Adaptation, Appropriation, Translation: Sebald on the Silver Screen

Home , Adaptation (arts), Literary adaptation, Projector

Isa Murdock-Hinrichs

F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, based on Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel Dracula, exemplifies the radical potentialities of adaptation, both in terms of the film itself as well as the extraordinarily diverse mutations it has spawned for almost a century. Having been refused film rights by Stoker’s widow, Murnau was forced to make significant alterations to character names and setting. The locale was moved from London to Wismar, and vampirism no longer allegorizes the ills of fin-de-siècle capitalism but the growing specter of fascist brutality (Grady 1996; Cohen 1996: 5). Remaking Murnau’s groundbreaking cinematic intervention, Werner Herzog, Guy Maddin, and Elias Merhige, to name a few, reconfigure the work by situating it in different historical moments and/or foregrounding the conceptual aspects of film itself. Maddin’s operatic camera work in his 2002 Pages of a Virgin’s Diary retains elements of silent film yet transforms the text into a study of movement in cinema, and Merhige’s 2000 adaptation narrates the making of Murnau’s film and thereby suggests that cinema itself exhibits vampiric qualities. In addition to these more liberal interpretations, there are numerous

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shot-by-shot reproductions of canonical films, and many of these remakes have been recognized for their unique artistic merits. Gus Van Sant’s 2002 Psycho surgically replicates every facet of Alfred Hitchcock’s original, while Jill Godmilow’s remake of Harun Farocki’s 1969 documentary Inextinguish- able Fire changes only the cast and translates the German dialogue of the original into English. Cinema’s hunger for new sources of inspiration pro- pels it sometimes to other artistic and formal terrains. Film’s particular incli- nation to incorporate and adapt different media, like painting, theater, and literature—exemplified by the literal restaging of Eugene Delacroix’s painting in Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion—raises profound questions about the nature and function of the cinematic image. Even though all these aforementioned titles can take refuge under the rubric of adaptation, the term itself fails to adequately capture the seemingly endless number of complex processes and permutations constituting the relationships between these works and their respective origins. The proliferation of words and phrases around the concept of adaptation (allusion, homage, simple quotation, remake, “based on,” “inspired by”) highlights a pervasive uncertainty. This confusion is symptomatic of a larger anxiety besetting the contemporary cultural sphere, which has become increasingly defined by the multiplicities of how “things come alive,” as W. J. T. Mitchell (2004) puts it. Images, language, and texts no longer cohere in a polarized relationship between antecedents and subsequents, originals and remakes. Ultimately, not just cinema but all cultural production is vampiric, nourishing itself while simultaneously reproducing its mode of being. Roland Barthes’s theorization of the intertext forgoes definitive and polarizing categories and instead explores the interstitial spaces between them as the main site of artistic production. His declaration that every text is “an intertext” (1981) identifies an inherent intertextuality in all writing, palimpsests bearing the marks of an endless array of cultural and literary traces. Echoing Barthes, Julia Kristeva describes all literary endeavors as “living mosaic[s], dynamic intersection[s] of textual surfaces” (1986: 36). Julie Sanders has recently elaborated on this line of thinking by broaden- ing the semantic range of adaptation to encompass a variety of practices, including but not limited to “borrowing, stealing, appropriating, inheriting, assimilating . . . being influenced, homage, mimicry, travesty, echo, allusion . . . interpretation, imitation, proximation, graft, etc.” (2006: 3). In addition to granting more dynamism and flexibility in imagining the connection between source and adaptation, Sanders’s conjecture runs afoul of the sacrosanct notion of originality. Whereas the dividing line between origi-

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nal and “fake” retains its visibility in certain contexts, the critical dialogue around questions of textual purity, adaptation, and appropriation has effectively marginalized the long-standing distinction between source and reproduction (Eco 1991). While adaptation implies a kind of surplus to the original, an understanding of the relationship between what Gérard Genette calls hypertext (adaptation) and hypotext (source) allows for more complex readings of each work (1997). Frequently, a hypertext imports its own cultural genetics, radically reconfiguring the hypotext to such a degree that it is more justly termed appropriation. Even though adaptation and appropriation are inti- mately interwoven as concepts, the latter entails a looser engagement with the original than the former, which, according to John Ellis, “[prolongs] the pleasure of the original presentation and repeat[s] the production of memory” (1982: 4–5). Now that the boundary between hypotext and hypertext has been recognized as more porous than presumed, the resulting blend of source and original undercuts the stability of both signifiers. The fact that W. G. Sebald’s two most widely circulated books, The Rings of Saturn (1998) and Austerlitz (2001), are themselves deeply impli- cated in questions of translation, adaptation, and remediation magnifies the problems raised by the different strategies Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald) (2012) and Stan Neumann’s Austerlitz (2015) employ in their cinematic reconfiguration of their respective originals. While Gee pursues the same strategic subversion of genre underwriting The Rings of Saturn, Neu- mann is far more faithfully attached to the basic narrative elements of what many see as Sebald’s most novelistic work (Verdolini 2013: 614). By translating and appropriating the signature formal stylistics of The Rings of Sat- urn onto the silver screen, Gee fashions something involved as much with the author as it is with the text and the expert readers the film engages. The work echoes with a polyvocality that renders the influences, musings, and myriad psychological associations of Sebald’s text into externalized fragments that visually convey the interwoven processes of memory, perception, and spatialization in The Rings of Saturn. Neumann, in contrast, initially focuses on the unnamed narrator’s encounters with the title character. Even though he faithfully reproduces Jacques Austerlitz’s observations, anecdotes, and confessions, Neumann shatters the visual representation of the plot and congeals different media into a single filmic text. Moreover, Neumann’s invention and superimposition of himself as a “character” further undermine not only the claims to historical authenticity but also the possibility of a stable system of signi-

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Figure 1. Patience (After Sebald) (Grant Gee, 2012).

fiers. This deliberate intervention of the persona of the translator-filmmaker contradicts what Lawrence Venuti sees as the dominant trend in Anglo- American translations—namely, the erasure of the linguistic peculiarities of the individual translator (1995). To the contrary, it emphasizes the agency of the “translator” and the transformative properties of the text. Ultimately, both films are neither adaptations nor translations, but rather appropriate elements from Sebald’s work in order to trace the effects of his literary style. On the one hand, Gee, as I discuss in the next section, pursues these questions through experimental techniques, and Neumann, on the other hand, integrates them into the film’s plot and articulates them through the mouth of the title character, played by Denis Lavant.

