In short: By Our Selves (2015)

Apart from a handful of exceptions, I’ve never gotten along with much experimental cinema. That’s not the films’ fault, I believe, but more one of those idiosyncratic and personal reactions to art, and I do tend to neither get these things nor develop a feeling for or from them.

So I was a bit surprised that this experimental (though not abstract) piece of filmmaking by Andrew Kotting (sometimes Kötting) did actually speak to me and held my interest throughout. But then, it is following the route John Clare – embodied by the great Toby Jones – took on his escape from an asylum in Essex to his home in Northamptonshire (for other non-Brits like me: that’s quite an expedition on foot, four days in Clare’s case) through what’s now predominantly industrialized agricultural fields and roads full of lorries, with the writer Iain Sinclair as a goat-masked guiding spirit or follower, and even one of the rare-ish appearances of Alan Moore. So it is very much operating in my cultural comfort zone of the discomforted. If it weren’t, I probably wouldn’t have the faintest idea what this thing is even about, but there’s nothing wrong with this sort of project not bringing its own handbook.

It’s an often strikingly shot film, suggesting parallels between Clare’s fractured mind and the human-caused fractures in the landscape we encounter. Though Kotting also still finds a place for the strange - even if it is now by necessity a wilful strangeness filtered through the intellect – even if it is by going through his own movie dressed as a straw bear. For some tastes, this will all be a bit too consciously eccentric in execution, something that’s certainly not helped by Kotting’s puckish sense of humour, but for me, the film works as a way of putting concepts and thoughts that aren’t always best helped by clarity, precision and earnestness into life.

Plus, I could watch Toby Jones doing anything for hours.