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Patience (After Sebald): A Walk Through the Rings of Saturn

Between 2010 and 2012 I worked as part of the core creative team, with director Grant Gee and producer Gareth Evans, making a feature film exploring W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn. Patience was conceived as a work of audio-visual literary criticism in the form of a film-essay and my critical interest in the relationship between essayistic forms in literature and cinema was germane to the project.

In collaboration with director and producer I compiled a list of interviewees, formulating the themes we wished to address, particularly the central idea of ‘pilgrimage’ as a contemporary practice of engaging with space and place. I originated the practical idea of a ‘Patience deck’ (a stack of postcard-sized reproductions of images from Sebald’s book), which we gave interviewees during filming, asking them to select images. This eased them into the filming process and provided Gee with material bringing together spoken contributions and images. Several key sequences were subsequently constructed around contributions elicited thus. I worked on ten of the fourteen filmed interviews.

I collaborated on both the rough and fine cuts prior to the world premiere in Aldeburgh, January 2011. In 2010, I did public presentations with Gee of work-in-progress sequences from the film where we addressed the challenges of bringing Sebald’s book to the screen: at ‘Landscaping: Artists, Maps and Britain’ at the British Library in September and ‘Cine-City: Brighton Film Festival’ in November. I also did a solo presentation at the ‘Film Criticism in Dialogue’ symposium at the University of Kent in November 2010. Following the UK theatrical release in January 2012, I undertook joint and solo public presentations throughout the UK.