Lost in Language: Reality and the Individual

Patience (After Sebald) begins with a brightly colored map of the world populated by little purple markers (Figure 1). Through staccato enlargements of the lower eastern corner of Great Britain, the East Anglian “landscape” reveals more and more of itself. However, the proliferation of arrows of different colors simultaneously magnifies the map’s intrinsic abstract nature. Suddenly the two-dimensional picture of the map— morphed into a satellite image—unfolds into three-dimensional structures. When a purple marker finally identifies the particular site of “Norwich” (Figure 2), a voice-over begins to read the opening lines of The Rings of Saturn. Almost immediately, the succession of satellite images gives way

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Figure 2. Patience (After Sebald) (Grant Gee, 2012).

to a static shot of the book’s cover photo. As the spoken words on the soundtrack assume a kind of narrative agency, the first pages of The Rings of Saturn appear as a slightly skewed visual. The verbalizing of the words written on the page seems to be authoring the scene. Yet the stasis of the image, the reluctance of the film to follow familiar modes of cinematic narrative development that give life in the form of visuals that correspond to the words articulated on the soundtrack, undermines the power of those signifiers to evoke a signified (Schwenger 2004). The voice-over merely intonates the words that appear on the screen in writing as an image of the page of Sebald’s text. This combination of spoken words and their corresponding visual representation seems to qualify as ekphrasis. Famously exemplified in Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield, ekphrasis renders the absent object present through language, effectively bringing an inanimate object to life (Auerbach 2003). Cinema has drawn on and adapted ekphrasis to indicate temporal shifts, particularly when returning to earlier moments on the narrative timeline. Frequently, these shifts are preceded by voice-over narrations of particular scenes, sequences, or settings that then transform into portrayals of the events themselves. As opposed to the depiction of an image through language, the spoken words inaugurating Patience (After Sebald) only utter what appears in writing on the pages, strangely rendering those signifiers devoid of life (Figure 3). The voice-over affirms the inky stasis of the words in the image as image, thereby robbing them of all representational potential. In doing so, Gee exposes a slippage inher-

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Figure 3. Patience (After Sebald) (Grant Gee, 2012).

ent to all languages—namely, signification is always an approximation and abstraction, as Ferdinand de Saussure and Mikhail Bakhtin have most famously theorized. The text on the screen embodies the abstract nature of language—the spoken words, in mirroring the page, can only reaffirm the inability of language to access the essence of something. Gee continues to expose the “death” that language embodies when he introduces, almost subliminally, a second layer to the soundtrack. Peter Schwenger’s discussion of the relationship between language and the Kantian Ding an sich is relevant here, specifically his claim that the act of naming, of linguistic designation, brings an object to life while simultaneously “murdering” it (2004). Drawing on Maurice Blanchot, Schwenger argues that to “define a thing is to replace it with its definition” (141). Gee’s layering of the soundtrack—which in cinema can be separated into voices and both diegetic and nondiegetic sounds and noises—hints at those elements of a thing that the act of naming eliminates. As the voice-over narration intonates the words on the screen, a second, separate layer on the soundtrack can be heard. The background of the voice-over reading the image of Sebald’s text is augmented by what seem to be muffled announce- ments voiced through a loudspeaker. This auditory presence, foreshadow- ing the images of a train station in the subsequent shots, also suggests an additional, spectral existence that cannot quite be identified or defined. Gee’s layered soundtrack thus points to an excess, a ghostly haunting not

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intrinsic to the spoken words—an excess, according to Schwenger, that escapes the limits of language. In other words, Gee’s visuals expose the inadequacy of linguistic signification to authentically connect an individual to the natural and artificial objects surrounding them. Translating Sebald’s preoccupation with the human inability to perceive and understand the essences of things, the film is mired in the ever-present dilemma of the Kantian Ding an sich. Gee’s visual rendering of textual images inherits and reimagines Sebald’s concern for language as a system of both articulation and, in the Lacanian sense of the word, alienation. Halfway through the film, Christo- pher MacLehose, the first publisher of the book’s English translation, recalls an exchange with Sebald about the German language. Despite de- cades living and working in England, Sebald insisted on writing primarily in German. In Gee’s reconstruction of this exchange, Sebald cites the word Handy, the “modern German” term for mobile phone. According to Mac Lehose, Sebald confesses here to a seemingly paradoxical allergy to the “modern” tongue, identifying his idiom as “nineteenth-century German.” MacLehose’s memory of this conversation points out a temporal disjunction between what Sebald perceives as the language that defines him and the everyday spoken vernacular. Sebald’s deliberate rejection of “modern” German embraces the alienation inherent to language. Moreover, MacLe- hose’s account paints Sebald’s criticism of Handy as implicitly nativist. Not only has “modern” German integrated foreign signifiers but this transformation has also further ruptured the relationship between words and concepts. Handy in English designates something “close at hand” and “comfortable to use,” or, alternatively, someone good with his or her hands. In German, though, Handy only abstractly discloses the meaning of its English original. Ultimately, what is at stake is not whether Sebald lamented the linguistic adulteration of modern German but whether MacLehose’s state- ments revivify Sebald’s theoretical and formal probings of the limits of language. The integration of the non-Germanic into the Germanic mirrors the fusing of fragments from countless foreign texts constituting Austerlitz. Stuart Burrows describes the latter as an “echospace,” a “dense web of references, tributes, allusions, and outright borrowings, both acknowledged and unacknowledged” (2020: 61). This form of Bakhtinian heteroglossia hence intimates that language, and those constructs that are developed through language, always echoes cultural constituents (Bakhtin 1981). According to Bakhtin’s theory, texts incorporate a variety of voices.

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Limits of Translation and Representability: Language and Image The cinematic translation of Sebald’s page into the visual contains another curiosity: the writing is from the English translation and not the German original. Translation theory has long held that translation is always already an approximation (Benjamin 1969a; Eco 2008). As Emily Apter has recently phrased it, “Translation cannot capture cultural peculiarities and should not intimate cultural equivalence and substitutability” (2013: 2). Gee’s reliance on the English translation of Sebald’s text instantiates the film’s principal undertaking—namely, the translation of a literary text into a visual language. By adopting some of Sebald’s techniques, Gee shines a spotlight on the formal limitations of film. In other words, Gee’s work emulates Sebald’s methods rather than faithfully retraces the narrator’s supposed walking tour through East Anglia. Gee’s emphasis on the ontology of the cinematic image further frac- tures what Sebald conceptualizes as a delicate tie of language to expression and individual experience. Gee experiments with perspective, superimposition, and intersections of color and black-and- white film stock. Moreover, he employs the image-within-the-image as “window, frame, and mirror,” which for Vivian Sobchack are three different visualizations cinema alternates between (1992: 14). Gee blends the boundaries between these three lenses through sequences in which images are framed by other images. Gee’s multiplication of several pictures simultaneously within the frame foregrounds the ontology of those particular images and the cinematic image in general. This layering of visuals produces a form of visual excess similar to the excess of language that Gee intimated through the voice-over’s “reading” of The Rings of Saturn. The proliferation of images that seem to come into being on their own enacts a free play of signifiers that furnishes an endless supply of alternative signifieds. Held together by the fragility of a voice-over on the soundtrack, the sheer abundance of Gee’s visuals assaults the eye. The superimposition of static reprints of photographs of natural landscapes and human structures merges into a labyrinth of fragments whose ability to cohere in a single “narrative” has become a uto- pian fantasy. Phrased differently, the eye’s simultaneous confrontation with several images culminates in total narrative instability. As the ocular sense struggles to narrate the visuals, the limitless number of narratives made up of different combinations of pictures manifests as a possibility of numerous alternative readings through different combinations of these. Gee’s images-

