The Spectator’s Holiday

It will soon be a year since we met in Brussels to see-hear-watch-listen to the images and sounds seen-heard-watched-and listened to, filmed and edited by Johan van der Keuken. He was there, the filmmaker, to watch his films again, to comment on them, to put his eyes in our gaze, those that he remembered having had behind the eye of the camera and in front of the screen of the editing table, those that he had at the moment when, like us, he was watching (watching again, that is to say experiencing a new view) Johan van der Keuken’s (his) films. They were there, the spectators-seminarists, they too with their eyes watching the filmmaker’s images, making him see, as he did for them, what he could not see in his images, his own eyes, his gaze. Exchange, reversibility, reciprocity, chiasms, endless mix-ups of foreseeings, glances, visions, viewpoints: such was the experience of watching and re-watching Johan van der Keuken’s films together.

Every film we saw was a spatial experience, an experience of descending-ascending-crossing the layers and horizons of the gaze, an experience of a visit, a wandering, a straying; of a temporary life in the tower of the gaze. Johan van der Keuken’s films have the singular virtue of being constructed, built or, more precisely, of constructing themselves, building themselves in front of the viewer’s eyes and, above all, behind them, because the images are not copies of this given, of this reality that we can keep in front of us and point to, always assured of the clear distinction between it and me, this world and my body, this thing and my consciousness, this object and my view of this object. The tower of images that Van der Keuken’s films construct gradually surrounds the viewer’s gaze, takes him inside: up and down its staircases, corridors and flats, in the middle of its empty rooms with no light, sometimes with a window open to the sky – a ray of light in the thickness of the shadow, transforming the viewer (without his being aware of this transformation) into its inhabitant: a singular tenant with ambiguous sensations.

He knows he’s only been here a short time and feels like he’s been here forever; he thinks he’s always been here, that he’s at home, and feels like he never came here, that he’s at someone else’s place. The tower of the Gaze (or of the gazes, or of the images constituted by these gazes) is made up of multiple floors, some of which are buried, forgotten, and yet still inhabited by what the first tenants saw, original visions forming the first layer of all the gazes that will inhabit the tower, gazes always already formed by other gazes, sedimented, stratified into layers of images seen by other eyes, by the eye of the Other. The presence of another gaze in my gaze: experienced again when, at the countless windows covering the entire surface of the tower, I look outwards at the outside that is looking at me, making it impossible to know who is seeing whom and who is being seen by whom, impossible to determine whether the windows are looking outwards from the inside or inwards from the outside. Reversibility of the seer and the seen, I am seen by the outside that I see (at that moment, who is this “I”?).

In the screening room, this outside that I see and that sees me are images on a screen. Images cut by Johan van der Keuken’s gaze, a gaze that is also looked at, seen by the things he films. If his films have this capacity to look at the spectator’s gaze, to make him enter a tower of images, a stratification of gazes; if, on entering this tower, the viewer feels his gaze overwhelmed, off-centre, out of focus, caught up in images that he has not formed and that nevertheless reveal themselves to him, it is because Johan van der Keuken’s gaze, when he was filming, was also always in a position allowing itself to be looked at, to be overflowed by what was outside his frame or within it, by the depth of the image, its inner workings as a movement of plasticity and a movement of meaning, which always exceeds the gaze, which in order to be seen requires a passivity of the gaze, an allowing-itself to-be-seen by what it sees. The eye of the filmmaker is also seen, penetrated by those layers of reality that do not show themselves, that resist being put into images, that will only be sensed, promised thanks to that second gaze of editing that connects images (and at the same time lets them connect): a connection between images seen for another image that has never been seen, sometimes has been caught in a glimpse maybe.

That the filmmaker’s gaze is looked at by the images he films and the spectator’s gaze is looked at by the images he sees means that these images open up a space of proximity, of oblique communication between the overflow of the gaze of the filmmaker and that of the spectator, that to look at the filmmaker’s images is not to look at his gaze but at the overflow of his gaze, at the same time (and because of this) as being surrendered to the overflow of one’s own gaze as a spectator.

A double overflow, then, a double decentring of the gaze that makes possible a Seeing beyond the Looking (looking at a painting is not yet seeing what it shows), a Seeing that doesn’t differ so much from a Touching, that has entered into this dimension, this state of the real (it was Johan van der Keuken who wrote somewhere: “cinema is a state, not a language”), this invisible texture that makes the images of gestures, objects, bodies and landscapes that (I) see appear to me with a presence that shatters all (my) representations, starting with this representation of the real that our culture projects, anguished by the multiplication of its mediations, in a neurotic quest for a True, an Authentic, a Real, a Presence that would accomplish redemptive soldering.

The genesis of Seeing in Johan van der Keuken’s films does not take the form of the disappearance or erasure of the filmmaker’s gaze, of his image-cutting subjectivity, in favour of a reality that by itself would allow itself to be seen. On the contrary, the mediation, the work of this gaze is constantly claimed, ostensibly designated: it is only because I assume my view of this thing as a singular perspective, that it is vulnerable, open to what is outside its frame, that it can be hollowed out by the gaze of these things that it does not see but which see it and require its (physical) displacement, its rotation, for it to see them. In the way Johan van der Keuken films and edits, there is an emphasis on the work of subjectivity, an activity that is both active and passive, putting the eye in the same position as the sculptor’s hand, which touches (forms) the clay, lets itself be touched (formed) by it, lets itself be guided by it, as if the material were participating in the creation of forms, as if it were generating forms. If the real is not a given, if in order to appear it needs an attack by reality through the filmmaker’s gaze which turns it upside down and gives it the rotation necessary to cross appearances, the fact remains that this gaze allows itself to be caught by what it catches, to be discovered by what it discovers, to be guided by the light of things, allowing it to enter into their logic, their layering, their sedimentation.

