Montage-Collage

In the bookcase at Henk and Phien's house, I found the catalogue of the Henry Moore exhibition
in Paris. The book has got about six pages of pictures of the same statue, taken from farther and
farther away.

The first picture shows a rounded shape with a curved slit in it, a sensual autonomous object. If
you turn the page, you see the same shape again, but now you see it connected to other shapes,
just as stylized, but you recognise them as the shoulders the slithead is on.

On the basis of the two pictures you have now seen, you automatically have a certain expectation
of what the entire statue is going to look like: probably a seated figure midway between
sensuality and abstraction. But what happens when you turn the next few pages is hard to
believe. The subsequent additions and variations on the original shape seem to know no bounds
and you see before your very eyes a figure that is simultaneously sitting, reclining and flying.
Sexy, hilarious, coy and dramatic all at the same time and all that in a lovely English park. This
is, of course, a case of montage. I never really care whether montage takes place between
moving or stationary images, it can even take place within one and the same seemingly
motionless frame. Because montage is the movement of the spirit itself, the thinking which sets
matter in motion.

In the period when I was still trying to find out what one could do with film, I tended towards the
term collage. Montage, the way we learned about it from the textbooks, seemed to me to have
more to do with two ways of dictating: the American way, cutting the world up into pieces and
then pasting it back together again in such a way that it looks just like the real thing, a world you
can join as if you had been born to it; and the Russian way, cutting the world up and then
regrouping the pieces into a system of concepts. American films present the reality of their
images as something untouchable. No questions can be posed about them; they are already
totally complete. Russian films make allusions to a new reality in which, in the end, each image
is to be granted its rightful place.

There was something overly persistent about Eisenstein's insistence on extracting concepts as
quickly and emphatically as possible from each and every combination of images, but in the
American montage, hardly any concept was-- or is--ever explicitly presented. The ideology is
swallowed down with the whole pre-cooked conception of fictional reality. That is why it is not
so hard to choose between the two styles of dictating. On the scale going from dictating style to
dictatorship, that does alter a bit. The choice between a left-wing and a right-wing dictatorship is
not one any human being should ever be forced to make. What kind of position are you in that
you can decide what is best for everyone? What is more, how in the world did you get into that
position? In concrete political situations, it is also a choice that cannot be made that simply.

On the other hand, however, I very much object to the recent widespread reluctance to see any
distinction between communism and fascism, since both of them have taken millions of lives.
The historical conditions under which the massacres occurred, the totally different impulses
behind them, are not taken into consideration, which is precisely why the announcement of a
view of this kind serves as a manifestation of an anti-left-wing attitude with everything to the left
of social democracy being associated with Stalinism. This attitude, I feel, stems from
disappointment with the vulnerability of the various liberation movements of the sixties, in such
sharp contrast with today's rough, tough economic and social recession. Numerous intellectuals
are discovering that it is hip to be right wing again, the left-wing trimmings are passé.

Back to the montage. The dictating style, whether left or right wing, is of course a pattern
individual creativity manages to evade, but what I felt was lacking there was perhaps a bit of
ignorance: the image still totally ignorant of its own connotations. In the realm of that brand of
ignorance, I felt film had been provided with a kind of poetic ground to stand on. It could take a
step backwards in the direction of its own origins. Seeing, now not subjectively reproduced by
human hands but mechanically imitated and wound up on reels to be unwound in time, created a
new public activity, the seeing of seeing, witnessing the witnessing.

To me, a combination of images seemed to be strong if it could make that seeing tangible and
visible, providing the sensation and sharpening the consciousness at the same time. The people
and things that were seen faded into the unreality of light projections, but there they were more
evident "in their own right" than as mere impulses for concepts. Even for the most trifling
moment, attention was demanded and although the combination of those moments in the collage
certainly produced meanings, they were never final. The image was always victorious over the
idea.

In my attitude to film, this idea of collage still plays a significant role. It is a certain kind of
freedom that you grant to the images. You don’t have any pretense about knowing all the
feasible potentials of every image. There is a remainder, a more or less remote region where the
image means nothing. And the more freedom you give the image at the start, the more leeway
you have to create complicated rela- tions between images, to play a fascinating game between
reality and the imagination, in which meanings are rounded off like a buoy. You also move
farther and farther away from the social arena, where battles are not only fought with concepts
but with real weapons as well. The more progress you make as a filmmaker, the more you view
your work as a force, be it perhaps a modest one, in the social struggle. One of the repercussions
is then that the free, autonomous image often has to be subordinated to the image as the bearer of
meanings. I have the feeling that, in covering precisely this ground, the art of montage has
enriched its possibilities.

First it dissociated itself from meaning and concept and became collage. By way of an
acknowledgement of the limitations that our society (and perhaps every society) imposes upon
us, it returned to the formulation of concepts. But in the process, it became a kind of montage
that also incorporates the collage and exhibits a constant interchange between freedom and
collective necessity. Dialectics that are left wing in their consequences but that "preserve the
level of surprise."

Moore's statue can well be examined from the angle of montage. All the parts of the whole, in
their interrelatedness, produce a total surprise. The sequence of photographic cuts in the
catalogue illustrates the autonomy of each shape, but in the long shot everything flows together
and only one polarity remains, the polarity between the beautifully shaped stone and the memory
of a human figure conveyed by it. Like all Moore's statues, this one has a timeless personality. In
a dialectically arranged montage, the parts can not be reconciled with the whole. There is not
only polarity, true conflict remains. We have to go back to the street more, look at what is going
on there, take part, often feel useless or redundant. The timeless moments are there, but for the
time being, those vast breathing entireties are still beyond our reach. On television I have just
watched police tanks uprooting the gardens of South Moluccans.

"From the World of the Self-Employed" in Skrien, October 1977

© 1999 Johan van der Keuken

Questions/Photographer and Filmmaker

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, Wij zijn 17 (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 Achter Glas (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 more serious.

I didn't know much about film. I had seen Pabst's Dreigroschenoper, Carné's Quai des Brumes,
Flaherty's Nanook of the North and a couple of ciné-poème type Dutch documentaries by
Herman van der Horst and Bert Haanstra. That was visually challenging, that was a photographic
art form and that was a world I wanted to explore. The rest, organizing everything, arranging the
props and the people, doing the production, was not my cup of tea.

Today the purely visual--or rather the purely sensory image and sound--is still the nucleus it all
revolves around. The first convolution around that nucleus is the montage, the process of
splitting up sensations and combining them again to create an object in time, an optical
statement. As soon as I detected that first convolution, it made me suspect there were more.
Chains of problems I didn't want to have anything to do with at that stage, but which I later
successively moved through, from one film to the next: where do you put the statement, the
argument of your film, in relation to the purely sensory energy you aspire to if you notice that
without the argument, you can not find a montage form in which the energy is effective? How
can you make time, movement and framing the subject of your movie, how can you approach
them musically and graphically without lapsing into impressionistic frivolity? How can you
create an autonomous composition that nevertheless makes a statement about reality?

How can you evoke a physically perceived three-dimensional space on a flat surface? How does
a text enter into this entity and how clear does it become if a political dimension is added to your
worldview? What discrepancies are there between the text and the entire composition of visual
signs? If an actor comes in, how does he speak? How does he move? What kind of position does
he assume? And if, with all of that, a story should develop, does it remain on the surface of the
film or is it concealed underneath? Does it exist in formal fragments of narrative or is it projected
from the holes, the missing images of the film?

