Cine Blatz 1: Jeff Keen’s Delirious Pop-Trash Films

Seminal films from 1960 to 1972 by an unsung pioneer of British experimental film.

“Keen’s films are high-voltage visual shocks, eruptions of pulp imagery, eroticism, violence, language games, uncensored imagination and sheer giddy exuberance. His early films are love-letters to cinema history: to silent film and B-movies, to slapstick, thrillers, exploitation flicks and sci-fi apocalypses, his later works disquieting parades of video news imagery and documentation of his own creative processes. Frankenstein and Godzilla share the screen with Keen’s own cast of heroes and villains such Motler the Word Killer, Dr Gaz, Silverhead, Omozap and Mothman (often played by friends and family). Edited into machine-gun sprays of imagery, Keen’s pedal-to-the-metal, high-speed films are like animated collages —action painting with the stress very much on action.” Dan Fox

16mm pints courtesy National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, and Lux, London. A joint project between IMA and OtherFilm.