Tag: Andrew Kotting

The Whalebone Box

Posted on by victorfraga

This isn’t an easy film to pigeonhole. It’s not even a particularly easy one to describe. But it’s a very easy film to get locked into, the sumptuous visuals capturing its rod firmly on the viewer’s captivated eye. It certainly starts well, with a black and white still of a barren, abandoned box. Over the box, radio voices crackle with exalted excitement as to what, who or which it might contain.

As it transpires, it is a whale bone box. Caught in the Outer Hebrides, the box landed on a remote beach where civil interest soon turned to astonishment at the box’s mystical powers. Fearful of the powerful consequences, beyond their good and evil, the box must never be opened. Piecing this preternatural jigsaw, director Andrew Kötting focuses the narrative on his daughter Eden, the subject of ensorcelled fables. Filming in 2018, Andrew joined writer Ian Sinclair for an eight hundred mile pilgrimage from London back to the Isle of Harris.

What starts with good intention turns to good potentiality as both men encounter demons inside and outside the terrain. Eden pieces the fragments together, both in her part within the story and as an excited viewer watching the story. It’s more arthouse than forthright, yet its almost certainly a documentary in nature.

It’s an intuitive work, more focused on form over content, however beguiling the hexed content. It makes sense to focus on the visuals; many of them are exquisite. Some of the grainier footage recalls Francois Truffaut’s more striking sixties work, especially one montage that films two of the paraders in sepia tinted colours. While filming through the mountainous snow, Sinclair compares the slippery white ground with an albino whale. Behind them, a scintillating scream echoes with deafening inducement as the two men catch their collective breaths. There’s a magical poetry at play, somehow in keeping with the film’s more abstract agenda. The film prides itself on its DIY aesthetic, leading the viewer into the dazzling territory of devilry.

It requires a certain palette. Viewers coming in expecting realism will be dismayed by the rampant occultism. Pilgrimages are a voyage in time: as such, the film uses past and contemporary footage to wheel their dizzied viewers. The result is strangely hypnotic, capturing the flourescent wonders of a shared journey. At 80 minutes, the film doesn’t stretch out its journey, but does struggle to bring purpose to the story. Perhaps that’s the ultimate delirium; meaninglessness!

The Whalebone Box is on Mubi on Friday, April 3rd (2020). On Blu-ray on Monday, June 7th.

Edith Walks

Posted on by victorfraga

Sometimes a medieval love story, sometimes a historical reconstruction, Andrew Kötting’s new film, like its protagonist, meanders about. Edith Walks is a tribute to Edith Swan Neck (or Edith the Fair), “handfast” wife of King Harold II. She became a fixture of English folklore because she traveled 108 miles on foot from Waltham Abbey to St Leonard’s-on-Sea in order to meet her husband’s body, who was killed during the Battle of Hastings – a journey which the film attempts to recreate.

To be honest, she does walk. Despite being dead for almost a millennium, she also speaks. Unfortunately, despite the filmmakers’ best intentions, she neither goes far nor says words of profound wisdom. Instead, our trip into a emblematic historical event becomes, unlike the real Edith, a bit aimless.

The film borrows much from the oral history format, based on interviews with those familiar Edith’s story. The English writer Alan Moore is one of the most knowledgeable interviewees, and he talks at length about her journey. The project’s insistence on serendipity, however, doesn’t spawn exciting scenes, unlike masterpieces such as Visages Villages (Agnès Varda, 2017). Varda’s film made full use of the characters found along the way in order to touch the viewer. Here, it just feels like we’re eavesdropping.

Claudia Barton functions well as the protagonist Edith, always fully-clad in medieval attire. She refers to the real Edith in the third person, thereby stripping the historical figure of a voice. While willfully done, this comes across somewhat clumsy. Nevertheless, Barton manages to sing a few medieval ballads to keep thing going.

The poor quality of the images doesn’t help either. Many scenes are so distorted that we can only see blobs vaguely resembling human beings. This is Kötting’s style though, and fans of no-budget and highly experimental cinema may be pleased with this. Others, however, may find that such aesthetics render the film a little amateurish, almost video art or home video feel. At a frugal duration of just 61 minutes, Edith Walks never feels like a conventional feature film.

In a given moment, death is defined as “just your length in time”. That notion implies that the dead and the living are forever intertwined and affecting each other. It’s a fine concept and very much present in art, as we keep seeing works that reference deceased individuals. Unfortunately Edith Walks got a bit lost midway while hurtling towards a more in-depth philosophical analysis.

Edith Walks is showing in selected cinemas across the UK from Friday, June 23rd.