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Figure 4. Patience (After Sebald) (Grant Gee, 2012).

within-images corresponds to the disjunction between text and image that is characteristic of Sebald’s work. In the film, Lisa Patt draws attention to the fact that in The Rings of Saturn the written words are sometimes at odds with the depictions inscribed on the interspliced images. Patt points out that during Sebald’s discussion of the local herring trade, the drawing of a fish in the text is in actuality a trout, yet more evidence of the arbitrari- ness of the link between signifier and signified (Figure 4). The misalignment of linguistic term and image foregrounds questions of representation and representability. Gee’s deliberate transformation of the visuals in the film into a maze of images whose uniform intelligibility is obscured represents a translation of Sebald’s disjunction between text and visual. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin notes how the “delayed temporality” of cinema fashions an object that is simultaneously dead and alive (1969b). For Benjamin, the performa- tive qualities of cinema are contingent on a “present absence”: the actors are no longer physically present in the here and now yet continue to popu- late (and repopulate) the screen during a film’s exhibition. Gee conceptualizes the ontological dimension of film qua visual image on the screen by repeatedly integrating colored visuals that move within an otherwise static black-and-white image. While the framing image, both in its stasis and the absence of color, is bound to a different temporality, a moment arrested in time, the color and movement transform the nested graphic into a representation of the here and now. When the camera turns to Robert Macfar-

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lane’s attempt to retrace the text’s imagined pilgrimage, Gee superimposes color shots of Macfarlane’s feet into a black-and-white image of the East Anglian countryside. Although the feet within the image are in motion, they nevertheless lack direction. This migration seems to be a quixotic endeavor that revels solely in its inability to capture the narrator’s lived experience. The shots merely portray a focus on movement without the capacity to access the landscape that characterizes and evokes Sebald’s perceptions and memories. It is only when the wanderer arrives at the ruins at Dun- wich and connects the location to his own experiences that “things come alive” on-screen. The complex interplay between static and moving images transfers cinema’s ability to present the illusion of life. Yet the still image of photography often signifies a there and then rather than a here and now. Hence, the static image conveys a temporal and spatial disjointed- ness. Strangely enough, however, precisely at the moment when the dead image becomes animated, it transfers, in the Barthesian sense, a punctum. Therefore, the movement within an otherwise static framing image conveys simultaneously the unintelligibility of the “unfamiliar landscape of foreign memories” while also theorizing the effect of cultural and material aspects of human existence on individual experiences. While critics have exhaustively mapped Sebald’s interest in memory, Gee’s visual translation of the author’s memories of a fictional pilgrimage, despite all the documentary pretenses, harnesses an abundance of images in such a way that renders them almost unreal. Gee emphasizes the complex interplay of temporalities and memory making by following Paul Ricoeur’s theory, which postulates that processes of memories are interwoven with processes of image making. In identifying remembrance (not synonymous with recollection) as a form of artistic creation, Ricoeur reinforces the potentially fantastic nature of memory, of falsified reality (2006). This reaches back to Plato’s concept of simulacra—namely, that “likenesses are always images of dissimilarity” (Camille 2003: 36). By including images whose tie to reality is tenuous, Gee thus channels Susan Sontag’s claim that “to possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to re-experience the unreality and remoteness of the real. Instead reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cam- eras” (1973: 154). Combining both Sebald’s visuals and his own artfully staged images, Gee simultaneously undermines photography’s claim to reality while asserting its critical function in the production of collective memory and reality. Furthermore, Gee interpolates himself as a subject insofar as his own engagement with and response to Sebald are inter-

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woven with those of the other participants in the film—intentionally blurring the line of demarcation between subject and object.

No Longer Subject or Object, but both/and Subject-Object In the act of remembering, the subject, the person who remembers, is not only a blank screen where the remembered images migrate in their unadulterated state but also the projector of his or her desires. Macfarlane identifies how his own pilgrimage through East Anglia is framed and over- shadowed by his own yearning in his admission that he “wanted it to be a grey day, but it was a bright day.” The film’s formal constructions internalize this conflict between projected desire and experienced reality that Macfar- lane’s endeavor embodies. And even though this pilgrimage is shaped by memories of The Rings of Saturn, the text itself is a fictional construct. In other words, Macfarlane’s model of an authentic experience of this countryside is a literary text that does not deny its own fictionality. As such, Macfar- lane embodies a subject’s merging with the object of desire—namely, the desire to experience Sebald’s narrator’s authentic pilgrimage. In The Rings of Saturn, the pilgrimage through the East Anglian landscape is memo- rized: an act of retracing in and of itself. Gee’s fixation on Macfarlane’s desire for an authentic remake of an inauthentic textual pilgrimage once again exposes something that much of Sebald’s work achieves—namely, the slippage between the fictional and the nonfictional (Figure 5). One oft cited example of the formal hybridity of Sebald’s text—the alternation between the written and the visual—invokes the duality of stasis and movement, and therefore highlights the representational limitations of both media (Lessing 1984). Although this duality has often been used to delineate subject and object, as Bill Brown has shown, seemingly inanimate and material objects can potentially transcend their ontological limits and, in coming to life, acquire a form of subjectivity. Gee explores cinema’s life-giving potentiality as he transforms static objects into animate beings by bestowing “thingness” and thus renders them into speaking subjects. Like Gee’s representation of Macfarlane’s journey, Sebald’s depiction of Somerleyton plays with contrasts of static and moving images. However, contrary to the framing of Macfarlane’s wanderings, Gee’s Somerleyton consists of reproductions of black-and-white filmed images of the estate Sebald included in The Rings of Saturn and his own visuals of the site. Gee superimposes these individual representations onto one another and thus creates a fourth object—a hybrid of temporalities and languages. The film

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Figure 5. Patience (After Sebald) (Grant Gee, 2012).

