CUTTING WITH A KEEN EDGE Jas Duke Cantrills Filmnotes, Australia July 1976'

I first met Jeff Jackie and Stella when we were all living in St Michaels Place a crumbling slum (since wrecked) of Brighton Angleland and all on the dole. He said to me We’re making a movie tomorrow would you like to be in it?’ or words to that effect and in no time I was dressed in yellow tights and wrapped in a purple cape and teeshirt with MARZMAN on the front and I AM BRIAN DONLEVY on the back striking attitudes in the middle of the Brighton municipal garbage dump a martian desert littered with the remains of lost civilisations and thus very suitable for titanic epix movies. During those early days myself and the family Keen found loads of common interests like Z Grade Hollywood, Comicbooks Thru the Ages, Sam T. Coleridge Meets The Romantic Movement, the paintings of G. Moreau, and the compulsion to Act The Goat In Public so once having been in the movies life seemed empty without blinding lights in the eyes and a camera clicking. Jeff comes from rural Wiltshire originally from the servant class his father was one Lily Langtry’s butler so I guess there’s some hereditary taste for vicarious highlife and crazy dressing up. All the live action movies were backyard exotic affairs with friends, neighbours and lovers playing Maria Montez, Bela Lugosi, B. Karloff, Sabu the Elephant Boy, Tarzan, and a vast retinue of mad scientists and mad dictators which were my contribution I moving from MARZMAN to MOTLER (“how right Motler was to kill the word”) and finally DOCTOR VOLTA. All these scenes came very naturally to me as my brain was filled to overflowing with forgotten rubbish of 1940s movies and comicbooks acquired in Ballarat Aust. Motler’s struggle with The Word occupied most of 1969 during this time words were shot stabbed burnt eaten and generally exterminated while in the background floated endless cups of tea fruit cake hungarian black currant jam crummy movies on the teevee excursions to the garbage dump occasional public appearances (as the ACME GENERATING COY.) The RAYDAY wall newspaper and Brighton’s crumbling streets and dirty pebble beach. Not the Brighton is insignificant in the KOSMIC ROLL OF THE MOVIES for around the corner was St. Ann’s Wells Gardens where G.A. Smith made Titanic Epix in 1898. In public appearances we always had a little shrine containing water from St. Ann’s Wells as a homage to the Birth of British Movies.
From 1968 to 1972 I saw the FAMILY KEEN in action almost every day. Calm Jeff in his camouflage jacket cradling his camera Jackie made up like a sexy lioness and distillation of every spirit drop of movie queendom and Stella all grave natural regal dignity a Chinese princess with a love comic all in front of walls covered with movie stars (suitably flattened) movie screens discarded movies discarded movie costumes a mighty atom of a world in themselves proof positive of the victory of art over economics and the uncrushability of human creativity. And if the world has still to discover the magic of THE PINK AUTO, UNDER PARAMOUNT SKIES, MR. SOFT ELIMINATOR, MARVO, BLATZART, CINEBLATZ, MOTHMAN, MUTTONJEFF ICE CREAM SUNDAE, MEATDAZE, SHERBERT SUCKERS, WHITE DUST and other mighty movies so much the worse for the world. As a minor partner in these TITANTIC EPIX all I can do is fire at you my jumble confusion of transposition and juxtaposition (like a Jeff Keen movie) as the FAMILY KEEN is not really a word scene and this too solid time would melt itself and drip away life’s jellied cosmos. Jeff is quiet and undemonstrative, with a restricted domicile and radius of action, all his space is inner space, all his trips internal. Jeff Keen Flix are high speed collaging and assembling of the discarded garbage of everybody’s brain and live action movies packed with elaborately dressed characters – drawn from yr favourite movies – in a succession of complicated tableaus drawn equally from the worst of Hollywood and History Painting with many layers of superimposition and made almost entirely in the camera with minimal editing. Being bald and non-beautiful I generally made it as the villain.
Jeff at the time was fond of quoting E. A. POE’s statements as to the superiority of briefness over length and that if you couldn’t do it in one go, it wasn’t worth doing in the first place (E. A. Poe never went in much for jumbo productions) to which you could add M. Gandhi’s thoughts that all the best things are done at home. This thinking led to attempts to make all movies in one day which got into trouble at times with rain, hail, sun, sleet, snow, power failures, transport strikes, blown fuses, jammed cameras, exploding photofloods, bodily needs and other delaying factors but I think the spirit of urgency this thinking gave shows up in the movies.
The major Keenflic WHITE DUST was at first going to be WHITE TRASH (changed because A Warhol pre-empted the title) because everyone was white and everyone was trash – I can speak that way as I was one of them. Angleland being the class-obsessed shit heap that it is I can reveal that the Keen cast of thousands included a grave-digger, a maker of enamel badges, a park gardener, a builder’s labourer, a laboratory assistant, an art teacher and other fully paid-up card carrying members of the downtrodden trash, minds filled-up to the eyebrows with Hollywood’s more frivolous and useless garbage. Enough of this painful lacerating self-criticism. If it wasn’t for Spencer the Garbageman all societies would shudder to shuddering halts. The people are Jackie Keen, Steve Wynnard, Pussy Wright, Avril Hodges, Caryl Upton, Tony Sinden and me. I can’t remember the name of the saxophone player. The public quickly lost its appetite for this breed of surreal clowning and went in more for WHAT ABOUT THE WORKERS? But at least we managed to say KILL THE WORD BEFORE IT KILLS YOU a few times when there was someone in earshot.

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