See You Later, Sweet Form

On Johan van der Keuken

In 1966, Johan van der Keuken made a film about a blind boy he had met two years earlier while shooting his film Blind kind at the institute for the blind in Huizen, the Netherlands. Herman Slobbe was a “little chap” who had stuck with him. In this second film about blind children’s perception of reality, he has Herman, then fourteen years old, play the role of a reporter. With microphone in hand, Herman becomes “the voice describing his world, the ear through which we listen to the world,” as Van der Keuken tells us in the voiceover.

Herman Slobbe doesn’t only show us the life of a blind boy. With a number of interventions, Van der Keuken also lets us look at the creation of the film itself. Early in the film, an image of a film reel running through a spool in a Bolex camera appears, as if giving us a look behind the scenes. Van der Keuken explains that the film he’ll make with Herman is set on the roads between his own house, Herman’s house and the institute for the blind where Herman stays during the week. He immediately reveals the structure of the film that will follow, as if we are simultaneously viewing both the front and back of a tapestry: the composition and the weaving. This staged transparency does not render the film more sober but instead anchors it in a broader sensibility within Van der Keuken’s work, an ongoing reflection on form and reality.

Later, the image of the film roll reappears: “Now the film gets jammed.” The celluloid no longer runs but gets stuck in the camera’s body. Then a picture of a man falling to the ground and yelling appears. “On June 7, James Meredith was shot in the back on his Freedom March.” Then we see Herman back as a reporter at the fair. In a Ferris wheel, he goes up and is thrilled. “This is it, ladies and gentlemen,” he shouts deliriously. Back on the ground, he interviews his friends and asks them what they think of the ride. As the film comes to an end, the image of the reel returns one last time. “On 29 June,” Van der Keuken tells us, “the Americans bombed Hanoi. Now we abandon Herman. I’m going to shoot a new film in Spain.” We see images that suggest Spain. Then he suddenly says: “Everything in a film is a form.” We see two workers smashing stones in a quarry. Archie Shepp’s incantatory music accompanies the image. Then suddenly Herman reappears, removing a motorbike helmet, and with his head somewhat slumped as if taking a slight bow. “Herman is a form,” says Van der Keuken. “See you later, sweet form.” Then Herman turns and walks away from the camera.

Van der Keuken is best known as a documentary filmmaker; he focused his gaze on the world and the people in it. Yet, he tells us, everything in a film is a form. “For me, the material side of film comes first: a beam of light on a screen. And what’s transmitted in that bombardment of light on a screen is always fiction.”1 Everything that makes up a film – colour, sound, light, people, spaces, things – are no more than elements in a composition. “I first say, ‘Everything in a film is a form.’ With that, I resisted the widespread misunderstanding of documentary. Even if it’s documentary, it isn’t true: it’s a form, matter edited and processed, fiction.”2 Films, including documentaries, are always constructions, something made. “I’ve always worked from a recognition of a certain abstract nature of film, because for me it is, after all, a projection of light onto a surface.”3 Through the deliberate use of light, colour and texture, and through a musical handling of the images and sounds in editing, Van der Keuken’s work emphasises the matter of the medium.

Herman, too, is a form, light on a screen. “As soon as a person has been filmed, he’s no longer a person but a piece of fiction, filmed material.”4 Herman is then no more than a shade in Van der Keuken’s palette of colours. The blind boy becomes a thing in the world of forms in cinema. Or not quite: “And then I take it back and say, ‘It’s also someone I’ve lived with: see you later!’ Herman exists in fiction but also in real life.”5 Outside the film, Herman lives on undiminished; he’s more than a form. This tension led to Van der Keuken’s objections to a certain documentary view that claims to present an objective picture of reality, as if film offers a transparent window onto the world.

“Conventional storytelling proceeds from the idea that you knew the reality you are describing beforehand; that you also knew the characters you show in the film. For me, and for a number of others, it’s just the opposite: I start from the feeling that I don’t know anything and, in the end, the filmed images are all you are left with as knowable reality. They are moments of contact, of knowledge, the only ones you have left of the world you have entered.”6

As a filmmaker, he’s only able to show a fragment of Herman. There’s ultimately no fundamental truth to be told about this blind boy. The viewer knows nothing about the character other than what’s shown on screen. This relativity has far-reaching consequences for the documentary filmmaker. If a documentary has nothing “essential” to say about its subject, then, as a document of reality, it is, after all, incomplete and arbitrary. “The film is only a rather random cut-out and for that reason alone it is fiction.”7  Thus, the film always runs aground on its own representation. Van der Keuken integrated this difficulty into Herman Slobbe by making the film jam both literally and figuratively. He lets in the reality that takes place outside the film. Van der Keuken takes an interest in Herman, but by disrupting the unity of the film, he indicates two things: “reality exists in all the characters and in everything that surrounds it,”8 and it cannot be described.

