Join us on Thursday 23 February at 4 p.m. in Lecture Theatre one for a screening of Grant Gee's film essay Patience (After Sebald). Following the screening Grant will be in conversation with critic and tutor in Critical Writing in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art Brian Dillon. For more information on Gee's film go here.
The public release of Patience (After Sebald) by Grant Gee in January this year coincided with the ten-year anniversary of the death of the Swiss-German born writer W.G. Sebald. Since his death in 2001 Sebald’s estimation as a writer has gone from strength to strength to being considered an unmistakably major European voice. Indeed there are those who speculate that had he lived he would have been in the running for the Nobel Prize.
On record there is an extraordinary list of writers that have come under the star of Sebald: Will Self, John Banville, the critic Michael Silverblatt, John Berger, Robert MacFarlane. And if any of you caught The Essay on Radio 3 before Christmas about Sebald you will have heard the story of how Susan Sontag sought him out at a soiree and sat at his feet to listen. Sebald’s writing (and person) has a curious intimate quality, it creates a strong sense that there is only you and him. To say such a thing about an author is a cliche ('he/she speaks to me directly'), but no doubt it applies to Sebald. He writes with a kind of cadence and rhythm that, given the time, you enter into in a bodily way. A friend who knew him personally characterised him as a kind of Pied Piper figure. He has entered the vocabulary: objects, events - phenomena can be ‘Sebaldian’. Even if such phenomena came before Sebald they can be retroactively Sebaldian.
Grant Gee’s film Patience (After Sebald) is based on the author’s book The Rings of Saturn first published in German in 1995. The book records a summer journey on foot along the coast of East Anglia. Blending fiction, autobiography and history Sebald uses the landscape as a backdrop to reflect on relationships between ‘man’ and nature: deforestation, towns drowned by the sea, imperialism and industrial decline, and to address (however obliquely) some of the most urgent questions of modern history concerning trauma, forgetting and the holocaust. In The Rings of Saturn an ostensibly pastoral summer walk slips into something much more harrowing.
Gee’s film performs what I want to call an archaeological re-enactment of that East Anglian walk. It physically re-traces the journey in the landscape whilst presenting those who have been moved to respond to Sebald’s work, situating the writer in a recent history of ideas. The film is also an extension of the book, identifying and bringing to life aspects of the narrative by cinematographic means.
Despite living in England for over twenty-five years Sebald never wrote in English, always his native German. Translation is at the heart of his project and he developed close working relationships with several translators - one of whom, Michael Hamburger, features in Patience. Obviously Gee is not the first director to make a film based on a book, but this question of translation is one central to his project too. The question could be put like this: How does a filmmaker translate a book - by many accounts a great book, into a film? What kind of transformations and departures take place between the original text and its new form?
The public release of Patience (After Sebald) by Grant Gee in January this year coincided with the ten-year anniversary of the death of the Swiss-German born writer W.G. Sebald. Since his death in 2001 Sebald’s estimation as a writer has gone from strength to strength to being considered an unmistakably major European voice. Indeed there are those who speculate that had he lived he would have been in the running for the Nobel Prize.
On record there is an extraordinary list of writers that have come under the star of Sebald: Will Self, John Banville, the critic Michael Silverblatt, John Berger, Robert MacFarlane. And if any of you caught The Essay on Radio 3 before Christmas about Sebald you will have heard the story of how Susan Sontag sought him out at a soiree and sat at his feet to listen. Sebald’s writing (and person) has a curious intimate quality, it creates a strong sense that there is only you and him. To say such a thing about an author is a cliche ('he/she speaks to me directly'), but no doubt it applies to Sebald. He writes with a kind of cadence and rhythm that, given the time, you enter into in a bodily way. A friend who knew him personally characterised him as a kind of Pied Piper figure. He has entered the vocabulary: objects, events - phenomena can be ‘Sebaldian’. Even if such phenomena came before Sebald they can be retroactively Sebaldian.
Grant Gee’s film Patience (After Sebald) is based on the author’s book The Rings of Saturn first published in German in 1995. The book records a summer journey on foot along the coast of East Anglia. Blending fiction, autobiography and history Sebald uses the landscape as a backdrop to reflect on relationships between ‘man’ and nature: deforestation, towns drowned by the sea, imperialism and industrial decline, and to address (however obliquely) some of the most urgent questions of modern history concerning trauma, forgetting and the holocaust. In The Rings of Saturn an ostensibly pastoral summer walk slips into something much more harrowing.
Gee’s film performs what I want to call an archaeological re-enactment of that East Anglian walk. It physically re-traces the journey in the landscape whilst presenting those who have been moved to respond to Sebald’s work, situating the writer in a recent history of ideas. The film is also an extension of the book, identifying and bringing to life aspects of the narrative by cinematographic means.
Despite living in England for over twenty-five years Sebald never wrote in English, always his native German. Translation is at the heart of his project and he developed close working relationships with several translators - one of whom, Michael Hamburger, features in Patience. Obviously Gee is not the first director to make a film based on a book, but this question of translation is one central to his project too. The question could be put like this: How does a filmmaker translate a book - by many accounts a great book, into a film? What kind of transformations and departures take place between the original text and its new form?
