Andrew Kotting (2012)
Andrew Kotting’s journey on a pedalo in the shape of a swan from Hastings to Hackney: the odyssey ends when the craft literally bumps into the London 2012 Olympic site. Kotting is accompanied most of the way by the writer Iain Sinclair, well known for his devotion to East London and his antagonism towards the Olympics. There are a few guest appearances in the pedalo en route – the comic book writer Alan Moore, the comedian Stewart Lee, and Dudley Sutton, who gives the proceedings a lift reciting some verse about growing old (‘swollen knees/breath like cheese’) with appalled, incredulous verve. It’s Lee who says of Sinclair that he ‘doesn’t think anything should be allowed to happen in Hackney without his permission’. In an interview last week with The Independent, Sinclair described his and Kotting’s voyage, undertaken over four weeks in September and October 2011, as an ‘“absurd and relevant” protest against the Olympics’. The timing of the film’s release in cinemas (not that Sinclair’s responsible for that) suggests that the commercial tyranny of the Games may be even more extensive than he realised.
Sinclair is a psychogeographer, interested in the influence of a physical environment on the psychology of its inhabitants, and vice versa. The waterlands of East Sussex and Kent through which he and Kotting travel towards London are impregnated with ghosts – of actual but anonymous people and fictional but more specific ones, created by the likes of Dickens (and Sinclair himself, who reads from his novel Downriver). But Kotting, in order to bulk up Swandown, needs to call on a variety of marine, riverine and water-faring poetry which is not particularly linked to these parts of England. There are references too to the most familiar drownings-by-suicide – Virginia Woolf and Ophelia, played by an actress who doubles up, according to the closing credits, as Leda. There’s also, not unexpectedly, a fair amount about swan mythology and biology. I kept thinking part of the music on the soundtrack was going to turn into ‘The Swan of Tuonela’ but it never quite did (only Jem Finer’s original music gets a credit).
The variety of light and landscape is wonderful; and the look of the film, photographed by Nick Gordon Smith, is always beguiling – even when the camera is showing a shoal of plastic bottles in the water. Swandown is essentially, though, a pretentious home movie in the sense that it seems to have been made principally for the entertainment of the people who made it. Kotting is socially selective about who is allowed to be amused by his craft. It’s OK or even witty if non-posh-sounding onlookers call out remarks about the swan but when the jokes and jeers come from swankier boat owners we seem meant to find them rebarbative. They are too – but since the whole piece depends heavily on the avian pedalo’s comic improbability it seems a bit much to condemn anyone for having a laugh at it. Kotting uses old black-and-white public information films about the River Medway etc in a similarly prejudiced way – the visuals are nostalgically haunting, the plummy narration is anachronistically ridiculous. The swan is remarkable, though. No matter how often it appears, it’s surreal in its natural surroundings – and it never stops looking like a gigantic bathtime toy rather than a conveyance for the open water. The craft is called Edith, after King Harold’s bride. The gender is supposed to be crucial: Sinclair contrasts the sinuous trajectory of a swan, seen as essentially female, with ‘male plodding forward’. A fair amount of the humorous conversation between Kotting and Sinclair is irritating (and probably meant to be) but when Kotting asks two elderly men on the riverbank if they can tell whether the swan is male or female, the reply he gets is the best one-liner in Swandown: ‘Oh, I think that one’s unisex’.
24 July 2012
