Netherlands,
1963, 10 min
Shown in 1999
CREDITS
OTHER
COMMENTS
Shown as part of a shorts program titled Johan van der Keuken: Early Shorts. Johan van der Keuken appeared in person as the recipient of the Persistence of Vision Award.“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.
A Moment of Silence is an impressionistic view of everyday life—glances, gestures... canals.
—Kathy Geritz