Wim Wenders

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Among the directors who emerged during the new wave of German cinema in the 1970s, Wim Wenders (born 1945) has been paradoxically the most complex and, at times, the most commercially successful. His films "Paris, Texas" (1983) and "Wings of Desire" (1987) were among the most widely distributed art films of the 1980s.

Wenders, like many other European filmmakers, was fascinated and influenced by Hollywood cinema. His films, at times, have been difficult to follow, with multiple stories that might or might not be resolved, but they often used the forms of classic American film genres. Wenders used well-known American actors in fresh ways in his films, and beginning early in his career he wove rock music into his cinematic language. His fascination with music led to a new phase in his career later in life, as he helped launch a worldwide interest in classic forms of Cuban music with his documentary Buena Vista Social Club (1999).

Raised in Post war Germany

Wenders was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, on August 14, 1945, the day World War II ended in the Pacific. Germany had surrendered several months earlier and lay in ruins. "Growing up in postwar Germany wasn't exactly fun," he was quoted as saying in a New Zealand Dominion Post interview reproduced on the Asia Africa Intelligence Wire. "It was all about rebuilding the country. Very materialistic, and joyless, not that humor was ever an elaborate German quality." Wenders was the son of a doctor at a Catholic hospital. He was given the name Wim (pronounced Veem) Wenders, but a government official clinging to the last remains of German nationalism insisted that Wim was not a German name. So he was, in officialdom only, named Ernst Wilhelm Wenders.

The materialism of German life did not appeal to Wenders, who made his first film at age 12, pointing a movie camera out a window to record the movement of people and cars on the street below. For the rest of his career, his style would be characterized by long, reflective shots of pure background that provided a canvas on which the action of the film developed. Wenders at first wanted to become a watercolor painter, and his films, like watercolors, had muted, gentle color schemes. He made several stabs at a more practical career, dropping out of medical, philosophy and sociology programs at universities in Munich, Freiberg, and Düsseldorf, respectively. In Düsseldorf he met the young Austrian playwright Peter Handle, who would eventually write scripts for several of his films, and he began to think about a filmmaking career.

Wenders moved to Paris around 1966. He applied to art and film schools there and, with no track record or schooling in either field, was turned down by both. Finally he apprenticed himself to an engraver. But Wenders managed to give himself a film education in cinema-crazy Paris; he went to the Henri Langlois Cinémathèque, a well-known private film archive, nearly every night and, according to his own estimate, saw more than 1,000 films. When he returned to Germany in 1967 he was accepted at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen (Film and Television Institute). Before enrolling he completed a three-month internship at a German office of the American United Artists studio. That was enough to convince Wenders that a commercial film career was not what he wanted.

During his student career Wenders made short experimental films such as Silver City (1968), a three-minute montage of shots of a Munich street that recalled the film he had made at age 12. His graduation project was a full-length feature called Summer in the City.

Adopted Road Movie Genre

The titles of that and some other Wenders film were in English, as was the name of his film production company, Road Movies. As a youth, Wenders loved American culture, which, he told the Dominion Post, "offered the great alternatives: comic strips, movies, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, chewing gum, rock 'n' roll. America seemed to offer one joyful adventure after another, and already as a little boy I collected pictures of skyscrapers and big cars and beautiful women with beautiful houses behind them and children that had the greatest toys." But Wenders was ambivalent about the effect of American commercialism on German film, and his film Der amerikanische Freund (The American Friend, 1977) depicted the negative effects of American culture. Wenders lived in New York in the early 1970s and spent five years in Los Angeles, California, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Wenders would adopt the road movie, an American genre filtered through various European influences, including that of German Romanticism, as his favored medium. His breakthrough film in art cinema circles was Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Anxiety of the Goalie at the Penalty Kick, 1971), based on a play by Handke, which followed the often meaningless travels of a loner soccer goalie through Germany and Austria. The WDR (West German Radio) studio, impressed with that debut, signed Wenders to direct a conventional film adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter in 1972, a project Wenders completed but did not enjoy. He was quoted as saying in a Senses of Cinema essay that he would never make another film in which "no car, service station, television, or jukebox" was allowed to appear.

The American landscapes that figured in many Wenders films made an appearance in Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities, 1972), which featured the Chuck Berry song "Memphis" at an important juncture in the plot. For Falsche Bewegung (The Wrong Move, 1974), Wenders and Handke re-teamed to transplant a novel by Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (The Education of William Meister), into a distinctly alienated modern setting. Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road, 1975) was a road movie set in Germany but influenced in its look by the work of famed American photographer Walker Evans.

