the american friend (w&d wim wenders)

Wenders’ films are indeed like old friends. They seem to fit the viewer’s hand like a glove. The enigmatic tone, the waspish humour, the flirtation with melodrama, the pseudo thriller tone. People will die, hearts will be broken, but life will go on. HIs choice of actors seems to reflect this: figures who seem almost too knowing for their roles: Harry Dean Stanton, Rüdiger Vogler, Kôji Yakusho. And here, again, Bruno Ganz, whose sympathetic features and tendency to smile wryly seem to speak to a world beyond the screen the film is set in, a life lived by his character with pleasures and sufferings we will never know. Wenders is neither slave to narrative nor afraid of it. His films contain stories that hold them together, but he seems more interested in the detail: the angle of the frame that Ganz’s character, a picture framer, is holding, or the tilt of Hopper’s hat, or the worry on the face of Lisa Kreuzer, rewarded by one of the film’s rare close-ups. Yet, this concern for the image is never permitted to become self-indulgent, and the pace is maintained by the zesty edit of Peter Przygodda.

It would be interesting to speculate on what inspired the director to tackle this story. If anything, the juxtaposition of the raddled cityscape of New York, contrasted with the high industrial orange hues of Hamburg and its port, might be the film’s most arresting element. That and the chance to juxtapose the broad tones of Hopper’s acting with understatement of Ganz. At the very end, Ganz appears to gain a kind of revenge via his melodramatic death, outdoing Hopper’s baroque beachside barbecue. These tonal contrasts fire the film, they give it an edge that transcends what might otherwise have been a generic mafia tale. 

perfect days (w&d wenders, w. takuma takasaki)

Daily life is a repetitive strain syndrome. Sometimes it feels ok, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, just maybe, it feels great. The beauty of Wenders’ film is the way, in telling the story of Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, he captures this so perfectly. Film is generally about dramatic action. Plot points. Development. Whenever these threaten to appear in Perfect Days, Wenders and co-writer Takaski rein them in. What matters about this film, what makes it special, isn’t what happens. It’s what doesn’t happen. Not many filmmakers get to the point where they’re permitted to explore this kind of vibe. I for one am thankful that in this instance, someone has given Wenders money to do just that. I could watch this film a hundred times and never get bored.

Ps I got a counterpoint to this on my first night back in the UK from Mr Curry, who said that the more he thought about the film the more it got on his nerves. In is view, a film about a toilet cleaner  who just happens to have a wealthy background and drives around playing their favourite songs was the kind of project overprivileged males dream up in fancy hotel rooms… and he might have a point…

wings of desire (w&d wenders, w peter handke, richard reitinger)

Various thoughts occur after watching Wenders’ film for the first time.

1. Berlin

Wings of Desire was released in 1987 - filmed in the closing era of the Berlin wall, which features prominently. There’s a remarkable sequence where an old man is accompanied by an angel as he stumbles through the wasteland which used to be Potsdamer Platz (and would soon become again). There’s also archive footage of Berlin destroyed during the war. (Which did indeed bring to my mind my grandmother and great-grandparents and what they lived through). I visited Berlin two or three times as a child. Hazy memories of deserted railway tracks, which lead nowhere and were a fine playground; crossing Checkpoint Charlie; the constant sense of a city which harboured a clear and present physical threat, articulated by the wall. All of which is incidental, but related to the fact that Berlin contained a peculiar energy. West Berlin was a bubble, a dreamspace, suspended in the aspic of communism. Wenders film represents that limbo with flair. The monuments which no longer carry their intended weight, and have become a resting place for angels. The wastelands, made for circuses and reflection. The faded glory of clubs which ooze post-punk decadence; punk being the noise that empires make when they are hollowed out, leaving an empty shell where people can scream with fury or delight. Wings of Desire is very much a companion piece to Żuławski’s Possession or Bowie’s Low. 

2 Nick Cave

Who should wander into this dreamscape but the youthful magi himself, Nick Cave. I played the song he and the Seeds sing in the film (From Her to Eternity) on the jukebox in Fenix the other day and my companions’ attitude was that this might be a great song but I really didn’t need to inflict it on them. Cave’s stringent rock adds the perfect touch to cut against the way Wenders’ allows his film to drift towards sentimentalism. The subsequent sequence where Ganz and Solveig Dommartin meet is perhaps the weakest in the movie, and reflects the way that it might be said that Wings of Desire loses its way, as it tries to winkle out a feelgood finale, abandoning the more ambiguous tone of the first black-and-white two thirds of the film. 

