Light on a Screen is Always Fiction

Johan van der Keuken was a photographer and a filmmaker. As a filmmaker he operated the camera himself. The world around him, reality, was his subject. He stood out as a photographer and as a filmmaker because he confronted reality in a very personal way, distinguished by the fact that he did not see it as something that lay outside himself. He did not look at the world as an outsider and then turn it into a photograph or a film. Neither did he want to approach reality with a predetermined plan, or story, and then make his photographs or film images serve that plan or story. That would present too limited a picture of reality and reduce it to something unambiguous. His objection to the more conventional documentary was its pretension of being able to present an objective picture of reality, as if a photograph or film image could be a transparent window onto the world. Every image frame, every camera movement, every image transition is actually driven by the story or the argument its makers aim to deliver. This blurs our view of the world rather than clarify it. In essence this is the project to which Van der Keuken devoted virtually his entire body of work: how to avoid obliterating the complexity and the multiple meanings of reality on film and in photos in order to communicate them to the viewer. How to say something about reality without reducing it to something with only one meaning. Johan van der Keuken did not want to tell us about reality – he wanted to let reality speak for itself.

“I have always worked from an acknowledgement of a certain abstract quality of film, because to me it remains a projection of light onto a flat surface.”

In his writing Van der Keuken often refers to Cubism, which in his view sought, in a “fundamental and rigorous way”, to find artistic solutions for representing this multifaceted nature of reality. Cubism showed us that reality is not something finished that exists outside us. We are both spectator of and participant in this reality, and this, by definition, excludes a singular view of reality. Cubist painters developed an artistic strategy to represent this openness, this non-hermetic quality of reality on a flat surface. We are all familiar with those paintings in which we are looking at an object or person from different perspectives, as though we could also see the sides or the back. Van der Keuken tried to achieve something similar in his films and photographs, aware that this was an exploration that would in essence remain unfinished, because reality, by definition, cannot be translated into a singular image.

“It’s fortunate that there are no laws of film and no film language: anything goes.”

After completing his studies at the film school in Paris (1956-1958) Van der Keuken struggled with the question of how, as a filmmaker, to escape the “shelter of a singular narrative”. The filmmaking taught at film school at the time was a collection of conventions and rules. The revolution of the Nouvelle Vague had yet to be ignited (Godard’s À bout de souffle came out in 1960), and the teaching at film school was still dominated, on the one hand, by the fluid American system, based on telling stories and illusions, and on the other hand by the views of the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), who felt that images, on the contrary, should collide in order to elicit certain cinematic metaphors and communicate ideas and emotions to the viewer. In both cases the system defined to a significant degree how a filmed situation should be divided into separate shots, how the image should be constructed, how the mise-en-scène, framing and montage should serve the story or argument. Poets and visual artists of the period were struggling with similar issues, and from them Van der Keuken learned that there actually are no rules, that one system did not have to be replaced by another system. “Anything goes”, but this could not turn into a complete anarchy of image and sound. He explicitly opposed experimentation for its own sake, “impressionistic fiddling”, because this did not lead to new knowledge or insights.

“The ultimate form of one of my films is never the result of a predetermined idea, but a process that can start from scratch at every stage.”

Throughout his film career he would explore that line between control and experiment, between composition and free improvisation. When equilibrium and peace dominated, he would make them explode, and when the experiment took over, he would rein it in. His guiding principle was always reality first, that it be allowed to make its own case and that the filmmaker be a kind of intermediary between the filmed world and the viewer. It is not possible to translate reality into a system or film idiom, but it can be said that Van der Keuken made use of several artistic strategies that can be identified to a greater or lesser degree in his work. The most important strategy that runs throughout his entire body of work is a way of working that does show the influence of Soviet montage, namely that a new emotion or meaning is created by making two images or image sequences collide. This is something that, in essence, can only be done during shooting and editing, because it is impossible to know in advance which situations and images will present themselves.

