“I’m at home nowhere’
Wim Wenders' acceptance speech for the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Prize
(Bielefeld, 17 March 1991.)Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau was a great innovative storyteller and pictorial artist of the cinema, one of the few genuine landmarks of the seventh art. He was far ahead of his time, too far perhaps to be able to bridge that gulf for long. He lived like someone born in the latter part of this century, not the last.
It’s a great honour to receive a price bearing his name. It’s a great honour to follow in the footsteps of Eri c Rohmer, the first recipient of the Murnau Prize, I’d like to thank the Murnau Society, the town of Bielefeld and the Bielefeld Banking association for giving me this honour.
Many things in cinema have changed since the time Murnau made his films in Germany and America. The whole world has changed. And if it’s not quite true to say that it’s cinema that has changed the world, it is at least partly true. Storytelling has changed, images have changed, the transmitting and receiving of images has changed, our sense of the world has changed. To such a degree that Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau would be quite dizzy, if he were to be exposed to the profusion and variety of images and the type of image language that we’re used to seeing every day of our lives- especially the tenderest among us, our children.
It’s a turbulent time for the cinema.So it seemed appropriate to choose for this evening’s screening, a film that tries to draw up a kind of balance sheet of the cinema, exactly fifty years after Murnau’s death. It’s no accident that it’s in black and white, or that the director character in the film goes by the name of Friedrich Munro. Nor is it a coincidence that the film begins in Europe, at the most westerly point of Portugal, where Europe sticks its nose out to America, or that it ends with the death of the director on a street that’s barely and hour’s drive from where Murnau died. The night before his dead, Friedrich, our director, stands in a phone box, and quotes a diary entry of Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau’s: ‘I’m at home nowhere, in no house, in no country…’Maybe the film, The State of Things, was a little too dark, from its depressed perspective. Ten years have passed since then, and ‘the state of things’ is different again.
The cinema is facing a change as drastic and comprehensive as the quantum leap from silent to sound film. The age of photography and the photographic image – and hence of cinema – is approaching its end. At the end of this era, as it enters the new era of digital electronic images, perhaps intended for: to show twentieth-century people their image, in reality as in dream. Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau would be a great inspiration for such a feat. Surely, he would also be the first to warn us today against sentimentalizing the old cinema, and against being too gloomy about the coming age of digital image recording. He was a pioneer. He would be one if he were with us today. Pioneers are optimists by nature, and that’s why they tell you more about the future than the past.
My own view of the future of cinema is less bleak than it was in 1981, when I made the State of Things. New perspectives have opened up that were less evident then, or perhaps some of my old bogeymen have disappeared. There is no longer the arch-enemy ‘television’ and the devil ‘video’, because behind and beyond them there is a possible new ally and a new cinematic language in the form of the high resolution digitally sorted image which is currently being developed. Nor is there any more the ‘wicked’ and overweening American film industry, and the ‘poor’ little nation producers in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, England, Poland, Scandinavia, USSR, ect. There is a growing snese of a ‘European cinema’ as a proud language common to all these countries, and, one hopes, not just a language, but a functioning European institution and industry, a protective rood that will assure the small national industries of their survival. )And for how much longer? No one knows. Let’s say: for as long as possible, as long as cinema in some form still exists.)
Because such a roof demands solid beans and supports, I would like to suggest that Friedich-Wilhelm Plumpe, better known as Murnau, native of Bielefeld, Be taken less as a pioneer of the German cinema, than as one of the great forerunners of our common European cinema.
Thank you very much for listing.