Readinh/Watching FASSBINDER

Reading/Watching Fassbinder
by Justin Vicari

Justin Vicari is the author of a fiction chapbook, "In a Garden of Eden" (Plan B Press, 2005), and the recent winner of poetry prizes from Third Coast and New Millennium Writings.
“When historical expectations were defeated by events. . .or when the artists’ values, bereft of social support, became abstract, [the] difficulty in positioning a social order that did not exist acquired primacy over the more traditional problem of wrestling with the existing society. Inevitably, the role of the artist became redefined: he had not merely to articulate the relationship of traditionally accepted values to social reality, but to express truths for mankind despairing of social order as such.”
--Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

From his early childhood Rainer Werner Fassbinder fed omnivorously on images and words with the appetite of any child who feels lonely and neglected. From Hollywood and European films he lovingly drew a storehouse of tender and violent images, poetic shorthand for capturing emotion. These can be seen with particular nakedness in the early films: the car, the bottle of whiskey, the suddenly ringing telephone, blonde girls with big soft eyes, sunglasses, the kiss, the slap, the gun. From literature he learned to express extreme states of consciousness, and a tough critical intuition. Both films and literature taught him an open-mindedness about human behavior and its motivations, and both became more real for him than the “real” world -- closer, anyway, to the utopia Fassbinder always had in mind, his lifelong shelter from the world when he felt oppressed by it:
About twenty years ago -- I was just fourteen, or maybe fifteen already, and in the throes of an almost murderous puberty -- I had embarked on my completely unscholarly, extremely personal grand tour through world literature, guided only by my very own associations, when I encountered Alfred Doblin’s novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz.
At first, to be quite honest, the book didn’t turn me on at all; it didn’t knock me over or hit me over the head as some books had, though not many, I admit. . . I might easily have put the book aside. . . Strange! I would not only have missed one of the most stimulating and exciting encounters with a work of art; no -- and I think I know what I’m saying -- my life would have turned out differently. . . from the way it turned out with Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz embedded in my mind, my flesh, my body as a whole; and my soul -- go ahead and smile.
These charming words are from Fassbinder’s lovely and thought-provoking essay on Alfred Doblin. This essay is a declaration of love for literature, written by a man who chose a different medium to express his soul, and in which Fassbinder cedes the place of the life-saving encounter in his formative years not to a film but to Doblin’s novel, BerlinAlexanderplatz.
Let’s look more closely at the wording of this essay. First of all, a certain natural bias toward stimulation and excitement is invoked in the beginning of the second paragraph quoted above: “it didn’t knock me over or hit me on the head. . .” The idea that books can be dull, that they withhold themselves, is a deeply ingrained cultural judgment; its obverse is that movies are exciting, that they give themselves all at once to the viewer, to be understood instantly, in a flash. The last words, too -- “go ahead and smile” -- suggest that Fassbinder feels he will be mocked for saying that he likes a book this much. (Can the juvenile laws of the playground still haunt a grown man and successful artist? The answer to this is, of course, a resounding “yes.”) He “goes ahead” and makes the confession anyway, standing up for the more archaic art form.



