mentions that he wants to kill his own father. He suggests to Guy that they swap murders – Bruno would murder Guy’s
wife Miriam and Guy could murder Bruno’s father, making
two perfect (that is, motiveless) crimes. Guy does not take Bruno seriously, but simply humours him. Nevertheless,
Bruno carries out the murder of Miriam at a fairground.
However, he is spotted by an attendant in charge of one of the rides, who later confirms that it was Bruno, not Guy, who was at the scene of the crime at the time of Miriam’s murder.
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The wrong man. As is apparent from the discussion of narrative techniques, one of the dominant themes of Hitchcock’s films is the wrong man. In The 39 Steps (1935), Richard Hannay 98
(Robert Donat) is falsely accused of the murder of the spy Anabella Smith. In To Catch a Thief (1955), Cary Grant plays John Robie, a retired cat thief who is accused of carrying out new thefts. In The Wrong Man (1956), Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) is falsely accused of robbing an insurance office. In North by Northwest, Thornhill is mistaken for the non-existent decoy agent George Kaplan. Finally, in I Confess, Father Michael Logan, who hears Otto Keller confess to murdering Mr Villette, is mistakenly suspected of committing the murder.
The cinema of Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders is one of the dominant figures in the New German Cinema which, like the French New Wave, is a dominant school of European Art Cinema. In the Encyclopedia of European Cinema (pp. 304–5), Thomas Elsaesser and Joseph Garncarz identify the following characteristics of New German Cinema: 3
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It is a German art movement that was dominant from 1965
to 1982.
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It rejected the work of post-Second World War German
commercial directors, who had begun their careers during the Third Reich.
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It rejected established German film genres and stars.
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It was indirectly influenced by American cinema, rather than by German cinema (with the exception of the films of Fritz Lang and F W Murnau).
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It dispensed with the producer and scriptwriter, as the
directors of the New German Cinema (such as Werner
Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, as well as Wenders) took on these roles.
We shall go through a number of these points in more detail by considering the work of Wenders.
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33 The influence of American culture
It is significant to note that Wenders was born in 1945, a few months after the end of the Second World War. He grew 3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 99
up in a Germany dominated by the American occupying
forces. Germany after the Second World War was based on a collective amnesia, an unwillingness to speak about the Nazi regime. Those who grew up in the post-war period therefore had little or no access to recent German history or culture.
Instead, their sense of culture was dominated by American culture and this domination is reflected in many of the films of Wenders, as well as other directors of what came to be known as New German Cinema.
What characterizes New German Cinema is its representation of
‘the German situation’, of a nation self-exiled from its own past and its own culture. In its place, the Germans found American culture. It should not be surprising, therefore, that American culture plays a prominent role in New German Cinema (as
well as in post-war German literature). Indeed, a number of German writers travelled through America and wrote about their experiences, which were made up of a combination of familiarity and estrangement.
One of the most prominent writers in German to tackle the German situation is Peter Handke. He travelled across America in 1971 and wrote a book called Short Letter, Long Farewell. In an interview, Handke explains:
America is for the story only a pretext, the attempt to find a distanced world in which I can be direct and personal. For if I imagine writing the same adventure in Europe, I can’t think of a place where the objects, the outer world, would constitute a similar challenge, and at the same time, there is no other place except America which provokes in me such depersonalization and estrangement. I tried to represent the inner world of my characters as exactly as possible. But I also tried to depict the outer world as a fiction. So that everything that the protagonist sees becomes a sign for him of what he has experienced, or what he would like to do. America is an environment which is known to me in advance by its signs.
Quoted in Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Germany’s imaginary America: Wim Wenders and Peter Handke’, p. 7
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America is also known to Wenders in advance by its signs and images, and these signs and images constantly recur in his films. Wenders collaborated with Handke on three films, The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (1972), which is based on a novel by Handke, Wrong Move (1975) and Wings of Desire (1987).
33 Road movies
It is this experience of travelling – of travelling through a land that both constitutes one’s identity and at the same time alienates oneself – that becomes one of the dominant themes in Wenders’s films. Most of his films can be defined as road movies, particularly Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), Paris, Texas (1984), culminating in the ultimate road movie, Until the End of the World (1991), in which the characters literally travel around the entire world and then travel into their inner selves (as I shall point out below).
The first ten minutes of Alice in the Cities consists of the main protagonist, a German writer called Philip, travelling across America in an attempt to write a story about American culture.
