Wim Wenders

A UNIVERSE TO DISCOVER
What the new technologies offer to us

I better start this whole thing on an optimistic note.
Pessimists never discover much,
and to find a whole universe, (what a tall order!)
you got to be looking around open-mindedly.

So I hope my very optimistic approach is not going to shock you.
It starts with the following thesis:
The future of the cinema lies no longer in its past.
Or the other way around:
The past of the cinema will not help us much to lead us into its future.

"Hey, what's so very optimistic about that?" some of you might say.
"We've learned everything we know about the cinema from its past.
It's dear to us! We're good at what we know from it!
Why wouldn't that knowledge carry us (and our cinema) into the future?
This guy sounds more like a pessimist."

I am not.
I fully and totally believe in the future of the cinema,
and especially our European one, more than ever.
I love and cherish its history.
But I have lost all confidence whatsoever in nostalgia.
The future of the cinema is just about to get invented,

and its past is no longer the obvious bridge into what is about to come.
Why?
I believe that the digital revolution
of which we are witnessing but the first phase for the last few years,
is not that much based on evolution
as we all might like to believe.
I have the impression it's rather reconstructing Cinema from scratch.

When sound came up, some seventy years ago,
a lot of rules changed, some stayed the same.
Films looked less elegant for a while, that's for sure,
and the elaborate language of the silent era was reduced and crippled at first.
But not for that long:
Film incorporated the new technology of sound pretty fast,
recovered and grew and became more complex than ever.

The "new technologies" however are not just an extension of film,
even if they introduced themselves as such at first.
They don't just add a dimension, like sound did.
They will not be incorporated,
they are rather taking over.
They are about to replace "film".

I am not just referring to the material, to celluloid.
I am referring to everything you and me know about our craft,
our art, our industry.
The entire landscape of film is about to be shaken up completely.
Its past will no longer be its future…

Now you might really say,
"Hey, this is not an optimistic message at all.
We're the European Film Academy,
What are we going to do without our middle word?"

Don't worry: I suppose we will all continue to do what we do:
We will be actors, directors, producers, writers, cameramen, agents,
set designers, editors, composers…
We will all continue to work in that large field of storytelling,
in the realm of the audiovisual world.
Our profession might even continue to be called "Filmmaking".
But it won't be based on what we know now
and what we've learned from the past.

I don't pretend to know more than you.
I have worked a bit inside that new digital world,
I have learned how to use the new tools, just a bit,
I have made some music videos and commercials,
I have shot on virtual sets,
I have worked in High-Definition,
shot 2 entire films digitally,
done some special effect work, sat on machines
like the Henry, the Flame, the Inferno,
worked on the Fire, the C-Reality…
Just enough to understand that I have only opened a door
and peaked into a new landscape.
I feel like the guy in that famous drawing from the middle ages
who breaks through the skin that is wrapped around the Earth
and sees the planets and the stars out there, in amazement.
I feel like I want to turn around and tell you
that the Earth is not flat.

It's really in those dimensions,
that I see the impact of the so-called new technologies:
Cinema is not flat,
and we all don't have an idea yet what's out there.

Even Lars von Trier with his historical step into this future
(I'm talking about "Dancer in the Dark")
even Tom Tykwer with "Lola runs", even Luc Besson,
even Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Roland Emmerich
and with them other directors
who have faced and embraced the new technologies
don't know all that much about the vast open territory in front of us.

Right now filmmaking seems to me like at the age
when the first scientists imagined nuclear energy
and then eventually managed to split matter for the first time.
Little did they know.
It's like that now.
We have just learned how each image and each sound
can be split up down to its atoms
and be put back together.
But we are still handling those images with the same narrative structures,
the same dramaturgy, the same storytelling recipes,
the same storyboards and editing techniques
like Griffith, Chaplin or Abel Gance. Basically.

We can feed film into computers so that it becomes immaterial information,
of which every bit, every single atom, can be worked at,
manipulated, changed and replaced.
Then we can output the result back to film,
as if nothing ever happened.
But we have not changed all the tools around.
We're still toying around with a new nuclear technology of images
but have no clue where it is taking us.

You see, that's why I'm an optimist.
Because I imagine the future of storytelling,
where directors, writers, producers, actors, cameramen etc
actually start controlling that nuclear technology
that we will have at our disposal,
not just playing around with it.