A certain romantic old-fashionedness goes with the territory in Fassbinder: his characters often listen to do-wop from the 1950’s (“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”) or children’s songs (the novelty record that the gangster Franz loves so much in Gods of the Plague), and there is, over his films, a certain patina of the Hollywood 40’s and 50’s, a throwback to “simpler times” even as the characters get mired in their own hopeless postwar complexities. Critics have argued that this sort of dislocation is a Verfremdungseffekt (making us think, as viewers, about the song that is used, rather than just “consume” it), and Fassbinder’s stylizations do operate this way; but on a more basic level, they reveal something about Fassbinder’s own rather vulnerable nostalgia for a past era of lost feeling, something we do not always automatically associate with him: a tender heart.
Fassbinder enjoyed playing the “tough guy,” a role he almost certainly learned from watching Hollywood tough guys, Bogart, Gable, Cagney, Dean, etc. It covered up his massive personal insecurities, and it’s probably one of the reasons why he was drawn to the outgoing, assertive mediums of film and theater, though in some ways he remained innately shy. And yet, in his essay on Doblin, Fassbinder overcomes any diffidence he may feel, to gush over the experience of reading. He even goes so far as to suggest that this book actually saved his life: reading between the lines, “an almost murderous puberty” suggests that perhaps he was, at that age, beset by suicidal thoughts. In fact, later in the same essay, he restates this idea even more plainly:
And, to be quite specific, this reading helped me to admit to my tormenting fears, which were almost paralyzing me, my fear of my homosexual longings, to give in to my suppressed needs; this reading helped me avoid becoming completely and utterly sick, dishonest, desperate; it helped me avoid going under.
Without dwelling too much, yet, on the specific emotional and sexual issues addressed by his encounter with Berlin Alexanderplatz, we are left with the form of Fassbinder’s declaration of love. What does it mean when a practitioner, even a master, of one art form (in this case, film) goes out to praise an entirely different art form? I suggest that it can -- and in this case, does -- signal the creation of a brand new language.
Fassbinder’s use of the word “embedded” to describe his penetration by this novel gets at the transformative aspects of the experience of reading: it’s highly interiorized, and its potency stems from this interiorization. Films can draw us out of ourselves, by making us identify with a larger-than-life being who is “out there”; but books put us back into ourselves. Both operations are necessary to the psyche. The inquisitive artist who loves both experiences, may well ask: Can these operations somehow be combined? Can a film achieve that same interiorizing intimacy, where one seems to be alone with one’s own most private thoughts and feelings? One would have to somehow “trick” the medium of film into no longer being so “locked down” by its perfect mimicry of life; one would have to build into film a kind of extra-dimensional space where the imagination of the viewer could take over and “complete” the film’s life-likeness. For a film to be able to be “read like a book” it would have to have lines that one could read between. Indeed, what makes Fassbinder’s reading of Doblin’s novel so powerful -- and so personally essential for Fassbinder himself -- is that it is almost entirely a reading between the lines, a drawing-out of the central relationship in the novel (between two men) as a repressed homoerotic love story: “. . .when I was really at risk during puberty. . . I read it as the story of two men whose little bit of life on this earth is ruined because they don’t have the opportunity to get up the courage even to recognize, let alone admit, that they like each other in an unusual way, love each other somehow. . .more closely than is generally considered suitable for men.”
Fassbinder, on the one hand, describes his process of reading as a kind of solitary orgy: “. . .I read on, suddenly found myself reading in a way that you would hardly call reading -- more like devouring, gobbling, gulping down. . . which dangerously often wasn’t reading at all, but more life, suffering, despair, and fear.” This “devouring” is certainly more akin to our usual cultural experience of watching movies: a gluttonous pleasure that is largely passive and requires little critical thinking on our parts. But then, Fassbinder also says: “Again and again, I was forced, as any reader is, to return to my own reality, to analyze. . . reality. A criterion, by the way, by which I would measure any work of art.” Here, attention is once again mastered, disciplined; here, critical thinking is given its necessary due. These twin poles -- of losing and finding oneself -- need to be played like the notes of a scale, by an artist virtuoso enough to summon them both in a single experience of reading/watching.
In fact, Fassbinder was such a virtuoso. His adaptations of novels into films are some of the most stunning and extraordinary ever accomplished; somehow the entire tone of the novel remains intact within the body of the film. Again, he invented a new film language, partly derived from literary technique, to accomplish this. These were among the building-blocks of that language: selected passages from the books read on the soundtrack, over the scenes of the film, or printed out on title cards; quotations from other literary sources; a deliberate suppression of the actors’ emotional affect, so that their motives and emotions would remain obscure, open to interpretation; elliptical scenes that sometimes seem to begin or end in the middle, with razor-sharp cuts between the sequences, forcing concentration; discrepancies between sounds and visuals, so that we’re hearing one thing and seeing something else, something that seems very different; and, significantly, the use of fades-to-white instead of fades-to-black between sequences. Here is Fassbinder talking to an interviewer about FontaneEffi Briest, a film he adapted from a novel by Theodor Fontane:
Well, fades to black usually manipulate feelings or time, whereas fades to white wake you up, because seeing just whiteness on the screen gives you a little jolt and keeps you awake, not in the sense that you might have gone to sleep, but mentally alert. But these fades to white are used the way they are in a book, when you turn the page or when a new chapter begins, and the blank space creates a break. Simply so it won’t have the smooth progression that most movies have.
At face value, again, what seems to be expressed here is something that can be taken for granted: the differences in our culturally formed habits of reading a book and watching a movie. For a movie, one goes into a darkened theater, similar to the darkened rooms where one goes to sleep, to dream, etc. Attention is passive, always on the verge of slipping into unconsciousness, and more significantly for our purposes, uncritical. Reading, on the other hand, occurs in a brightly lit room, so the fades to white occur to simulate that extra light which is needed to read, to maintain and focus one’s attention, and to illuminate, to think critically.
But the master stroke of this passage, what can not simply be taken for granted, is, of course, that the two habits are being conflated into one: the same rapt loss-of-self in the darkness is asked to become a sharpened, heightened awareness in a flashing, intermittent light. What is really happening here is that a formerly legible text (a film in traditional film language) is being made over as a slightly illegible text, a gap or “blank space” (the words are Fassbinder’s) where a dream can live. The dream is both the formal dream of the art work (to be both a book and a film simultaneously, to be a hybridized or perhaps hermaphroditic creation), and the political/social dream of the creator (to shed light on a problem or an issue: poverty and homophobia in Berlin Alexanderplatz, the stagnation of the institution of marriage in Effi Briest). That “blank space” is now not only the excavated gap or borderless page where the artist himself creates for the future; but a place where the spectator of the film is invited to become an artist, and create a vision of the future for himself.
The creation of formal, and narratival, “gaps.” In avant-garde cinema, techniques such as surreal juxtapositions, dreamlike sequences, graphically violent imagery, written intertitles, voiceovers, fragmented elliptical narrative, or the ironic use of music, are deployed to disorient and challenge the viewer, and to create an alternative, poeticized reality. What Fassbinder did was to apply these avant-garde techniques to Hollywood-derived, narrative (even what we might call “escapist”) cinema, with two distinct results: first, films that seemed to be traditional cinematic productions were actually revealed to be fractured, self-commenting, profoundly experimental “stylizations” of traditional cinematic productions; and second, the (imitated) reality itself was thrown into question. How fully is the “boom-time” of the postwar Wirtschaftswunder reimagined by The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola as unhealthy, hysterical wallowings in compulsive behavior and rampant greed; how dreary and empty is the face of the new West Germany behind the glossy glass high-rises of In a Year with Thirteen Moons and The Third Generation: after being filmed in a critical way, “reality” itself cannot return to itself unchanged. The emotional lives of characters who behave like automatons, or indeed like characters from other, older films, can no longer be considered “normal,” but rather, somehow impaired: the life Fassbinder’s films depict is stunted, restless, unhealthy; a life where individual consciousness is no longer marked by independent subjectivity but a dehumanized objectification, and where instinctual responses -- cut off as it were, voided -- become meaningless, empty gestures.
What is inevitably missing (so far) from this process of dreaming is the reception of society at large, which we can represent by the average film audience, who clings to the unified field of power-based, codified languages. So Fassbinder coaches this prospective audience in advance -- again regarding FontaneEffi Briest, but the words could just as well be applied to all of his films:
It’s important to me that people not experience [my] film as they do other films, which appeal to the heart or the emotions; it’s an attempt to make a film that’s clearly for the mind, a film in which people don’t stop thinking, but rather actually begin to think, and just as when you read, it’s your imagination that turns the letters and sentences into a story, the same thing should happen with this film.
Surely, this is not just any audience, but an ideal audience which the director has in mind. The need for an ideal society -- a utopia -- is, in fact, presupposed by all this cultural dreaming. Fassbinder had the foresight to ask for this utopia upfront, to pursue it as an overarching goal of his entire oeuvre. Not to be pulled up short by under- or over-estimating the social construct whose language and cultural habits (of reading and watching) he intends to dissent from, Fassbinder makes his fight for utopia go hand in hand with the dreamwork itself.
Watching that is more like reading: when I say that literature had a profound influence on Fassbinder’s cinema, I certainly don’t mean to imply that Fassbinder’s usage of literary ideas and techniques makes his films stodgy and uncinematic. But just as Godard, for example, always referenced literature in his films, having his characters recite passages from Mayakovsky or Lautreamont, so literature is an illuminating presence in Fassbinder’s cinema, an element of mise-en-scene. Indeed, Fassbinder didn’t restrict his use of “literary” techniques to the films he adapted from novels; he built them into the screenplays that he wrote himself, and into his mise-en-scene. In all of Fassbinder’s films we find the same open, self-questioning structure, the same open-endedness about characterological motivation. An important technique makes use of overlapping layers of interstitial “blocks of information” -- sound and image, dialogue and action -- to produce new meanings from juxtaposition and collage. This technique is inherently cinematic, though it makes use of film as a total art form, able to combine all the others -- music, performance, writing, etc. -- into a new experience. New meanings are formed by the inter-recontextualization of the individual meanings of the separate parts: an ironic juxtaposition of sound and visuals, a layering effect, sets off sparks of friction and produces new hybrid meanings. The director’s use of music or other sound effects, long speeches spoken or written out, quotations from extrafilmic sources, all of these are diverse elements of mise-en-scene combined and recombined, within the diegetic space, in order to recontextualize what we are seeing and how we are to understand (or read) these pieces of information. (Music, for example, is highly significant in In a Year with Thirteen Moons, where it is used to express the main character Elvira’s deepest personal longings.) More pointedly, in Freudian terms, the various and separate “manifest contents” reveal, when they are skillfully combined, an unforeseen “latent content,” where they can be seen to overlap. This kind of mise-en-scene can also throw the viewer off, by crossing his senses, sending him one way in the visual field and a completely different way in the auditory one: an ambiguous latent meaning is always buried somewhere underneath.
A relatively simple example of this would be the scene in Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette where Angela, the crippled daughter, recites some lines from Rimbaud, about a trumpet that wakes up to find that it is a drum, and the famous line, “I is another”; while we hear her voice, we see a panoramic view of the green countryside around the villa; finally, we see the skull of a cow decaying, riddled with maggots, while Angela finishes her recitation: what makes this scene so evocative is that multiple contexts have been montaged to create a new, shared context, in which Rimbaud’s “I is an/other,” a crippled girl, nature, death and decay are all brought together to share the same space. I believe the figurative meaning of this montage is that when the I “awakens” to find that it is, in reality, an Other, it experiences a death of self, which is brutal and traumatic, even literally fatal, but at the same time can be entirely natural, as natural as the decaying of an animal carcass into the earth. Indeed, many of Fassbinder’s characters have this traumatic experience of “awakening” to the knowledge of who they truly are, a “journey into the light” (the subtitle of another film, Despair); this discovery that they are someone else, an “other,” or rather, this moment of becoming who they always already were without having realized it, almost invariably destroys them. T
Though it is fluently cinematic, this kind of montage of contexts also has its roots in the stream-of-consciousness style of the modernist novel, as written by James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, and again, Alfred Doblin. Talking off-handedly about Doblin’s multi-layered narrative technique, Fassbinder comes close to describing his own filmic language:
And consciousness of life in a big city, a very specific alertness to everything that living in the city means, certainly provides the source of [Doblin’s] montage technique. . . that means constant shifts in one’s attention to sounds, images, movement. And so the means used for narrating the chosen elements shift. . .
A hybridized form is the only kind of form trustworthy, and accurate, enough to tell the stories of “hybridized” lives, people who fall between the standard polarized identities (and lives that have been contaminated, irreversibly “damaged” first by fascism and then by capitalism, which, we will see, turn out to be the same to the extent that both are totalizing systems dependent on an essential dialectic of those who have power and those who do not). In this hybridization, everything in between is a charged field, populated by what can only be stated indirectly, or in the friction between two statements.
This means, in part, that all the formal elements of filmmaking must be broken down and reconstituted: the camera, the lighting, the editing, the set design, the acting, all become the knowing elements of a mechanism that wants to tell us something, that wants to signify. This is similar, of course, to elements of literary writing: what is called “style,” the author’s use of language, his vocabulary, his sequencing and pacing; and because this signification is available for use, whether superficially or profoundly, by all filmmakers, it is what we mean when we refer to a film language. But in Fassbinder’s work, even those elements that normally belong only to “content,” the realm of mimesis in which films typically strive to imitate life naturalistically, are also made over as free-ranging stylistic options: static situations, tableaux, reaction shots that are unprovoked or prolonged beyond logic; the mismatching or downplaying of affect in the acting; even the structural ways in which plots often seem to implode, at the climax, into nothing, or conversely, gather momentum at the end to whip themselves into unmotivated frenzy. In place of a naturalistic film language, Fassbinder offers a poetic one, intensely lyrical, lacking in certain syntactical segues, de-familiarizing what our expectations of “normal reality” are. And yet, his films represent nothing less than a war fought for the sake of reality itself, a crusade of sorts meant to redeem reality.
In this sense, Fassbinder’s films are “open” texts, demanding to be read on multiple levels. Indeed one “reads” a Fassbinder film precisely the way one reads a book: small, subtle details build up to define the characters and their relationships; things referred to only once, and seemingly in passing, can be of paramount importance; atmosphere often takes precedence over action; “gaps” and “silences” are used articulately, to counterpoint the flow; and the deliberate down-playing of affect in the acting allows space for the imagination -- and critical perspective -- of the viewer to seep in and decide what the characters’ true motivations are. Many things are not spelled out, again except in passing; most of Fassbinder’s characters exhibit radical contradictions, and their behavior does not, as in most movies, correspond to the naturalistic expression of a single defined emotion.
Even more, the functional events of the narrative itself are often up for grabs. Are we to believe Joanna when she claims that she and Jorgos have a future at the end of Katzelmacher? Why does Marlene leave Petra von Kant, why does she pack (among other things) a gun, and where will she go? Who is shot when the gun is fired again at the end of Chinese Roulette? Does Maria Braun blow herself up intentionally or accidentally? The films point to several possible, different and equally valid answers -- the answer I might insist upon will say more about me than about Fassbinder or his film. And this is the idea. The questions raised can be more essential, more productive, than nailing down one specific answer. Ultimately, each film leads into the next; their meanings interlock and expand upon each other; each film is a door pointing to a different door, a different film.
There is a telling moment in Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, a film about filmmaking that offers many clues to Fassbinder’s aesthetic and working methods. Fassbinder’s surrogate in that film, the director Jeff, is explaining to his cameraman (who is supposed to be Fassbinder’s camerman, Michael Ballhaus) how he would like to shoot a scene in which a murder is supposed to take place:
Mike, I want an incredibly long, slow shot -- dolly through the two rooms. Since this is a scene of two brutal murders our approach must be a complete contrast. If we make it quick and snappy, and it’s cut around afterwards, the audience will never get the feeling that a murder takes time, that it’s not so simple. The woman must know at once that she’s going to die. She just stares. . . I want to dolly into the house with Eddie, stay behind him a while and observe how the minister reacts to his appearance. . . We dolly back to a long shot, then the murder’s committed. Maybe we pan to the woman first. She’s standing in the doorway, watching. She’s speechless and retreats. Then a slow pan to Eddie. The minister has already been killed. Eddie looks for the woman, goes out of the frame. The camera stays on the minister, then pans past old oil paintings, like the guy’s ancestors maybe, and returns to the woman, frontally, with Eddie from the rear. Eddie strikes her. She collapses. Eddie goes into the garden, lights a cigarette. . . and that’s it. A murder like that’s a strange thing. It can be really sentimental, and the audience feels shattered because it thinks it knows the people up there. But not the way they tick. And that’s what we want to try to show. You have to understand what a murder really means.
Apart from the simultaneous appeal to the emotions (“It can be really sentimental”) and the intellect (“the audience. . . thinks it knows the people up there, but not the way they tick,” and Jeff significantly points to his head here), the first obvious thing about this statement of cinematic philosophy is that an “action scene” is being filmed contrary to its normal look and feel: in most action scenes, fast cutting is used to create excitement in the audience, to distort the time frame and make the audience feel as though it is “caught up” in the danger of what is happening onscreen. According to Fassbinder’s words (in Jeff’s mouth), just the opposite is what needs to happen: a slowing down, a flattening-out of time and space, in order to induce the audience to think about what is happening before its eyes. A murder, after all, already carries its own emotional freight of signification, and this received, irrational freight is what must be steadfastly avoided by the filmmaker. In this sense, we see that all the elements of mise-en-scene are here in the service of a central idea (that a murder “takes time”). But what is the point of thinking abstractly about a murder? What the film director is really leaving the door open for, is the audience’s imaginative humanity, its empathy -- but we can only come back to feelings after first “learning” or re-learning how to think (in another scene, Jeff berates the crew about their technical deficiencies: “What is this, a kindergarten? You must learn, as I had to!“ and his meaning seems to be somewhat personal as well as technical). Pointedly this pedagogical process takes place without directing the audience’s empathy toward either killer or victim. In a traveling long shot, both killer and victim become more or less the same: point of view is redistributed (I almost want to say, “anarchized”) between both protagonists. This is contrary to the way camera viewpoint and editing are often used in Hollywood movies to clearly establish who the “hero” is in a scene, and who the “villain” is. We usually “see,” via the camera, from the hero’s perspective, especially when the hero is killing the villain, thereby satisfying, for the spectator, the self-righteous blood-lust that has been aroused by our primary identification with the hero in the first place. However, in Jeff’s plan, even when we are shown the victim’s reaction, we also always still see the killer (“from the rear”) in the same shot; thereby, the audience’s identification is deflected. We are forced to become witnesses, rather than identifying with one or the other protagonist.
This, in fact, ties in to the second, less obvious point that’s limned in the above speech: the murders themselves are choreographed within a series of relayed “looks,” or stares, in which the action is paused, so to speak, so that the reactions of all three protagonists can be dwelled on. At one point, the audience is not supposed to be watching the murder, but watching the woman watching the murder. We learn how to watch the characters in a film from watching them watch each other. What the disestablishment of forced point-of-view does, in a violent scene, is to simultaneously disestablish (institutional) moral categories and moral imperatives.
I believe that Fassbinder felt it was essentially fascist to impose these sorts of categories and imperatives on an audience. What critics have sometimes pointed to as the amorality of Fassbinder’s films, their harshness and even their “cruelty,” is in fact a kind of training ground for the spectator to relearn his own humanity, or to fail to relearn it as the case may be: the project is always left open, and left up to the viewer. The lack of defined viewpoints creates, again, the kind of gap or blank space in which a dream of the future can take root. The audience’s identification, deflected from either “killer” or “victim,” ideally returns, in the end, to the audience itself: to its idea of “what murder is like.” (Later, in Beware of a Holy Whore, Fassbinder shoots this murder-scene from the film-within-the-film exactly the way Jeff has described it, but adding a further Verfremdungseffekt: there is no sound.)
I am reminded of Adorno’s celebrated dictum that, after the concentration camps, it became barbaric to compose lyric poetry. I believe that this statement of Adorno’s (which he later softened) has often been misunderstood: like all of Adorno’s statements, it is a model of dialectical-thinking-in-action. Adorno was questioning, and attempting to recast, the relationship of lyric poetry (and, by extension, all the creative arts) to the world, following the “total break in history” which the Holocaust represented (not because it did not develop out of European history in general, but because its sheer and systematic extremity radically exceeds everything, even the worst anti-Semitism, that had come before). There can be no innocuous waxing-romantic over the moon in June; nothing can be written (“created” in the arts in general) that does not take into account, struggle with, the unaccountable reality of genocide. Poetic language must change, must become acutely, even painfully aware of this problematization of consciousness (which language stems from) before it can become, again, a worthy vessel to contain the poet’s experience of the world. For our purposes, I will be considering film, also, as an art form, a creative expression and a language that is similarly burdened by the taint of historical experience. By Adorno’s logic, then, art must not remain oblivious to historical reality, must not remain pretty and composed and “above it all”; all art must be set back, to start at the same ground zero of barbarity, in order to clear its bad conscience. If art reabsorbs some elemental barbarism (whether in its form or in its content), it may stand a chance of standing up to the horrors of reality.
This is how the German poet Paul Celan, himself a Holocaust survivor, whose poems have become synonymous with bearing witness to the horrible and destructive legacy of the camps, described his own project of the redemption of reality through his chosen medium, poetic language:
A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the -- not always greatly hopeful -- belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are underway: they are making toward something. . .
Such realities, I think, are at stake in a poem.
And I also believe that ways of thought like these attend not only my own efforts, but those of other lyric poets in the younger generation. They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt-of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being to language, stricken by and seeking reality.
Fassbinder felt a legacy of guilt and horror about the camps, a need to understand how they happened in his own homeland, in the generation of his own parents. He made films that spoke out against the stultifying, narrow-minded, prejudicial values of the “Nazi generation,” films that spoke for the nameless victims of all denomination and stripe. And he brought a unique perspective to this, as a homosexual, still potentially persecuted in contemporary German society. One can hear Fassbinder, over and over again in his films, telling the postwar Germans: “You are still Nazis.” (And of course, no one liked being told this.)
I think it’s significant that, in the speech quoted above, Celan equates the language of poetry with human “dialogue”; Fassbinder was to demonstrate, in his plays and films, how human speech, even at its most quotidian, has become a meaningless language, opaque, chronically misunderstood, bouncing around in a void, and, more pointedly, tainted with issues of power, violence and control. As quoted by Saul Friedlander, George Steiner puts this beautifully:
Use a language to conceive, organize, and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanize man during twelve years of calculated bestiality. Something will happen to it. . . Something will happen to the words. Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of the language. Imperceptibly at first, like the poisons of radiation sifting silently into the bone. . . The language will no longer grow and freshen. It will no longer perform, quite as well as it used to, its two principle functions: the conveyance of humane order which we call law, and the communication of the quick of the human spirit which we call grace.
Indeed, people argue and verbally spar in Fassbinder films almost constantly: many of his characters routinely end their assertions with the challenging question, “oder?,” similar to, but more confrontational than the English phrase, “or what?” It’s suggestive of an aggressive stance: “What are you going to do about it?” Another frequent exchange between Fassbinder characters runs like this: A. says, “That’s nonsense,” to which B. responds, defending his or her own earlier assertion, “It is not nonsense.” This suggests that the meaning of any statement can be labile, questionable, literally “lying in the ear of the hearer.” (For every thesis, there’s a counter-thesis.) One speaks in the very expectation of being hopelessly misunderstood. Fassbinder’s characters have often been called “inarticulate”; in fact it goes deeper than this: they are people who are painfully aware that their language has died in their own mouths.
It’s also significant that Celan’s address stresses the fallen state of nature (“stars that are human handiwork”); nature is no longer an idealized refuge but another tainted element of man’s relentless and toxic destruction/restructuring of the world. The irony is that, despite its ruthless exploitativeness, its numbing misery, society is all that we have to cure ourselves of society itself. Fassbinder almost never apostrophizes nature -- shots of open sky are rare in his films; where they occur in In a Year with Thirteen Moons, the sky is invariably bordered, cut off, by ugly man-made buildings.
In Fassbinder, film becomes precisely the only art form with the good faith to “cure society,” to wrestle the truth from our societal lies on the very home-ground of social interaction as it were, in that film is itself a social product. Cinema, like the “holy whore,” is a pharmakon, the poison that is also a remedy. Films depict microcosms of society, and films, by their nature, simulate reality; so films can expose the barbarism of the social construct plainly, baldly, without glossing over anything. Therefore, film is the only art form where reality itself can be directly redeemed. When the language of film has been purged to essentials, stark figures enacting simple dramas of betrayal and death, lyricism will be rediscovered, reborn even, in the frisson produced by such a harrowing mirror. Dialogue (Celan’s “message” sent out to the world) becomes as stylized as poetic speech, and as “incomprehensible” (in the sense that others may choose not to decipher it, or call it “nonsense”). The mirror itself becomes charged with the same lyricism that poetry first set out to conquer: the sublime raptures and terrors of real life.
Notes
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “The Cities of Humanity and the Human Soul: Some Unorganized Thoughts on Alfred Doblin’s Novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz,” The Anarchy of the Imagination (Translated by Krishna Winston, Edited by Michael Toteberg and Leo A. Lensing, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 160
Fassbinder, ibid., p. 162
Fassbinder, ibid., p. 161
Fassbinder, ibid., p. 161
Fassbinder, ibid., p. 161
A link between Effi Briest and Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons: the directors narrate in the voice of the authors whose novels have been adapted. Both films operate like “novels on screen,” trying to make the viewing audience more like a reading audience and make it read between the lines as opposed to just getting “chunks of imitated reality” (Hollywood-style cinema) delivered to them. You really don’t know, at the end of The Magnificent Ambersons, if Joseph Cotton is going to marry Agnes Moorehead or not: the expression on her face in extreme close-up says so many different things all at once. It might be horrible if they married now, as a last resort. And then again, you can see that she still loves him. That ambiguous moment races decades ahead toward Fassbinder’s cinema: it’s a Fassbinder moment.
It isn’t for nothing that the German title of this film replicates the exact way an author’s name appears with a title on the spine of a book.
Fassbinder, “‘Images the moviegoer can fill with his own imagination’: A Conversation with Kraft Wetzel about Effi Briest,” ibid., p. 151
This comes from Walter Benjamin on Baudelaire: “Baudelaire’s poetic output is assigned a mission. He envisioned blank spaces which he filled in with his poems. His work cannot merely be categorized as historical, like anyone else’s, but it intended to be so and understood itself as such,” Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (Translated by Harry Zohn, London: Verso, 1976), pp. 116-117
Fassbinder, ibid., p. 150
Again, not for nothing did Fassbinder name his distribution company Filmverlag der Autoren, “Authors’ Film-Publishing.”
In Effi Briest, for instance, there are numerous scenes in which the spoken narration and the visuals conflict or combine to reinforce the essential fatalism of the story: we witness Effi’s introduction to Instetten, when she agrees to marry him, while we hear Fassbinder reading an earlier scene from the novel in which Effi’s mother proposes the arranged marriage to her for the first time; we see that the whole thing is already a fait accompli, and that Effi really had no opportunity to agree or disagree. Later, when Effi is introduced to the social circle of Kessin, the visuals show her meeting people, calling at their homes, entertaining them in hers; Fassbinder narrates the vicious, negative gossip that is subsequently spread about Effi by her judgmental new neighbors -- again, everything is a fait accompli, settled in advance, as it were. The most remarkable example of this technique of the fait accompli is the duel scene, which is embedded in a lengthy sequence during which Instetten discusses with his friend Wullersdorf his reasons for challenging Major Crampas; Wullersdorf tries to talk Instetten out of it, but as the dialogue progresses and the friend’s objections are gradually worn down by Instetten’s cold-hearted determination, Fassbinder begins to intercut, dramatically and sinisterly, fragments of the duel itself. Again, we see that the other side of the argument, Wullersdorf’s humane objections, never had a chance; the duel was always going to be fought. None of this belongs to novelistic techniques of narration, of course, only the cinema, as Fassbinder understood, can support this kind of complex and disjunctive layering of events (sonic events and visual events); but it can be said to approximate the readerly intuition of an author’s foreshadowing, and perhaps more significantly, that dense knowledge of the interpenetrating parts of a text that comes from reading and re-reading a favorite book.
Fassbinder is allied with Godard in the use of this kind of montage, in particular Godard during and after his involvement with the Dziga-Vertov group. Colin MacCabe writes: “…the Dziga-Vertov group formulated this principle in the slogan: Montage before the shooting, montage during the shooting, and montage after the shooting… Montage before shooting entails a commitment to placing before the camera material which is not unified in itself but which already invites contradictory positions from which to see it” (Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980; pp. 42-43). MacCabe goes on to analyze a scene from Godard’s 1980 film, Sauve qui Peut (La Vie), in which Godard stages dialogue in front of a background in which we also view a game of Hornuss (a Swiss team sport) and the passing of trains, “three elements which escape any simple unification in one image” (MacCabe, ibid., p. 44).
Fassbinder, “The Cities of Humanity and the Human Soul,” ibid., p. 167
Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (1958),” Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (Translated by John Feltsiner, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 396
Quoted by Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Translated by Thomas Weyr, New York et al: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 92-93