This journey along the convolutions of a spiral is still in progress today. The problems I could
not solve three years ago are assailed again in the film I am making now. Next year I might just
come across last year's pitfalls again. Thus my approach to the material is in a constant state of
flux and, in art terms, it is sometimes more abstract, sometimes tried to get a grasp on it. The
book was not published until five years later, in 1963, in a limited edition, but after the four
versions I had made of it in the meantime, in the end the personal and original element prevailed
above all those influences. For the time being, the tension between the fragmented outside world
and the slow moving inside world permeated, with all its limitations, the carefully balanced
selection of photographs. The explosion, the vertigo and the desolation were tranquilly deposited
upon the flat surface.

In that sense, I am a self-taught person. The school had no particular interest in asking questions,
just in conveying the values and techniques of a system. A system I did not really fit into because
it was based on theater, on literature, and on financially profitable production. I came from the
tradition of the lonely, wandering eye, a myth I had already made my own in adolescence. From
the age of 18 to 20, I roamed about Paris, cutting classes at the film school whenever I could, and
my mind was on photography.
I took my chances with that grand theme, Man in the Metropolis, and tried to give it a touch of
myself. I had already pored over the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (I still study it, time and time
again), I was somewhat familiar with Izis, Doisneau, Bishoff, Brassai, Seymour, Capa, Haas,
Ronis, Roiter, Emmy Andriesse and the Americans who worked with existing light. I was
stimulated by Ed van der Elsken and the fact that he ventured to put himself on the scene as a
participant observer and violate the sociology of reporting, and by his way of dealing with the
color black. I was influenced by Rene Groebli's very intimate book of photographs entitled The
Eye of Love, showing how you can create a continuity with a minimum of statements, of
arguments (see above!). And now, in Paris, it was as if I were knocked senseless by the "New
York" of William Klein: no one had ever spoken that directly before, here was a way to break
through the culture wall.

There were other influences as well, John Coltrane's solo in Straight, No Chaser on a Miles
Davis record called Milestones, exposing the very bowels of music. And before that there had
been Parker and the other bebop musicians, and the paintings I had been looking at for the last
couple of years at modern art museums. Paris Mortel, the book of photographs that emerged
from all that was my last large piece of work in the period when I was developing as a
photographer and didn't yet consider myself a filmmaker.

After the inner-directed work I had done in my closed world of Amsterdam teenagers, this was a
harsh confrontation with the outside world. Paris in the twilight of the colonial era, the coup of
Massu and Salan in Algiers, de Gaulle's rise to power, the boy who felt lost amidst the turmoil
and beforehand, when I began to improvise, to think via the images that emerged of their own
accord from the confrontations with reality, when I started to illuminate people and things with
one or two tiny lamps as I had been wanting to do when I took pictures, and when I started to
dissociate myself from theatrical naturalism, the pretence of true-to-life that dominated and still
dominates current thinking about film, when I rid myself of the inhibiting idea of production and
could more freely experience the pleasure of creating images, when I had the courage to define
film first and foremost as a visual art, then it became my own medium.

The way I feel about it is that Paris Mortel was on one and the same track as the films I was to
make later. In addition to the strong preoccupation with form, in the films there is virtually
always the direct contact with people, the clash with circumstances, the emotional and often
over-emotional interchange between the one who sees and the one who is seen, and often the
reluctance to focus the camera straight onto a face. In the late fifties and early sixties, for me
photography also had an aspect of action, of intervention, of intensified contact. The more I
learned to film and the film camera merged with my eyes and my body, as the photography
camera had before, the more that function waned.

I retained my love of photography, but it made its way into quieter, more reflective waters. I no
longer argued, announced or demonstrated in my pictures, I simply noted what I saw: about
seeing--how much there is to see in how little--how to place it within those four borders in such a
way that what is outside them is also present, how to create color in the gradations between black
and white, how to depict objects, soft but not limp, how to work with light, where to stand. The
people who populate my films are fewer and less emphatically present. Photography thus became
less a matter of conquest. With its miniature observations, it nourishes my films but it also means
a "filmmaker's holiday." I no longer have to depend on it exclusively for making a living and that
makes it much lighter, because for the photographer the economic aspect is even more of a
torment than for the filmmaker: he is almost never his own pictures' boss. Learning to make
films in the years after the film academy had again a lot to do with photography. It was only
when I started to take the camera off the tripod and ventured to film on my own eye level and
arm's length, when I began to incorporate what I was observing at the moment into the flow of
images and to mix it with what I had planned more figurative. The formulation of questions and
the pursuit of answers keep pace with the discovery and exploration of life.
What did bother me at the time was the "photographer's film" label that was sometimes put on
my work. But ever since the emancipation of photography (paradoxically enough, partly because
it has been admitted to the capitalist gallery arts) and the notion of mixing the media have made
such great advances, it no longer fazes me. A photographer's film: What could be more exciting
than the almost stand-still, the highly visible section of reality, the frame that is almost final, only
to explode at the very last moment, upwards, downwards, any which way, towards new visions?
The photograph is not able to do that. Only the moving medium can show the standstill and its
abolition.

When you make a film, you constantly think, What is the next step, what sound, what text, what
music, what act, what fact can I link to this shot? How do I connect everything to everything? In
the first instance, film works by a process of expansion. When you take a photograph, you think:
how do I get all those observations into one and the same shot? How do I separate that one
picture from all the others? How do I stop it and get it to stand still? Photography mainly works
by a process of reduction. I have noticed that my way of thinking tends to be a predominantly
binary one, a binarity that dissolves into endless combinations. It is never a matter of this or that
but always of this and that: indoors and outdoors, people and things, the others and me, north and
south.

A binary stance that sets me editing. Two elements compete and merge into one concept without
their battle ever completely ending: The individual against the surface also always remains the
individual in the surface. Solving this conflict in a unity of vision, but still keeping it alive all the
while, is a contradiction the film medium has easily managed to live with. In photography, it is
more difficult to show the montage in its active stage within one and the same picture. If you
want to do that, taking pictures is more difficult than making films. You have much less to work
with. After years of filmmaking, I too have seen the idea of the unique picture fade away. In
retrospect, reality seemed to have been disguised as often as revealed by it. One second of film
frequently contained a number of meaningful and varied photograms, thus making the selection
of that one and only photograph I had in mind quite a problem. The intensity with which you
take your photographs, the desire to make your move at exactly the right moment, gives the
photograph an added emotional value that no single film photogram has, affected as it is by
chance circumstances. But that element of chance, once it is admitted, menaces an image that is
perhaps only an ideal image born of the fear of the free fall, that absolute image in which
everything that moves chaotically is called to order.

In 1976, there was a special exhibition of 30 years of Dutch photography at the Stedelijk
Museum in Amsterdam. For the first time in years, I exhibited my photographs again. In 1980,
the Stedelijk Museum showed a selection of my photographs since 1955. These relatively public
viewings stimulated me to turn back to photography on a more regular basis. The only restricting
factor was that it is difficult for me to take pictures and make films in the same period. No matter
how much they do have in common, the way of thinking about time, of thinking in time, is
totally different, perhaps diametrically opposed.