There are films in which he applies these strategies in a limited way or even seems to reject them, yet the Van der Keuken signature is always identifiable. One hallmark is that Van der Keuken has no pretensions to a monopoly on truth. To Van der Keuken, filmmaking is “realization”, a process that can be adjusted at any moment if reality or the film material requires it. This process-based aspect of his way of making films is a way of searching – exploring – and thinking, and not the exposition of a purported truth or a message. And he wanted to make the viewer part of this process, to let him experience his exploration. And Van der Keuken was the first to reflect on this process, as evidenced by the many writings he published.

“Thinking about time, thinking in time, is very different in filming and in photography, perhaps diametrically opposed.”

The common factor among painting, photography and film is that they are produced on a flat, two-dimensional surface. In film the flat surface is the projection screen. As a result Van der Keuken thought very much in graphic shapes, shapes on a flat surface, shapes of light and shadow. Even the people in the image are shapes that are part of the composition. At the end of Herman Slobbe/Blind Kind II, for instance, he says goodbye to Herman with the words: “Everything in a film is shape. Herman is a shape. Farewell, lovely shape!”

A different camera position is therefore not so much a different perspective, but primarily a visual change in the two-dimensional plane, a shift in the composition, an exploring of the surface of the screen. This, to Van der Keuken, was where the major difference between film and photography lay. A still photograph is able to express the concept of time, whereas film works with time itself. According to Van der Keuken, “photography and film stare one another in the face”: the photograph is a plane within which time is created, whereas film is actually time within which a plane is created. In film an image is always related to the next image, to a spoken text, an action, the sound. The film is not a recollection; it always happens now, in time. Photography, on the contrary, separates one image from all other images; it is frozen in time and the outline of the four lines of the frame is definite. A photo can express the concepts of time and space, but only the moving medium can show time and space – rest and its cancellation – through the succession of images.

“For me, film is not primarily a representation, but the creation – using images and sounds – of a place, of a space and of the life within it.”

Although film and photography unfold on a flat surface, the idea of space was crucial to Van der Keuken. Not space in the sense of a three-dimensional representation, but the physical space in which he moved as a cameraman and to which he also wanted to lead the viewer of the film. The creation of such a space is one of the essential hallmarks of his films. As a filmmaker he moved in a physical space in which he was simultaneously spectator and participant, someone who watches, sees, in a particular space and at the same time makes a film. Using this participatory viewpoint he tried to describe a reality that appears as multi-faceted and complex and is impossible to represent with a single outline, a single camera position. He operated as the mediator between reality and the viewer of the film. In this regard it was vital to him not to make himself invisible, for that is precisely what happens in American cinema: there the primacy of the illusion reigns, and the makers and the medium (montage!) remain essentially unnoticed. Van der Keuken wanted the medium and the maker to be noticed, because that was how he affirmed his position as mediator between reality and the viewer and how the viewer became conscious of the resilience of the medium and the hand of the artist.

Van der Keuken is often actually present in his films. Often by posing questions, by interviewing as he’s operating the camera, and sometimes also by appearing in front of the camera himself. Van der Keuken often manifested himself through the movement of the camera, the powerful zooming in and out, the scanning of the surface of the screen, the brusque “montage” within a shot. The film camera that wanders, searches, that wants to know what there is to hear and see beyond those four lines of the frame, that wants to create a space. The voice-over was also a proven way of underscoring his own presence.

“Painting was very important to me from the very beginning. The Dutch tradition that is very much based on the material itself... That tradition, which goes back a long way for us, of letting the structure of the paint come through clearly; not just the colour, but also the substance of the paint. And through the presence of that substance, making the physical work that created the painting palpable. The image is not formed by an idea that existed in advance; when an idea comes forth out of the image, it is created by the physical work of the painter.”

