Johan van der Keuken

In a small, depopulated village of the Aude province of France, an elderly couple confides to the “vacationer”‘s camera their memories of the past: war, illness, death… 
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, 1975Read More »

The film was part of the project Hexagon by Frank Scheffer in which six Dutch filmmakers took inspiration from a work by a Dutch composer. Van der Keuken chose a piece by Willem Breuker, who had written the music for nearly all of his films since 1967. The title refers to the work of renowned photographer Edward Muybridge (1830-1904).Read More »

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.Read More »

Synopsis:
Abstract film based on the music piece of the same name by Charles Ives. A woman has lived in a nursing home since the death of her husband. She does not realize that her husband is no longer alive. She is often restless and writes letters to her husband.Read More »

Synopsis:
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.Read More »

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

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.Read More »

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.Read More »

This four hour documentary looks for the exotic in the everyday life observed in just one city, the filmmaker’s own Amsterdam.Read More »