That rupture and that world outside the film show themselves in different forms. There’s the relativity of the subject. As a documentary filmmaker, Van der Keuken chooses to focus on one boy, the blind Herman, but by doing so he also chooses not to focus on the bombing of Hanoi or the shooting of the US civil rights activist James Meredith, two events that, from a certain perspective, carry more weight than the life of young Herman. Citing these other realities briefly “breaks down the idea of a limited, circumscribed reality – even for the short duration of a film”.9 That which is usually left out of the picture, as if it did not exist, is briefly hinted at. The film about Herman is just one fragment of an ever-flooding reality. It’s a tendency that documentary filmmakers, or at least filmmakers working with reality, must constantly resist: the drive for completeness. What’s the beginning and the end of a film? What am I filming and what am I not? What is my “subject”?

The world outside the film is also Van der Keuken’s own. “Now we abandon Herman,” he remarks at the end. The interest the filmmaker shows in his subject is always fragmentary and limited to the filming period. Once that’s over, the subject is left in a reality without film. Van der Keuken is already heading for his next film in Spain.

Here, the “violence” of the documentary filmmaker also becomes clear. A blind boy becomes a piece of fiction, filmed material. After filming, he’s left behind, but Van der Keuken takes him to his editing table as a form. Then Herman is edited and enters a film that will be watched by countless viewers. And yet, at the same time, he lives on, far away from the cinema and television screens on which he can be seen. Herman gave Van der Keuken access to his life, trusted him to use and transform elements of his life for a film. But in the end, Van der Keuken has to leave. That breakup is painful but inevitable.

The French documentary filmmaker Nicolas Philibert devoted a film to this “aftermath”. In 1975, he collaborated as a directing assistant on Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère..., a film by René Allio, shot with non-professional actors who didn’t move on to another role after filming but resumed their ordinary lives. Thirty years later, Philibert decides to return to Normandy to meet the temporary actors from that film again. The result is Retour en Normandie. Without knowing what he was looking for or would find, Philibert’s film explores the influence of cinema on lives that shouldn’t have initially come into contact with the film world. Despite the enchantment of a film’s solidified reality, Retour en Normandie shows that the disillusionment of this aftermath remains inescapable. The truth that unfolds during the duration of a film is always relative. After Herman Slobbe, Van der Keuken shot Een film voor Lucebert (1967). He announces the new film by already showing images from it. In a strict sense, the workers in Spain have nothing to do with Herman. But in Van der Keuken’s world of images, they follow one another. “All this to make it clear in the form of the film that it is something very fictional and relative in comparison to the life and truth of the people who appear in it.”10

But how does Herman as “subject” relate to the incomplete images and fragments in which he may not recognise himself at all? When Herman becomes a form, a piece of fiction, but at the same time lives on, and when the reality of that character cannot be fully described, it places a huge responsibility on the shoulders of the documentary filmmaker. Herman is not an actor playing a role but a person filmed in his own real life. He’s captured just as he moves, acts and reacts in everyday life. In other words: Van der Keuken also documents Herman’s reality. He observes and records the blind boy’s life, generally as it occurred. Yet here, too, the truth of reality does not prevail. For if everything in a film is a form, then the ethics of the documentary filmmaker lie precisely in making known the relativity of that truth in the form, which is only the result of the concrete situation of and decision-making processes during the shooting. “I try to emphasise that ambiguity of documentary: that the filmed material is always documentation of what happened on the spot. Not just the description of the place but also of what was going on between us. My physical reaction to what was happening, people’s reaction to our presence, and so on.”11

Yet this “original” truth of the shot is again negated by the editing. During editing, Van der Keuken decides to show only this bit of Herman at the fair, to cut out a strange camera movement at the end or to merge two images that have nothing to do with each other temporally. “And there you encounter, in a different way, one of the fundamental questions of documentary: what’s really the truth (...) and what’s the right way to let it in?”12 The images are carefully weighed in the editing, striking a balance between what fits well into the continuity of the composition and what doesn’t. In the end, the film is more than just the sum of the collected shots. Herman Slobbe’s reality must also be created and constructed. Thus, Van der Keuken stresses, a fictional documentary truth also remains. To reflect the reality of that shooting situation, artifice is needed in the editing. That fiction is thus necessary to precisely recover a certain reality, which in turn is completely fictional.

