 EXIT
Image and Culture is a quarterly magazine that is published
'during the first fortnight of February, May, August and November'.
This text about Wim Wenders and his photography by Felipe Hernández
Cava is from EXIT's issue dedicated to filmmakers and their artistic
endeavors off the movie screen. Among other directors featured
in the issue are John Waters (who has published 4 books and exhibited
his photographs and artistic work in museums and galleries in
New York, Ohio, Lyon and Madrid), Atom Egoyam, David Lynch, Dennis
Hopper, Peter Greenaway and Stanley Kubrick - who began his work
as photographer for Look Magazine between 1945-1950, but soon
directed his attention to the cinema.
"How Truthful! How Existent!"
Felipe Hernández Cava
Who is ever going to write this story another
way, even if only in the nuances, nuances that could indeed
help greatly to liberate the people from the frozen images in
which they see each other?'
A WINTER TRIP TO THE DANUBE,
SAVE, MORAVA AND DRINA RIVERS or JUSTICE FOR SERBIA
P E T E R H A N D K E
Some of the visions most committed to the modern project - for
despite its shifting sands, Wender's has become just this- are
concerned by the progressive weakening of those discourses that
tried to articulate the totality of the relationships we maintain
with reality.
Today, amidst increasing image noise,
such visions seem to us somewhat forsaken and lacking a framework
to refer to when searching for the slightest hint of meaning.
They cling to an adherence to a few solid, although sometimes
contradictory links, in fear of perishing in the erratic postmodern
fragmentation. These are basically the visions of those who believe
that not only is it wrong to consider modernity finished, but
that what we are living today is nothing more than another one
of its eras, although, in fact, quite a troubled one.
I believe that those who wager on
those visions refuse to accept all the rules of the farce we are
immersed in, this perhaps being the only certainty we can count
on. But they cannot be denied their status as resisters in these
times when it is not even easy to ponder the essence of the image,
perturbed not only by its saturation but also by the dislocation
it is being subjected to. Mostly from the advertising field, there
comes an endless generation of thousands of images which are increasingly
opaque however seductive they appear after undergoing the corresponding
manipulation carried out by professionals. Professionals who,
as Wenders have occasionally pointed out, make a show of the condescending
audacity to consider that nothing are good enough to do without
revaluation.
The German filmmaker and photographer,
like other lucid members of his generation, that which wanted
to subvert the order of things, has always maintained an untrusting
relationship with our overpopulated iconosphere. He has found
a myriad of overabundant images that could be labeled "impure",
not so much owing to their high level of contamination, but rather
to the fact that they no longer attempted even to show us what
was reflected within them.
So great is the degree of divorce
between what most images apparently mean perse and what they end
up meaning, that the only thing they achieve is to extend the
void before our eyes and strip the objects of interest by emptying
them of existence. Dead images that do not portray, that are merely
eloquent aspects of a thought boasting about its erratic wanderings.
How then does one restore the 'purity'
of the images? Or, what amounts to the same thing, how does one
restore their meaningful capacity, allowing them, as much as possible,
to grant the photographer his authorization to explain them?
In this utopian project, so interconnected
with meditations on modernity, there is no choice but to retrace
the steps taken so far and return to origins free of many of the
current burdens. To my understanding, it is the same path as that
taken by several graphic designers and painters. A path which,
in short, is mapped by nothing more and nothing less than a desire
to disassemble the current visual device, to stop seeing like
machines, like automatons.
Wenders belongs to this moment with
a less 'subversive' attitude than some of his traveling companions.
In the end, his attitude is basically revisionist, to the extent
that he aspires to revise this contemporary model rather than
destroy it or find another alternative. Thus, he is more optimistic
than Godard, for example, who long ago reached the conclusion
that the visual device is being altered by forces of Power and
becoming just another mechanism of culture.
Perhaps, then, from these suppositions,
we ought to confront Wenders' photographic work as a display of
the illustrated eagerness to accomplish an art that at last discovers
its own rigorous science ("science and poetry" Goethe
said, "can be combined until they meet once again on a superior
plane", and that sort of meta-reality is what I believe this
creator aspires to).
Therefore, to undo the skein into
which we have become entangled, an in which many amuse themselves,
there is no longer any other alternative but to look at the images
in another way, from another 'point of view', whether by searching
for their flip side or by submerging ourselves in them, without
any distance whatsoever, by I going from their exterior to their
interior', as is the case with Velazquez' best paintings, for
example. Thus, it seems to me now that Rosa Olivares was wise
to decide, against my advice, to call this monographic Off Screen.
For, in effect, we are talking, or ought to be talking about a
change in position that will facilitate the alteration of an entire
phenomenology. The goal: to extract the meaning of things with
their dignity intact.
Now, in this displacement, in this
abandoning of a one framing for a new one, the camera should behave
like an instrument of conscience, that portrays equally forwards
and backwards, what is in focus and what is out of focus, to create
something that is not only physical but also symbolic.
