Patience (After Sebald)

Rating: 3/5  

W.G. Sebald was a German-born writer who lived in the U.K. from the early 1970s, teaching at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and publishing major, acclaimed works beginning in the late ‘80s. By some accounts, he was one of the great figures of literature of his time. There were even those who were completely convinced that he was in line to receive the Nobel Prize when he suffered an untimely death at the age of 57 in 2001, caused by an aneurysm he suffered behind the wheel of his car. It may have been fitting that he was traveling when he left this world since travel is the key component to what is largely considered his greatest work, the book that inspires the foundational structure of Grant Gee’s new documentary on the author.

Patience (After Sebald) traces the life and influence of the writer in a suitably erudite, cerebral manner. Drawing on Sebald’s 1995 novel The Rings of Saturn, Gee’s film assembles footage meant to trace the lead character’s wanderings around the county of Suffolk. As is noted by Barbara Hui, creator of the Litmap project (an endeavor meant to map real locations included in classic books), almost every page of the book includes a specific real place name. Gee has plenty of luminaries lined up to extol the virtues of Sebald’s artistry – including novelist Rick Moody and literary critic Adam Phillips – but he largely eschews talking head footage. Instead he treats that as voiceover to be stitched together and leans on newly shot black-and-white images of the various locales visited in {Saturn}, often including a helpful on-screen credit to identify exactly which page of the book it appeared on.

The commentary mingles with Jonathan Pryce’s readings from Sebald’s novel, the dry, careful recitations of both sometimes merging so softly together that it’s like separate streams meeting. When that’s combined with the meditative quality of the images, the film takes on a slightly mesmerizing quality. In fact, certain testimonials fade away before they’re completed, heightening the sense that this is a piece of scholarship filtered through the wavy logic of a dream or the wandering cognition of an ever-churning mind. Patience (After Sebald) looks like the kind of thing James Franco sees when he falls asleep in one of his graduate school seminars.

It may not be conventional or even all that gripping, but the film does hold a ruminative fascination. It comes across as an especially honest method for a filmmaker to grapple with the challenges of unlocking the mysteries of print. It’s not especially dynamic to film the pages of a book, but when Gee dissolves from one deliberately grainy photograph that Sebald inserted between paragraphs to another that appeared a few pages later, finding the hidden symmetry in the work, it ably demonstrates the way one artist can use his unique tools to unlock the mysteries of another. Patience (After Sebald) isn’t about delivering answers like most documentaries. Instead, it’s about the long, slow discovery process that comes from asking questions in the first place.

• Director:
  Grant Gee
• Rating:
  NR
• Runtime:
  82 min.
• Studio:
  Cinema Guild