Edifying Horror: Brief Notes on Land of the Dead (Film Journal)

Edifying Horror: Brief Notes on Land of the Dead

by Brian Wilson


Brian Wilson is a writer and filmmaker living in Carbondale, Illinois.


Though some have failed to recognize the significance of George Romero’s newest contribution to the cinema, Land of the Dead (2005) contains the most complex social and political schema of any of the director’s previous zombie films. There is no longer a question as to whether or not one may take Romero’s work in the genre seriously: critics such as Robin Wood (1) and Tony Williams (2) have discussed at length the various economic, cultural and sociopolitical factors surrounding the production of the first three installments in the tentative series of zombie films, and place continual stress on the fact that these are not mere products of the commercial horror film industry but important vehicles for radical and idiosyncratic political statement. As Williams points out, “no cinematic work can really be understood apart from significant aspects of a highly influential national cultural tradition.” (3) Night of the Living Dead (1968), for instance, was born out of the midst of the Vietnam war; Dawn of the Dead (1978) out of the roots of a society misidentifying commerce with individual identity; and Day of the Dead (1985) during an era of Reaganomics and the Cold War. Land of the Dead then may be seen as a necessary reaction to the present atmosphere of terrorist threat, political disillusionment and George W. Bush; and while these aspects are not readily available to those who view Romero’s films as escapist works of horror and violence, they nonetheless work to inform every area of the director’s creative vision.

Land of the Dead continues certain structural patterns began in the first three films, but offers the most complex conceptual scenario thus far. Robin Wood notes that the first two films “are built upon all-against-all triangular structures, strikingly similar yet crucially different:



NIGHT

Besieged

Zombies Posse



DAWN

Besieged

Zombies Gang” (4)



Wood further contests that the characters of Day of the Dead are all “connected or belong to an authority group. In the course of the film they progressively disassociate themselves, by their actions and their attitudes, from these nominal allegiances, forming an oppositional group of their own.” (5) Land of the Dead transfigures these structures through the introduction of a fourth crucial element: Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) acts as the epitomic representative of a fading bourgeois capitalist society, his residual power exercised from the confines of a tower in the midst of the isolated city. Whereas the characters of the first three films are relatively independent in their actions (excepting Day of the Dead, which features restrictions under an authoritative militant rule), those of Land of the Dead function at least initially under the control of Kaufman. His presence underlines the relationship between Cholo (John Leguizamo) and Riley (Simon Baker), and the subsequent divergence between both men. Cholo’s rebellion against Kaufman spurs a potentially positive reaction but is motivated by reasons of expediency, underscoring his sincerity and placing him at the center of narrative conflict. Thus, the all-against-all triangular structure which Wood identifies within the previous zombie films is complicated into a quadrangular structure within Land of the Dead; it may be seen as such:



LAND

Riley

Zombies Cholo

Kaufman



Of course, the complex nature of Romero’s film is not easily reducible to such structures, but their arrangement works to form at least a cursory understanding of the placement and function of the film’s internal narrative elements. This structure also reveals the relative similarity existent between Land of the Dead and Romero’s previous zombie films, namely Dawn of the Dead; but whereas that piece contains similarly explicit anti-capitalist statements, it makes only allusions toward the cause of such phenomena. Land of the Dead, by contrast, reveals in Kaufman a tangible point of reference through which such matters may be targeted and identified. His character acts as the literal and physical embodiment of bourgeois capitalism which, though centered within the narrative of virtually all of Romero’s zombie films, is merely implicit within the structures of such works. The explicit nature of these tendencies within Land of the Dead seems entirely appropriate, however, in light of present political concerns within both society and the film industry itself.

Williams notes that Romero’s cinema has “always been characterized by a lack of false optimism, a willingness to look objectively at the hard facts of reality, and a recognition that any victories may be tentative (or even unlikely) in grim situations.” (6) Land of the Dead continues such thematic concerns, while introducing modernistic tonalities which work to place the film within the realm of current horror cinema. However, the subversive nature of Romero’s creative vision necessarily resists easy classification within the field of popular horror film: recent works such as The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2004), Boogeyman (Stephen T. Kay, 2005) and Dark Water (Walter Salles, 2005) evidence weak narrative structuring and trite moral positions when compared to Land of the Dead. These are films which, though arguable influenced by Romero’s earlier work in the genre, have invariably misread the director’s larger concerns and intentions. The abundant and often unnecessary use of computer graphics in many of these films, for example, reveals a clear compensation for stylistic inadequacy. However, Romero’s employment of the same material within Land of the Dead is minimal and tastefully executed. The director’s stylistic traits seem inevitably linked with economic concerns, each of his films being produced within the means allotted him at the moment of creation: Night of the Living Dead, for instance, was shot on the less expensive black-and-white and entirely conceived on a nominal budget; subsequent films such as Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead reveal more fully realized creative visions through lesser economic restraints (though the latter was subject to particularly restrictive conditions). That Land of the Dead utilizes modern cinematic devices such as computer graphics and employs well-known actors such as Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo does not mean that the director has effectively “sold out,” or that this film is any less significant than previous works; Romero is simply utilizing the resources available to the film artist working today. A cursory glance at the current state of horror cinema evidences an uninspired and grossly self-referential genre, emulating only the most superficial elements of the cinema which Romero worked to refine, personalize, and politicize.

In the conclusion to his monograph on the cinema of George Romero, Williams observes that the director’s films “express oppositional utopian yearning for a better world but realize that such a world is impossible unless audiences actively seek to change the present system.” (7) The complex sociopolitical tendencies of Romero’s films, however, continue to be overshadowed by the more superficial aspects associated with the horror genre. The inability of audiences intent upon various displays of gore and violence to discern such radical statements within the context of a commercial motion picture is symptomatic of wider humanistic deficiencies; and perhaps this is part of the reason for Romero’s increasing withdrawal from the medium (Land of the Dead is only the director’s third film in over a decade). Significantly, the film’s ending seems indicative of the director’s desire to retreat from such a restrictive and unperceptive creative environment, as we see Riley and his gang forge their way toward the borders of Canada (a reflection of the recent desires of many Americans). Despite its perpetual association with the mindless products of the modern horror genre, however, Romero’s cinema continues to argue for the importance of human value and radical political change. Land of the Dead may be seen as among the greatest examples of this tradition.



Notes

1. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan…and Beyond, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, 2003.

2. Tony Williams, The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead, London: Wallflower Press, 2003.

3. Williams, p. 1.

4. Wood, pp. 104-105.

5. Wood, p. 288.

6. Williams, p. 1.

7. Williams, p. 171.

HIDDEN : frome CINEASTE

Cache

by Christopher Sharrett

Michael Haneke's latest film Hidden, as its evocative title suggests, is concerned with suppression—in this case, the suppression of history. Hidden and Time of the Wolf (2002), Haneke's previous film which focused on the easy collapse of a tenuous social order in the aftermath of an unnamed apocalyptic event, are meant to be viewed as the filmmaker's ‘post-9/11' works. As many nations—especially the U.S. in the wake of September, 2001—ask ‘Why us?' Hidden suggests that such questions are either naïve or disingenuous, rooted in the profound denial of moral responsibility related to colonialism. An adept student of psychology, Haneke produces in Hidden a work that rescues the belief of the personal as political from overused banality—doing so through a microcosmic representation of the political unconscious of the colonialist, imperialist mindset.

Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) are a comfortable bourgeois couple representative of the contemporary French intelligentsia. Georges hosts and produces a TV literary chat show where his guests glibly discuss the merits of Rimbaud (Georges edits one show for being “too theoretical”). Anne works for a publisher, managing in-store book parties where wine-and-cheese-consuming culture vultures argue Baudrillard. Georges and Anne own a chic townhouse that is a model of upscale make-over toniness, its smartly appointed dining room neatly integrated within a large library, which shows less their erudition than the bourgeois appropriation and administration of the entirety of Western culture—a Haneke preoccupation. A sketched-out rendering of the same bookshelves appears as the backdrop to Georges's TV show, as if to assure his viewers that they are in the right place. He and his smug guests know whereof they speak as the ‘experts' on a culture, which, in the current context, has become nothing but a commodity to be brandished by a privileged class.

