Johan van der Keuken

Johan van der Keuken was born in Amsterdam in 1938. He was twelve years old when his grandfather introduced him to photography, seventeen when he published his first album of photography and eighteen when he went to the IDHEC film school in Paris. In 1956, he spent two years visually roaming the French capital, with film school being nothing but an alibi to wander round the city “asking himself questions and seeking answers”, in short, “learning about life”. At the same time, he was working on finishing his book “Paris Mortel”, eventually published in 1963. For van der Keuken, this was a period of gradual transition towards filmmaking, where he examined the very notion of vision, explored framing and colour and experimented with things that would slowly influence his films. He ended up making over fifty movies. “A Moment’s Silence”, officially his first, made in 1960, began his filmography and heralded his cinema to come: fragmented narratives whose layout upended the traditional rules of editing. The camera becomes the eye, the body the camera, in physiological cinema that recorded what surrounded it and restored it in the flow of images through the prism of thought. When he died, he left behind him a socially committed and universal body of work of more than fifty films, all shot on film roll, among them “Blind Child” (1964), “Filmmaker’s Holiday” (1974), “The Way South” (1981), “The Eye Above the Well” (1988), “Amsterdam Global Village” (1996) and “The Long Holiday” (2000).