According to The Bible, God created just about everything in a week. Obviously, he didn’t have a day job to get in the way of his creative impulses, because it takes me about a week just to finish up a single comic page. When you don’t have to eat or pay for car insurance, you can pretty much rock ‘til the break of dawn without any consequences. So, what did this God do BEFORE he slapped together The World As We Know It?

Dave McKean asked this back in 1998, and it pretty much changed my perception of film forever. He answered his own question with a 23-minute film called ‘The Week Before’, which I subsequently passed around to all of my family, friends, girlfriends, classmates, congressmen and pets. Seriously - I was merciless, because I felt as if I’d found gold. After a while, my VHS copy did what all VHS copies do and started to fuzz out, losing definition and the return on my investment, but I’d seen it enough times to pretty much be able to reenact it myself if I had to. For a while, the VHS was even worth a whole fistful of money.

As an (over)active Dave McKean collector, I found that his books were always relatively easy to hunt down and purchase, either through Amazon or contacting his publicist, Allen Spiegel, directly - but McKean’s films were not easily accessible. I ended up purchasing enhanced-CD singles from the UK by obscure bands because the Dave McKean music videos inside, or CD-Rom projects by The Residents because McKean had illustrated a short story hidden somewhere on the disc. Mostly, I hit a thousand dead ends - grasping at rumors of new McKean projects, scanning press shots for clues, and finding nothing. Even as the age of the internet rolled around, there was very little to find. It wasn’t even until this month that the computer adept McKean even had a website of his own.

So, I’m pretty thrilled that McKean has finally released Keanoshow, a DVD compilation of all his major works, even if it duplicates my hard-fought collecting victories of the past decade. You might recognize his work from the film ‘Mirrormask’, or the occasional CD or comic cover - but even as you recognize it, it shifts into something completely new and beautiful.

McKean’s film work has many recurring visual themes - a layering of images so dense that it’s almost unfathomable, scrawling ink drawings on things that aren’t usually drawn on, wrinkled paper, expressionless masks somehow emoting, and a cloud of dark surrealism surrounding everything. Sometimes he’s narrative in his works, and sometimes he goes relatively abstract - but he never completely abandons the narrative that’s inherently implied by juxtaposing objects, and the way that they are observed by the camera.

The DVD includes just about every major and minor work that McKean created since 1998, including commercials, music videos, a few odds and ends, and his five ten-minute-or-more short films.

‘The Week Before’ is the first on the disc, and reproduced great clarity - so much so that certain portions of the film that I was never able to clearly make out on the VHS (even before its ritualistic abuse) have finally presented themselves. Also included is ‘N[eon]’, a plodding little film about a naked ghost wandering the streets of Venice, and the man who loves her, mostly inspired by McKean’s love of Venice and the font of artworks that came from his visit there. ‘Displacements’ is a set of six digital ‘rooms’ that McKean constructed for another filmmaker, who subsequently tore them apart and filmed the results. They present themselves as these claustrophobic, slow crawls through the finite landscapes - and are somehow a lot more fascinating than I expected. Because of the digital nature of the rooms, things change while they’re out of view, and the ‘viewer’ can zoom infinitely into any detail, finding secrets and losing them at the same time.

Also included is ‘Whack!’, which you probably won’t want to watch after dark. Inspired by McKean’s work with Neil Gaiman on the graphic novel Mr. Punch, Whack! is a live-action staging of the ultra-violent Punch & Judy show. Hilarious when it’s made of puppets (as most things are), but terrifying when it’s made of people - made moreso by the camerawork, which darts around the room as if trying to avoid the spastic violence - all taking place in a small tent, which feels smaller and smaller as Punch progresses through his serial killings. Finally, there’s ‘Dawn’, which is a typical (excellent) McKean narrative about thought, the nature of the universe and our place in it, presented with McKean’s grace and humor, and narrated by McKean’s genuinely soothing voice. For all of his work illustrating things for Neil Gaiman, I’ve always found McKean to be a vastly superior author. Dangerously obsessive Gaiman devotees, please direct your rage to the comments section below and you will be dealt with in kind.

Not to be concluded there, there are four very short commercial works, 2 semi-sarcastic mini-documentaries that McKean made about his artistic process for Kodak and Adobe, a sampling of film from other incomplete projects, four music videos, and absolutely best of all - Show and Tell, an hour-long film that Dave McKean shot of himself without the usual subterfuge of surrealism and layered imagery that he usually shrouds himself in. He unpretentiously talks about his entire filmmaking career, even sharing super-8 clips that he made with his friends as a kid, running around in superhero costumes. Within the ‘Show and Tell’ segment, he answers every question I’ve ever had about his rumored half-projects and even shares what they would have looked like were they completed. I find myself unable to want anything more.

Keanoshow is absolutely an essential part of my library of great and inspiring film shorts - the Wholfin collection, The Brothers Quay, The Animation Show, The Director’s Series Michel Gondry. Plus, obscure artsy DVDs are always a great way to get a girl back to your room and impress her with your sensitivity to alternative film. You know, at least the worthwhile girls. It was worth the decade-long waiting period.

For the DVD. Not the girls.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.