A Sense of Place

Talk at Princeton University

I was trying to think of something
I could talk to you about.
Something I could share not just with "film buffs"
or future filmmakers,
but with people interested in other fields of human expression,
or "the human experience".
After all, I very much believe
that movies can be in touch with life and the experience of it, …
realizing that in this day and age
this turns me into some sort of dinosaur filmmaker,
or at least a hopeless romantic.

I will get to my subject not in a straight line,
but via some detours.
(Just like in his movies, some will now say...)
So bear with me.

What do you think is driving a movie?
I mean not the money and the investment,
or a desire for profit,
which rules out a certain number o films from our consideration here.
I mean: What is the driving force inside the film,
its engine, its soul.
What keeps it going?
What gives it the strength
to convince a producer to invest funds in it
and the director and the actors to invest their time?

In contemporary cinema,
you will quickly find that this power comes from THE STORY.
A lot of energy gets invested into it.
Directors, Writers, Producers work for years sometimes
to develop the story.
Actors attach their names to a project,
because they believe in the story,
more than in the director, or in the budget or in anything else.
In fact, most films today get made because of their story.
Their commercial potential is based on "the good story".

"The Story" is the biggest hero of most contemporary movies,
overruling most other interests,
even that of casting.
The human heroes play second fiddle to the "hero plot".
To get the story right is the paramount objective,
more so than ever.
The actors are exchangeable, if push comes to shove,
the director, too, of course,
and so is everybody else, except for THE STORY.

I love stories.
It is my profession to tell stories,
so, don't get me wrong, I don't want to put them down.
I'm just questioning their primacy
and their tendency to make themselves the absolute centre of attention.
Stories, too, can be in the service of another force that can govern a film,
or the desire to make it in the first place.
I want to introduce you to this "force".
It's clearly a lesser known option today,
by no means an unknown factor to American films,
but definitively more of a European approach.

But even that might just be a commonplace
and not necessarily true any more.
In order to avoid generalization,
I will call this approach "My Way",
to quote Frank Sinatra.
So I will rather speak for myself and for a personal preference.
I don't want to recommend my "movie centrepiece",
or even compare it to others,
I will rather talk strictly in a phenomenological way about it,
hoping that it will raise your interest.

As I said; I assume not all of you are future filmmakers
(at least I very much hope so)
and I have the impression
that what I will talk about
might find applications in other fields,
or at least allow you to compare its consequences
and its spirits to your own work.

I want to talk about
A SENSE OF PLACE.

Let me explain a little bit what I mean by that.
I am sure some of you will recognize similar feelings or impulses.

I travel a lot.
I often come to places I have never been before.
Or to places I haven't seen in a long time.
I walk around.
I see cities, streets, houses.
I see people go to work.
I see kids play.
I look at an apartment building,
I see the lit windows,
shadows moving behind it,
maybe a woman leaning out and calling a kid's name.
Maybe there'll even be an answer from somewhere.
"I'm coming…"
Whatever.

I can't help this feeling, immediately,
that I want to know everything about this place.
How it is there… How these people live.
How they have fun. What they worry about.
How they eat, drink, sleep, work…

Or I come to a place where nobody lives.
Let's say a desert.
I imagine the nomads roaming around there.
Or the hunters who come by occasionally.
Or the first human being who ever passed and laid eyes on these mountains,
this lake, this high plateau… whatever.
Who made the first map…
You see, places have this irresistible attraction for me.
They're a never ending source of inspiration, of stories…

I lived for 8 years in America, from the late Seventies to the mid-Eighties,
in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.
Then I moved back to Germany
and settled for the first time in the city of Berlin.

I walked around for weeks, for months,
staring at buildings and places,
listening to my mother tongue, German,
as if I never really heard it before.
I totally rediscovered my own country.
I totally rediscovered my own country.
I wanted to know all about these people,
their past, their history, their secret thoughts…
It was the city that induced this desire.
I wanted to tell THIS CITY'S STORY.
It was a divided city still.
2 different people lived here,
although they spoke the same language.
It was a city with a divided sky, so to speak.
I called my project THE SKY ABOVE BERLIN,
or THE HEAVENS ABOVE BERLIN,
but I had no story for it whatsoever.
Not a clue.
I didn't even have characters.
I had nothing but the desire to dig deep into this place.

