Patience

... quite well enough, thank you, but with a resonant German basso that makes his words instantly distinguishable in this collage of voices of his British admirers. That's one thing I learned from Patience After Sebald, since I never had the privilege of meeting the man. Another thing I learned was how awkwardly any trace of narcissism comports with Sebald's preternatural integrity. More than a trace of narcissism went into the making of this abstracted documentary; you'll hear it in the measured reflections and observations of a dozen or so literary luminaries, though less of it in the voices of the "commoners" who encountered Sebald during his lifetime in England. And I don't begrudge anyone a portion of narcissism; how could you possibly dare to write anything without it? The astonishment is reserved for W.G Sebald, whose books seem freer of literary flash than anything else I've ever read. His honesty with himself is what makes his honesty with readers believable."Patience" is a collage of visual images as well as verbal reflections. Most of the images are black and white, grainy, loosely cropped, seemingly almost random; thus they are patently an imitation of the odd snapshots that Sebald sprinkled on his pages, photos that look both informal and inconsequential until you place them mentally in the text. The fact that Sebald manipulated his photos mechanically to make them look 'naive' is another thing I learned from the film. The implication is startling. Sebald's simplicity and sincerity were not achieved without deliberate craft.The 90-minute film is constructed as a 'pilgrimage' along the same walking route Sebald described in his book "The Rings of Saturn." Places Sebald visited are revisited. Thoughts that came to Sebald's mind as he toured are re-thought, and his many allusions and diversions -- historical, scientific, biographical -- are pursued. Sebald's footsteps through the countryside meandered, his book meanders, and the film meanders, though one of the central points the film hopes to make is that "The Rings of Saturn" is not as loosely meandering as it might at first seem. Its neutrality is aligned with passionate concerns.What were Sebald's concerns? The film suggests that a resigned despair over the eroding 'Lebenswürdigkeit' (I made that word up; if it were really German it would mean Life-Worthiness) of the 20th Century is his insistent theme in The Rings of Saturn, an erosion that parallels the erosion of the cliffs and beaches of East Anglia. Is the book fundamentally a Holocaust essay, as the film implies? If so, it's both elusive and allusive ... and that's what makes it so affective.Robert Walser and Thomas Browne both show up as referents in the film, as they do in The Rings of Saturn and elsewhere in Sebald's works. And that's something else I learned from the film. I had picked up on the similarities of Sebald's word-walks to the walk-words of Robert Walser, but I hadn't grokked the across-the-centuries communion of thoughts among the 17th Century Browne and the two 20th Century amblers. What a triangle they make!One last thing I learned from the film: I need to read The Rings of Saturn again. It had a huge impact on me when I first read it about ten years ago, but I think there's more to be had from it.

A very beautiful discussion of Sebald's life and work. Pryce captures the spirit and tone of Sebald's writing in this film.

Amazingly the film captures the mood and some of the ideas of Sebald in an effective and stirring manner. It lays open the Rings of Saturn for anyone who wants a bit of reinforcement.

This film is a fantastic work of art and understanding. Beautiful, haunting and profound, True to the letter and spirit of The Rings of Saturn. Max would be proud and happy about Patience. Highly recommended.

This is a highly unusual and mesmerizing film, one that in many ways captures the essence of Sebald's writing and eloquence. The focus of following Sebald's footsteps around the Norfolk coast works very well, and the interjections of various authors and their views of the book, as the film navigates the coastline, provides a very enjoyable and informative viewing experience.

This documentary introduced me to Sebals writings

This is the first film about the international acclaimed writer, W.G. Sebald, portraying the work and influence of this author. In addition to historic facts, contributions are included from writers, filmmakers, and artists. The art and rich landscape is stunning, and the portrait of life and loss is thought-provoking throughout. The film brings the viewer through Coastal East Anglia, the path which followed Sebald in "The Rings Of Saturn.' Brilliant, and Entertaining. Highly Recommended!

confused rambling.... Sebald was a great author this does not do him justice. Reread his books rather tan waste time on this over arty flic

A chi ama i libri di Sebald, e in particolare "Gli anelli di Saturno", questo documentario risulterà sicuramente commovente. Girato prevalentemente in bianco e nero, a memoria delle foto inserite nei suoi libri, e con una delicatezza rara. Assolutamente consigliato.

