Born in 1938, Johan van der Keuken started photography with his father at the age of 12. He was only 17 at the time his first book was published. As an IDHEC student (former Fémis -French national school of cinema), he made his first films in Paris and simultaneously published chronicles, critics and texts about photography in Dutch magazines.

Many photographs but mostly films: Johan van der keuken made nearly 60 films of all lengths (from a few minutes to four hours), for which, travelling from Netherlands to Palestine, from Bolivia to Sarajevo, from New York to India, he always carried the camera alone. Essential indication, of course: not because it implies one individual’s point of view but rather a body’s weight and tension. There is not a work less centered than Van der Keuken’s one: often qualified as a citizen of the world, he doesn’t take the pose of a typical documentary moralism supposing the research of a fair point of view over things, nor the subjectivism of the artist whose task would be to deform the illusion of a cohesive world. Van der Keuken has a passion for the material –that can the one of painting, music or literature– which allows him to create the possibility of “an other experience of the reality”.

Johan van der Keuken has travelled on all the continents, made films from the point of view of political, economical, ecological or ideological struggles, depicted men and artists’ lives (poet and painter Lucebert, saxophonist Ben Webster, photographer Ed van der Elsken…). Even when he pretended to be sedentary in order to make The Filmmaker’s holidays, he chronicled life in a French village in the summer of 1974 more than his own, in order to say how much conscience is entertained by the outside, how it can’t be anything but permeable to the world. He always filmed ideas though (opposition between North and South, Dollar, life, death, exploitation) but these ideas can only appear as pieces: it’s a way to submit perception to different schemes, to dissipate the signification, to perpetually stay in movement. Above all, a way to defy the “cinema-vérité” that believes that there is in front of us a reality that is only waiting us to be picked, that there is only one language able to create links between people and things. On the contrary, for Van der Keuken, everything has to be reinvented and each film has to create his own language. Then, at the end of Herman Slobbe – Blind Child 2, second part of a work about blindness, the filmmaker can say simply “farewell, my great little form.”

Bastien Hader