Gallivant

[MichaelB]

Andrew Kötting’s riveting and eccentric road movie GALLIVANT (1996) follows his 85-year-old grandmother Gladys and his eight-year-old daughter Eden on a zig-zagging 6,000 mile trip around Britain's coastline. Newly remastered in 2K by the BFI, the Blu-ray includes a selection of short films chosen by the director.

Out on 17 July 2023.

[Calvin]

This is a wonderful film and I'm glad to see it's getting upgraded - the DVD must be about 20 years old now. Hopefully the short films get an HD bump too.

[MichaelB]

Full specs announced:

GALLIVANT
A film by Andrew Kötting

‘When it comes to immersive cinema, few filmmakers can hold a candle to British maverick Andrew Kötting’
Mark Kermode

Limited Edition BFI Blu-ray, iTunes and Amazon Prime release on 17 July 2023

To gallivant, is, according to its dictionary definition ‘to wander about, seeking pleasure or diversion’, and this is just what artist turned filmmaker Andrew Kötting set out to do on this zig-zagging 6,000 mile trip around Britain’s coastline.

Part home movie, part road movie, Kötting’s riveting and eccentric film stars his 85-year-old grandmother Gladys – opinionated, bursting with anecdotes and contradictory reminiscences – and his seven-year-old daughter Eden. As the journey begins, the two are practically strangers, but by the end, ‘Little Eden’ and ‘Big Granny’ have struck up a warm bond, a relationship lent added poignancy by the fact that Eden has Joubert Syndrome, a condition that affects her speech and movement so she communicates through sign language.

Newly remastered, the film is released on Blu-ray for the first time in a Limited Edition, with extras including twelve short films by Andrew Kötting, three film collaborations between Andrew and Eden Kötting, and an illustrated booklet.

Special features
• Newly remastered in 2K by the BFI and presented in High Definition
• 11 short films by Andrew Kötting (1984-2001, 119 mins): Klipperty Klöpp, Hoi-Polloi, Acumen, H.B 1829 (his badblöod), Diddyköy, Smart Alek, Là Bas, Gallivant (The Pilot), Jaunt, Invalids and Me
• Three collaborations between Andrew and Eden Kötting (2018-2021, 33 mins): Dog Ate Dog, In Far Away Land and Diseased and Disorderly
• The Buzz of the Past (Andrew Kötting, 2022, 8 mins): short film commissioned by HOME in Manchester for their retrospective of filmmaker Derek Jarman
• A Gallivant round St Leonards-on-Sea with Andrew Kötting (John Rogers, 2021, 31 mins): filmmaker and writer John Rogers travels to St Leonards-on-Sea in East Sussex to go for a seaside walk with Andrew Kötting
• Limited edition (1,000 copies), including 44-page booklet with writing by Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair, plus an interview with Andrew Kötting by the BFI’s Jason Wood

Product details
RRP: £19.99 / Cat. no. BFIB1491 / 15
UK / 1996 / colour / 104 minutes / English language with optional descriptive subtitles / original aspect ratio 1.66:1 // BD50: 1080p, 24fps, PCM 2.0 stereo audio (48kHz/24-bit)

[Swift]

Nice to see John Rogers in the extras. I subscribe to his youtube channel where he uploads his filmed walks weekly, occasionally featuring fellow psychogeographers Kötting (the piece included on the release can be found there actually) and Iain Sinclair although I believe they have disdain for that term nowadays. I've been meaning to check out some of Kötting's features for a while now, though I haven't cared for any of the various shorts I've seen.

[cubist]

Excellent to have an upgrade but a great shame that the Visionary Landscapes extra from the original release has been dropped. Will have to hang onto the original release then…

I wonder if BFI will now upgrade the similar psychogeography releases “London” and “Robinson in Space” by Patrick Keiller? I very much hope so, Robinson in Space is particularly grim, has a very distracting “mesh” artifact in the visuals.

[colinr0380]

Nice to see John Rogers in the extras. I subscribe to his youtube channel where he uploads his filmed walks weekly, occasionally featuring fellow psychogeographers Kötting (the piece included on the release can be found there actually) and Iain Sinclair although I believe they have disdain for that term nowadays. I've been meaning to check out some of Kötting's features for a while now, though I haven't cared for any of the various shorts I've seen.

Thanks for pointing this out, and I subscribed to his channel! Gallivant is probably the most accessible of Kötting's features since this works as a kind of elaborate family home movie (as much a valediction for the grandmother as a validation for the daughter, with father generationally trapped between them as the facilitating brawn) combined with discussion of the similarly disappearing, and often bizarrely unorthodox, extremely specific local traditions of the inhabitants of the coastline that they are travelling around. I keep wondering if this structurally inspired the BBC's later (albeit much more conventional) Coast series!

The later films like Swandown and the recently released by Anti-Worlds The Whalebone Box get much more forcefully avant-garde and abstract, so may be a bit too much (arguably a bit too obscurely solipsistic) for general audience tastes.

Excellent to have an upgrade but a great shame that the Visionary Landscapes extra from the original release has been dropped. Will have to hang onto the original release then…

I wonder if BFI will now upgrade the similar psychogeography releases “London” and “Robinson in Space” by Patrick Keiller? I very much hope so, Robinson in Space is particularly grim, has a very distracting “mesh” artifact in the visuals.

Seconded, especially so that those two earlier films can complement the BFI's Blu-ray release of the third film, Robinson In Ruins!

[ntnon]

Nice to see John Rogers in the extras. I subscribe to his youtube channel where he uploads his filmed walks weekly, occasionally featuring fellow psychogeographers Kötting (the piece included on the release can be found there actually) and Iain Sinclair although I believe they have disdain for that term nowadays. I've been meaning to check out some of Kötting's features for a while now, though I haven't cared for any of the various shorts I've seen.

What's the new term..?

[Swift]

I'm not sure that there is a new term, but Sinclair in particular feels the idea has become co-opted.

[Aunt Peg]

Got my copy yesterday. I haven't seen the film in years.

Hopefully the BFI will give This Filthy Life the same treatment.