This is an edited transcript of a talk given at Norwich Castle on Tuesday the 27^th of August 2019. My thanks to Dr Nick Warr and Philippa Comber for their help.

Considering the wealth of photography on the walls of the Line of Sight exhibition housed next door (an exhibition detailing many photographs taken by the author for his novels), it is unsurprising to find the work of W.G. Sebald to be deeply connected with another visual medium: cinema.

This may seem an unusual statement to make at first considering the lack discussion by the writer regarding the medium, at least in the public realm. I believe, however, that the link is not only perceivable but, more importantly, that such an influence was a two-way street. For the writer was greatly indebted, clearly passionate even, about the medium, and his writing appears to be the result of an immersion in the visual form as much as the more obvious literary one.

Equally, a number of filmmakers have been touched by Sebald’s work since his untimely death and so the relationship between the two is unusually complex.

There is no doubt as to the power of Sebald’s prose which is a stark mixture of meandering travelogue, historical archaeology and melancholic observation, matched in atmosphere by the grainy photographs and seemingly inconsequential ephemera that litter his the pages. But today, I am going to talk about Sebald from three angles, all related to cinema rather than literature.

The first is to look at cinema as an influence on Sebald’s writing, his relationship to cinema and even his own shadow-career as a would-be screenwriter. Moving on from this, the second section will look at Sebald’s influence on cinema with the writer being its subject, looking in particular at documentaries about the writer and how making cinema about his work affected the way in which filmmakers approached the medium. And, finally, with this somewhat symbiotic relationship defined, I will conclude by looking at the potential of a Sebaldian cinema itself; a cinema arguably influenced by his atmospheres but which uses them to create new work.

First, we go back to before Sebald’s rise in the literary pantheon had taken place; to the days of his life as an early career academic, a time filled with cinema visits and scriptwriting.

Sebald and Cinema

Though he rarely mentioned it in his work, other accounts of Sebald’s life show it to be one littered with cinema. Philippa Comber recounts meeting Sebald in her book, Ariadne’s Thread (2014). In her book she recounts an early meeting with the writer:

And so it was that on a warm Saturday evening at the end of August, arrangements were made for a group of us to meet at the Noverre Cinema for a showing of Polanski’s 1979 movie, Tess.

Later on, she details a number of cinema visits, one particularly apt recounting a screening of Fritz Lang’s M (1931); apt for it was chosen for the day’s entertainment over seeing a Cubism lecture held right here at Norwich Castle. As she writes, ‘Max came round again this evening. We went along to Cinema City to see Fritz Lang’s M, opting for this rather than the lecture on cubism at the Castle Museum.’

Cinema was clearly important to Sebald, more important than he suggests in his writing and in the handful of interviews and essays of his that survive. Once aware of his leaning towards cinema, however, we can begin to see its effect on his prose.

As Nimrod Matin has argued, Sebald’s prose, even leaving aside the presence of actual images, could itself be seen as an attempt of cinematic rendering of the written form, one argued by both Matin and Sebald himself to be a response to the solid-image prose of Franz Kafka. He writes:

The image’s physical shifting of positions serves as a medium enabling the metaphysical shift into the three above-mentioned dimensions. This enabling movement, I argue, is a primitive configuration of a moving-image. Its direct effect is a metaphysical shift of time, space and agency, which in turn creates the conditions for the image to become meaningful. Since this movement is a paradigm for writing, it can be seen as an embryonic definition of the cinematographic medium: writing through the setting-in-motion of images so as to enable their becoming meaningful.

This plays heavily into an idea of French post-structuralist Gilles Deleuze who argued that cinema itself shifted from images of movement to images of time after the Second World War, arguing for the heightened complexity of cinema after the war and its emphasis on images and scenes that seemed to go directly against cinema only showing things necessary for narrative concerns.

Sebald’s writing is certainly closer to time-image cinema than narrative cinema but, considering the films that can be connected to the man, this is unsurprising.

Sebald himself actually taught a module on early German cinema at the University of East Anglia alongside Professor Thomas Elsaesser, creating a list of suggestions for relevant texts for his students, including films by Robert Wiener, Paul Wegener, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang.

