Johan van der Keuken

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

One of Van der Keuken's earliest fictional shorts.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

"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.

Film essay about the slums of 1960's Amsterdam.