|
Wim Wenders and the Landscape of Desire Published: November 30, 2003 Wim Wenders says he is the only filmmaker in history to have been awarded an honorary doctorate in theology, a doctorate that had to be approved by the pope himself. The Catholic Church decided (agreeing with some critics) that films like "Wings of Desire" (1987), "Paris, Texas" (1984), "The American Friend" (1977), "Kings of the Road" (1976) and "Alice in the Cities" (1974), movies that deal with alienation, disengagement and a lack of identity, represented a spiritual quest. (In a recent interview at his New York gallery, he said he owes this to a conspiracy of monks who were movie freaks.) Though his films of the 1990's continued to win awards internationally, none measured up to the work that had made him a great hero of art-film audiences everywhere, nor did they attract much attention in America until "Buena Vista Social Club" in 1999. Mr. Wenders, 58, takes still photographs, too. In 1986 the Pompidou Center in Paris showed his work, and since then it has appeared at the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Bilbao and museums and galleries from Australia to Japan to America. Some of his photographs, large and beautiful, are on view at the James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea through Dec. 20 and in a book, "Pictures From the Surface of the Earth: Photographs by Wim Wenders" (Schirmer Art Books). There are landscapes and abandoned cities in the American West, landscapes bound up with religion in Israel, decaying houses in Cuba, all basking in brilliant light and color or sprawling under foreboding yellow skies. Mr. Wenders's life and work are a series of journeys, spiritual and otherwise. "Travel is my main profession," he said, laughing. "It's a state of grace, which is being on the way to somewhere and not necessarily knowing where that somewhere is, but knowing why it's worth trying to find it." Born in 1945 in Düsseldorf, Germany, a city that had been 80 percent flattened during World War II, he said that travel was a necessity in postwar Germany. Some place might exist that looked better. The many travelers in his films are rootless men seeking self-knowledge and a way to live in a time that offers too few signposts. In some of his movies they search for a way to cope in a world dissolving into images. Mr. Wenders searched for himself in a lot of places when he was young: he briefly studied medicine, then psychology, then romance languages and after that philosophy. Mostly he painted, though for a while he devoted himself to the saxophone. (He once said that rock 'n' roll had saved his life. Most of his films' scores have been issued as CD's and several have been more profitable than the films themselves.) Eventually he went to film school while writing film criticism. He first picked up a film camera as a possible tool for a painter, encouraged by the example of some American painters, and film simply eclipsed painting. Mr. Wenders said that although he owes a lot to Walker Evans's attitude of modestly "stepping back to let the object be all it is about," and although Robert Adams is a giant to him, he does not think he has been influenced by any photographers, only by painters. The influence of painting is evident in his photographs (as it is in his movies). Some of his landscapes have the grand sweep of Dutch 17th-century landscape or of Caspar David Friedrich. One is called "Wyeth Landscape," and a couple of silent streetfronts bring to mind Edward Hopper, who, Mr. Wenders said, was a "total film nut" and whose paintings are cinematically pregnant with something about to happen in the next frame. Mr. Wenders considers his still photography a kind of spiritual quest, much as his movies are, but seeking the spirit of places and the stories each one has to tell. The photographs are large enough to walk across — several panoramics are almost 15 feet long. They are printed by the same woman who works with Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff. "Place is the driving force of my filmmaking," he said, "to let places tell the story instead of impose a story on a place." Most of his movies start with a location; narrative, which he finds much harder, almost an obstacle, comes afterward. "Wings of Desire," a film about melancholy angels in Berlin who yearn to be human, grew out of an urge to portray that city. He said that if a film is inspired by a landscape or city, "the story and its characters then become what it's about."
Mr. Wenders toured the American West in the early 1970's, taking his first color pictures, because he wanted to make "Paris, Texas," a movie set in the Southwest, and he needed to "exorcise" American film images of the West from his mind. As a teenager, he mentally traveled to America each day through comics, music and movies that struck him as the only authentic expressions in the inauthentic culture of postwar Germany. His movies are strongly influenced by American filmmakers, especially John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller and Anthony Mann, a director he calls "one of the great painters of the American West." Mr. Wenders's films combine an American film language with a European approach, pace and style. A tall, soft-spoken man with a gentle air and a penchant for thinking before he speaks, he lived in America for seven years and now lives in both Berlin and Los Angeles. His manner combines a certain European reserve, almost a diffidence, with a more American warmth and openness of gesture. Much acclaimed and laden with prizes, he traveled to Hollywood and moved to America in the 1970's to fulfill his dream of becoming an American director. It turned into a nightmare. He made a film about Dashiell Hammett, whom he considers one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century and an influence on Faulkner and Hemingway. The studio junked the film; he said it wanted an action-crime film and insisted he start over from scratch. Mr. Wenders went off to make "The State of Things," a bleak, exquisitely filmed indictment of the studio system. (He does all his framing himself, leaving the lighting to the director of photography.) He considers "The State of Things" much more cerebral than his other work, "as it came out of a sort of depression." "It is important for somebody who is depressed that at least some formal things are right," he said. "Sometimes you can heal yourself by sticking to form." And "this flimsy little story" did renew his faith in the storytelling power of movies and enabled him to finish "Hammett" (1982) as the prescribed action-crime film. Still, it flopped critically and financially and ended his career as an American filmmaker. Mr. Wenders had his own production companies before that experience, and he has had them ever since; he has made movies the way he wanted to and in effect reinvented himself several times. Though he does not consider himself a postmodernist, for some years he has been on a quest to find a viable path through a corrupt and overbearing imperium of images. In his book he writes that he "returned home" from "Disneyland," an inner journey as well as an exterior one, partly because "I no longer felt the breath of `true images,' only the bad breath of mendacious images." Fascinated by the word, he holds out hope for its redemptive power. His photographs are full of words: "Western World Development" (a worn sign on a field of scrub), "Flammable," "Safeway." He said: "The appearance of graphics and writing and hieroglyphs and type-face, both in the city and the desert landscape, is an enormous part of the American culture, and extraordinarily unique. Americans seem to look down on that. For me it's on a level with Rembrandt." In the film "Until the End of the World" (1991), a kind of road trip from France to Germany to Portugal, Japan and Australia, a woman becomes totally, hopelessly addicted to images and is healed by a story. "It still seems to me," Mr. Wenders said, "that the word, as much as it shifted from the center of our culture to sort of a side issue, I still think it will have an important function in the future to keep us sane in this ever-growing, image-driven culture. In this at least I am an eternal optimist." Still he travels in search of the stories that places have to tell
and the dwindling evidence of reality in the face of the image onslaught.
At the end of his film "Reverse Angle" is a prescient
quote from Cézanne: "Everything is about to disappear.
You've got to hurry up, if you still want to see things." Mr.
Wenders added a line to Cézanne: "I hope it's not too
late."
|