Of course, I looked for characters.
I tried to find some that would get around a lot,
so they would meet a lot of people,
in order for me to be able to look into a lot of apartments,
and really see into all these lives.
I thought of making a postman my hero,
or a taxi driver,
or a fire fighter.
I thought of doctors or travelling salesmen.
I thought of strangers who'd arrive and get lost, like me.

But none of my possible leading characters
only remotely fulfilled my desire to dis-cover,
to un-cover this city.
I was really obsessed with this place.
I felt very clearly that the city wanted to be turned into a movie,
and wanted to use me as its instrument.
And, hey, I was willing.

Walking around and staring at houses
I saw a huge amount of decoration, pillars, arches,
and stuff I had not noticed before.
A lot of them were incorporating angel figures, to my amazement.
Every second statue, and there were lots of them,
depicted angels.
A lot of names evoked them.
Cemeteries, finally, were crowded with them.
So the city slowly imposed these figures on me: Angels.

I didn't want to believe it at first.
It didn't really sound like me.
My interest in angels was limited.
They had inhabited my childhood fantasies, maybe,
as I was raised as a catholic boy,
but that was long ago.

Anyway: That obsure, scribbled line
"Tell the city through the point of view of guardian angels"…
it was in my notebook
and seemed to want to be there for good.
Other notes got erased.
This one stuck,
until I finally accepted my fate.
The city had imposed the leading characters,
I was sure it was also going to take care of their story.

I started this movie
(which was eventually going to be called WINGS OF DESIRE in English)
without a script or a story.
On my wall in my office
I had lots of pictures
of all the places that had to appear in the film
and of all sorts of people
that I wanted to discover via these angels.
And lots of ideas for scenes.
Possibilities were endless.
These angels could appear anywhere,
and through their perception anything could be revealed.
Not only were they invisible,
They could also hear people's most secret thoughts.
They were my ideal secret agents to invade the city of Berlin.

(Story of East German film ministry…)

The city remained the principle character all through the shoot.
You really have to imagine this process of making a movie without a script
like very similar to a writer writing a poem.
He wouldn't know what the next line would be, either.
I never knew what I would shoot the next day.
Anything was possible with these angel fellows.

They were the absolutely perfect medium or intermediaries
for this journey of discovery into the soul of the city of Berlin.
Today, the film is a historic document of a place that has vanished.
This city does not exist anymore.
A new city has taken its place.
I don't think any documentary could do the Berlin of the Eighties
more justice than this "story-less fiction film".

As you know,
there was a remake made of this film,
ten years later,
in the proverbial city of angels, which is Los Angeles.
Some of you will have seen it.
Actually, 10 times more people saw the remake than the original.

I had sold the remake rights thinking:
"How strange they want to acquire the story rights to a film
that was made without a story…
I better take the money.
Nobody can ever find the recipe for this one again, anyway."

Well, they made the film.
A fine film, don't get me wrong.
I do not want to discredit it at all.
But if you think you know anything about the city of Los Angeles
from seeing "City of Angels" … you're mistaken.

Why?
Because the driving engine behind this American film was
ITS STORY.
It was incredibly story-driven.
Powerful story. Good actors.
But it had no sense of place whatsoever.
"Sense of place" also needs place
to expand, to give space to, to breathe.
"Story" doesn't like competition for the room
that it wants to occupy with itself.

I'm telling you all this not to put down "CITY OF ANGELS".
I'm quite proud to be the grandfather of this baby.
But you see 2 very different approaches at work.
TELLING A PLACE
or TELLING A STORY.
While American novels still very often
display a very intense sense of place,
American movies don't

Think of novels like Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy"
or Cormack McCarthy's "Border Trilogy
and you see what I mean.
One gives a perfect picture of New York,
the other one of the American West.
I just discovered, for myself, Joan Didion,
and I finished reading "Play it as it Lays"
which takes place in Los Angeles,
and I tell you: That small novel
has infinitely more sense of place
and describes the "City of Angels" more accurately
than the movie of that title or any other American movie.

