Patience (After Sebald) is an intriguing ‘film essay’ about the late author W.G. Sebald and his multi-layered book, which is illustrated with black and white photographs, The Rings of Saturn. Narrated by Jonathan Pryce, the film is made up of readings from the 1995 book, excerpts from interviews with Sebald, and comments and anecdotes from a wide variety of intellectuals, academics, artists, authors and journalists, including Iain Sinclair, Katie Mitchell, Andrew Motion and the artist whose film is currently in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, Tacita Dean. Although there are segments that are unclear and require more knowledge than the uninitiated might have, the film will satisfy fans of Sebald and should attract new readers to his work.  

Sebald was born in Bavaria, Germany in 1944, the turning point of World War II. Although he moved to the UK permanently in 1970 to teach Comparative Literature at the University of East Anglia, his books are all written in German and are permeated with images of the Holocaust and of Germany’s demoralised post-war years. Sebald worked closely on the English translation with his regular translator (The Emigrants, Austerlitz), Michael Hulse. When Sebald died in a car crash in 2001 at the age of 57, the UK lost one of its deepest thinkers and, one of its most original, thought-provoking writers. The film notes that he was considered a likely candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize for the body of his work.

The book’s publisher, Christopher MacLehose, notes how difficult it was to classify the book as required by libraries and retailers. While it adheres to no one genre, categories like biography, history, travel, landscape, and pictorial ‘essays’ all spring to mind. To his credit, Director Grant Gee (Joy Division) avoids pigeon holing his film and tries to find the cinematic equivalent to the book’s style.

In 1992 Sebald took off on a journey on foot through Suffolk; a walk that, judging from the quality of the interviewees in the film, might become one of the most venerated pilgrimages in English literature.  Already Barbara Hui has mapped out the journey (and the book) digitally http://barbarahui.net/litmap/.

The title, which is referred to in the book by an epigraph from the Brockhaus Encyclopaedia, is explained in the film. The rings of Saturn are fragments of a moon that wandered too close to Saturn and was shattered, but continued circling it. This is, perhaps, a metaphor for the shattered fragments of English history that are connected like points on a silk route, or by a thread, if not in our culture, than at least, in Sebald’s book.

Just as the book is digressive – floating seamlessly from touching portraits of selfless deceased academics Sebald knew; to the 17^th century medical pioneer, and silk merchant’s son, Thomas Browne; to a chapter on silk worms – so is the film. The silk metaphor is not coincidental, as, Sebald seems to be suggesting there are threads that connect this narrative after all, just as history is an accumulative continuum uniting the living and the dead. Both book and film are, in some respects, like dreamscapes where fact, fiction and reveries come together; and where time and place intersect on an eternal time line. 

Gee’s film is shot like a progression of photographs, and is primarily in shades of black and white. And just as Sebald’s atmospheric images are characterised by fog, mist and vapour, Gee includes plenty of these in the film. In one haunting shot, the mist rising above a road side corner where Sebald died is transformed into a portrait of the man, with his white whiskers.