A brief History: Marvo Movie

Jeff Keen (1923) attended Brighton art College at the age of 37.  The school’s film society was looking to justify their purchase of 8mm film equipment, so he started creating these beautiful films using toys, comics, and elements pulled from a garbage dump. His distinct style of filmmaking combines collage and performance to create elaborate painterly compositions on film.  His work often references his time fighting in World War Two, pop culture, and his outsider artist status.


 
Marvo Movie is Keen’s first 16mm film, which was made with two 100ft reels of film; it is as much a thematic experiment as it is a study of the structures of the medium.  He had planned it as two films, but later combined the two reels into one to make a more complete movie. It is consider to be one of three films in the “Jeff Keen Trilogy,” the other films are Cineblatz and White Light.

 
 
Keen worked with Poet Bobb Cobbing, one of the founders of the London Filmmaker’s Co-op, to create the abstract soundtrack, the vocalizations are comparable to DADA “sound poems” which turn words into abstract performances, aimed at bypassing the viewer’s instinct to find meaning.  Keen’s other collaborators included his wife Jackie, friends and other artists.

 
 
Keen’s work was created during a boom for British Experimental Film principally financed by the State through the BFI’s Production Board which had started life as the BFI Experimental Film Fund.

 

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