Johan Van Der Keuken
Van der Keuken had an illustrious career and was not recognized to the degree that he deserved in North America. My hope is that this small tribute will enable visitors to gain some insights into his work and contribution to the culture of film and photography in the twentieth century.
“It was my grandfather who introduced me to photography. Somewhere between the age of 12 and 17, experimenting with whatever material happened to be available, I became a photographer. In 1955, I published my first book of photographs entitled, We are 17, a 30 picture portrait of the Amsterdam high school group I was part of. The book was followed in 1957 by the romantic, Behind Glass, published when I was already a student at the IDHEC film school in Paris. There were no scholarships for photography at the time, but there were for film. Film was far more serious.” (From WRITINGS by Johan van der Keuken, published on the occasion of the 42nd San Francisco International Film Festival, April 22-May 6, 1999 and the presentation of the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award for Lifetime Achievement.)
The following interview with van der Keuken revealed not only the depth of his thinking but the range and breadth of his artistic practice.
REINVENTING THE DOCUMENTARY CINEMA: A DISCUSSION BETWEEN JOHAN VAN DER KEUKEN AND RON BURNETT
Ron Burnett
So much of what you are trying to do in your films is a response to the history of the documentary, the way in which the documentary has tried to set up a false window/mirror on the world and presumes itself to be showing what is happening in the reality around us but never really trying to bring out the complexity of what it is showing, never self-reflexively bringing out the political, economic and social context of which it is a part. The window presumes a clarity on the part of the filmmaker, a unified view of the world, a homogeneity, a lack of contradiction--all these are perspectives which I think you are trying to work against. There are two levels at which I perceive you operating. One is at the level of the reality that you are trying to depict and show and the other is a level of discourse in which you try to comment upon and politicize the way reality is understood and seen. I would like to understand how you are affected by what you are filming and then how you feel you are, politically, influencing the images which you are show. You are trying to include two sets of complex elements simultaneously in the act of filming, does the history of representation, the history of the documentary, overwhelm the spectator's capacity to recognize the level of critique which you are trying to construct?
Van der Keuken:
In SPRINGTIME, the economist Claude Ménard plays a crucial part. The documentary for me is only part of what I am trying to do. I am trying to account for a thinking process. The portrait of Claude Ménard is a double process: my inquiry into a certain set of problems and his self-reflexive attempt to formulate an answer to these problems. Film as a finished product only presents, the strongest stages, the most effective moments, of a long process; that is, it puts together strong points, and this does not allow for insight into the whole itinerary. Claude Ménard's interview-section in the film contains moments of uncertainty, where you may feel that he is not in the right setting perhaps, but I include that uncertainty so that the spectator may see where the whole process comes from--mine and his. Everytime I watch SPRINGTIME with an audience I get tense because I don't know if it works, whether or not people will accept this intrusion on their normal viewing experience. Audiences expect results, polish, they cannot accept weak phases in a product. This is where the history and ideology of representation is so strong. To me it was important to transform the process and go through these uncertain phases and try and give the audience a place in any discussion of the film by in effect opening the text up to them, reinventing its premises, relocating the viewing experience.
Ron Burnett
Why is it so important for you to disrupt the audience's desire for a finished product?
Van der Keuken
That depends on the phase you are in yourself as a filmmaker and for me it changes from film to film. SPRINGTIME brought resistance when it was shown on T.V. and in the Cinémathèque in Holland, but my next film was well-received. All my films have breaks within them to try and alert the audience to the fact someone, in this case a filmmaker, is presenting them with a point of view but the images also have to touch the audience and ironically that may contradict what I am trying to do
Ron Burnett:
Do you try and provide the audience with tools to unravel the ideology of the documentary? Or do you think that it is the way documentary films structure meaning, frame enunciations which determines the unraveling? In THE PALESTINIANS there are alot of events presented in terms similar to what we might see on television. How do you try and make the audience understand that what you are presenting them with is a construct--your construct--and not just an objective representation of reality? Is there a means within the film itself for understanding the woman who stands besides her bombed out house for example? (ed. note: there is a crucial scene in the film during which the camera examines a bombed out house in Lebanon; we see some older women crying and moaning, they talk of having once lived in a house that is now rubble; the shot is a relatively conventional one and seems derived from cinéma-vérité.)