Out of all of the films that Comber mentions in her book, however, the one that seems truly pivotal to Sebald is, in hindsight of the labyrinths of his own writing, not surprising (and another time-image film). She details it as follows:

Going to the cinema with Max was a treat. Not long before this, when talking about films, it emerged that there was one that had always held a particular fascination for both of us. This was Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad. Its appeal lay as much in the hypnotic quality of the cinematography and soundtrack as the enigma at the core of its narrative. Maybe this predilection dated us; but then, we were children of the sixties – of the Continental sixties.

Alain Resnais’ and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year in Marienbad (1961) is in itself a premonition of some of Sebald’s themes.

The film features the melancholia of a European retreat and the unreliability, perhaps even failure, of memory as the protagonist tries to solve the riddle of whether he originally met, and perhaps loved, a woman he meets in a luxurious spa retreat in Marienbad.

Of course, in typical Sebaldian fashion, the film wasn’t shot in Marienbad at all but in a spa just outside of Munich (a common cinematic sleight of hand that I imagine Sebald would have been interested in recreating himself).

Reading Sebald’s work, in particular the Somerleyton segment of The Rings of Saturn (1996), reminds of the way Robbe-Grillet treats background characters. As in many films by Robbe-Grillet as director, and to a certain extent in his novels, conversations between main characters render the rest of the world frozen, bodies turned to mannequins as the sheer weight of history within the wider story is unfolded and looped around.

The links go further still when considering Robbe-Grillet’s edited publication of the script as a self-proclaimed ciné-roman in which the edited dialogue is interspersed with still-photographs from the film. The document, in spite of being a film script and collection of film stills, was meant to be read. So far, so Sebaldian.

There are several references to cinema in Sebald’s work, at least in what has been translated into English. In one of the Sebald’s essay, Kafka Goes to the Movies, he mentions the Wim Wenders film Kings of the Road (1976).

Part of the German New Wave of cinema that arose in the 1970s, alongside work by the likes of Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff, Wenders’ film highlights a particularly German take on the road movie, seeming at least in part related to what we could later term to be Sebaldian. The narrative is meandering and melancholy, following two men travelling in an anti-road movie of sorts, recounting their various meetings with strangers on the way.

Equally, in The Emigrants (1996), the narrator sits in the cinema and has a revelation of sorts whilst watching Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), and in Vertigo (1990), the references to a certain Dr K. touch upon a character from Henrik Galeen’s The Student of Prague (1926).

Heavily influenced by Wenders’ sometime collaborator Peter Handke (the writer of a stage adaptation of Kaspar), it is unsurprising to find some of the films Sebald mentioned to be loosely connected to the writer. Being a noted admirer of Handke’s work, in particular Repetition (1986), Sebald’s sensibilities are clearly enmeshed in the same visual needs of the cinema around him, and certainly in a Germanic culture that actively sought to exorcise its recent past. As in a great deal of German language literature, German New Wave Cinema sought to find a new language outside of the previous, war-tainted culture.

Handke, like so many from the group of artists who, in the Post-War years sought to escape the previous cultural baggage of Germanic culture, made films as well as writing scripts and novels. Though rarely discussed or even publicised due to the copyright problems and the strict rules of archives, it is unsurprising then to find Sebald’s early ventures into creative writing take the form, not of experimental novels or poetry, but scripts, film scripts to be exact.

The first script Comber details regards the life of philosopher Immanuel Kant called And Now the Night Descends – Scenes from the Life and Death and Immanuel Kant. The script, which was completed and exists in its entirety, came close to actually being produced, allowing for a possible alternative history of Sebald to be glimpsed. As she writes:

There was good news from Jan Franksen, Max’s media contact in Berlin. It seemed that the TV station, Sender Freies Berlin, had contrived to secure a hefty sum for the ‘Kant Project’ – one and a half million marks, he thought. And whilst the studio was proposing to start filming next year, Max remained sceptical: he’d believe it when he saw it…

She further details the angle of script, hinting at what it might have been like; a typically phenomenological biography project seeming not unlike films from the same era such as Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch (1974), Straub-Huillet’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), or Herzog’s Kasper Hauser.

