Andrew Kötting

Andrew Kötting (born on 16 December 1959) is a British film director, writer, and Artist. Born in Kent, 1959. Studied BA Fine Art at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design, London, 1984; MA in Mixed Media, Slade School of Art, London 1988. In 1989 collaborated with Leila McMillan in setting up BadBLoOd & siBYL studios in the French Pyrenees.

One of his first attempts at filmmaking, according to a Premiere profile, "involved inserting iron filings in the shape of religious icons into his penis and then drawing them out again". For his degree film, a short called Klipperty Klop (1986), Kötting ran round and round a Gloucestershire field pretending to ride a horse.

Over the next ten years, Kötting directed a number of experimental shorts, often produced via the London Film-Makers Co-op.

Kötting's first feature-length movie was Gallivant (1996). A "highly idiosyncratic" documentary, it records a journey the director took clockwise around the coast of Britain accompanied by his 85-year-old grandmother, Gladys, and his seven-year-old daughter Eden. Eden was born at Guy's Hospital, London, in 1988 with a rare genetic disorder – Joubert Syndrome – causing cereberal vermis hypoplasia and several other neurological complications. The growing closeness between these two and the sense of impending mortality give the film its emotional underpinning. Gallivant was premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where it won the Channel 4 Best New Director prize.

Kötting's second feature, This Filthy Earth (2001) was loosely adapted from Zola's novel La Terre, the film is set in a rural community somewhere and sometime in the north of England. Kötting summed up his aim as "trying to show the landscape in its full beauty and brutality". Since then he has completed Mapping Perception (2002), a short 'science, film and art project' inspired by his daughter Eden. Kötting still sees himself as essentially a performance artist. "Even to this day," he says, "I wouldn't think of myself as a feature film-maker. I'm just making longer pieces of work."

Most recently Kötting has returned to working within the gallery context see his In the Wake of a Deadad . www.deadad.info a piece of work which led to his being shortlisted for the Derek Jarman Award 2008.

Filmography/Videography

*Early Works (1980)
*Forgive Me (1983)
*Klipperty Klopp (1984)
*Anvil Head the Hun (1986)
*Self Heal (1987)
*Erik and Ingrid (1988)
*Jäckofalltrades masterofnône inalandofman eâtingtrees (1988) "Performance"
*Hub Bub in the Baöbabs (1989)
*Acumen (1990)
*Hoi Polloi (1990)
*H.B. 1829 (His Badblood) (1991)
*Fleshfilm (1992)
*Diddyköy (1992) "A film by Nick Gordon Smith and Andrew Kötting"
*Smart Alek (1993)
*Festival of Brent (1993)
*Gallivant the Pilot (1994)
*Là Bas (down there) (1994)
*Jaunt (1995)
*Gallivant (1996)
*Donkeyhead (1998) "A film by Andrew Lyndsay and Andrew Kötting"
*Me (1999)
*Kingdom Protista (2000)
*Invalids (2001)
*This Filthy Earth (2001)
*Mapping Perception (2002)
*Nucleus Ambiguous (2002)
*Too G. (2002)
*The Wake of a Deadad (2006)

References

Matheou, Demetrios, 'Profile, Andrew Kötting', Premiere, Oct. 1997, p. 13Calhoun, David, 'Britain as you've never seen it before', Observer (Review section), 14 Oct. 2000, pp. 8-9Calhoun, Dave, 'Up to his neck in mud and blood', Independent on Sunday (Culture section), 8 Dec. 2000, p. 2Kötting, Andrew, 'It's a Dirty Job', Guardian (Section 2), 2 Nov. 2001, pp. 10-11

External links

*In the Wake of a Dead Dad Website [http://www.deadad.info/]
*Mapping Perceptions [http://proboscis.org.uk/mappingperception/index.html]
*imdb name | id=0467836
*BFI Screenonline Profile [http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/578008/]
*Lux Online Profile [http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/andrew_kotting/index.html]
*Guardian Article [http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/oct/21/familyandrelationships.family6]