Hing Tsang (Lectuerer, University of Surrey)
Direct Cinema and the global Dutch city in the work of Van der Keuken
This paper examines the use of geographical space in Van der Keuken's Amsterdam Global City both in terms of its rootedness in early city films such as Dziga Vertov's and Joris Iven's work, and its connection with recent developments in sociological theory such as the mobility paradigm in Urry's work and the idea of the networked society in Castells' now classic work.
While Van der keuken's work is rooted in documentary tradition, its visual presentation of the city and the nation is inevitably distinct from earlier cinematic accounts of the city - what Becks has described as the container view of society and the national state. Instead, Van der Keuken presents his own native city of Amsterdam as a nodal point in an extended non-foundational network where its inhabitants move to and fro across several continents, and as viewers our engagement would seem to be more immediately spatial than temporal and narratively based.
Urban space is now reconfigured as a mobile space, where even architecture is presented on the move, and Kuleshov's clash effect has now been updated so that intervals between 'unrelated' shots involve movements between both disparate areas of the cities and even jumps in space between different continents. But Van der Keuken's film remains a film of the individual body and provides some clues as to why the notion of 'creative geography’ remains relevant to any engagement with his work. Vertov's idea of the 'interval' remains as pertinent as shown by Van der Keuken's updating of the cameraman/motorcyclist.
The paper concludes with an examination of a final sequence which is literally shot from the point of view of a flying bird, but which is paradoxically altogether different from what we would normally associate with an objective 'birds eye view', or what has been termed the view form nowhere.
While Van der keuken's work is rooted in documentary tradition, its visual presentation of the city and the nation is inevitably distinct from earlier cinematic accounts of the city - what Becks has described as the container view of society and the national state. Instead, Van der Keuken presents his own native city of Amsterdam as a nodal point in an extended non-foundational network where its inhabitants move to and fro across several continents, and as viewers our engagement would seem to be more immediately spatial than temporal and narratively based.
Urban space is now reconfigured as a mobile space, where even architecture is presented on the move, and Kuleshov's clash effect has now been updated so that intervals between 'unrelated' shots involve movements between both disparate areas of the cities and even jumps in space between different continents. But Van der Keuken's film remains a film of the individual body and provides some clues as to why the notion of 'creative geography’ remains relevant to any engagement with his work. Vertov's idea of the 'interval' remains as pertinent as shown by Van der Keuken's updating of the cameraman/motorcyclist.
The paper concludes with an examination of a final sequence which is literally shot from the point of view of a flying bird, but which is paradoxically altogether different from what we would normally associate with an objective 'birds eye view', or what has been termed the view form nowhere.