Places in American movies are mostly exchangeable.
There is very little local colour in them, so to speak.
Most stories could take place somewhere else just as well.
Cities and landscapes are "background",
"locations", that are found by the "location manager".
They are no longer heroes,
like Monument Valley was in John Ford's westerns.
Of course, there are a few glorious examples that prove the opposite,
but there are no rules without their exceptions.
The exception only confirms the rule.
FARGO for instance, doesn't carry the name of a place
by coincidence.
Its story is deeply entrenched in local colour.
But let's not examine the exceptions,
lets look at the rule.

In my book,
The loss of place is a lost quality in movies.
It comes with a loss of reality,
a loss of identity.
Maybe it is a European distinction
to have more of a sense of place.
Of course: There are more borders,
more languages, more national identities.

Films like "Billy Elliott" or "The Full Monty"
could not happen anywhere else than in depressed English mining towns.
You really feel the places play an important part in these movies.
They have a very strong local atmosphere,
local touch, local slang…
Short: They are very "specific"
by lack of a better word.
Very few American films are that specific,
or better: Have an interest in specifics.
They almost avoid it
as if they were afraid that it might turn people off.
As if too much "reality" and "local truth"
would interfere with "The Story".
Stories appear clearer, and dominate clearer,
if they are centre stage.
Stories want to have first billings.

Again, I'm not here to criticize,
I'm here to talk about a different approach.
And how to interpret it.

When Sam Shepard and myself sat together
to come up with a script,
back in 1982,
we told each other lots of stories, first,
to find out what our common ground was.
We realized, we would never find it "in a story".
There were too many of them,
they were endless,
we would still be talking to each other…

We discovered our common ground rather in a place:
The American West,
more specifically, its deserts.
The border to Mexico.
Those little lost places in the middle of nowhere.

We didn't have to convince each other
that it would be worth it
to start a movie there.
We knew. No question about it.
No second thoughts.

So when we had accepted that our film would start there,
without any discussion, almost like in a silent agreement,
the desert gave us our character,
and our story.
A man without memory,
trying to reconnect with his past,
trying to find his lost family.

I had travelled for months through Texas, Arizona and New Mexico,
until I knew every road out there,
Or at least it felt like it.
When Sam and I evoked a name of a place,
we could write the next scene.
Our itinerary became our storyline.
The film's title "Paris, Texas" was not so much the name of a city,
but became a metaphor for the torn biography of our hero.

Sam Shepard and I never wrote the entire script.
We wrote half of it,
and our intention was to shoot up to the middle,
get to know our characters,
learn everything about them
and then write an ending that would come out of these people,
organically, naturally,
not out of a story that we had invented
long before our characters had a chance to come to life.
Sam would be with me on the shoot,
travel with us, experience the place and the actors with me,
and then would write the thing as we went along.

It was a beautiful concept, but didn't work.
There is a beautiful nonsensical German saying to illustrate that,
but I found no equivalent in English,
so I have to translate from my mother tongue:
It goes: "First: Things will be different,
and Second: Than you think."

When we finally shot the film,
after postponing several times, mainly for funding,
Sam was under contract as an actor for another movie
That was shot way up north, "Country".
So I ended up shooting my film without the writer at my side.
Halfway into the shoot I ran out of script.
No more pages. We stopped shooting.
That was in the day before fax machines.
Is there anybody in the audience who remembers that time?
What did we do?
How did we manage?
There was a machine called "Telex".
It was an unspeakable thing.
I'm not even going to evoke the horror of it.

Anyway, in deep despair I thought about how to end the movie.
Somewhere in Texas, that's all I knew.
(I'm not testing here if anybody actually saw the film
or remembers it, so I will explain:
our man without memory eventually finds his son in LA
and then returns with the little boy to Texas to find his wife,
the boy's mother.)
So all we knew was that the movie was returning to Texas.

I couldn't think of any decent way to end our story,
until I gave up
and just thought of places I knew.
I thought about how much Huston had impressed me
as a "mushroom city" that had grown in no time out of nowhere.
I thought about the excitement
of my first "drive-in banking" experience.
I thought about the abundance of "space" in Texas.
The story fell in place.

