White Dust

“JEFF KEEN’s White Dust is an extended celebration of those moments at which the fragments in a collage coalesce into narrative and disperse again. The film is formulated as a (very accomplished) homage to vintage movie serials, a form with very specific, very idiosyncratic narrative conventions: strict alternation of confrontations and linking sequences, regular cliff-hanging climaxes, unexplained ‘gaps’ and so on. These conventions are observed, but the filmmaker uses collage as his starting point rather than narrative as such. Elements of parody and satire do not camouflage the essentially surrealist subversion that results: a particularly despised form of ‘lowbrow’ cinema is elevated to the status of a formal model, and a great spiritual fidelity to this model produces what can only be described as a ‘collage-narrative’, whose flaws, elisions and mistakes are completely integral.” – Tony Rayns.