Only the gaze that moves within this dialectic of seeing/seen, that stands in their in-between, is capable of filming the real, of bringing to light the world in its density that defies all transparency, of making images that are showing at the same time as an it shows, images that show at the same time as they show themselves in the process of concealing the image that is always behind, the image that would have corresponded to another gaze, to another layer of reality, more difficult to see, less conscious. As if the real stood in this place where showing is at the same time concealing, always in debt to what is in terms of images, as if the real were also a tower with its lit and hidden parts, its stratification in layers, in storeys, some of which are buried, difficult to clear, difficult to see, with its zones of shadows, of night, its labyrinthine crossroads, as if it were this dimension that can only take shape and exist for the viewer when he, watching it, is caught up in the tower of the gaze.

I was caught up in this tower of the gaze almost every time I saw Johan van der Keuken’s films. If today, a year later, it’s still possible for me to talk about them, to remember their images, it’s undoubtedly because my stay in that tower isn’t over, that the images have survived, perhaps, moreover, altered to the point where they no longer resemble the images I saw then. The fact remains that they survive, both as memory and as present, as that which refers to a past, is its trace, its imprint, its photograph, and as that which each time is updated, returns to take place in the present, to become film again. It was Johan van der Keuken who said in his film Les Vacances du cinéaste: “A photograph is a memory. I remember what I’m seeing now. But the film remembers nothing. The film always takes place in the present.”

The close-ups of the faces of Herman Slobbe with his harmonica, Ben Webster with his saxophone, the old Eritrean woman in Rome, the young deaf worker in Groningen with his hearing aid... all take place in the present.

Images that belong to different films but which appear to me together, forming an autonomous constellation whose light diffuses throughout Johan van der Keuken’s entire oeuvre. Light in the moment of chaos. The sound and fury of the mountain splitting. Boulders by day against boulders by night, colliding, breaking, exploding. Such is the light emanating from these faces of children, men and women. Faces “of the shaken; […] of those who are capable of understanding what life and death are all about, and so what history is about.”1 Faces in which the suffering of the uprooted, the excluded, the mutilated, the dispossessed is imprinted; where resistance to this uprooting, this dispossession is expressed. Faces at war thus, who have experienced the frontline, who experience it every day... Ben is in pain. White people’s racism. He defends himself with his lips, his nostrils, his teeth. His music is beautiful. The tiger in the cage. When he plays, during the time it takes for the tiger to paw, his teeth become claws. Herman is in pain too. So much that he can laugh about it. That he can come out of his isolation. He is afraid of not existing. He wants to live. He plays the harmonica and the microphone. The old Eritrean woman. She too is in pain. The story of an eternal uprooting. She belongs nowhere except in the words that speak of the exodus of a woman who has never been at home anywhere. She lights a cigarette. The faces of the families of the young illiterate workers of the Groningen ice factory. They’re in pain too. They resemble a battlefield after the battle. A devastated, amputated, tortured landscape. The son is deaf. If he wants to hear, he’ll have to get used to this device behind his ear...

….Shaken faces, forms shot through with chaos. As opposed to the sublimated form from which all horror would be evacuated. As opposed to the false reconciliation, the false peace with the world that the image of a face might lead us to believe in. Van der Keuken refuses this optimism, which lives only by repressing and not seeing the horror of the physical and mental misery and the pain experienced in the contemporary world, the world of absence, the new ice age. The faces he films are tragic, witnesses to chaos, a struggle between form and chaos, even if in the end it is form, the presence of the human being, that must win. "Everything in film is a form. Herman is a form. Goodbye, nice little form,” the voice of the filmmaker is saying at the end of Herman Slobbe/ Blind Child 2. The humanism that emanates from Van der Keuken’s films certainly has to do with these shots of faces, of the human being in the very essence of its appearance, its expression, its form. It undoubtedly also has something to do with the filmmaker’s ethics: the guilt inherent in having an eye that can turn out to be devastating and brutal at any moment, filming without obstacles; the consequent humility of this eye that moves outside the frame because it knows it is limited and therefore militant; the way it looks at those it is filming, the way it talks to them, the way it makes the viewer feel, without demonstrating it, its solidarity with those who are shaken.

The sequence from Beauty, in which the exterminating hero puts makeup on (hides his face) and puts opaque glasses in front of his eyes, comes to mind again. The anti-human hero can thus only begin his work of extermination once he is sure he can see without being seen. The gaze, again! If this hero is a possible future for the man with the camera, it’s because the latter is always in a position, with a vengeance, to be able to look without letting himself be seen. It is in an ethic of the cinema, of the cinematographic gaze, that we should seek the foundations of the reciprocity of the seen and the seer. I think that’s one of the things Van der Keuken never stops telling us throughout all his films.

• 1This is how the philosopher Jan Patočka in his essay “Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War" describes those who have been shaken by the experience of the frontline. In Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 134.