Wenders,Wim b.August 14, 1945; Dusseldorf, North Rhine-Westfalia
German film director and producer who, fascinated by the American film noir tradition, has produced numerous “road movies,” among many other films depicting U.S. subjects and themes.
He was born Ernst Wilhelm Wenders. As of 2005, Wenders has made almost forty films; almost half of them deal in one way or another with the United States. Born in West Germany just after World War II, fascinated by U.S. culture, often questioning the German identity and challenging its society after the Third Reich (which he had not experienced), Wenders began his artistic career with a few short 16-mm film essays, such as Alabama: 2000 Light Years from Home (1968) and 3 Amerikanische LPs (1969), that already contained two of his main interests: Anglo-American music and America in general. As many German directors before him (Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Werner Herzog), Wenders has worked most of his life outside his native country, making movies in many mixed languages, often in English.A newcomer in the early 1970s, Wenders had the chance to release his first feature films at a moment when West German cinema received easy financing and television exposure. After spending a year in New York City in 1972, Wenders wrote (with the uncredited advice of American director Sam Fuller) his script for Alice in den Stadten (Alice in the Cities, 1973). It is the story of a German reporter who meets a friend at the New York airport and agrees to travel with the woman’s nine- year-old daughter, Alice, back to Europe. The three are supposed to reunite at the Amsterdam airport, but the mother never shows up. The man and the child travel together through West Germany, trying to find the child’s grandmother, without any address. This feature film initiated Wenders’s approach to the “road movie” genre and his errant, deconstructive, partly improvised style that often makes his films seem like works in progress with no clear endings.
Most Wenders movies are about traveling.After six feature films produced in West Germany in the 1970s, Wenders began a first “American cycle” by asking three of his American heroes, Dennis Hopper (from Easy Rider), Samuel Fuller (1911—1997), and Nicholas Ray (1911— 1979), to be part of his adaptation of a novel by Patricia Highsmith, Der amerikanische Freund (The American Friend, 1977). This is Wenders’s first real thriller: In Hamburg, an ill man who thinks he is condemned to die in just a few weeks is asked by a foreigner to murder two “Mafiosi” in Paris. He accepts and does the job, but he learns later that the medical reports were false: he is not sick anymore. Although the film is meant to be a tribute to the American film noir, it differs from the genre because it is almost impossible to follow or understand the second half of the story.
A few months later, Wenders teamed up again with Nicholas Ray to produce a sad tribute or testamentary documentary entitled Nick’s Movie: Lightning over the Water (1981) that retells the rise and fall of that great American director, who once created the James Dean classic Rebel without a Cause (1955). Incidentally, a very sick Ray played himself in the first half of Wenders’s film, but he died of cancer after a few weeks and the film was dedicated to his memory.
Fascinated by the American film noir tradition, Wenders imagined directing a tribute to American novelist Dashiell Hammett (the author of The Maltese Falcon). After four years of episodic shooting and forced pauses due to lack of financing and conflicts with coproducer Francis Ford Coppola, the film Hammett (1982) was finally released in the United States, adapted from a story by Joe Gores that had nothing
to do with Dashiell Hammett’s real life. Here, Hammett’s character is not a writer but a private detective living in 1928, who investigates the San Francisco underworld. In fact, the preparation of Hammett was so complicated and painful that Wenders released three other films meanwhile, including a short chronicle titled Reverse Angel.
New York City. March 1982 (1982), about his problems of inspiration, his doubts about Coppola, and some possible ideas about how to finish Hammett.The same year, 1982, Wenders invited a dozen directors from Germany (including Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog) and from elsewhere (Paul Morrissey, Steven Spielberg, and Jean-Luc Godard) each to do a monologue about their own conception of cinema in a documentary (made in two versions) titled Chambre 666 (1982). It was made from thirteen scenes shot in a hotel room at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.
