Between art and politics; the Johan van der Keuken Guess

Is it a coincidence that the Arab spring starts precisely where Johan van der Keuken in 1979 decided to shoot The Master and the Giant (De Meester en de Reus, 1980), a film about the unfair global economic system running the world and deciding for our life and our future? It was surely not a coincidence because Van der Keuken used to feel deeply concerned by the human destiny as an indivisible whole, as witnesses his distributor, Pierre-Olivier Bardet: “In his work, the documentary, however infused with social and political preoccupations and a radical questioning of North-South relationships, rediscovered its place at the heart of the cinematic art, breaking down barriers between categories of militant cinema: the environment, women’s liberation, workers’ struggle, etc.” The film makes a link between the Tunisian peasant living in the desert and the North European (Dutch) middle class citizen facing unemployment and the grasp of taxes. Very early, and in a deep visionary perception, he saw that there wss no dichotomy between North and South but between the neo-capitalists; those who make money on the backs of the others, the “Subalterns”; those who are evicted from wealth and power.

Indeed, this is still a topical film. First of all because the Dutch filmmaker was a genius who was able to analyse the way human history is working. It is also because he had enough humanism and openness toward the Other that he believed in human unity in front of evil. But it is primarily because he had such deep perspicacity in the way he looked at reality that he could see the symptoms of what we are facing today: falling from a crisis into another one, acting according to the crisis. In fact, politics since 2008 at least, is made on the emergency of the fight against financial recession.
Let’s not forget that this 32 years old film is the combination of the director’s visionary talent and the analyses of the Canadian economist Claude Ménard. It is based on two important ideas: the grasp of capitalism on western society including the migrants communities on one hand and the overexploitation of nature for industrial purposes on the other hand. Using a very intelligent editing process, Van der Keuken alternates fictional scenes showing the inhuman face of a tax collector, other very poetic ones engaging a conversation between cubs, trees and the wind, and finally documentary scenes of the archaic life in a small village in the south of Tunisia. At that time the main idea of the film is that our life is getting more and more artificial and the risk that it loses its meaning is bigger and bigger. The emigration is considered from that very simple statement: immigrants are trapped by their dream of the northern wealth when they leave their original way of living. The opposition of the two lifestyles is clearly in favour of the picturesque proximity of man to nature in the small village lost at the doors of the African desert.

Shot in 1979, the film is a poetic pamphlet against the growing power of banks on men’s life. From that point of view, the two men guessed what we are now confronted with. Indeed, the film has a new soul if we look at it through the prism of actuality: it pinpoints the link between the so-called Arab Spring and the shakiness world’s economic. Since a few years we witness a watershed in the history of mankind: 9/11, global warming, financial crisis, fluctuation of oil prices, spectacular growth of Asian Economies, Arab Spring, recession in southern European countries, insecurity of the Euro and the Dollar, the occupy movement, the budget cuts policy, etc. It looks like we have the 1929 recession, the 1973 oil crisis and the cultural revolution of may 1968 in one.
Here one should take a new look at the way the auteur of The Way South (De Weg naar het Zuiden, 1981) puts Dutch squatters and Moroccan emigrants in a very eloquent parallelism at the beginning of this other precocious film. The ones fight for their right to have a house and occupy empty buildings and luxurious apartments in the Kinkerstraat. The others occupy a Church as a sign of protest against the government’s decision to send them back to their country. By a strange coincidence also this film ends in Egypt, the second country of the Arab Spring. Van der Keuken pays special attention to the Egyptian wretches, those who stand out of the economical flow and who one year ago initiated the Tahrir Square sit-in. It cannot be by chance that the filmmaker went in these two countries to tell a story which remains still relevant in our times: the injustice of the world economic order.
When we look closely to the connection between the so-called Arab Spring and the also so-called Economic Crisis, we come easily to the idea that the way the other was seen is perhaps changing. Some political parties are reviewing their programs to be more human; some even talk about compassion and the enriching role of emigration. The discussion about the squat is over nowadays, or let’s say marginalized, but the theme of emigration is like a Chinese puzzle for any politician. The main reason is that it was never considered out of the tight and biased angle of unfair policy serving the interests of the bourses, the traders and the multinational banks. Of course there is no way then to consider things from a human point of view nor a cultural one. Not yet, not enough.
What is relevant for art and culture is, most of the time, not valid for politics. This is particularly true when it comes to emigration. The last couple of years, it was admitted in the European political spheres that integration’s policy failed. Such statement is more than disputable. It is intended to discredit migrants while it should be understood, first of all, as a confession of failure of the politicians themselves, if ever there is a failure. If the process of integration failed, it is because politicians could never, or did never, want to find the right answer and the appropriate policy. Migrants were and are always considered by politicians as a foreign entity which is accepted only as far as it is needed for the host society not necessarily for itself and merely not when it is somehow an answer to its own need. This means that the statement over the failure of integration or not is made according to a monolithic vision, a way of thinking according to pragmatic goals and rational strategies which are simply the component of hegemonic attitudes. That’s why, when the physical presence of this entity overpasses the need of the local society, it is stigmatized as the source of all evil. This latest attitude leads to the rise of extreme right parties.

