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DIRECTOR Grant Gee An immensely enjoyable film essay based on WG Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn. Narrated by Jonathan Pryce, with contributions by Andrew Motion, Iain Sinclair and others, it is an account of a walking tour of Suffolk replete with literary and historical reflections. You may recognise the Sailors’ Reading Room in Southwold, the pagodas at Orford Ness and the beach at Dunwich. Highly recommended. Introduced by the director, Grant Gee. Shown as part of the Words in Walden festival. For more information about the festival, please see www.hartsevents.co.uk A richly textured essay film on landscape, art, history, life and loss. The film offers a unique exploration of the work of internationally acclaimed writer W.G. Max Sebald (1944- 2001) via a walk through East Anglia tracking his most influential book, The Rings of Saturn. This new feature by the Grierson Award-winning director of Joy Division, Patience is the first film about Sebald internationally, marking ten years since the writer’s untimely death, and with contributions from major writers, artists and film-makers. BBFC advice: Contains one image of moderate sex Further Parental Advice “This modest, immensely enjoyable documentary is about one of my favourite books, The Rings of Saturn by the German poet and critic WG Sebald, who was born in 1944, taught for much of his adult life in this country, mainly at the University of East Anglia, and was killed in a motor accident in 2001. It was first published in German in 1995, translated into English three years later and is an account of a walking tour of Suffolk, the people he meets, the places he visits, and the historical and literary reflections prompted by what he sees and senses, taking his mind around the world. Suffolk becomes a sort of palimpsest for his eloquent, precise, lugubrious, often drily witty meditations about war, death, destruction and decay, about memories and continuities and the feeling that nothing entirely disappears. The film is largely shot in grainy grey-and-white, which matches the photographs, etchings and documents that illustrate the author's text, though from time to time small frames of colour film are imposed on these monochrome images. Jonathan Pryce reads from the book, and these words are occasionally imposed on the film. A variety of admirers, friends and students of Sebald comment on his work, some highly personal (Andrew Motion, a one-time colleague at UEA, talks of visiting the vanished town of Dunwich as a child), some scholastically (cultural historian Marina Warner discusses Saturn and the roots of melancholy), and sometimes from the perspective of a fellow practitioner (Iain Sinclair, who has made not wholly dissimilar psycho-historical journeys). A couple of weeks ago Phil Grabsky's In Search of Haydn sent me off to hear more of Haydn's music. Grant Gee's film should make anyone want to read The Rings of Saturn and the rest of Sebald's relatively small but exquisite oeuvre, some eight or nine books in all. Cinephiles in particular should look out the essay "Kafka Goes to the Movies" in Sebald's collection Campo Santo.“ UK RELEASE 27 January 2012 RUNNING TIME 86 minutes COUNTRY UK |
