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> REVIEW

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Patience (After Sebald) (2012)

 

Take a walk…

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By Carol Vine | January 2012

 

 

DIRECTOR: Grant Gee

WRITER(s): WG Sebald (source)

 

Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald) is an evocative exploration of WG Sebald’s near-legendary book, The Rings of Saturn – a melancholy, strange and darkly beautiful work that traces the narrator’s physical and philosophical journey through the landscape of Suffolk.

 

Sebald refused to be “boxed” as an author, wanting his work to have all classifications, and it is virtually indefinable – an intense mixture of fact, fiction, travelogue, history, and an examination of mankind’s capacity for abominable acts.

 

Following his award-winning music documentary on Joy Division, Gee’s approach to Sebald’s work has been to produce an “essay” film, which as he states, is “a personal form, not governed by pre-ordained structures and templates”.  Gee has clearly never felt constrained by “commercialism” or hard and fast rules, and here he has created a work that captures the essence of Sebald’s book perfectly.  A literal and figurative journey – a fragmented, hypnotic and surprisingly humorous meditation that traces the author’s physical path of the Sufflok walk, along with the emotional exploration of life, history, loss, landscape and art.

 

It is a richly textured film, combining haunting, grainy images with commentary from the likes of Sir Andrew Motion, director Katie Mitchell and novelist/filmmaker Chris Petit.  The result is a quietly engaging piece that has a meandering beauty.  Gee explores Sebald’s work through atmospheric use of image – visually it is eloquent, subtle, sometimes desolate (as can also be said of Sebald’s text).  The commentators provide an interesting, and occasionally dryly humorous narrative.

 

Gee is best known for his music documentaries, but here he establishes himself as far more diverse.  He approaches a work that could be almost unthinkable in structure and scale, and pares it down to something effective and simple in tone, focusing on the essence of Sebald and the book, on people’s response to it and their personal experience.  As with the book, there’s no real narrative thread; instead Gee structures the film around the landscape, the place, the path of the walk through photographic records. In the old, haunting images there’s a sense of history, of timelessness.

 

But for all Sebald’s melancholy and the “paralysing horror” described in The Rings of Saturn, Patience (After Sebald) is not a depressing film, far from it.  It’s a film that gives us some sense of an extraordinary writer and his imagination, a sense of mystery, a sense of a landscape reinvented.  It is a quiet, personal, beautiful film.

 

Subject……………………………………………………………………………..……………..

 

Grant Gee tackles an extraordinary and complex piece of work by a writer who

may have won the Nobel Prize were it not for his untimely death.  The popularity

of Sebald seems only to increase with time.  4

 

Direction………………………………………………………………………………..…………

 

Gee handles the subject with subtlety, grace and restraint, opting for image and

atmosphere over heavy-handed narration.  The result is a beautifully personal

and evocative study.  4

 

Verdict………………………………………………………………………………………………

 

An exploration of this important work by Sebald with an understanding of the

“place” as an imagined landscape, and some fascinating insights into the author’s mind.  An ambitious piece expertly realised.  4

 

 

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