brings objects to life to reveal their own histories that are multiple rather than singular (Brown 2015). Referencing both The Rings of Saturn as well his own experience of Somerleyton, Macfarlane attributes “linguistic abili- ties” to the site. Yet in commenting on the erosion of the distinction between animate and inanimate, Macfarlane merely articulates a basic thesis of The Rings of Saturn, while Gee’s rendering of text and space transforms these objects into speaking subjects. The expressive capacity of objects is clearly devoid of sound and hence correlates to what Sebald once referred to as “a language of silence” (Gee 2012). Commenting on his upbringing in postwar Germany, Sebald expresses frustration by the absence of language that shaped his childhood and adolescence. By some “tacit agreement,” as he puts it, “parents never told you anything about their experiences” (Gee 2012). While this seems to collapse the absence of verbal communication with an absence of language and meaning, the film posits otherwise through its deployment of a language of silence. Slowly panning over inanimate objects, Gee’s camera exposes hidden depths and details through direct focus. Brought to life, these objects morph into subjects capable of expression and thereby acquire “thingness.” As Brown argues, “The matter-movement transposes the object into some other thing that is (the being of which is) in excess of any manifest object” (2015: 5). Gee foregrounds how as a result of such a language of silence the “human drama [appears] written in the non-human.” He identifies how the human condition is inscribed into the landscape itself

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and thus suggests that access to reality is always mediated through epistemic processes (Brown 2004). Gee’s epistemic process subverts the reliance on the individual inter- action as the foundation of “the human drama.” The marginal role played by human beings in the film renders them almost completely immobile, limited to stationary talking heads, disembodied voice-overs, or fragmented body parts whose lack of totality precludes any possibility of subjectivity. These human deconstructions articulate Gee’s dissolution of the binary of subject and object, animate and inanimate. Photography as a form of imprisoned reality also implies that the images function as static moments that emphasize the absence of the “life body” in the here and now; instead, the “body” in the image assumes a metaphorical presence. Suggesting that “representation always turns a subject into an object [so that one] experiences one another simultaneously as subject and object” (Jones 2003: 260), Amelia Jones highlights the possibility of simultaneously occupying multiple forms of existence. The photographic process already initiates a form of dual coexistence, a split subject, insofar as the photographic subject, as Barthes observed, transforms in front of the camera into the object before the image is even taken (1980: 14). Barthes identifies that the awareness of the photograph being taken stiffens his posture, instinctively leading him to pose rather than allowing the image to capture what he imagines himself to be. As such, the photograph represents as a mirror that confronts the subject with his or her image and simultaneously transforms the subject into an object (Figure 6). But this perception does not lead, according to Barthes, to a form or recognition but fosters a continuous process of misrecognition. The photographic moment and the photograph itself serve as Lacanian mirrors that lead the subject not to identification and recognition but to dissociation and alienation. Gee’s inversion of the binaries of subject and object and the concepts associated with each emphasizes a dissolution of stable systems of meaning and instead suggests a multiplicity of significations and interpretations. While such an array allows for numerous potentialities, it also functions as a site of misrepresentation and misrecognition. Gee’s filmic deconstruction documents the ways in which individual and collective histories intersect and result in a sense of “being lost” in the world (Tally 2013: 68).

Space and Time and the Discontinuities of Thought

Another facet of The Rings of Saturn Gee incorporates is the repeated oscillation between the macro to the micro. But the transitions

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Figure 6. Patience (After Sebald) (Grant Gee, 2012).

between these two visual registers are not seamless and thus draw attention to the cinematic suturing. Gee alternates between filmic sequences and aspects that highlight the materiality of the image and thus disrupts any presumption of a seamless narrative. By embedding visuals, Sebald not only hints at the way in which images have become an integral feature of the quotidian (Mitchell 2006) but also deconstructs their imagined omnipo- tence. Sebald’s textual methods seem to move the narrative in a particular direction only to then redirect it, or, more importantly, retrace it. Both Sebald’s narrative and Gee’s visual fragments are held together sequen- tially by a spatiality of landscape rather than narrative. While the film seems to proceed linearly insofar as it aligns itself with chapters of The Rings of Saturn, it also undermines this ordering by deviating temporally and spa- tially from the source. Gee repeatedly returns to the act of mapmaking to emphasize the inability to reproduce abstract processes of the mind. The opening sequence’s mapping suggests, for example, a correlation between the arrows and the lines that depict the trajectory of Sebald’s text. While this appears to make the East Anglian landscape legible in the form of a two-dimensional map, it simultaneously reveals the workings of the mind as obscure. Moreover, as Gee follows in the footsteps of Sebald’s narrator’s, the geographies on the screen disclose themselves as amalgams of real sites and imagined spaces. This fusion exposes a seemingly labyrinthine intertwining of different temporalities. For example, Rick Moody’s detailed mapping of Sebald’s references in each chapter of the book invokes

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Umberto Eco’s desire to retrace James Joyce’s Dublin. However, Eco’s attempt to map the Dublin of a literary text only leads him to encounter another site, neither Joyce’s Dublin nor the actual city of Dublin. Eco’s dis- covery of a different spatiality exposes how Moody’s complex color-coded map transforms the chapters into abstractions rather than makes them more legible. This map fails to capture the intricacies of The Rings of Sat- urn, instead highlighting its own ontological relationship with the text. With its ability to channel both spatiality and temporality, writing itself is a form of mapmaking, “literature” an “attempt to give form to a formless spatiality” (Tally 2013: 84). However, Gee echoes Sebald in emphasizing that those “textual” maps often do not proceed according to long-standing guidelines of mapmaking. Instead, they function as sites that expose and examine the abstractions of mapmaking. Seemingly undercutting the infrastructure of legibility, Sebald’s text appears to engage with ideas at random. These tan- gential pursuits, however, are all points on the same trajectory. As Gee interweaves voices, interviews, and images, it becomes apparent that he paral- lels Sebald’s method of forging connections between seemingly unrelated thoughts. In correlating, by way of editing, specific phrases in the interviews to those of other interviews, he translates onto the screen the psychological maneuverings of the unconscious provoked by these different and varie- gated observations. This mirrors what Gilles Deleuze identifies as “nomad thought,” the crossing and recrossing of boundaries that expose spatialities and hidden processes of spatial practices. While Deleuze focuses on how nomadic thinking reconfigures perceptions of space, the concept extends much further. This nomadic traversing of boundaries is precisely what is at stake in Sebald’s description of fishing practices in East Anglia as a gate- way to contemplating the atrocities in Bergen-Belsen. Gee’s slow panning over the maps visualizes Sebald’s “crisis of apprehension” (Tally 2013: 70). His on-screen maps alternate between two registers. There are, on the one hand, close-ups that reveal particular sections of those maps that ultimately obscure the totality of those mappings, and, on the other, shots of seemingly complete maps whose claim to comprehensibility obscures critical details. Thus exposing the limits of geographic perception, Gee theorizes a wider “crisis of apprehension” that gives way to and perpetuates a sense of what Jean-Paul Sartre calls “not being in the world.” Sartre identifies this sense of “homelessness” as an inherent quality of the human condition and also as the root of the dread and anxiety that characterizes being (Tally 2013: 65). Gee’s emphasis on the different mappings of The Rings of Saturn documents a venture to

