Cocking a snook at the Olympic torch procession two men have plotted their own epic journey – along the waterways from Hastings to east London in a giant fibreglass swan
'Ahoy there!" shouts film-maker Andrew Kötting to a dredging vessel on the Lee Navigation canal, just outside London's Olympic Park. The man on the boat gives us a grudging wave. Kötting explains that the same man wouldn't let him pass any further up the canal yesterday. Nor would the Gurkhas who guard the Olympic site.
This could have something to do with our mode of transport. I am sitting beside Kötting in a two-person fibreglass pedalo in the shape of a giant swan. Or it could have something to do with my co-pilot: Kötting is wearing mirrored shades and a shabby, dark blue suit on top of a cardigan embroidered with swans. He hasn't washed the suit for the past month,...
'Ahoy there!" shouts film-maker Andrew Kötting to a dredging vessel on the Lee Navigation canal, just outside London's Olympic Park. The man on the boat gives us a grudging wave. Kötting explains that the same man wouldn't let him pass any further up the canal yesterday. Nor would the Gurkhas who guard the Olympic site.
This could have something to do with our mode of transport. I am sitting beside Kötting in a two-person fibreglass pedalo in the shape of a giant swan. Or it could have something to do with my co-pilot: Kötting is wearing mirrored shades and a shabby, dark blue suit on top of a cardigan embroidered with swans. He hasn't washed the suit for the past month,...
- 7/20/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
★★★☆☆ Following hot on the heels of last year's French fancy This Our Still Life (2011), visual artist Andrew Kötting returns to selected cinema screens with Swandown (2012), a very British travelogue following the filmmaker and an assorted band of associates as they make their way from Hastings to Hackney, via the Olympic site, in a swan-shaped pedalo. Taking its cues from Kötting's 1997 piece Gallivant - where he toured Britain's coastlines with multiple generations of his family - this unique filmmaker manages to squeeze vital meaning out of the most bizarre of means.
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- 7/20/2012
- by CineVue
- CineVue
Andrew Kötting will be on hand for a Q&A this evening at the Curzon Renoir in London and he'll be taking his new film, This Our Still Life, to Manchester and Brighton over the coming days as well. The BFI has details. Kötting, notes Sukhdev Sandhu in a profile for the Guardian, "has carved out a singular career encompassing sound art, installation pieces, avant-garde theatre, short films, artists' books and full-length features whose cussedness and often unclassifiable nature has led him to be described as the heir to English dissidents such as Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway."
Jason Wood for Little White Lies: "Evolving as a series of drawings — now collected in a beautiful book — This Our Still Life offers a beguiling and expansive portrait of 'Louyre,' the remote tumbledown Pyrenean hidey-hole that filmmaker Andrew Kötting shares with his partner Leila McMillan and their daughter Eden (the...
Jason Wood for Little White Lies: "Evolving as a series of drawings — now collected in a beautiful book — This Our Still Life offers a beguiling and expansive portrait of 'Louyre,' the remote tumbledown Pyrenean hidey-hole that filmmaker Andrew Kötting shares with his partner Leila McMillan and their daughter Eden (the...
- 11/21/2011
- MUBI
Fifty-one-year-old British painter, performance artist and film-maker Andrew Kötting is best known for an eccentric documentary, Gallivant (1996), about his trip around the coast of Britain with his elderly grandmother and his seven-year-old daughter Eden, a sufferer from Joubert syndrome, a rare condition that affects sight, movement and speech. He's also made This Filthy Earth (2001), a curious transposition of Zola's La Terre to northern England. His latest film, This Our Still Life, is a film poem, collage or meditation about the old remote farmhouse in the Pyrenees in which he and his family have lived off and on since 1989. It's a highly personal, often obscure picture, structured around the four seasons, with poignant images, speeches on the soundtrack and a superimposed, somewhat portentous text in caps. Eden, now 23, figures prominently and is an endearing presence. It's been chosen as the film of the month in December's Sight & Sound, where Iain Sinclair,...
