Review No.67: Patience (After Sebald)

Now we're getting into May I'm making the conscious efforts to watch and send back all of my LoveFilm DVDs of films that came out in 2011 as we're getting towards the 2012 releases trickling out. Despite all of this year's film featuring in the high priority list it seems that this is just ignored and instead I get the last two films from last year that I wanted to watch and yet another arthouse documentary namely Patience (After Sebald). After watching The Nine Muses a couple of days ago I could've done with a brainless actioner to balance things out, thankfully plans are in place to watch The Avengers at some point this week, instead it is Grant Gee's film about German poet WG Sebald's book The Rings of Saturn which deals with the author's walking tour/pilgrimage in Suffolk. Sebald spent most of his time teaching at the University of East Anglia however he never felt at home in either Germany or Norwich but the book, in which he reflects on the people he meets and the historical stories the landscape inspires, made him a famous name only five years after his death from a motor accident. The visuals are a mixture of grainy black and white footage of the places mentioned in the text combined with the text itself when it is being read by an unseen Jonathan Pryce. We also get talking heads including people who had turned his words into various maps and flowcharts, scientists talking about the significance of Saturn and admirers such as former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion.

I'm not quite sure I'm the target audience from Patience, which at times comes across as a doctoral dissertation only in film form, as while I'm a fan of literature The Rings of Saturn comes across as a specialist piece. I feel that Gee's purpose of making this film was that more people would want to read Rings of Saturn but going by the information that was given in this film it seems a bit complex. I was quite interested by the mapping system that one of the academics had drawn up plus some of the anecdotes from those that had known him but this 80 minute film never really drew me into Sebald's world in the way that In Search of Haydn did into the composer's. Visually it's not as stunning as The Nine Muses but instead goes to the places mentioned in the book to give us a sense of what Sebald saw on his mission. In the end I think that I felt this was no better or worse than The Nine Muses both of them being specialist films and both of them having their own positive points but unfortunately neither of them appealed to me.

Verdict: Another specialist documentary that I felt the same after watching as I did The Nine Muses so it gets the same score of 5.5/10