Antony Fiant, Gilles Mouëllic, Caroline Zéau (dir.)

Documenter une présence au monde : Johan van der Keuken

Johan van der Keuken (1938-2001) is the author of a considerable body of work traversed by a great diversity of practices and forms: photography, cinema (some sixty films), installation and theoretical writing rub shoulders in a movement of perpetual questioning of forms and techniques.

His career spans nearly fifty years of cinema, from the emergence of direct cinema to the advent of digital technology, and the diversity of aesthetic proposals that are deployed make him an unclassifiable filmmaker, in perpetual struggle against grammars and conformisms. Built around a permanent dialogue between the intimate and the political – “we look at the world from inside ourselves” he wrote – Johan van der Keuken’s films question the complexity of the interdependencies that animate modern society; the look he takes at the relationships between the North and the South, between the economy and the environment, between the local and the global, works with astonishing relevance on the problems that are shaking our world. Among the film researchers and filmmakers who have contributed to this volume, some have been his fellow travelers in the exercise of an ever-expanding thought of cinema open to exchange, others have discovered the importance of his work later and testify through their work to its fertility and durability. These contributions to the vast field of investigation that this work offers us explore the numerous hybridizations that make up its poetics – between cinema and the arts, between art and technique, between image and text, between anthropology and the avant-garde – in order to shed light on the signifying tensions that underlie its political power.