Wim Wenders Films | Wim Wenders Filmography | Wim Wenders Biography | Wim Wenders Career | Wim Wenders Awards

Of the three young German filmmakers who achieved the greatest international fame in the 1970s as the vanguard of a German New Wave, Wim Wenders had perhaps a less radical though no less distinctive film style than his compatriots R. W. Fassbinder and Werner Herzog. Though critics typically cite American influences upon Wenders's ?road trilogy? of the mid-1970s, there is a greater affinity with the modernist tradition of the European ?art film? exemplified by the Antonioni of L'avventura and Red Desert?dramas of alienation in which restless, unrooted individuals wander through haunted, sterile, but bleakly beautiful landscapes within a free-floating narrative structure. (It is most appropriate that Wenders has directed the ?frame? sections for some short pieces by the aged Italian master.) True, the ennui in these films shades into angst and American Beat gestures, and the alienation has strong roots in the spiritual yearning, the love of loneliness and wandering, of German Romanticism. Romanticism seems too to be at the root of Wenders's conception of himself (well articulated in numerous interviews) as an artist: one who evolves spiritually with each work, or reaches dead ends (as he has called The State of Things) from which he must break out; and who sees each new work as an adventure, not to be mapped out too much in advance.

A crucial observation about Wenders's art is found in cinematographer Ed Lachman's remark that ?light and landscape are actors? in his films. Wenders's characters are typically revealed against urban or rural landscapes, upon which the camera frequently lingers as the actors pass from the frame. Most of the films take place predominantly out-of-doors (the studio sets of Hammett making that film all the more of an anomaly), or offer striking views from high-rise windows and moving vehicles. The urban views most often suggest sterility but have a certain grandeur, sharing with his views of desert (Paris, Texas) or sea (The State of Things) that vastness the Romantics called ?sublime.? The climactic scene in the peep-show booth in Paris, Texas is all the more powerful and inventive in the context of the epic vistas of the rest of the film. And the urban scene finally becomes the central ?actor? in Wings of Desire/Himmel ?ber Berlin, indeed a ?Symphony of a Great City,? in which the Wall is no barrier to the gliding camera or the angelic inhabitants.

Wenders's films are dialectical: they structure contrasts not as simple polarities but as rich ongoing dialogue, and the later films seem to be in dialogue with the earlier ones. Among the central concerns from film to film are American versus European culture, the creation of mood versus tight narrative, a sense of ?home? versus rootless ?freedom,? and even black-and-white versus color photography.

Wenders's ambivalent fascination with America has been a favorite topic for critics. None of his films is without interest in this regard, but Alice in the Cities is the first to be shot partially in America?a world of boardwalks, motels, neon, and skyscrapers, though still not so different from the urban, industrial Europe of the second half; it is also his first feature to make extensive use of American music, including the Chuck Berry concert in Wuppertal. The American Friend is a dizzying vortex of allusiveness, with its gangsters and cowboys, iconographic presences of Nicholas Ray and Dennis Hopper, miniature Statue of Liberty in Paris, Ripley's digs in Hamburg, hints of an allegory of the American film industry in Germany (the pornographers seducing the hapless framemaker), and a narrative derived from a novel by an expatriate American and strongly echoing Strangers on a Train. Wenders's ?American period? from Hammett through Paris, Texas is of course of central interest here, with a whimsically mystical and lyrical embracing of humanity and the particulars of physical life that recalls Walt Whitman. Wenders still calls his production company ?Road Movies? (in English).

The mid-1970s films may owe much to the American ?road movie? of a few years earlier (themselves echoing Kerouac's On the Road), but the classical Hollywood cinema is defined by its tight narrative structures, and Wenders can be felt to be wrestling with such a structure in The American Friend. He has said of Paris, Texas, in a Film Quarterly interview, ?For once I was making a movie that wasn't meandering all over the place. That's what Sam [Shepard] brought to this movie of mine as an American writer: forward movement, which is very American in a way.? Still, Paris, Texas is very unlike a classical Hollywood film, though the problematic Hammett, ironically enough, is like one; and the later Wings of Desire is much more a fantasia upon a great city than a classical symphony. (Tokyo-Ga too meanders through a great city rather than being a tight documentary on Yasujiro Ozu.)

Also explored dialectically are the concepts of home and homelessness, omnipresent concerns in Wenders's films. Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road, and Until the End of the World could all have as epigraph a Barbara Stanwyck line from Clash by Night quoted by Wenders in a piece on Fritz Lang: ?Home is where you get when you run out of places.? The State of Things is perhaps Wenders's most bleak portrayal of homelessness, while Paris, Texas expresses the greatest yearning for home, and Until the End of the World portrays home as a trap (both womblike and filled with scientific gadgetry) of obligations to parents?a place the viewers too are trapped for the second half of a long film. Wings of Desire features an angel wishing he could ?come home like Philip Marlowe and feed the cat;? an acrobat who has always felt ?alone? and unattached, but now, in love, can feel ?loneliness,? which means ?I am finally whole;? and a conclusion in which the former angel muses, "I found Home ... instead of forever hovering above"?like Wenders's camera in this film. Obviously the issues of home/homelessness shade into the other prominent Wenders theme of aloneness versus tentative human bonds, explored especially in terms of adult-child friendships, unstable male bondings (see Faraway, So Close for its treatments of both of these), and in Wings, the angelic/mortal possibilities of adult heterosexual love.

Until the End of the World, Wenders's most ambitious project to date, indeed a would-be magnum opus, is quintessential Wenders in its fascination with home and the road, memory and dream, the mundane and the sublime; yet it disappoints, despite its fine moments. Its early scenes splendidly evoke a future world through decor, a few striking process shots, and multiple uses of video and computer screens; yet the film is flawed in its vague and inconsistent notions of science in the second half, the amateurish handling of the few action scenes, the implausibility of some of the heroine's motives, and above all in the lack of enough meaningful connections between the ?dance around the world? of the first half and the Australian home-as-science-lab second half. The Australian landscapes, and the European ones of the very beginning, are hauntingly resonant, like so many in other Wenders films, though the hopscotch around the continents in the first half seems to turn the beauties of Lisbon and rural Japan into mere postcards, an effect seemingly unintended. Perhaps the film succeeds best in its use of various video or computer-generated images to suggest the working?and inseparability?of dreams, memories, and desires. Faraway, So Close, the sequel to Wings of Desire in which Damiel's angel partner Cassiel too becomes a mortal but finds it much harder to adjust to a world of time, suffers artistically from an attempt to include too many plot strands, to work farcical gangsters and daring rescue attempts into an otherwise private, meditative film. Wenders seems at his best when his stories are starkly simple, with complexity coming from the textures of the films' environments.

Wenders once claimed, with some relish of paradox, or perhaps recollection of The Wizard of Oz, that black-and-white was suited to realism, color to fantasy. Hence those stylized tales of murder The Goalie's Anxiety and The American Friend, as well as the science-fiction Until the End of the World, were in color, and the ?road trilogy? not, with Kings of the Road immediately declaring itself ?a Wim Wenders film in black/white.? He further claimed himself to be incapable of making a documentary in color?though he was soon to make more than one. Once again Wings of Desire seems a synthesis of previous concerns, if not a downright reversal, with the angels seeing the spiritual essence of things in black-and-white but humans perceiving the particularities of mortal life in color. Such inconsistency?or rather, willingness to change perspective?may be taken as representative of the exploratory nature of Wenders's film work as a whole.?JOSEPH MILICIA