Thus the spell of the unique was broken. Two or more are possible. The moment you are looking
for is invisible between two visible moments. Only before the mind's eye, time is made to stand
still for a while. Perhaps I take photographs because time passes too quickly and make films
because I am short of time. This year, I am making a film called "Time." There is not only time,
there are times, layers of time. We talk about it as if it is something, but it is nothing.
Nevertheless, within that nothingness, we have got a body. What name can it be given?

For the French magazine Photographies, October 1983

© 1999 Johan van der Keuken

Remains of the Day: Amsterdam, Early

Delicate morning light shines on the blue boat opposite. First sun in June foliage. Frames
reflected in the muddy water, fresh with the new day. Fresh water, fresh fetish light. Childlike
iris of the new day promising. This is the emotion of the new day on earth, every day, in Cairo,
in Tiruvanantapuram, in Sepia Panorama.

The army of millions of wretches leave the barracks and sets out. Kellogg's Corn Flakes, scraps
of fish and tiny portions of rice. This is the hour when I sit and stammer, my happy hour.

The tone of this article should be slightly grumpy. I don't know exactly why, it may help set the
scene, who knows? The rather gruff mood in which associations come and go freely, not dressed
with more authority than traveling salesmen with dented luggage. More bedspreads than banners,
more dripping taps than fountains, more bread than cakes, more life jackets than rafts, more nails
than bolts, more candles than torches, more cups than bowls, more saucers than plates. But not
holding more authority.

Not far from home, just visible from my open window, beyond the lock in the broad canal with
the blue boat and the muddy reflection in the new morning is a bar called Tis Fris. Tis Fresh.
C'est Frais. Sist Frisch. There's no way fresher than the Dutch way. Tis Fris! Tis Fris! Tis Fris!
Tis Fris! It cheers me on and now the day has really dawned.

Last week I was in the spotlight at the documentary film festival in Marseille and briefly I felt
the state of grace of the successful artist from top to toe, from fingertip to fingertip. (Just
imagine, you are standing there with your arms stretched wide apart, making a straight horizontal
line from your left hand by way of left arm, left shoulder, neck, right shoulder, right arm to your
right hand and you measure the maximum tension on maximum extension between the fingertips
left and right, you measure how you are stretched between your extremities). Someone who
counts, a mild babbling guru. For me they had lovingly cleared the stage where I was able to
shape this babble. All conditions that could be made on the concept of Recognition had been
complied with. Delightfully confusing to feel this concept hanging around you like a sexy scent.
A volatile emotion, but with a lasting effect, I think: Possibly for the first time, my work was
accepted with all its links and contradictions as a whole by an audience, and not just by a self-
chosen few.

But I felt sullen, surly, intractable towards the rest when the jury of that same Festival
International du Cinéma Documentaire ignored La vie est immense et pleine de dangers by Denis
Gheerbrant. I never want to be on a jury. I have seen too often how nice sensible people change
into a bunch of windbags collapsing wearily in the middle. That accursed middle ground that we
despised even more in the sixties and seventies than the blackest right wing. That middle that no
longer exists, they say, because left and right no longer exist, they say. But the extreme right
does. The extreme right exists, they say. But if they say that the extreme right exists, then they
say that right and left exist too and also the middle. The middle exists and you have to learn to
live with it. That is more or less what we have learnt in the last 15 years. That's about it.

There's nothing wrong with the middle. But real art usually (pre)tends to avoid the middle. Let's
assume for now that I am the one to decide what real art is. For instance, I think that Denis
Gheerbrant makes real art, simply because he can create an image. Few can create images--a
confidential remark, just between us, I am looking for the right pose to proclaim a bitter opinion
with authority, so that bitterness can become wisdom--"Very few can create an image . . . That's
how it is!" But Gheerbrant can do it, he can create an image because he can make a frame, a soft,
strong, breathing frame around the world. Around the radiant, painful world. Frame, rubber
saber, soft truncheon in the world's sheath. (Stop! In case of metaphors with this degree of
swelling, the article should be interrupted and the refrain sung.)

Hey! Hey! Remains of the day! Hey! Hey! Remains of the day!

Hey! Hey! Remains of the day! Hey! Hey! Remains of the day!

That swollen image, is it left or right, extreme left or extreme right? No, it is a swollen yet very
focused image of the middle. But then the immediate middle, the extraparliamentary middle, the
carnal middle where the snogging is cheery and the caresses tender. Even the extraparliamentary
middle is too extreme for a jury. Maybe because that cheerful rebellious mood predominates and
you can never really lay your hand on it, as for instance when Joe Williams, accompanied by the
Basie band, sings:

Bring me a wagonload of bonds and stocks And open up the door to Fort Knox

Then throw me Smack dab in the middle Smack dab in the middle Smack dab in the middle And
let me rock and roll to satisfy my soul.

"But Denis Gheerbrant is surely not the kind of person to satisfy his soul with rock and roll? It is
alleged that his rather pious tone of voice in the film slightly irritated the jury." (We are now in
the middle of a discussion between two festival visitors; we happen to be one of the two).
"Pious?"

. . . 'Yes, I don't know exactly what to call it, something like: on the noble side of things." . . .
"Aha, like that. But maybe you could just say that he tried to keep his voice neutral, in order to
evoke a situation of sympathetic detachment or neutral sympathy, while he is reporting on a life
and death struggle. This attitude is also present in his framing, a committed serenity with which
people and things are seen and passed on to us. In doing so he gives the little cancer patients he
films a chance to display their strength, humor and intelligence in front of the camera.
Gheerbrant himself doesn’t have to playact over the heads of the children. And even if he does
sound a little pious from time to time, you should be able forgive a great artist that. They all have
something." . . .

"I agree with all that. But I still think he could make the relationship between image and voice--
or even broader, between image and sound--more exciting, more dialectic. That somewhere in
his film he would dare to sound out of tune, that he would be out of step with his subject." . . .
"Aha, I think I know what you mean. . . . Coffee time? You want a cup?" . . .

"Okay, fine. But what I want to say is that Gheerbrant always stands in the right place for the
light, you don't often see that. He doesn't even seem to think about it, he just stands in the right
place relative to the lighting and the subject. Because the frames he makes are always determined
by the place from which he frames them. The filmmaker, the place and the frame are linked in a
natural way. In other words, he frames well because he stands in the right place in the triangle of
filmmaker, subject and light. Everything else--in particular the film's timing--is determined by
the purity of this positioning, that is always direct and physical, even if it has been thoroughly
thought out in advance on a more abstract level." "I know what you mean . . . sugar?"

I describe this discussion in the foyer of the Cinéma Odéon in Marseille because I care about and
admire Denis Gheerbrant's film, but also because it helps me clarify an idea: How the position of
the filmmaker in the concrete space in which he is filming coincides with his metaphorical place
in the fictional space of the film. The moment when he determines his place in the magic triangle
is the creative moment and direct cinema is only direct because that place is occupied so swiftly
and accurately. Filmmakers who work like that are in my opinion the real thing and you know as
soon as you see one in action. You see it in the sequence of his frames, reflecting the sequences
of positions from which he films. It is a complex play because these positions are able to exist in
peaceful juxtaposition, few in number (as in the case of Denis Gheerbrant) or in flashy variety:
moving locations of creation, moving crazily with respect to each other, so the fiction is left
without a fixed point. The viewer becomes a voyager across a shaky world, searching for almost-
obliterated tracks. He travels along lines of force linking places whose names he doesn't know,
altitude lines, isotopes, as he is dragged along in the maze through which the filmmaker whirls,
spitting frame after frame out over reality.

