Edith walks

In his last film to date, Andrew Kötting meets again author-director-walker- psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, the famous author of London Orbital, but also
his long-time friend and fellow traveller in By Our Selves (FID 2015), in which they tackled the figure of poet John Clare. This time, their guide and inspiration is Edith Swan Neck, the wife of King Harold, who was defeated by William the Conqueror in Hastings in 1066, in what became a founding act in the History of England. So Kötting, together with a surprising Edith and a few other companions, hits the roads and paths of the United Kingdom with a Super 8 camera, an iPhone and a specially devised recorder, and embarks on an epic, fanciful, festive and hallucinatory journey. Over 60 minutes and 66 seconds – well, well! – we follow them from Waltham Abbey, where Harold is buried, via Battle Abbey, where he died during the battle, to St Leonards-on-Sea, where there is a sculpture of Edith and – incidentally? – where Iain Sinclair lives. Five days and 170km of a journey brightened up by jokes, conversations and more or less unexpected meetings – once again with Alan Moore – in a landscape suffused with myths. In this journey, History merges with legends, and a love story doubles up as the story of a friendship. Their walk is as much a performance as a sharing experience, allowing the two lovers to reunite through the film. Here, cinema becomes at once an epic gesture, a documentary, and a free, unpredictable, poetic form of storytelling, which engages into a critical dialogue with the memorial statue, the end point of both the journey and the film. (NF) (NF)
Andrew Kotting