Johan van der Keuken

Het Witte Kasteel (1973)

Part of Johan van der Keuken’s North/South series, The White Castle focuses on the impact of the West on the underclass: on the concrete realities of their daily life and on the way their existence is isolated and frustrated. Interweaving images of the Spanish tourist mecca of Formentera, a community center in Columbus, Ohio, and factories in the Netherlands, the film vividly illustrates the fragmented, alienated lives that the market economy produces and chillingly portrays what van der Keuken saw as “a conveyor belt [that] runs across the world.”Read More »

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.Read More »

Between documentary and fiction, The master and the giant approaches the topic of the rivalry in the creation: a first God created the world, a second God destroyed it to build one new, better. Myth and reality meet in this film that puts in scene two different universes: a man and a woman in a neighborhood in demolition of Amsterdam, and images of the life in the confines of the tunecian Sahara. (Written in collaboration with Claude Ménard.)Read More »

Amsterdam’s De Melkweg (The Milky Way) is a 1960’s-type counter-culture center, set up in what was once a milk factory. As-yet unknown musical groups, theatre companies and poets perform there… Freedom of expression is absolute, multiform and eclectic; an explosion of rhythms (from rock to New Wave to Afro-Caribbean), colours, words and images attracts a young and cosmopolitan audience with an uncertain future. Portrait of a generation.Read More »

Description: Those familiar with van der Keuken’s films are aware of his extraordinary capacity to observe with a camera, to make the everyday magical and to slowly reveal the marvelous complexity of individuals’ lives. In his captivating new short, the delightful van der Keuken focuses on photography, in particular the extraordinary figure of a Chinese immigrant portrait photographer. A man of great authority, To Sang poses his various clients, all of whom work on the same street, with a precise sense of what constitutes a good photograph. He “directs” his clients into old- fashioned poses with a deft series of gestures: a Pakistani daughter stands between her visiting mother and father, a Kurdish son with his parents, a Surinamese travel agent sits alone. For van der Keuken, these photographs are “dream images,” more revealing of illusions and role-playing than reality. To Sang Fotostudio is not only a reflexive meditation on what an image is but also a complex portrait of a colorful, diverse neighborhood.Read More »

Quote:
The coronation of Queen Beatrix on the eve of May Day in 1980 provides a salient point of departure for Johan van der Keuken’s The Way South, a cultural interrogation into the intertwined sociopolitical landscape of immigration, dislocation, underprivilege, and class division. Continuing on the prevailing theme of economic disparity between the continental north and south (in such essay films as Diary, The White Castle, and the The New Ice Age), van der Keuken encounters his first destination within a short distance from his home in Amsterdam, where a unused office building on Kinker Street has been converted to a communal squat by activists (who see their action as a pragmatic solution to the affordable housing shortage by making use of existing real estate that would otherwise remain unoccupied).Read More »

Johan van der Keuken films in India, in Kérala, various situations of teaching or training: courses of a school of dance, songs, martial arts, a vedic school, a scene of theater. In counterpoint, the circulation of the money through the route of a small busy lender of countryside of village in village. It is a filmic movement which collects the gasoline of a civilization, the permanence of certain values of harmony and artistic discipline.

Note: Grand Prix with the Festival of Brussels, 1989.Read More »

1990-1991: “Face Value” Awarded the Dutch Press Prize, Netherlands

Rejecting linear narrative storytelling, the director offers us an epic on humanity and cultural diversity in Europe through a multitude of appearances, a cartography of faces, the reflection of an imaginary Europe made up of London, Marseille, Prague and the Netherlands.

“Everything revolves around faces and the act of looking: the desire to show oneself, the fear of being seen, the impossibility of seeing oneself, the fear and desire of seeing the other. And, as well, within this theme of looking and seeing, the uncertain struggle for identity, the ferocious struggle for territory, the sweeping movements of love and death” (JVDK)Read More »

New York, Geneva, Hong Kong and Amsterdam are major hubs of the world’s economy. Great amounts of money circulate there, and whereas poverty is ubiquitous in the streets of New York, Geneva carefully protects its wealth behind impeccable facades.
No one is unaffected by the myth of the all-powerful Dollar: the under-privileged struggle to survive talking about their unattainable dreams, while businessmen, from the safe distance of their offices, lay down the tenets of their financial theories.Read More »