Sunday, May 6, 2012

Grant Gee's new film "Patience (After Sebald)" at Northwest Film Forum: May 11 - 17



I've spent no small amount of time immersed in the work of W.G. Sebald. From the proto-Hauntological nature of his "Austerlitz" to the genre creating/defining "The Rings of Saturn". His works exist as literary explorations of the past, both real and imagined, and in the latter book's case the wandering, dreamlike nature of his inner-ambulations through the geography of a walking tour of Suffolk as a landscape embodying time, memory, nostalgia and and it's impression left on the psyche. Sebald's is almost a different take on the 'Zone' as depicted in the works of Andrei Tarkovsky. So this is going to make for a curious exploration of that invisible territory, documentarist Grant Gee's film essay on time, memory, geography and Sebald, playing for one week at Northwest Film Forum. And who better to soundtrack this documentary/visual poem on Sebald and his Zone than the composer of all things haunted himself, Leyland Kirby, aka The Caretaker. From the Northwest Film Forum: "Following up his documentaries on Radiohead and Joy Division, director Grant Gee turns his lens on author W.G. Sebald. An accolade rather than a biography of the German writer, Patience responds aesthetically to the writer’s body of work. A journey through the landscape of the novel The Rings of Saturn with literary commentary, the film, like the writer’s work, pieces together an intimate collage of fiction, nonfiction, history and recollection."