Kötting edge

Dave Calhoun travels to Hastings to meet filmmaker Andrew Kötting, who swam the Channel for his latest work.

Feb 15 2007

If you ever saw Andrew Kötting's beautifully loopy film 'Gallivant', you'll recall a typical moment in which the filmmaker walks into the cold Scottish sea, fully clothed, while his elderly grandmother berates him from the beach for being 'as daft as they make them'. That extraordinary film was a feature-length documentary-cum-performance piece in which Kötting travelled around the entire coast of Britain, from Bexhill-on-Sea and back again, during 1996 and 1997 with eight-year-old daughter Eden and 85-year-old grandmother Gladys in tow. It's a wonderful, chaotic collage of travelogue, road-movie, home-video and Super-8 that's unlike anything else and would easily baffle anyone expecting a cosy, put-your-feet-up, BBC-style ramble around our island nation.

Some critics were baffled by 'Gallivant'; Kötting remembers with glee how a reviewer from the Mail suggested that to criticise 'Gallivant' would be like 'drowning a puppy that's the runt of a litter'. Which, in its own horrible and crooked way, is something of a ringing endorsement for Kötting, who rates as one of our country's most fascinating and accessible purveyors of artists' cinema. He's consistently barmy and inventive enough each time to dream up a project that outdoes its predecessor for the physical, psychological and creative challenges it poses, both to him and his collaborators, be they actors, writers or, as often as not, immediate family.

Since 'Gallivant', Kötting has been busy on the edges of cinema as we know it. He has made another feature, 'This Filthy Earth' (a reimagining of Zola's 'La Terre' in the muddy wilds of Cumbria), and worked on numerous gallery and multimedia projects. He spent a month in Shanghai, recording the sounds of the city. He completed a five-year-long project called 'Mapping Perception', which took his daughter Eden's rare genetic condition Joubert's Syndrome as a starting point for a meeting of scientific and artistic minds, and has executed 'Deadad', a response on film, paper and in a gallery to his father's death, for which he blew up and photographed several giant inflatable models of his family on the Faroe Islands (where his grandfather secretly fathered a child during the war). Closer to home, Kötting's daughter Eden is now 18 and at school; his grandmother Gladys has died; and he, Eden and his partner, Leila, left London three years ago and decamped to Hastings in Sussex – a popular refuge of London artists – where they live a stone's throw from the coastal bolthole of Kötting's latest partner-in-art, the writer Iain Sinclair.

Last November, Sinclair was one of a tiny group who accompanied Kötting by boat when he, two of his brothers and three of his friends – Sean Lock, Xavier Tchili and Ian Dale – swam the Channel in a relay that took 14 hours and 17 minutes. Kötting didn't originally plan to film the swim until he discovered the name of the boat that would ferry them from Dover to Cap Gris Nez in France: Gallivant. Fate had intervened; there was no turning back. He secured funding from Film London and planned to construct a short film from the swim which, as he says, 'used the ghost of another film, the original 'Gallivant', as something that was going to infiltrate this new attempt. I knew I had on tape these conversations with Gladys, my grandmother, who had a big fear of the sea, and so I could cut some of that material into a new film.'

When not swimming himself, Kötting, along with his friend Gary Parker, filmed the perilous journey across the Channel on both a 16mm Bolex and a digital camera. He's now cut that footage into a 20-minute film: Sinclair delivers a commentary; Eden offers a narration; and we watch as most of the 15 people on the small boat throw up over and over again as seasickness spreads like bird flu through the decks.

'What you can't prepare for is the seasickness and the tiredness,' Kötting says of the swim, which was almost called off when all six swimmers became violently sick very quickly. 'And we hadn't slept the night before because we were waiting for the phone-call to say that the conditions were right – the tides, the wind, the currents. And our captain, this Captain Ahab figure, was a voice of doom throughout the trip. He didn't want to take us out that day.'

Three months since completing the swim, Kötting is sitting in a shed in his studio and showing me a rough-cut of the film, which he's called 'Offshore'. His shed is a refuge – an edit-room within a cluttered, unheated studio space that's hidden down a Hastings backstreet. The film will delight fans of Kötting's work; it's as much an exercise in sound design and visual tomfoolery as documentary narrative. The story is simple – a swim from A to B – but it's the voices, old and new, some recent, some from 'Gallivant', that are most compelling, drawing us into this bizarre, vomity adventure. Lines from 'Drunken Sailor' drift in and out of the film, sung both a decade earlier by Gladys and last month by a singer-accordion player hired by Kötting especially for 'Offshore'.

'It's a mess,' says Kötting proudly. 'It's like the original 'Gallivant' – there are all kinds of bits and pieces, a little bit of spillage, one story that begins and is never resolved. Iain Sinclair's voice pops up and disappears, pops up and disappears… There's some 16mm, some stuff which I've reshot from the screen to degenerate it – to make it look like it's all been washed up on the beach. The film feels as if someone may have dug it up from the ground. Cinematically, it's a bit of an onslaught.'

Talk turns to the future. Kötting is hoping to shoot a follow-up feature to 'This Filthy Earth' in France later this year, with the French actress Sandrine Bonnaire in a lead role. The original plan was to make the film in Britain, but when funding was not forthcoming he turned to a Swiss producer instead. He's also planning another collaboration with Sinclair. He shows me a detailed proposal of a plan to sail a pedalo in the shape of a swan taken from 'Swan Lake', a leisure pond on the Hastings seafront, along various Kentish waterways and then up the Thames and finally up the canal near King's Cross. It sounds like 'Gallivant' meets 'Fitzcarraldo'. It sounds right up Kötting's street.

'Offshore' premieres at the NFT at 6.30pm on Tues Feb 27, after which Kötting and Sinclair will talk.

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