Johan van der Keuken

Rare fictional short, written by Remco Campert, in the veins of existentialism. About a young man who is in love with the girlfriend of his best pal.

An short anti-cruise missile film created in collaboration with a group of filmmakers.

A "revolutionary theater" troupe from North Vietnam performs in Amsterdam.

Face Value is a film combining a conscious approach with spontaneity, and contemplation with action. It presents us with the differing views of a region we call “Europe”, an imaginary Europe situated somewhere between London, Marseilles, Prague and the Netherlands.

Five portraits from the mid-seventies. The nouveau riches and the nouveau pauvres take their places. With Joop Uchtman, Claude Menard, Ome Joop Beaux, Doris Schwert en Jan van Haagen.

Documentary shows brass bands from Nepal, Surinam, Indonesia and Ghana.

Rare fictional short, written by Remco Campert, in the veins of existentialism. About a young man who is in love with the girlfriend of his best pal.

Rare fictional short, written by Remco Campert, in the veins of existentialism. About a young man who is in love with the girlfriend of his best pal.

An short anti-cruise missile film created in collaboration with a group of filmmakers.

A "revolutionary theater" troupe from North Vietnam performs in Amsterdam.

Face Value is a film combining a conscious approach with spontaneity, and contemplation with action. It presents us with the differing views of a region we call “Europe”, an imaginary Europe situated somewhere between London, Marseilles, Prague and the Netherlands.

Five portraits from the mid-seventies. The nouveau riches and the nouveau pauvres take their places. With Joop Uchtman, Claude Menard, Ome Joop Beaux, Doris Schwert en Jan van Haagen.

Documentary shows brass bands from Nepal, Surinam, Indonesia and Ghana.

Documentary shows brass bands from Nepal, Surinam, Indonesia and Ghana.

Film essay about the slums of 1960's Amsterdam.

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

This film is a playful and experimental film object. The images of several films by Johan van der Keuken are mounted in a rhythmic and circular way to emphasize the repetition and similarity of the gestures they give to see: the daily gestures of men and women at work, throughout the world.

With the use of montage sequences, voiced over with the observations of the children, van der Keuken was able to use artistic expression to portray the sightless children’s unique perspective of the world.

In the district of Amsterdam where Johan van der Keuken lived with his family for more than twenty years, the "Islands of the West", the inhabitants were mobilised during then ‘70s in order to protest against the city’s policy of demolishing housing to make way for big commercial buildings. One misty October morning, they all got together to make a vast painting on one of the walls of a narrow road going through the district. A great day of community spirit. When the mural is finished, one can see the cranes and half demolished houses still there and a little further away the uninterrupted flow of traffic continues.

Van der Keuken follows the creative process of Lucebert, a Dutch painter annex poet. Episode four of four in a series for the VPRO.

In SPIRIT OF THE TIME (1968) van der Keuken presents a collage of "drop-outs," protesters (both left and right), musicians and "hippies." He organizes these figures around an idea of "mental readjustment," otherwise known as the counterculture. Acting upon a political and social withdrawal into self, they have tried to find new ways of living together.

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.

One of Van der Keuken's earliest fictional shorts.

Johan van der Keuken's first film is a uniquely beautiful portrait of Paris at dawn.

Johan van der Keuken: 'We kept the ends of a lot of shots in Amsterdam Global Village: the camera leaves the subject and pans to the sound woman, who quickly taps the microphone. These taps later in the cutting become the references for synchronising picture and sound. This film is the rhythmic sequence of these taps, in which something of a story can be seen.

A short portrait of poet Bert Schierbeek, who reads from his poetry.

A short portrait of poet Bert Schierbeek, who reads from his poetry.

"I am far away on a distant journey through my own city", filmmaker Johan van der Keuken says at the end of his four-hour portrait of Amsterdam. The city is presented as a place where people from all corners of the world live, who all exert their cultural influence on the life in the city. With a motor courier as his central figure, the filmmaker introduces the audience to birds of different feathers. We see diverse cultural expressions, like the house scene, the entry of St. Nicholas and a Ghanese mourning ritual. The binding factor in the film is the concept of 'travelling', in other words Amsterdam as a global village. The camera travels through the film in three ways: over land, over water (canals) and through the air.

