For his film Patience (After Sebald), screening in Spectrum, Grant Gee followed in the footsteps of venerated writer W.G. Sebald, Ed Lawrenson writes
It was relatively recently that Grant Gee encountered the work of W. G. Sebald. “It was about 2007,” he says, “and someone just passed me the book and said, ‘go on, read that’.” The ensuing movie
Patience (After Sebald) is a feature-length film essay on
The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s 1995 account of a walking tour he took of Suffolk in the east of England. A melancholy mix of travelogue, history, memoir and criticism, the book is perhaps the fullest expression of Sebald’s digressive style, an expansive and ruminative tone that the film shares.
“I wanted the film to act in a way so that it had a drift to it,” says Gee. “So that after a while you could accept a transition from a bit of archive film to a bit of biography to a bit of landscape. Any information that came up without jolting us. I wanted the film to have a hypnotic quality, so you could accept different types of material.” Mixing interviews with Sebald enthusiasts, including Tacita Dean and Rick Moody, with archive material, the “spine” of the movie comprises black-and-white 16mm footage of the locations where Sebald walked. Armed with a Bolex camera, Gee “plotted out exactly where Sebald walked” and followed the route, stopping to film what he needed.
Aptly enough, given Sebald’s pre-occupation with loss, the stock that Gee wanted to use was about to be discontinued. This limited how much he could shoot. “The fact of only having 90-odd minutes of stock for an 80-odd minute film was just brilliant. It meant no retakes. Don’t mess around. And when it came to the editing, basically everything I shot is there.”
A German writer who was long based in Britain, Sebald explored the cultural connections between his country of birth and adopted homeland. The writer also reflected on larger questions of European identity: “That’s one of the really important things that the book has left with me – the sense of England being part of Europe, imaginatively and literally.” Bemused by the similarities between between the Dutch landscape and East Anglian one that Sebald wrote about, he adds: “It’s the same thing really, even down to the windmills.”
More about Patience (After Sebald) here.