Patience (After Sebald) Review

The late W.G. Sebald was a German expatriate whose extraordinary books — uncategorisable blends of travelogue, history, fiction and a cri de coeur against mankind’s capacity for genocide — have elevated him to mystic status. In simple terms, he took epic pilgrimages across East Anglia drawing forth strange stories from the landscape: a world “irradiated with melancholy”. Director Grant Gee retraces Sebald’s footsteps for a halfway effective “aesthetic response” to his writing — a literary pop video of monochrome imagery that falls short of the grace of his prose. The value of the piece lies in the narration, an exploration of the writer’s troubling vision by reverent novelists, artists, architects and poets, including rare snatches of Sebald’s becalmed voice as if from beyond the grave.