Chapter 34 - Film

Summary

This essay considers the question of Sebald and cinema both in terms of how his texts engage with the medium and how film, in its turn, has treated the author and his works. The argument takes its cue from the essay ‘Kafka im Kino’ (translated as ‘Kafka Goes to the Movies’) in order to discuss the imprint of filmgoing experience that Sebald takes from Kafka, in dialogue with his own. The experience of film viewing raises issues that are central to Sebald’s writing, turning on the potential for identification and community of experience, the reliability of visual evidence and the vicissitudes of memory. These run through the references to film – ranging from early narrative cinema to different modes of documentary film and the French and German new waves – across a set of works by Sebald. The references, extending to medial avatars and intermedial relations, form a ramified network of association, not least in relation to projection and doubling. And the same preoccupations are also seen to reverberate through the cinematic afterlives of Sebald: films in different fictional, documentary and essayistic forms that have drawn – and continue to draw – their inspiration from his writing, also in its intermeshing with his biography.