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Mr
Paris, Texas finds a sense of place
Garry Maddox As he drove down the NSW North Coast this week, the celebrated German director Wim Wenders met one of his heroes. Given his artistic interests since pawning his saxophone to buy a 16 millimetre film camera as a young man, it is a surprise that this hero comes from outside his fields of filmmaking, writing, painting, digital art and photography. It was the Australian architect Glenn Murcutt, who has a house in Kempsey and shares Wenders's interest in "the sense of place" as an inspiration. But where Murcurt designs awardwinning houses, Wenders has made Paris, Texas, Buena Vista Social Club and Wings of Desire. Wenders was travelling from the Australian International Documentary Conference in Byron Bay to a dinner honouring director Fred Schepisi in Sydney and then a talk at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which is hosting an exhibition of Wenders's photographs later in the year. In an age of specialisation, he is a colourful anomaly. And in a brown suit, runners and fly-away hair, Wenders looks every inch the colourful European intellectual who can discuss photography and collalborate with musicians like Ry Cooder and Bono. "The beautiful thing about filmmaking is that you can really be in touch with all these musicians, writers, photographers, actors and architects," he says. Many of his films start from getting a sense of a location. The energy and music of Havana for Buena Vista Social Club represent an example. "It's a sense that's not regularly counted as one of our senses, although everybody is born with it - a certain sense of place. Most of my movies - almost all of them started with a desire to explore a place and put a certain city or landscape in the centre of a film." Often , as with Paris, Texas, the story is devised to fit this landscape. As well as a film with Sam Shepard, collaborator on the 1984 classic, Wenders is planning a film with directors, actors and musicians contributing stories about peace - World Without War. "We think of it as a great epic about peace but necessarily to be done by many voices from "all over the world." The president of the European Film Academy, Wenders says he is fond of the German Government for once for opposing a strike on Iraq. "There hasn't been a war like this a pre-emptive war- and I'm very scared that it will be the predecessor to many other wars. Once that preemptive war has started, it will open floodgates." Garry Maddox
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