Work in Progress

Johan van der Keuken (1938-2001) was a Dutch filmmaker, photographer, and author. At the age of seventeen, he already made a name for himself with Wij zijn 17 (1955), a photo book of portraits of peers. A year later, he entered the Paris film school IDHEC, where he discovered a growing passion for filmmaking. As a filmmaker, he broke through with experimental documentaries such as Blind kind (1964) and the North-South trilogy (Dagboek, Het witte kasteel, en De nieuwe ijstijd, 1972-1974) in which he depicted increasing global inequality. He made more than fifty films. Other notable films include Vakantie van de filmer [The Filmmaker’s Holiday] (1974), Het oog boven de put [The Eye Above the Well] (1988), and his acclaimed Amsterdam Global Village (1996). 

Van der Keuken’s cinema lives off the tension between ethics and aesthetics, between a radical commitment to the world and a distinct attention to form. A documentary filmmaker, Van der Keuken said, can never pretend to represent reality. “For me, the material side of film comes first: a beam of light on a screen. And what is transmitted in that bombardment of light on a screen is always fiction.” Influenced by painting, he always calls attention to the matter of the medium itself through the conscious use of light, colour, and texture and a rhythmic, musical montage.

But at the same time, Van der Keuken, who playfully conceived of the camera as an extension of his body, opposed the idea that filmmakers stand outside the world they try to depict. The filmmaker stands radically in the world, looking through their lens, framing reality. He always kept one eye on the surrounding world while the other peered through the camera’s viewfinder. In ‘Meanders’, a text from 1995, he described the driving force of his cinema: “I remain a materialist filmmaker: the world exists outside us, and our dream collides with it. The work of cinema is this relationship between the two: work in progress, always.”

This collection provides an overview of the available English-language texts on Sabzian about the work of Johan van der Keuken, as well as a complete multilingual annotated filmography. Van der Keuken was also a gifted writer on cinema, an activity through which he shaped his practice. Sabzian previously also published the Issue ‘Between Head and Hands’, featuring Van der Keuken’s writings. Meanders, a new trilingual booklet containing the Dutch filmmaker’s text of the same name, is available for purchase on our website.1

• 1From October 2024 until February 2025, Sabzian and CINEMATEK organized a complete retrospective of the work of Johan van der Keuken, in two parts.