settima

WillemBreuker

De nieuwe ijstijd [The New Ice Age] (Johan van der Keuken, 1974)

Mar

16

Reykjavík Food & Fun Festival

De nieuwe ijstijd (1974)

A young female factory worker listlessly fills a long plastic tube with pale ice-cream.. DP: Johan van der Keuken.

Ice or cold food to celebrate the final day of the Reykjavík Food & Fun Festival

“For me it’s important to note that the film’s information is also the only thing you know. That’s the idea of the tip of the iceberg, provided that only the portion above the water exists (in the film), because you know nothing of what’s under water and therefore it’s impossible for you to describe the entire iceberg.   For example, in De nieuwe ijstijd the characters are not described 'in their entirety'. What is shown is only what we’ve encountered when we were filming. It’s always a limited, fragmentary knowledge of everything that exists, and that’s how it’s shown.”

– Johan van der Keuken, via

Part three of Van der Keuken's Noord-Zuid trilogy. Again we are confronted with the contrast between the First and Third world, here represented by a Dutch family of monotonous ice-cream factory hands, and impoverished Peruvian workers establishing self-governance, accompanied by Willem Breuker's punching free jazz cacophony.