It's just another symptom of our all-American film culture quarantine: master Dutch documentarian/freeform personal filmmaker Johan van der Keuken dies in January 2001, putting an end to a 40-year career of unique screen work, and though cinephiles around the world mourned, in the U.S. he remained and remains cineaste non grata, less consequential than Ashlee Simpson's least rib. It's farcical to even wonder if any of his more than 50 films – ranging from five minutes in length to more than four hours – had ever seen a theatrical U.S. release. No major stateside magazine has ever profiled him, and no local television channel has ever broadcast his seemingly public-television-ready movies.

It's a shame, because van der Keuken perfected the balance in non-fiction film between reportage and subjective memoir that has become so immensely popular during the last two decades in the form of digital diaries and family-portrait documentaries. (In other words, he presaged, with Agnes Varda, the autobio doc principle as exercised in Martha & Ethel, The Same River Twice, Super Size Me, Tarnation, The Troubles We've Seen, 51 Birch Street, The War Tapes, and so on.) At the same time, he was a proud semi-avant-gardist, peppering his films with associative montage, abstractions and hip atmosphere. A beloved film fest favorite and north Europe's preeminent non-fiction voice next to Joris Ivens, van der Keuken's aesthetic is fastidious only in its refusal to prioritize moviemaking over the textures and exigencies of ordinary existence. ("Film is not life," he was fond of saying; "It's a second life.") Otherwise, JVDK's intimate glimpses into humankind are as organic as movies get – contemplative visual essays as genuine, messy and impulsive as their maker.

In fact, as Johan Van Der Keuken: The Complete Collection Volume 1 (a three-disc, nine-film DVD boxed set) demonstrates, he remains an auteur theory ratification. For auteurists, the significance of recognizing a director's point of view or thematic passions was never the issue, but the fabulous pleasure of sharing them will always be (a simple notion lost on Pauline Kael). Van der Keuken was nothing but point of view, as likely to capture socioeconomic crisis as he was to shoot his nude, pregnant wife -- sometimes in the same film. Documenting life-stuff everywhere from India to Sarajevo to Hong Kong to his own living room, van der Keuken's films hum with empathy, sardonic affection, patience and wisdom. He started out as a celebrated photographer (publishing his first book, a collection of classmate portraits, when he was still in high school), and proceeded throughout his career to merely chronicle what he loved, whether it be the poet/painter Lucebert (three short films, fashioned over a 30-year period, collected in 1994 as Lucebert: Time and Farewell), brass bands, jazz, his family, or Amsterdam itself (many films, ranging from the 10-minute A Moment's Silence in 1963, to 1996's four-hour Amsterdam Global Village, hopefully included in a subsequent volume). Just as often, van der Keuken was motivated by poverty and injustice – the situations of life must come with context, and most often that context is economic. His epic feature I [Heart] $ (1986), a intercontinental exploration of greed, market effects and financial inequity, is merely the most overt of his many inquisitive explorations of capitalist impact. There may not be another filmmaker who has so relentlessly questioned how and why the rich are rich and the poor are poor, and why it is that we can live with it this way.

Van der Keuken's strategies are unpretentious and respectful, always thinking the best of both subject and audience. Filming the apparently lovable Lucebert over the decades, the filmmaker refused time and again to film the artist's face – why would we care to look, when we can see the art instead? As he constitutionally would not allow his cinematic flow to be artificially controlled, his films have no dictatorial narration, and few interviews. He trusts only his eye, and what it finds on the streets and in the villages of the world.

After being slammed with cancer in 1985, van der Keuken's voyages tended to be even more digressive – the world seemed too large for any movie to settle on one thing for very long. (In 1988's The Eye Above the Well, rural *gaon* life is seen by way of asset distribution and informal patterns of education, enough information to pack a multi-volume treatise on Indian society.) The cancer returned years later, spurning van der Keuken and his wife Noshka to travel the globe one last time searching for cures (resulting in his rather buoyant final film, 2000's The Long Holiday, also destined for inclusion in a future volume). See just one movie, and you'll miss the guy.

For more information about Johan Van Der Keuken: The Complete Collection, Volume 1, visit Facets Multi-Media. To order Johan Van Der Keuken: The Complete Collection, Volume 1, go to TCM Shopping.

by Michael Atkinson