Jeff Keen was born in Trowbridge, Wiltshire in 1923. His father worked for the local landowner and the Keen family had no electricity or gas in the cottage where they lived. He worked in a branch of Sainsbury’s and in apparent preparation for the next part and, indeed, the rest of his life, took to drawing bombers. In 1942, he was called up by the army and sent to various locations to operate and experiment with aeroplane engines and tanks. Keen talks about his time in the army as the best years of his life and his later films and art draw heavily on war and military imagery.
Shortly after being finally dismissed in 1947, Jeff Keen moved to Acton, London and for a term studied art at a small college in Chelsea. He saw a lot of surrealist and other modern abstract art during this period and remembers, in particular, the art brut of French painter, Jean Dubuffet. He then moved to live near relatives in Brighton and met Jackie Foulds, whom he would later marry in 1956. She would star in nearly all his films in the ’60s and ’70s. Before this, the two of them would go and see movies in London and in the various local cinemas, sometimes several in one day. Jackie was an art student and by the late ’50s Jeff was virtually running the film society at the college she attended.
In 1959 and only a few years from forty, he started to make his own 8mm films. These helped maintain the film society and gave him something else to do while then working for Brighton Parks and Gardens. In 1962, he was approached by Tony Wigens of Cine Camera magazine. He liked Jeff’s films Wail (1960) and Like The Time is Now (1961), and had them blown-up to 16mm and distributed through the amateur film circuit. They made their way to London and to the National Film Theatre where the head projectionist set them up in the foyer. It was here that the influential critic Ray Durgnat first saw them and in 1965 wrote about them in Films and Filming.