The Reading Lesson

Generations of Dutch children have learnt to read by means of a board on which pictures and the words they illustrate are printed. A primary school in a popular neighbourhood in Amsterdam combines this traditional method with information about the present-day world. In The Reading Lesson, Johan van der Keuken further develops the system of gradually replacing images from conventional teaching aids with those extracted from political and social events: ”Within a very small space I attempted as far as possible to separate the sequential nature of the images and their meanings. By using short takes I was able to get as far as Salvador Allende’s speech and scenes of Pinochet assuming power in Chile. Then we return to the beginning, but the whole memorising process is now destroyed.” (Johan van der Keuken)