By Johann van der Keuken
(Documentary, 1998, color, 52 min.)
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Internationally
renowned photographer and documentarist van der Keuken turns his camera on his older
sister eight days before her death from cancer. Recording his conversations with Yoka and
his wife Noshka, LAST WORDS is a deeply moving and eloquent homage to Yoka's dignity and
strength in life and in the face of death. |
| REVIEWS
The choice of Johan van der Keuken to receive this year's Persistence of Vision Award
is a welcome one, but also an unfortunate reminder of how marginalized experimental film
has always been. The Amsterdam-based filmmaker/photographer has toiled quietly for 40-odd
years in the netherworld of "direct" documentary cinema, and his work is little
known outside museums and film festivals, despite its freshness and immediacy.
A generous sampling of this work at the SFIFF -- a program of van der Keuken's early
shorts, a featurette, and a feature -- shows what a determined filmmaker can do with a
camera he always operates himself. In the four shorts, van der Keuken extrapolates vivid
inner worlds from the prosaic exterior life of a jazz musician (Big Ben: Ben Webster in
Europe, 1967), a blind teenager (Herman Slobbe: Blind Child 2), a 10-year-old girl
(Beppie, 1965), and even a city (A Moment of Silence, 1963).
With characteristic modesty, van der Keuken called his longer works "poor man's
features," but they are among his most seductive. His fascination with music and with
a kind of ethnography of the everyday dovetail in Brass Unbound (1993), a charming look at
how formerly colonized cultures expropriated musical styles introduced by their colonists.
His most recent work is Last Words -- My Sister Yoka (1935-1997). Here he uses his most
direct tool yet, the digital camera, to make a touching tribute to his sister shortly
before she died of cancer. -- Gary Morris, The Persistence of Experimentalism,
San Francisco International Film Festival Catalog (April 1999)
DIRECTOR'S BIO
Johan van der Keuken
(b. 1938) published his first photobook in 1995, at the age of seventeen. He studies at
the Paris film academy IDHEC. He has made more than forty films, many around the theme of
the perception of reality and the relationships between "the many worlds within the
world": North-South, East-West.
He has written about film and photography. In 198? he received the Dutch Cultural
Award for his whole body of work. In 1993 he was awarded the Dutch Photography Prize for
his photographic work since 1953. In 1999 van der Keuken was awarded the Persistence of
Vision prize at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
His newest film, "Long Vacation" premiered at Rotterdam in January 2000,
and also screened at the 50th Berlinale. |
