A richly textured essay film on landscape, art, history, life and loss, Patience (After Sebald) offers a unique exploration of the work of internationally acclaimed writer W.G. Max Sebald via a walk through East Anglia tracking his most influential book, The Rings of Saturn.
Grant Gee’s doc is a suitably arty attempt to convey some of the book’s rich patchwork of allusions and digressions.
With so many films adapted from novels, it's nice to see cinema paying homage to unheralded greats of literature like Sebald. While this one often struggles to do justice to his sense of grandeur and poetry, it'll be manna for fans of the German's work.
If you haven’t read the book, you’ll want to. If you have read the book, you’ll want to read it again.
Plainly it's required viewing for [Sebald's] readers, though the reverential lit-crit tone and non-cinematic scale might not seduce the uninitiated. BBC4 is the film's natural habitat.
In keeping with the spirit of Sebald's writing, Gee's film is teasing, elegant and perhaps inevitably unresolved: an invitation as opposed to a destination.
Modest, immensely enjoyable.
A sedate, learned piece.
A decade after Sebald’s untimely death, there can be few better tributes (to a man tipped as a future Nobel Prize in Literature recipient) than this effort, imbued with the love and admiration of all involved in its production.
WG Sebald film takes journey to cliff's edge
Edinburgh Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Monday March 26, 2012, until Wednesday March 28, 2012. Followed by a Q&A with producer Gareth Evans on 28 Mar.. More info: www.filmhousecinema.com
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