But Georges and Anne find their complacent lives disrupted by a series of videocassettes delivered to their home. Each is wrapped in white paper with a crude, childlike yet gruesome drawing—one showing a face bleeding from the mouth, another a decapitated chicken. The cassettes appear to be surveillance tapes showing the façade of the couple's home, and the comings and goings of Georges, Anne, and their young son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky).

The film opens with an image of their home against which Haneke's emblematic diminutive titles slowly unroll. At first we assume the image is nothing more than the director's establishing shot, until the image cuts to Georges on the street, trying to discern the location of the hidden camera. An abrupt cut takes us back to the same image of the house as the tape shifts into ‘rewind' on a VCR while Georges and Anne ponder what's going on. Haneke, a veteran theater and television director, shows his preoccupation with media less as a symbol of postmodern alienation than simply a device of deception that disgorges truth, an important notion during a time when the political documentary has taken on a key role in challenging an unbridled period of reaction in U.S. politics.

Georges finds two of the videotapes especially disturbing—one is a rather bland traveling shot of a Parisian street, another is of the fieldstone farmhouse where Georges spent his boyhood. The images, especially the latter, begin to haunt his dreamlife. As Georges takes on the role of private eye, he protests to his wife that the police will refuse them help since no crime has been committed. He also reveals that he possibly knows the identity of the person watching them—knowledge he refuses to share with her. This sets Anne into a rage; she accuses Georges of distrusting her, of concealing secrets even as their lives may be threatened. Her anxiety is telling since, as Georges observes, nothing has happened to them. Georges could have better finessed the moment by assuring Anne that he is only trying to protect her, and that he will soon reveal the name of the suspect. As his responses become feebler, Anne's anger intensifies, presenting a key notion of the film: the emptiness and deceit of bourgeois married life, with its hidden layers of jealousy and resentment.

What is also hidden, of course, is the truth of the tapes, Georges's origins, and, ultimately, a concealed national history. As the narrative progresses, we sense that Georges knows more than he pretends, even as he assumes a bogus investigative mode. More importantly, he seems haunted by something the appearance of these bland tapes has dislodged. Yet the tapes show nothing revealing (no peeping-tom images) beyond the possibility that the videographer is trying to ‘case' the house—but then why deliver the tapes to the subject?

Using one of the tapes as a guide, Georges visits a rundown apartment building where he confronts Majid (Maurice Benachou). A paunchy, unprepossessing Algerian national, Majid was, we learn, a boyhood friend of Georges. When Georges angrily accuses Majid of harassing his family, Majid pleads innocence. Following Georges's departure, another tape is delivered to Georges and Anne, this one showing the confrontation at Majid's apartment, including Majid's anguished breakdown after Georges leaves. As Georges continues his investigations, he visits his stricken mother (Annie Girardot). After assuring her that ‘everybody's fine' in an archetypal moment of a son consoling his aging, infirm parent, Georges asks if she ever thinks of Majid. She brushes off the question, slightly bewildered. Why should one care about such long-ago events? The scene is crucial—Georges's mother answers for a nation and a civilization.

Majid and his parents were once employed by Georges's family. In October 1961, during the Algerian revolt against French control, French rightist forces led a pogrom against Arab populations living in France. The Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) retaliated, igniting a bloody purge led by Paris chief of police Maurice Papon and paramilitary squads that resulted in the murder of at least two hundred Arabs, many of their bodies simply thrown in the Seine. The moment also produced the Organization Armée Secrète (OAS), a group of disgruntled army officers who continued the atrocities and went so far as attempting to assassinate De Gaulle for being ‘soft' on Algeria. The backstory not only gives Hidden its scope but also evokes the current era of racial profiling, persecution, and neofascism, with the ball very much in the U.S. court on matters of policing of the colonial domain.

Majid's parents were two of the “jigaboos” (the term is nonchalantly said to Georges during his inquiries) murdered during the period. Provided shelter by Georges's family, who intended to adopt him, Majid was abruptly shipped to an orphanage in response to Georges's jealous, ‘hidden' plot to banish Majid. That Georges appears to be ‘rediscovering' much of this is at the heart of the film. Rather, he seems to be pretending from the first not to remember much, not to know the source of the tapes—to be the ignorant innocent. When Georges appears at Majid's apartment for one final, accusatory confrontation, perhaps planned by Majid using the tapes as a lure, Majid suddenly cuts his own throat in a shocking moment recapitulating one of the drawings sent to Georges. There is the sense that Majid wants Georges as a witness to his death as he had been to the misery of his life, if from afar.

The scene makes clearer some of the film's assertions about Georges. His studied innocent, put-upon demeanor has authenticity only if one accepts the notion that the individual bears no responsibility for history, a very popular idea in the neoconservative West. Georges—a not-unappealing person—sees himself solely as victim precisely because his society encourages the notion of historical irresponsibility, represented very well in Georges's conversation with his well-heeled television producer, who is aware of the video harassment, is sympathetic, and seems to have not the slightest interest in whether or not Georges may have provoked it.

Questions remain as to the culprits of the narrative. Did Majid actually make all of the tapes? He protests his innocence in a manner that seems convincing. In his initial investigation, Georges cannot locate the position from which a video camera could have produced the image of his house seen on the tapes. Although the tapes recording the meetings of Majid and Georges were recorded from within Majid's apartment, was a hidden camera running continuously? If not, how did Majid know when Georges would arrive? Did he turn the camera on just as Georges appeared? These questions are deliberately unanswered, affirming, at least at one level, that the narrative is concerned with broad issues of guilt and paranoia, and a culture of surveillance created in large part by the West to protect its property. In the hands of the Other, surveillance, which in this narrative seems rather pointless and largely a metaphor for repressed guilt, is a deadly transgression, an act of ‘terrorism' (Georges uses the term), since it upsets, even in its slightness, the blasé routine of daily life, widening the cracks in the fragile façade of bourgeois existence.

After Majid's death, his young son (Walid Afkir) accosts Georges, blaming him for his father's death, caused, he says, by Georges's harassment. Georges is dumbfounded, seeing himself as the sole victim and suspicious of the son as a coconspirator.

No summary can capture the resonances of this densely textured film. The fear of the racial Other is at its heart, markedly so as we glimpse one of Georges' dreams, in which a young Majid, apparently seen from the viewpoint of the child Georges (point of view is a major philosophical issue of the film), decapitates a rooster in response to Georges' planned provocation, designed to discredit Majid. The blood splashes across Majid's face, foreshadowing (or recapitulating) one of the drawings sent to Georges's house. As the young Majid finishes the slaughter, he walks straight toward Georges/the camera, blackening the image, the child becoming a shadowy monster, suggesting that Georges's are the collective dreams of a societal bad conscience—a projection of anxiety and guilt rather than a depiction of the world. Indeed, the same may be said of the entire film—not that it is ‘only a dream,' but rather that Hidden concerns itself with the white bourgeoisie's preoccupation with itself, with the Other the obvious emblem of its unease.

The problem with race is represented in the type of offhand moment for which Haneke is noted. When Georges and Anne suddenly step into the street from behind a parked van, they are nearly hit by a young black man on a bicycle. Georges flies into a rage, accusing the man of negligence. The man takes his part, the episode about to turn to fisticuffs, until Anne intervenes with a measure of temperance—the young man was careless, but so was Georges, although Georges sees the street as his , a response unnecessarily belligerent and smacking of racism. The moment also reestablishes gender as a theme.

The bicycle scene is as much about machismo as race, the two men perhaps capable of killing each other—not an overstatement in the case of Georges, fuming at this point that his privileges have been violated at various levels—until Anne offers what is an obvious, easily-attained moment of sanity. The couple proceeds to their car, which Georges opens with a remote beeper—now standard issue for the middle class. As they shut out the world in the hermetically-sealed interior of their pricey, spotless vehicle, the small episode becomes one of many underscoring the disparities between rich and poor, black and white, on the ‘globalized' scene.

Class is spontaneously conjoined to race in these images and the rest of the narrative. Majid's squalid apartment building stands in marked contrast to the stylish, even splendid, townhouse and various accoutrements of Georges and Anne. The point is reestablished as Georges ponders his problems at his desk, his wide-screen TV used as background media wallpaper showing the latest Iraq atrocities and the Palestine situation. (These moments help make Hidden the most explicitly political of Haneke's films.) But the images go unnoticed by Georges and Anne, who carry on a discussion about their current travails oblivious to the exterior world, unconcerned about their connections to it, which in fact are absolutely central to their problems.

The several secondary themes of this film are intelligently integrated, yet Haneke wisely refrains from connecting all the dots. In one episode, Georges and Anne's teenage son Pierrot is missing. Although he is absent only a short time, the couple panics, imagining the worst atrocities in the context of the (rather innocuous) tape deliveries. It turns out that Pierrot, who is insolent but no more so than many teenage boys, was merely staying overnight with a neighbor. Pierrot withdraws into his room, adorned with Eminem posters and other paraphernalia of the vapid, corporatized youth culture, offering a rebellion that is no rebellion at all and that siphons off the adversarial energies of the young. Pierrot's anger, which seems barely contained at some moments, has no outlet in such a culture. Anne's attempt to engage him in conversation produces only a strange expression of resentment over Anne's too-frequent contacts with her employer (Bernard Le Coq). The film introduces incestuous desire as well as simple child neglect.

Anne doesn't seem to be having an affair with her boss, but Pierrot's complaint forces us to revisit earlier dinner table scenes, where Anne and Georges entertain guests with prototypical silly banter. Haneke's shot/countershot scheme suggests the tension in this otherwise banal moment, conveying both mutual seduction and mutual contempt. Pierrot, then, seems a kind of chorus to his dysfunctional family (and yet Haneke's construction of his characters makes us reflect on the uselessness of the term—what precisely is a functional family if one is willing to examine prevailing social/ideological assumptions?).

Following his final confrontation with Majid's bereaved and angry son, Georges returns home, feeling the matter is settled. He takes sleeping pills, and crawls naked into the cocoon of his shaded bedroom for a nap. An image of his childhood farmhouse reappears, showing young Majid taken, screaming, to his destitute future. What follows is an oblique but haunting final shot not unlike the images of the empty, indifferent landscape at the end of Time of the Wolf . We see the front steps of Pierrot's school filmed with a telephoto lens, an image that seems to recreate almost exactly an earlier shot of Georges picking up us son. (The school has functioned in the film as a site of regimentation and competition; we don't see Pierrot in class, but practicing endlessly with his swimming team.) The students come and go, some picked up by their parents. It is difficult to discern the precise nature of all the activity, but among the young people, it seems that Majid's son and Pierrot are having a rendezvous for some undisclosed purpose. If so, what are they up to? As important a question has to do with whether we are seeing another video image shot by an offscreen observer or whether we are seeing the director's point of view.

At several moments in the film it appears that Pierrot may be the real culprit, attempting to destroy his alternately doting and neglectful parents, whose monstrousness he perceives however well-protected their liberal exterior. Then Majid's son seems to be the perpetrator. The young generation trying to destroy the old would seem a nice but perhaps too easy denouement. The more central questions may be: Is Georges really a cruel racist? Is the son responsible for the sins of the father? Is each generation guilty of the crimes of the past? Such questions have been asked (and dodged) for decades by people in the U.S. in regard to the issue of slavery and its legacy. Georges's utter refusal to show sympathetic interest for Majid (while plagued by dreams that belie his indifferent demeanor), his mother's dismissal of Georges's questions (which are more about his own self-protection than interrogation of the past), and the failure of anyone in Georges's circle (with the exception of Pierrot) to connect meaningfully with anyone of color answers the questions well enough.

It seems that one can walk away from this film with one essential conclusion: Haneke has shattered the barrier between self and other, even as the West again attempts with a vengeance to recreate line-in-the-sand demarcations. As Bush would have it, ‘You are either with us or with the terrorists.' A merely rudimentary knowledge of history reveals such side-choosing as an easy job only for the most vicious and dull-witted.

In Hidden , Michael Haneke again shows his kinship with cinematic modernism—Bergman's Shame and Godard's Weekend would seem the precursors to both Time of the Wolf and Hidden . Like Bergman, Haneke finds consolations in Western culture, but, more political than Bergman, he is extremely skeptical of the civilization that produced it. Haneke, finally, expresses skepticism toward the culture itself—represented in the portrayal of classical music in the hands of the terribly self-destructive Erika in The Piano Teacher , and Georges's C-SPAN-like chat show in Hidden . (It is noteworthy that Hidden is one of the few of his major works without any trace of classical music, as if the director has given up on that consolation). Haneke is the legitimate heir to the modernists by showing insistently the utter fragility of Western society, its instability based on its unprincipled core. In its restrained majesty, Hidden offers an exploration of Western political assumptions, resulting in an enormously effective corrective for what dominant culture tells us as it rapidly erases history and sane discourse.




from: http://www.cineaste.com/Cache%20Review.htm

Wim Wenders

Wilhelm Wenders

b. August 14, 1945, Düsseldorf, Germany


by Dave Tacon



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David Tacon studied German at the University of Melbourne and Cinema Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, completing a thesis entitled Road Movies: Wim Wenders und der amerikanische Traum in Melbourne as part of his BA (Hons). He currently resides in Melbourne and works as a translator and editor.
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Born only a few months after the end of the Second World War, Wim Wenders is a product of post-war (West) Germany. One of the formative elements in Wenders' youth was an obsession with the mainly American (but also British) pop culture of comics, pinball machines and, most importantly, rock and roll. Wenders, the most commercially successful exponent of the neue deutsche Kino, has become known as the most “American” member of the movement, in terms of his filmic content as well as the measure of success that he has achieved in carving his own niche as a European filmmaker in America. Wenders is also the only 'member' of the 1970s German film movement to have attended film school (the then theatre director/playwright Rainer Werner Fassbinder was turned down by Munich's Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, from which Wenders and his long-time cinematographer, Robby Müller, and long-time editor, Peter Przygodda, graduated).