I thought about the most desperate town I had ever seen.
Port Arthur.
It's only claim to fame being
that Janice Joplin went to high school there.
I remembered a picture I had taken
of a crummy bar/peep show called "The Keyhole Club".
The story fell into place.

I described these places to Sam over the phone.
He understood immediately.
He wrote what I considered the most amazing pages of screenplay
I had ever read
based on me describing places to him.
He wrote those dislocated characters
based on the knowledge of dislocated places.

He dictated the scenes over the phone to me.
(That's what we did before faxes,
if time was off the essence…)

I shot the second half of my film
based on an intense knowledge of places.
There was no time to do any more "location scouting".
And no need: Those locations had scouted their story,
Not vice versa.

Now, don't think that I picked these examples out of my head,
and that the rest of my films belonged to the rules
instead of the exceptions.
I assure you: they are even more obvious affirmations of my thesis.

(What thesis?
That places find stories
and make them happen.
Not that stories happen anyway,
and just need "locations" to "take place in".)

A most affirmative example would be LISBON STORY.
But the title already speaks for itself here.
The film is an exploration of a city via its sounds.
Very few cities have so much of a "soundscape" of their own as Lisbon.
The noises of the old rattling streetcars,
the sounds from the harbour,
the pigeons,
the strange texture of the Portuguese language itself,
that I have never mastered,
mainly because it sounds so different than what it looks like on paper.

And then, Lisbon has its own music.
Like the Son of Havana, or the Blues of the Mississippi Delta,
or the Tango of Buenos Aires,
Lisbon has the Fado,
a very longing, mostly sad, slow music
that is not played anywhere else than in this city.
It is a Portuguese interpretation of the Blues,
with a melancholic Latin touch.
"Madredeus", a band from the working class area of Lisbon
that gave them their name,
gave me the soundtrack of the film,
before I had started shooting.
And those 12 songs Madredeus had given me
were like a guided tour through the city,
those songs became my script.
Again, you see, the city had supplied me with all the elements
to turn it into a movie.
I just followed all of Lisbon's guidance.

UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD is a good example, too.
That whole film started, 10 years before it actually got made,
when I first stumbled onto that beautiful ancient continent
and met its Aboriginal culture.
These are extraordinary people,
in many ways, but especially as far as their sense of place goes.

Their whole existence is based upon it.
Their belief, their religion is "The Land",
and its storytelling capacities….
They are obliged, each one of them,
to keep a stretch of their land alive,
by keeping its story alive.
When they let that story die,
when they let that land die along with its story,
they themselves die with it.
They are "singing their country",
and remember:
Homer was singing the Odyssey, not reading it.

The encounter with the Aboriginal culture
of worshipping their places,
that started this film.
(You can check it out tomorrow night,
when I show it for the first time here on the East Coast
in my director's cut, at the DGA.
5 hours.
You have to have eaten, and you need a babysitter,
but: you'll travel through four continents,
and you will meet those people in the end…
I keep making my own subtle advertising, as you see.
But it's okay: I'm not really advertising myself here,
I'm advertising for a cause:
The respect for PLACES.)

END OF VIOLENCE, another example.
That movie did not have a story first,
but started as a desire to paint a portrait of a city.
Los Angeles.
The city of LA imposed the subject of violence.
It was its main export article,
and it was suffering heavily from its own inventions,
its own creations.
It might be my best example tonight
of a place designing and projecting not only its own imagery,
but its own catalogue of "content",
pitching its very own autobiography.

Take "Buena Vista Social Club".
(Finally a picture that some of you might have seen.)
I went to Havana to shoot it,
a place where I'd never been before.
All I knew was the music that these old men had produced,
electrifying, intoxicating, contagious music.