A camera is not the machine gun
some dreamed of during the sixties, with which to contribute to
the making of the revolution. But it can serve to explain things
if it manages at least to show them. Not sell them - which was
another habitual error made by some idealists, who thus committed
the same mistake as did their enemies - simply show them. As does
Kariostami, to place a proper name on that visual ethic.
2.
"As if solitude were no longer representable,
or it remained forever very small in the image, in a lost corner"
THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
P E T E R H A N D K E
In that pursuit of the life of things, it seems logical that
Wenders chose landscape as his favourite genre. On the one hand,
because the growth and prosperity of landscape art is intimately
related to modernity. On the other hand, in that process of revelation
of nature, art and science have walked together, often trying
to clarify the limits of that subtle frontier between objectivity
and subjectivity.
When we speak of his photos, driven
to a large extent by his own words, we tend to think of influences
like Caspar David Friedrich. Doubtless, he is like one of the
romantics resisting a bourgeoisie realism that, with its shallow
conventionalism, meant to subjugate the spiritual and symbolical
tension that he, and others like him advocated.
Yet, like the painter he could have
been, Wenders thrusts his roots deeper in time. He goes much farther
than that fascination with "travelling toward the unknown."
What is more, as happened to Goethe in his vital journey, one
moment we see him as a passionate romantic and the next moment
we see him as a champion of a certain classicism (like that of
the master from Weimar, in any case, a sort of objective classicism).
Either way, with both options, he always flees from the practice
of arbitrariness, of capriccio, that vision that nowadays owns
an adjective which qualifies its lack of point of view: the tourist
vision.
Balancing between objectivism and
subjectivism, his pro-European pictorial education allows him
to amble through a vast legacy. Therefore, although he has never
been heard citing them, there are moments in which I see echos
in his photos of Claudio de Lorena or Jakob Ruisdael, for example,
two forceful formulators of a genre in which each one of the elements
they present us with is erected like something symbolical of the
creative strength of the world. And we are astonished by a primitive
formulation in which it is easy to read "what is real",
and wherein nothing superfluous and estranged from the landscape,
starting with the human figure, is disturbing.
Yes, there is a wealth of landscape
history behind Wenders' photos. Many comings and goings along
paths which, most of the time, want to lead us into reading those
images as part and object of a moral formation, as a means of
elevating the spirit, in which idea and truth struggle to join
each other in order to reach a pure style. Nevertheless, with
them, we are placed on other paths, and Wenders knows many paths,
in which the only reading possible seems to be that of the authentic
life that the images can release due to their total integration
in that context to which they are joined harmoniously.
Now he is Constable, for example,
clinging to that dominant idea that painting can and should transmit
moral ideas. Or Rousseau, speaking about the composition "that
is within us" and of the necessity to penetrate things beyond
their external reality. Now he is Goethe, surprised by the vision
of a crab in an Italian river, "how truthful, how existent!".
Or he is Cezanne, whom Wenders often cites, commenting on the
lucidity adhered to every one of the glances directed at nature.
Or, why not Gauguin, forcing himself to see symbolically, in the
midst of a context in which impressions took priority over things.
What is the essence of beauty if not a symbolic reality?
The demonstrated responsibility that Wenders feels for landscape
is what does not prevent him from seeing it from distinct suppositions,
although foremost is the journey through the moments in which
the artist did most to extract and represent what he was seeing
in himself. Consequently, with the limits of the genre overwhelmed,
it is possible to stroll with this photographer through symbolism,
surrealism, or through abstraction (which is where Wenders identifies
with Antonini). And even through realism itself, whenever it is
appreciated, as by Brecht, that realism is not what true things
are like, but what things are truly like (which is where Wenders
also identifies with Edward Hopper, the most obvious among his
visual influences).
A compromise with which he is linked
to all those who, in their own way, have at one time committed
themselves to the essence of things. A legion of artists unfolding
themselves in the territory of a new mythological field that can
offer them the assurance that they are standing on firm ground.
It is due to this necessity to feel
himself participant of an aesthetic order that maintains an equal
relationship with the subject of the artistic practice and the
object that, for concrete photographic material, he has always
gone across the Atlantic to look for roots (Wenders' spirit is
split between the Old Continent and the young one, when it comes
to defining his relationship with reality).
In this sense, we frequently hear
him citing Walker Evans, possibly one of the photographers who
have conferred the most meaning to this medium, the author of
a literal avant la lettre work, one who made use of this discipline
as objectivity par excellence. But a deeper inquiry would lead
us to that same diversity he maintains with painters.
The foremost photographer-topographers
(O'Sullivan, Hillers, Jackson, Watkins ... ) are in his photos,
searching for the aesthetic order of nature. As is Stieglitz -
deep down, a romantic -, equally aware of the subjectivity of
the photographic mechanism and of the symbolism of the images.
And Ansel Adams is here, as is the objectivity of the second generation
photographer-topographers (Baltz, Gohlke ... ), placing the method
before the emotion. Also here is Robert Frank, to whom I shall
refer below.
Present herein are all the photographers who have looked with
respect at that object we have come to call landscape.
3.