Van der Keuken:
From one film to another you may even diametrically change your own point of view. I feel there is a strong theme of unity between my films. In fact I sometimes get the feeling that I am doing the same thing in all my films! Always the same story, but taken in different directions, from different viewpoints, and even different viewpoint inside my self...although each new film starts at a point opposite from the last one. My film on the Palestinians was responding to the immediacy of the situation and was therefore less concerned with itself at the level of self-reflexivity. And this is an important moral choice and perhaps also an important political choice. Whereas in SPRINGTIME it seemed necessary to be outspoken thematically and restrict feeling, in THE PALESTINIANS there was certain need to make the film available to a specific group of people...the committee in support of the Palestinian cause in Holland...a country by the way which has never understood its guilt as one of the major causes in its lack of understanding about the Palestinians...a guilt, the result of Holland's policies during the Second World War....
Ron Burnett:
With THE PALESTINIANS the play between the representation and what is being shown, between the filmmaker seeing and reproducing, is now shifting to the level of political utility. What is the utility of these images in relation to the overall Palestinian situation? Can you ever escape the problems of representation, that is, fictionalizing every situation you enter into?
Van der Keuken:
I fictionalize in order to arrive at truth. In SPRINGTIME you have people speaking. and there is the pretension of truth--because that is the commitment of the filmmaker--to go and see these people, listen to them talk etc.... I cannot guarantee that what they are saying is true but I can establish relationships between the people speaking. In this way I try to create a comprehensive framework for the different speeches. But where the framework is brought in the use of the means is made clear. I mentioned, in relation to THE PALESTINIANS that at the beginning of the film there is a photo of an old Jew in the Ghetto. I had each frame printed five times. It is on the screen for two minutes with a small text and phase-like music. I think that this in itself goes against the ethos of the documentary tradition. Here the image is totally flat, it cannot deliver more information than it did at first glance. So you are presented with an image which empties itself out so to speak, and the text that is spoken by me has the characteristic of being a text spoken by a person. I think that in this way you establish a very different relationship to the documentary. It is quite clear that the photo is not there for two minutes to prove anything. It only gives a material basis, an image and a text to the spectator. It also leaves things open, it leave things unsaid which the spectator can fill in and which establish a framework in which the more truly recorded elements find their place. Also, what I have tried to do in THE PALESTINIANS with the commentary was never to present commentary as such, over a determined action but to make a separate place for the commentary so that it would speak over the more aesthetic, passive elements in the film--not dynamic elements. In that way the commentary itself would never interfere with the action itself. In the whole construction (but I think this may be hidden to the audience) there is one important aspect on the level of the didactics of the film, that is, all the things which are said to people by people somehow refer to spots in the general commentary. The schoolmaster goes over the history of Palestine, the coming of the Jews and the policy of the British--this all reflects back to a commentary spoken much earlier in the film. So you have different angles, mine which is fictional in a way (and the fiction becomes fiction because this guy is telling the same things out of his practice)--the understanding of what is happening is quite different from my enumeration of these facts, or supposed facts in a commentary, which never coincides with an image. The image is a limited set of stock shots which have been designated by a printing process and which are repeated, and to some extent do away with the historical or supposed historical chronology.... I think these are some tools which may enable an audience to see that here there is no pretense to a claim to history or authenticity.