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make sense of both a specific text and the world in general. As such, the processes convey a Lacanian Imaginary and an imagined cohesion while simultaneously exposing the incoherence of human existence. Gee’s visual interrogation of the art of mapping directs attention to the fact that Sebald’s narrators journey through not just space but time as well. In fact, the East Anglian landscape often serves as a stage for narratives and histories of other, sometimes distant lands and different temporalities. In traversing the East Anglian landscape, Sebald’s narrator also traverses history and, along the way, interweaves the personal and the collective. Sebald’s narrator consciously evokes the figure of the Benjaminian flaneur (Long 2007). While the flaneur’s urban wanderings embody the construction of space insofar as he “paints modern life” (Tally 2013: 97), his counterpart in Sebald reconfigures the modernist character. Sebald’s interest in both temporal and spatial movement through the countryside adopts Michel de Certeau’s notion of walking as a form of transgression while simultaneously conveying a nostalgia for a “lost knowability” (89). Although memory ruptures time by introducing different temporalities into the here and now (Schillinger et al. 2010), in Sebald’s text they are inextricably linked. Moreover, the journey through the countryside hints at a form of nostalgia linked to the rural. In literature, the countryside often signifies simpler times and an understanding of temporality that can best be described as circular (Tally 2013: 86–87). Helmut Lethen’s analysis of The Rings of Saturn notes a seasonal circularity rather than linear temporality as the underlying prin- ciple governing the interpretations of the images (2006: 26). Sebald’s narrator repeatedly traverses the conceptual boundaries of time and space to illustrate the impossibility of comprehending either concept. In lieu of mapping and its claims to empirical truth, Gee privileges subjective perception as a foundational component of human understanding of space and time. Gee emulates Sebald’s methodology of interweaving different temporalities and spatialities to convey collective ideas of nation and history while simultaneously exposing the fragmentary nature of time and space, and, in turn, the fictionality of collective memory. Gee augments the multilayered narrativity of The Rings of Saturn by incorporating references anchored in the present tense of the film’s production. For example, when Gee traces images of urban locales, such as Lowestoft Central, the sequence opens with a static shot of the railway station. However, Gee immediately exposes this shot as a reproduction when the flapping page discloses it as the image from Sebald’s text. Barely allowing for this to register as a copy, the film then moves into shots of the moving traffic around

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the train station in what appears to be 2012. In emphasizing movement over stasis, he undermines the idea that the static understands histories founded on notions of monumentality. Like its source, Patience (After Sebald) does not rely on a chrono- logical or linear structure. Instead, the film fosters readings of both the images and sequences individually or in different combinations that ultimately enable the coexistence of multiple, divergent narratives. This recalls the Mnemosyne Atlas, sixty-three wooden boards upon which Aby Warburg “added and removed, arranged and rearranged, black and white photographic reproductions of art-historical or cosmographical images. Here and there he also included maps, reproductions of manuscript pages, and contemporary images drawn from newspapers and magazines. As part of this combinatory process each panel would often then be photographed before another arrangement was attempted” (Johnson 2012: 9). For Christopher Johnson, Warburg’s reconfiguration of the panels into different arrange- ments highlights a narrative plurality. Gee’s film exhibits similar possibilities for different configurations. Thus, the film points to the way in which history and memory are a shorthand for nonlinear collectivization of individual moments and experiences that manifest in the film through a multiplicity of increasingly subjective encounters and stories. However, Warburg’s “archival catalog” of images implicitly points to an absence, as the images are only stand-ins for brief moments frozen in time. In other words, these fragments lack temporal and narrative cohesion. In Patience (After Sebald), the abundance of such frozen moments in the form of photographs and interviews are bound together as ency- clopedic entries. These individual moments eschew any overriding herme- neutical organization, undermining the very notion of categorical thinking. On the contrary, this archival catalog can be assembled and reassembled according to a variety of different principles and thereby can potentially be employed in a multiplicity of narratives. While these images may cohere into a catalog, the coherence of the “represented body is constantly under- mined by the very incompleteness these images seek to overcome” (Mir- zoeff 2005: 19). Each frame is a fragmentary extract of both the interviewee and the source text itself. In this manner, the possibility of multiple arrange- ments of the filmic fragments articulates the impossibility of comprehensive knowledge, as each narrative prompts yet another reading and recombi- nation. In lieu of total knowledge, the image “takes on depth through the displacements, identifications, and projections of the interpretive relationship, which enlivens and enfleshes by tapping into embodied memories”

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(Jones 2002: 968). It becomes, in Derridean terms, a free play of signifiers that consistently invoke yet another image/memory. Gee’s film captures how “memory sets us an impossible task because we are forever shuttling between the familiar and ‘the foreign’” (Johnson 2012: 2). This “shuttling between the familiar and the ‘foreign’” brings to mind Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory. Drawing on Hirsch, Eric Santner describes how postmemory captures “the peculiarities of the memory of events that hover between personal memory and impersonal history, events one has not lived through oneself but that, in large measure through exposure to the stories of those who did experience them, have nonetheless entered into the fabric of the self” (2006: 158). Neumann’s filmic composition ultimately elucidates what Adam Philips identifies as the uncanny of Sebald’s text insofar as it reveals the “catastrophic dilapidation of foundations” (Gee 2012). Patience (After Sebald) builds on the text’s own epigraphical identification of the rings of the planet as a “moon that wandered too close to Saturn and was shattered by the gravitational pull but that forever keeps circling the planet which destroyed it.” This extract from the Brockhaus Encyclopedia refers not only to Sebald’s Rings of Saturn but to the vio- lent effects of history and the multiple “ways of seeing” (Berger 1972) that Sebald’s “pilgrimage” repeatedly confronts. In the early section of the film, MacLehose highlights the text’s resistance to generic categorization. He remembers Sebald’s firm belief that this work belongs in “all the boxes” that literary scholars, publishers, booksellers rely upon so profoundly. Sebald’s resistance to traditional labels of genre obviously articulates an understanding of these conventions as a limit on creativity. However, this reluctance emphasizes that while such paratextual classifications are designed to make sense of the world, they ultimately prove to be their own undoing as they expose the random and contingent nature of the classification of human experience. MacLehose also comments on the decision to modify the original German title (Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt). The subtitle, according to him, was truncated in order to avoid the reli- gious connotation of the word pilgrimage. Nevertheless, as Philips explains toward the end of the film, Sebald, his narrator, and the audience are all very much engaged in a pilgrimage that destabilizes all these three positions through a kind of “utter catastrophe.”

