Andrew Kötting: Straddling both worlds
Ahead of his return to Cork, art filmmaker Andrew Kötting tells about his take on the tale of a boy who lives with a pack of dogs.
One would never regard Andrew Kötting and Shane Meadows as cinematic bedfellows.
Over ten years Meadows senior, Kötting regards himself as an artist working with the moving image, and for close to three decades has ploughed his own furrow, producing a body of experimental film work that defies easy categorisation.
Meadows, meanwhile, is regarded for his more realist film work, which is rooted in a very recognisable north of England, and for scoring a hit with This is England, a feature that developed into a spin-off television series.
Yet when Kötting looks ahead to presenting his latest work, Lek and the Dogs, in Cork, his thoughts return to the friendship he struck up with Meadows when both were presenting their early film work at Cork Film Festival in the mid 1990s.
Kötting was attending the festival to present his first feature Gallivant, a personal piece that saw the filmmaker journey around the coast of Britain accompanied by his 85-year-old grandmother and his seven-year-old daughter Eden, was has a rare genetic disorder called Joubert syndrome.
Meadows was also presenting his first feature Small Time.
“We got on very well,” recalls Kötting, “and then we met again a few years later in Edinburgh. It can be shocking sometimes to think how much time has passed.
"We’ve taken very different career paths but we’re both still very busy making work.”
Kötting’s work inhabits the gaps between narrative cinema and documentary, occupying that hinterland known as expanded or hybrid cinema. In fact, he isn’t quite sure himself where it sits.
“I think this has always been my dilemma, is that it’s quite hard to know whether my work belongs in the kinda wantonly experimental camp or whether it belongs in the more wantonly narrativistic camp,” he considers.
“I think there are stories and narratives in my work but sometimes they are annihilated by my desire to experiment with the medium.”
Lek and the Dogs is perhaps his most boundary pushing work.
An adaptation of Hattie Naylor’s play about a young Muscovite boy who ran away to live with a pack of wild dogs, Kötting’s film takes on a more apocalyptic aspect.
It sounds grim and at times it evokes Tarkovsky’s sombre Stalker, yet it is playful, immersive and engagingly weird. It leaves the filmmaker wonder where he would position it.
“It exists in that strange no-person-land between narrative, documentary and also essay. But I think maybe another element you could throw in there is the way I’m playing with the textures of archive and the detritus of celluloid,” he says, referring to the occasional use of grainy film stock.
“I think there are four very distinct elements at work within that which have always fascinated me, but this is the first time that maybe they’ve all conjoined to produce a piece of work which I’m very satisfied with,” he concludes.
While the central story is a fascinating one, its appearance now as the eyes of the world are seeing a modern and outward looking Russia is a salutary reminder of a great country suffering economic collapse in the ’90s.
However, Kötting’s interest was motivated by a desire to collaborate with Naylor, who had been a student in the Slade School of Art while Kötting was studying his post-graduate there.
“That’s really why I did it. Not necessarily because I was drawn to the story or because I thought it was a story that needed telling.
"It was more about working with her. And I do tend to collaborate with people I care about. It’s rarely I ever collaborate with anybody from the industry.
"It’s just people I have a familial connection with or a mutual respect for the work.
“If you’re going to invest a year or two years of your life I would rather be doing that with somebody I care about,” he reasons.
