Survey of German Film

Minutes for October 31^st, 2001 – Lecture on director Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders is another major director of the New German Cinema movement.  (We have already talked about Fassbinder and Herzog at some length.)  Unlike Fassbinder and Herzog, Wenders has a more traditional background in film and is more “film literate.”  This allows and encourages him to use more conventional film techniques to direct his films, quite unlike Fassbinder, especially, with his very unconventional “anti-film” approach.  Wenders is also different from Fassbinder and Herzog (again, especially Fassbinder) in that he is more concerned with reaching his audience and making his films accessible to a relatively broad base of viewers.  Further, Wenders’ films are mostly in English, and often feature known actors as their stars.

Wenders is known for having an uncompromising attitude towards his film-making.  He wishes to maintain his control over the films, and does not allow them to be changed much from his original plan.  (Dr. Reimer underlines this point by saying that it is unlikely that one would find a “Director’s Cut” version of a Wenders film, because the version seen in the theaters is likely to have been the director’s cut.)

A weakness Wenders has in his film-making is that he is not always able to control his story and rein it in to his command.  As a result, many of his films are overly lengthy, having as much as 30-45 minutes of superfluous content that would have been better cut out.

In class, we looked at clips from two of Wenders’ major works.

Paris, Texas (1984)  A man (Travis) is found wandering in the desert and is retrieved by his brother, who takes him to the brother’s home in California.  There, Travis is reunited with his estranged son.  During the course of Travis’s sojourn at his brother’s house, Travis and his son gradually develop a father-son relationship and eventually develop a bond.  They set off to find Travis’s estranged wife and mother of his son in Texas.  They eventually find her working in a peep show house.  Travis reunites mother and son, and then goes off on his own again, thus ending the film.

We watched in class the scene wherein Travis has entered the peep show house and talks to his wife in a long, moving scene.  He tells her a story, that is the story of their love and how they came to be estranged.  This is the first understanding the audience is given about how this came to be.  She is moved to tears by his story, hearing her own story in his words, but is not definitely certain that it is he with whom she speaks until the end of the conversation, as there is a one-way mirror separating them.  Through this usage of the mirror, Wenders plays upon his preoccupation with recording and film – Travis is able to watch his wife, as in a film, but she is unable to watch him.

Wings of Desire (1987)  In this film, an angel who is relegated to observation on earth, and can only be seen by children and sensed by a few adults experiences an increased desire to become human and be able to live on earth in body, not merely in spirit.  He eventually falls in love with a woman on earth, and with the help of an angel who earlier has chosen to fall to earth himself (played by the glorious Peter Falk!), he falls to earth and becomes human, and he and the woman meet and fall in love.  (City of Angels was a remake of this film, though not an exact one.)  Through this film, Wenders addresses the Holocaust and the need to accept and come to terms with that horror of the past.  He also is discussing the division of Germany and, more specifically, the division of Berlin.  In a broader sense, Wenders is treating the theme of the past’s impact on the present.  He does all of this indirectly through the story.

We watched the first 15-20 minutes of the film, which establish the character of the angel, and the very limited interaction he has with earth and its inhabitants.  Through a conversation he has with another angel, we are quickly acquainted with the beginnings of his desire to live bodily on earth.  The actual plot of the story does not present itself in this first portion except through these introductions.  Despite this lack of action and real plot development, the poetic nature of the angel’s situation makes this portion flow easily (at least in the opinion of this viewer).