Jeff Keen

Directing

Jeff Keen

Born 1923-11-26 · Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England, UK

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.

Acting credits

Behind the camera

Cineblatz poster
9.0

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.

Cineblatz

1967

B-B-B Bom and Life Storm poster
8.8

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.

B-B-B Bom and Life Storm

1990

Family Star (The Mutt & Jeff Icecream Sundae + Mothman) poster
9.0

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.

Family Star (The Mutt & Jeff Icecream Sundae + Mothman)

1969

Mad Love poster
10.0

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.

Mad Love

1978

Instant Cinema poster
9.3

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.

Instant Cinema

1965

Rayday Film poster
8.0

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.

Rayday Film

1970

Marvo Movie poster
8.0

Four minutes of heavily cut-up sound and vision with collage, animation and multiple exposures throughout.

Marvo Movie

1967

Marvo Movie poster
8.0

Four minutes of heavily cut-up sound and vision with collage, animation and multiple exposures throughout.

Marvo Movie

1967

Plazmatic Blatz poster
8.0

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

Plazmatic Blatz

1991

Wail poster
9.0

Experimental short featuring motorbikes and animation. This is the second version of Jeff Keen's first film; that film became too worn.

Wail

1960

Pulverised Cinema poster
8.0

Jeff Keen processes his cinematic past in this filmic attack on his back catalogue.

Pulverised Cinema

1990

Stolen Moments poster
8.0

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.

Stolen Moments

1972

Spontaneous Combustion poster
9.0

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

Spontaneous Combustion

1989

Flik Flak poster
9.0

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.

Flik Flak

1965

White Dust poster
10.0

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.

White Dust

1972

Blatzom poster
8.0

Jeff Keen dons paper masks and his knitted Artwar jacket, after avoiding bombs and pacing a moonlike landscape.

Blatzom

1986

Kino Pulveriso poster
9.0

The Artwar face peers through painted celluloid and a barrage of explosions and film noise.

Kino Pulveriso

1993

Artwar poster
8.0

This version of Artwar builds from performances with paper masks and implements and various sequences of gunfire.

Artwar

1994

Blazomatika poster
8.0

Produced by Jeff Keen for looping in an exhibition context.

Blazomatika

1990

Meatdaze poster
9.0

Made to represent an entire cinema programme, Meatdaze consists of six sections that include cartoons, supporting and main features.

Meatdaze

1968

Plasticator poster
8.0

Treating apocalyptic and aggressive imagery with silence and slow washes of colour, Jeff Keen exhibits and works against his usual tropes.

Plasticator

1990

Breakout poster
8.5

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.

Breakout

1962

Afterblatz 2 poster
8.0

'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.

Afterblatz 2

2002

24 Films poster
9.0

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.

24 Films

1975