I'd be happy if that would still be called filmmaking.
Although that doesn't really matter.
WHAT we do with all the new toys, that matters.
Technologies never do anything that you don't make them do.
Nothing else produces poetry, beauty, truth, drama, tension, human feelings,
than the human mind and the human heart.
Digital technology doesn't do that.
It doesn't do anything on its own.

Technology is not entertaining us, not teaching us, not moving us.
In the future of cinema
you still have to do that.

You know what word I hate most today:
"Content".
It comes out of a very insecure time of transition
in which technology rules.
We can do so much, all of a sudden,
that this new digital technology of transmission
is encouraged and pretends to BE the essential thing itself,
so that what it transports,
looks like it was only of secondary nature,
only "Content".
Can you feel how condescending that word is?

I am looking forward to the future
where technology will be so boring again
that the only exciting thing will be, once more,
what you say with it, what you express with it.

Mind you, I am not talking against the new technologies now.
In the very contrary:
I rather suggest to accept it as given
that they are here to stay and to change the cinema.
But I would like to encourage you
to imagine how to overcome that situation of unbalance
between technology and "content".

If the biggest advertising factor for a film today is his special effects,
meaning the mere technology used to tell a story,
and if the story and the characters play second fiddle to these effects,
then we are in the process of giving up our craft to our tools.

Already today it is getting difficult to get a wide release for a film in the US,
(after all the biggest market for films in the world,)
if you don't make extensive use of digital effects.
Distributors are simply not interested in your "product".
And that is a phenomenon that we will face in Europe soon as well.
I see a generation of moviegoers and film-freaks grow up
for whom effects are already more important than storylines,
who already mix up motion with emotion.

Again, I am NOT complaining here. ON THE CONTRARY.
I can't accept to look at that situation
from a position of "victimisation".
There is a much better attitude!

Which is: We have to master that nuclear technology.
We have to learn how to use it.
Right now it is in effect starting to use us.

We have to embrace the New Technologies in a big way.
We have to make sure that we learn to master them,
that a new generation of filmmakers has access to all of it.

There is nothing right now that can be done in Hollywood,
that could not be done in Paris or London or Munich,
Barcelona or anywhere else in Europe.
We have great post-production facilities here in Europe.
A lot of the future software is developed here or in Asia.

We are in a good position here in Europe.
European cinema is a huge, endless fountain of creativity,
of phantasy and of imagination.
We are backed up by the longest tradition of theatre, literature, painting, poetry,
architecture, music,
everything that can help to turn cold digital technology
into an emotional new language of cinema.

In a few years, there will be data beamers standing next to the good old movie projectors,
and in another few years, those projectors will be gone.
The entire history of cinema will be available in any theatre
via servers, optical cables, satellites, broadband or whatever system.
We want to make sure, here in Europe,
that this important transformation happens in our control,
that the norms regulating this giant change will not exclude us
and won't be dictated by somebody else.
Whoever finances the huge cost of installing these new facilities
in cinemas all over Europe
will also control their programmation.
Let's make sure that we are not at the short end of this development.

The future of the European Cinema might not be as much based on its past,
as we all would like to believe.
And that is okay, as long as we have confidence
that the future remains to be invented.
Right now it might seem to many,
as if all that digital technology was invented mainly to blow up things
and to create new and cheaper ways to depict destruction,
all sorts of Horror and brutality.

It would be so very nearsighted to constrain it to that.
It would be fatal to fold our hands and say: "We can't beat that!"
"We don't want to work with these tools."
It is up to us and to a next generation of talent here in Europe
to put the new digital technologies into the service of all sorts of storytelling
and push them into realms that nobody has opened up yet.
Only this technology will help us to explore new territories of storytelling,
adequate to grasp the reality of the 21st century.
We can't make new expeditions into the human mind and the human heart
with the hardware of the 19th century.

This cinema of the future does not exist yet.
We see glimpses of it, glimpses of an incredible richness of expression.
And that is my optimistic outlook,
My introduction to our "boat ride" today.

Technology can't do anything on its own.
You have to force it to start swinging, maybe even dancing.
(Otherwise we'll all end up as dancers in the dark..)
The power, the poetry and the imagination
are only in the hands of people
who have learned to use their tools.
There is an abundance of new tools just lying around.
We have to start shaping the future European cinema with them.

It is up to us to expand our craft and our art and our knowledge
so we stay in control of the industry
that we still might call "European Cinema", in the future.

This speech was held at a conference about the future of European Cinema in Paris.
A shorter version of this speech can be found in the January supplement to "La Republica."

back to January 2001 News Reel