Johan Van Der Keuken's Global Amsterdam

7. Form, Punch, Caress: Johan van der Keuken’s Global Amsterdam Patricia Pisters After many years of travelling the world with his camera, in the early 1990s documentary filmmaker Johan van der Keuken expressed his surprise at the many changes that had taken place in his hometown of Amsterdam: ‘To tell the truth, I didn’t recognize all the cultures that had settled there in the past few decades, nor the subcultures and “gangs” that had sprung up’. At the same time, he realized that ‘my city, Amsterdam, was the place where everything that I could see eve- rywhere else was represented’, and that in order to understand the world, all he needed to do was direct his camera to his own neighbourhood (van der Keuken, qtd. in Albera 2006, 16). This is when he decided to make Amsterdam Global Village, a four-hour documentary filmed in Amsterdam in the mid-1990s. He made it in his characteristic fashion, travelling through the city with his camera, visiting some of its inhabitants in their homes, listening to their stories, and sometimes following them to places elsewhere in the world – but always to return. Johan van der Keuken captured Amsterdam with his camera from the very start of his career, following his studies at the Institut des Hautes Études Ciné- matographiques (IDHEC) in Paris in the late 1950s. As he regularly applied his camera to Amsterdam through several decades, his work forms a rich – and very personal – archive of historical impressions of an ever-changing city. Looking at some key films situated in Amsterdam, such as Beppie (1965), Four Walls (1965), Iconoclasm – A Storm of Images (1982), and Amsterdam Global Village (1996), this essay presents a double portrait of the Amsterdam corpus within van der Keuken’s oeuvre. On the one hand, it charts the development of van der Keuken’s different camera eyes, looking at how he cast in turns formal, angry, and loving gazes on the city, and exploring the social and political implications of these different stylistic registers. On the other hand, the portrait to be presented here is that of Amsterdam itself and its inhabitants in their development over time, with a special focus on the increasing intrusion of the ‘global’ in the everyday life and culture of the city. In the final part of this essay, van der Keuken’s vision of Am- sterdam as a ‘global village’ will be considered in terms of a number of formal aspects, including the interest in ‘mosaic narration’ which is now a salient feature of many transnationally oriented films, and which van der Keuken was one of the first filmmakers to explore. First, however, let me say a few introductory words about Johan van der Keu- ken’s style and about the different phases that can be distinguished in his work. 125 Imagining Global Amsterdam - de Waard.indd 125 04-09-12 14:32 To begin with, it is noticeable that as a documentary filmmaker van der Keuken always defied any strict distinction between realistic and fictional representation. While he always turned his camera on the ‘here and now’ – in a strictly thematic sense, many of his films come close to a form of social realism – he never made a secret of the fact that he often asked people to perform their role for him, that he sometimes restaged a scene, or that he used the presence of his camera to pro- voke a ‘coincidence’. A documentary about van der Keuken’s work, Living with One’s Eyes (Ramón Gieling, 1997), exposes this method explicitly. It follows van der Keuken during the shooting of his beautiful short film To Sang Photo Studio (1997), a portrait of a Chinese photographer who was asked by van der Keuken to make family portraits of several shopkeepers and retailers in his own street, the Ferdinand Bolstraat in the vibrant, diverse neighbourhood of De Pijp. In succession, we encounter the shopkeepers of Hollywood Hair, a Kurdish restau- rant, a Dutch grocery shop, and a Pakistani clothes shop as well as a Surinamese travel agent and a jeweller from Hong Kong. They are all portrayed by van der Keuken in their own store and then followed into To Sang’s studio, where Mr. To Sang takes their picture. Both van der Keuken’s filmed portraits of the shopkeepers and To Sang’s photographs of them are clearly staged, and the doubling of those different acts of staging self-consciously foregrounds the constructedness, the mise-en-scène, of what the viewer gets to see. Nonetheless, van der Keuken’s film succeeds in offering a fascinating insight into the multicultural Amsterdam of the 1990s. This play in the border territory between fiction and reality, between staging and spontaneity, but also between