As she writes:

… the use of images was the ideal way to represent the life and works of thinkers of the past. (The same held for his use of images in a book: instead of ‘instructing’ the reader how or what to think, pictures spoke for themselves.)… Rather than trace Kant’s development as a philosopher, or treat his metaphysics in any abstract sense, Max chose to introduce the reader/viewer to a human being of fragile constitution and marked eccentricity.

Alongside this is a less finalised script regarding the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein though neither project was ultimately realised.

The plan for a chronologically jumbled collection of tableaux from the Wittgenstein’s life sounds remarkably like Derek Jarman’s later film project, so there was undoubtedly potential in such work.

Yet, the sheer fact of their existence shows that Sebald was cinematically literate, passionate about the medium and that it was a creative pillar to what would eventually become his novels. In another life, perhaps he could have followed the path of Peter Handke whose films and novels sit on a vaguely similar plain, at least in mainland Europe.

Perhaps then this explains the contents of our next section of discussion; namely films about the writer and how his work influenced cinema when he himself became the subject matter.

Sebald in Cinema

With the writer’s place in the literary pantheon growing exponentially after his death, it is unsurprising to find Sebald become a subject of interest for filmmakers. In many ways, especially due to his use of visuals to break up his prose, his work has been ripe for documentary cinema.

The first films to mention about Sebald are sadly ones that I can tell little about due to their scarcity. Having spoken to Comber at a recent BBC recording about her friend, film being one of the key connections about which we spoke, a film by a director called Thomas Honickel came up in conversation.

Honickel is perhaps best known for his documentary on Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse film series, Mabuse in Mind (1985), one of the films Sebald taught on his module on German Cinema. In 2007, Honickel made two separate films about the writer, W.G. Sebald: Der Ausgewanderte and Sebald. Orte (uploaded to YouTube since the time of this paper). The former, which was translated into English with the subtitle of The Emigrant, documented his life and included interviews with his previous colleagues, while the latter followed in the footsteps of his books’ narrators.

The most successful film about Sebald to date, critically and in terms of recreating the atmosphere of his work, came in 2012 in the form of Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald). Simultaneously following the route from The Rings of Saturn – recreating many of its original photographic images on grainy black & white 16mm – and assessing Sebald’s literary standing with a variety of talking-head interviews, the film represents a pivotal moment in appreciation for the writer’s work. But, more importantly, Patience shows how the aesthetic of Sebald’s literary vision could be transposed with ease into cinema.

Interestingly, Patience as a project came about, not as an exploration of The Rings of Saturn but actually through interest in Austerlitz. As Gee suggested in an interview with Book Forum, the film’s title was a reference to that book:

We went through about three major attempts and different proposals about how to do a film about Sebald. When we came up with the title Patience, it was because in the book Austerlitz there’s a key scene in which the Sebaldian narrator comes across the Austerlitz character, sees him from behind in a room, and he has a stack of black-and-white photographs. The narrator says he can see Austerlitz dealing them out in a sequence like he’s playing a game of Patience, which is like Solitaire in the States.

I was lucky enough to talk to Grant about his project, alongside the film’s composer James Leyland Kirby – alias The Caretaker – and, interestingly, Gee saw the cinematic potential in Sebald’s prose:

Reading the books for the first time… I had the feeling of a strong, strange, cinematic quality to a strand of Sebald’s imagery. More so than even the photographs throughout the books, the written imagery just seemed to suggest grey, grainy, gently seething movie-camera images. A bit like Béla Tarr’s shots. Given the subject matter of the books, this seething weirdness was fascinating. Then I was asked by producer Gareth Evans to propose an idea for a trans-media event called The Re-Enchantment; all about artistic examination of place, and the idea crystallised to use the route walked in The Rings of Saturn for the form of a film.

Gee’s recreation of Sebald’s world is startling, a mirror image of the book that manages to use the structure of The Rings of Saturn to assess the writer who created it.

It is an innovative use of the original novel, one which shares a likeness with that other East Anglian ghost walker, M.R. James whose short story ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, M’Lad’ was similarly inverted by Jonathan Miller and turned into a film for BBC Omnibus in 1968 that psychologised the thinking behind the story’s original writer. The two films also compare in that they both use the East Anglian coastline, including several shared locations (namely the crumbling coastline of Dunwich).