As filmmaker with an interest in the world, Van der Keuken is also a reporter. However much he engages with light and texture, he inevitably ends up in the margins of news reporting. The indexicality of an image – the camera is always filming a world here and now – ensures that a form of reporting always comes into play. Just because Herman becomes a form, an abstraction, he also risks becoming an image of all blind children. The appeal of the “theme” is not foreign to Van der Keuken; despite the fiction, he doesn’t want to give up his belief in the documentary potential of film. He doesn’t want to film just anything. Although everything in a film is a form, he doesn’t limit himself to making images of sunlight playing through the leaves of a tree or rippling water whose lines jump and dance. Van der Keuken often starts from a strong social commitment. His films about blind children focused on how they hold their own in the world and form a worldview without sight. “That’s something I always ask myself: what would I be like if I were in the shoes of this one or that person?”13 Yet this is always just a starting point; the final destination, what the film is meant to be, remains unknown. Van der Keuken doesn’t gather evidence to confirm a predetermined thesis. He opposes filmed journalism that reduces those portrayed to props in a larger argument and seizes on its subject. Rather than a delineated object of study, the subject is an arena through which Van der Keuken moves very physically as a filmmaker and he constantly revises his orientation.

This inconstancy raises the question of what role the film can or should play in describing an issue, and how much control the people you are filming have, the people you are forming an image of. What does the film mean to them? In a material sense, very little, according to Van der Keuken. The political and personal effectiveness of cinema always remains relative; “people’s problems always take place at the level of their daily lives”.14 Van der Keuken’s film Vier muren (1965), about the housing shortage in Amsterdam, didn’t actually help any of the filmed residents find housing. But it also remains problematic in terms of image making itself. In Het witte kasteel (1973), like in a collage, he combines footage of a summer camp for children from the poor neighbourhoods of Columbus, Ohio, with scenes on Formentera. When the children were shown the film, they reacted mostly negatively. They didn’t understand their relationship with the inhabitants of the Spanish island. Filming blind people puts this issue on full display. For blind people, by definition, there’s no relationship or agency possible – they can’t even see the images made of them. In other words, they don’t have any use for it at all. This is accentuated in the film’s ending where Herman somewhat shyly takes off his motorbike helmet in front of Van der Keuken’s camera: a filmmaker, observing through his camera, is filming a blind boy who has no relation to that watching. The image thus becomes a testimony to this “impossible” encounter.

“On the one hand, there are those blind children themselves, who have to get by in life and so there is a human drama there. And on the other hand, you have this obsession to show something you cannot show, implying that our reality as a whole cannot be shown. You are aware that people born blind cannot really imagine what a film is. It is total fiction. An absolute relativity. Whether you are blind or not.”15

This absolute relativity need not lead to indifference. If the film is an entirely fictional and relative representation vis-à-vis the life and truth of the people featured in it, the film form should make that clear, according to Van der Keuken. “That is also where the connection between politics and form is, because how are you supposed to process in a form what you cannot process in life? The struggle between the different elements of film thus becomes a constructive principle.”16 That uncertainty, which characterises the form of cinema itself, is something a filmmaker must nurture and maintain. Van der Keuken expresses this instability and incompleteness through his editing, which he described as “cubist”. The editing should not offer one angle but, as in a collage, a multitude of perspectives in which reality could possibly be described. The juxtaposition of heterogeneous material then serves not to make a comparison, but rather to point out a deficiency and incapacity of the image. “When different excerpts from reality are juxtaposed and used in a dialectical way, I say: the presence of some images exists in the absence of some other images.”17