3 Camera work

The opening twenty minutes or so of Wings of Desire are astonishing. The angels eavesdrop on the thoughts of man and woman, with only the children in on the game. The film seeks to capture the inner monologue of an entire city. Like something out of Kierkegaard or Strindberg All of which is made possible by the magical camera work of Henri Alekan. His camera soars through the skies, before dropping into a flat or a library or a car to steal thoughts. Reminiscent of Gasper Noe’s camera (Benoît Debie) or that of Soy Cuba (Serguey Urusevsky), the camera itself is transformed into a technological angel, one who takes the arm of the poor human and accompanies that lesser creature along the bumpy road of life. 

From Wiki:   “During filming, Alekan used a very old and fragile silk stocking that had belonged to his grandmother as a filter for the monochromatic sequences.”

alice in the cities [d wenders]

1974 seems like a long time ago. We know that's where we are from the opening frames when Rudiger Vogler's bell bottoms hone into view beneath the boardwalk. His character, Phil Winter, dresses like an embodiment of a time which has become the territory of kitsch memorial. There are other hints of the way the world has changed: is that a woman smoking behind the protagonists on the Pan-Am flight from New York to Amsterdam? And the in-car phone used by the policeman on the ferry at the end, a slightly lugubrious plot device in such a free-wheeling film, looks curious and unlikely.

Phil Winter spends the first twenty minutes of the film drifting around the United States, taking photos. He's supposed to be writing an article, but the 'images' swallow him up, as he explains to his editor. In one of the few scenes of the film inveighed with any tension, he visits an old girlfriend in New York, looking for a bed for the night, and she throws him out, telling him he's only there to tell her his stories, and he's only doing this to prove to himself that they might be real, the same reason he's taken the photos. Edda Kochl's remarkable cameo as the 'friend' opens the door to another movie Wenders chose not to write, perhaps like the article that Winter's writing and of which we only catch a glimpse. The unwritten film would be the one in which the lead character's neurasthenia is explored and revealed. (There are hints in the film that Winter is an alter-ego for Wenders himself, not least when an announcement is made at Amsterdam airport for 'Mr Wenders' - and for a moment we in the audience think this must be for Mr Winter. Winter's name also seems like an obvious pun on a psychological state.)

However, Wenders chooses not to go down this route. Instead he explores the margins of Winter's condition. The film may be called Alice in the Cities, but it is really about Winter's sense of alienation and drift. (When he goes to see a Chuck Berry concert, the song Wenders' chooses to use is - Driving along in my automobile/ No particular place to go...) Alice in some ways offers the loner a sense of selfhood which nothing else in the vastness of America or Europe has done. Much as he might complain about being stuck with her, and although he says, on occasion, exasperated, do you not think I've got better things to do? - It's clear that he doesn't. In a mutable world, Phil needs something to hang on to, and Alice offers him a hook.

In this sense then, perhaps, 1974 is not quite as distant as the bell-bottoms would suggest. Part of the success and cachet of Alice in the Cities may well have been, at the time, the modernity it embodied, the way in which it suggested the path the future would follow. The film opens with a shot of a plane, going we know not where. The shot pans down to reveal Winter on the beach, taking polaroids. The film ends with a sweeping helicopter shot, panning from Phil and Alice up over the Rhine (strangely reminiscent of the closing shot of Into the Wild). Since the film was made, we have entered the era of globalisation, expanding migration, ever-increasing rootlessness. The solid houses of the Ruhrgebeit, an old man informs Phil, are being demolished. In their place will be built flats and smaller houses (the like of which my parents' once lived in in Essen).

Which finally leads us to Alice, who is nine when the film takes place, and would be in her early forties now. In constructing the film's narrative, Wenders decided that Phil needed a foil to his blankness, someone to offer shape to a character he was reluctant to excavate beyond the image. (For the first twenty minutes of the film, the character of Phil barely speaks, mainly reading signs in his pidgeon English. We never learn about Winter's past or why he ended up in America or even what kind of articles the journalist usually writes). Besides the effectiveness of having a charismatic child character fronting his film, the beauty of playing Alice against Phil is that it means Phil never has to explain anything. Rather than exploring the character from the inside, we slowly piece his personality together from the outside. This is shown through the way he interacts with his companion, sometimes affectionate, sometimes irritable, always learning more about himself in the process. And the reason he feels so at home with Alice, the child, is that she has so much in common with him. She too enjoys drifting, feels herself to be rootless, has no particular sense of place. As comfortable in New York as Oberhausen, Alice possesses an aura of world weary modernity, which is as pertinent now as it must have seemed then. She's nine years old and she's already seen it all.

Alice in the Cities is a picaresque movie, of detail and incident. The only thing I could remember from my previous viewing of it, two decades ago, was the modernistic Wuppertal transport system. It is neither gripping nor taught. It's a movie with no particular place to go. Which engenders the paradox that it goes all over the place, going nowhere. When we leave Alice and Phil on the train to Munich, it seems unlikely that this will actually prove to be their final destination. Who knows where they eventually ended up.