control and coincidence, was always part of van der Keuken’s style. ‘Reality is not something that can be captured in images’, he once said in an interview, ‘but you can create a kind of structure, and claim: within this structure I can have a notion of what reality could be. In this sense, this Amsterdam is my reality’.1 An important clue regarding van der Keuken’s style is provided by the filmmaker’s own comparison of his camera action with, successively, a musical per- formance, a boxing punch, and a caressing touch. First, as musical instrument, the camera allows the player to play a part, to improvise, and to transform reality into abstract forms. But the camera can also give a punch in the face, produce an angry gesture, or denounce injustice in response to the hardships and painful scenes to which it is a witness. Finally, the camera can be gentle, caressing what it films, especially when it zooms in on the human figure or the face (van der Keuken 2001, 99). These three different functions of the camera – each a blend of aesthetic, political, and human values – always interact in van der Keuken’s work and form the basis of his style. For the purpose of this essay, it is important to add that in different periods of his career, one of these camera functions could be seen to prevail. In the first period of his work, in the late 1950s and 1960s, he used film predominantly as a formal and aesthetic medium. Then, from the 1970s until the mid-1980s, the ‘punch’ function prevails; not coincidentally, this is also the most directly political period in his oeuvre. In the last period, which stretches right up to the filmmaker’s death in January 2001, the human touch and the ‘caressing’ camera are the most salient features. In focusing on images of Am- sterdam from those different phases in his development we will see that van der 126 part ii: amsterdam global village Imagining Global Amsterdam - de Waard.indd 126 04-09-12 14:32 Keuken’s camera eye captured and constructed different cities – even if the ‘form, punch, and caress’ functions always combined in different ways, the distinction between them not always being crystal clear. Form: Cramped Spaces, Cramped Minds In the early years, the 1960s, van der Keuken’s dominant concern was with the formal aspects of film. In this period he made several television films that have be- come classics of Dutch cinema, such as Blind Child (1964) and Herman Slobbe, Blind Child 2 (1966), where he seeks to render the world of blind children in dynamic images and sounds. At the end of Blind Child 2 van der Keuken com- ments in voice-over, in his characteristic thoughtful voice, that everything in film is form. Saying farewell to his little protagonist he says: ‘Herman is a form. Bye bye, dear form’. Films of this period that are shot in Amsterdam show the same interest in formal aspects. Most famous at the time was Beppie (1965). Beppie was one of van der Keuken’s girls next door on the Achtergracht, where the filmmaker then lived. In the film he follows the lively and talkative girl as she walks to school, rehearses multiplication tables, hangs out in the street, and plays ring and run with her friends; we also see her in the swimming pool and at the hair- dresser’s.2 Important here is that everything is told through the dynamics of the film, including the rhythm of the framing and cutting of the images. The film is also a good example of how van der Keuken fashioned his own role as filmmaker and interviewer, quietly drawing attention to the ‘outsider’ role he played in the lives of those he filmed. Beppie lives with her mother and seven sisters in a very tiny apartment. While the girl talks freely about how they cope in their small and overcrowded rooms, Beppie’s mother would not allow the camera to enter the house; she speaks with van der Keuken outside, visibly ill at ease. The cramped spaces in Beppie point to the persistently bad housing situation in Amsterdam in the 1960s. Following the war there was a serious shortage of social housing residences, and the quality of the available units was poor. In 1969, a memorandum on ‘urban renewal’ would conclude that of a total of 260,000 social housing residences in Amsterdam, no fewer than 100,000 stood in urgent need of renovation while another 44,000 would have to be demolished – tell- ing figures indeed (de Liagre Böhl 2010, 84). The problem is addressed head-on in another short film of this period, Four Walls (1965). Four Walls opens with some drawings, scale models, and sketched designs by the Dutch structuralist architect Herman Hertzberger.

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