Austerlitz/Austerlitz

Stan Neumann’s Austerlitz largely focuses on reproducing the narrative elements of Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, which, as Alexander Verdolini

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and others point out, aligns more closely than any other of Sebald’s works with the “conventional novel form” (Verdolini 2013: 614). Like Gee, Neu- mann translates specific elements of text pertaining to language, space, and memory, and poses his own questions about the ontology of the visual. However, while Gee’s work plays with experimental cinematic techniques, Neumann initially seems to pursue these questions via narrative strategies of plot construction and character development. But at the end of the adaptation process, which always entails finding ways to alter, adjust, and “make suitable” (Hutcheon 2006: 7), Neumann highlights the various qualities of visuals as he weaves static images, alternative film stock, and printed materials into the film. The camera is the translator of the narrative of the literary text by further portraying the instability of systems of meaning. Neumann’s guiding light is the relationship between the unnamed narrator and Austerlitz, a bond that leads viewers on another pilgrimage to terrains of history, memory, and the social environments that mold our subjectivities—albeit more subtly than Gee’s film and The Rings of Sat- urn. The narrator’s preoccupation with Jacques Austerlitz transforms the latter into an object of investigation. While Patience (After Sebald) endows objects with agency, Neumann’s Austerlitz plays both roles of subject and object more fluidly. Yet the more Austerlitz seemingly reveals himself and is revealed, the narratives within the narrative increasingly obscure the title character as an object of study. Austerlitz emerges as a mise en abyme of characterological fictions and not biographical facts. Following in the footsteps of the source text, the film’s framing narrative consists of the narrator’s recollections of their repeated encounters, which consist almost entirely of Austerlitz’s recollections of his autobiographical pilgrimage. As he narrates his life and research interests, Austerlitz integrates a patchwork of observations and memories supplied by other characters. For example, in the description of Austerlitz’s meeting with his Kinderfräu- lein, Vera, Sebald clearly identifies Austerlitz as narrator—at least initially. But as Vera’s own memories begin to lead the narrative, the distinction between Austerlitz’s first-person perspective and that of Vera erodes (Ver- dolini 2013). Sebald’s narrative structure intertwines the two central fictions of the narrator and Austerlitz to such an extent that Austerlitz’s autonarra- tion is an act of self-creation. Even though the novel blends nonfiction with fiction in a characteristi- cally Sebaldian fashion, the narrative structure of Neumann’s filmic translation questions the validity of the nonfictional dimensions of the source work. Despite Neumann’s decision to open the film with an image of the book on a desk accompanied by a voice-over pondering the act of reading generally

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and the selection of this text specifically, he nevertheless reproduces the novel’s multilayered narratology. The opening sequence is immediately fol- lowed by the narrator’s encounter with Austerlitz, but instead of represent- ing the narrator on-screen, Austerlitz begins his musings facing the camera and thus directly addresses the audience. Neumann conflates the narrator with the spectator and thus conscripts viewers into the spectacle. This inter- mingling with the plot fosters what Deane Blackler terms a “disobedient” reading. According to Blackler, a “disobedient reader” is “skeptical about the text, engaged with it in an interrogatory, contestatory way as a collabo- rative author rather than the obedient or passive recipient of its authority. This kind of reader steps backwards and forwards across the effaced or elided textual boundary from the text to his or her own domain” (2007: 187). Neumann’s disobedient reader is further complicated by the presence of multiple voice-overs. In addition to Neumann and the title character, there is a third, unknown voice. When the words of that unfamiliar voice-over are placed in the context of the narrative, it becomes evident that this voice occupies the position of the narrator. The combination of Neumann’s unorthodox camera work and acting breaks the fourth wall and hence forges a link between viewers and Austerlitz’s narration. However, Neumann’s integration of a voice-over that clearly represents the narrator undermines the fusion of viewer and screen. Therefore, the audience occupies two positions simultaneously and, in shifting between them, appears to both collaborate with the narrative and surrender to the narrator’s interpretations. The film fragments Sebald’s narrator into two different figures. On the one hand, the narrator merges with the audience and thus assigns them a participatory role; on the other hand, he at times becomes spectral, a barely discernible haunting of a suggestion. In contrast, Neumann fleshes out the character of Marie de Verneuil, who emerges as a figure radically diverging from the source. Sebald’s Marie is a marginal presence, a fragmentary existence haunting the title character as he narrates her. Austerlitz briefly introduces her in the accounts of his obsessive wanderings through London’s underground corridors. However, after he discloses her name, he immediately turns away, relegates her to the abode of the dead entombed beneath the train stations that fascinate him so intensely, and promises to speak more about her later (Sebald 2001: 136). When Austerlitz discovers that he, Vera, and his parents, Agáta and Maximilian, had visited Marien- bad in 1938, he returns to the character of Marie by way of a retelling of their visit to the very same town in 1972.

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Contrary to her passive function in the novel, Neumann’s Marie plays a more lively and animated role. Instead of revealing her identity through Austerlitz, she too directly addresses the camera and conveys her observations. As she comments on their faltering romance, she looks again at the camera and positions the audience to function as a stand-in for Austerlitz. Neumann’s cinematic appropriation of Marie not only assigns her more direct narrative agency but also defragments her and conveys a more cohesive character sketch. Marie’s direct address forces viewers to occupy a variety of different positions in relation to the film. The audience is alternately drafted into the narrative in the guise of the narrator and, at times, simply takes up the position of the more traditional passive spectator. Thus, the audience is forced into a “disobedient” reading that actively participates in the construction and interpretation of the narrative. These various engagements, in turn, force the viewer to interrogate the narrative in different ways. Moreover, the destabilizing of the narrative generates a questioning of filmic genres, as Neumann increasingly subverts boundaries between narrative, experimental, and documentary cinema. In the early scenes, Neumann seems to employ standard conventions of narrative cinema; however, as the film progresses, his increasingly experimental approach subverts the relatively stable generic formula. Neumann’s own voice assumes a more prominent role until Sebald’s text recedes into the background. Toward the end of the film, Austerlitz’s and Vera’s descriptions of the respective fates of Agáta and Maximilian are suddenly ruptured by a black-and-white photograph of a young boy. Unlike the cover of the novel, which supposedly depicts the young Austerlitz dressed as a page boy, Neumann’s image distinguishes itself by its quotidian char- acteristics. The child comes across as mundane, bedecked in slightly out- dated street clothes, posing against the backdrop consisting of a forget- table street scene. However, the appearance of the photograph, which Neumann identifies as an image of himself at a young age, marks a turning point in the film. Suddenly Denis Lavant’s Austerlitz recedes and Neumann comes forward as the main subject. Having become the film’s main focus, Neumann transforms into a detective investigating the documentary evidence and factual claims that supposedly underpin Austerlitz. Neumann traces not only Austerlitz’s supposed biography but also his own autobiog- raphy through the labyrinthine streets of Prague, the city of his birth. He uses the image Sebald reproduced in the text as a clue to guide his search for Agáta’s remains. Neumann shows the photograph to a Czech friend, who laughs and directs him to the bookstore a few doors down. In the dis-

