De tijd

I combine HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR with a programme of three films that each contain a reflection on death. And in their combined presentation, a view on style as well. Style is extremely unstable; it must be conquered in the course of a film - and in the coherence that arises between films; as far as I am concerned, style should embrace many languages since you are working with the heterogeneous, the divergent, the intrinsically contradictory in order to - for just a short while - visualize a coherent world. Style goes beyond exterior stylistic devices. I have shown FILMMAKER'S HOLIDAY and TIME together many times, as they seem to me to be partly dealing with the same: the family (also the non-genetic family you choose in the course of your life), the past and the present sliding into one another, and something I call: the photographic emotion. Both films end by making a fade-out to white. But whereas time is almost stuck in its formal means, HOLIDAY is almost an amateur film: the form is there, but it keeps a low profile. I prefer to work in the area of tension between those two moods. I strive to make the distance between the two as large as possible, right until the point where the tension all but breaks. If people label HOLIDAY again and again as "so accessible": there are accessible films in all stages of my work, I like to make them, they are part of my life. But for me accessibility is not the ultimate goal. There is no ultimate goal, only a continual attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable in a discussion between similarities: everyday secrets and hermetic platitudes, with the irreducible, heartrending misery of the world in the background. As a preface: THE DOOR, a small, rapidly cut gem. It deals with the loss that my friend Bert Schierbeek had to suffer and with the sagacious mentality with which he overcomes it. With the poetry that sustains him in the process. Johan van der Keuken