Showing @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh until Wed 28 Mar

Grant Gee / UK / 2011 / 86 mins

The human mind is a labyrinth of ideas, memories, and ostensibly random associations; the most humble stimulus can often provoke the most extraordinarily tangential line of thought. But how do you explore this on screen? With ease and élan, one might believe, after watching award-winning director Grant Gee’s latest project.

Patience (After Sebald) takes the form of a feature-length documentary, charting a ramble through East Anglia inspired by the late German writer W.G. Sebald and his 1995 book (and Michael Hulse’s 1998 English translation) The Rings Of Saturn. Gee utilises his formidable skills, developed in his earlier films Meeting People Is Easy and Joy Division, and includes contributions from architects, writers, psychoanalysts, ex-poets laureate and fellow directors.

What is most striking about Patience is just how well it compliments Sebald’s book. Shot almost entirely in black and white, with dashes of colour used sparingly, the monochrome footage gracefully presents the bleak delicacy of the transient East Anglian countryside. Gee, clearly an avid fan himself, captions each location with both name and page reference, which will have fellow Sebald acolytes thumbing furiously to the correct passage.

But it is the exquisite use of montage which really captures the flitting nature of the mind, each idea firing up the next one and carrying the Subject away with itself. And when the psychologist, Adam Phillips, discusses the nature of melancholy over shots of empty, archaic Suffolk streets, or Andrew Motion mentions his grandmother’s suicide against images of crumbling Covehithe Cliffs, you get a real sense of ‘that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind’ which Sebald experienced when first setting out on his journey in 1992. A decade after Sebald’s untimely death, there can be few better tributes (to a man tipped as a future Nobel Prize in Literature recipient) than this effort, imbued with the love and admiration of all involved in its production.