I now have to put this article back on the rails. Just as in many documentary films, you can often
see in such a text that one starts out experimenting with the form-the author occasionally
mentions the progress of the dawn or breaks into a pointless refrain, and in doing so he opens up
for debate the fact that this is an artifact, an object conceived and created. The development of
that form, specific but not yet fleshed out, is an extra stimulus to the viewer to stay awake. How
will the maker manage to make ends meet?

But halfway through the film, this intention is forgotten or hidden away. The designer who
started enthusiastically has no more new ways of camouflaging his ulterior motives, or it is too
much like hard work for him to compose the ulterior forms that are needed right through to the
end. So the story is told straight from then on and you're back where you always were. No
movement beyond the movement of the story, no memory to link point to point and to make the
road traveled loom up for viewers looking back. Blind and deaf, people hasten forth on the wings
of whatever story.

This time I do not call:

Hey! Hey! Remains of the day! Hey! Hey! Remains of the day! Hey! Hey! Remains of the day!
Hey! Hey! Remains of the day!

because simple mechanical repetition is no good. Something has to change in the course of the
documentary, so that the view of that which has been documented changes too, until in the end
one wonders what was actually documented and whether there was anything to document.
Irresolute traveler as one is, one risks a trip to Nowhereland, where a machine has been placed
by Tinguely, that self-destructs. But one also once had an opportunity to reach an unknown and
untrodden area. It is as beautiful as a dream and smaller than a shoe, a new reality. Now one
documents how one treads this new reality, smaller than one's shoe (right shoe, for instance, or
left shoe). A new reality the size of a blob of chewing gum, flattened under your sole. Now that
flattened blob is un-untrodden, you document that and it yields a documentary: always too late to
capture the virgin state.

So I call out:

Bonjour, vestiges du jour! Bonjour vestiges, du jour!

Bonjour, vestiges du jour! Bonjour vestiges, du jour!

You always have to do it four times, until everyone is waiting and counting: one, two, three four.
Then you do it only three times or, say, 76 times. In that way you keep the construction alive and
you achieve that breakthrough in viewing habits, which is so widely highly regarded.

So now the construction is back on the rails, but in the meantime, one topic has been left: the
middle. You have to keep an eye on it, that the lines are neatly drawn and completed. How was it
you found that middle? Something is thrown together from words (or pictures), a sidetrack is
taken, one thing leads to another and suddenly you are stuck with that middle. A middle only
comprising words (or pictures). And then suddenly there turn out to be two middles: an
extraparliamentary, eccentric middle--that is good—and the middle where the jury collapses--
that is bad. The good middle is blood red, a sheath willed with worldly energy. The bad middle is
gray, all strength ebbs out of it. Dimness incarnate. But when you penetrate further into the
matter, you see that these two middles are manifestations of the Great Middle of and for Itself.
Well, that's one way of looking at it, of drawing the lines to their ends and turning words (or
pictures) into an idealist reality. But I can't do that. I have to live with two middles, a red one and
a gray one. I have to take them seriously because I evoked them with my words: rubbish, but
documented. The documentary exists and you have to live with it.

Before I reached this point in my documentary, before it became now in my article, I had gone
through a lengthy crisis.

It was like this:

I started writing at about 6:30 this morning about that boat, that fresh muddy water, that early
light. I carried on writing until 10:30. With interruptions--making tea, going to the toilet, messing
in the kitchen, bread and cheese, bread and peanut butter, coffee in the garden with Nosh, give
Nosh a cuddle because she is in a bad mood as she has to go Down South, to Aunt Lisa, a tough
old bird of 92 lying waiting in a rest home until she is allowed to die, but who time and again
turns out to possess an amazing strength. You think she is completely exhausted, thin as a
skeleton, almost blind, almost deaf, but she bounces back and puts bystanders in their place. Or
she reminisces about the good and the bad times, with great precision.

Nosh is going there with a half roast chicken that Aunt Lisa nibbles on the sly because the
nursing staff doesn't approve in the Roman Catholic South, where suffering has to be extended
because that is God's Will: Chicken is bad for Aunt Lisa.

Around 10:30 I can't write any more. The inspiration has run out, the refrains are breaking me
up. I withdraw into erotic daydreams, water the garden, sleep for half an hour, shave and head
for De Balie to do an interview with the Telewizja Polska. How can I describe in three minutes
what I have done in the last 30 years? That is usually what such an interview is about. I bump
into my colleague Frank Scheffer, the initiator of the film project Hexagon that was premiered
the previous evening: Six Dutch filmmakers make films to accompany compositions by six
Dutch composers. We discuss the reactions of press and audience, we pat each other on the back.
Frank is full of music, music! But what next? Go home and carry on writing? Or a visit to the
new exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum? I never get to see anything! I always have to work.
That brings me back to the permanent gripe: I Always Have to Work. Reaching the environs of
the museum, I realize I have to fetch the dolly for tomorrow's shooting. Tomorrow we are going
shooting, but this article has to be finished first.

Hey! Hey! Remains of the day! Hey! Hey! Remains of the day!

Hey! Hey! Remains of the day! Hey! Hey! Remains of the day!

The day has trickled away in escapes and chores. It's two in the morning and at last I am writing
again. Everything is quiet. Nosh has gone to bed, my ears are singing as a write. I hear crying by
my window, inconsolable sobbing. Behind the tree by the water, I can discern a small body
shaking and trembling. It is still there 15 minutes later. She'll fall in the water or drown. . . . I go
outside and look at the young old face lying there. It is crying. A musical instrument in a case is
lying beside it. It is crying. A cello! It cries and cries! She sees me. "You're that filmmaker,
what's-his-name, you make those awful films," she cries. "Help me for a minute," she cries. She
stumbles in with the cello, sits on the sofa until dawn and cries and talks and weeps and cries.
She has flipped on a bad constellation of wine and hash. Desperate stories about humiliation and
rejection. Crying angrily, compulsively possessed, talking louder and louder. They kicked her
out of the jazz workshop next door in the BIMhuis.1 There was a girl on coke and hash and
booze and all the men just stood and laughed as she lay there vomiting. Fantastic men, men who
play jazz music, they do something like that! Unbelievable! She went mad when she saw that,
and then the boss of the bar kicked her out. "You can never come in here again," he told her.
Then she lay down. "How will I ever get rid of her," I wonder.
"With all those films you make, you should be able to empathize with me," she blackmails me. I
say: "I don't mind listening to you for a while, but I am not going to put myself in your shoes. I'm
sitting here working. I have to write an article and that isn't easy." I say, "Don't shout, you'll
wake everyone up," and laugh feebly. "Just sit here and have another cup of coffee and a
sandwich until you calm down," I say. And in the end she leaves, calmly but shakily, with the
cello tied to her back. Oh, I hope the cello and she herself make it home in one piece! She has a
three-room apartment in Leiden, she cried to me, where she is heading. To my relief. And now
calm. Take it easy. And now calm. And calmly home. She goes. There is a brief trace of
friendship, but I can't have that, I don't feel like it and she understands all too well and, "Sorry
for acting like a fool here." Never mind, no problem, be careful, keep your cool. She leaves, calm
and in despair.