Perhaps the strongest aspect of Gee’s film, and certainly why it ultimately is the strongest of Sebaldian films made so far, is the musical collaboration with The Caretaker. In a similar fashion to Sebald, The Caretaker took existing older recordings and played through their crackle until they disintegrated.

Named as part of the Hauntology movement in recent years by Mark Fisher, The Caretaker’s soundtrack for Patience highlighted its memory-ridden aesthetic. When I asked about the relationship between his and Sebald’s work, Kirby suggested the following:

Grant Gee got in touch with me and proposed the idea that he’d love for me to score this film for him based around old recordings of Schubert he’d sourced. After reading the book I could see why Grant approached me, certainly if you look at the graininess of the images in the book. There’s a specific quality to that which could be compared to some of The Caretaker work I’d done up to that point. I wanted to stay true to the source material and looked for specific loops and also textures which I felt would work.

Both Gee and Kirby suggested that the use of Schubert’s Die Winterreise and its various crackly recordings was because it had personal meaning to Sebald, Gee suggesting that he had learned that the music was played at Sebald’s funeral.

He could not confirm this for certain but the point is that the film was produced with a key to every aspect, recognising that a subject such as Sebald would benefit from being addressed through a common aesthetic language; one filled with memory, disintegration and melancholy. Arguably, these are all central components and echoes when considering the potential for a Sebaldian cinema.

Gee also had the advantage of enlisting an array of knowledgeable speakers to litter his documentary with observations. The sheer diversity of background in the speakers, in particular the presence of people from the visual arts such as artists Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, the theatre director Katie Mitchell and the filmmaker Chris Petit, shows Sebald’s influence to be essentially a multimedia one.

Dean is particularly poignant an inclusion considering the presence of her 2007 film, Michael Hamburger in the exhibition until recently housed in The Sainsbury Centre; a Sebaldian meditation on the space and ephemera surrounding the man featured for his ghostly coincidences in The Rings of Saturn. Dean’s relationship with Sebald’s work is complex. Suffice to say, some of these have manifested in the cinematic medium and, most importantly, through the analogue practices that Dean defiantly still works within to this day.

Gee’s film was by no means the last explicitly Sebald-themed project and was followed a few years later by the little seen film by Stan Neumann, Austerlitz (2015). Austerlitz was never properly distributed in the UK, surprising considering it was here where Sebald’s literary success was jump-started, but it is available online.

The French film deliberately blurs the line between documentary and fiction, featuring well-known Leos Carax regular Denis Lavant, and the film documenting, simultaneously, the discovery of Sebald’s book and the Sebald’s overall narrative. Though less successful than Gee’s film in recreating the atmosphere of Sebald’s book, the film is certainly an interesting inclusion in the slowly growing canon of Sebaldian cinema.

Of course, for a more specific film looking at Austerlitz, the shorter film put together by Richard West and Source Photographic Review is also worthy of discussion. The film is barely half an hour but features in-depth, detailed exploration, and revisits the locations of the photographs Sebald used in Austerlitz, conducted by Professor Jonathan Long, author of W.G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity.

In these films, we get a sense of Sebald’s gravitational pull and his keen eye for the most bizarre synchronicities. Simply dealing with his work, his life and his various themes often results with filmmakers being forced to adopt similar methodologies and visual ideas in order to do their subject justice. In the final segment of this discussion, then, we will move on to films that take this Sebaldian mindset and wander further from their source of inspiration; namely films that are Sebaldian without actually being about the writer.

The Potential for a Sebaldian Cinema

What can we really call a Sebaldian cinema? It seems a little too easy to suggest the previous films as being somehow uniquely Sebaldian when the writer was their subject. Instead, I argue that a number of films and filmmakers have, through differing ways, tapped into the same vein of ghostly history and melancholy place-sketching as Sebald.

Sticking with theme of Austerlitz, we come to another film of the same name. Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitza has become relatively successful in recent years for similarly themed work, in particular addressing the legacy and the complexity of ghosts from the Second World War.

