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Press:

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Ariel Magnus. Página 12 / Radar. 15.04.2012
Alejandro Lingenti. La Nación. 21.04.2012
Federico Lisica. Página 12. 21.04.2012
Juan Pablo Russo. Escribiendo Cine. April 2012
Quintín. Perfil / Cultura. 07.05.2012

Patience (After Sebald)
United Kingdom, 2011, 82 minutes
Filmed and Directed by Grant Gee
Edited by Jerry Chater, Grant Gee
Produced by Gareth Evans, Di Robson, Sarah Caddy

Featuring Tacita Dean / William Firebrace / Dan Gretton / Barbara Hui / Arthur Lubow / Robert Macfarlane / Christopher MacLehose / Jeremy Millar / Katie Mitchell / Rick Moody / Andrew Motion / Chris Petit / Adam Phillips / Iain Sinclair / Bill Swainson / Lise Patt / Marina Warner / Christopher Woodward

Synopsis
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 (1944 – 2001) via a walk through East Anglia tracking his most  influential book, The Rings of Saturn.
The much anticipated 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.

Notes towards a film. By Grant Gee
W.G. Sebald has, in the ten years since his sudden death in a car crash (14.12.2001), begun to exert an almost uncanny influence over contemporary art and writing. He’s become one of those rarest of writers: the adjectival author, in the shortest possible time. ‘Sebaldian’ has entered the language. I wanted to find out why this is, and trace his influence through the zeitgeist.

Both my previous major long-form works – Radiohead’s Meeting People Is Easy and Joy Division – as well as the recent short film The Western Lands, examined iconic contemporary artists in the context of the landscapes they inhabited, respectively the ‘non-places’ of international touring, the post-industrial wreckage of late 1970s Manchester and the lethal cliff faces of the Orkney Islands. These artists could not be understood fully without an understanding of the landscapes and locations they occupied. The dialogue between personality and place is thus central to my own artistic investigations.

Rarely has the idea and importance of place been more prominent in culture and thought than it is at the moment. There are many reasons for this, not least the effect of globalization, with its spread of ‘sameness’ and the subsequent alienation and lack of belonging people feel. As things are erased, so they become even more significant.

This destruction of ‘place’ is a kind of catastrophe in our imaginative lives. It doesn’t have to take the form of explicit environmental or topographic change. Perhaps even more pernicious is the long-term psychological effect. Sebald’s body of work is profoundly aware of this and offers the richest statement I have come across about the importance of attention to place and the histories it holds and has made.

Properly to honour the associative nature of the book and the themes discussed, the ‘essay film’, a ‘genre’ employed to great effect by the likes of Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Patrick Keiller and Chris Petit, seems a very helpful and productive means to explore such material. Such a form allows for multiple tones and textures, essential when considering Sebald and place. It is also a personal form, not governed by pre-ordained structures and templates. I am extremely glad to have had the opportunity to work with this approach, and hope in a small way to have done justice, on film, to the remarkable work of this most important and influential writer.

Biography

Grant Gee is a prolific cinematographer and film-maker, best known for directing definitive studies of music and musicians. He has been Grammy-nominated twice, for Meeting People Is Easy – about Radiohead – in 2000 and Demon Days – about Gorillaz – in 2006.
His recent feature length work Joy Division premiered at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival in 2007 and won the Sound and Vision award for ‘Best Music Film 2007’ at the CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen, and the Audience Awards for Best Film at the Gdansk film festival 2008 and ‘In-Edit’ festival in Barcelona 2008. It also won the prestigious Grierson Award 2008 for Best Cinema Documentary.
He also films and directs short, artists’ moving image works including City Symphony, 400 Anarchists and Mr. Fred Zentner’s. These have been shown internationally by the British Council, onedotzero and others. The most recent, The Western Lands, about climber and writer Jim Perrin’s climb of The Old Man of Hoy won best short film awards at the Banff and Vancouver film festivals.
He also shot, edited and made motion graphics for the acclaimed feature documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, for director Stephen Kijak in 2006.
Gee was born in 1964 in Plymouth. He studied Geography at the Universities of Oxford and Illinois. He has worked in film / video since 1990. He lives in Brighton with his wife and son.

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With the support of Tenaris – Organización Techint