Patience (After Sebald)
Directed by: Grant Gee
(2012)
Patience (After Sebald) made me curious enough to read the book, but I would not watch the documentary again.
The documentary starts with one of the most peculiar sequences I’ve ever seen on a big screen: a giant, moving Google Earth map. Patience (After Sebald) focuses on writer W.G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn. The book relates to a series of walks the author took in Suffolk , East Anglia
The most striking feature of the documentary is its surprising, inventive and quite home-made editing. Images dissolve into one another, pages of the book are juxtaposed to images of landscapes, sometimes two images are superimposed one to the other, a new image opens in a widow on top of the other. I guess that to an audience familiar with the book this kind of freestyle editing might be of resonance with Sebald’s way of writing. To an audience less familiar with the book and author, however, this jumbled editing remains confusing. On this regard, the documentary would have benefitted from a clearer, progressive exposure of the book and context and a less experimental approach.
That said, Patience (After Sebald) does touch on certain aspects of the book that make you want to read The Rings of Saturn. In particular, the fact that the book as been interpreted as an oblique response to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The idea that places and events can transform into signs which respond or provide cues to how to think of modern days is also of interest. Finally, the trope the book exploits of the walk, as a melancholic activity in a world lacking tangible meaning, acquires a significantly nostalgic taste, reflecting on a way of travelling which we somehow lost.
You might need to have some patience to watch Grant Gee’s documentary. But you will also be introduced to an enticing work of literature, as experimental as the feature is.
fiamma
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