In the four years before settling on a study of filmmaking, Wenders, the son of a chief doctor at a Catholic hospital, dropped out of studying for a medicine degree in Munich after two semesters. He then moved to Freiberg to study philosophy, left that and moved back to Düsseldorf to study sociology, before finally discontinuing his university studies altogether. At this stage, Wenders was more interested in watercolour painting than pursuing an academic career.

In Düsseldorf, Wenders became friends with Austrian writer Peter Handke, who in 1966 was experiencing his first success with a number of spoken word pieces. Handke would later become a long-time collaborator with Wenders on such films as Wenders' first commercial feature for German television, The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty (1971), Wrong Move (1975, a loose adaptation of Goethe's Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) and Wings of Desire (1987), which marked Wenders' return to Germany after more than a decade living as a filmmaker in the United States.

A further formative period was a year spent in Paris. Initially the young Wenders moved to France to continue his studies—this time with an artistic bent. He applied for a place at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, then for admission at the famous Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques (IDHEC) film school. Rejected on both occasions, he ultimately began an apprenticeship in copperplate engraving with Johnny Friedlander after he was not even allowed to take part in the candidature at the IDHEC. (1)

Wenders has described this time as the loneliest period of his life, however the combination of isolation and a freezing Parisian apartment created the perfect conditions for him to study film more intensively than possibly anywhere else in the world. Every evening from the time that Friedlander's studio closed up until midnight, Wenders could be found alone viewing some of the world's most significant cinematic works at Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque. During his year in Paris, Wenders viewed well over one thousand films. (2)

Wenders returned to Munich to commence studies at the then newly founded Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, but first he undertook a three-month internship at United Artists' Düsseldorf office. This experience at United Artists left a sour taste and was later recounted in 1969 in a short essay titled “Verachten was verkauft wird” (“Despise what is to be sold”):

From production through to distribution, the same brutality was at work: the lovelessness in dealing with images, sounds and language, the stupidity of German synchronisation, the meanness of the block and blind booking system, the indifference of advertising, the absence of conscience in the exploitation of cinema owners, the narrow-mindedness in the shortening of films and so on. (3)


Kings of the Road
Wenders would later extend his criticism of this corporate imperialism of the German film industry through his representation of the death of the old provincial cinemas in Kings of the Road (1976). His concerns about the abuse and corruption of images, particularly in connection to the American film industry, would become a recurring theme in films such as The American Friend (1977), The State of Things (1982), Faraway, So Close! (1993) and The End of Violence (1997).

Once back in Munich, Wenders' background in watercolour painting and copperplate engraving was reflected in the spatial elements of his shot composition in his short films. His early short films, Locations (1967), which was subsequently lost, and Silver City (1968) comprised extended static shots. Silver City, for example, is literally a moving picture—a static image of a Munich street, taken from a window ledge with a little movement within the static frame provided by passing cars trains and the occasional pedestrian. Each sequence lasted a little over three minutes—the duration of a 30m roll of 16mm stock. (4) This predilection for long sequences of apparently inconsequential subject matter would continue through his work, with their suggestive emptiness providing mood and depth to Wenders' often linear narratives. The tendency to give his films English titles was also indicative of the young director's obsession with rock 'n' roll culture.

A little-seen work made during Wenders' four years of experimentation at film school is Polizeifilm (1968), which was made for Bavarian television, but never shown to the general public. In this unusually humorous mockumentary short, a whispering voiceover tells the viewer of new police tactics for use against protesters. Police are shown first assaulting a clichéd hippie protester with a placard, and then displaying an alternative method of attempting to befriend the apprehensive young man, offering him a cigarette and conversation. This short also included still cells from a Disney comic depicting police attempting break down a door to apprehend a villain, which actually turns out to be a seal in a bathtub.

As part of the '68 generation, Wenders was drawn into politics at this time, at one time being arrested and charged for resisting arrest at a demonstration. However, although he was active in protesting against the Vietnam War, he was not able to shake his ambivalence towards America. He continued to attend screenings of his beloved Westerns every evening and thus never quite fitted into the anti-imperialistic milieu of his student sharehouse. (5)


The American Friend
Wenders graduated from film school in 1970 with the completion of his final year film, a full length feature. Summer in the City concerns a man coming to terms with life on the outside, after his release from prison, a loner unable to connect with society. Played by Hans Zischler, who also appeared in the short Same Player Shoots Again (1967), he is pursued by shadowy enemies from his criminal past, who never actually appear. Attempts to evade them take him from Munich to Berlin, and ultimately to Amsterdam, after he is unable to get a flight to New York. It was unusual for a final year film to be feature length, but after doing the sums Wenders discovered that he could shoot a feature length film with the money allocated to him, as long as he shot on 16mm black and white stock, rather than on 35mm colour and “shot everything only once”. (6) However, the one thing that the young filmmaker failed to take into account was music copyright. Wenders had crammed many of his favourite rock artists such as Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones (as well as Gustav Mahler) onto the soundtrack of a picture, which was named after a Lovin' Spoonful song and dedicated to a British rock band. This was not the film's only problem: due to poor original sound recording, all character dialogue was coupled with an overdubbed voice-over by Zischler reiterating what had already been said. This did in fact enhance the sense of existential angst in the character, adding a further element of subjectivity.

This film was Wenders' second with Robby Müller, whom he had previously met on a set where Wenders worked as props man and Müller as camera assistant. Like the short Alabama 2000 Light Years From Home (1969), Summer in the City features stylistic elements such as extended tracking (establishing) shots, presenting the view from a moving vehicle (possibly for lack of a dolly). (7)

After Wenders had initially cut his film together, he ended up with a feature that was more than 3 hours long. He was persuaded by a confident young acquaintance named Peter Przygodda to hand over the editing reins for additional editing. Wenders only later learned that this was Przygodda's first real editing job after a single stint as an assistant editor. The director fought “tooth and nail” against each cut, but finally a 125 minute print emerged. (8)

Wenders' collaboration with Przygodda was the beginning of a long working relationship and both Przygodda and Müller were on board when Wenders was given the opportunity of realising Peter Handke's screenplay of The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty, adapted for the screen from Handke's story of the same name. The goalkeeper in question is once again a loner, who inexplicably allows an easy goal to pass through during a soccer match, insults the referee and is sent from the field in the film's opening sequence. He then wanders aimlessly through Vienna, has a chance meeting with a cinema ticket window cashier named Gloria, and strangles her after picking her up and going to her home. He continues to drift from Germany down through Austria until he reaches a village near the Yugoslavian border where he visits a female friend and joins in a bar-room brawl, apparently spurred by Van Morrison's “Gloria” which blasts from a jukebox. Throughout, he seems apparently unconcerned with the police's efforts to find him, which he follows in the news.

The story bears obvious similarity to Albert Camus' The Stranger and although Wenders' film technique is apparently influenced by Hitchcock, it is curiously devoid of any kind of suspense. In general, his film aesthetic has a very cool, detached feel and takes on the same-distanced subjectivity of Handke's original text. (9)

WDR, the co-producer of The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty, was so impressed with Wenders' direction that they signed him on as director of another screen adaptation, but this time of a better known text—Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, written in 1850. From Wenders' point of view, the production of The Scarlet Letter (1972), which was filmed in Portugal, was an unpleasant experience from the start to finish. After the film was completed, Wenders remarked that he never wanted to make another film where “no car, service station, television or jukebox” is allowed to appear. (10)


Alice in the Cities
With his next film, Wenders returned to material closer to his heart. Alice in the Cities (1973) was, by all accounts, a very personal film. Wenders' inspiration for Alice, came paradoxically via American rock 'n' roll, as he sat in the editing booth for The Scarlet Letter with the Chuck Berry song “Memphis” in his head, whilst viewing a short scene featuring Rüdiger Vogler and five year old Yella Rottländer. Wishing that all of the film could work like that one particular scene, Wenders was taken with the idea of the scene combining with the song to make a film. (11)

Following his disappointment with The Scarlet Letter, Wenders moved to New York City and began developing Alice. His project nearly suffered a devastating blow when he attended a preview screening of Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon (1973) and discovered, to his horror, that the film that he had been developing had an identical storyline to Paper Moon. In desperation, Wenders contacted maverick American director Sam Fuller at his home in Hollywood (the pair had met in Germany during Fuller's shooting of Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street [1972], which had also been produced by WDR). Together they reworked the story of Alice and Wenders, who had been considering giving up filmmaking, was able to make the film that cemented his resolve to continue.

For Alice in the Cities, Wenders decided to return to shooting with black and white 16mm film stock. Again, as in Summer in the City, the main character is a male loner, a drifter confronted with the seeming meaninglessness of his existence. In this case, the 'hero' is Philipp Winter, a German journalist who has become spiritually lost while travelling America by car, searching for inspiration for a story he is unable to finish. Purpose for Winter comes by chance, in the form of Alice, a five year old girl, whose mother puts into Winter's charge. When Alice's mother fails to meet the pair in Amsterdam after they have flown out of New York ahead of her, they are stuck with each other.

Just as the Chuck Berry song “Memphis” worked as a catalyst for the genesis of the film, it also plays a pivotal role in the film's plot in a documentary-style scene when Winter views a live performance by Berry after handing Alice over to the police. This moment of identification for Winter leads him back to Alice, who has fortunately slipped away from her new charges. The two then set off in search for Alice's grandmother, who lives in Düsseldorf.

Wenders commented that for an extended period after Alice, he received reviews that discussed “the three As: Alienation, Angst and America”. (12) In this, his first production to be partially shot in America, Wenders certainly touched all bases. Winter's alienation from society is reflected in his incessant photographing of his American surroundings with a Polaroid camera, which at the time of filming was only available as a prototype. Winter finds that he has been numbed by his American experience and the Polaroid camera renders the gulf between reality, reproduction and expectation visible. (13)

Winter reflects Wenders' ambivalent attitude to America, as he is a character both fascinated by and despairing of America. He also reflects views later discussed by Wenders' in an essay/poem, titled “Der amerikanische Traum”, first published in 1984. In “Der amerikanische Traum”, Wenders states that America has “betrayed and sold” its own dream, something that the character of Winter seems to agree with wholeheartedly. As in Wenders' poem, American television is used in Alice as a point of reference for Wenders' harshest criticism of American culture. Early in the picture, during Winter's stay in a cheap Florida motel, John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) provides the soundtrack to the journalist's dream of an endless road, which we see superimposed over a close-up of the sleeping Winter. (14) Winter wakes to find that this Young Mr. Lincoln has been interrupted, highjacked by meaningless advertisements. In the only violent act of this gentle film, Philipp smashes the television set on the floor of his motel room.

The film also closes with a final homage to Ford via a newspaper obituary titled “Lost World”, which Winter is reading as he and Alice travel through Germany to meet Alice's mother in Munich. Despite the sense of loss, the film ends on a joyous note with a swooping aerial shot which starts on Winter and Alice smiling out of the window of the train and then soars away to a bird's eye view of the landscape, with the train hurtling towards its destination. (15)

For his next feature film, Wenders once again collaborated with Handke, this time on a distinctly European, or rather German, premise—a Handke screenplay adaptation of Goethe's 1796 Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship), set in 1970s West Germany with Rüdiger Vogler once again playing the lead. In contrast to Alice in the Cities, Goethe's novel and the Bildungsroman tradition, Wrong Move is perpetually bleak in its outlook and Vogler's Wilhelm does not experience any enlightenment during his travels through West Germany. Movement in Wrong Move is motivated by Wilhelm's search for inspiration in his attempts to become a writer. However, every decision and direction seems to be a wrong one and in the end Wilhelm has learned little about himself.

By this time, Wenders had established two distinctly different methods of filmmaking, which he elaborated on at a colloquium in Livorno, Italy in 1982. His black and white films, he described as “Group (A),” These arose, without exception, from an idea of Wenders' own—“idea” being a very unspecific term including “dreams, waking dreams and experiences. The second type, “Group (B)” were colour films which followed a script very closely”. (16)


Alice in the Cities
Wrong Move was Wenders' second “(B)” film and the second film of what was to become known as Wenders' “road movie trilogy”. It is characterised by an aesthetic, which once again draws on Wenders' background in painting, with the landscapes of eighteenth century German painter, Caspar David Friedrich, lending significant inspiration. For this film, Wenders also cast an actress who at that time was making her mark as a regular in Fassbinder's already imposing body of work—Hanna Schygulla, who appears as one of Wilhelm's travelling companions and ultimately unromantic and unconsummated romantic interest. Schygulla is introduced in one of the film's most graceful movements, looking out the window of a passenger train in a beautiful extended tracking shot along a station platform, subjective to Wilhelm's view from a carriage on the opposite side of the platform side. Unfortunately, Schygulla is lost in the coldness of the film and Wenders admitted to not being able to use her as well as Fassbinder could.

