Sebald & The Rings of Saturn – Links March 2014

W.G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn gets some attention from non-literary disciplines in two recent posts elsewhere. Over at Celluloid Wicker Man, Adam Scovell has written about Grant Gee’s film Patience (After Sebald). He gives a thoughtful examination to the relationship between Sebald’s book and Gee’s film, especially the way in which the film and the book attempt to capture perception.

There are a number of reception possibilities attainable when watching Grant Gee’s 2011 essay film, Patience (After Sebald). Any film based on a book or around an author is always going to separate its viewers into two groups; those who have read the original source material and those who have not. While the latter will be seeking to latch onto the their initial experience of film as it happens, the former will be no doubt be cast in the inescapable lure of the original book and its contexts.

And:

For a writer who is at once both extremely modern in his style but shot through with the prism of a classical antiquarian, the 16mm film perhaps is the most aesthetically pleasing and apt model left to us when exploring the writing of W.G. Sebald. Like his writing, it is just as littered with scratches, grooves and imperfections that make it both a leaping jump towards recreating perception and something deeply humanistic to experience.

Meanwhile, as part of his ongoing project Writing With Images (which I wrote about recently), art historian James Elkins has added a lengthy analysis of the images in The Rings of Saturn. Elkins writes about three specific photographs and ponders the “epistemological veracity of his images in this book, which are often manipulated and difficult to read.”

Writing with Images

Art historian James Elkins is engaged in an extensive study on the practice of writing with images, and he is doing this in a very public way by posting drafts of chapters on two blogs and using his Facebook account to solicit ideas and get feedback. It’s a form of live writing with a touch of crowdsourcing thrown in. At his first blog, Writing with Images, Elkins describes his overall project like this:

I have been exploring the history, theory, and possibilities of writing with images. By “writing” I mean fiction (modernist, experimental, conceptual, unclassifiable) and nonfiction (including some art history, art criticism, cultural criticism, visual studies, and art theory). By “images” I mean principally photographs (but also charts, diagrams, maps, photocopies, and other graphics) and sometimes drawings and paintings.