Hey! Hey! Remains of the day! Hey! Hey! Remains of the day!

At present I am very interested in the non-representative image, that gradually fills with
substance, with representation, with narration. My contribution to the Hexagon project, On
Animal Locomotion, works like that. The images seem to be plucked at random from the large
stock of world views, but the violence of the look, the wrath of movement, the links between
fragile points of meaning, the casual tactile contacts with the music of Willem Breuker, the
power of the visual associations in the music, all this leads to a conversation, a metababble,
intense and inaudible, as compelling as the possessed talking of the girl with the cello. A plea
that isn't there but that generates words in me, visible and audible words that aren't there. They
move in a deep emotion that I cannot prove, but that can be communicated to others. Not all, but
some. People who have eyes and ears for what is absent between things. Between image and
image, and music and music, and music and image, and image and music.

On Animal Locomotion ends in Sarajevo, it is in a manner of speaking my second film about

Sarajevo. Both are short and are about my inability to understand what I see-- my deep-seated
inability to see, to be there. To film that means commitment, despite everything. To say that it all
means nothing, as the great Fred Wiseman appears to do, is too modest, I do not agree with that.
Certainly, there is nothing, but in that nothing, something is always made. It cackles and talks, it
blabs and tattles and tries to exist. Oh, golden dawn now breaking. Oh happiness! Oh, Albinoni-
Pasolini dawn. There is Otis Redding on a golden quayside watching an iron ship heading for the
horizon. The sun continues on its path. Let’s listen to Otis Redding.

He sings

Sitting on the dock of the bay Watching the remains of the day Sitting on the dock of the bay
Watching the time go away

as evening falls.

June 24-25, 1994

© 1999 Johan van der Keuken

On "The Truth 24 Times a Second"

The idea of "the truth 24 times a second"* is erroneous. The acceleration that takes place in the
mechanical process creates a gap between the "function" of mechanical repetition and it's "form"
as a continuous flow that is only perceivable in a purely subjective experience of time.

Fragmentation, in the present day montage conception, is not an automatic result of a

fragmentation built into the mechanics of the film. It solely corresponds to the searching
movements in our consciousness, to the shifting back and forth between the various layers of
reality. Just as the corners, holes, convex and concave surfaces in a given space can be explored,
the time fragments in the film correspond to the convex and concave surfaces in our time
experience as it is shaped by various states of mind.

Whereas Eisenstein's "cubist" montage created an equivalent in time for the free standpoint in
some given space, in today's montage we move freely in a space that no longer has any borders.
The dialectic element lies in the fact that, again and again, the montage is abolished by it's own
disappearance, an amorphous flood of observations in which shapes waveringly emerge. These
shapes represent, so to speak, our feeling of responsibility, choice, direction. They are
microscopic signs of everyday solidarity in the flow of perception.

Film is such an impressionable medium that any schematic categorization within time and space
has become unfeasible. This is the freedom and the uncertainty we have acquired since cubism.
(Whereas most films, even modern ones, are still at some pre-cubist evolutionary stage such as
impressionism, or on some sidetrack of modern art as magic realism.) Anything and everything
can serve to turn a film into a space. The important thing is not the reproduction of a three-
dimensional reality, but by way of the "time elements" in a film, the creation of an autonomous
space. The whole syntaxis of camera angles and movements that was once hoped for has been
shattered along with the notion of a unified space or a central piece of subject matter or, one step
further, a mechanical fragmentation countering that central piece of subject matter. In spite of
what we have been taught, on the level of montage, the "cut" can introduce an element of
slackness.

Even more importantly, it can provide the horizontal or vertical lines with which we demarcate
the very transitory arenas or playgrounds in the space of our film. From this totality of undefined
spaces and wavering shapes, a final form emerges as soon as the film has unwound itself. This
final form, convenient in size, can be wrapped up by the viewer and carried off in his head. It is a
thing, but it is a thing that moves, it is fragile and expansive at the same time and it can loose
itself in the space inside the head. But as long as we can keep an eye on what is going on in
there, whenever we want, we can scrutinize the forces that rule reality or, for whoever wishes to
put it that way, the universe.

The dynamic equilibrium of a composition is a permanent check on the tension, violence and
aggression in the real world. In that sense, it is an ideal state of affairs. The every-day aspect, the
upper layer of consciousness consists of never forgetting the unchecked violence and its opposite
pole, the unchecked slackness. If the final aim of a work of art is the breaking down of weak
forms and the creation of an equilibrium of strong forms, then weaknesses, stagnations and
moments of shattering fervor also have to be included in the composition. This means that one
has to choose one's point of departure in ordinary reality which, in essence, rebels every way it
can against composition.

Thus film has two layers, the unending interaction of strong forms in dynamic equilibrium
expressing a general progressive view of the world, and a series of moments of stagnation and
unresolved violence, corresponding to the individual fate that can not (yet) be steered by strong
forms and usually accounts for the more anecdotal streams in the film. But in the process of
filmmaking, these two layers have to merge into a final form in which there is no longer any
hierarchic distinction between the component elements. This is why even a text or anecdote can
become a spatial element. Emotionally speaking, the "work" of filmmaking is indeed the energy
expended mirroring information back and forth and granting that information its final form. The
film itself is only a vehicle for information, not a product. It is a substance that possesses certain
characteristics that can be played off against each other. This accounts for the idea of dynamic
structure in contrast to the idea of a final product.

* A statement by Jean-Luc Godard in Le Petit Soldat: "Photography is the truth, and cinema is
the truth 24 times a second"

July-August 1967

© 1999 Johan van der Keuken

Flat Jungle-30 Minutes of Montage

I want to try to describe a piece of editing work with as much precision as I can. It is Monday,
the sixth of February, a quarter past 11. The place where we set up shop last November is a
partially darkened room in a shed on the grounds of the Cinetone Studios in the east of
Amsterdam.

The interior is a bright but indefinable shade of green, the exterior visible from the window has
the picturesque gloominess of a set where, decades ago, the last Eastern was shot. At the editing
table, Jan Dop, the montage/editing/ cutting artist, perched on the edge of his swivel chair
cranked up so high he is almost standing, brings to mind a cowboy ready for the roundup.

Next to him, actually slouching half behind him way down on his sacroiliac, his feet up on one
table and then on another, sometimes restlessly wheeling this way and that on his chair adjusted
to a much lower and more comfortable position, yours truly. In the background, the gentle
bubbling of Jan's Hungarian coffee percolator, a labor-intensive device bearing a marked visual
similarity to an old-time steam locomotive. Topped with a good-sized steam whistle, it would
make it all the easier to believe in the setting outside, a hamlet in the puszta where stylized
violence can break out any minute now. Besides cutting, Jan and I spend a sizeable amount of
time prompting the percolator.

