XX-Rated: On Anne G. Sabo’s After Pornified
October 26, 2012William Klein @ Tate Modern
November 6, 2012
By Diarmuid Hester
We’ve just heard the very exciting news that British filmmaker Jeff Keen will be the focus of a retrospective entitled “Shoot the Wrx: Filmmaker and Artist Jeff Keen” at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery from 27th October 2012 to 25th February 2013.
As the gallery blurb would have it:
Keen, who worked for Parks and Gardens for several years, spent most of his artistic career in Brighton and used the city as a major inspiration for his work. He ignored the hierarchies of the London arts scene and the wider world of avant-garde cinema in favour of a radical commitment to locality and intimate community. Keen’s work focuses lovingly on a close-knit circle of real and imaginary friends at work and at play in and around Brighton & Hove.
Jeff Keen is a favourite of the team at One+One: Filmmakers Journal – founder-editor Daniel Fawcett has written lots about his work here on the site, elsewhere on the web and in an early issue of the journal back in 2010 (which you may download here). As Daniel says in his recent post “[Keen] deserves to be counted as one of the key figures in British cinema, any history without him is, in my view, incomplete” and with the inclusion of Keen’s work in a number of shows (most notably a Tate show this September) and this retrospective in his home county it looks like he’s well on the way to becoming acknowledged (alas all-too-late) as one of Brighton and Britain’s most exciting and innovative filmmakers.
Admission to the exhibit is free and if you’d like a more in-depth appraisal of Keen’s work, Jenny Lund, the curator of the show is running special sessions on 3rd November and 17th November.