In his filmmaking the phases of the actual shooting of the film and the montage were paramount. These were the phases of “realization”, the phases in which the process-based nature of the way he worked were expressed. He was receptive to the situation, even though he had of course made painstaking preparations. Reality can show itself in many different ways, and the way Van der Keuken responded to this physically was also translated in his camera work, the movements, the selection of the shots and the framing. The improvisation involved in this was his way of giving reality a chance to speak for itself. Indeed he did not confine himself to what was visible in the image, but constantly kept an eye on what was going on outside the frame. He literally looked with one eye through the viewfinder of the camera and with the other past the camera, to keep an overall view of what was happening around him. He was always concerned with what might come into the image from the edges, or go out of it. This explains some of his camera movements, which seem to be looking for something and then return to the main subject.

“The essential aspect of montage, and perhaps of all art, is that you show each thing at its full worth.”

In the cutting room, a filmmaker is confronted with a mountain of filmed material. The conventional approach is usually to attempt, with that material, to tell the story the filmmaker originally had in mind. Van der Keuken made a principle of working in a different way. Even in this phase of the realization he strived to redefine the film, as it were, with what he had to work with at that moment. “In this stage you have to connect to what you wanted to make, even as you have to include in that process the things that constantly came up during the shoot. The montage, for me, is always based on the autonomous effect of the filmed image.”

In the montage you have to try to find out what the images “do”, what their potential combinations are. As noted earlier, the montage principles he had been taught at the film academy did not, in his view, do justice to the complexity of reality. They lacked “ignorance”, namely the image that has no notion as yet of its own meaning. To Van der Keuken this was essential, that an image could be an autonomous image, that it had been able to see for itself, as it were, and not be an image that had seen what the narrative and the montage prescribed. It was only in the montage phase that it became clear how this image could relate to other images, what the meaning, the effect and the function of an image could be, by doing justice to the intrinsic “worth” of an image or sequence.

Van der Keuken’s montage, in some cases, was perhaps more a collage, but not a cut-and-paste for its own sake, for there had to be a reason for doing it in a particular way; something had to emerge that could not have been conceived in advance. Montage was also a musical activity. Films can be seen as compositions, in which a role is played not just by chance and improvisation, but also by the form and control. It is no accident that jazz was a great source of inspiration for him: a composition that allowed for experimentation, freedom and chance, but at the same time was ordered and controlled. This element of resistance, creating a rupture, making shots “with a fish hook” is an important strategy of Van der Keuken’s, which he applied during the shoot as well as during the montage. It is the same collision he was after during the shoot, that confrontation between equilibrium and disruption, between contemplative peace and the energy of life. In his vision, you sometimes had to destroy something, make something explode, create a hard schnitt or cut, precisely in order to give the image a chance to overcome that rupture. It was also a way of being noticeably present in the film, because you cannot let the course of the film be entirely determined by the autonomy of the images. Van der Keuken’s films usually contain repetitions. Sometimes this is a way of capturing elapsed time, as in the case of the basketball-playing boy in Even stilte [A Moment’s Silence]. Sometimes they are repetitions within a short space of time that are somewhat alienating, that make the hand of the filmmaker palpable and that often have a certain musical quality. Sometimes he creates unexpected combinations by having images recur over a much longer period of time. He compared this type of repetition with the view from an airplane, when you can sometimes see through the clouds and glimpse bits of the earth. This repetition of images in his films is comparable with that view of the earth. It is not always visible, but it is there, and it forms a solid foundation.

Finally, if we return to Van der Keuken’s photography, we see that he also created beautiful series that can be “read” as a montage of images. One striking series in this regard is the one he took in India, with double exposures, in which he thus arrived at montage within a single image. These photos feature not so much double images as entirely new images created by making separated images collide. Here he achieved within a single frame what normally can only take place in the imagination of the viewer.

“I’ve never cared whether the montage takes place between moving or still images; montage can even emerge within one seemingly motionless image. Because the montage is the motion of the mind itself, the thought that moves matter. For me that material aspect of film comes first: a beam of light onto the screen. And what is communicated in that bombardment of light onto a screen is always fiction.”