How does a blind child percieve reality ? In order to explore this mystery, Johan Van der Keuken spent two months in a specialised institution in the Netherlands.
Beppie is the name of the young girl living next door to the van der Keuken family. He films her as she roams around Amsterdam and playfully disjoints the world around her.
“Dag Bep, kom binnen!”
“Dag meneer van Keuk!”
“Dag Beppie.”
“With the camera, I can only show a house hunter’s outside, but what matters is his inside, how life inside him is decaying like a pile of rotten lettuce.”
Johan van der Keuken
De waarneming van de werkelijkheid is een proces dat van tiende seconde tot tiende seconde in ons gaande is. Onze omgeving overspoelt ons met een onvoorstelbare hoeveelheid gewaarwordingen: kleuren, bewegingen, vormen, tekens.
In Vakantie van de filmer, van der Keuken brings together various audio and visual material: memories of an elderly married couple, personal holiday photos, the saxophonist Ben Webster, poems and a portrait of his grandfather who introduced him to the world of photography.
“Sinds Dagboek probeer ik in de montage zoveel mogelijk het begin van de zoombeweging af te snijden – het is dus geen shot dat begint te bewegen, het is een beweging die er al is. Het shot ervoor is vaak een stilstaand shot.
Johan van der Keuken went against the grain in 1980: from Amsterdam (on April 30 with the coronation riots and squatting actions) via Paris, southern France and Italy to Egypt. He made his personal travelogue in three parts for VPRO television.
Personal cinematographic trilogy with which the filmmaker bids farewell to his recently deceased friend and artist-colleague Lucebert.
In this documentary on the international city of Amsterdam, the director has taken a careful look at a variety of the city’s inhabitants, tracing their activities and roots out into third-world countries and regions and back to the city again.
In De grote vakantie Johan van der Keuken learns he only has a few years left to live after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. He and his wife Nosh decide to go on a long vacation to make a final film.