Face Value

JOHAN VAN DERKEUKENS CONTINUOUS work is an effort to select and record what counts as creative development in a culture's history. His latest film is a philosophical documentary where the camera travels through the geography of the human face and where he gives a panorama with simple but telling photographs over how life is lived in Europe today. Everything in the film has to do with human presence and constitutes a mosaique of physiognomies, sound fragments, voices and colors in an imaginary Europe located between London, Marseille, Prague and the Netherlands. The moment and the mechanisms of seeing are in the center and the film forces the viewer to continously keep his eyes open for meaning and context. A personal and poetic film about the ability to sce what's already visible.
Comment:
''I CAN FEEL IT IN THE AIR TONIGHT. .. '' and then drums, bang, bang, bang. It was Phil Collins who sang. The record was Face Value and the cover was nearly completely occupied by the artist's face, like so many other covers would be, following his. Everybody played the tune at the parties the year I graduated from highschool- the second year of the eighties. A decade followed when it really mattered to have face value. Success and fame became primary goals, ends in themselves. Show off yourself, provoke, lie, buy, sell, it doesn't matter what or why - as long as it gives you the opportunity to, like Phil Collins, have your face hammered on a record cover, the front of a magazine, on TV or on a book cover. A classmate in my graduating year maintained sincerely that she wanted to become famous, how or for what was not important.
Some confused optimists insist that we, at the beginning of the 90's are going towards something different, but I'd rather say it's getting worse,
The small people have becn forgotten: the released prisoners, the unemployed from the coal mines, the deaf, boxers who always will have their ass kicked, the retarded, the street kids, the half-blind, the crummy variety artists, the immigrants and the girl who stacks the milk counter in the store (unless she's amazingly beautiful).
Not even when people die in Aids do we care, unless it's connected to fame.
The cynical media people trade in faces, provocations and scandals. Opinions without substance have become hard currency attached to the right face, The faces of the collective on the other hand, have become worthless, and with that their voices as well. They will live their worthless lives without ever rising to real existence: the one affirmed by the media. Poor devils!
HÅKAN ÖSTLUNDH

Medverkande
Documentary: Producent
Johan van der Keuken, Noshka van der Lely: Manus
Johan van der Keuken: Foto
Johann van der Keuken: Talat språk
Dutch, French, German, Czech