It was Der Amerikanische Freund that brought Wenders to international prominence. A thriller about a shady American art dealer who tricks a German picture framer into becoming an organized crime hit man, the film starred American actor Dennis Hopper, along with Germany's leading male actor, Swiss-born Bruno Ganz. The chemistry between the two on the set was explosive, but after they came to blows several times, the two became friends. The intensity of the relationship showed in the film, which was widely exhibited by American art film houses and university film societies. It attracted the eye of American director Francis Ford Coppola, who invited Wenders to make a film in Hollywood.

Married Ronee Blakely

The resulting film, Hammett, was a film biography of mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. Coppola was dissatisfied with the results of filming, and re-shot large parts of the film himself, so the final version was more Coppola than Wenders. The film gained little public notice, but Wenders used his extended sojourn in the United States to make new friends and gather new material. He married country-rock backup vocalist Ronee Blakely, but the marriage dissolved when he returned to Germany in the early 1980s. A lasting relationship was forged when Wenders met playwright and actor Sam Shepard on a soundstage next to the one where he was shooting Hammett. Shepard wrote the screenplay for Paris, Texas, which was released in 1983 and earned Wenders the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) award, for Best Film, at the Cannes Film Festival in France the following year. The film was moderately successful commercially, beyond the usual art film circles.

Paris, Texas (1983), was a drama that featured actor Harry Dean Stanton as an amnesiac who wanders through the American Southwest and the rather futuristic cities of Los Angeles, California, and Houston, Texas. Wenders's treatment of American landscapes was widely praised; in the words of one commentator it seemed almost as though the landscape was a character in the film. The intense, almost surreal landscapes were reminiscent of those in the desert film Zabriskie Point (1971) by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, a filmmaker Wenders admired. The film's evocative score was by slide guitarist Ry Cooder, who would later inaugurate another important phase of Wenders's career.

Wenders would return to the United States several more times, but he said that Paris, Texas marked the end of the American phase of his career. He made the film Tokyoga (1985) in Japan, and then returned to Germany for the haunting Der Himmel über Berlin (The Skies over Berlin or The Heavens over Berlin, 1987), usually known by its English title, Wings of Desire. Peter Handke wrote the screenplay of the film, which put a unique Wenders spin on the sentimental idea of angels watching over the inhabitants of a city. The film starred Bruno Ganz as an angel - with a long black coat and a ponytail in place of wings - who observes the lives of Berliners but wants to experience human feelings and sensations. Anticipating a technique used in several later American films, Wenders shot scenes pertaining to angels in black and white, but used color for the sphere of human existence. Wings of Desire featured American actor Peter Falk, best-known as TV's detective Columbo, playing himself, in a delightfully off-beat treatment of a familiar face. Wenders's fluid camera work, gliding through the streets and alleys of Berlin like the angels depicted in the story, won rapturous praise from critics, and international audiences flocked to the film. Wings of Desire was remade in the United States as City of Angels in 1998.

Wenders's films of the 1990s, including the Wings of Desire sequel In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Far Away, So Close, 1993), were not as well received as his earlier works, even though Wenders continued to attract famous guest stars - Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had a small role in Far Away, So Close, and Mel Gibson appeared in The Million Dollar Hotel, one of two Wenders films made in Los Angeles. Wenders scored a major triumph, however, with Buena Vista Social Club, a 1999 documentary he made about a community of aging Cuban musicians discovered by Ry Cooder. Wenders's film earned an Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature, and, in conjunction with several Cooder-produced albums, touched off a renewal of popularity for Cuban music around the world.

In the early 2000s Wenders continued to explore musical themes with a contribution to Martin Scorese's The Blues, an anthology that compiled segments by various directors who addressed aspects of the blues tradition. His 2005 film Don't Come Knocking reunited him with Sam Shepard, who played a washed-up cowboy film actor who seeks out his family in Montana. Top stars, including Jessica Lange and Eva Marie Saint, continued to jump at the chance to work with Wenders, and his German Romantic perspective on America continued to yield unique results.

Books

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 2: Directors, 4th ed., St. James, 2000.

Kolker, Robert Philip, The Films of Wim Wenders, Cambridge, 1993.

Periodicals

Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, October 31, 2003.

New Statesman, January 2, 1998.