We are about three-quarters through with our film on the Dutch Shallows, the Wadden Sea, Flat
Jungle. We spent the first couple of months piecing together isolated fragments, clusters of
image and sound, that we didn't arrange into any kind of sequence until a much later stage. We
thus approached every piece of film "from the inside," rather than from start to finish. Each piece
is its own middle, as it were. It wasn't until later, in the completed structure, that it was to be
defined as a main component or a connecting link.

This is how you arrive at a structure in which all the elements are treated with the same intensity,
since from the start none of the elements are subordinate to any of the others. But now that we
have come to this three-quarter point, there are relatively few elements left. In the course of our
editing, we have either reserved them for the last part or have simply got them left over. It is easy
to get an overall view of the remaining material, and with it we can elaborate upon what our film
has already become and round it off in a somewhat more efficient, less tentative way than up to
now. The film consists of layers. Layers of natural production and, above them, layers of human
production. A rather menacing world has already been clearly depicted by the time the vacation
begins: Time Off, Recreation.

Within the colorful span of the entire film, this is the only passage that has been shot in black and
white. The vacationers are strangers to the region, old prints, with a touch of nostalgia. Not
everything, however, is in black and white. Every now and then the picture switches to full color,
when a vacationer's dream comes true, just for a second, like the brightly hued trailer called
Eldorado or the dune waving in the wind. Vacation, that is obvious. A stretch of film estimated at
maybe five minutes, after which the planes, the factories and the nuclear plants take over. A
short respite, a moment's laughter, the carefree enjoyment of a sham paradise. This is the passage
Jan and I are working on now. We are at the shot of an elderly couple sitting on folding chairs in
front of a tent gently flapping in the wind. She is wearing a floppy-brimmed sun hat and gaudy
sunglasses, and he, in his little straw hat, looks a lot like W.C. Fields, but nicer. The catchy
rhythm of an evergreen sung by Max Woiski, the Surinamese singer, can be heard from inside
the tent. The couple sits there without budging, while the music swings cheerfully to the wind.
The next shot is of the same couple, but now more of a closeup, they are still motionless, with a
friendly look into the lens. The radio plays on. The next shot is from even closer, and the man
starts talking.
"When we came here 40 years ago, you could see the seals on the shoals. But you don't see them
any more nowadays and that's too bad." (On the radio, the audience laughs at the jokes of a
popular Dutch comedian). "You don't see as many rabbits as you used to either. But they don't
run away as fast," his wife says. "Yes," he agrees, "they just stroll around the tent like it is the
most normal thing in the world." As he speaks, he points to something off screen, and that's
when you see the trailer called Eldorado. A conventional link that turns out to be deceiving,
someone points and you show what he is pointing at, only there is something wrong. The man is
pointing in black and white and the trailer is in color.

After the trailer there is another shot of the couple, but now they are in color themselves. Their
bungalow tent turns out to be bright orange. The man's voice goes on. "The main reason we
come here is to enjoy nature. Everything we have seen here on the island, the birds and the
rabbits, the dunes, the sea, everything we see here, to us it is the most beautiful place in the
world." Gleaming sand reed and a sweeping dune panorama follow the orange shot of the couple,
both in color as well. The man’s voice is still heard during these shots.

We have already got this sequence put together and now Jan and I are going to try and make it a
bit more compact. First we shorten the spoken text, for example by cutting out "like it is the most
normal thing in the world." We play it back three times just to make sure the sound splice is
right. Now "The main reason we come here is to enjoy nature" comes sooner and the shot that
goes with it, the orange shot of the couple, can be a little shorter. We also make the sand reed
shorter, so the cut to the dune panorama comes right after the sentence starting with "Everything
we have seen here." In order to stay in the rhythm, we also shorten the dune panorama, making
the whole sequence a bit more interesting. The man's text is now longer than the shots, so that it
continues into the next sequence, a short series of closeups in black and white of beer cans and
plastic bottles, half buried under the sand on the beach. We take advantage of this opportunity to
combine these shots with the man's listing of "the birds and the rabbits, the dunes, the sea,"
another deceiving combination: a verbal listing simultaneous to a visual listing, only the two do
not correspond.
In order to make the combination coincide, we shorten the previous shots, the orange tent, the
couple, the sand reed and the dune panorama even more, so that the text becomes relatively
longer and completely covers the shots of the beer cans and plastic bottles. After the cans and the
bottles, after the man's text, there is a shot of a tiled shed with a running faucet above a sink
filled with laundry. The shot is static; it is about eight seconds long and is followed by a wide
total shot of a coastline with a high-rise apartment building in the distance. In the foreground,
there are rows and rows of beach chairs, each with a big number on the back: 2432, 2449, 2352
and so forth.

For two reasons, we decide to turn up the sound of the faucet and let it run over the shot of the
building and the chairs. First, for a sharp departure from the naturalism of the "documentary."
Secondly, to stress the association of the numbers of all those beach chairs flowing out of the
faucet, with a clear and somewhat coarse effect that presents a different variation on the false
links between the pointing and the trailer called Eldorado and between the nature words and the
cans and the bottles. A more fundamental variation, since there is no inherent link between the
beach chairs and the water from the faucet, which was the case, to some extent, in the other
combinations. It all seems very complicated when it's down on paper like this, but what it boils
down to is that there is no medium like film.

In the meantime, it is already a quarter to 12. In this half-hour of the total of 750 hours spent
editing Flat Jungle, we licked into shape a sequence of ten shots with a total length of 42
seconds, shortened it and put the sound track in its place. In the course of writing this, I realise
that these 42 seconds of film are based, construction-wise, on three sham links that each function
in a different way.

The first one works by way of a discrepancy between the action and the off-screen space
(pointing/Eldorado), the second one by way of a discrepancy between what is seen and what is
said (beer cans and plastic bottles/elements of nature the man lists) and the third one by way of
the discrepancy between the objects that are seen and the sound that is heard (beach
chairs/running water from the faucet). The third one has no alibi in the actual content and thus
gives the biggest jolt. These 30 seconds contain a small escalation concealed under the
"documentary" style of the film. Ideally you ought to be able to analyse the whole hour-and- a-
half film with this kind of precision. The thought of it! Good God! The nice thing about it though
is that while we work, while we play so carefully with the material at hand, we automatically
discover all these links. Maybe that is what keeps us seated in these very same swivel chairs for
750 hours. Tiny unexpected perspectives keep opening up.

P.S. We later managed to fit in that Eldorado shot somewhere else. Now the man points directly
at the sand reed. It makes it clearer what he means when he refers to "nature." It makes him
stronger and his words can survive the juxtaposition with the shots of the beer cans and plastic
bottles. For more or less the same reason, the orange shot of the couple has been left out. It was
too "cute" and competed with the color shots of the sand reed and the dune panorama. We have
to do nature justice.

Skrien, April 1978

© 1999 Johan van der Keuken

Film Is Not a Language

Film is not, as is often assumed, a language in which certain combinations of signs refer to
certain concepts and in which series of combinations of signs can be arranged into a syntaxis.
Film has no sign and no significance. The sentence "John is a villain" cannot be converted into a
combination of cinematic signs.

It is possible, however, to use a camera to show John kicking a dog. Then it is immediately
obvious that John is a villain. People who refer to film as a language are essentially referring to a
limited number of signals to which there are a limited number of conditioned responses. John
kicks dog = evil, mother kisses child = love, hand shakes hand = brotherhood of man. These
signals have nothing to do with film itself. If John kicks a dog on the street, people will think he's
evil even without the help of cinematic language. The film is an instrument for the registration,
reinforcement and distribution of the signal. All it can do is show, but it can show anything, in
any way.

