W.G.
Sebald rose to prominence late in life, but for a brief period he was
considered one of the leading candidates for the Nobel Prize in literature. Unfortunately, due to his accidental death at
the peak of his productive years, he is probably already due for a critical reappraisal. Indeed, his influence on artists working in
diverse disciplines has steadily grown in recent years. Rock music documentarian Grant Gee radically
shifts gears, using Sebald’s fictionalized travelogue-essay The Rings of Saturn as a jumping off
point for his meditative documentary, Patience
(After Sebald), which opens this Wednesday at the Film Forum (trailer here).
Though
keenly aware of the pitfalls of such an approach, Patience more or less retraces the steps of the fictional narrator
of Sebald’s walking tour across the picturesque but lonely Suffolk landscape in
the German expatriate’s acknowledged masterwork. Yet, it quickly becomes clear Sebald the
author is a subject who resists biographers’ conventional strategies.
Instead,
Sebald is often presented as a series of paradoxes. The German-born English professor wrote all
his significant books in his original tongue, requiring their translation in to
English. Several commentators note that
it is really the Michael Hulse translation of Rings on which his reputation largely rests. His work was deeply informed by the
Holocaust, but is not easily aligned with any subsequent ideology. Indeed, despite increasing invitations to
serve as a public intellectual, Sebald remained a private, almost inscrutable
individual.
For
practical purposes, this leaves Gee with Sebald’s text and some striking East
Anglia scenery, beautiful in a grey traditional Wuthering Heights kind of way.
Sounding like the essence of erudition, Jonathan Pryce’s voice-overs perfectly
suit the former, while the mostly black-and-white photography of the latter
evokes a mood of quiet introspection. (However,
Gee’s reliance on an academic researcher’s google-looking online map of Sebald’s
Saturn sojourn, though impressive
scholarship, consistently clashes the film’s visual style.)