- 11/20/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
On the eve of the release of his most personal film to date, This Our Still Life, the avant garde director talks to Sukhdev Sandhu
"Central heating is my biggest enemy," declares the film-maker Andrew Kötting. "I'm not a big fan of double glazing. Or the Shopping Channel. Or sweet-smelling perfumes. Vanilla living is always something that makes me physically sick." He pauses for thought. "Actually, the biggest enemy is often myself. I get angry with the voices in my head: I want to shut them up."
Coming from any other director, these words could easily sound abrasive or disturbing. From Kötting, they're absolutely normal, almost reassuring. In 2001, he issued a Dogme 95-inspired manifesto entitled eArthouse Declaration of Spurious Intent that not only urged "All film-makers to have spent time with their arms or feet inside another sentient being, alive or dead", but also that "The film should show signs...
"Central heating is my biggest enemy," declares the film-maker Andrew Kötting. "I'm not a big fan of double glazing. Or the Shopping Channel. Or sweet-smelling perfumes. Vanilla living is always something that makes me physically sick." He pauses for thought. "Actually, the biggest enemy is often myself. I get angry with the voices in my head: I want to shut them up."
Coming from any other director, these words could easily sound abrasive or disturbing. From Kötting, they're absolutely normal, almost reassuring. In 2001, he issued a Dogme 95-inspired manifesto entitled eArthouse Declaration of Spurious Intent that not only urged "All film-makers to have spent time with their arms or feet inside another sentient being, alive or dead", but also that "The film should show signs...
- 11/19/2011
- by Sukhdev Sandhu
- The Guardian - Film News
Magic Trip (15)
(Alison Ellwood, Alex Gibney, 2011, Us) 107 mins
Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters' LSD-fuelled 1964 road trip is one of those seminal cultural moments you can't believe really happened, at least not like it did in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. But here it is, chaotically shot and narrated by the culprits themselves and painstakingly reassembled. That makes for a certain lack of perspective, and watching others having a great time isn't necessarily the same as having one, but the contrast between these turned-on teens and square 60s America is often hilarious.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (12A)
(Bill Condon, 2011, Us) Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner. 117 mins
At last, some consummation! Bella and Edward's wedding comes a few movies too late for neutral observers, but the supernatural saga is in no danger of coming to an abrupt end, thanks to the franchise's determination to vampirically milk fans dry.
(Alison Ellwood, Alex Gibney, 2011, Us) 107 mins
Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters' LSD-fuelled 1964 road trip is one of those seminal cultural moments you can't believe really happened, at least not like it did in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. But here it is, chaotically shot and narrated by the culprits themselves and painstakingly reassembled. That makes for a certain lack of perspective, and watching others having a great time isn't necessarily the same as having one, but the contrast between these turned-on teens and square 60s America is often hilarious.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (12A)
(Bill Condon, 2011, Us) Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner. 117 mins
At last, some consummation! Bella and Edward's wedding comes a few movies too late for neutral observers, but the supernatural saga is in no danger of coming to an abrupt end, thanks to the franchise's determination to vampirically milk fans dry.
- 11/19/2011
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
Following Gallivant, his curious documentary about a journey around the English coast with his mother and handicapped daughter, and This Filthy Earth, a puzzling English rural tragedy inspired by Emile Zola's The Earth, the maverick British filmmaker Andrew Kötting's new film is made in France and in French, apparently for budgetary reasons. It's an uneasy, whimsical tale about the dysfunctional household of an elderly Russian émigré living in the Pyrenees with his faithful old Russian servant (a figure out of Chekhov who also appears in This Filthy Earth), his youngish French wife and their four children. One day he discovers his daughter engaged in what appears to him to be inappropriate sexual conduct with her teenage brother. He angrily throws the boy out of the house, whereupon the lad takes to the trees vowing never to touch the ground again, and the family falls apart. It's an allegory of sorts,...
- 7/24/2010
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
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