Between Head and Hands

The Texts of Johan van der Keuken

ARTICLE
Gerard-Jan Claes, Nina de Vroome, Tillo Huygelen, 2024
Johan van der Keuken, a Writing Filmmaker

Introduction to ‘Between Head and Hands’

ARTICLE
Johan van der Keuken, 1963
Film Is Not a Language
ARTICLE
Johan van der Keuken, 1967
On “The Truth 24 Times a Second”
ARTICLE
Johan van der Keuken, 1969
That and How
ARTICLE
Johan van der Keuken, 1975
The Violence of the Gaze
ARTICLE
Johan van der Keuken, 1977
Henry Moore’s Montage
ARTICLE
Johan van der Keuken, 1978
Flat Jungle: 30 Minutes of Montage
ARTICLE
Johan van der Keuken, 1980
You Want It Always to Stay This Way
ARTICLE
Johan van der Keuken, 1982
From a High-Flying Airplane

For Jan Dop

ARTICLE
Johan van der Keuken, 1983
Photographer and Filmmaker
ARTICLE
Johan van der Keuken, 1984
The Mystique of the Camera
ARTICLE
Johan van der Keuken, 1995
Meanders

Johan van der Keuken (1938-2001) was a Dutch filmmaker, photographer, and author. At the age of seventeen, he already made a name for himself with Wij zijn 17 (1955), a photo book of portraits of peers. A year later, he entered the Paris film school IDHEC, where he discovered a growing passion for filmmaking. As a filmmaker, he broke through with experimental documentaries such as Blind kind (1964) and the North-South trilogy (Dagboek, Het witte kasteel, en De nieuwe ijstijd, 1972-1974) in which he depicted increasing global inequality. He made more than fifty films.

Van der Keuken’s cinema lives off the tension between ethics and aesthetics, between a radical commitment to the world and a distinct attention to form. The filmmaker stands radically in the world, looking through their lens, framing reality. A documentary filmmaker though, Van der Keuken said, can never pretend to represent reality. “For me, the material side of film comes first: a beam of light on a screen. And what is transmitted in that bombardment of light on a screen is always fiction.”1 Influenced by painting, he always calls attention to the matter of the medium itself through the conscious use of light, colour, and texture and a rhythmic, musical montage.

Van der Keuken was also a gifted writer on cinema, an activity through which he sought to delineate his practice as a filmmaker. Every filmmaker goes through a trajectory between the idea for a film and the final work. How that distance is covered, how to cross from that first stage – the “inner image,” as he called it – to the finished film, is different for each filmmaker. Writing played an essential role for Van der Keuken in this: “For myself, writing was necessary at times, because something lived inside of me, floated before my eyes, that I wanted to grasp. With hermetic formulas or intuitive stammering, speculative ebullitions or harsh prescriptions for the world.”2

Early in his career, writing was a way to anticipate his films, to explore ideas that may not yet have fully manifested themselves in his work. “I suspected film for some time to be a thing in which time and space have fused and solidified, before I could really make that thing. In the meantime, I needed words to make the connection between my head and my hands.”3

In 1980, Zien kijken filmen, a first book with texts by Van der Keuken, appeared. Later, in 2001, an even more comprehensive edition followed: Bewogen beelden. Unfortunately, these books, and the texts contained in them, are hard to find today, and you often have to go to specialized second-hand stores for a copy. Hopefully this collection of texts by Johan van der Keuken offers a chance to (re)discover him not only as a filmmaker but also as one of the most original writers on cinema.4

Gerard-Jan Claes, Nina de Vroome, and Tillo Huygelen

  • 1Serge Daney and Jean-Paul Fargier, “Een interview met Johan van der Keuken in de Cahiers du Cinéma,” translated by Johan van der Keuken and published in Zien, kijken, filmen (1980). Originally appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma 289 (1978).
  • 2Johan van der Keuken, “Je wilt dat het altijd zo blijft”, in Zien, kijken, filmen (1980).
  • 3Van der Keuken, “Je wilt dat het altijd zo blijft”.
  • 4This Issue is published on the occasion of the Johan van der Keuken retrospective ‘Seeing Looking Filming’, a collaboration between Sabzian and CINEMATEK (Brussels), taking place from October 2024 to February 2025 at CINEMATEK.
    With the support of ANV and Commission for contemporary art / KULEUVEN

Texts

Introduction to ‘Between Head and Hands’

Gerard-Jan Claes, Nina de Vroome, Tillo Huygelen, 2024
ARTICLE
16.10.2024
NL FR EN

Van der Keuken elegantly distinguished writing and filmmaking from each other. The two activities do not impose strict prescriptions on each other; rather, they run parallel in his work. They are similar searches but with different means. Early in his career, writing was a way to anticipate his films, to explore ideas that may not yet have fully manifested themselves in his work. “I suspected film for some time to be a thing in which time and space have fused and solidified, before I could really make that thing. In the meantime, I needed words to make the connection between my head and my hands.”

