| |
view contents
chapter sample
Introduction
reviews
'In his perceptive examination of Wim Wenders' development as a
filmmaker, Alexander Graf presents a solid analysis of the director's
philosophy regarding the moral function of films, his belief in
preserving reality on celluloid, and the tension between image and
narrative in his films. The more theoretical first two parts of
the book are supported by appropriate examples from Wenders' films
and essays, while the third part presents insightful readings of
six films that constitute markers in Wenders' career. It is a sheer
joy to follow the logical flow of Graf's arguments. For students
of cinema, the volume offers a coherent introduction to the work
of Wim Wenders, and readers already familiar with the filmmaker's
earlier works will want to read Graf's deft analyses of the more
recent Lisbon Story and The Million Dollar Hotel
to discover where they are situated in the director's ouvre and
development.'
Franz Birgel, Muhlenberg College
'Graf has done an excellent job of contextualising and explaining
Wender's views on filmmaking in a way that leads to productive textual
analysis of his films. This book is a must for Wenders fans.'
Julia Knight, University of Luton
‘Graf’s book conveniently divides into two sections,
the first part examining some elementary theoretical positions that
inform and are of primary relevance to Wenders’ film aesthetic.
Chapter one focuses on the particularly intimate relationship the
filmic image has with reality, by virtue of its photographic nature,
but also on the conflicts that emerge from the assertion that reality
is in fact illusory, existing as it does only in the films’
images. Chapter two addresses the filmic narrative, first in the
context of Wenders’ belief in the incompatibility of images
and stories, and then moving on to the analysis of the narrative
structure of the stories that Wenders does, despite his mistrust,
tell in his films. As both of these two chapters, compromising the
first section, are heavily theoretically orientated, chapter three,
the second half of the book, closely analyses a representative section
of six of Wenders' films – Alice in the Cities (1974),
Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, The Million
Dollar Hotel (1999), Lisbon Story (1994) – with
the aim of animating the problematic exhaustively detailed from
the outset, and covering in-depth Wenders’ career from the
first to the latest independent features, and including one of the
meditative documentary films Tokyo Ga (1985) for which
Wenders is well-known ... Cogently argued and well-balanced this
is an innovative and significant contribution to the appraisal of
Wenders’ imaginative celluloid odyssey.’
www.kamera.co.uk
‘Alexander Graf's perceptive and intelligent introduction
to the cinema of Wim Wenders recalls Godard's astute observation
that the French don't tell stories; they do something else. According
to Graf, Wenders has been trying to do 'something else' throughout
his long career as a filmmaker. Convinced that the film image and
the filmic story are incompatible, Wenders has explored the possibilities
of a cinema without the need for stories, or, more accurately,
a cinema in which stories provide the minimal framework for the
presentation of images. Graf's book examines the elementary theoretical
positions that motivate Wenders' rejection of traditional movie
narratives and his passionate commitment to a cinema of unmediated
visual perception based on the affective richness of the moving
sound image. Graf's thesis is that this fundamental conflict between
image and story informs Wenders' themes, production methods, and
critical writings, and constitutes the unifying factor in his diverse
work in film and other media. This conflict, I would add, and Wenders'
uneven success in resolving it, also accounts for the recurring
criticism that his films are narratively weak, and for his reputation
as a failed storyteller.
Citing theorists like Bela Balazs, Andre Bazin, and Siegfried Kracauer,
Wenders has made the film image the technical and aesthetic basis
of his cinema. Graf shows how, like his mentors, Wenders is impressed
by the idea that photography is a mechanical process for recording
the physical world. It is this capacity of photography to objectively
record reality, Wenders believes, that promotes our awareness of
physical existence, making it transparent and bringing us to a
closer connection with the real world. The accurate pictorial reproduction
of physical reality – highlighting its fleeting nature and
rescuing it from the transience of time – is, for Wenders,
not only an aesthetic goal, but also a profoundly ethical one.
The mission of the cinema, as Wenders' sees it, is to preserve
and protect the integrity of the image from anything that threatens
the freedom of vision that it can provide.
Foremost among these threats, in Wenders' view, is our pernicious
need for stories. Although Wenders recognizes the therapeutic importance
of stories, he deeply distrusts them: 'In the relationship between
story and image', he writes, 'I see story as a kind of vampire,
trying to suck the blood from an image'. His conviction, as Graf
demonstrates, is that stories falsify and pervert the truth latent
within the filmic image; they manipulate the free flow of images,
destroy their temporal relationships to reality, build illusory
connections between phenomena, and bring about 'lies, nothing but
lies, and the biggest lie is that they show coherence where there
is none'. Graf's book focuses on theoretical issues underpinning
Wenders' preoccupation with this story/image conflict, analyzes
how these two elements interact in the films, and investigates
the various strategies that Wenders has employed to circumvent
this conflict.