Perhaps the most interesting casting decision though was 13 year-old Nastassja Kinski, estranged daughter of Klaus, in her first acting role. Her inclusion in the film came about when she caught the eye of Wenders' then partner Lisa Kreuzer—Alice's mother in Alice in the Cities and Wilhelm's girlfriend in Wrong Move—at a Munich nightclub. Kinski plays the mute companion of the hobo Laertes, played by Hans-Christian Blech, who is enveloped in the shadow of Germany's nazi past. When Wilhelm discovers that the old man was a commandant in a concentration camp he decides to kill him, but ultimately lets him go when the opportunity presents itself. Later at the film's closure when Wilhelm stands at the top of Germany's highest peak, the Zugspitze, contemplating his general failure, he bemoans not hearing Laerte's story—which he considers yet another wrong move. This would be the first instance of Wenders venturing outside the narcissistic inner world of his heroes, opening a discussion about Germany's Nazi past—instead of ignoring, or replacing and suppressing it with “American pop culture”. However, he remains distant from a direct confrontation of social and political issues such as that which exists in Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967) or the films of Fassbinder.

The third movie in the trilogy, Kings of the Road, also starring Rüdiger Vogler, marked a return to black and white photography, this time on 35mm and 16mm stock. This was also the first film produced by Wenders own production company, Road Movies. Although this male “buddy movie” takes place along West Germany's most impoverished area—the Zonenrandgebiet bordering East Germany—Wenders and Müller again turned to American images for the film's “look”, using photographer Walker Evan's images of America during the Great Depression as their aesthetic reference point. To paraphrase the film's most famous line, Wenders and Müller's aesthetic consciousness had been “colonised” by the “Amis” [German slang for Americans] in this highly stylised film about male companionship in the absence of women and the seeming demise of German small town cinemas.

The linear narrative follows the relationship between two men: Bruno Winter (Vogler), a travelling cinema projector repairman and “Kamikaze”, a man who has just left his wife. The men begin travelling together after Bruno witnesses “Kamikaze” driving his VW beetle at breakneck speed into the Elbe River. In a comical scene of an attempted suicide, the driver is deprived of his means of transportation and also earns himself his nickname.

At first distant from each other, the two slowly bond over the course of their journey along the Western side of the border of the two Germanys, which is determined by Bruno's work. As in Alice in the Cities, rock 'n' roll is a crucial factor in character and plot development with a spontaneous sing along to Bruno's portable 45s player blasting out “Just like Eddie” as the two men become closer.

While American images shaped the look of Kings of the Road, Wenders also criticises the American or American-influenced action and porn films that cinema owners were forced to show due to the major distributors' system of block booking. During a period when Kamikaze has temporarily left the partnership, Bruno visits a cinema showing a sex film. Being a consummate professional, he is dissatisfied with the projected image. When he enters the projectionist's booth and catches him masturbating, the projectionist angrily departs and Bruno pieces together a loop of film material consisting of naked breasts, a burning house and a woman being raped in mud as the voiceover states “Cruelty, action, sensuality. 90 minutes which no television…”—a damning metaphor of the situation of German cinema in the '70s.


Kings of the Road
In Kings of the Road, the meditative pace and shunning of many plot devices that propel a story in the Hollywood model, mirrors that of Yasujiro Ozu, who Wenders first became aware of whilst living in New York. However, Wenders looks fondly towards Hollywood cinema in a homecoming sequence, which directly quotes Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men (1952), when Vogler, rather than Robert Mitchum, discovers a tin box full of comics under some stairs in the house of his childhood. Nicholas Ray himself was given a supporting role in Wenders' next film, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game (recently remade by Lilian Cavani), which existed only in manuscript form when acquired. The American Friend is a thriller about an American who hoodwinks an innocent picture framer into committing hits for organised crime. Dennis Hopper cuts an at times bizarre figure as the sinister Tom Ripley, a loner, a cowboy adrift in Hamburg, consumed with existential angst. Hopper's characterisation must have been a shock to Highsmith purists, but highly enjoyable for the rest of us. Yet the chemistry between Hopper and the film's other lead, Swiss German Bruno Ganz, was, at the beginning of shooting, explosive to say the least. Ganz's preparation for his role as Jonathan was as meticulous as the character's approach to his profession as a picture framer and restorer. Hopper had left the entire cast and crew waiting for his arrival and when he finally turned up at Hamburg's airport, direct from Francis Ford Coppola's set of Apocalypse Now (1979) in the Philippines, he was still in his photographer's costume and out of his mind on drugs and alcohol. However, according to Wenders, when he said “action”, Hopper was completely in the character, but back to his prior rather psychotic state after the order “cut!” Ganz took great resentment at Hopper's unprofessionalism and a few days into shooting, his frustration erupted and he punched his American co-star in the face. Hopper however was a far more experienced brawler and soon bloodied Ganz's lip. The two continued to brawl their way off the set into Hopper's Thunderbird only to return to the set the next morning arm in arm, heavily intoxicated, differences settled, but in no state to be filmed. (17) The chemistry between the two very different stars is one of the strongest suits of the film, along with the superb direction—one particular highlight is a masterful scene depicting Jonathan's inept murder of an American underworld figure in the Parisian metro system.

Once again, although the film was predominantly set in Europe, the unifying aesthetic was American. This time, Wenders and Müller decided to model the film's look on Edward Hopper, whose own work had been heavily influenced by American cinema. Wenders was drawn to Hopper's simplicity of framing and the ominous mood of his painting—Hopper's often deserted urban landscapes seemed to capture a moment of quiet “before all hell breaks loose”. (18) The choice of Edward Hopper combined with Jürgen Knieper's brooding score created a sense in the viewer that danger is always just around the corner. Furthermore, the use of a deliberately American aesthetic in European locations brought a peculiar geographic confusion to the viewer with cross cutting geared to accentuate this confusion.

Although heralding a shift towards more conventional genre filmmaking for Wenders, The American Friend still features Wendersian motifs such as the use of rock 'n' roll, with Jonathan singing the Kinks' “There's Too Much on My Mind” to himself in his workshop; motion, as in Jonathan's travels from Hamburg to Paris and Munich, and allusions to the corruptive nature of American movies. Wenders' discourse on Hollywood is at once damning and reverential, as he ironically cast Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller as an art forger and a crime boss respectively. (19)

The American Friend was Germany's only entry in the Cannes Film Festival in 1977. It did not win a prize, unlike Kings of the Road, which won the FIPRESCI, but it did catch the eye of Francis Ford Coppola, who was beginning his attempts to shape himself into a studio mogul, founding his own Zoetrope Studios. Wenders was travelling in Australia when he got word that Coppola wanted him to direct a feature film in America.


Alice in the Cities
Taking up this opportunity also meant the end of his relationship with Lisa Kreuzer, who had appeared in his last four films—like Alice's mother in Alice in the Cities, she could speak little English and America held little to offer her in terms of her career. However, Hammett (1982) was a difficult project, from its beginnings in 1978 to its completion and release more than four years later. After the wrap of the first shoot, Coppola was dissatisfied and ordered the film to be completely re-shot. Apparently only 30% of Wenders original film remained in the final cut. Coppola's own imprint is clearly on the final version, particularly in the closing sequence, which employs the same style of superimposed images as seen in Apocalypse Now and the Cotton Club (1984). Nevertheless, Hammett is a fairly enjoyable homage to the author of the Maltese Falcon, among other noir novels, as well as to the noir genre itself, with beautiful compositions drenched in jet-black shadow courtesy of veteran cinematographer Joseph Biroc who had shot Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), alongside numerous B-movies including Sam Fuller's Forty Guns (1957), a personal favourite of Wenders. (20) Sam Fuller also appeared in Hammett in a small role as “Old man in pool hall”.

During the numerous setbacks during the production of Hammett, Wenders did not remain idle, but found the time to make four films, which were far more personal. He also married singer songwriter and former Bob Dylan backing singer, Ronee Blakely, whose voice he had previously enthused about in a review of Robert Altman's Nashville (1976) in the German newspaper Die Ziet. However, the marriage failed to outlive the production of Hammett.

Lightning Over Water (1980) was a collaboration between Wenders and Nicholas Ray during the last weeks of Ray's life, as he succumbed to terminal cancer. It is an intimate portrait of the director as he reflects on his life and career and blends documentary with fictional elements. During the extensive post-production of Hammett in 1982, Wenders also made two short films for French television. Reverse Angle was a film diary about the editing of Hammett. Chambre 666 was filmed in room 666 at the Hotel Martinez during the Cannes Film Festival in which such luminaries as Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Steven Spielberg, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michelangelo Antonioni are all put the question: "Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?"

The feature film, which Wenders' directed during the complicated birth of Hammett happened quite by accident. Wenders was visiting the set of Ráûl Rúiz's The Territory (1981) on location in Portugal and was wistfully reminded of the way that he used to enjoy making feature films. However, Rúiz's own production was hardly trouble free and they ran out of film mid-shoot. Wenders helped out by sending for some stock stored in a refrigerator in Berlin, thus enabling them to wrap the film. After shooting concluded, Wenders asked whether he could borrow the cast and crew to start another film straight away. This film became The State of Things, which addressed many of the problems that Wenders had encountered working within America. The film also borrows from Rúiz's experience in the opening sequence on the Portuguese coast where a German director, Friedrich Munro (addressed as “Fritz” —and obviously a reference to two of the most famous German émigré filmmakers), played by Patrick Bauchau, is told by his cinematographer, played by Sam Fuller, that further shooting is impossible, as they have run out of film. The State of Things marked a return to Wenders' more spontaneous style of filmmaking. Cinematography was provided by an even older camera veteran, whom Wenders was surprised was still alive: Henri Alekan, who had shot Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la bête, 1946). This time, photography was in black and white, with Wenders' feelings on this perhaps best summed up by Sam Fuller's line as cinematographer: “Life is in colour, but black and white is more realistic”.

The storyline of The State of Things is very bleak indeed, chronicling a cast and crew in limbo in Portugal after an aborted production of a science fiction remake ironically titled The Survivors. (21) In a desperate attempt to rescue the film, Fritz travels to Hollywood to try to track down the film's missing producer, Gordon, who it turns out is on the run from loan sharks who were unimpressed with the film's black and white visuals, asking “What's wrong with the colour?” However, it is in America where Wenders' film really finds its feet, with a series of stunning compositions and a wonderful burst of what the film lacked to this point—narrative drive. In America, Fritz finds himself in a real life movie, which ultimately costs him his life. As Wenders' commented in the short documentary Fish Flying Over Hollywood (1982):

It's an investigation into my profession. I started it in a very dark mood – a film noir if ever there was one. And then this film did a magic trick – it pulled itself up and me with it by its own bootstraps. Imagine at the end of a movie that says “cinema is over”, I was telling stories again like a maniac. The film had overcome the dilemma that it dealt with. Filmmaking and story telling seemed a piece of cake again. (22)

During the production of Hammett,Wenders also met musician/writer/actor Sam Shepard, who at one stage was acting in Frances (Graeme Clifford, 1982) in an opposite studio. Shepard gave him a manuscript of his poems and short stories, which at that stage was called Transfiction, but was later published as Motel Chronicles. This manuscript was the inspiration for a collaboration between the two which resulted in one of Wenders' most artistically and commercially successful works: Paris, Texas (1984).


Paris, Texas
Shot with a crew of only about 20, Paris, Texas was made completely outside the studio system and is a milestone in independent filmmaking. In fact, most of the crew risked deportation by breaking the conditions of their tourist visas. Shooting was reduced by weeks and almost closed down when the American Teamster's Union got wind of the production and began to make increasing demands that union drivers be hired by the production. A compromise was reached when, rather than having to hire his own driver, Wenders joined the union himself. Paris, Texas ultimately won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Paris, Texas begins with the depiction of a man who collapses outside a small town. The man, Travis, is mute, but a crooked German doctor (played by Bernard Wicki, who directed the anti-war film The Bridge [Die Brücke, 1962]) finds a card in his wallet and calls the number and so Travis' brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) who hasn't seen Travis for some years is summoned from LA to collect him. Since Travis disappeared, Walt and his French wife Anne (Aurore Clément) have raised Travis' son Hunter as their own. (23) Travis gradually begins to regain his identity and after bonding with his son, they set off to find Travis' estranged partner Jane (Nastassja Kinski) who, according to Anne, is in Houston. The film is a family drama/road movie, which moves from the Texan desert bordering Mexico, across the country to LA and then to Houston. The transition from desert to city is gradual, with only the suburbs of LA being featured before Hunter and Travis arrive in Houston—a city of glass and steel.

Wenders viewed the film as being the closure of his “American phase”. The film also represents a break in Wenders' own tradition of filmmaking. The film follows Shepard's screenplay up until Travis and Hunter's departure for Houston in their search for Jane. At this point the film (in progress) left Shepard's script behind, in search of its own ending. However, the film came to a halt until some phone calls to Shepard (with Wenders furiously scribbling away on a notepad) produced the final two monologues between Travis and Jane.

