Grant Gee's 'Patience (After Sebald)'

Grant Gee's Patience (After Sebald) is an unclassifiable film about an unclassifiable writer. The German writer W. G. Sebald— part novelist, part poet, part historian and part anthropologist— emerged from the cocoon of an academic career in his 40s and 50s to produce four works to which perhaps the term "fictions" is most applicable, although actual, disguised, and imaginary figures move through a landscape that's both visionary and precise: a signposted labyrinth of the mind.

Unlike the Surrealists whom he superficially resembles, however, Sebald's object was not to recreate interior consciousness; he sought to recreate the world itself.

That quest began for him early. Sebald was born in a small Bavarian town in 1944 and grew up in the blasted landscape of postwar Germany. As a child he never heard the war alluded to, publicly or privately; and what we've come to see as its central enigma— the Holocaust— was never acknowledged.

Of course all children grow up in a world of adult mystery in which certain things are never talked about. But for the young Sebald, the sense of a conspiracy of silence was all-engulfing and, at last unendurable: What was being withheld was not this or that corner of experience, but the whole world.

Unnamed, unstable narrator

After study in Switzerland, Sebald migrated to Britain, where he became a professor of English literature at the University of East Anglia. From that vantage, he slowly came to probe the silence that, as he discovered, had only followed him into exile. Together with his contemporary, the painter Anselm Kiefer, Sebald emerged as one of the consciences of modern Germany.

Unlike Kiefer, who depicted the Nazi period directly and defiantly, Sebald's ruminative texts only rarely and tangentially mention the Holocaust. Nonetheless, it's the key to his labyrinth— the hidden site to which his divergent roads all lead.

Typically, a Sebald fiction is a monologue in which an unnamed first-person narrator, presumably the author's persona, sets out in a journey through both time and space. The narrator is not a stable locus for the events he relates: He appears hesitant, depressive and inert, and, in The Rings of Saturn— the basis for Patience— he is hospitalized at the end "in a state of almost complete immobility," or so he says.

Death camps

Nothing much happens to the narrator as he wanders across the coastal country of Suffolk, a landscape unappetizingly described as "nothing but grey water, mudflats and emptiness." Seemingly chance encounters or associations provoke meditations on such subjects as the posthumous fate of the skull of Sir Thomas Browne, the 17th-Century author of Urn Burial; the so-called "Black Diary" of Roger Casement, the Irish patriot executed by the British in World War I; the Tai'ping Rebellion in China, in which 20 million perished; and the World War II Croatian death camp at Jasenovac.

"Time itself grows old," the narrator remarks. Indeed it may seem to.

This would appear the most unpromising kind of material for a film— no character, no plot, no action, but only a text that unfolds like a riddle turning back on itself. But the British documentarian Grant Gee has taken up the challenge and produced a dreamlike, hypnotically beautiful work that follows in Sebald's tracks, with voiceover passages from the text spoken by Jonathan Pryce and interspersed commentary from prominent English writers and critics, including Andrew Motion, Adam Phillips and Marina Warner.

Fatal accident

The film is shot mostly in black and white, or, more precisely, a rich spectrum of grays interrupted by occasional bursts of color. Reversing normal procedure, the grays represent present tense (or, more precisely, a kind of atemporal suspension), while the shots in color signify past events.

Occasionally, a postcard-like color window is superimposed on the gray background, showing a pair of legs doggedly striding along. This presumably represents Sebald himself, and it's also an action that occurred in the past, since the author was killed in an auto accident along these same roads on December 14, 2001.

It also references the photographs (taken by Sebald himself) that intercut the texts of all his fictions. Unlike the prose, they're documentary snapshots that make no claim to aesthetic value or finish. Gee searches out these locales and puts them in his own frame, where— the camera being his pen— they're imbued with a mysterious, haunting life.

Echoes of Napoleon

T. S. Eliot would call this finding an objective correlative, for what Sebald's text does is to read the landscape as a palimpsest through which the past shimmers and slowly yields the traces and secrets of its human inhabitation.

The chief trace yielded by this stretch of Suffolk is that of its former military installation. Sebald is fascinated by old battle sites— one of his other fictions, Vertigo, begins with a set-piece of a Napoleonic battle— and Suffolk was the chief base for the massive Anglo-American bombardment of Germany in World War II. So we revisit the "silence" of Sebald's youth, but from the enemy shore.

Sebald's most controversial book, On the Natural History of Destruction, is a factually based account of the aerial destruction of Germany's cities, a subject in some ways even more taboo in contemporary German culture than the Holocaust. As is usual with Sebald, it's fraught with personal irony, since England was his adopted country, or rather his chosen place of exile.

Bipolar reaction

"It was," he writes of the ruined military site, "as if I were passing through an undiscovered country, and I still remember that I felt, at the same time, both utterly liberated and deeply despondent."

This bipolar reaction is typical of Sebald's narrators. What had happened to his native land was simultaneously justified and horrific. What is "liberated" in the narrator is his sense of guilt (the price of atrocity has been paid); what is depressing is precisely the ensuing relief (which cannot be merited). No wonder his journey traps him in a maze and ends in collapse.

Gee attempts to translate these effects into cinematic terms through overlapping images and sequential voicing, with Sebald's own text set off by commentary and the camera lingering reflectively over some Constable-like effect of sea or sky. These latter moments are actually some of the film's most arresting, not only for their pictorial quality but also for the suggestion of estrangement they convey, of the inviolability of Nature to our purposes.

Philadelphians' patience

Near the end, Gee shows us the place where Sebald was killed— the author himself, grave-faced and deep-toned, appears in the snippet of an interview he gave shortly before his death— and the film comes to a quiet, elegiac close.

Patience had its premiere two years ago at the New York Film Festival, where it was appreciatively received. It has taken this long to travel down the turnpike, but, where innovative art films are concerned, Philadelphians have long schooled themselves to a patience of their own. International House is to be commended for bringing Gee's evocative meditation to town, even if only for a single performance.

If you missed the film, though, you can read the book. Sebald was almost certainly on his way to a Nobel Prize when he was struck down. He didn't translate his own work into English, but like Conrad— whom he uncannily resembles in some ways— he belongs to world literature.