ENTHUSIAST: 'As soon as people have read it, they either go "I can’t stand that!" or they love it to death, says filmmaker Grant Gee of Sebald's The Rings of Saturn

Film-maker Grant Gee spent eight days in East Anglia, laden like a Royal Marine, to retrace the steps of a quirky writer’s walk along the Suffolk coast. STEVEN RUSSELL finds out more

LOWLANDS: Coastal Suffolk. Picture: GRANT GEE

SEEING as he’s just back from walking his dog in the woods – where he had to dodge torrential rain – it seems a bit mean to plonk a tough question in Grant Gee’s lap. However, the film-maker’s happy to attempt to unravel the riddle of WG Sebald – a German intellectual who settled in East Anglia and nearly 20 years ago walked a long stretch of the Suffolk coast.

The book he wrote afterwards, The Rings of Saturn, is as slippery as a bar of soap and defies attempts to stick a label on it. It’s not a novel; it’s not a memoir; it’s not (as one might expect) a traditional travelogue.

Grant, a confirmed fan, would love it to be wider known and appreciated, but acknowledges: “It’s quite a hard sell! As soon as people have read it, they either go ‘I can’t stand that!’ or they love it to death.

“The really difficult thing is when people say ‘What’s it about?’ Well, OK . . . here we go . . . It’s about this rather staid academic chap who goes on a little hike around Suffolk . . . And you hear people going ‘Right . . .’ And then it spins out into a tale of cosmic destruction. ‘OK . . .’ But it’s not fiction. Well, it kind of is . . .”

NOW SHOWING: The titlepage from the documentary Patience (After Sebald) filmed by Grant Gee

Oh, and it’s somewhat melancholic, too.

There are some gently comic episodes, such as his disappointment at a hotel’s offering of a hard piece of battered fish he suspects has lain in the freezer for years, but often his expedition’s observations are the leaping-off point that takes us on to somewhere else.

Sebald can be enjoying a “sense of eternal peace” in his beloved Crown Hotel at Southwold, for instance, when his mood is broken by an article about the mass murders of Bosnians, Serbs and Jews by Croatians supported by Nazis during the war.

Film co-producer Gareth Evans says it’s amazing how the writer can within a few pages take readers from a Lowestoft B&B to the Belgian Congo, on to the Voyager space probe and back to the B&B.

ARCANE, PERHAPS, BUT MUCH-LOVED: The late writer and lecturer WG Sebald

At Covehithe, Sebald notices a couple lying on the beach and compares them to “some great mollusc washed ashore” – “a many-limbed two-headed monster that had drifted in from the sea, the last of a prodigious species, its life ebbing from it with each breath expired through its nostrils”. The man’s feet “twitched like those of one just hanged”. No – not your average guide-book . . .

There’s a theme of the destructive energy of both nature and Man. It seems the writer uses his observations as catalysts and sparks that fire his concerns about other, broader issues. Is that a fair verdict?

“Absolutely. I think there’s been a lot of overstating about how much of a writer about the landscape he is,” says Grant. “It’s like the MacGuffin: the hook in a film that then gets forgotten... This is a book about a walk and it’s really not about a walk. It’s not about that landscape.”

In 2010 Grant retraced the author’s steps over eight days, on his own, travelling from Norwich to Somerleyton, on to Lowestoft, down to Dunwich, inland to Middleton, over to Boulge and Woodbridge, across to Orford and Yoxford, and back up through the “Saints” villages near Halesworth.

ARCANE, PERHAPS, BUT MUCH-LOVED: The late writer and lecturer WG Sebald

“I had a 16mm camera kit on my back and a monopod, and a sound kit and my clothes, and film stock and a stills camera, so I was in marine yomping mode!”

He must have been shattered.

“Strangely not. It was really ethereal. I’m not a great walker – I go for Sunday walks with the dog on the Downs (near Brighton) – but there was something very meditative for me. I could go at my own pace and do what I love to do best: walking and taking pictures.”

The resulting film – Patience (After Sebald) – had its premiere at Snape Maltings a year ago and has just been released in the UK by distributor Soda Pictures. This week it’s hoping to catch an eye or two at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

REEDS, MUD AND WATER: A classic scene from east Suffolk. Picture: GRANT GEE

It was aired at the New York and Vancouver film festivals last autumn, and will be distributed in America in the spring.

Patience, narrated by actor Jonathan Pryce and described as a “multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss”, is from the stable of cultural projects group Artevents.

The 90-minute production is supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the National Lottery, UK Film Council, Screen East and Screen South. It combines scenes of Suffolk and interviews with writers who talk about Sebald’s influence – people such as Robert Macfarlane, a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, whose books include The Wild Places (about our remaining wildernesses). He also made a documentary for the BBC called The Wild Places of Essex.Grant doesn’t find The Rings of Saturn off-puttingly morose. If anything, it’s strangely comforting.

“For one thing, even if a book’s depressing, if you like it, there’s an enjoyment. It’s melancholic rather than depressing. It’s not grinding. His imagination is fast-moving enough for there to be an intellectual lightness of touch.