What I am saying here about politics seems to me in a deep contradiction with art and culture. And this is precisely what someone like Johan van der Keuken tried to say more than thirty years ago. Such statement cannot be in coherence with the spirit of the so-called “Old Continent”, the continent of the human rights and the Aufklärung, to say it in a couple of words. However, this spirit of the “Old Continent” is still to be found in the realm of European culture and art. From the pragmatic and egoistic argument of the direct use and assimilation of the Other, we shift to a complex and enriching real interaction with it on the name of ideas of beauty, authenticity and humanism. Integration gets then another meaning and hence becomes possible.
Here I pass over the number of European politicians and businessmen from the immigration who are part of the European elite. I neither talk neither about the number of soccer players or sportsmen who are defending European flags in international tournaments. Unless they are considered not numerous enough so that we can talk about successful politics of integration. But such a reasoning can lead to another extreme; can you imagine a national soccer team with ten players from second or third generations of immigrants ? Inconceivable for the extreme right wings way of thinking.
What I want to stress is the emergence of artists in the context of immigration. A Moroccan actor who is nominated for the best Dutch actor will annoy purist nationalists, but if he wins it makes it worse; they would be exacerbated. Then you can get a very eloquent sentence addressed to politicians who don’t believe in integration : “ I am Dutch and I am proud of my Moroccan blood”, said Nasrdin Dchar when he got the Golden Calf few months ago. He would then address a couple of right wing parties leaders. This is the kind of artistic replica to the political statement. Dshar stands for the whole film sector and addresses politicians. The jury by attributing him the price speaks on the name of the profession. Here there are other rules than what politicians decide in the meetings in which they discuss how to get rid of immigrants. Here there is no discussion about taxes, budget cuts, criminality. What is discussed here is Beauty and what counts is the talent of the actor, not the blood in his veins.
Dchar is not an isolated case. Many other actors and filmmaker contribute to the glory of the Dutch film scene like every emigrant contributes to the wealth of the country’s economy. I would mention actors like Hakim Traidia (Dutch Algerian), Sabri Said (Dutch Egyptian). I would also mention filmmakers such as the Dutch Peruvian Heddy Honigman, Hani Abou Assaad from Palestinian origins, Mohamed Al-Darraji originally from Irak and the Algerian born Karim Traidia. I would mention also many names from that kind of talents in France, Germnay, England en other European countries : Fatih Akin, Abdellatif Kechiche, Rabah Ameur-Zaimech, Mahamet-Saleh Haroun,… Are these people symbols of a failed integration? Then when would we say that integration succeeded ? How many talented filmmakers do we need to say that immigration contributed to enrich the European film galaxy ? If a couple of real creative artists can emerge of two millions of immigrants community, that means that there are tens of others who are not very good or who didn’t get their chance to emerge. And how many brilliant filmmakers do we have in an autochthon community of 17 million? Quite not so many as genius, everybody knows, is by definition rare.
Since 2011 cultural sectors started to suffer from budget cuts because of the economical crisis. At the same time, European governments started to discuss seriously new migration regulations in order to limit the phenomenon as more as possible. This is happening in the frame of a new general social policy. If the American president Barack Obama had to step back in his plan of social health care project, short cuts in the health sector was a subject of a tempestuous debate about subsidies of handicapped persons and the budget of the cultural sectors had to be halved. At the same time new measures are decided to reduce to the minimum the number of migrants and among them the asylum seekers.
