It’s fitting that a post about Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald) is written on
the last day in which the movie is screened--alas, will Film Forum ever bring this treasure back? Thus the reader of the blog is able
to feel the sense of something which both exists and doesn’t exist, which is
just one of the many themes of the film. Patience is an attempt to retrace the steps of W.G. Sebald’s now iconic The Rings of Saturn, his l992
recollection of a walk he took around Suffolk. The notion of the uncanny is a
recurring theme in the film, which introduces us to Rick Moody, Andrew Motion,
Barbara Hui (a scholar who uses satellite photos to
create a sense of connection between all the places that Sebald cites in the
book and who introduces the l7th century physicianThomas Browne’s Quincunx Board into the discussion), Adam Phillips, the psychoanalyst, and a number of other scholars, publishers and artists who share a fixation on
Sebald’s work. The uncanny, or Unheimlichkeit was a word used by both Freud and Heidegger and it literally means not feeling
at home. Sebald is quoted as saying the one place he ever felt at home was the
I'isle de St. Pierre on Lake Biel in Switzerland, where Rousseau also lived, which was
a little like the Ark (or really half the Ark) to the extent that there was one
of everything: one farmhouse, one field, one fence. One of the commentators remarks that the concept of home is really non-existent. It’s a
children’s idea. Certainly a place where there is only one or even two of
everything is. The grainy black and white photos of the places Sebald passes
through (recalling the grainy photos from the original book) are intermixed
with color inlays which give a sense of the film’s present act of retracing.
Sebald was born in Germany in l944 and lived his adult life in England (before dying in a car crash in 2001). The memory of both psychic and physical devastation of
the Second World War and its horrific antecedents never left him. Obviously there are other Germans who immigrated to England after the war and who do not walk the
countryside experiencing a world of haunted associations in which the shell of
recognition is peeled away from familiar objects. But then again these other
Germans or their English counterparts, who have moved to Berlin or Munich or the
Bavarian countryside, are not W.G. Sebald.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
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