Wim Wender

In Wenders’ career a feature film often alternates with an essay film. The 1977 feature The American Friend was followed by the 1980 essay Lighting over the Water; the 1982 Hammett by the mixed-genre The State of Things and the essay Reverse Angle in the same year; the 1987 Wings of Desire by Notebooks on Cities and Clothes. Lis bon Story could be considered as a mixed genre, like The State of Things, following the feature films Until the end of the World in 1991 and in 1993 Faraway, so close.

But what is Wenders’ film theory? In the last few years his name has been mentioned in the discussion of postmodern cinema. How easy is it to apply the postmodern tag to such a director, who always seems in search of his own home and identity and “he is at home in no house and in no country”?

In post-World War II Germany, Wenders

Since it is a Wenders film children could not be out of it. In Wenders world child figures as a point of certainty, oblivioius, self-sufficient and innocent of history. It is open and responsive to the world and is able to filter out the despair of the adult characters. Children represent the richness and immediacy of being where connection prevails. Their intelligence and self-awareness are qualities they share with Truffault’s children. In The State of Things, only children emerged as figures of hope for the future. So, children welcome Winter at Friedrich’s house and later a child will lead him to Friedrich; children that Winter calls “vidiots” because they are obsessed with recording everything they see on video cameras.

Friedrich had planned to make a short length film about Lisbon and make it black and white. But pointing a camera-weapon – an old Wenders idea of “a weapon against the misery of things, namely against their disappearence” ( a phrase borrowed from left-wing manifestos of the 1920s) present also in the last sequence of The State of Things, when Friedrich shoots his own death- at the city he thought that the city was taking distance, trying to escape from him. Friedrich keeps on observing that only “an image that is unseeing can’t sell anything; it’s pure, innocent ”. To this end, he straps a video camera to his back and blindly tapes a vision of the city to be archived – “a library of unseeing images”- for future generations. This is also maybe an indirect reference to Pesoa’s famous chest. He kept all his manuscripts in a chest; he didn’t want to spend time publishing them. He preferred to write, file, correct and revise his writings instead of publishing them. Nonetheless he was aware that one day they are going to be appreciated by the future generations.

After Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, Wenders bemoans the end of those westerns that “spread out a surface that was nothing else but what you could see” and speaks of “a death of a genre and a dream, both of them American. Wenders’s faith in American cinema will erode slowly and finally come to an abrupt end when he goes to Hollywood to make Hammett (1978-1982).

Wenders in an “absence of tradition” of his own, belonged to a “generation without fathers”, felt a close tie to the filmic vision of the 1940s and 1950s Hollywood cinema that in his youth had instilled in him a positive image of America.

Some topics in this essay:
Lisbon Story, Dziga Vertov, Hollywood Hammett, Fellini Wenders, American LP’s, Germany Wenders, Story Pesoa, Reverse Angle, Paris Texas, Union Winter, lisbon story, wings desire, faraway close, wrong move, reverse angle, 3 american lp’s, film art, kings road, paris texas, american cinema, 3 american, vista social club, buena vista social, notebooks cities clothes, european film art,