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The director as traveller

Wim Wenders likes to stray from the path, yet is always en route to his stories. A portrait of the great German filmmaker.

13.08.2012
Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders © picture-alliance - Wim Wenders

He celebrated his 65th birthday two years ago at the Arsenal cinema in Berlin. Everyone expected him to make a speech in which he would review his career. But things turned out differently. He entitled his speech “65 reasons to be grateful”, which certainly caught people’s attention. In it he gave an account of his career to date, with a slight irony coupled with an unswerving earnestness. He did this, however, by talking about other people: people he had met, who influenced his life is some way or other. He acknowledged unknown cinema-owners in the provinces who introduced him to American genre films and European art films. He thanked Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque française in Paris, festival directors and juries whose decisions were to be important milestones in his career. He thanked a few people a number of times, for example, the author Peter Handke, who was the first (and last) person to buy a painting by the young and hopeful artist Wim Wenders, and was later to become his most important screenwriter.

 

Early years in Paris

Ultimately, Wenders could only deliver a few of the many speeches of thanks he had intended to deliver. The encounters, discoveries and experiences he talked about were simply too important for him to be able to quickly list them. They were each given their appropriate attention and tempo. In doing this he turned out to be a gifted, extravagant teller of anecdotes. The audience hung on his every word and compensation for the missing last 30 reasons to be grateful came in the prospect that the whole speech would be available sometime to read; although reading it would certainly not be as amusing as hearing Wenders present it. In the end there was only time to show a short film, but this did not seem to upset anyone.

Wenders’ foray into his own life corresponded with the filmmaker’s gift of digressing without losing the focus of the narrative. It also suited the course of his biography, given that he has repeatedly wandered from the path, to great avail. The son of a doctor, the filmmaker was born in Düsseldorf and raised as a Catholic; for a time he even toyed with the idea of entering a seminary. Instead he started studying medicine, soon adding philosophy and sociology. In actual fact, he did more painting than studying, and even went to Paris to learn how to draw. There, he fell under the spell of the small district cinemas where in 1965 alone he claims to have seen more than 1,000 films.

Art as an elixir of life

Wenders’ speech was also characteristic in another sense. Its leitmotiv was the feeling of being considerably indebted to people. The director Wenders is primarily a great admirer of his actors and technicians, his companions and models. Here, his gaze ventures far beyond cinema, and is open for all the arts. He has paid special reverence to musicians: he dedicated an early film to John Coltrane, Chuck Berry made a guest appearance in Alice in the Cities, his Buena Vista Social Club contributed to the worldwide popularity of the Cuban son, his Lisbon Story made the Portuguese band Madredeus famous in Germany, and a documentary film by him raised a monument to the Cologne-based cult band BAP. His most recent film Pina is consistent with this aspect of his oeuvre and at the same time its crowning glory. It documents a friendship, an elective affinity, and marries different artistic disciplines. His involvement with the work of choreographer Pina Bausch seems to have reminded Wenders that cinema is an art associated with tranquillity and with movement in space. At the start of the collaboration between them they did not know that the film would become a requiem to a great dancer. After Pina Bausch's death, the director had to fill a yawning gap. This he did with circumspection and reverence. The advertising slogan for the film Pina quotes the titular character: “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.” Art as an elixir of life is defiant and files an objection to death.

From the very start Wenders held a special status among the representatives of the New German Cinema, whose films travelled the world in the 1970s. He lacked the melodramatic vehemence and the historical implacability of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the intellectual stringency of Alexander Kluge and the metaphysical ambition of Werner Herzog. Yet his style is just as distinctive and individual. The place of a conventionally construed plot is taken in his films by an abundance of moods and observations. The private, intimate stories of his early successes, like Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road provide an image of a Germany that, three decades after the end of the war, was in the process of seeking its roots and its future. Wenders’ early heroes are in search of a freedom that is more likely to be found in restless solitude. They accept the legacy of romanticism and set out on journeys which lead outwards and inwards. To them, freedom and homeland seem to be an irresolvable contradiction. They feel forced to head in the direction of the unknown. They mirror the director’s own wanderlust. As if he feared that staying in one place would stifle his imagination. For him, a director is first and foremost a dreamer and traveller. He must always be on the way to his stories.

“You can’t buy eyes”

It is no coincidence that Wenders’ own first production company was called Road Movies. Places tell him stories, he says. And according to some critics, the most interesting thing in his films is often the landscape. The eye of the camera often remains for a long time on a scenario after the protagonists have left the frame. This applies even more so in the case of Wenders’ photographic work. His photography developed from being an instrument for exploring possible scenarios to being an independent form of expression. The cityscapes he films are often derelict, places that have been abandoned by their inhabitants. Wenders seeks a purity, a paradoxical virginity in such images. The United States is the place of longing both in his films and in his life. Edward Hopper’s paintings have clearly left their mark on his films, which are full of fascination for the sublimity of the landscapes, their wide open spaces, and for the sea of lights in the cities. Paris, Texas pays unique homage to the dazzling sunlight of the deserts. Here, however, America is not longer the promised land, the rediscovered Garden of Eden. The director has learned that endless mobility does not equate with freedom. He knows the United States well, having lived there for two long periods in his life.

“You can’t buy eyes,” someone says in one of Wenders’ early films. But perhaps you can earn them. This director is fighting against 
the corruption of images. He puts up opposition to the suggestive power of the Hollywood blockbusters that dictate to the viewer what he or she should feel. Wenders makes decidedly non-aggressive films. Their composition leaves the viewers scope, their tempo gives them enough time to think. He thus sees himself in the tradition of the European auteur film. His oeuvre hovers between respect for cinema history and open-mindedness regarding aesthetic upheavals. Wenders exposes himself to the present armed with a delight in seeing. He is open to innovation; Alice in the Cities was the first film in which Polaroid photography, brand new at the time, played a role; in Hammett he experimented with electronic recording techniques; Buena Vista Social Club was the first completely digital documentary film. In Pina Wenders used 3-D, with a fascinated yet sceptical curiosity.

Many critics regard that film as the most beautiful to be made in this technology so far, as the most persuasive argument for it not just being a passing fashion. Wenders had wanted to make a film with and about Pina Bausch for 20 years, but only the further development of stereoscopic film photography gave him the feeling of being able to do justice to her work. Wenders not only celebrates her art on stage, but takes it out into the streets of her hometown of Wuppertal, onto the suspension railway and into an old coal mine. Wenders makes the filmic space dance. Quite a few critics were astonished that he even dared to take this incalculable aesthetic risk. But Wim Wenders has always known how to surprise us, by being faithful to himself.

Gerhard Midding is a film critic in Berlin. He works for different daily newspapers and magazines, for TV and radio, and has collaborated on numerous books about cinema.