Jeff Keen
Birth : 1923-11-26, Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England, UK
Death : 2012-06-21
History
Jeff Keen (1923–2012) was a pioneer of experimental film whose rapid-fire animations, multiple screen projections and raucous performances redefined multimedia art in Britain.
Keen was a veteran of the Second World War, and his work powerfully evokes the violence, colour, speed and noise of the 20th century. He transformed cinema into a riotous collage of comics, drawings, B-movie posters, plastic toys, burning props and extravagant costumes. His early 8 mm and 16 mm films are built for speed, combining footage of Beat-era motifs – jazz, motorbikes and car culture – with experimental animations in which the achievements and atrocities of the 20th century seem to flash by within a few short, cacophonous seconds. A single frame could not contain the frenzied energy of Keen’s imagination, and by the mid-1960s he began to use multiple screens and live action in presentations of his work.
Director
Experimental animation created using a video pen.
Director
'Afterblatz 2' was shot on video and screened alongside 'Omozap Terribelis'. It uses the toy 'My First Sony' to present a number of computer-generated drawings.
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'Omozap Terribelis' was shot on video and screened alongside 'Afterblatz 2'. It uses the toy 'My First Sony' to present a number of computer-generated drawings.
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Jeff Keen's final film pushes his conflation of personal history and war even further than before.
Self
A Super-8 portrait of Jeff Keen. This short but evocative experimental portrait melds Keen's style with that of its maker, Ian Helliwell, another artist filmmaker based in Brighton. The title comes from an adage of Jeff Keen's and features Keen reading some Keen-isms.
Director
This bright animation cuts from interiors to exteriors and pushes pictures of Keen at different ages up against violent actions and symbols of violence.
Director
Footage of the first Iraq War is jarringly intercut with shots of the artist painting at the local tip and at home. Drawing upon pivotal moments in Jeff Keen's own life - serving in WW2 - these explosive films are a distillation of the themes and concerns that run throughout his work. These compelling titles stage a frenetic attack on our sense of modern culture.
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This compilation work uses Keen's drawing computer, screams and gunfire and proclaims ' enemy territory is outside the frame. Includes the titles 'Albino Ray', 'Grafico Blatz', 'Eye Blaze' and 'Grafico Blatz 2'.
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This version of Artwar builds from performances with paper masks and implements and various sequences of gunfire.
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Short video by Jeff Keen.
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The Artwar face peers through painted celluloid and a barrage of explosions and film noise.
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For this video, Jeff Keen had all his images for the Artwar series run together and over the top of each other.
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Omozap is a gun-wielding wildman and Keen anti-superhero akin to The Punisher. Compulsive animation and action look to the Artwar films and videos to come.
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Omozap is a gun-wielding wildman and Keen anti-superhero akin to The Punisher. Compulsive animation and action look to the Artwar films and videos to come.
Director
Stealth bombers hover over crashing waves and ruined land. Using found footage and several thick layers of video, Jeff Keen presents and visceral version of Armageddon
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From spinning paper guns to pulsing television screens, from zooms, crosscutting and painted film surfaces to burning paper, Jeff Keen uses all the effects at his disposal to make a series of extraordinary animations where movement is never allowed to stop.
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Jeff Keen processes his cinematic past in this filmic attack on his back catalogue.
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The Artwar loops were made for non-cinematic exhibition and go from harsh film surface noise to colour bars and other video effects filmed from the TV. These can be watched as individual films or as loops.
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The Artwar loops were made for non-cinematic exhibition and go from harsh film surface noise to colour bars and other video effects filmed from the TV. These can be watched as individual films or as loops.
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Produced by Jeff Keen for looping in an exhibition context.
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A documentation of Jeff Keen painting, using montage to turn a mild-mannered English painter into a Wild West gunslinger.
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Treating apocalyptic and aggressive imagery with silence and slow washes of colour, Jeff Keen exhibits and works against his usual tropes.
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This vibrant montage of colours and positive and negative images shows Jeff Keen filtering and reflecting on his previous films.
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This relatively unknown Jeff Keen film presents an insistent series of exquisitely composed action and animation sequences and must be one of the only 8mm 'cinemascope' films in the world
Jeff Keen dons paper masks and his knitted Artwar jacket, after avoiding bombs and pacing a moonlike landscape.
Director
Jeff Keen dons paper masks and his knitted Artwar jacket, after avoiding bombs and pacing a moonlike landscape.
Director
Jeff Keen's daughter gave him some music and sound effects recorded at the cinema and invited him to use it as the basis for a film. He added a plastic Hitler mask from Brighton pier and created this red and blue-dominated film that runs at a distinctly different pace to the rest of his work. Its reflective tone matches the mood of its title and features such imagery as a blindfolded artist painting.
Silver Head
The Keen family go on holiday in the jungles of the English countryside while the mysterious Silver Head - Jeff Keen wearing an inside-out, silver-lined photographic paper bag - haunts Brighton and the snowy fields of winter. Part diary, part fantasy.
Director
The Keen family go on holiday in the jungles of the English countryside while the mysterious Silver Head - Jeff Keen wearing an inside-out, silver-lined photographic paper bag - haunts Brighton and the snowy fields of winter. Part diary, part fantasy.
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A short, sharp, visceral attack on the news using, amongst other things, science fiction footage and scattered newspaper headlines.
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Action and animation are pushed to the extreme in this frenetic film. Keen makes references to the God-like status of the director, the framed world of the cinema and the history of popular entertainment.
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Jeff Keen had a chance encounter with a collection of old 78 speed records at a Brighton flea market and used it as an opportunity to create a surrealist film (naming it after the poetry collection by André Breton). A requiem for B movies and the marginalised popular side of cinematic history.
