, we have abandoned the idea of reality as a self-contained entity existing outside and independently of us. So if you don’t wish to take the position of someone watching an external reality from the outside, but rather of someone who is observer and participant at the same time, then you’re facing the problem of how to define yourself as an individual, or how, as an observer, you are to see yourself. Who is the person who makes, and who is the person who sees?

Of course you can not deny that there is subject matter. A film is about very clear things, living conditions, modes of production, power relations. . . . But they are not established facts that you then simply translate into a film. On the contrary, whatever knowledge there is, is acquired by making the film. So there is no point in asking me anything else about the subject matter, since everything I know is already in the film. The film is the result of the learning process. And the learning process, you might say, repeats itself in the viewer. The viewer is to the film what the film is to reality. Reality consists of infinite numbers of images, infi- nite numbers of lives. And yet there are long passages in my films where hardly anything happens at all, the long shots of the windows at the end of The Spirit of the Time, the long corridor in Diary, the endless observation of three beds in The New Ice Age. To me, those are very important moments, because the film no longer provides information at a “normal” rate, and the viewer is left to his own devices.

He has to realize he is looking at a screen. He has to define his own position. I think the viewer faced with this situation–if and when he is willing to go along with it–is able to acquire a kind of knowledge that differs, in its very essence, from the kind of knowledge acquired in conventional education. There the knowledge comes ready-made from an outside source, whereas here the viewer can go look for it himself by consciously taking a stand with respect to the reality of the film. To me it has to do with the idea of “democracy at the basis,” where everyone occupies an approximately equal position regarding the knowledge available. Knowledge does not come from above, everyone can go for it. (JVDK)

Diary (1972).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 25mn
Size: 	1.52 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	708x480 ~> 708x531
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 284 Kbps
BPP: 	0.280
Audio
#1:  	Dutch 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/02875B7FDDB67FA/Diary_(1972).mkv

Language(s):Various
Subtitles:English, French, Dutch

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