By Our Selves
One of the best films of this year
John Clare was a minor nature poet who went mad. In search of his first love Mary Joyce, three years dead, Clare made an 80 mile journey through Epping Forest from his asylum to the Northamptonshire village of Helpston in 1841, a walk recreated by director Andrew Kötting with Toby Jones as the Peasant Poet himself. By Our Selves is an art film, driven not by narrative but by sound, landscape and abstract image. In the introduction Kötting talks about his desire to portray Clare’s ‘in-scape, his mindscape and soundscape’ and the result is one of the best films of this year.
The camera follows the mute poet, circles him, hugs him, crouches down to study the leaves, shoots off into the air to view the forest as a whole. Repeated lines read by Freddie Jones, Toby’s father, fill the air and mix with the echoing footfalls, finding a way into Clare’s madness through an almost psychedelic eeriness – ‘drifting’ is what Kötting calls it. Sometimes he drags a Straw Bear with a rope, sometimes it walks beside him. The involvement of author and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, who appeared in Kötting’s 2012 film Swandown as the two peddled a swan boat from Hastings to Hackney, provides us with a questioning companion. He interviews academics and follows Jones in a goat mask; he is the devil. Watched not only by Sinclair and Kötting’s camera, there are also shots of CCTV-ish devices attached to trees, creating this strange combination of modern day technology alongside the arboreal wilderness of Epping Forest.
Alan Moore, hairy comics writer and self-professed magician, likes to think of Northamptonshire as the unofficial centre of England, a ‘cultural black hole’ as he calls it in one of the film’s interviews, that has trapped artists, poets and queens alike (including Moore himself). Viewing By Our Selves as this inevitable pilgrimage - as if Clare himself is magnetically drawn to his birthplace - makes it all the more beautiful as he stumbles and stares, giving the film mystical purpose, the power of his poetic mumblings pushing him onwards. It’s a surreal and intellectual experience, one that dregs up memories of MR James ghost stories and Ben Wheatley films to create a work of art that’ll make you want to get lost and eat grass and read nature poetry for the rest of your life.
10/10
