Educational Media Reviews Online

Patience (After Sebald) is an unusual, provocative and almost seductive film that transcends documentary, and becomes more of a visual representation of the late German-born author W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, which was published in German in 1995 and translated into English in 1998. Sebald’s book, in the guise of the author’s narrative (with photographs) of his walking journey through the English countryside, is a hybrid of travelogue, memoir and history, as well as Sebald’s personal reflections on the interconnections of time and thought and geography.

The film traces Sebald’s pilgrimage through the train stations, rolling fields and labyrinths of the East coast of England. Much of it is shot in grainy black and white, much like the photographs in Rings of Saturn. The film’s images are supplemented with color inserts, such as a reoccurring image of a man walking; but there are also specific visuals that complement Sebald’s observations—many of them about war and violence—such as a vintage cockpit film of British airmen on a bombing run during World War II. The first image of the film, which also occurs later, is of a Google map cluttered with an apparent maze of strings secured by thumb-tacks; this maze highlights not only the geographic and historic range of Sebald’s thoughts on history and meaning, but also the connections and patterns he sees in things.

Award-winning director Grant Gee has chosen a variety of renowned writers and artists to discuss Sebald and The Rings of Saturn. These include Tacita Dean, Dan Gretton, Barbara Hui, Arthur Lubow, Robert Macfarlane, Kate Mitchell, Rick Moody, Sir Andrew Motion, Adam Phillips, Iain Sinclair, Bill Swainson and Marina Warner. Their comments illuminate the breadth of Sebald’s knowledge and the complexity of The Rings of Saturn, but their visual presence in the film is wisely minimized in favor of the moving images of Sebald’s walking tour. Jonathan Price supplies Sebald’s first-person narrative as he reads passages from the book.

The power of this film lies in its ability to capture visually the ethereal nature of Sebald’s musings without trying to just put pictures to words and places. The film reveals that Sebald believed that “images can paralyze moral capacity,” and can “militate against our capacity for reflective thinking.” Just as his own observations in Rings of Saturn engage his readers in reflective thought, Grant Gee’s choice of commentators, his cinematography, and the over-all presentation of Patience (After Sebald) engage viewers in much the same way.