As I’ve already indicated in my consideration of By Our Selves (2015), Andrew Kötting’s films are masterpieces of the connection between personal nostalgia, landscape and family, matched only (for me) by Patrick Keiller’s Robinson films. Through his career, he has explored Great Britain from a variety of angles, usually journeying in an unusual fashion, and this is clear from his first film Gallivant (1996) and his latest Edith Walks (2017).

Gallivant is a documentary following Kötting, his daughter Eden and his grandmother Gladys, as he circumnavigates mainland Britain starting at his childhood home on the south coast. Along the way Kötting and his family engage with a variety of locals, experience some of the mythology of the regions, and explore the inter-generational dynamics of his own family. It’s a witty, eccentric and highly personal film, told in a disjointed, fragmented way with speeded-up footage, loops, clips of audio jarring against the images. It’s a bit like an acid-house version of a Humphrey Jennings documentary or a postmodern evolution of the GPO Film Unit movies of the 1930s and 1940s. The most engaging part of the film though is watching Kötting connecting with his daughter (who suffers from Joubert syndrome) and his grandmother (who refuses to suffer from old age and, at times, seems indomitably immortal).

Edith Walks, released twenty one years later, doesn’t have this dimension of family, but instead replaces it with a meditation on history. Kötting, along with psychogeographic philosopher and author Iain Sinclair, follow the an imagined route of Edith the Fair,  the wife of Harold Godwinson. They start at Waltham Abbey and walk in a kind of carnival procession to the site of the Battle of Hastings. The film, like Gallivant, is blurred in terms of film techniques but this blurring maps onto a feeling of time travel, and to this end Kötting includes found footage of school festivals from the time of his own childhood. This film sums up the progression of Kötting’s method, from the personal odyssey in Gallivant, to the micro-slice of history and mythology in Edith Walks. Taken as a whole, his films build up a psychological and cultural tapestry of the country that is both rich and mesmerisingly engaging.

Watch in a double bill together (obviously) or watch Edith Walks with a similar walk (albeit more lavish and formal) in Russian Ark (2002)