Objects in the rings of Saturn are scattered, diffuse, in constant motion, broken debris from asteroids and comets that have been orbiting the planet aimlessly and steadily for over four billion years. The journey in eternal circles goes nowhere, which for Sebald forms an irresistible image of wandering and its accompaniments — dislocation, exile, rootlessness, loss and homelessness. A child of the German wandervögel, he wanders as existential guide through such debris here on Earth — through history, landscapes, aesthetics and ideas, an itinerant philosopher-poet with a desire to roam, witness and remember.The film is exemplary in its attempt to bring the nuances, peculiarities and difficulties of Sebald's writing to the screen. Its narrative is non-linear, its voiceovers sensitive and insightful, its cinematography dreamy, soft-focussed and full of dissolves, one form flowing into another, the sky merging with the sea, for instance, as if to say the only borders we see in the world are those we create and imagine. In this way the film is faithful to Sebald's mind and spirit.It's often been said that he was a ghostly sort of writer, that he wrote about lost and missing things — things scattered from memory by time or by willful acts of denial or obfuscation. If so, the film takes advantage of this by showing the odd connecting points his mind made while wandering. For instance, he sees Norfolk, the ground over which he treads, as an extension of the old geological and geographical Germany. Long, long ago when the land was connected, long before there was a Channel, East Anglia was the mouth of the Rhine. The water to the east is not the North Sea in his mind; it is the old German Sea which washes against his old ancestral homeland. He is a wanderer and stranger in Britain, yet he is not. To the extent there can be any home on Earth for one, he's at home in Norfolk, in the old ancient realm of the Angles, Saxons and Norsemen. His sense of things — lands, landscapes, peoples, time — is fluid. Thus if his writing flows like a river between points in time and place, the film does too in a beautiful dreamy way. If you are quiet, mindful and patient, it sweeps you along, just as Sebald's books do.There is joy in this because this is what beauty does to us. It makes us happy. But there is sadness too, a lamentation for loss — the hopeless destruction made by war, the ravages of landscapes made by human ideas and desires, the loss of places and homes, including homelands. Home is really an emotion, not a place. It's what we feel for something valuable and defining, for the things that make our identity. It could be anything: our old school, the fields and trees we played in as children with our friends, our bedroom, the town square now gone, covered by a car park and shopping centre. For Sebald modern Germany was the lost domain. He belonged to another Germany, perhaps the Germany Goethe had enjoyed, rather than to one divided by a wall and Cold War politics.He wasn't at home in the silence of modern Germany either, in a past of which no one would speak openly. He called it a conspiracy of silence among the adults, a great taboo no one had the courage to touch. He had to discover the holocaust by himself, he said, and when he did he was astonished, mortified, ashamed. Where could he go to bury and honour the dead? What could he do? His solution was to go inward, and to England, and to ghostly, hallowed places in his mind. It's as if he wrote his books for the millions of departed souls, as though he wanted to reach out to them with his own comforting sorrow and pity. Wandering for him was a way of coming to terms with memory and history.Film, naturally, is the art of the visual. How, then, to sensitively portray the inner world of a writer, the realm of writerly ideas? It's difficult, of course, and probably never fully possible. Reading a writer is what should be done. There in a book your own imagination creates worlds only suggested by the words. But film has a right to try. This one does and I think succeeds as well as may be thought possible. I feel Sebald's spirit in it. I see his ideas represented — ideas understood and appreciated by the filmmaker and all who took part in the film. Also, the film does not lecture to us; it invites us in. To the extent we can, we are allowed to enter the mind of a truly great writer. It's wonderful that this film was made. I believe it would have made him happy.

You know when you watch some film and you're just dumbstruck afterwards? You feel profoundly affected by it but you don't know why or how?This is such a film. I read Sebald's 'The Rings of Saturn' many years ago and could sense the attraction, and this film has re-awakened my appreciation. Perhaps I need also to return to coastal Suffolk sometime soon, but if there is a lesson to be learned in this film it is that this 'English Pilgrimage' is not one in which to find Sebald.Anyway, if Sebald means nothing to you, none of this will make much sense. Suffice to say director Grant Gee has done what many would think impossible: to fashion a captivating film in the book's image, with contributions from the likes of Robert Macfarlane, Adam Phillips, Iain Sinclair, Marina Warner, and Andrew Motion.And to think I went to school with Grant Gee! Wow!

Patience (After Sebald) is a highly evocative film which captures the quiet, uncanny melancholy of Sebalds's book, The Rings of Saturn. Some of the text of the book is read as a voice-over as the camera scans scenes described by Sebald in his pilgrimage across the coastal plains of Suffolk. Sebald's own voice is also occasionally heard as he talks about his own work. Poets and artists also describe the techniques that he uses to produce the effects that the book evokes. The film ends with a rather strange photographic transformation at the place of Sebald's sudden death where smoke from a firework gradually transforms into an image of his doleful face, heavy with eyebrows.Sebald is one of the most interesting German writers to emerge since the Second World War. He supervised the translations of his work into English himself so, although his work is German in origin, the English versions have the same authority as the original German. His work owes a great deal to writers in the German tradition such as Kafka and Walter Benjamin but also to Freud's psychological insights into aesthetics and to the phenomenological tradition that featured at the University of Freiburg when Sebald was a student there in the 1960's.Anybody who has been fascinated and captivated by Sebald's writing, particularly The Rings of Saturn will find this DVD a satisfying supplement to their of Sebald's books - which, because of his untimely death in 2001, will remain forever sparse.

Beautiful. Intriguing. Visionary. A "must have" if you loved Sebald's Rings of Saturn and you are fond of psychogeographical stuff.