"I am far away on a distant journey through my own city", filmmaker Johan van der Keuken says at the end of his four-hour portrait of Amsterdam. The city is presented as a place where people from all corners of the world live, who all exert their cultural influence on the life in the city. With a motor courier as his central figure, the filmmaker introduces the audience to birds of different feathers. We see diverse cultural expressions, like the house scene, the entry of St. Nicholas and a Ghanese mourning ritual. The binding factor in the film is the concept of 'travelling', in other words Amsterdam as a global village. The camera travels through the film in three ways: over land, over water (canals) and through the air.

Last Words: My Sister Yoka (1998) is the director's tribute to his sister, who speaks to the camera just days before she dies of cancer.

The opening segment for a planned larger documentary by Johan van der Keuken. Unfortunately, this is all that was completed before his death. These are small portraits of people he met during his travels.

BEPPIE is a moving and disarming portrait of an Amsterdam street urchin. Van der Keuken once described her as follows: 'She was ten years old and the joy of the Achtergracht, where I was living at the time. An Amsterdam child, sweet and crooked as a corkscrew.' He films her while she skims the city with some friends and knocks at strangers' doors. Her family has nine children and is not well off. In those days, a visit to the De Miranda swimming pool cost a quarter, but only ten cents if the weather was bad. At school, Beppie gets a poor mark because she is too boisterous, but when the whole class rattles off the multiplication tables, she joins in at the top of her voice. All of TV-watching Holland was wildly enthusiastic about this portrait, with which Van der Keuken even made the front page of the national newspaper De Telegraaf.

BEPPIE is a moving and disarming portrait of an Amsterdam street urchin. Van der Keuken once described her as follows: 'She was ten years old and the joy of the Achtergracht, where I was living at the time. An Amsterdam child, sweet and crooked as a corkscrew.' He films her while she skims the city with some friends and knocks at strangers' doors. Her family has nine children and is not well off. In those days, a visit to the De Miranda swimming pool cost a quarter, but only ten cents if the weather was bad. At school, Beppie gets a poor mark because she is too boisterous, but when the whole class rattles off the multiplication tables, she joins in at the top of her voice. All of TV-watching Holland was wildly enthusiastic about this portrait, with which Van der Keuken even made the front page of the national newspaper De Telegraaf.

The point of departure for this film is the 1981 composition De Tijd by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Van der Keuken leaves the music undisturbed as an autonomous soundtrack and has the images engage in a sort of battle with it. These images are associations, fragments of events, scenes and situations. The film is preceded by a text by Bert Schierbeek.

In this short documentary by Johan van der Keuken, he films young women walking the streets of Amsterdam.

The indomitable laughter of a radical. A collage. Third of four in a series for the VPRO.

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.

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.

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, 1975

Experimental documentary by Johan van der Keuken about Dutch painter and poet Lucebert.

No synopsis available yet.

In the late sixties, the American saxophone player and living jazz legend Ben Webster lived in Amsterdam for a year. Webster, who was born in Kansas City in 1909, was a unique personality in the world of jazz and blues. In the thirties, he played with all the great names. During his Amsterdam period, he stayed with an elderly landlady, Mrs Hardloper, with whom he appeared on a national talk show. In conversations with Van der Keuken, he muses on the past; on the fantastic experience of playing in the renowned Duke Ellington band; or on one of his best friends, who was so deft at eating with a knife and fork. Short, fragmented remarks, which Van der Keuken has edited in a loose, improvised editing style.

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.

In the person of To Sang, a Chinese-born photographer living and working in Amsterdam, JVDK has found his perfect counterpart and alter ego. To Sang's monumental, stagey portrait photos reach back toward painting, just as JVDK's carefully composed film images recall still photography. Like JDVK, To Sang works in close collaboration with his wife. As image-makers, both men gently but firmly impose their way of seeing on the world. "Although we laugh at first, in the end he is master of the situation," says JVDK about To Sang in Gieling's film.

Collage film in which Van der Keuken makes use of Eddy Posthuma de Boer's source material.

The tools people adopt to try and control nature. In parallel with the early history of Van der Keuken's child.