"To the following images, which are
progressively cut from one to the other at regular intervals
of time, which gives us the impression that what is happening
in them is also accelerated in an unseemly way, the narrator's
voice is likewise added, with the same questions as before and
changing only the words, evidently without being able to prevent
the mute images, which are so due to the fact that they are
so graphic and manifest, from gradually displacing the sense
of the questions, which are not seen, by first of all showing,
immediately capturing the attention of sight...
DISCOURSES AND ACTIONS OF THE
FATHER IN THE MAIZE FIELD
P E T E R H A N D K E
One of the aspects that most interested Wenders about the Evans'
photos was the presence of text in them, that same text we find
in many of the works by Paul Strand, or Ralph Steiner, or Russuell
Lee, or Ben Shahn and which is converted into a sign that opens
a door to another sphere not necessarily associated with that
of the images: that of the stories.
Since another one of our photographer's
obsessions is capturing the greatest quantity of time possible
in those spaces, which is the way to narrow the relationship between
photography and life. And, although his mistrust has also lead
him to the discovery of a serious opposition between some images
that must stand up on their own, without the necessity of leading
anywhere, and some stories that represent a danger to them. Indeed,
in many of the snap shots he has captured, Wenders has tried to
find the first image of a sequence.
With this interest, he repudiates
many of the great landscape artists (such as Claudio de Lorena,
for example) who thought it was desirable to flee from the literary
sense. But in his eagerness to go from showing, and not describing,
to narrating, he acts with the same respect for the images mentioned
before, expectant, for if he has conferred them with the right
to tell something by themselves, they can, in exchange, authorize
him to place them in a new context with which to create a whole.
Certainly, in that conflict open
between wanting to tell and wanting to see, he has always thought
more about characters than about plots, but to me it happens that,
however many times I have had the opportunity to be before a Ruisdel,
I have tried to read in it the beginning of something (Where is
that man in the distance coming down the trail headed? Is there
or is there not a certain shadow behind that tree on the side
of the path, behind which to intuit the hiding of someone who
is waiting for him? ... ) Almost like in that marvellous tale
by M.R. James, The engraving, in which one plate held the whole
story.
This is why I can understand what
happens to Wenders with the Hopper's paintings, because they have
a premeditated and sought after meta-narrative aspect, and our
vision, determined by film as well as by literature, tends to
ask us what is happening to that woman alone in a room or that
individual who has just stopped at a petrol station. The word
romantic and the word divine always explore a symbolic space.
The tale, then, in many of our photographer's
images, seems to be crouching and waiting for us to tear it from
its immobility, and even from its abstraction. Waiting for our
emotion to bestow it with motion. One image, another after it,
another still... and, by way of this act of liberty, we begin
to put together an entire story.
We would not be able to do it if
those landscapes were mere backdrops. But they are not. And with
but the mediation of a glance that treats them like characters,
they demonstrate to us that they wish to take on protagonism,
without our knowing for certain where they will lead us. Although,
if we are to believe Novalis, whose shadow is always hovering
over Wenders, it is most likely that they will end up leading
us toward ourselves.
But at times it is not like this
-I have already alluded on several occasions to the exercise of
contradiction as an enriching practice of Wenders' doings-, and
that trip by way of tales cannot be considered a vital experience
that is to enrich us, but rather, as he likes to say, as a mere
false movement.
4.
"Save a feeling from the underground
and take it home for me".
THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
P E T E R H A N D K E
Photography also captures moments of the sly conduct of Death,
albeit less vertiginously than film. The artist does nothing but
observe how things advance toward what bestows them with their
ultimate sense, disappearance, and tries to intervene in that
process by trapping something of its appearance.
He thus establishes a relation with
death, with the loss of identity (the visible link between what
is dead and what is alive that Goethe spoke of), and he fleetingly
feels like a demiurge who can halt a logical process. To photograph,
said Susan Sontag, is to preserve something.
I believe that is why Wenders especially
prefers landscapes that present 'wounds' through which that existence
escapes. It is indifferent to him whether said wound comes determined
by the space in the middle of the whole (an empty lot in the middle
of the city) or its opposite (a small construction installed in
the middle of the desert). As in the romantics, in his gesture,
there is a proof of love for the tragedy of the finite fact which
is life, an eagerness to dissolve into nothingness so that God
or Nature, each of us can chose his preference, is all.
They are, like the wounded walls
of Robert Frank, a small assertion of skepticism about a farther
reaching preoccupation, that to which Roland Barthes referred
when, speaking of the images, he said that the worst wounds come
more from what is seen than from what is known. And they speak
to us about feelings like loneliness, sadness, or alienation.
They are a great effort of memory, with which poets almost always
occupy themselves. And they create a very particular atmosphere
of time.
From this vigilant attitude, Wenders
creates the transcendental illusion that the ruins of our past
are already contained in our present.
Deep down, very deep down, there
is always the innocent utopia that possibly, if we had not seen
those images, if we had not contaminated them, perhaps they would
remain innocent. The object and the image would possess each other
mutually, as occurs with dreamlike images. And perhaps ... perhaps
... they would not die.
Felipe Hernández Cava is an art
critic, curator of exhibitions and scriptwriter
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