The very crucial difference between THE PALESTINIANS and the films that I did before is that with a subject like THE PALESTINIANS your moving space is much smaller. In a more pretentious film there is an element of play--the game between the filmmaker and every spectator which is much more in the forefront than the documentary content itself. In THE PALESTINIANS the element of play is at a less powerful level than the element of direct speech by the people concerned--and that is a moral choice. It is important to talk of reality in terms of relationships and not just facts. Normally they would be formal relationships, but here the form has shifted in some senses to the content--so that they become relationships of content. So the film has to deliver a set of relationships to the audience which make sense and I think that at that level the film works. As a film it is not authoritarian. It is not saying to the audience, you have been misinformed; this is the way it is. But it brings out a set of more or less disconnected images in a certain structure/construction of relationships and an audience can make sense, or get a certain tone out of it. That's more important than what is being depicted. Because I believe that lists of facts--and this is my experience when I see documentary films--are useless, hard to remember. But an overall image stays. To be able to communicate what is happening you have to downplay the facts somewhat to get people to realize that they are looking at a construct; the construct is there and if the spectator is interested or aware, he will see the constructs.
Ron Burnett:
The problem of how you establish the overall tone.... The desire on the part of many political filmmakers has been to collapse the multiplicity of meanings that are possible or desirable in imagery into one flat directed statement so that all the complexities which make up the process of coming to an understanding of something--all of the complexities making up the process of looking at a moment in history and trying to understand it--all that is collapsed into what appears to be a pure statement of and about reality. And that bind, the political filmmakers bind of, in the one instance wanting in one or two hours to convince an audience of something which has perhaps taken the filmmaker himself or herself many years to arrive at --that desire to completely obliterate all the mediators is a dangerous desire because it is ultimately a desire to objectify the audience.
Van der Keuken:
In THE PALESTINIANS the aesthetic is fully there. It is not being collapsed. It is more hidden, more subdued perhaps, but this has to do with a feeling towards the outside world you are dealing with. It is not the result of a calculation towards the audience but it is more or less an intuitive reaction towards the people and the reality in front of the camera...formal play should be there to help the communication but a film like THE PALESTINIANS is not the arena for me to discover and play with the aesthetic questions.
Ron Burnett:
The tradition of the documentary can be turned around to work in your favour. One has to get away from over-emphasizing the actual effect of the aesthetic and begin to understand that there is a play between the aesthetic and between the history of the conventions of the documentary, and a play between what is being represented and the history of representations. It is still possible as a result of the medium itself to use the power of duplication in a positive and political manner. To move too far to the other side has its dangers too, which is that one can over-emphasize, fetishize the way the aesthetic is operating and the way the medium is determining what is being said. This can dilute the powerful effects that the tradition of the documentary film has had. And it is within that effect, that tradition that one begins to change the rules of the game. But it can only be done to a point. It can't be shifted entirely. It's a really difficult problem. If you negate it entirely you end up with a film which is essentially incapable of moving beyond a limited group of people. If you shift it too much the other way you end up with a collapsing the very possibility of a viewing. In between these two poles is the place to be, but I guess one shouldn't try and become overly obsessed with the necessity of keeping the representation visible as representation all the time.
Van der Keuken:
Whether or not it is possible, in THE PALESTINIANS you are faced with a moral choice...Le film ne peut jamais dépasser le public.... The film can never transcend its audience nor should it try and go beyond the reality of which it is a part. We can never make a better model than the realities that we are faced with. If we put form as a strong fence before the screen, in front of the audience, we still put it as a fence that shows the audience and ultimately ourselves as ourselves--our own limits of perception. This is also a moral choice. With THE PALESTINIANS we had to open up the possibility of perception to people who, up until that point were closed to any communication with anything that had to do with Palestinians. On the level of the écriture of the film, what is very strong are the images of the airplanes, machine-like and unnaturalistic. This image, cannot, within a certain style of writing of a film, be directly connected with the scenes that follows, where people tell how they have been bombed out etc. The truth of people's speeches is almost naively accepted. I came here to take in what they had to say. It was a primary relationship. But the whole thing in its working, its mechanism as a dramatic representation is questioned by the shots of the airplane in black and white, while the other scenes are in colour. Many people in any given audience are not consciously looking at what they see. Concepts are linked up in the mind of the audience such that the planes are associated with bombing the people. What we deconstruct the audience reconstructs. On the level of what is there materially, you have two realities which on the one hand flow over, one into another and on the other hand are strongly separated from each other. I think these are the tools we use to make clear what we want to do. We came to take in what they (the Palestinians) had to say and not to question whether or not the bombed-out kitchen was in fact the kitchen of the woman showing it to us...and that framework in which we organized all these images remains the framework of a conjecture. At times the film is further away which permits us to see the images which come most strongly towards us in another perspective. One must never play a game with the audience, a game of signs or of interpretation of signs which separates our particular attitude towards the subject matter at a given moment from the attitude which we believe the audience holds.
