Patience (After Sebald)

When quizzed about which sub-sec­tion of a book shop he would be keen for his works to appear, the late, Ger­man-born author WG Sebald respond­ed: all of them. Almost in silent trib­ute to the sui gener­is nature of Sebald’s for­mi­da­ble lit­er­ary offer­ings, Grant Gee’s superla­tive and sin­gu­lar film, Patience (After Sebald), remains equal­ly resis­tant to pigeonholing.

Is it doc­u­men­tary? Art film? Biog­ra­phy? Trav­el­ogue? Philo­soph­i­cal dia­tribe? Psy­cho­geo­graph­ic essay? Or is it a sim­ple cel­e­bra­tion of the intel­lec­tu­al wan­der­lust pos­sessed by this enquir­ing and deeply melan­cholic lit­er­ary sage? In spir­it, it feels like one of Patrick Keiller’s Robin­son movies.

The focus here is specif­i­cal­ly on Sebald’s cel­e­brat­ed 1995 qua­si-mem­oir, ​‘The Rings of Sat­urn’, in which he doc­u­ments his on-foot pere­gri­na­tions around the Suf­folk and East Anglia coastal region. Gee uses the time­line of the book as a nar­ra­tive back­bone for his film, but also invites a diverse range of Sebal­dian experts and super­fans to try to prise mean­ings and allu­sions from the text.

Occa­sion­al­ly there are those who will search for lit­er­al con­no­ta­tions and attempt to locate pat­terns and sys­tems from with­in the pages. Oth­ers, such as artist Taci­ta Dean and the writer Iain Sin­clair, expound more freely on how Sebald’s work inspired their own ways of thinking.

Vivid spec­u­la­tions on the grim beau­ty of the land­scape (suit­ably cap­tured in abra­sive mono­chrome by Gee’s cam­era) are cou­pled with big­ger ques­tions such as how do we men­tal­ly process objects and build­ings? Does our mood effect the way we view the world and the way we inter­act with out own imag­i­na­tion? Where do we look to find inspi­ra­tion in the land­scape? When vis­it­ing a loca­tion, must we always be wary of both past and present? More than being specif­i­cal­ly about Sebald, this is a film about the art of thinking.

If all that sounds rather heavy, it’s real­ly not. The inter­views are edit­ed in such a way that they’re more breezi­ly anec­do­tal than soap­boxy. And the quixot­ic, col­lage-like approach to the imagery mesh­es per­fect­ly with the pas­sages from the book, atmos­pher­i­cal­ly nar­rat­ed by Jonathan Pryce. Also, those not par­tic­u­lar­ly au fait with Sebald’s mus­ings are giv­en a help­ful leg-up by Gee’s aus­pi­cious arrang­ing of the mate­r­i­al, as he makes sure that there’s ample per­son­al biog­ra­phy and con­text mixed in with the more in-depth readings.

Along­side films like John Akomfrah’s The Nine Mus­es and Patri­cio Guzmán’s forth­com­ing Nos­tal­gia for the Light, Patience (After Sebald) already her­alds 2012 as a vin­tage year for the biography/​essay/​philosophical art documentary.