Netherlands,
1967, 32 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. Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe 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.
In Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe, Van der Keuken draws on the improvisation and spontaneity of jazz for a dynamic sense of the legendary tenor saxophonist.
—Kathy Geritz
FACTOID #336
Bing Crosby was invited several times for an onstage tribute at the Festival, reports then-director Claude Jarman, but declined the honor. “Nobody wants to see those little things that I used to do,” he modestly replied. He did attend though, with wife Kathy and their friend, Rita Hayworth.