REMOTE, BUT WELCOMING: An isolated church on the Sebald walk at Covehithe. Picture: GRANT GEE

“My own experience of doing that walk was absolutely delightful and not at all miserable. This is the project of a lifetime for me and probably the most enjoyable experience of film-making I’ve ever had, though the film isn’t about my experience; it just happens that when I was walking around Suffolk for eight days I had a wonderful time.”

There is, he agrees, a dreamlike quality to Sebald’s writing – “another reason why people are able to interpret it in different ways. It affects you so much that you put your imagination to work with this book and you can take from it what you like.

“In the film (author and filmmaker) Iain Sinclair says something like ‘This Rings of Saturn landscape is an imaginary landscape.’ That’s what was very interesting to me – doing that walk, going to these places, and realising that beautiful though it was, atmospheric though it was, and great to film, it’s not the book.”

The idea, from the start, was about exploring how Sebald works with the sense of place. “One thing we really hit on early on was that for people who really like this book it becomes almost like an imaginary place for them that they keep coming back to.

“It’s like a universe you can keep exploring – almost like a strange encyclopaedia you can keep going back to and exploring different bits of. I kind of wanted the film to have a similar sense: you go into a landscape that you haven’t necessarily been to before, or thought about before, but find yourself quite immersed in it.

“If I can transmit the sense of love that I feel for this book – and love I don’t think is too strong a word when you talk about the art you most like – then that’s the goal, really.”

Grant didn’t know the Suffolk coast before he set off with his heavy load. “I grew up in Plymouth and I’ve lived in Brighton for 13 years, and I’ve been to Norwich a couple of times, but I’d never been on that coast. I loved it; and now it’s the only other place, apart from Brighton, I could imagine living.”

Eric Homberger’s obituary for Sebald, following the writer’s death just over a decade ago in a car crash near Norwich, most likely to have been caused by a heart attack, spoke of his “incomparable feel for the oddness of life in East Anglia” and about him being a “connoisseur of the isolation of an area which has been left largely untouched”.

Did Grant feel the same?

“The single thing about that coastal region that sticks in my mind from reading Sebald and then doing the walk is how it should really be connected with the other side of the North Sea and that it is essentially like Holland and Denmark and the mouth of the Rhine,” he says.

“We’ve got an animation in the film that shows how land used to connect that coast to what’s now mainland Europe.

““That’s one of the great things Sebald does: it made me think about the south coast here being essentially like the upper Normandy coast. He makes these connections. I don’t think of it (Suffolk) as being cut off from England; I think of it as being cut off from Europe.”

It all sounds a very different experience to one of Grant’s best-known projects: a film about the late-1970s post-punk band Joy Division that won the 2008 Grierson Award for best cinema documentary.

“It was much easier to get the elements but much more difficult to fit it all together.

“And that was properly melancholic and difficult mentally to deal with, that story – much more than dealing with Sebald’s melancholy.” That’s because the band’s lead singer – battling depression, epilepsy and the collapse of his marriage – hanged himself at the age of 23.

“Ian Curtis’s death is like a pit at the end of the story, and as you ‘walk’ along the story you feel this pit getting closer. With Sebald, even though there is his own death, it doesn’t have the same sense of dead-end.”

Does Grant ever wonder what Sebald might think of the film?

“I don’t imagine he’d be interested at all, really! He seems such an arcane figure. Famously, he was the last person at UEA (the University of East Anglia in Norwich) not to have a computer. When he died, the PC was still in the box, under his desk. He didn’t have a mobile. He smoked with a cigarette-holder. He’s sort of from another era.

“I’m part of an era where books are exploited in a way that he probably would have hated – fragmented and derivative in ways he would have hated.

“He was looking back to much more classic literary periods in his imagination.

“He was much-loved, though, as a lecturer.” Perhaps because he bridged the old world and the new? “Exactly. I think that’s maybe why The Rings of Saturn has this cult appeal.

“What I think grabs people is the extreme gravitas of those links he’s making. With Wikipedia, you can just keep clicking and clicking without end, and with no consequence. The mind just jumps about, quickly, and nothing sits properly in context.

“He does it and reminds people that you can’t jump away from everything: that there are real dead ends in history.”

See it here

PATIENCE (After Sebald) will be shown at Cinema City in Norwich on March 4 and Saffron Screen in Saffron Walden on March 12. It’s also at Ipswich Film Theatre on June 26.

Director Grant Gee has twice been Grammy-nominated: for 2001’s Meeting People Is Easy (about the band Radiohead) and 2006’s Demon Days (about the music project Gorillaz)

• Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was born in May, 1944.

• His home was in Bavaria – at Wertach Am Allgäu.

• He liked to be called Max.

• Father Georg, who came from a family that made glass, was freed from a prisoner-of-war camp in France a couple of years after the surrender.

• Max went to grammar school at Obersdorf.

• Then he studied German literature at Freiburg University, graduating in the mid-1960s.

• Very soon he was appointed foreign languages assistant at the University of Manchester.

• He married Ute in 1967 and they had a daughter, Anna.

• In 1970 he became a lecturer in German at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

• In 1987 he became professor of European literature.

• His best-known works are Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001)

• Places where he lived in Norfolk included Wymondham and Poringland

• WG Sebald died in a car crash on the A146 near Norwich in mid-December, 2001, aged 57