Patience (After Sebald) [DVD]

Following in the footsteps of the narrator of W G Sebald's extraordinary work The Rings of Saturn sadly makes for a most pedestrian experience.
The film is disappointing on so many levels that it left me, as an admirer of Sebald's books, angered and profoundly depressed but, sad to say, not really surprised, given the British tendency to reduce all forms of cultural enterprise to the level of a National Trust magazine feature. One wonders whether director Grant Gee thought at all about the medium he was using or what 'a documentary film' actually means; surely the opportunity was there to explore in a Sebaldian way - allusively, tangentially, playfully - Sebald's extraordinary text and its impact on a generation of artists. Instead, we have a film which is earnest but wearisome; leaden-footed, and deeply unimaginative. Why, for example, are all the people interviewed either British or American? Given that Sebald was German, and wrote in German, achieved literary fame first in Germany and given that his subject, by and large, was the 'tacit conspiracy' of silence in post-war Germany, would it not have been worthwhile to talk to some Germans? It says something about the film's cosily insular outlook - something Sebald repeatedly and pointedly pokes fun at - that even though much is made of his European sensibility, and his work's Nobel Prize-worthy international resonance, the only German accent we hear belongs to Sebald himself. And even though Sebald's highly distinctive and exciting way of creating meaning and of questioning the value of documentary 'evidence' is exactly what all the people in the film are talking about, Gee seems to imagine that a series of images of the places Sebald mentions (rendered somehow more 'meaningful' or 'poetic' by being in black and white, or blurry, or wobbly, or all three) and some close-ups of the pages of the book, somehow magically add up to a worthwhile enterprise. They don't. They add up to some rather dull pictures to go with some rather dull talking and some rather dull music. The people interviewed have, with a few honourable exceptions, very little interesting or perceptive to say about the book, being largely content to try to explain how it works (as if we, as readers, had somehow missed this) how good it is (ditto) or, even more boringly, 'what it meant to them'. The film would probably be so boring for someone who has not already read The Rings of Saturn to sit through that it would put them off Sebald for life, and for those who have read the book it adds absolutely nothing to the experience beyond, perhaps, a sense of wonder that such a magical work can be made to seem so dull. Bewilderingly, Gee even gives space to some deluded individuals who think that by 'mapping' the places Sebald mentions they are doing something other than vapidly parasitizing his work. But their contribution seems positively scintillating in comparison with a final sequence discussing Sebald's untimely death which is as tasteless as it is pretentious.The absence of any adequate critical or artistic engagement with Sebald's work on the part of either the contributors or the film-maker is, given the intellectual generosity and fertility of its subject, profoundly dispiriting.

I had read 'Rings of Saturn' and I come from East Anglia so I was bound to go for a film based on Sebald's book. Will this make sense without a review of the book too? I'm not sure. I won't go into it here, but the book is weird, very personal, goes off in many different directions but is totally fascinating. The film has the same sort of free-ranging weirdness and includes interesting insights into Sebald from writers and friends.
If you have read the book then, in my estimation, the film will hugely complement it. If you see the film first it will probably make you want to read the book but it might just put you off.

Patience (After Sebald) is a highly evocative film which captures the quiet, uncanny melancholy of Sebalds's book, The Rings of Saturn. Some of the text of the book is read as a voice-over as the camera scans scenes described by Sebald in his pilgrimage across the coastal plains of Suffolk. Sebald's own voice is also occasionally heard as he talks about his own work. Poets and artists also describe the techniques that he uses to produce the effects that the book evokes. The film ends with a rather strange photographic transformation at the place of Sebald's sudden death where smoke from a firework gradually transforms into an image of his doleful face, heavy with eyebrows.

Sebald is one of the most interesting German writers to emerge since the Second World War. He supervised the translations of his work into English himself so, although his work is German in origin, the English versions have the same authority as the original German. His work owes a great deal to writers in the German tradition such as Kafka and Walter Benjamin but also to Freud's psychological insights into aesthetics and to the phenomenological tradition that featured at the University of Freiburg when Sebald was a student there in the 1960's.

Anybody who has been fascinated and captivated by Sebald's writing, particularly The Rings of Saturn will find this DVD a satisfying supplement to their of Sebald's books - which, because of his untimely death in 2001, will remain forever sparse.