Linked to the notion of a film language with its own grammar, there are the film "laws" to be
adhered to. These laws stipulate what is allowed and what isn't, mainly what isn't. Certain critics,
experts and pseudo-experts invariably cite them as veritable prohibitions. The notion of film
language and film laws make a lot of people find the bad films good and the good films bad.
Fortunately, neither film laws nor film language exist. Anything goes.

Art from Now (Kunst van Nu), August 1963

© 1999 Johan van der Keuken

The Mystique of the Camera
Message for Menno Euwe, Sound Man

How to return, how to leave behind. The cinematic space of New York, the Lower East Side,
"Loisaida" as its Spanish-speaking residents so aptly call it and also write it: cracked pavement,
the rot of a bad tooth, manhole covers, the scars of flames, scorched spot in the city--now left
behind, everything forgotten, senile like in Bernlef's Mind Shadows.*

Suddenly you no longer know a single name, a single place, a single number; you have gone
blind from too much seeing.

Yes, it's true, shooting a film is a Work of Love. Endless love, grand indeterminable flow to and
from people, energy and yearning. Endless shlepping with the camera and all the other
equipment, the rolls of film and Nosh with the Nagra recorder and the microphones, the tapes
and the light, sometimes on the verge of total exhaustion, not an unusual feeling for women, she
says. Endlessly pleased to meet you, everything nice, beautiful, impressive, too much, we would
like to film how people survive and the money, how it flows, those who have it and those who
don't.

That is what we want to film, that is why we want to film you. Nice people! They are just nice, in
other words very much alive, or dead, addicted, broken, down and out. Ever since Bessie Smith,
there has been a whole down-and-out romanticism, talking about it, defining it, singing about it
all serves to specify an inconceivable experience that then goes on to become a legend, and then
folklore, and then a lie. An acceptable, operable form slips in between man and his truth. Nobody
Knows You When You're Down and Out, a song whistled between the teeth of the rich man as
he spreads his behind over his bag of gold. A form problem with no solution.
The electricity of DOING in this city. All that complaining and whining in Holland, nothing ain't
ever really possible. . . . Come on, go for it! Anyone can do anything. My world is an enormous
belly, I swell up, and over that balloon I look at other worlds below me, as tiny as my
insignificant toes. This here is my America and tomorrow I will vote for more and more, it never
ought to end. The other me (the author) says, But what about the other worlds that get less and
less and want it to end right now? What about the tension, the violence?

But we too have been touched by that go-and-get-it spark, just like the little man who is a tough
and strong man, a Puerto Rican or Dominican, who is against it all, that goes without saying, but
he too does or dies, always on the lookout for business, he makes it or dies, he braces himself to
stay where he is in his neighborhood his house tiny as it may be, at the foot of the power and not
to be smoked out and exiled over the bridges to Brooklyn and the Bronx.

He estimates his own worth and the worth of his equals and acts accordingly. We are charmed by
that active thing, it peps you up, it is refreshing, yes. It is just as if you are writing along with a
78 RPM record, those notes go too fast, have you seen the despair, yes, seen, but senile now, a
menacing feeling, sometimes, walking into the twilight among groups of twilight people, on the
stoops in front of scorched houses in among piles of broken TV sets, more broken TV sets and
injection needles. When we film an arrest, voices resound from above the crowd of onlookers:
HEY MOTHERFUCKER, GET OUT OF OUR NEIGHBORHOOD!

Petrified, the thought alone of a knife in my back is enough, I stop the camera just as one of the
cops flicks off the pint-size suspect's hat, is there some more heroin under it? The most
humiliating moment of all, I should have gotten it, I could kick myself. Our guardian angel in
Loisaida, Marlis, shouts up to the voices shrieking from the scorched window sill above us:
SHUT UP, YOU BITCHES, I LIVE HERE! YOU JUST MOVED IN FROM CONNECTICUT!
Next time IÕve got to have the guts.
There is a mystique of the camera you have to obey. If a woman is dancing and I am filming her,
then I dance with the camera, I see the edges of the picture dancing with the edges of the person,
that woman. Like Adela, an overweight but sturdy, shiny black woman, a scrumptious warm shy
but very determined lady. Dances on the sidewalk in front of her restaurant, Caprice on Avenue
C, dances to the music coming out of the touching little model car contraption driven by a round-
bellied Hispanic gentleman with a Panama hat and cigar, and the proceeds go to crippled Puerto
Rican children-- Ayudales a caminar, help them walk again--and I dance along with the camera,
just a few careful little steps and I hope it is barely noticeable because who can dare move in the
presence of these master dancers: there is Adela herself and another woman from the restaurant,
smaller more wrinkled, knowing, laughing, and the moustached man in his white jacket, also
from the same restaurant, always silent but an elegant cavalier, a swinging, toothless, radiant old
lady, cigarette dangling from her mouth, a introverted young girl at a distance swaying only
slightly from the hips, a motley group of spectators, taking a sip now and then from a brown
paper bag. Dancing with the camera with graceful precision-- I know that Nosh is getting the
sound right--she takes me across Avenue C, where the sound is now melancholy and distant.
Italian neo-realistic.

The dancers become tiny animated figures pasted against a flat housefront, the purplish reddish
bricks, tin, iron, aged aluminium, yellowish paint, aged stoops, a decor with the letters Candy
Store, Caprice and farther down the street ,my favorite: Eddy's Bakery Shop with the
sugarcoated cake and the hope-filled bride and groom on top, Loisaida America Decor. No use
holding back, go ahead and love it. The cinematic space you can't forever keep untouched by
references to older masterpieces--at the moment the barbarian Fuller is the strongest of all--but
try to postpone them for a while, mistrust those references and peel down that image going back
to the real-life despair and passion. Feelings that might be smaller and less classical, but are at
least within your own reach. Stay latent as long as possible. Be senile. Here I Stand. I'm Blind.
Please Help Me, Buy a Pencil.
Bought a second-hand suit for the trip at Jojo's on Herenstraat in Amsterdam and a tie tooÑhad
not worn one in at least 15 years--and off we go with a charming enterprising smile to financial
backers, investors. I've already read a variety of books on money, but this is not the world of the
Dutch economist Professor Heertje, this is the realm of Mark Motroni, Peter Bakstansky, Ed
Kassakian, Roger Kubarych and Mike Kajanka with the icy eyes of a J.R. Those eyes give me
the creeps; my tie is too tight.

About money, the bloodstream, the clean killer, making something out of nothing, I think in
silence and at a distance, covertly and in instalments, I don't betray my thoughts to my unbiased
thinking, waiting for the unexpected moment when the neverending flow of info will be captured
in a very everyday shot. Until that moment, I do not understand a thing. I make a composition
out of the signs I pick up on the way. Signs that have eyes and a voice, received with a woman
who is mistress and friend alike, in a space of flesh where I am happy, in a cinematic space
where I am happy. A cinematic space between walls of radiant and innocent gas on which bodies
and objects interglide in illumination. If it is rolling right and I am rolling with it, the camera is a
string, an elastic string or a string of steel. When two men look, it is one thing. When two women
look, it is something else. When a man and a woman look, it is something else again. Two eyes,
Image and Sound, together make a third eye.

