Project Sign Off: The Beginning of Slow Beauty

W. G. Sebald: Image from Austerlitz (2001). München: C. Hanser, 2001.

I have created here an example of the project sign off that you will discuss and complete with your tutor.  Your tutor must sign off on your project! 

Here is my project that I will be carrying out this term.

Zoe's Project: Slow Beauty

To begin where there is no beginning is how this project shall proceed - Sebald writes in memories, in streams of consciousness, in layers of beauty that are like waves of feeling that wash over the reader.  What is most appealing to me is the use of photographs with the text as shown above.  Preuschoff writes:

'Sebald’s literary work is exceptionally visual, and his writing from and with images demonstrates an approach to literature not in competition with (or afraid of) the visual, but in dialogue with it, knowing that for both description and photo or drawing there first needs to be careful observation and study.' (Preuschoff N: 2019)

This dialogue is what interests me and the same could be said of Chris Marker's work.  There is a layering of meaning that means that you may never actually know what the whole answer, as is true in life, Preuschoff goes on to state:

'What makes Sebald’s prose unique and sets it apart from both his 19th and early 20th century patron saints and other contemporary German writers is a technique of montage, of which the included images are only the most visible expression: the extensive use of quotations and references taken from all kinds of sources, sometimes marked and exposed in the text, sometimes hidden and included like little academic riddles for intertextual research' (Preuschoff N: 2019) 

I enjoy the riddles, the strange references. It reminds me a little also of Beckett's 'Dream of Fair to Middling Women' in that strangeness of language and surreality.  I want to incorporate many of these elements into my photofilm, I want it to reflect the inconsistency, the chaos and the beauty of memory.

References

Preuschoff N. (2019) Unrecounted: Text and Image in W.G. Sebald [Online] Available from: http://enclavereview.org/unrecounted-text-and-image-in-w-g-sebald/ (Accessed 13/10/19) 

Sebald W.G. (2001) Austerlitz, Penguin Books Ltd, London

Publishers Weekly (05/03/1993) Dream of Fair to Middling Women by Samuel Beckett, Author, Eoin O'Brien, Editor, Edith Fournier, Editor Arcade Publishing [Online] Available from: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-55970-217-1 (Accessed 13/10/19)