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Figure 7. Austerlitz (Stan Neumann, 2015).

play in the front windows of the bookstore is a book with that very same image on its cover (Figure 7). The salesperson inside the store reveals that the image is that of a famous Czech opera singer, Ema Destinnová, who lived an ordinary life and died in the 1930s. Neumann’s transformation of the film into a detective tale is paradoxical. While the structural compo- nents of the film begin to incorporate documentary elements, Neumann unmasks Sebald’s source documents as fictional. Although Sebald’s narrative of Agáta clearly harnesses certain aspects of Destinnová’s life, like her stage career, he invents a Jewish identity for her as well as the fate she suf- fered at the hands of the Nazis. The paradox lies in the fact that Neumann’s supposed distance from the text brings him closer to the literary techniques that brought Sebald so much critical and popular success. There is an uncanny resemblance in how both films engage questions of language and text. Like Gee, Neumann forgoes German in favor of French and brief snippets of Czech (Figure 8). The explanation for this translation can perhaps be found in the original text when the narrator reveals that Austerlitz and he “had always spoken in French since our first conversation in Antwerp. . . . When we switched to English, in which I was better versed, I was strangely touched to notice in him an insecurity which had been concealed from me before” (Sebald 2001: 31–32). Remaining faithful to this facet of Sebald’s portrayal of Austerlitz, Neumann perpetuates the text’s fictionality only to completely undo it in the concluding por- tion of the film by inserting himself. The play of languages takes place on

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Figure 8. Austerlitz (Stan Neumann, 2015).

the visual register as well. Neumann, like Gee, includes visuals of text, images, and even entire pages from the original. These are either accompanied by a voice-over that reads the lines directly from the corresponding pages. Throughout the film, Neumann fashions himself as a “disobedient reader” who both colludes with and interrogates the narrative. Initially a disembodied voice, Neumann’s presence is limited to reading, interpreting, and imagining. Bringing the narrative to visual life, Neumann reorganizes and reconfigures certain elements of the text. While Neumann’s imagina- tion endows Marie de Verneuil, for example, with a voice and direct agency, he reconfigures Sebald’s text to render the film a product of his conception of his reading of the narrative. One revelation uncovered by Neumann’s detective work is the fact that Austerlitz is in part a collage of different canonical texts. The film pre sents an image of the book’s French translation accompanied by a voice- over articulating the words on the page. A few seconds later, the camera focuses on a computer monitor where the words that appeared shortly before on the page are typed into a search engine. The source of these words discloses itself not as Sebald’s Austerlitz but as Marcel Proust’s writing. Neu- mann also uncovers direct inclusions of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. This polyvocality points to the intertextuality that Barthes sees as inherent to all texts (1981). In yet another Sebaldian gesture, Neumann’s dissection of the text into its constituent parts shines a spotlight on the uncanny cultural archive that is the source for all textuality.

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Furthermore, Sebald’s intricate play with Ema Destinnová’s image seems to demonstrate his supposed belief that a “photograph demands narrativization” (Long 2007: 47). Yet Neumann’s deconstruction of the text on its linguistic register undermines Sebald’s binary distinction between image and language. Indeed, Neumann’s Austerlitz hints that language itself is as unstable as the visual. Deciphering the different voices constituting a text ultimately results in an absence, not unlike the father whom Austerlitz never locates but with whom he remains preoccupied. Neumann explores this instability of language in his retracing of Austerlitz’s steps in Prague. He visits Vera’s supposed residence and attempts to find Agáta’s afterlife in Terezín. Initially fascinated by the precision of Sebald’s rendering of geographies, Neumann concludes that the correspondence between text and reality is spectral; his archaeology of Vera and Agáta turns up nothing. Instead, he is confronted with his own history in the form of documents related to his father’s internment in Terezín. Here the film returns to the opening sequences in which Neumann proclaims himself first and fore- most a reader of the text. An integral piece of the textual fabric of Austerlitz is the title character’s fascination with the history of architecture and monumentality. The trajectory of Neumann’s emphases on particular architectural sites and forms in Sebald’s text, like the Brussels Palais de Justice, the windows that appear like “blind eyes,” and the dilapidated resort in Marienbad, takes him beyond his source and to Anthony Vidler’s examination of architecture as a modern “unhomely” (1992). Neumann’s visual handling of the Palais de Justice retools it as a metaphor for the title character’s shattered subjectivity. While the building occupies two and a half pages in Sebald’s text, Neumann renders the site as an extensive visual allegory for Austerlitz’s enthrallment with hidden significations and, on a more general level, for psychic processes. Neumann reproduces Sebald’s preoccupation with architecture as a site of cultural memory (Figure 9). The text’s portrayal of Austerlitz as “obsessed with nineteenth-century architecture” echoes Sebald’s self- declared preference for nineteenth-century German and his correlating disdain for the contemporary tongue. It does not, therefore, seem acci- dental that Neumann visually elaborates on Austerlitz’s vivid descriptions of nineteenth-century architecture. By situating older modes of imagining space in the contemporary context, Vidler’s mapping of the uncanny as an enduring affect concretizes these structures today: “[The] contemporary sensibility that sees the uncanny erupt in empty parking lots around aban- doned or run-down shopping malls . . . in the wasted margins and surface

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Figure 9. Austerlitz (Stan Neumann, 2015).

appearances of postindustrial culture” is heir to feelings of unease that first originated in the late eighteenth century (1992: 3). Like Vidler, Neumann displays a particular fascination with labyrinths and blind windows, building on Austerlitz’s personal obsession in order to deconstruct a wider cultural imaginary. Early in the film, when Austerlitz articulates his preoccupation with the Palais de Justice, a long shot of the palace transitions to a slow pan over its structural particularities. This quasi establishing shot of the “singular architectural monstrosity” in the center of Brussels (Sebald 2001: 29) functions as a mechanism of visual control over the represented object. However, the subsequent shots expose this supposed dominance as merely illusory by penetrating the building’s interior. Austerlitz’s voice-over interweaves historical details with myths as the camera continues to wan- der through the halls and crevices. The camera’s mobility contrasts with the rigidity and monumentality of the walls, ceilings, and floors. In fact, the impenetrability of the stones seems to obscure visibility. Expanding on the original text, Neumann’s Austerlitz describes the palace as “the biggest stone pile in Europe. Noteworthy for the emptiness it holds. It is said the bourgeoisie were in such a rush that the architects had no time to complete the plans, so it is as though the palace built itself” (Gee 2012). Austerlitz’s narration in the film hints at the interplay between cultural artifacts and a collective uncanny. As the camera switches to Auster- litz sitting at a table and turning the pages of a book of enormous architec-