In a nutshell, the responsibility of the economical crisis is put on the shoulders of artists, migrants and other kinds of minorities and weak members of society. They are paying the price of the crisis while they were never the ones who profited from it. Artists and emigrants share the position of Subaltern, would the postcolonial philosopher Homi Bhabha say. They are never considered as part of the hegemonic power. This latter even though needs and uses them. Hence they are always forced to resist it. That’s why the consecration of an artist from emigrant origin is a double subaltern claim : as an emigrant and as an artist.
If Jean Paul Sartre used to call for the unity of the proletariat of the whole world- the workers of the North and peasants of the South-, it is time perhaps for a new kind of unity: whatever and whoever is against those who have hegemonic power. Emigrants and artists then join another form of resistance that we saw at the end of 2011, the one of occupy. It seems that there is a kind of consciousness which is developing within a broader and broader counter-hegemonic community. We are at a new turning point of history. The subaltern social groups according to Bhabha used to be the oppressed minority. The neoliberal globalization produced such a growing inequality that this group is becoming bigger and bigger. The power is no more in the hands of the democratic majority, but in the hands of minor groups commanding the worlds finances.
A lot of traditional concepts are not relevant anymore. The idea that in a democracy the majority has the power cannot stand in front of the slogan of the occupy movement (1%=/=99%). The world is run by the very small number of people among the richest. 99% is getting poorer and poorer because they are paying the prize of the wealth of the 1%. The oppression is nevermore synonym of marginalizing the minority, what Gramsci means by the concept of “Subalternity”, but in our time it means economic discrimination of the majority for the benefit of the very small but very powerful and hegemonic minority.
What we witness in the Arab Spring, in the Occupy movement or any other signs of resistance against the mysterious powers running the world and deciding of its mumbo-jumbo, dixit J. P. Sartre, is a kind of “subaltern awareness”. People don’t want to be exploited anymore, neither excluded from the wealth nor the power. The problem is however, the division. As far as subalterns are divided in North / South, autochthon / emigrant and any other dichotomies - it will never be a real awareness. A part of the unhappy people is not aiming to destroy the hegemonic power but to “have a piece of the pie”. Its claim is, until now, made within the hegemonic discourse and hence never subversive enough to achieve categorical rupture with an insane relationship between social groups built on boundaries, limits and antagonisms.
This was the call of Johan van der Keuken since 1980 (also already present in his previous films from the 60ies). He used to believe in sharing the world generously in the benefit of everybody. His heroes were always the Wretches of the earth, would Franz Fanon say. It is only that for Van der Keuken this category is broader than the colonised in Fanon’s text: a blind Kid, emigrants, workers, unemployed, ... these are the kind of wretches in his cinema. Even in his work as a filmmaker his philosophy was to give back and share. This is perhaps the lesson some politicians finally started to understand when they look a little bit more beyond the numbers and the too much economical considerations. Leftist parties are regaining confidence because the people started to see how politics can go very far from its human basis on the name of budget cuts ignoring the essence of human life.
I read the news having in memory what Johan van der Keuken used to believe and say. And I can’t stop thinking that, somehow, art can help politics to find the right way: So you try – says Johan van der Keuken to his son learning cinema but it is as if he talks to a politician– to get very close to people. Not just the work, the vulnerability too, … But you can also give back, I believe, as a film maker, in the way we film. Not as a story, not as a pearl that you admire from outside, which also can be beautiful, of course. But we have to go in there, physically be there with our cameras and we have to show that as well. That seems to me a fundamental kind of sincerity. That is the practice of filming. I have always liked exploring the boundaries of it.”
So spoke a genius.



* http://www.eutopiainstitute.org/2012/02/between-art-and-politics-the-johan-van-der-keuken-prediction/