Divided into three long chapters, plus a brief Introduction and
a Conclusion, Graf's book pursues the contradiction between Wenders'
claim that he rejects stories, and the obvious fact that his films
do tell stories. Chapter One focuses on Wenders' views on the filmic
image and its intimate relationship to reality. Chapter Two analyzes
the narrative structures of the kinds of stories that Wenders does
manage to tell. And Chapter Three provides close readings of six
of Wenders' films, including the kind of meditative documentary
for which Wenders is well known.
In the Introduction Graf notes the great diversity of theme, form,
and genre of Wenders' prolific output – 17 feature films,
11 short films, 7 documentaries, 2 television films, music videos,
and numerous advertising films, along with his work as a photographer.
He sketches Wenders' relationship with directors of the New German
Cinema, and documents the sources of inspiration and influence – Nicholas
Ray, John Ford, the road film, film noir, the Western, American
music. Often seen as one of the key figures of the New German Cinema,
Graf argues that Wenders was actually 'more an outsider … than
and insider', and that American culture and Hollywood are the strongest
influences on his work. (In Kings of the Road, for example,
one of the characters utters the famous line 'the Yanks had colonized
our subconscious'. Critics generally agree that they have certainly
colonized Wenders' films. Probably no other filmmaker has dealt
with the American presence in the European subconscious as directly
and as often as Wenders has.) Given the wide variety of genre and
media that Wenders's work encompasses, Graf rejects an approach
to his work along the lines of a national cinema as too restrictive.
He finds the term 'European director' insufficient. What best summarizes
Wenders' diverse output and constitutes its unifying feature, Graf
maintains, is the image/story problematic.
Graf's detailed analyses of the six films, then, are performed
within the context of Wenders' preoccupation with the conflict
between image and story. For Graf, all of Wenders' films are motivated
by the search for a narrative structure that allows the images
to retain their affective richness and integrity. Avoiding conventional
patterns of plot, Wenders' understated and diffuse narratives provide
little more than a coherent context for the presentation of images.
Graf notes that Wenders avoids conventional plot constructions,
opting instead for episodic, fragmented, open-ended structures
in which each sequence remains autonomous and yet relates to others
'like beads on a necklace'. From the perspective of the image/story
dialectic, Wenders' entire oeuvre is 'an ongoing exploration, an
experiment in progress'.
It is not surprising that Graf finds in each film a variation on
Wenders' central dilemma. Alice in the Cities (1974),
Wenders' first independent production, is a road movie with a linear,
open,
episodic narrative. Graf cites scenes and sequences that do not
build up meanings or further the narrative – they are just
there, sufficient unto themselves, documenting an event in space
and time. The film also foregrounds perception, the act of seeing
(children in Wenders' films seem to enjoy the purest perception,
a pure ontological gaze), and a favorite theme of Wenders': the
inflation and commodification of images on American television – 'an
optical toxin' – and how advertising has eroded and degraded
American cinematic traditions.
Paris, Texas (1984), another experiment in cinematic form,
exhibits one of the strongest narrative structures in Wenders'
work, recalling for Graf the narratives of the earlier The
American Friend (1977) and Hammett (1982). This time
Wenders worked from a script by Sam Shepard, allowed the narrative
to develop
within a closed space, and relied more on dramatic tension. The
film even culminates in a dramatic peak and a sense of closure.
Graf finds again that 'the film is about images, about degraded
images, and about the degraded images men can have of women'.
More than Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire (1987)
is, in Graf's reading, 'a fragmentary collection of impressions,
without
ever
seeking to develop a story out of these'. Scripted by Peter Handke,
the film thematizes both the image and the search for a story,
and deals with the tensions between European and American cultural
identity. This remarkable film seems to blend Wenders' desire for
meaning-making hypnotic images with an episodic structure and a
diffuse, unassertive story. Unlike many critics who see the story
in this film as a more positive force in Wenders' work, Graf insists
that the film reiterates Wenders' position regarding the role of
stories, as expressed in The State of Things (1982): 'Stories
only exist in stories (whereas life goes by without the need to
turn it into stories)'.