Ron Burnett:
The way we experience films, particularly in the documentary tradition, is that the flow of meaning generally speaking, is very difficult to contradict, (after all, the film is out there, we cannot change its structure, though we can change our viewing strategy) mainly because even if the film is a very self-conscious one, viewing it somehow seems to collapse difference into unity, contradiction into homogeneity and so forth. Do you believe that it is possible to break down that unity? It is now not just a question of aesthetics, it is also a question of the politics of communication. This is a question political filmmakers have been struggling with for a long time. And it seems fundamental to film because in the theater for example you can try to break down unity with silence for example, the silence you tried to generate in parts of THE PALESTINIANS I am thinking of the scene around the campfire, (Ed. note: the scene being described has the camera circling a group of Palestinians as they silently eat and rest around a campfire...the camera focuses in on their gestures, looks and reactions to each other...not a word is exchanged). The gap that scene creates within the process of communication has to be a constant part, I think, of the way in which all documentary films express meaning, in a sense in order to overcome the preconception that documentary films must be about the real world. Now I am not suggesting that they should'nt be, I am just asking about the moral imperative that they must.
Van der Keuken:
In response to what was said about silence: to me the silences are there in all my films. If I were able to take all my films some of these silences would be inescapable. Spectators are not accustomed to seeing films which are either silent or contain moments of silence within them. They are unaccustomed to hearing themselves breathe. What happens in front of a piece of silent film is that the audience becomes present again. You go into an inner space somehow by observing the outward appearance of someone in silence. The spectator who is willing to get into it has to project his own feelings into this silent image. It is a silence which represents a possible level of content - of what was already there. Before, I used to use silence in a kind of academic way, and at a certain moment you could state it as a problem of lecture - of the presence of a text. But it can also be the statement that goes beyond the overall communication of the film. For me, and this might be a false hope or a false justification, but I now experience it a small step to maturity, I don't need to make statements separate or apart from the situations I am in. I don't have to proclaim any philosophy over the heads of the Palestinians for example. With regard to the second part of the comment that you made, let us say that you are interviewing someone, wouldn't it be better if that individual recognized that they were acting? Wouldn't that create some of the distance so necessary for the audience to more fully understand the kind of fiction which is at the heart of all forms of discourse? Documentary filmmakers look for charisma in the individuals they interview, is that necessary? What if the person displayed an outward distance to the role they were playing?
Ron Burnett:
There is a lyricism which seems to pervade all of your films, a lyricism born out of passion/conviction. It is a lyricism which often transcends the images themselves as if there is an excess of meaning 'outside' of the films, so to speak, which has to be grasped in order for the films themselves to be understood.
Van der Keuken:
What can I say about the level of meaning? To me it is hard to talk about...why would a piece of music move you? Why is a painting, a song, a film, to some extent understandable to so many people? Another thing about my work, is that I find reality or the experience of life very bewildering. I think that the activity of making films is also the need to create some kind of order in all of this and to find some entry into reality, ways of understanding. Sometime this happens more on an intellectual level, sometimes more on the level of intuition...or of construction. For me the element of construction is very strong.