New Yorker, September 29, 2003.

Time, May 9, 1988.

Variety, May 30, 2005.

Online

"Wim Wenders," All Movie Guide, http://www.allmovie.com (February 24, 2006).

"Wim Wenders Biography," Images Journal, http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue01/features/wenders.htm (February 24, 2006).

"Wim Wenders," Senses of Cinema, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/wenders.html (February 24, 2006).

Quotes:

"The more opinions you have, the less you see."

• Born: Aug 14, 1945 in Dusseldorf, West Germany
• Occupation: Director, Writer, Actor
• Active: '60s-2000s
• Major Genres: Drama, Film, TV & Radio
• Career Highlights: The American Friend, Kings of the Road, Falsche Bewegung
• First Major Screen Credit: Klappenfilm (1968)

Biography

Born in Dusseldorf just after the end of World War II, German film director Wim Wenders grew up with an insatiable appetite for American movies. Not all that interested in big-budget products, he, instead, developed a fascination with B-movies, notably melodramas and Westerns. After studying Medicine and Philosophy in his native country, Wenders took up art in Paris (a mecca for viewing American films), and then returned to his homeland to attend Munich's Academy of Film and Television. Like many of his French movie-fan brethren, Wenders began his career writing film criticism before directing a few short subjects of his own, and, in 1970, he and several other young filmmakers formed a production-distribution firm, Filmverlag Der Autoren. Summer in the City (1970) was Wenders' first feature film, but it was his 1973 adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter that first brought him attention outside of Germany. The film included many accomplishments, most notably coaxing a superb performance from Senta Berger as Hester Prynne, and managing to make the landscapes of Spain resemble 17th century New England.

At this point, Wenders began his road movie cycle, inspired by such American pictures as Easy Rider (1970) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Three films in this genre followed in quick succession: Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976). For his first English-language picture, The American Friend (1977), Wenders cast three of his American movie idols: actor Dennis Hopper (director/star of Easy Rider) and "cult" directors Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause) and Samuel Fuller (The Steel Helmet). Wenders would later co-direct Lightning Over Water (1980) with Ray.

Wenders' American-financed films Hammett (1980) and Paris, Texas (1983) were remarkable in their evocation of time and place, and the director could certainly have continued quite satisfactorily in Hollywood. However, he seemed to prefer activity in Europe, even though he was always one step ahead of his creditors -- especially when running his own studio, Gray City. Wenders' return to German filmmaking was rewarded in 1987 with the release of Der Himmel Über Berlin, or Wings of Desire. The story of an angel who wants to become human after finding earthly love met with an enthusiastic international response, culminating in a slew of honors for Wenders (including a 1987 Cannes Best Director award, a 1988 European Film Academy award for Best Director, and a host of awards from the New York Film Critics Circle) and an eventual 1998 American remake, City of Angels.

In the 1990s, Wenders' love of on-the-road location filming was again manifested in such films as Until the End of the World (1991) (filmed on four continents and designed to be "the ultimate road movie"), and Faraway, So Close (1993), a marathon experience (which originally ran 164 minutes) wherein an angel wanders about to observe the changing scene in a newly unified Germany. In 1995, Wenders made a road movie of a different sort with Par-Dela les Nuages/Beyond the Clouds, which he co-directed with legendary Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. Set in various European countries, the film explored the vagaries of love and lust through the experiences of several principle characters. Receiving decidedly mixed reviews, it differed strongly from Wenders' next effort, Die Gebrüder Sklandanowsky/A Trick of the Light, a 1996 historical tribute to some of the more neglected developers of moving picture technology. Wenders returned to the States the following year with The End of Violence, a film that explored the effects of violence on the intertwining of people's lives. Featuring Bill Pullman, Andie McDowell, and Gabriel Byrne, it was not a great commercial or critical success, but Wenders did win acclaim the following year for The Buena Vista Social Club. A documentary about Cuban music, the film was the result of a successful collaboration between Wenders and musician Ry Cooder, who had previously supplied the score for the director's Paris, Texas. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Lumière and Company Buy this Movie	The American Friend Buy this Movie	Alice in den Städten Buy this Movie	Falsche Bewegung Buy this Movie
Die Angst des Tormannes beim Elfmeter Buy this Movie	The Million Dollar Hotel Buy this Movie	Willie Nelson: Teatro Buy this Movie	Buena Vista Social Club Buy this Movie

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