Patience (After Sebald.) (PG.)
Directed by Grant Gee.
Naration by Jonathan Pryce, featuring Andrew Motion, Ricky Moody, Ian Sinclair. 82 mins.
After a film about Manchester post punk band Joy Division, director Grant Gee has made a film about a German émigré academic and author with a name like a cricket correspondent who settled in East Anglia, wrote in German and had someone else translate it into English and whose most famous book, Rings of Saturn, documents a walking tour of Suffolk and Norfolk which becomes an unclassifiable study of memory, melancholy, the Holocaust and 20th century atrocity in general. If Wikipedia didn’t insist on him being genuine I’d have assumed that W.G. Max Sebald was an invention of Peter Greenaway or Patrick Keiller.
The movie is a collage of locations, book extracts (narrated by Jonathan Pryce) and the disembodied voices of various writers and academics elucidating its themes. Everything, apart from some archive footage, is in black and white and this gives it a dislocated air. The landscapes are recognisably contemporary East Anglia but the film is a timeless and ghostly vision of the area. Similarly, though Sebald reflects on the past and its relation to the present he seems to be a figure outside of history: mentions of events that tie the action down to 1995 seem as anachronistic as a wristwatch in a gladiator film.
It’s an elusive and mysterious vision but also a thoroughly indexed and annotated one. Each speaker is clearly identified and every scene is accompanied by a page number for the accomplished reader to reference it to.
It is the perfect amalgamation of the BFI British avant-garde moviemaking. It references the work of Greenaway, Jarman, Keiller and all the psycho geographers. As Rings of Saturn wove reflections on the horrors of the past onto the mundane reality of the present, Patience takes a slightly dry and academic piece of art strand documentary and loads onto it a celebration of a kind of arthouse filmmaking that has all but died out. In the Dave age of austerity there will be no place for this kind of fare.
Directed by Grant Gee.
Naration by Jonathan Pryce, featuring Andrew Motion, Ricky Moody, Ian Sinclair. 82 mins.
After a film about Manchester post punk band Joy Division, director Grant Gee has made a film about a German émigré academic and author with a name like a cricket correspondent who settled in East Anglia, wrote in German and had someone else translate it into English and whose most famous book, Rings of Saturn, documents a walking tour of Suffolk and Norfolk which becomes an unclassifiable study of memory, melancholy, the Holocaust and 20th century atrocity in general. If Wikipedia didn’t insist on him being genuine I’d have assumed that W.G. Max Sebald was an invention of Peter Greenaway or Patrick Keiller.
The movie is a collage of locations, book extracts (narrated by Jonathan Pryce) and the disembodied voices of various writers and academics elucidating its themes. Everything, apart from some archive footage, is in black and white and this gives it a dislocated air. The landscapes are recognisably contemporary East Anglia but the film is a timeless and ghostly vision of the area. Similarly, though Sebald reflects on the past and its relation to the present he seems to be a figure outside of history: mentions of events that tie the action down to 1995 seem as anachronistic as a wristwatch in a gladiator film.
It’s an elusive and mysterious vision but also a thoroughly indexed and annotated one. Each speaker is clearly identified and every scene is accompanied by a page number for the accomplished reader to reference it to.
It is the perfect amalgamation of the BFI British avant-garde moviemaking. It references the work of Greenaway, Jarman, Keiller and all the psycho geographers. As Rings of Saturn wove reflections on the horrors of the past onto the mundane reality of the present, Patience takes a slightly dry and academic piece of art strand documentary and loads onto it a celebration of a kind of arthouse filmmaking that has all but died out. In the Dave age of austerity there will be no place for this kind of fare.