Once I saw and filmed Havana,
I realized what was so special about this music.
It came out of this city.
That music was the blood of this city.
The place had transcended into sound,
had found another form of existence in these songs.
And these old men were able to produce
that story of their own place,
because they had not abandoned it,
like so many other musicians before them
who had fled the country to go to Florida, to Mexico, to Spain.
(Which I am not saying to discredit those who left, believe me…)

All I'm saying is that the incredible love of their own place,
their sense of identity and belonging,
that had made these old men undergo a lot of pain
and a lot of suffering,
that this had also turned out to be their strength
and their saving grace.
Music, great and moving music,
does not happen without a sense of place.
It needs roots to draw from,
it needs "story" and "his-story" (basically the same word)
to nourish it.
Sometimes, the absence of a place,
the yearning for it, the exile from it,
can produce the same roots.

There would be no blues without the South,
without the Delta, without slavery,
and without the lost home continent of Africa
forever removed like a distant galaxy.

Last but not least:
"The Million Dollar Hotel".
A film that is like the topography of one street block,
at 5th and Main Street
in Downtown Los Angeles.

My friend Bono had first discovered the place
when his band, U2, were looking for a location
to shoot their video "Where the Streets Have No Name".
He stumbled upon the "Million Dollar Hotel"
and was so impressed,
that for once he didn't turn the experience into a song,
but into a story, which eventually became a script,
which I then eventually turned into a movie.
That movie could not have taken place anywhere else.
The story was conceived here, the film had to take place here.
It belonged to this street block,
where one of the city's prime hotels
had been built in 1914,
in the middle of what was then the centre of the entertainment industry,
all around Broadway.
From being a grand place where Presidents and film stars had stayed,
the "Million Dollar Hotel" had declined over the years
to a flop-house,
the last refuge of outcasts, drug addicts,
the old and forgotten, the lunatics.

Another story in the service of a place.
I could go on with the entire list of my films,
trying to prove to you
that they all start like this:
As a place wanting to be told,
as a place needing to be told.

That list wouldn't be complete
if I kept my biggest failures a secret.
Now luckily, these 2 films show where I got
when that sense of place was dislocated.

SCARLET LETTER,
a beautiful, very American novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
That was my second film,
originally intended to be done I New England,
where it belonged.
Salem, Massachusetts.

We lost some of our financing,
a long story, I won't bore you,
when I finally started the film,
I had to shoot it in Spain,
and all the Puritans were played by Spanish catholics.
My American Indian was an out of work bullfighter.
That could still have worked.
Actors can work with many handicaps.
What didn't work was
that we shot the film in a "Western village"….
near Madrid,
where they actually shot most of the so called "Spaghetti Westerns"
that most people believed took place in Italy.

Well, I tell you: Those took place mainly in Spain.
Shooting a story that belonged to the East Coast of the United States
in the middle of Spain,
that is what did us in.
The STORY did not survive to be transplanted to another PLACE.

Or my last and final example: HAMMET.
The great American writer
who influenced not only Chandler, Ross McDonald or Mickey Spillane,
but Hemnigway and Faulkner.
I made a movie about him, for an American Studio.
A fictional story when Hammett lived in San Francisco,
worked there as a detective himself,
and started to write those detective stories and novels
that changed the face of mystery writing…

We shot the film in San Francisco.
It was great.
Authentic. True. Sense of place was there.
The story was where it belonged,
the city of San Francisco carried it,
gave it its reason,
provoked it, to say it more clearly.

The studio didn't like it.
Not enough action, not enough phantasy.
Too much rooted in reality.
Whatever.
I ended up reshooting most of the film in Los Angeles,
both in the studio, and in the streets of downtown LA.
It was all fake, of course, all make-believe.
More story, that's for sure,
less soul.

A film dissociated from its place of origin,
that's what I learned in the two cases,
where story and place were not connected vitally,
but put together arbitrarily,
such a film is doomed.
At least in my book it looks like a solid rule.

Now, amazingly enough,
that rule doesn't apply in the case of most contemporary American films.
They don't even care much for that distinction
of doing justice to a place.
They first of all do justice to their stories.
And that works, most of the time.

What does that really mean?
Am I exaggerating with my theory of places inventing their stories?
Is it just a nice construction
made in the head of a European director
who cannot tell his stories without meandering,
who needs his "security blanket" of a place to root his stories?

