Gallivant

This film ties up and unifies a rambling,anarchic sensibility(witness the various pre-Gallivant shorts in the dvd 2 Disc package).This has a real emotional core,his grandmother Gladys 84 and his 6 year old daughter Eden,who has Joubert's syndrome and communicates with sign language. They both acompany him around the whole coast of Wales,England and Scotland on a home movies-type travelogue.Kotting is a kind of fine art school graduate who is into performance art.If Beckett made short films they would be like these from Klipperty-Klopp onwards.I feel this director has an urge to the autobiographical but sometimes the subject matter is thin.A major theme in most of his films is the sea side,visits to ,travelling,living rough,say in the French Pyrennes,also the mad artist figure knocking his head against the wall(maybe to get his films funded,made and released).The reason this film does work is that he wanted these two individuals on the edge of mortality to help him celebrate our English tradtions,pagan,folklorish and otherwise.His use of sound,song and image is rejuvenating to tired documentary tradtions.He shoots in super 8 for landscapes and buildings and 35 mm for people and interviews.He captures the outsider aspect of our island race with a great crackerbarrel full of words of wisdom,different accents and borderline activities.Whether he's got it in him to go beyond this personal material into a full feature of other material I'm not aware,although he has made an update of Zola which I haven't seen.The dvd package has 2 booklets, one introduced by Ian Sinclair ,with notes about the smaller films and one where he presents snippets and notes from Gallivant.