Wenders' goal, according to Graf, is to accommodate the demands
of spectators for story, without compromising his passionate position
on the film's image. The result, as Graf demonstrates again and
again, is that Wenders uses story only as a frame to structure
his films: the films are episodic, with minimal editing, and avoid
as much as possible unrelated time sequences and changes in location.
The moving sound image transmits most of the information in these
films, and none of Wenders' films tell stories so assertive that
the images are subordinate to the story.
Graf's primary interest is to describe and elaborate the basic
premises of Wenders' film aesthetic. Although he admits that Wenders'
meditations on the cinema 'can sometimes leave an impression of
puerile idealism', Graf generally refrains from staging a full-scale
critical interrogation and refutation of Wenders' premises. No
doubt Wenders' film aesthetic is more of personal moral stance
than a substantial theoretical position on the nature of cinema.
Wenders' weighty statements about unmediated visual perception
and the redemption of the real can strike the reader as naive,
essentialist, and ahistorical, especially at a time when current
theory emphasizes the inaccessibility of the real, and the constitutive
process and mediating structures of representation. Wenders' belief
that cinematography bears an unimpeachable witness to 'things as
they are', and provides an ontological bond between representation
and what it represents, invokes a metaphysics of presence that
leads to the misrecognition that images can exist somehow in an
unmediated, nonmedialized, nonedited form. For Wenders, only film
can redeem the real. The temporal and spatial separation of images
from the realities they depict – making them reproductions,
mere illusions of reality, and spectacle – seems to have
little bearing on Wenders' desire for an unmediated representation
of reality. Unlike Farber's special high tech camera in Until
the End of the World (which records not optical images, but
the neurological event of seeing), moving film images (even 'true
ones')
do not automatically imprint on our brains – they are negotiated,
mediated by our point of view, our experiences, our memories. Even
if we grant that film images have a latent truth-telling potential
and can preserve the real world, they are also, as Graf points
out, highly fragile and open to abuse. Just like stories, they
can be used to manipulate, distort, and tell lies.
But there is also much that is attractive and appealing about Wenders'
film aesthetic. His ideal, after all, is to restore an existential
openness and visual richness to the film experience and to safeguard
the viewer's freedom. Cinema, for Wenders, is not just as sensuous
object, but a sensual, sensing, sense-making process – a
performative act that implicates the viewer in a kind of double
seeing: the film sees the world as visible images and the viewer
sees the images both as world and the seeing of the world. Wenders'
respect for the appearance of physical reality, his desire to waken
the spirit in things, to narrate the flow of time in images, suggests
that he remains committed to the high modernist aesthetic and ethical
project to redeem everyday life in and through film. Graf observes
that Wenders' approach to filmmaking is 'purely phenomenological',
an approach that promotes creative perception of images, remains
open to the visible world, and allows things to present and represent
themselves, in order to uncover their secret. Unlike Eisenstein's
montage, which represents an analytic and violent approach to life,
showing our maladjustment to the world we live in, Wenders' cinema
patiently probes, offering us a poetics of film which values contemplation,
harmony, accord. Wenders' desire is to show things 'as they are',
to avoid the consumption of images by story, a cinema that carries
on an incessant dialogue with reality. Like Balazs and Bazin, Wenders
sees a genetic link between the image and the physical world, a
link that allows for discourse with the real world, and opens the
possibility that we might see what we had previously ignored.
Overall, Graf provides a balanced, penetrating, and coherent introduction
to the work of Wim Wenders. The strength of Graf's book is in its
exposition of Wenders' film aesthetic, and the clarity of his explanations.
Unlike many introductory books of this kind, Graf manages to take
us to the core of Wenders' cinema.’
Peter Ruppert, www.film-philosophy.com
books of related interest
New German Cinema:
Images of a Generation
Contemporary
North American Film Directors
The Cinema of Emir Kusturica:
Notes from the Underground
The Cinema of Ken Loach: Art
in the Service of the People
The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood
Transgressor
The Cinema of Robert Lepage: The Poetics
of Memory
The Cinema of George
A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead
The Cinema of Terrence
Malick: Poetic Visions of America
The Cinema of Andrzej
Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance
The Cinema of David Lynch:
American Dreams, Nightmare Visions
The Cinema of Krzysztof
Kieslowski: Variations on Destiny and Chance
The Cinema of Nanni
Moretti: Dreams and Diaries
The Cinema of Mike Leigh:
A Sense of the Real
The Cinema of John
Carpenter: The Technique of Terror
The Cinema of Roman
Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World
The Cinema of Todd Haynes:
All That Heaven Allows
The Cinema of Steven
Spielberg: Empire of Light
|
