Roger Keen | Videos

Videos

Literary Stalker: Model Villages, Metacrime & Möbius Strips

In this fourteen-minute film, I visit the model village at Bourton-on-the-Water in the Cotswolds and use it to talk about the metafictional elements in Literary Stalker and other books and films. This model village is a particularly fine example of the art, completed in 1937 after five years of work. It is most interesting because — as the model stands within the actual village — it has a model of itself, which in turn has a model, and so on, creating an infinite regression.

Beat Writers and the Psychedelic Movement

My Breaking Convention talk from July 2015.

In their writings and lifestyle experiments, the Beat writers were very much the precursors of the psychedelic movement. They were pioneering users of ayahuasca, mescaline, psilocybin and LSD; and when Timothy Leary began his Harvard work he naturally tried to induct the three as elder statesmen figures...

Tripped in the Woods

The Mad Artist contains two epic LSD trip sequences, both taking place in woodland settings in South Devon. This film was inspired by those experiences and shot in the actual location of one of the trips. It replicates the unique primal intensity of woodland tripping, using extensive muti-layered video effects and complementary sound design.

The Beat Hotel & Shakespeare and Company

This short film was assembled from footage I shot in 2006, showing the legendary Beat Hotel in Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Paris Latin Quarter, and the nearby equally legendary bohemian bookshop Shakespeare and Company. In the 1950s the hotel was home to Beat luminaries William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. The original bookshop was founded by Sylvia Beach in the 1920s, and writers such as Hemingway, Pound, Fitzgerald, Joyce and Beckett gathered there.