Page 27 - Studio International - November December 1975

August ( ?) '68. Jeff Keen puts on his first expanded lyrical movements of Little Dog for Roger (loops of 9.5
show at the Arts Lab. (He has shown 2-screen works film freezing and straying from side to side as they are
before here and at Better Books.) Juxtaposition with pulled through the projector/printer), and the 8mm
Sitney's NAC programmes provokes some English/ China Tea.
American comparisons. Essentially a collagist, Keen's Also October. Steve Dwoskin and I go to Munich
basic technique since his first films of the early sixties for the first European film-makers' meeting. Seeing the
has involved overlapping layers of taken movie imagery
(often from TV), drawn and painted animation,
pixillation of cut-outs, and single-frame 'live-action'. His
imagery is that of Pop Art, old advertisements, single
words and phrases, cartoon strip pictures, plus 'real' and
re-created personae from the Hollywood B Picture. The
technical parallels with Vanderbeek and early Breer are
self-evident, as his fascination with Hollywood parallels
that of Anger, Warhol, Jack Smith and others ; but the
particular obsession with Maria Montez shared by Keen
and Jack Smith (and, by adoption, Warhol), allows a
direct contrast of English and New York sensibilities.
To Keen, Montez is a personification of the success of the
Hollywood star system, a triumphant creation of a mythic
image of womanhood. But the power of her image is
curtailed by the extent to which she is simply part of a
larger iconography that Keen maintains in a constant
state of flux (the overlapping images), her influence
seldom lasting longer than the length of one shot (or
pose in performance) before becoming submerged in the
flow and inevitably displaced. To Smith she represents
the total artifice of Hollywood, and as played by a man,
she exists as a double-edged parody of femaleness, the
homosexual implications being an essential element in
the larger strategy of subversion.
September '68. Mike Snow is in London to show
Wavelength, New York Eye and Ear Control, and films by
Joyce Wieland. Malcolm meets him. Tonino Debernardi
from Italy shows his II Mostro Verde and a version of
Dei for 6 screens at the Arts Lab. The multiple
superimpositions and tableaux are like those we've
seen in Ron Rice, but further multiplication through 6
projectors emphasizes the leisure of his approach. He
lacks the precariousness and anarchy of Rice but gives
instead a vision of almost classic (orthodox/traditional — W±B Hein Rohfilm 1968
in the best sense of the word) beauty. He seems happily
rooted in the great tradition of Italian mural painting. Heins' Rohfilm there I'm startled by how close it is to
Also September. The BFI, in the persons of Stanley being a portrait of the aggression in Malcolm's early
Reed, William Coldstream and Philip Strick, visit the Arts movies. Both Malcolm and the Heins seem to have made
Lab in response to already repeated requests for finance to their first approach to film through violent attacks upon
set up a workshop, and for a change in policy in the illusion, the viewing experience, the conventional
BFI film distribution library towards the inclusion of more language and art of film, and in the Heins' case upon the
work from the (early) avant-garde (Richter, Len Lye etc.) actual materials of film itself. This seems a uniquely
Despite their evident sympathy and interest, nothing European equivalent of the New York 'subversion of
Hollywood' tactic of Rice Smith and Warhol. (Again none
happens...
October '68. Malcolm has his second show at the of this occurs to me at the time — but I tell Malcolm of his
Arts Lab, exhibiting paintings as well as film. There spiritual brothers on returning to London.)
appears to be another side to his work, revealed in the The Munich meeting was arranged by the Heins as a
follow-up to Sitney and Shirley Clarke's suggestion, at
Knokke, that a European co-op ('Europ') be formed.
Nothing of substance resulted. Practical proposals that
secretaries be appointed and minor bureaucracies set up
were countered by the pure poetry of the Italian
delegation's insistence that a co-op meant equal
division of work amongst all participants— no sleeping
partners and no paid executives. Germany, taking the
opposite view, revealed the existence of a selective,
commercial promotional outlet, PAP (Progressive Art
Productions !), in addition to its three regional co-ops.
In London, after a long struggle over the more pragmatic
issue of financial viability, the co-op had decided to
employ a paid secretary, and simultaneously achieved
the major coup of securing the greater part of Sitney's
travelling collection for its library. (The latter event being
not totally unconnected with our choice of Carla Liss
of the New York Cinematheque as secretary). These
acquisitions greatly advanced the co-op's impact upon
the college and film-society circuit. The Federation of
Film Societies began to include co-op films in its annual
viewing sessions and the Central Booking Agency (run
by the BFI) began to include them (or some of them at
least) in its annually published lists. But a greater
repertory of titles and a wider circulation, though they
improved the co-op's turnover, can't be credited
Poster designed by Brigid Peppin and Malcolm Le Grice with the origination of any further film-makers. Almost
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