"From the World of the Self-Employed" in Skrien, Winter 1994-1995

© 1999 Johan van der Keuken

That and How

Situations in a film don't really explain anything. What counts is that they have come about by
way of participation. And it is only by way of participation that they can come to mean
something to the viewer.

Since I am unable to see things in pure isolation, I have also introduced a destructive emotion.
Life erodes every statement you make.

If you operate on that wavelength you create prototypes of reality. This can be done in very
simple everyday images. I would rather not have power over specialized technical machinery.
Film is more a way to put things into a context than to create a story. An innovation of the eye.

As soon as a person has been filmed, he is no longer a person but a piece of fiction, filmed
material. And yet, at the same time, he goes on living.

There is a great amount of tension in this double movement. Discovering a form for this tension
means projecting an imaginary world and describing the human struggle within it.

By linking the approach of the painter to the love of music, I am gradually entering the realm of
poetry.

July 1969

© 1999 Johan van der Keuken

You Want It Always to Stay This Way

Returning to Formentera for the third time, I see that the small windmill is almost gone. Some
spokes and stakes are left of it. Time and changing circumstances have been meddling. In
Northern Europe, windmills are progressive, here in Southern Europe environment-friendly
mechanisms fall into disuse.

I filmed the mill seven years ago--a perfect, dreamily rotating circle with paddles on a crystal--
clear slightly tilted landscape, that I didn't understand then as well as I do now.

Although, what do I understand about it now? Perhaps that something slightly tilted can be very
uplifting for a Dutchman, once he has lost some of his passion for mountains and valleys, that
overdose of drama.

I can see it better since I often think of Cézanne (I would like to do something about him
someday, but I don't know how)--those tiny tilts, faint angles between planes and the critical
difference they make in the light. On that plane, Giacometti as man: a wire nail, just as minimal,
and the great plasticity born in that wasted form. A man on a plane, another plane, hardly rolling,
hardly rising, just touching. More is not necessary.

That man meets another man. Maybe a third man joins them and together they go on. A road
makes its way in the plane. Who determines the road's course? Who looks after provisions? How
is the food divided up? "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is,"
Donovan drowsily sang. For me, it became a motto. Written down it turns into culture, while it is
nothing more than a great, often somewhat impractical love for "the body of reality." Or just for
the body.

The little windmill, as it was shot on Formentera and used in the film The White Castle, was
followed by the image of a lean, old, despondent black woman--looking out the window of her
American ghetto, a smoking cigarette dangling on her lip. Through the binding law of montage,
which creates a physical coherence in a simple sequence of images, that woman looks at that
mill. Ultimate longing for what has been taken away from her, that circle. One of the most
touching moments I encountered via the trickery of editing, and one of those moments that isn’t
that conspicuous in the course of the film.

The black woman looking at a very distant windmill creates a political connection. A mysterious
one. Because you don't state, "It's been taken away from her," the viewer is free to overlook it.
When you do say it, you obligate and antagonize him, "Ah, the theme of loss!" Yet, I feel that
sometimes you have to stand for platitudes and say, "It most definitely has been taken away from
her!" That then happens in other places, in other films, when you are angry, battling against
cohorts of nonsense and lies, and thereby perhaps adding nonsense to that nonsense. Sometimes
you have to step forth from emotion.

Looking at something that isn't there: a man on a plane and the light on it, a road, time passing,
the dividing of food--that is more or less what filmmaking is about. There are numerous
filmmakers and fine artists, who rarely speak that represented a break for me towards a freer
form: The medium is the content, the form is the message. or write a word-- not the worst ones
either. For myself, writing was necessary at times, because something lived inside of me, floated
before my eyes, that I wanted to grasp. With hermetic formulas or intuitive stammering,
speculative ebullitions or harsh prescriptions for the world. Sometimes a little tough guy takes
the floor; he wants to stay on top of the confusion. It's not always pleasant to read over old texts,
and yet I don't re-edit them, because censorship bars change.
Through years of playing diligently with the visible and audible material that presents itself
within the four sides of the image, the making of images became my profession. But what should
you film all day long? In order to point my camera at other people I have to conquer certain
disgust, because the image paralyzes life--limitation and falsification set in immediately.
Professionalism is the conquering of that disgust: to wrestle some life from it in spite of that, to
get closer to people, to bridge the distance. When I write, I hardly hit upon the problem of
disgust. Writing is not my profession; it is an activity to link other activities.

Texts from the early sixties show that I could formulate certain things long before I could make
them happen in my films. I suspected film for some time to be a thing in which time and space
have fused and solidified, before I could really make that thing. In the meantime I needed words
to connect my head and my hands.

Shifts are also detectable. Before long I wouldn't be held responsible anymore for an all
encompassing remark like "It should be possible to translate politics into a teacup or into the
Bank of the Netherlands," and that goes even stronger for my assertions about the "Woman" and
"Western Cul-ture" in the draft for Diary. Shifts exist in my view on the media. In the heated
report on a week of Dutch TV in 1966, television is seen as a hollow form, a latent presence, a
void awaiting a message. A year later I became entranced by Marshall McLuhan who pointed out
in Understanding Media that the mobile, probing, somewhat blurry way in which the electronic
image is formed has far-reaching consequences for our perception and our reactions. That
unfilled image relates us all immediately and simultaneously to everything, in a worldwide
alternating current. Through this vision I gained a strong desire to make The Spirit of the Time, a
film that represented a break for me towards a freer form: The medium is the content, the form is
the message.
Meanwhile, in the outline for Beauty (still under the working title Private Dick), made at that
same time, the cool media of the electronic era are looked upon somewhat more cynically and a
few years later all triumphant expectation is abandoned resolutely. "The masses will have to
change their own destiny--electricity could spread the necessary knowledge-- but electricity too
became an instrument of repression," as the didactic texts appearing between the images of Diary
read. The media cannot be separated from the economic interests they must serve. Not the global
village, but the global market.

Yet I am still fascinated by the incomplete, blurred information, the diffuse image around which
McLuhan built his fairy-like framework. I am thinking of the intense emo-tion that came over us
upon seeing a duplicate of a film of a videotape of a television broadcast in which you could see
and hear John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, Jimmy Garrison and McCoy Tyner going at it, extremely
vague, almost completely engulfed by static. It is the most direct experience of this quartet still
available, and therefore the most direct experience you can imagine. It takes a myth for that
blurryness to work. What was shown here couldn't really be depicted, it was too grandiose, too
intense. Never will we get closer to it. It's like the top notes of the older Coltrane himself, as if he
didn't really reach them, tearful, reedy, muffled, brokenly played, because they cannot be played.
He was a religious man.

As a tribute to "low-definition," I put in a photograph of Peruvian miners in an elevator that has

just come above the ground. The picture was reproduced with an impressive loss of quality from
the film The New Ice Age, but I think that if focused, it couldn’t be more effective. I also know
the opposite tendency: the filmy silhouette, the detailed surface of skin with all shades of light.
You want it always to stay like this.

Introduction to the book Seeing Watching Filming, July 1979

© 1999 Johan van der Keuken