London Orbital

LONDON ORBITAL brings together the “country in focus” with the “artists in focus”. The title of our series is taken from the joint film “London Orbital” (2002) by writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. Their films, which also include artist, writer and filmmaker Andrew Kötting as the third member of the trio, can be described as opening up “visual corridors onto our reality”, as Sinclair’s German translator Sven Koch aptly puts it.
Movement is central to the work of British artists. They use unusual means of transport, such as a pedal boat in the shape of a giant swan in Swandown (2012), or they hike through urban fringe areas, like a large housing estate mercilessly enclosed by Europe’s second-longest ring motorway, the M25 (in London Orbital). They actually go hiking: real distances covered on foot form the cinematic framework for exploring the cultural, historical and even psychological depths of the topography. Hiking becomes a thematic space for thought that Iain Sinclair, Andrew Kötting and Chris Petit explore in their films.
The aesthetics of their films are open and raw, and, like their wandering through the landscape, follow spontaneous impulses: a fork in the road is just as likely to trigger associations as bizarre objects from the leisure industry, an app on a mobile phone or experiments with the 16mm camera they carry with them.

Andrew Kötting / with Iain Sinclair

Andrew Kötting Born in Kent in 1959. Studied art at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design and mixed media at the Slade School of Art in London. Taught time-based media at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury. Experimental documentary filmmaker, performance
and installation artist, and book artist who always collaborates with family and friends on his projects.

By Our Selves

Film-maker Andrew Kötting takes inspiration from that great psycho-geographer Iain Sinclair – with whom he recorded an unclassifiably strange journey by pedalo in the 2012 film “Swandown“. Now he has been inspired by Sinclair’s book ”Edge of the Orison”, about the
fascinating and melancholy 90-mile walk undertaken in 1841 by the nature poet John Clare, from a mental asylum in Epping to Northampton, on a pilgrimage to find Mary Joyce, the woman with whom he believed himself to be in love.
Kötting has Toby Jones recreate the scenes of Clare’s great journey or ordeal, often amid bizarrely alienating and alienated scenes of modern life. Jones recites some of Clare’s work in voiceover, and Kötting also asks Jones’s father Freddie Jones to recreate his performance as Clare from a 1970 Omnibus documentary, from which he samples the patronising narration assuring us that Clare “was a minor nature poet who went mad”. – Peter Bradshaw

friday 10 okt 6:00 p.m. filmmuseum | guest: Andrew Kötting

Andrew Kötting
GB 2015 | German Premiere
83 min | English

Swandown

Psychogeography-lite is one way of describing this film by Andrew Kötting, the indulgent record of a gloriously daft journey the film-maker took in the company of author Iain Sinclair. They travel from Hastings beach to Hackney, round the coast and then north and east, via various circuitous waterways – in a pedalo shaped like a swan.
Part of their mission is to bring a defiant message of ambulatory freedom to the grim corporate compound that is the Olympic Park, and renew Sinclair’s protests about how the Olympic behemoth was foisted on local communities in east London. It is also to intuit and celebrate the occult resonances and connections within the landscape – in the traditional and now very familiar psychogeographic style. There are some wonderful, unexpected images of wilderness and the deep countryside of England. – Peter Bradshaw

saturday 11 oct 6:00 p.m. filmmuseum | guest: Andrew Kötting

Andrew Kötting
GB 2012 | German Premiere
90 min | English

Chris Petit / with Iain Sinclair

Chris Petit Born in Malvern, Worcestershire, in 1949. Author of eleven novels. Numerous works for television. As a filmmaker, he plays with essayistic, documentary and fictional forms and their intertwining. He shares with Iain Sinclair, with whom he frequently collaborates, a psychogeographical approach to the urban reality of London, as in his first novel Robinson (1993).

Films (selection)
Radio On 1979 | An Unsuitable Job for a Woman 1981 | Chinese Boxes 1984
Unrequited Love 2006 | Content 2010 | D is for Distance 2025 (20. UX)

Iain Sinclair Born in Cardiff in 1943. Writer, documentary filmmaker, poet, flâneur and visionary urbanist. As a psychogeographer, he is inspired by the Situationists. His exploration of urban spaces traces the hidden connections between politics, economics, fantasies and imagination. Close cinematic collaboration with Andrew Kötting and Chris Petit, among others.

Films (selection)
mit Chris Petit : The Falconer 1998 | London Orbital 2002
mit Andrew Kötting: Swandown 2012 (20. UX) | By Our Selves 2015, (20. UX) |
Edith walks 2017

A hallucinating essay film, in which the M25 motorway around London is point of departure for a virtuoso selection of poetic and intellectual associations. The film is based on the book by Iain Sinclair, in which the writer tells of his walk along the 120-mile road.
Chris Petit did not want to film this book and this walk, but to start from the trance-like state that driving along such a road can evoke in the traveller – like a moon on its orbit around a planet. The road itself receives plenty attention, yet in the film it serves primarily as a metaphor. The road leads us, for instance, to the prophetic work of H.G. Wells and J.G. Ballard – as a monument for a future that already belongs to the past – and gradually turns into a Borgesian labyrinth, in which there is also room for the bloodlines of Bram Stoker’s undead. – IFF Rotterdam

monday 13 oct 6:30 p.m. werkstattkino | guest: Chris Petit

Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair
GB 2002 | German Premiere
76 min | English