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tural sketches of the palace, his ability to control the book in front of him mimics the camera’s control over the site as an object. Yet, as in the previ- ous scene, the voice-over narration subverts the visuals by highlighting the fact that the building assumed a life of its own as it began to grow uncon- trollably. Neumann’s Palais de Justice aligns itself with the role Sebald, according to Naomi Stead, attributes to the site, as “the fine symbolism of justice and civic life is transformed into its obverse—a blind labyrinth signify- ing only state power and its inscrutable bureaucratic processes” (2015: 43). Yet there is more to Neumann’s cinematic architecture than the oppressive bureaucracy, insofar as the voice-over coyly flirts with the hidden cham- bers and dead-end corridors becoming the site of black-market commerce. In other words, the building reveals itself on-screen as a sentient being resisting external control. As in Gee’s work, the images seem to oppose the soundtrack and hence challenge the limitations of both the visual or verbal dimensions of the narrative. Alongside the palace’s role as a heavy- handed metaphor for the contradictions and secrets Austerlitz embodies, the site also serves as an uncanny concrete translation of abstract psychic structures. The fact that the palace seems to have come into being without human intervention mirrors the image of a collective uncanny burdened by what W. J. T. Mitchell identifies as the critical anxiety of our time: “Our time is not ‘things fall apart,’ but things come alive” (2004: 232). Neumann’s prolonged still life of this “monstrosity” at the heart of the Belgian capital is also a portrait of Neumann’s preoccupation with Sebald simultaneously immersed in and the by-product of a collective psychic Angst. Austerlitz’s fetishistic romance with the blind windows recalls Edgar Allan Poe’s depictions of windows as “eye-like but without life—vacant” (Vidler 1992: 18). Neumann re-creates these seemingly blind buildings to elaborate on the prevailing Freudian understanding of the uncanny as well as the interpretation of the thematics of vision and the archive in Sebald’s text. Freud’s analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman offers an illus- tration of Vidler’s theory of architectural structures as embodiments of the uncanny (1919). Freud’s interest in Hoffmann’s tale is in part a response to Ernst Jentsch’s reading of the narrative. Jentsch, like Freud, fixates on Nathaniel’s fear of losing his eyes and links it to an inability to perceive clearly and, moreover, the inability to distinguish between animate and inanimate. This perceptual uncertainty leads to an unease about the self and its place within its surrounding. Freud disagrees and names Nathaniel’s fear of losing his eyes as a form of castration anxiety. Austerlitz explains how this fetish for blind windows is rooted in the memory of his childhood

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room in the Elias’s household. As his narration establishes a direct connection to Poe insofar as the windows that are cemented shut represent blind eyes, Neumann’s camera pans over numerous building facades. The abundance of this strange architectural feature in the various structures begins to constitute an archive. The limits those windows impose on perception, according to Austerlitz, lead to a sense of being lost in the world. The combination of Neumann’s archive of images and Austerlitz’s discur- sive observations confirms the interrelatedness of Jentsch’s postulation of the uncanny as the fear of the loss of sight and Freudian castration— for both turn on the loss of power in a patriarchal society. In other words, although critics have equated his fascination with the archive as the foundation of understanding and a site that “stresses the equivalence of knowledge” (Long 2007: 153), Neumann’s transformation of “blind houses” into an archive undermines this reading. The archive now obscures knowledge, and its labyrinthine construction disorients the subject precisely because of this “equivalence of knowledge.” Indeed, Austerlitz’s desperation for “sub- stituting the archive for interiority” (Long 2007: 162) clearly indicates an awareness of his own alienation. Ultimately, the blindness of the windows excises from the Heim any sense of belonging, leaving behind alienation and disconnection from the world outside the home. Encased inside the Elias household or barred ocular entry into a space (Marienbad), the home represents either a tomb—and as such a fear of being buried alive (Vidler 1992)—or a perpetual homelessness in the great wide open, an exclusion from any potential social home. While Sebald includes several images of blind houses in the original text, his description of Marienbad features only an interior shot of what appears to be a winter garden. Neumann translates Austerlitz’s excursion to Marienbad with Marie de Verneuil into a detailed study of architectural decadence and the artisanry of ruins. Neumann’s Marienbad also suffers from an absence of perception, revealed through several shots of dark- ened or blind windows that interrupt the images of monumental architecture. These windows, as blind eyes, clearly point to Austerlitz’s desperation to trace his origins through his fragmentary memories. Sebald exemplifies the title character’s inability to remember through his belated recognition that the room Marie and he occupy is symbolically connected to the year he visited the spa with his parents and Vera. While the Marienbad sequence in the film consists primarily of photographs, Neumann incorporates shots of postcards that depict the locale as a health spa for those ailing bodies in need of a “shed.” These postcards are a historical trace of Marienbad of

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the late nineteenth century and simultaneously a disruption of Neumann’s cinematic archaeology of the contemporary remnants of the site (Remmler 2005). Featuring hand-drawn caricatures of overweight patrons, the postcards at once assert and undermine photography’s ontological claims to realism. Contrary to Neumann’s filmic portrait of Marienbad, these postcards, with their inscriptions of greetings and actual dates, disclose themselves as historical documents. At the same time, these images are mere pastiche renderings that fashion Marienbad in an exaggerated manner and thus expose their fictionality (Sontag 1973). Neumann’s collage of images documenting Marienbad illuminates its own narrative mechanisms and, moreover, the fragmentary glimpses that constitute historical narratives masquerading as comprehensive reproductions of space and time. Hence, Neumann’s interpretation and reconfiguration of the architectural commen- tary in the novel foreground how architectural sites embody individual and collective psychologies. Gee’s and Neumann’s visual translations of Sebald’s texts engage his central tropes to explore the two filmmaker’s obsessive attachment to his writings. By inserting themselves into the narratives, these filmmakers transform their respective works into deeply personal readings. Even though Gee does not directly reproduce himself as either an image or a voice-over, Patience’s emphasis on and inclusion of visual documents of the 2012 production date transform the film into yet another pilgrimage echoing The Rings of Saturn. Whereas adaptation and appropriation require an ability to take part in a “play of similarity and difference” (Sanders 2006: 45), the transgressions of genre boundaries and the manipulation of film as a form in both works produce a “deviant reader” whose participatory function further destabilizes standard conventions. Ultimately, both filmmakers appropriate and translate literary techniques into visual language to explore alternative methods that defy systematic ordering. Incorporating many of Sebald’s configurations of individual experiences, perception, private and collective memory, both films recontextualize concrete and abstract engagements with both cultural artifacts and space and time. Like Sebald, Gee and Neu- mann dismantle structures of signification to critically refute all fictions of categorization. Both works, in other words, expose the failure of rational thought and historical understanding, and insist on the random disorderli- ness of lived experience.

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