As a recording device, the camera can only trace the outside of a person. For the filmmaker Van der Keuken, Herman is primarily an apparition, a surface, behind which a whole world is hidden but cannot be depicted. In this sense, the film shows us nothing of Herman. What Herman thinks, we will never know. “Cinema is no more than the technical presentation of something that is there.”18 That “something” is presented in a form that’s first and foremost “specific” and therefore not revealing. In the film, Herman is no more than a delineated figure; the blind boy’s inner world is simply not given. And for Van der Keuken, the political power of cinema lies in maintaining that tension. “It has to be unstable in order for it to be different.”19 It is only through form that the volatility of that reality becomes visible and expresses itself as something transformable. In other words, the reality depicted is as important as the gaze that falls on it. As the German film critics Frieda Grafe and Enno Patalas wrote, the best films are “the best critiques of themselves”, films that lead viewers to “look and listen consciously, always considering the chimerical of what they see and also taking pleasure in the rupture between the depicted and the image”.20

Yet even Van der Keuken’s “total fiction” is still framed as “documentary”. He was fascinated by cinéma-vérité, not because it was a supposedly more truthful process but precisely because it had the capacity “to follow the duration of events but lacked the formal means to describe the ‘world of things’”.21 It is precisely this ambiguity that attracted him to it. As a technique, it is no more transparent than any other, but above all, the artificial has a more direct relationship with the reality of recording.

What is finally the value of the notion of “documentary”? Van der Keuken creates forms of reality and the people he films. Despite its absolute relativity, that fiction is nevertheless less innocent and relative than it presents itself. The documentary filmmaker ultimately desires his view of reality to become objective. By turning it into a form, Van der Keuken allows what he sees, and especially how he sees it, to “be”. He turns it into a thing. And by measuring it exactly in reverse to reality, it provides “the evidence for the validity of that view of that reality” itself.22 The documentary dimension – that it took place like this, unseen and without intervention – associates the film with reality outside the film. What happens on screen may only be a fragment of what is “going on” outside, it is nevertheless part of it, as well as adding to it. Away from the cinema, reality continues and the film offers an answer to the desire to solidify that reality very briefly just by keeping a link to it. It validates fiction as something “authentic”, however impossible that word may be. “That’s a kind of fascination, hard to explain. A kind of drama in itself. That you were actually there. That you defied the passage of time.”23 In this way, the film offers a testimony to a world that is always still happening, that “continues to this very moment”, and in which Van der Keuken, the people he is filming and the spectators have to endure every day. Van der Keuken’s perception of reality is thus inscribed in time, a brief moment anchored in a larger historical narrative.

In Verlangen naar ontroostbaarheid, Patricia de Maertelaere writes that art, and more specifically “fiction”, is one of the ways in which man seeks a solution to “ground his way of seeing in a form of being”.24 Man wants confirmation that what he sees, but is not there, is nevertheless there. “What we would like is to see things perfectly as they are, without them thereby, in a paradoxical way, becoming merely objective.”25 With Sartre, De Martelaere notes that artistic creation is an expression to feel essential in relation to the world and to aestheticize it, to endow it with an intention and purpose. Only the work of art is “capable of giving the unquestionable, indestructible certainty of existence as well as of meaning, the [impossible] perfect coincidence of seeing and being.”26

This desire is not foreign to Van der Keuken: ‘It would be nice if you could let reality organise itself completely.”27 What the filmmaker would actually like is for reality to come into its own in a completely natural way, without the need for artifice. But that is, paradoxically enough, precisely what fiction offers him, and this in a double movement – “a coming and going between fictionalisation and the return to the world”.28 As a filmmaker, he’s able to shape this reality through fiction, and conversely, this distortion offers precisely a hold on that reality. “A look of recognition on and of the world.”29 This recognition through fiction offers us just the proof that the world exists and that we are part of it.

This “recognition” could also be expressed more strongly. As a “rather random cut-out” from reality, Herman has stuck with Johan van der Keuken to such an extent that he dedicates a film to. He loves this “chap” as a specific form that lives on at the same time: a boy with a hazy gaze caused by his blindness, the eyeballs slightly turned outwards, making it seem as if he’s unaware of what’s going on around him. His gaze has something absent but at the same time he exudes a profound concentration, especially when he plays the harmonica, performs a radio show or boldly addresses his mother. For Van der Keuken, the camera becomes an instrument with a double role: he expresses his love for a piece of reality, this “sweet” form, by paying attention to it. But he also wants to capture Herman, so that he cannot escape, does not fade with time, and at the same time can stand as proof of the beauty and “sweetness” of the world.