Director
One of Jeff Keen's diary films. Keen made many diary films with his daughter, wife and friends in the late 60s and 70s. These were edited in camera and used multiple exposures. They would then be projected in various combinations though usually as a four-screen.
Director
One of Jeff Keen's diary films. Keen made many diary films with his daughter, wife and friends in the late 60s and 70s. These were edited in camera and used multiple exposures. They would then be projected in various combinations though usually as a four-screen.
Director
One of Jeff Keen's diary films. Keen made many diary films with his daughter, wife and friends in the late 60s and 70s. These were edited in camera and used multiple exposures. They would then be projected in various combinations though usually as a four-screen. Rosa Canina was always show in the bottom right-hand corner
Director
Made between 1970 and 1975, Jeff Keen's films always contain internal layers and films within films. The twenty-four films here include hand-painted work, animation and montage.
Director
One of Jeff Keen's diary films. Keen made many diary films with his daughter, wife and friends in the late 60s and 70s. These were edited in camera and used multiple exposures. They would then be projected in various combinations though usually as a four-screen.
Director
Named after the horror film White Zombie and the rom-com Red Dust (both 1932), White Dust follows the friends and family of Keen while they explore archetypal characters of Hollywood and myth. These unresolved episodes look back to American film serials.
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Rayday Film was shown projected in several 100-foot length parts from multiple projectors. The friends and family who featured in costume and character within - like Motler, the Word Killer who reflects Keens preference for action over thinking - performed similar actions in front of the screen. After a final performance in 1976, Keen spliced the parts together so it could be shown according to normal cinematic convention.
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Experimental short directed by Jeff Keen.
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Various different holiday locations ar joined together through the pleasures of ice cream in The Mutt & Jeff Icecream Sundae, while in Mothman the strange title character crawls through roof-top windows and we see footage of a funfair. These two films have many similarities with the other Keen diary movies but have always been shown in this pairing, and under this title.
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Made to represent an entire cinema programme, Meatdaze consists of six sections that include cartoons, supporting and main features.
Writer
White Lite is something of a mystical film, evoking the feeling of going 'through the looking glass' to another world, despite the fact it was largely shot in the flat of its director, Jeff Keen. The film greets us with the invitation "meet anti-matter and the bride of the monster", pointing to Keen's love of B-movies (and a reference to Ed Wood's The Bride of the Atom, aka The Bride of the Monster [1955] as it was later known).
Director
White Lite is something of a mystical film, evoking the feeling of going 'through the looking glass' to another world, despite the fact it was largely shot in the flat of its director, Jeff Keen. The film greets us with the invitation "meet anti-matter and the bride of the monster", pointing to Keen's love of B-movies (and a reference to Ed Wood's The Bride of the Atom, aka The Bride of the Monster [1955] as it was later known).
Writer
Four minutes of heavily cut-up sound and vision with collage, animation and multiple exposures throughout.
Director
Four minutes of heavily cut-up sound and vision with collage, animation and multiple exposures throughout.
Director
In Cineblatz, the viewer is subjected to a high-impact barrage of evolving images, at once comic and terrifying. Glossy magazines are cut up and reconfigured, newspaper pages are defaced with animated squiggles, comic-book superheroes fly out, over and through at superspeed. Pictures appear only to burn up or be torn apart, toys dance in ferocious stop-motion before melting into pools of plastic decay, a hammer plunges down on an image of the assembled House of Commons - all to a crackly soundtrack of treated shortwave static. It is a hyperkinetic panorama of 1960s popular culture in meltdown, where seemingly nothing stays still for more than a single frame, as the artist ejaculates ideas onto the screen faster than the eye can properly register. Lasting just three minutes, Cineblatz is exhilarating, orgasmic even--but also thoroughly exhausting.
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This early quick-fire cut-up animation melds machine gunfire with scratched film. The soundtrack was made by Keen in 2007 with a wasp synthesizer and a shortwave radio.
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Comics, monsters and a zombified Keen are gently desecrated in this paint-flecked film that also features a picture of Jackie Keen crying heart-shaped tears.
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Jeff Keen thought that some of his previous films had been dominated by long-shots. In this film he grapples with the language of cinema, not as a means to inspire audience identification, but rather to make up for an imbalance.
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Silent 8mm film.
The Pink Auto, screened using two projectors, is one of the very first examples of expanded cinema. Jeff Keen walks as a zombie and carry his dead bride through brown English fields.
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The Pink Auto, screened using two projectors, is one of the very first examples of expanded cinema. Jeff Keen walks as a zombie and carry his dead bride through brown English fields.
Director
Breakout is an unfinished film and, unusually for Keen, contains a loose narrative. It presents the story of a young man hounded by a large pink Pontiac Continental.
America comes to Brighton as three beatniks hang out, listen to records and smoke before strange hats appear out of nowhere and a cartoon bubble suggests they go to the cinema.
Director
America comes to Brighton as three beatniks hang out, listen to records and smoke before strange hats appear out of nowhere and a cartoon bubble suggests they go to the cinema.
Cinematography
A deliberately non-synchronous film, shot in 8mm with the sound on tape. Piero Heliczer reads his poem "The Autumn Feast," and the visuals interact with, but does not literally represent, what is read.
Director
A deliberately non-synchronous film, shot in 8mm with the sound on tape. Piero Heliczer reads his poem "The Autumn Feast," and the visuals interact with, but does not literally represent, what is read.
Director
Experimental short featuring motorbikes and animation. This is the second version of Jeff Keen's first film; that film became too worn.