Rather than the usual rock 'n' roll that is so often in Wenders' films, Ry Cooder's haunting soundtrack stands alone, providing a perfect counterpoint to Müller's evocative imagery. Although Wenders and Müller decided against an aesthetic model before commencing filming, the opening sequence has Travis walking through the landscape of an American “Western” mythology—a landscape very similar to Monument Valley where John Ford shot such films as Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956). The cowboy parallels once again appear at the film's closing sequence, where Travis drives away from Houston into the sunset. Thus Travis is painted as a heroic figure, rather than a coward, for leaving his wife and child, as he has made a painful decision, sacrificing his own hopes for the happiness and those he loves most. (24)


Tokyo-ga
True to Wenders' statement that his “American phase” was over, his next film, Tokyo-ga (1985) took him to Japan in search of any remnants of the old Japan (that he felt was disappearing) as depicted in the films of Yasujiro Ozu, who had died 20 years earlier. During this pilgrimage of sorts, there are a number of bizarre sequences showing such uniquely Japanese occupations as hitting golf balls on multi-story driving ranges, the meticulous preparation of plastic models of food for window display and the Zen pokie-like pachinko parlour. The film also features a monologue/conversation with Werner Herzog on top of the Tokyo Tower, with Herzog considering applying to NASA to continue his increasingly difficult search for “adequate images”. The strangest of all sequences, however, is undoubtedly footage of Japanese rock 'n' rollers in outfits straight out of the 1950s practising their dance steps to a ghetto blaster in public park—perhaps inspiration for fellow Ozu-fan Jim Jarmusch's Japanese characters in Mystery Train (1989). The film ends on a particularly touching note with Ozu's long-time camera assistant, Yuharu Atsuta who had loyally worked with Ozu since his days of silent film before finally earning the position of cinematographer in 1952. His heartfelt reminiscing of his hard taskmaster to the point where his emotions overcome him is unique and moving—one could not imagine another cinematographer who could be so heartbroken by the death of a director that they are unable to work again.

Wenders returned to Germany for his follow up feature to Paris, Texas, a foray into the realm of fantasy about angels watching over the citizens of modern-day Berlin. The film, Wings of Desire—whose German title, Der Himmel über Berlin, has a double meaning in English as “The Sky/Heaven Over Berlin”—reunited Wenders with two of his past collaborators, Bruno Ganz and Peter Handke. Ganz plays the angel Damiel and Otto Sander—another well-established actor, who Ganz had often acted with in the theatre, but never on film—plays his angel friend Cassiel. Both are invisible to all human 'mortals' with the curious exception of children. Wenders also cast his editor for Tokyo-ga, French Solveig Dommartin (with whom he was also involved in a relationship with), as Marion, a circus acrobat, with whom Damiel falls in love and for whom he decides to relinquish his immortality, taking human form, to gain the ability to feel physical sensation.

Like The State of Things, Wings of Desire was shot on black and white 35mm stock by Henri Alekan. The first half of the film is almost exclusively in black and white, subjective to the angel's distance from humanity, however colour stock was used to represent human existence. The divide between the angels and humans within the film also echoes the division between the East and West of the city of Berlin. The original idea itself was Wenders' own, but like the second half of the production Paris, Texas, a number of key monologues—originating predominantly from the thoughts of random Berliners—overheard by the angels, were provided by Peter Handke. Richard Reitinger, who had co-written Mika Kaurismäki's Helsinki-Naples All Night Long (1987), in which Wenders appeared as a gas station attendant, also contributed to the screenplay.

Wenders admits to having only vague ideas of how the angels should look, even at the beginning of filming. He finally opted for long black coats (and pony tails—very '80s) after various variations of armour and wings had not worked. The realisation of the angels was a collaborative effort. At one point, Otto Sander aborted a take when he started to get rained on—no one had considered that angels should always remain dry. This realisation also led to the application of extra hair gel to ensure that the angel's hair never moved.

The inclusion of Peter Falk (starring as himself) was actually the idea of Claire Denis, who was Wenders' first AD, as she had been on Paris, Texas. This decision was made after she and Wenders had mused upon various well-known identities that could function as ex-angels including sports stars and politicians. Falk actually wrote his own monologues once he had returned to his home in LA, recording them in a sound studio. However, one thing that Falk overlooked was his reminiscences about his German grandmother—a rather contradictory aspect to his character that Wenders chose to ignore.


Paris, Texas
Image source: Wim Wenders - The Official Site
Along with other Wenders regulars, Jürgen Knieper, who had provided a score for all of Wenders' films since The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty (apart from Hammett and Paris, Texas) was once again on board. However, the then-burgeoning live music scene in Kreuzberg, West Berlin's easternmost district, was also embraced. Interestingly, the scene was seemingly dominated by Australian ex-pat musicians, in the form of the Crime and the City Solution and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Once again, Wenders uses rock music as a moment of epiphany, with Nick Cave's dramatic “From Her to Eternity” creating the soundtrack for Damiel's meeting with destiny in the guise of Marion. The film earned Wim an award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival, along with other awards. The rights to the film were also snapped up by Warner Brothers, who re-made the film into the blockbuster City of Angels (1998).

Wenders returned again to Tokyo when the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris commissioned him to make a short film on the subject of fashion. The result was Notebook on Clothes and Cities (1987), a 79 minute essayist documentary reflecting on the creative process, cities, identity and the digital age through conversations with Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto.

Certainly the most ambitious film of Wenders' career thus far was Until the End of the World (1991). Solveig Dommartin again featured in an all-star cast including Max von Sydow, Jeanne Moreau, William Hurt, Sam Neill and locations as diverse as the cast's nationalities. Robby Müller and Rüdiger Vogler also returned to the fold for Wenders most expensive film by far. Set in the “future” of 1999, with a script written by Wenders and Peter Carey, Until the End of the World features a plot involving a camera that can enable the blind to see, a love triangle, bank robbers, the CIA and bounty hunters, all of whom are chasing each other all over the globe, all the while an Indian nuclear satellite is headed for earth. The plot is confusing to say the least. To keep to contractual obligations, the sprawling narrative was cut from 270 minutes down to 179 minutes for the Japanese, German and Australian markets and 158 minutes for the US. On release, the film was generally greeted with a lukewarm reception by critics and audiences alike. However, Wenders, dissatisfied with the result, had other ideas for the fate of his film. He put the following comments on the newsreel of the site www.wim-wenders.com in October 2002:

The Reader's Digest version I was forced to release at the time would have broken my heart if I had left it at that. I knew that. And I felt I owed it to my actors, to my crew and to the musicians who had worked on that fabulous score, to finish the real work we had done. […] Together with my editor, Peter Przygodda, we added another full year after the delivery of the commercial version at the time, at our own expense, and finished what I considered "the real film." Of five hours. […] At the time we had to condense the film so much that all the fun had gone out of it. The "message" had become very heavy, if not to say heavy-handed. (25)

Wenders has shown this director's cut in various places around the world and claims that the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.

In 1992, Wenders possibly bewildered a good portion of his fans by making a 30 minute short for children, titled Arisha, the Bear and the Stone Ring. The story description posted on Wenders' website reads as follows:

The bear leaves Berlin. He's fed up. On the way, two Russian ladies—Anna and her daughter, Arisha—hire him as their driver. During the trip, a Santa Claus who cannot stand Christmas, and then a Vietnamese family, join the group whose destination is a spot by the sea. There, on the beach, lies a stone ring, which wants to be found.

In this children's fable written by Wenders, Rüdiger Vogler is the guy in the bear suit and the director appears as Santa Claus. Another outcome of the film's production was Wenders meeting his future wife, Donata (then Donata Schmidt) who was the film's camera loader.


Wings of Desire
In Faraway, So Close! Wenders followed up the open ended denouement of Wings of Desire, where it is now the angel Cassiel's turn to become mortal. Instead of becoming mortal for romantic love, Cassiel takes human form in order to save a young girl from falling to her death from an East German apartment block in the centre of unified Berlin. This sequel is on the whole pessimistic and moralistic. The innocent Cassiel becomes alcoholic and homeless after the devil, played by Willem Defoe, introduces him to the demon drink. The presence of evil and greed in new Berlin is represented by Americans, in the form of Horst Buchholz as Tony Baker, an American arms and porn dealer who employs Cassiel, who is initially ignorant to his exact line of business, as his assistant. Wenders once again shunned the simplicity of earlier works to produce a work of half-ideas and loose ends that are clumsily bookended with an unintentionally ghoulish voiceover of the angels addressing the audience in unison. The film once again had rock music as a form of salvation, featuring a live performance of Lou Reed singing “Why Can't I be Good?” It is also Lou Reed who saves Cassiel from the streets, handing the begging Cassiel 100 US dollars and urging him, “You can do it.” (!)

Rüdiger Vogler reprises his role as private detective Philipp Winter from Until the End of the World, which reunites him with a much older Yella Rottländer as his guardian angel. Peter Falk once again appears, but this time in a number of disappointingly unfunny sequences. Willem Defoe plays his role with appropriate menace and has a number of memorable scenes with Nastassja Kinski (as Cassiel's angel friend Raphaela). This time, Robby Müller did not act as DP, with Jürgen Jürges (who had shot Arisha) taking the role. Richard Reitinger, who had also contributed to Wings of Desire, shared writing credits with Wenders and the East German poet/playwright/actor Ulrich Zieger.

In Germany, Wenders attracted a certain degree of criticism for using a veteran actor who had remained in Germany during the Nazi era, Heinz Rühmann. Rühmann's role as Konrad, a chauffer who worked through the Nazi era, draws some questionable parallels between his own life and his character's experience. In a scene where Konrad lovingly cleans a vintage car, he sympathises with it for being sent out to serve in the military campaign in the Sudetenland—evading the distinction that cars are not equipped with moral judgement. Wenders defended his decision to cast Rühmann in his final acting role, claiming that he had looked into the actor and decided for himself that he was never a Nazi.

Michail Gorbatschov, who makes a cameo appearance as himself, was perhaps the biggest casting coup. Part of his agreement to appear was that Wenders direct a promotional film for Toyota as a favour for a relative of the father of perestroika. This short commercial film titled Drive my Car has rarely been seen.


Alice in the Cities
Lisbon Story (1994) marked Wenders return to Portugal, via a return to the road movie, this time scripted solely by himself. In the film's opening sequence depicting Rüdiger Vogler travelling by car from Berlin to Lisbon, via Paris in montage of POV shots reminiscent of Alice in the Cities, but in colour. Vogler, once again under the moniker of Philipp Winter, plays a sound engineer who travels to Lisbon at the request of his friend, the director Friedrich Munro. Munro has come to a creative crisis during the filming of a silent movie that he has been making with an old hank-crank camera. Upon arriving in Lisbon, Winter finds that Munro is nowhere to be found and sets himself about the task of gathering sounds with his tape recorder, experiencing the city and its inhabitants. Finally, when Munro turns up, Winter convinces him to finish the film in what is a far more upbeat and sentimental conclusion than in The State of Things. The obligatory guest cameo is by legendary Portuguese filmmaker, the nonagenarian Manoel de Oliveira who philosophises on the nature of cinema.

Wenders was signed on as insurance for the completion of Michelangelo Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds (1995), who had suffered a debilitating stroke 11 years previously. The film, which was based on Antonioni's journals and short story collections, once again featured an international all-star cast, this time including Sophie Marceau, John Malkovich, Vincent Perez, Peter Weller, Jean Reno, Fanny Ardant, Jean Moreau, Jeremy Irons and Marcello Mastroianni. The film consists of a series of vignettes that bear the unmistakable framing of Antonioni and are, in turn, ponderous, melancholy and heart-wrenching— or jaw-droppingly pretentious, depending on your taste. Each story centres on the physical and emotional aspects of relationships between men and woman. The stories are framed by a prologue, epilogue and series of intertitles, all featuring John Malkovich as “the director”, and which are the result of the familiar collaboration of Wenders, Müller and Przygodda.

Possibly inspired by his own film within a film in Lisbon Story, Wenders returned to his old alma mater, the HFF in Munich, to make a film with its students, shooting mainly with a hand-crank camera. This collaboration became A Trick of the Light (1996) and traced the birth of cinema in Berlin courtesy of the little known Skladanowsky brothers, who invented a camera projector at around the same time as Lumière in France and Edison in the United States.

Los Angeles was the setting of Wenders' next film, The End of Violence (1997), written by the director and the American Nicholas Klein. It was also the director's first to be shot in cinemascope. Wenders return to LA saw him reunited with past collaborators, recruiting Ry Cooder to compose his film's score and casting Frederick Forrest and Sam Fuller in small supporting roles. However, this time Robby Müller was not on board, with Frenchman Pascal Rabaud carrying out DP duties.


The End of Violence
The story is loosely based around the character of Mike Max, (Bill Pullman) a Hollywood producer known for his violent action films. Mike seems to do nothing but work and is even surrounded by communications technology when sitting in his backyard, wheeling and dealing. He is alienated from his wife, Page (Andie MacDowell) who calls him from their bedroom to tell him that she's leaving him. He miraculously escapes murder at the hands of two inept hitmen when they themselves are mysteriously killed. Following his brush with fate, Mike goes into hiding, enjoying the hospitality of a family of Mexican gardeners. It seems that the attempted murder of Mike can be traced back to a 400 page FBI file that had been mysteriously sent to his email account. At this point the plot diverges into several strands and open-ended ideas. A young detective known as “Doc” (Loren Dean) investigates Max's disappearance, interviewing some-time stuntwoman and aspiring actress Cat (Traci Lind) on a movie set that is a meticulous reconstruction of Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks. The two eventually become romantically involved. The key to Max's disappearance is Ray Bering (Gabriel Byrne) who watches over the city, monitoring a series of Orwellian anti-crime cameras from the observatory made famous by Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955)—he was the one who sent Max the file. In the meantime, Page takes over Mike's production company whilst wearing a series of stunning Bulgari gowns and ruthlessly shuts down a movie in mid-production, helmed by a European director played by Udo Kier. We also witness several evocative poetry readings.

The reoccurring challenge to “define violence” is indicative of the meditative nature of this film, which deals with violence and alienation, the latter most often represented via technology. However, the full threat of the technology which Ray oversees is never revealed. On the whole, the effect of so many plot strands and open-ended ideas is quite puzzling.

