Andrew Kötting's The Whalebone Box (2020)

 

 And I thought Edith Walks was crazy. The Whalebone box itself goes back a long way in human time, in fact thirty years. It was then that sculptor Steve Dilworth in Tarbert, Harris – interested in once living objects, shamanism and other things – gave the box to Iain Sinclair, who promised to return it. Sinclair now thinks it's time. It is made from the bone of a washed-up whale and is said to contain a metal box filled with sea water. That's why – although we're not told this in the film – we sometimes see a different box here, in cardboard: Sinclair says he's an old man and the box is heavy; Kötting agrees and says it's like a car battery and you can only carry one of those so far.

So there we are, and the journey back to Harris begins, Kötting and Sinclair going with their 'muse' Eden Kötting, the director's daughter who has a genetic disorder and whose words are given subtitles: this film is in part from her dreams. Obviously there are many literary quotations, such as by Basil Bunting, whose grave in the Quaker cemetery in Briggflatts, Cumbria is visited on the way, and there's mention of T. S. Eliot's walking tour with Ezra Pound.

And of course there are songs, such as the disturbingly shrill 'Murdered Mermaid's Song' by MacGillivray, or the French rap band Quai des Brumes singing 'Julien et Mathias'. This latter may seem surprising, but then Kötting and Eden live part of the time in the French Pyrenees, and a digression in the film is a visit to the ruins of a castle in the times of the Cathars on Mont Ségur, which Sinclair considers crucial. This still doesn't give anything like an idea of the strangeness of the film, but how's this for a quotation from Sinclair, who of course is preoccupied by the relativity of time:

'You just find a right place to go and that's always a site within this forest. There might be a rock over there that would allow you access to the time of your great-grandfather, to the moment in the garden. There might be a waterfall over there which allows you through to the time of your mother's childhood. There are places you go to access time, the ghosts come into the forest and at that point linear time begins.'

No matter how much I stare at the words above I still think: 'This is hippie crap!' Very weird film, quite fascinating, but Sinclair's words, often admittedly fascinating too, sometimes just seem to clog it up.

Andrew Kötting's Edith Walks (2017)

 

This, like Swandown, is a journey with Iain Sinclair, although here it's a walk involving several other people. And it's even crazier. The purpose of this is in memory of King Harold (killed in 1066, of course) and his wife. The journey, or pilgrimage, is in reverse order, beginning from where King Harold's remains are said to be, Waltham Abbey, and ending in St Leonards-on-Sea, where there's a sculpture of the pair.

Harold's wife, Edith Swan-Neck, is a character on the march played by singer and actor Claudia Barton, and the others – apart from Kötting and Sinclair – are percussionist David Aylward, who drums, plays bicycle spokes and anything else he can get a sound from; writer and 'wizard' Alan Moore, who believes time is a box and that Hereward the Wake was a reincarnation of Harold: and Anonymous Bosch, who uses a pinhole camera.

The troupe meet with many incidents on the way, and – as is usual – Kötting fills the film with snippets of different films, the most notable being a 1966 ninth centenary reinactment of the Battle of Hastings performed by young school children and devised by three local head teachers. Wonderful, total insanity. Brexit was of course one inspiration, trying to put together what has has been torn apart, like England in 1066 and the pieces of Harold himself. The film, by the way, lasts just one hour sixty-six seconds!

Andrew Kötting's Lek and the Dogs (2017)

 

This is the last of Kötting's Earthworks (or Landworks) trilogy, which also includes This Filthy Earth (2001) and the French-made Ivul (2009), in all three of which French perormance artist and actor Xavier Tchili appears as 'Lek'. This film is based on Hattie Naylor's play Ivan and the Dogs, which itself is based on the true story of the Russian Ivan Mishukov, who as a child left his Moscow home following abuse from his stepfather and his alcoholic mother. He spent two years living  with a pack of dogs which accepted him, although the time Lek spends with the dogs is much longer. With its overvoices by ‘body psychotherapist’, ‘child psychologist’ and ‘animal behaviourist’ it appears very much like a documentary on one of the most terrifying forms of alienation.

There is also something of Samuel Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape in this, along with Tarkovsky's film Stalker, although it is in a space of its own. Kötting'x Lek is less adaptable than the non-fictional Ivan, and he leaves his girlfriend Mina and his child to return to the world he knew before. At the end of the film I thought Lek was walking around a dog cemetery, and then a quotation from Eugene O'Neill: 'There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.'

Andrew Kötting's This Filthy Earth (2001)

 

Andrew Kötting's second film throws us into a frightening world set, I'd say, in at an unknown English place sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. It relentlessly pursues the unbelievable violence, prejudice and wilful ignorance in a self-isolating (yes, I know that word is now overused!) rural community where lust for money, sex and drink are the ruling desires, but not necessarily in that order.

No compromises are made here, and I can only shudder to think what an awful mess Hollywood would have made of this.  The elderly farmer father (Dudley Suttton) is very difficult to get on with (as are most of the characters here. His daughters Kath (Demelza Randall)  and Francine (Rebecca Palmer) work on the farm and the brutish Buto (Shane Attwooll) essentially marries Kate as he is after the property, and indeed begins to declare to most people shortly after marriage that it's his land. As for Kath, well, she's just grateful for a regular sex life. Oh, and Buto's brother is always drunk but has the nickname of 'Jesus Christ' because of his dark long hair and his beard.

Loosely based on Zola's novel La Terre, this is a grim world full of dirt, terrible weather and almost universal piggish behaviour. In fact apart from the weather, I was very much reminded of Adoul's Le Souffle.

Francine is touching though, as is the Russian farmhand Lek (Xavier Tchili), who is inevitably the brunt of so many racist insults. It's Lek who's the most competent of the whole bunch, but as the outsider he's also deeply hated and is the village scapegoat: if anything goes wrong, he's the cause.

I could write quite an amount on this devastating naturalistic movie, but suffice to say that it's a gem.