Johan van der Keuken, 1963
ARTICLE
16.10.2024
NL FR EN

The notions of the language of film and the laws of cinema are used by many as a reason to find bad films good and good films bad. Fortunately, there exist neither laws of cinema nor a language of film: everything is allowed.

Johan van der Keuken, 1967
ARTICLE
16.10.2024
NL FR EN

Fragmentation, in the present-day montage conception, is not an automatic result of a fragmentation built into the mechanics of the film. It solely corresponds to the searching movements in our consciousness, to the shifting back and forth between the various layers of reality. Just as the corners, holes, convex and concave surfaces in a given space can be explored, the time fragments in the film correspond to the convex and concave surfaces in our time experience as it is shaped by various states of mind.

Johan van der Keuken, 1969
ARTICLE
16.10.2024
NL FR EN

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.

Johan van der Keuken, 1975
ARTICLE
16.10.2024
EN

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?

Johan van der Keuken, 1977
ARTICLE
16.10.2024
NL FR EN

The more progress you make as a filmmaker, the more you view your work as a force, be it perhaps a modest one, in the social struggle. One of the repercussions is then that the free, autonomous image often must be subordinated to the image as the bearer of meanings. I have the feeling that, in covering precisely this ground, the art of montage has enriched its possibilities. First it dissociated itself from meaning and concept and became collage. By way of an acknowledgement of the limitations that our society (and perhaps every society) imposes upon us, it returned to the formulation of concepts. But in the process, it became a kind of montage that also incorporates the collage and exhibits a constant interchange between freedom and collective necessity. Dialectics that are left wing in their consequences but that “preserve the level of surprise.”

Johan van der Keuken, 1978
ARTICLE
16.10.2024
NL FR EN

I want to try to describe a piece of editing work with as much precision as I can. It is Monday, the sixth of February, a quarter past 11. The place where we set up shop last November is a partially darkened room in a shed on the grounds of the Cinetone Studios in the east of Amsterdam. The interior is a bright but indefinable shade of green, the exterior visible from the window has the picturesque gloominess of a set where, decades ago, the last Eastern was shot. At the editing table, Jan Dop, the montage/editing/cutting artist, perched on the edge of his swivel chair cranked up so high he is almost standing, brings to mind a cowboy ready for the roundup.

Johan van der Keuken, 1980
ARTICLE
16.10.2024
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Through years of playing diligently with the visible and audible material that presents itself within the four sides of the image, the making of images became my profession. But what should you film all day long? In order to point my camera at other people I have to conquer certain disgust, because the image paralyzes life – limitation and falsification set in immediately. Professionalism is the conquering of that disgust: to wrestle some life from it in spite of that, to get closer to people, to bridge the distance. When I write, I hardly hit upon the problem of disgust. Writing is not my profession; it is an activity to link other activities.

For Jan Dop

Johan van der Keuken, 1982
ARTICLE
22.04.2020
NL FR EN

Every time an image emerges from the depths, something changes: in size, intensity or movement, or in the relationship it establishes with other images – from other layers. In the course of these changes, the argument, the train of thought, the story of the film develops.

Johan van der Keuken, 1983
ARTICLE
16.10.2024
FR EN

Today the purely visual – or rather the purely sensory image and sound – is still the nucleus it all revolves around. The first convolution around that nucleus is the montage, the process of splitting up sensations and combining them again to create an object in time, an optical statement. 

Johan van der Keuken, 1984
ARTICLE
16.10.2024
NL FR EN

How to return, how to leave behind. The cinematic space of New York, the Lower East Side, “Loisaida” as its Spanish-speaking residents so aptly call it and also write it: cracked pavement, the rot of bad teeth, manhole covers, the scars of flames, scorched spot in the city – now left behind, everything forgotten, senile like in Bernlef’s Mind Shadows. Suddenly you no longer know a single name, a single place, a single number; you have gone blind from too much seeing.

Johan van der Keuken, 1995
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16.10.2024
NL FR EN

It is therefore the specificity of the means that determines the paths to be taken, towards partially unknown goals, and in a progressive articulation of the film. Style is not a homogeneous characteristic. It’s a set of wanderings, perhaps tics, through which the author’s person is barely holding together. The last moment of unity before the collapse, the last moment of a “vision of the world”, as we used to say: the search for this last moment begins over and over again.