The Eye Above the Well

Johan van der Keuken (4 April 1938, Amsterdam – 7 January 2001, Amsterdam) was a Dutch documentary filmmaker, author, and photographer. In a career that spans 42 years, Keuken produced 55 documentary films, six of which won eight awards. He also wrote nine books on photography and films, his field of interest. For all his efforts, he received seven awards for his life work, and one other for photography.

Van der Keuken was an extremely industrious man. His career spans four decades, from 1955 until his sudden death from prostate cancer in 2001. Even before graduating from the IDHEC film school in Paris (1956-1958), he had already published two books on photography and started to work on his first documentary film. In 1960 he joined Haagse Post, a Dutch newsmagazine, as a film critic but left the following year.

Based outside Amsterdam on Prinsenijland, he traveled the world, making films and taking pictures on many topics. Most of his work was produced for VPRO, a Dutch television station. Van der Keuken’s work is regarded by many as exceptional, and his premature death is seen as a real loss to the documentary filmmaking industry. (surrealmoviez)

When he was 17 years old he already published a photo-book called ‘We are Seventeen’, portraying sad looking classmates from his Montesori School. Later followed by two other photo-books: ‘Behind Glass’ and ‘Paris Mortel’. A year later van der Keuken moved to Paris, where he studied at the famous IDHEC film school. His debut-film ‘Paris a l’Aube’ (58) was a love-letter to Paris. In France van der Keuken has always been seen as one of the great ‘cineasts’. He said once that it is difficult to be recognised in France among the cine-literate , but if they do, you belong to their ‘club’ for life.

Back in Holland he impressed by making short portraits like ‘Blind Child’ and ‘Beppie’. He was a good friend of photographer Ed van der Elsken (now recognised as an influential photographer), who also lived in Paris for a while and did the photography for ‘Beppie’. Van der Keuken made three films on the poet and painter Lucebert. Among his friends were the Dutch writers Remco Campert, Gerrit Kouwenaar en Bert Schierbeek. The free style musician Willem Breuker often wrote the scores for his films, starting in the Seventies. Those artists have influenced van der Keuken’s work, and it’s very likely that at this time he developed his free-style, associative and intuitive style of filming. Van der Keuken has never seen himself as a documentarist pur sang, anyway.

In his speech at the Bert Haanstra Award ceremony Van der Keuken quotes the earlier mentioned writer Bert Schierbeek: “There are many who have the voice, but only a few who hear him.” Van der Keuken: “For people who hears that voice, the projects they undertake widen from news item to art. Words and images in themselves are not sufficient, when one tries to seize the loneliness and extase of human life and to reconcile the irreconcilable. New combinations are necessary of pictures, sound, words, music, actions, places and stories, the interchange of all these elements form a breathtaking interplay.”

A turning point in van der Keuken’s career came in 1985, when he was diagnosed with intestine cancer. Before that he made political left wing engaged documentaries like ‘The Flat Jungle’, ‘Diary North-South’ and ‘I love Dollars’. He didn’t take any longer all the suffering of the globe on his shoulders. Van der Keuken about this: “In the past ,until ‘I love Dollars’ I had to understand how the world worked. After my illness I let that go, now I only understand image for image, which I work with in the editing , making something in connection with other images.” He arguably made his best films in the Eighties and Nineties: ‘The Eye Above The Well’, ‘Face Value’, ’Moved Copper’ and his last film ‘The Long Holiday’. All together Van der Keuken made fifty films. —johanvanderkeuken.com