Netherlands,
1966, 29 min
Shown in 1999
CREDITS
- dir
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Johan van der Keuken
- cam
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Johan van der Keuken
- source
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Cornell Cinema, 104 Willard Straight Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853. FAX: 607-255-9910. World Sales:Idéale Audience, 6 rue de l’Agent Baily, 75009 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-5320-1401
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COMMENTS
Johan van der Keuken was the 1999 recipient of the Persistence of Vision Award. This was shown as part of a program entitled Johan van der Keuken: Early Shorts.
OTHER
“Film is not life,” observed van der Keuken recently, “but it has to touch your life. It’s a second life.” These four early poetic films reveal the origins of the complex, layered style of his later documentaries. The lyrical, subjective camerawork, detailed observations of everyday life and sensitivity to inner reality make these portraits among the most lovely of short films. While time, movement and framing are the subjects of all van der Keuken’s work (he is as much devoted to the abstract as the figurative), these fragmented glimpses of other lives send us beyond the frame, to the life that continues outside the film.
Herman Slobbe talks of his blindness, the struggles of Blacks and, in two unforgettable scenes, takes over the microphone to provide his own sound.
—Kathy Geritz
FACTOID #27
A surrealist stop-motion animator, the Czech Jan Svankmajer, was the first recipient of the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award in 1997. The POV Award honors the lifetime achievement of a filmmaker who works outside of feature-length narrative filmmaking.