Taken from a few short stories by American writer and actor Sam Shepard, Paris, Texas (1984) was Wenders’s biggest commercial success. After explaining that there are about twenty cities named Paris in North America, Wenders tells the story of a salesman separated from his beautiful wife, who tries to get her back. The role of the wife is played by German actress Nas- tassia Kinski, who incidentally made her film debut when she was only a child in a previous Wenders production, Falsche Be- wegung (Wrong Move, 1974). Here, in Paris, Texas, Wenders achieved the quintessence of his conception of the “road movie” by creating an atmosphere that evokes a mythic America at its purest. The slow rhythm and the wide images of the western desert are sometimes inspired by the universe of John Ford (The Searchers, 1956), but also by Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, Zabriskie Point (1970), produced as well in the United States. The famous Paris, Texas soundtrack music played on slide guitar by Ry Cooder is, in fact, copied from melodies of an African American musician, Blind Willie Johnson, who recorded his “Dark Was the Night” in 1929. Paris, Texas was Wenders’s most popular film and was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
After living for ten years in the United States (although traveling frequently worldwide), Wenders ended his American cycle after 1984 and returned to West Germany to shoot his most beautiful film, Der Himmel uber Berlin (The Wings of Desire, 1987).
Wenders worked again with his longtime friend, novelist and screenwriter Peter Handke, with whom he had teamed up in the early 1970s. Their script was published and translated into many languages. But the American spirit remained somehow in that film centered on the Berlin Wall with the presence of U.S. actor Peter Falk (famous for his Colombo character), who played himself. Wenders was awarded Best Director at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. By then, Wenders had come back to settle down in Europe.After ten years of international productions and recognition, Wim Wenders returned to his fascination for American culture, this time country music, with a one-hour documentary essay, Willie Nelson at the Teatro (1998), which contains ten vignettes centered around country songs interpreted by U.S. artist Willie Nelson. Fifteen years after Paris Texas, Wenders worked again with musician Ry Cooder. A tribute to African Cuban music, Buena Vista Social Club (1999) is a nostalgic documentary shot in Cuba that revives the
rhythms of the 1940s with some exceptional African Cuban musicians that were long forgotten. The film was a huge success, especially on video and DVD. It gained six prizes, including the Best Documentary Award given by the New York Film Critics Association, in 1999.
Back in Los Angeles in 2000, Wenders released The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), from a script cowritten with rock star Bono (the singer from the Irish pop group U2). Although it gained the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, this thriller did not attract much audience. Because he often mixes isolated elements, some film theoreticians now consider Wenders a “postmodern artist.”
In 2003 Wenders directed another documentary on African American music produced for PBS, titled Soul of a Man (2003), that concentrates on blues artists, mixing archives, interviews, and fiction (in order to revive pre-World War II blues artists). Similarly, allusions to American popular culture and its dominant position can also be seen in other Wenders movies, such as The State of Things (1982), Faraway, So Close! (1993), and The End of Violence (1997).
Wenders’s film Land of Plenty (2004) was cowritten with young American screenwriter Michael Meredith. It is the story of a Vietnam veteran who experiences a paranoia crisis after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. Descended into a patriotic madness, he films every person on the street who seems suspect. The inspiration from deep America seems always fertile in Wim Wenders’s mind. Two decades after the success of Paris, Texas, Wenders coteamed again with Sam Shepard, who cowrote and starred in their recent “road movie” titled Don’t Come Knocking (2005), about an aging cowboy actor (Shepard) who quits his acting job for the quest of himself. After three decades of presence in countless film festivals, Wim Wenders’s influence is acknowledged by a whole new generation of directors in Canada (Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg) and in the United States (Jim Jarmusch). Wenders even obtained an “Honoris Causa” doctorate from La Sorbonne University and many international prizes. Retrospectively, Wenders’s movies appear like a never-ending quest.Yves Laberge
See also Film (German), The Image of the United States in; Herzog, Werner; Lang, Fritz; Lubitsch, Ernst
References and Further Reading
Handke, Peter, and Wim Wenders. Les Ailes du desir. Le-Chesnay and Paris: Jade and Flammarion, 1987.
Land of Plenty (Film). Official Site http://www.ocean-films.com/landofplenty/ (accessed May 11, 2005).
Wim Wenders Official Site http://www.wim- wenders.com/ (accessed May 11, 2005).