Wenders' next film was to be quite different. The origins of Buena Vista Social Club (1998) begin with Ry Cooder and the elderly Cuban musicians that he had been acting as producer for in Havana, prior to joining the End of Violence team in LA. During work on the soundtrack, Cooder was listless and distracted. When Wenders' asked him what was wrong, he said that he was “still in Cuba” and played Wenders a tape of the Buena Vista Social Club recordings. Wenders was excited about the recordings, but intrigued to find out the age of the musicians, who had he assumed to be young up and comers. (26)

Focusing on the recording of Ibrahim Ferrer's solo album, the life stories of the players, who also played on the album Buena Vista Social Club, the film also features footage from concerts in Amsterdam and documents the musicians' first ever trip to America, to perform at Carnegie Hall. Loose in terms of structure and still a road movie of sorts, Buena Vista Social Club was one of the first major films (feature or documentary) to be shot entirely on digital video. Rather than an aesthetic choice, it was a one of practicality, allowing greater flexibility for the camera operators, as well as considerable savings in film stock and lab costs. This time, gun steadicam operator Jörg Widmer shared DP credits with Robby Müller and Lisa Rrinzler. Widmer was responsible for the fluid camera movement, in scenes such as Ibrahim Ferrer's duet with Omara Portuondo on Silencio. Wenders himself also shot a great deal of second unit footage. Ultimately, 80 hours of raw material was edited down to a 101 minute film. (27)

Wenders next film was once again a music film, but far smaller in scope. Willie Nelson at the Teatro (1998) features 10 of Willie Nelson's songs, performed at Daniel Lanois' (producer of Bob Dylan and U2) studio, a converted picture theatre in Oxnard, California. The film alternates between film and video footage and features Emmy Lou Harris on backing vocals.


The Million Dollar Hotel
Image source: Wim Wenders - The Official Site
The Million Dollar Hotel (2000) represented Wenders' return to feature filmmaking in LA. This film also had a strong musical connection, as the story was the brainchild of Bono of U2. Wenders had directed the music video for U2's cover of Cole Porter's Night and Day in 1990 and U2 provided the soundtrack for this murder mystery cum romance, which starred Milla Jovovich and Jeremy Davies. Mel Gibson's (in Wenders' greatest casting coup to date next to Michail Gorbatschov) then recently founded company, Icon, also co-produced the film and Gibson acted in a supporting role for union rates. The story, scripted by Wenders and Nicholas Klein, is set in a run-down hotel and, like Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) and American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999) begins with the main character narrating from beyond the grave. The film's spectacular opening shows idiot savant, Tom Tom, played by Jeremy Davies—originally to be played by Bono (!)—running in slow motion along the roof of an old building in downtown Los Angeles. He turns and waves to off screen before taking a flying leap to his death.

The building in from which Tom Tom plummets is a flea-pit called the Million Dollar Hotel, once a respectable residence, now the home of sundry impoverished misfits. However, the story really begins with the earlier death of another resident—Izzy (played by an uncredited—ie unpaid—Tim Roth) who was a nasty piece of work and also, it turns out, the son of a billionaire. Enter Detective Skinner (Mel Gibson) an FBI agent who has been sent to solve the mystery. Did Izzy jump, or was he pushed? In order to get to the bottom of the case, Skinner installs an elaborate surveillance set-up, bugging the entire hotel with cameras and microphones and recruits Tom Tom as his reluctant informant, using the tragic beauty Eloise (also a Million Dollar resident) as Tom Tom's bait.

The Million Dollar Hotel is a fairly patchy effort from Wenders, although it has some surprisingly comic touches. It doesn't quite succeed either as a mystery—by the time we have know Izzy's fate it doesn't seem important—and Tom Tom's innocent, platonic love Eloise fails to push many romantic buttons. One of the most problematic aspects of the film is the confusing (and confused?) characterization of Tom Tom, whose conflicting voice over and actions cause the viewer to wonder whether he is an intelligent, sensitive young man pretending to be an idiot, or just an idiot. This confounds any effort by the viewer to actually understand the character and ultimately undermines the story itself. This time, Phedon Papamichael (son of the Cassavetes collaborator of the same name) took over cinematography duties.

Since Million Dollar Hotel, Wenders has made two more music films Der BAP Film—An Ode to Cologne in its English title—a tribute to a veteran German rock BAP, who sing in their native Cologne dialect, Kölsch, and a segment for The Blues (2002), a documentary series featuring short documentaries by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood and Mike Figgis. Wenders' installment is a tribute to two obscure American bluesmen, Skip James and J.P. Lenoir, titled Devil got my Woman. (28)

Prior to completing his Blues segment, Wenders also contributed a fictional short film to another series of themed works titled Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2002). Wenders' film Twelve Miles to Trona, features alongside works by Chen Kaige, Víctor Erice, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki and Spike Lee. Wenders' contribution drew on a personal experience that he has not often discussed—an accidental drug overdose 33 years prior to filming that ended up with the director being rushed to hospital and almost dying.

As well as a having amassed a large body of filmic work, Wenders has also worked extensively as a director of commercials for Cadillac, Pontiac and Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) and continued to make music videos for U2 as well as David Byrne and the Eels. In addition to this, he has authored three books of collected essays and interviews\. Wenders currently has a travelling exhibition of photographic prints titled Pictures from the Surface of the Earth. Many of the prints featured in the exhibition were taken during the location scouting for such film as Paris, Texas and Until the End of the World. The exhibition could just as well be titled Locations as it is the images are mainly renderings of desolate locations themselves with no intruding in the frame. Many of the images in the exhibition have also been published in various collections of Wenders' photos. Alongside, commercial and music video directing, writing and photography, Wenders is the president of the European Film Academy and has recently taken a newly established “Visuals Science” chair at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Wenders is obviously not one to stand idle.

Since the 1990s it has often been remarked that Wenders' glory days as a filmmaker are behind him. Wenders' best work, such as Alice in the Cities, Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire feature a grace and simplicity that has been lacking from some of his more recent work. The pitfalls of Wenders' improvisational filmmaking technique are clearly apparent in films such as Far Away, So Close!; where too many ideas fly around, confusion reigns.

Much of Wenders' best work has been achieved in collaboration with a writer with a strong sense of structure and story—whether it be the cool intellectualism of Handke, the tough American romanticism of Shepard or even the chilling meticulousness of Highsmith. In the American spring of 2003, principal photography is set to begin on Wenders' second collaboration with Sam Shepard, a film titled Don't Come Knocking, which Wenders has described as a “family road farce”. As well as being co-written by Shepard, Shepard will also star in the film. Phedon Papamichael is once again signed on to carry out DP duties, which will take place in Arizona, Nevada and Montana. (29)


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© Dave Tacon, April 2003

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Endnotes:

Reinhold Rauh, Wim Wenders und seine Filme, Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich, 1990, p. 12


Rauh, pp. 12–13


Wim Wenders, Logik der Bilder: Essays und Gespräche, Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt/Main, 1986, p. 53 [translated from original German by the author]


From Wim Wenders—The Official Site,
http://www.wim-wenders.com/movies/movies_spec/shorts/shorts.htm#


Klaus Phillips (ed.), New German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen Through the 1970s, Frederick Ungar, New York, 1984, p. 382


“Fireside chat with Wim Wenders” presented by Popcorn Taxi at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2 March, 2003


This was a technique which Jim Jarmusch later employed in the opening sequence of Down by Law (1986) for which he also recruited Müller, who would also become his regular DP.


Another milestone in Wenders career to occur in 1970 was the establishment of the company Verlag der Autoren, which Wenders formed along with 11 other filmmakers (including Rainer Werner Fassbinder) to ensure that their films received distribution.


Rauh, p. 34


Rauh, p. 36


Wenders, p. 115


“Fireside chat with Wim Wenders”


Wenders, p. 39


Already in 1970, Wenders had written an article mourning the loss of the “humanity” which typified the films of John Ford.


Alice in the Cities was a critical, though not a commercial, success and Wenders had to direct two episodes of the German children's television series The Family of Reptiles (1974) in order to recoup some of his production expenses.


Wenders, pp. 72-73


“Fireside chat with Wim Wenders”


“Fireside chat with Wim Wenders”


Hopper was not Wenders' first choice. Wenders originally wanted John Cassavetes for the role but Cassavetes recommended Hopper for the role of the shady Tom Ripley when his own filmmaking commitments prevented him from accepting the role. Hopper, who had acted in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955), in turn introduced Wenders to Ray.


Additional photography was undertaken by another Hollywood veteran, Lucien Ballard, who had shot John Boorman's first foray into American movie making, Point Blank (1967).


The film within the film is actually a remake of Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended (1956). Corman himself appears in Wenders film as a lawyer in LA.


Another ironic twist in the production of The State of Things was that after Wenders wrapped, he gave his short ends to a young filmmaker named Jim Jarmusch, who he knew as the late Nicholas Ray's assistant, thus allowing Jarmusch to finish Stranger than Paradise (1983). No wonder that Jarmusch lists The State of Things as one his favourite films of the 1980s (!).


Hunter is played by Hunter Carson, son of L.M. Kitt Carson (of David Holzman's Diary fame), who also received a writing credit on the screenplay.


Wenders recently commented that an unfortunate by-product of the success of Paris, Texas was that Harry Dean Stanton, after years of playing support roles, decided that he would only play romantic leads. Therefore, he disappeared off the map, like Travis, into the Hollywood wilderness.


Brent Aliverti, http://www.theacf.com/endworld/


RRR FM (Melbourne) radio interview


From Wim Wenders—the Official Site,
http://www.wim-wenders.com/movies/movies_spec/buenavistasocialclub/borders_interview.htm


Oliver Samson, “Wim Wenders: Art in Motion”, Deutsche Welle, 21 November, 2002,
http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1441_A_677958_1_A,00.html


It may be worth mentioning that Wenders and Shepard were set to work together on another co-authored screenplay in 2000. This film, In Amerika, initially planned as a romantic road movie, never got past the pre-production stages.



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Wim Wenders
Filmography

All titles are features, unless noted otherwise.

Locations (Schauplätze) (1967) short

Same Player Shoots Again (1967) short

Silver City (1968) short

Polizeifilm (1968) short

Alabama: 2000 Light Years From Home (1969) short

3 American LPs (1969) short

Summer in the City (1970)

The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty (Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter) (1971)

The Scarlet Letter (Der Scharlachrote Buchstabe) (1972)

Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten) (1973)

“The Island” and “From the Family of Reptiles” (“Die Insel” and “Aus der Familie der Panzerechsen”) (1974) two episodes from television series “A House for Us”

Wrong Move (Falsche Bewegung) (1975)

Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit) (1976)

The American Friend (Der Amerikanische Freund) (1977)

Lightning Over Water (1980)

The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge) (1982)

Reverse Angle (1982)

Chambre 666 (1982)

Hammett (1982)

Paris, Texas (1984)

Tokyo-ga (1985)

Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) (1987)

Notebook on Cities and Clothes (Aufzeichnungen zu Kleidern und Städten) (1989)



The American Friend
Until the End of the World (1991)

Arisha, the Bear and the Stone Ring (1992)

Faraway, So Close! (In Weiter Ferne, so Nah!) (1993)

Lisbon Story (1994)

Beyond the Clouds (1995) with Michelangelo Antonioni

A Trick of the Light (Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky) (1996)

The End of Violence (1997)

Willie Nelson at the Teatro (1998) documentary

Buena Vista Social Club (1998) documentary

The Million Dollar Hotel (2000)

The Blues: Devil got my Woman (2002) documentary

Twelve Miles to Trona (2002) part of omnibus film Ten Minutes Older: the Trumpet





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Bibliography

Michael Atkinson, “Crossing the Frontiers”, Sight and Sound, 1, 1994

Steven Cohan & Ina Rae Hark (eds), The Road Movie Book, Routledge, London, New York, 1997

Timothy Corrigan, New German Film: The Displaced Image, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1986

James Franklin, New German Cinema: From Oberhausen to Hamburg, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1983

Frieda Graf (ed.), Reihe Film 44: Wim Wenders, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 1991

Todd Kontje, The German Bildungsroman: The History of a National Genre, Camden House, Columbia, 1993

Gerhard Mayer, Der Deutsche Bildungsroman: von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart, J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart, 1992

Hans Günther Pflaum, Germany on Film: Theme and Content in the Cinema of the Federal Republic of Germany, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1990

Klaus Phillips (ed.), New German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen Through the 1970s, Frederick Ungar, New York, 1984

Hans Helmut Prinzler, Chronik des deutschen Films 1895–1994, Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzer, 1995

Reinhold Rauh, Wim Wenders und seine Filme, Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich, 1990

John Sandford, The New German Cinema, Oswald Wolff, London, 1980

Wim Wenders, Emotion Pictures: Essays und Filmkritiken 1968–1984, Verlag der Autoren. Frankfurt/Main, 1986

Wim Wenders, Logik der Bilder: Essays und Gespräche, Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt/Main, 1986

Wim Wenders, The Act of Seeing, Faber and Faber, London, 1992






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Articles in Senses of Cinema

Lisbon Story: Portugal Year Zero by Carloss James Chamberlin




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Web Resources

Film Directors – Articles on the Internet
Several online articles can be found here.

Interview with Wim Wenders

Interview with Wim Wenders for The End of Violence

Wim Wenders interview

Wim Wenders—The Official Site


Click here to search for Wim Wenders DVDs, videos and books at





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