In his 2016 film Austerlitz, he turns his critical eye to what is often described today as ‘dark tourism’ and the troubling, grating tension that has come from popularised, touristic visits to the remains of the concentration camps. Though not connected to Sebald’s book, Loznitza named the film in Sebald’s honour, most probably due to dealing with similar themes. Loznitsa’s film, in stark black and white, details the simple actions of tourists taking photos of extermination equipment with IPhones, going on disturbingly Tower-of-London-esque guided tours, and capturing Selfies with the gates of Auschwitz and their motto Arbeit macht frei hashtagged.

In more calming, less critical work, we can see some Sebaldian potential in the work of filmmaker Ben Rivers. Filming on 16mm film, as so many filmmakers here do – Sebaldian cinema being distinctly analogue – his memory-drenched images of landscape and solitude bear more than a passing resemblance to both the photographs in Sebald’s books and the general atmosphere of the prose they’re placed within.

In Two Years at Sea (2011), Rivers showed he has the same keen eye for eccentric characters, capturing the life of Jake; a hermit who lives a Thoreau-esque life in the forests of Scotland. He could be a figure straight out of Sebald’s The Emigrants or Vertigo. Rivers also grapples with a common question raised by Sebald’s work; namely the blurred line between the real and the fictional. He turns the very process of filmmaking in upon itself, fitting narratives into the capture of other film projects, in particular his Paul Bowles inspired project, The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015) in which his narrative occurs in the midst of the filming of someone’s else’s real film. If any filmmaker comes close to recreating Sebald’s slippery, almost auto-fictional elements then it is Rivers.

Looking at more narrative-based cinema, its most successful Sebaldian exploration is arguably in Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years (2015); a film that surprisingly swept the awards season on both sides of the Atlantic.

Its Sebaldian narrative of restless memory manifesting may perhaps owe as much to its original source material by David Constantine being distinctly Sebaldian as much as the choices in the film itself. With its tale of a lost love reasserting as a painfully destructive ghost in the East Anglian countryside, breaking apart the relationship between Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, the film is essentially a romantic tragedy fitted into the mould of the Henry Selwyn segment of The Emigrants. Such is the likeness between the film and the story, even down to the location of Switzerland housing the lost loved one and the outer Norwich landscape being the realm of the haunting, that 45 Years can be seen as close to a big-budget adaptation of a Sebald novel as we are likely to see.

I could go on to list filmmakers whose imagery draw likenesses to Sebald – I will here mention the filmmaker Guido van der Werve and his film Nummer Zestien (2015) in passing – but the point would often be moot as the writer’s mentality has crept quietly into much culture and many different forms.

Finally then, and perhaps naively, there are the short films of my own, argued as being Sebaldian specifically because they were designed on my own part to be so.

Shot on super-8 stock that is older than myself, I have often sought the Sebaldian disintegration in image and theme, going so far as to track East Anglian locations touched by the writer and equally taking the themes of his prose one step further into the strange and wyrd.

To conclude, I will screen my own short film Heavy Water (2016) reacting to that strange friction found on the Suffolk coastline between Sizewell and Dunwich. It is the same friction tapped into in The Rings of Saturn; where the past destruction of the lost town of Dunwich and the implied, unconscious future destruction hinted at by the looming structure of Sizewell Nuclear Power Station possess an unusual, eerie quality.

In conclusion, I hope this presentation has shown how Sebald was influenced, fluent, and perhaps even indebted to cinema as a medium. It is there in his past and it is there in his prose. I also hope that, in showing how Sebald as a subject augmented the medium, that the potential for an actual Sebaldian cinema was initially opened. But most of all, I hope that such a potential is, in the future, realised further; whether in new films or perhaps, if we are lucky, in adaptations of the writer’s own scripts that already exist, currently gathering dust in archives under the guard dogs of copyright.

For, once the work of this visual, detailed and powerful writer is taken into the mind’s eye, his gaze cannot be easily switched off; his filter upon the world retains its startling ability to cut through the haze, and the potential of it, in our increasing age of circular history and calamity, has never promised so much that is necessary to all creative forms today, film or otherwise.