• Tweet

Four out of Five stars
Running time: 86 mins

Grant Gee’s adventurous documentary is a poetic exploration of W G Sebald’s part travelogue, part memoir, The Rings of Saturn.

What’s it all about?
Most literary documentaries which focus on individual writers take a wide view, surveying their entire life and work. By contrast, documentarian Grant Gee has just selected W G Sebald’s musing on the Suffolk coast, The Rings of Saturn. Using contemporary filmed footage of the landscape that Sebald wandered through, along with archive photographs (including some of Sebald’s own), maps and extracts, as well as the reflections of a number of cultural figures, Gee pointedly demonstrates the allure of this eerie, history-laden coastline but also crafts an impression of the novel, delving into and building on many of its subjects and themes.

The Good
How do you unpick a literary work with a film camera? Ideally with plenty of imagination, which is what Gee has done here. Sebald’s footsteps along the Suffolk coast have been retraced many a time, but here the myriad of different voices (artists, poets, writers, a psychoanalyst) and the lyrical, muted black and white cinematography (capturing heaths, cliffs and wartime ruins, with an eye for the ghostly) both guarantee a much more in-depth and wide-ranging insight into Sebald’s masterpiece.

The Bad
Gee mimics the meandering style of Sebald’s novel, veering off piste with some of the more personal, idiosyncratic reflections from writers and artists, although these won’t resonate unless you are familiar with the novel. The interviewees though mostly have illuminating observations on Sebald and his book. For the most part, it’s just their voices that are heard but occasionally – and rather distractingly – their figures are superimposed over the haunting landscape shots, which rather detracts from the film’s visual potency.

Worth Seeing?
For Sebaldophiles or indeed anyone intrigued by the layers of history that lie beneath a landscape, this will be treat. For those new to the writer, some parts of the film may be a little impenetrable, but Gee’s documentary certainly entices you to pick up a copy of The Rings of Saturn.