{"id":825,"date":"2015-08-11T11:55:48","date_gmt":"2015-08-11T11:55:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=825"},"modified":"2015-08-11T11:55:48","modified_gmt":"2015-08-11T11:55:48","slug":"review-of-by-our-selves-film-screening-at-bars-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=825","title":{"rendered":"Review of ‘By Our Selves’: Film Screening at BARS 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

We continue our Romantic Imprints retrospective with a review of the special screening of<\/em>\u00a0By Our Selves\u00a0held at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff during the conference. Many thanks to Erin Lafford of the University of Oxford for these thoughts on the film!<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018John Clare was a minor nature poet who went mad\u2019. This statement, uttered in a crisp RP accent, is one of the most memorable soundbites from By Our Selves<\/em>, a recent film release by Andrew K\u00f6tting and Iain Sinclair that re-traces the steps of John Clare\u2019s escape from High Beech asylum in Epping Forest in 1841, back to his home in Northborough. An 80 mile walk reduced to ten words, which in one sense sum up the story that K\u00f6tting and Sinclair are trying to tell as much as they only begin to scratch the surface of the film\u2019s affective and revisionary power. They become a refrain that recurs throughout the film, its frosty enunciation emerging starkly from a sonic patchwork of birdsong, muttered snatches of Clare\u2019s poetry, letters, and journal entries, folk music, the haunting strains of Mary Joyce (played eerily by performance artist and poet MacGillivray), traffic noise, the whir of wind farms, telephone conversations, ominous murmurs of \u2018doctors\u2019, and the rustle of a dancing straw bear.<\/p>\n

It is the soundscape, mixed and edited by Philippe Ciompi with music provided by Jem Finer (of The Pogues fame) and David Aylward, which is most immediately arresting in By Our Selves<\/em>. With the skeleton of Clare\u2019s journey from Essex there as a loose structure for each scene, sound becomes one of the most prominent tools for capturing the disorientation and delusion suffered by the poet and subsequently offered out to the audience. One scene close to the opening of the film shows Clare, played here by Toby Jones, in a clearing within Epping Forest. He stumbles across the forest floor and gazes about him as snippets of sound fade in and out \u2013 voices, snatches of music, the crackle and fuzz of reverb, some fleeting lines from \u2018I Am\u2019, are all blended into each other with the effect that poetry, language and meaning become a messy background noise at the same time as every snap and twang calls out for attention. K\u00f6tting seems to want to retrain our ears in these opening scenes, overturning the precise diction of \u2018John Clare was a minor nature poet who went mad\u2019 with a more anarchic wash of noise that resists such a neat narrative and therefore tests the boundaries of what this madness might have been, and how we might receive it now.<\/p>\n

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