Netherlands,
1965, 35 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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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. Beppie 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.
Beppie, an expressive ten-year-old girl who lived on the same canal as the filmmaker, gives us a tour of her world.
—Kathy Geritz
FACTOID #95
Later to find fame with the amnesia-tinged film noir update Memento, British director Christopher Nolan was nominated for the SKYY Prize in 1998 for his first feature Following. Nolan shot the film about a writer who stalks strangers, on weekends over the course of a year on a budget of $6,000.
