A Persistent Vision Lesley Keen DOWSER Issue 4 (Spring 2021) Edit, Typeset, Design: Marcus Jack
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4. A Persistent Vision Lesley Keen DOWSER Issue 4 (Spring 2021) Edit, typeset, design: Marcus Jack Frontispiece: Lesley Keen, Invocation, 1984. Back Cover: Lesley Keen, Burrellesque, 1990. DOWSER All images courtesy of Lesley Keen. © Total Immersion Ltd. Published by Transit Arts in Glasgow, Scotland. www.transitarts.co.uk Printed in an edition of 200. Typeset in Optima. ISSN 2634-7083 (Print) ISSN 2634-7091 (Online) © 2021 Transit Arts and its contributors. All rights reserved. DOWSER is a series of newly commissioned essays, interview transcripts and archival materials which makes available, for the first time, a collated set of resources from which we might begin to plot a history of artists’ moving image in Scotland. Conceived as the necessary groundwork for a critically underreported field, this series hopes to share fragments, positions and testimonies that articulate the development of a now ubiquitous artform with a vivid and unique history in Scotland. It wasn’t until 1982 with the much-belated filmmakers in Scotland found routes to launch of the Scottish Film Production Fund accommodate brazenly independent practices that Scotland could finally claim to offer its first that don’t necessarily cooperate with existing public film subsidy free from the contingencies narratives and categories. The remarkable work of sponsorship endured in previous generations. of experimental animator Lesley Keen and her Until then, the country’s film infrastructure had production company Persistent Vision (1982– been outpaced by its southern counterpart by 1999) is one such lesson in disruption. From her the measure of decades, a disparity felt even studio in Glasgow, Keen navigated the field of more acutely amongst those on the experimental broadcast television in the early days of Channel end of the spectrum. Even this new provision 4 to produce a body of work steeped in histories was slow to make waves, however, and the of visual culture, mythology, spirituality and the feeling of a gap, ambiguous in size, has echoed unconscious mind. through time. Characterised by the flow of luminous lines Operating outside of the London-based which cut across black picture planes, independent filmmaking community, its funding simultaneously flat and infinite, Keen’s pipeline and support organisations, though highly individual style intersected with the often interfacing with the same aesthetic and philosophical and material concerns of the political agendas, filmmakers in Scotland were organised avant-garde, animation set and forced into negotiating their own version of a Scottish independent sector, never quite at sustainable avant-garde practice—the spoils home in any. Over five films, culminating in of which have also been too readily forgotten the remarkable feature Ra: The Path of the Sun within histories of the British experimental film. God (1990), she articulated an uncompromising belief in the liberatory potential of animation Through hostile cultural policy and lacking to visualise that which was otherwise infrastructure, a handful of resourceful inconceivable for artists prior to the digital turn. 6 7 This issue comprises the edited transcript of an interview I conducted with Keen in January 2020 in which she reflects candidly on her journey through a sometimes-inhospitable terrain. It also includes an excerpted essay by Keen on the techniques and theories employed in her analogue work, originally published in 1983 within a companion volume to the animation Taking a Line for a Walk (1983). The issue is generously illustrated with a selection of production artwork, film stills and photography all from Keen’s personal archive. I hope that in profiling her kaleidoscopic persistence of vision in this way, we might begin to expand existent accounts of experimental filmmaking practice in the UK, considering for and by whom these were formed in order to identify what else is missing. Marcus Jack, Editor Lesley Keen, Ra: The Path of the Sun God, 1990. 8 Preparatory diagram for the opening sequence of Invocation, 1984, instructing on the choreographed movement of a field of dots over forty-eight frames. Interview Lesley Keen They’d started this thing called the Associate of The Glasgow School of Art, which you may or may not have heard of. I’m one of the few people who didn’t convert it to a BA. You had to do two subjects, so I did Graphic Design and Silversmithing but then within about a term I realised that I’d actually prefer to do something dynamic. I managed to persuade the head of department that it would be a good idea just to let me go off and do animation. The trouble was that nobody was teaching it, so I had to teach myself which wasn’t particularly easy; I hadn’t much to refer to. I didn’t know anything at all about animation really by the time I’d graduated in 1975. I got a British Council scholarship to Prague to go on an animation course but as soon as I arrived there they told me “actually, sorry we don’t do that anymore.” So, I’m sitting there thinking that I’d just given up a job at the BBC, albeit a summer one, what am I going to do now? I knew someone in the short film studios Lesley Keen (r) preparing for the installation of so I just asked: “look, I’ve got a grant, can I Ra: The Path of the Sun God as an exhibition at Tramway, Glasgow (29 August – 6 September 1990). just come and sit around the studios and learn something?” They said “you’re not going to learn 15 very much,” because the way that it worked Scottish Arts Council (SAC) and later the Scottish then was that you’d train as an in-betweener for Film Production Fund. The SAC didn’t recognise seven years, then you might be another seven film as an art form at that point, let alone years as a lead animator. There was a seven-year animation. The only way you could get a grant cycle for everything, twenty-one years before was if you made a film about another artist. I’d you could direct anything. After auditioning, had an interest in Paul Klee going back to my I was given some in-betweening, so there are primary school days so I thought, right, taking a Czech films out there that I’ve worked on. They line for a walk because Klee has all these very said “you’re not going to learn anything doing advanced theories about movement and that’ll this, why don’t you go and make your own film be a good starting point. I got an SAC grant to do and we’ll give you a mentor to help you work a storyboard, just about the same sort of time as your way through it.” I’ve no idea why they Channel 4 was starting. did that but that’s what happened, so I made a little graduation film there called Ondra and The founding CEO of Channel 4, Jeremy Isaacs the Snow Dragon (1978). That film still exists, a came up to Glasgow on an evangelising tour copy of it is sitting in the the National Library of and said “right you guys, you need to get your Scotland’s Moving Image Archive. They hold all act together because we’re going to apply a the negatives and positives of all my films. positive Scottish bias and you can do some of your own projects now. Dig out whatever I came back to Scotland in 1979 and worked you’ve got in your bottom drawer and send it as a freelancer in the local independent film in.” Channel 4 started in 1982, so this must have and TV pool for a while but there wasn’t a lot been the tail end of 1980 into 1981. of call for graphics and animation. So, I started looking around for ways to fund my own work. Although I had made the storyboard for Taking The only place at that point where you could get a Line for a Walk (1983), I hadn’t managed to any money for anything vaguely like this was the take it to the next stage. In the meantime I’d had 16 17 funding to do another storyboard for Orpheus to become visible. I went back to the SAC and and Eurydice (1984). That went on be shown in asked “if you can fund this, I can get the rest competition at the Cannes film festival. It was from Channel 4.” To which they replied “that’s the Orpheus storyboard that I sent to Channel 4. what everybody says.” I told them I could At that point, they were just six people or so in actually do it, they said “OK then, prove it.” It a small attic office opposite Harrods. These were was one of those circular things. all the commissioning editors who went on to build Channel 4, people Jeremy thought were a The trouble was that this film was only going nice little team to help him do it. One of them to be only 11 minutes—what they used to call went on to be my mentor in all of this, a woman interstitial programming—you couldn’t really called Naomi Sargant. Her background was in show it as a standalone work. When Naomi education, so her remit was actually more to do came up to Edinburgh at festival time in 1981 with educational programming, so I was never we met to try and work out how we would part of the animation department, I was always actually make a programme out of it. I suggested off to one side of the mainstream.