The true documentary moment then is not the outcome of the showdown between truth and fiction, but the outcome of the fiction itself:

“So it is only at the end that you can see the whole, like an object that suddenly emerges from a system of temporal relations, that fixes itself in a condensed object that for me is the moment of truth, the pure documentary moment, where that composite object exists through its duration, can be experienced and seen in what is like a visionary way. The document about the real is perhaps that. Not the primary reality of all those events or images, nor their fictionalised nature, but the final materialisation of that composite object, in our minds.”30

Van der Keuken makes a world exist, he creates a reality. Describing then is not representing something that already exists but rather realising “a” reality. By creating forms, he creates a world of things that comes to life in our imagination. Herman does exist, as form. The good fortune Van der Keuken makes us part of is just that magical realisation of the world on the screen, where the inner suddenly becomes outer.

However, this moment of fulfilment is short-lived. The ecstasy that comes from seeing that constructed world is immediately followed in the cinema by an intrinsic sense of melancholy arising from the realisation that every film is coming to an end. As form, Van der Keuken was able to solidify Herman very briefly in time and space, to delineate a piece of reality and allow it to exist. But that can only be done by taking Herman out of the real world, turning him into a thing and moving him in that form into the world of light on screen. For Van der Keuken, his work as a filmmaker is a constant process of creating and freezing. “A filmmaker’s work focuses exclusively on forms. This work is a high-stakes game. The film is never a usable product but simply a temporary freezing of this game. In a frozen state, the game can be preserved.” This is immediately followed by the realisation that in the end it is all nothing, a piece of fiction that will melt as soon as the film ends. And “when it thaws, the game can begin again”.31 See you later, sweet form!

• 1Serge Daney and Jean-Paul Fargier, “Een interview met Johan van der Keuken in de Cahiers du Cinéma,” translated into Dutch by Johan van der Keuken and published in his Zien, Kijken, Filmen. Foto’s, teksten en interviews (Van Gennep: Amsterdam, 1980). This text was originally published in French as “Entretien avec Johan van der Keuken,” Cahiers du Cinéma 289 (1978). The Dutch and French texts were both republished on Sabzian on 6 October 2013  and 28 October 2013 respectively.
• 2Ibid.
• 3Johan van der Keuken, cited in Mark Paul Meyer, “Light on a Screen is Always Fiction,” brochure on the occasion of the Johan van der Keuken exhibition Tegen het licht in EYE, 30 March–9 June 2014.
• 4Johan van der Keuken, “That and How” (1969), Sabzian, 16 October 2024.
• 5Daney en Fargier, “Een interview met Johan van der Keuken in de Cahiers du Cinéma.”
• 6Johan van der Keuken, “Maart 1978,” in Zien, Kijken, Filmen.
• 7Daney en Fargier, “Een interview met Johan van der Keuken in de Cahiers du Cinéma.”
• 8Ibid.
• 9Ibid.
• 10Ibid.
• 11Ibid.
• 12Ibid.
• 13Ibid.
• 14Ibid.
• 15Ibid.
• 16Ibid.
• 17Ibid.
• 18Johan van der Keuken cited in Christoph Hübner, Dokumentarisch Arbeiten. Christoph Hübner in Gesprach mit Johan van der Keuken, ARTE, 59 min., 1995.
• 19Hübner, Dokumentarisch Arbeiten.
• 20Frieda Grafe and Enno Patalas, “Trouble in Paradise by Ernst Lubitsch,” trans. Sis Matthé, Sabzian, 13 July 2022. This text originally appeared as “Trouble in Paradise (Ärger im Paradies) von Ernst Lubitsch,” in Filmkritik 3/69, vol. 13, nr. 3 (March 1969): 177-179.
• 21Johan van der Keuken, “Meanders,” trans. Veva Leye, Sabzian, 16 October 2024. This text originally appeared in Trafic, nr. 13 (winter 1995): 14-23.
• 22James Blue and Johan van der Keuken, “Bach en de zingende zaag,” Podium 6, vol.19 (1965).
• 23Ibid.
• 24 Patricia de Martelaere, Een verlangen naar ontroostbaarheid (Meulenhoff: Amsterdam, 2000), 116.
• 25Ibid., 114.
• 26Ibid., 122.
• 27Blue en Van der Keuken, “Bach en de zingende zaag.”
• 28van der Keuken, “Meanders.”
• 29Ibid.
• 30Ibid.
• 31Johan van der Keuken, unpublished, 1967.