So much has been written about W.G. Sebald and the use of photographs in his novels that it seems almost fruitless to write further around the subject. With it being one of the defining features of his work, and with a rapidly increasing library of volumes and handbooks exploring the writer’s legacy, I struggled to initially frame the subject I want to write about here: … Continue reading Chasing The Ghost – Excavating Sebald’s Portraits
This paper was delivered at the Resonant Edge Hauntology Symposium on the 15/06/2017. Full interviews with Grant Gee and James Leyland Kirby will be published later this summer. My talk today is about two specific forms: the writing of W.G. Sebald and the musical work of The Caretaker. My aim is to show the links between the two, with reference to ideas of Hauntology but … Continue reading Memory and Disintegration in the work of W.G. Sebald and The Caretaker
The strongest moment in Grant Gee’s documentary on W.G. Sebald, Patience (After Sebald) (2012), is courtesy of a photographic work by the artist, Jeremy Millar. Towards the end of film, the inevitable addressing of the tragedy of Sebald’s life being cut short in a car crash in 2001 comes to be addressed and uses one photo from a series of works by Millar titled A Firework … Continue reading Responses: Jeremy Millar’s A Firework For Sebald (2005).
On finishing W.G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants (1992), it felt as if some loose connection to a recent film or book was left hanging mid-air. The narrative of Sebald’s novel is split into the stories of four émigrés, all seemingly interconnected by a multitude of strange images but chiefly by their fleeing from the rise of Nazi Germany. The connection didn’t seem to be so … Continue reading Ghosts in the Ice
Celluloid Wicker Man 