Obviously, stories are better marketable
and easier to swallow,
if you detach them from their sources, their ground.
You can sell them to the four corners of the world
only if they can be applied and understood everywhere.
So by subtracting their specifics
you find the largest common denomination.
This is really why you see the same 10 American movies
in any Cineplex all over the world,
in Iceland just as well as in Korea,
in Patagonia like in Poland.

Mankind has an insatiable need and lust for stories.
Basically, these stories exist everywhere,
clad in local colour, populated by local characters
that embellish the ever-same myths
that are the same all over the world.

But it is only recently,
that this need is filled more and more
with surrogates,
with pre-fab "Ersatz" stories
that pretend to satisfy people's need all over the world
but deliver only make-believe:
Stories deprived of the places they were coming from
and which gave birth to them,
cannot really satisfy.

They tend to make up for their lack of place
with ever shinier surfaces,
with more spectacular special effects,
with greater, outrageous budgets, more luscious sets…
They fill the hole they have created
with glorious material.
But it remains "filler" for the real thing.

The tricky thing, though,
is that this filler can become addictive.
A good part of that filler is violence, let's face it.
Violence has become an integral part of entertainment,
a totally accepted "consumer good",
the addiction to which is apparent
if you sit in any blockbuster action film today.

I'm getting carried away a bit
and maybe lose my subject,
which is the context of places and stories.

I might have exaggerated, anyway,
overdoing the role of "place" in storytelling a bit.
The other source of stories, obviously,
and maybe just important,
are "characters".

Stories come out of amazing characters,
out of people.

But again, just like with the places,
who were turned from "instigators" to "background"
we come to accept and believe the wrong idea about people as well.
Instead of people/characters being in charge of their destiny,
creating story and his-story,
movies teach us the opposite, more and more,
which is the utterly erroneous concept
that STORIES FORM CHARACTERS,
that people are subject to stories, not vice versa.

People and places have become the scenery of stories,
they are no longer its origins.
In most American movies today,
the stories manipulate the characters.
People are the victims of the events.
And events, most of the time,
are nothing but a chain of spectacular action effects.

Do you understand why I come to believe
that movies more and more represent the world turned upside down.
Not people in control of their fates,
turning their lives into stories,
but stories turning people into their slaves,
into "assets".

Where is this big confusion coming from?
It is not storytelling as such,
as I said, most novels still keep the right balance,
books are not to blame.

That confusion rather arises out of the ever-growing dominance
of a visual culture
over a verbal culture,
and out of the massive commercialisation
of that visual culture.
Those words may somehow startle you
as coming from a filmmaker,
not a novelist.

But I am sticking to my theory here, to the bitter end.
Globalized cinema
has become a giant industry
(the audiovisual culture, as a whole,
might already be the biggest world industry)
and the commercialisation that comes with that
has deprived visuals and stories
of their anchors
into "place" and "character".

It has established "The Story"
as the paramount force
to move imagery and imagination,
at the expense of the story-building power
of people and landscapes.

That shift will drastically shape and form future generations.
Not only their imagination,
but ultimately their image of themselves,
their self-respect,
and their knowledge of our common place,
planet Earth.

I should end it here,
running the risk that you might think
I'm chickening out here,
I just don't feel like giving you "The answer",
or explaining something away
that should better remain a troubling mystery.

The "specifics" of place and local colour,
why do they happen in American literature,
but not in American imagery anymore?
Why is it that even most local news in this country
look like they were shot on a studio back lot?

Why is it that MOVIES have occupied the "space"
of specific and distinguished and unique "place"?

How do you explain the Great American Loss of …
the Unique,
the Unmistakable,
the Unusual,
the Deeply rooted…

How do you explain
that the so-called "Global Culture"
is nothing but the extension of that loss of identity
to the rest of the world?

How do you explain
that we will all suffer, finally,
in this 21st century,
from an insane amount of exchangeable images
and exchangeable stories,
and a total withdrawal from first-hand experience,
and a belief in the story-telling capacity of places
that, if the Aborigenes are right,
will die, if they were not kept alive,
and so will we, along with them,
or at least our imagination.

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