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Twelve
Miles From Trona
Wim Wenders' Synopsis for
his contribution to the "Ten Minutes Older" project.
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Ten minutes are nothing.
Ten minutes are an eternity.
To quote Dylan and the Byrds:
"… a time to live, a time to die…"
I wanted to fill "my" ten minutes
with some sort of experience of my own,
something I had lived through,
to give it an existential basis,
an urgency.
It could end up looking like fiction,
but it had to start with something real
that I could closely connect with.
Trying to remember ten minutes in my life
that really mattered,
I came up with a number of incidents.
Some were too private, so to speak,
some took clearly more time than the span of ten minutes,
some were better told in words than in images.
I finally hit upon a memory
that has always haunted me
and that I never dealt with in any film
or in any written account.
It was the only time I ever came very close to death.
The incident had changed my life, at the time.
33 years have passed since then.
Like any other vivid memory,
that incident had started its own life, over the years,
had become an entity of its own,
through the few times I talked about it,
through the selective filtering process
that the brain uses to deal with traumas.
Anyway, I felt I had the right to do with my own
memory
whatever I wanted.
So I changed the location,
changed the overall set-up,
changed the circumstances,
changed the timing,
changed the people involved.
I just kept the core of the matter,
which was a horrifying experience.
I summed it up as "a total loss of reality".
"Loss of Reality" was my working title,
too,
although I knew very well it would never make it as such.
As a title, it was too obvious,
too much "on the money".
But it helped defining what I was after
in those ten minutes of film I had at my disposal.
The experience itself, at the time,
was quickly told,
and I am certainly not the only one
to whom something like this happened
in those fabulous Sixties:
An involuntary drug experience,
an accidental overdose.
I was amazed, actually,
how many people could relate to it,
only in the short span of shooting and editing the film.
We worked with a tiny crew,
but even in that little group
I heard a dozen stories of similar experiences.
The "near death" part of it
wasn't what I wanted to film and tell, though.
That was something that always sounded flat
in any effort to put it into words.
Neither words nor images
would ever come even remotely close
to what I would have to convey.
So I kept that part pretty much for myself,
once again.
But the part of the story that lead up to it,
the one I associated with the loss
(and resulting) lack of reality,
THAT, I thought, was something which could actually
fit into ten minutes,
pretty accurately.
It needed a dose of Rock'n Roll
and the form of a miniature road movie.
You don't have to twist my arm
to venture into those territories.
For the Rock'n Roll part
I called for the help of the EELS.
For the "on-the-road-part"
I choose the California desert near Death Valley.
(Which sounded very a propos, to begin with....)
The little town of TRONA was a find,
one of those lucky circumstances
you're always hoping for
when you set out on a location survey.
That hospital you see in the beginning
which opens only "Monday through Thursday",
I didn't make it up.
That really exists.
And nothing is more helpful
to describe a loss of reality
than things that really exist.
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