Jeff Keen

Flik Flak (extract); Jeff Keen, 1963.



Instant Cinema; Jeff Keen, 1962/2007



GAZWRX; Jeff Keen, 1967

Gazwrx: The films of Jeff Keen

The BFI have just done us proud with a box set of Jeff Keen films entitled Gazwrx, not to mention various screenings of his works – and all from brand spanking new prints! Keen was one of the earliest and best British underground film-makers. He was largely self-taught and is blessed with a beatnik sensibility that converges with the hippie scene of the later sixties but remains a distinctive strand within it. As a starting point for all this, imagine a surrealist remake of Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy (1959) set in Brighton and you’re not a million miles away from Like The Time Is Now (1961); except, of course, the comparison glosses over Jeff Keen’s singularity. Wail (1960) is probably more typical of Keen’s cinematic sensibility; a crazy mix of animation and live action footage featuring Hollywood werewolves, high art and gang violence. Using 8mm film, Keen created scratch video 20 years before anyone else had thought of it. The resultant mix and match of high art and lowbrow popular culture runs through forty years of his film work.

From the early sixties right through to the late seventies Keen worked with an ensemble of players who might be compared to the troupe John Waters deployed in his midnight movie hits before making the transition to Hollywood director. Although both men clearly set out to entertain their audiences, the similarities pretty much stop there because Keen created shorts not features, had no time for narrative and made extensive use of animation and double exposure. So the results are closer to Ira Cohen’s Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (1968) than Pink Flamingos (1972). But as in John Waters’ far more conventional flicks, Keen’s ensemble of actors liked to dress up and act out as exaggerated comic book versions of themselves: and some of them were rather fond of taking their clothes off too, particularly Jeff’s wife Jackie Keen. One can sense from the films that there were sexual shenanigans going on off-screen that fuelled the bad craziness caught on celluloid. But if sex and nudity don’t do it for you, there are also cardboard ray guns, monsters, endless explosions of paint and other pyrotechnics. The titles of the films in the Gaswrx box provide a good indication of their content: Cineblatz, Marvo Movie, Meatdaze, The Cartoon Theatre of Dr Gaz, Return of Silver Head, Victory Thru Film Power, Kino Pulveriso, The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke, Omozap, Artwar Fallout, Plasticator etc.

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