But he ends up taking Polaroid photographs of typical signs and images of American culture. The whole film is a record of Philip’s journey. Moreover, his journey is presented as a series of returns: the film begins with Philip in California as he prepares to return to New York. From New York, he flies back to Europe (landing in Amsterdam) and then finally on to Germany, where he drives around various cities looking for childhood homes, first the home of a lost ten-year-old girl, Alice, who is travelling with him, but also his own childhood home.
The journey in Alice in the Cities, and Wenders’s films in general, depict a search for one’s identity, which involves a return to origins. The link between journey and identity is made explicit in Alice in the Cities, when Philip’s former girlfriend tells him that he takes Polaroid photographs of what he sees in order to prove that he exists.
Wenders goes one step further than the Polaroid in Until the End of the World. After the main characters have travelled around the world, they employ computer technology to record their own dreams, which are predominately childhood images.
3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 101
This is simply an advancement of the use of Polaroids in Alice in the Cities. In Until the End of the World, the journey around the world leads to a journey into the inner self in search of one’s origin and identity.
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3 From male bonding to male–female relationships
Probably Wenders’s most well-known road movie is Paris, Texas. This film charts the journey of Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) as he walks out of the desert in search of his wife, Jane (Nastassja Kinski) and son, Hunter. But he is also searching for the place where he thinks he was conceived, a place called Paris, Texas. The link between journey and identity is therefore explicit in this film. Travis is aided in his journey by his brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), who, along with his wife, is looking after Hunter. Travis and Hunter eventually find Jane working in a seedy peep-show joint. Travis realizes that they cannot return to being a couple, although he does reunite Jane with Hunter.
The introduction of the brother into the journey charted in Paris, Texas also introduces another dominan
t theme in Wenders’s films – male bonding. The following Wenders’s films involve the bonding between two male characters on the move: Kings of the Road, The American Friend (1977), Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire. By contrast, Alice in the Cities involves a journey taken by Philip and a ten-year-old girl.
The themes of these films point towards Wenders’s relation to women. In fact, we can chart a progression in his films. In early films such as Kings of the Road and The American Friend, women are almost non-existent. And when they are introduced in his early films, it is for pure innocence, as with the ten-year-old Alice in Alice in the Cities. However, in Wings of Desire, we see a strong female character, Marion, dominating the narrative.
The male bonding between two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, is gradually broken up by Marion, with whom Damiel falls in love. He even forfeits his eternal angelic existence and becomes human in order to experience that love with her. Moreover, Until the End of the World is a road movie featuring a journey taken by a woman in search of her identity. We can therefore discern a progression in Wenders’s films when it comes to his 102
depiction of women, from non-existent ( Kings of the Road) to the innocent ten-year-old Alice in Alice in the Cities, to Jane, the fallen woman in Paris, Texas, Marion in Wings of Desire and Claire in Until the End of the World. Lana in Land of Plenty (2004) is also a strong, well-rounded character who goes to Los Angeles in search of her uncle.
Does this gradual introduction and dominance of women
in Wenders’s films mean that he offers a veritable image of male–female relationships? Far from it! The way in which Travis and Jane are brought together in Paris, Texas shows the unbridgeable gap between the sexes. Travis finds his wife in a seedy peep-show joint, consisting of booths in which the customers can talk to the women through a two-way mirror, where the men can see the women, but not vice versa. When Travis finds Jane in one of these booths, he tells her about the relationship between two people he knows. He tells her how the couple fell in love, how the man gradually became obsessed with and jealous of the woman, and how that eventually led to the breakdown of their relationship. Jane gradually realizes that the story is about her and Travis, and that Travis is narrating it to her. But the couple are not brought together again. Travis tells Jane where to find Hunter and then he drives off.
The scene in the booth consists almost entirely of a monologue delivered by Travis about the disintegration of a relationship.
The visual nature of the image, with the couple divided by a two-way mirror, sums up Wenders’s philosophy about male–
female relationships (or the impossibility of such relationships).
Wings of Desire seems to transcend the problems of male–
female relationships, as Damiel is able to break through the seemingly impossible barrier between angels and humans
in order to express his love of Marion. Additionally, the penultimate scene consists of a monologue delivered by Marion about male–female relationships, in which she expresses her belief that she can, for the first time, become seriously involved in a relationship. To some extent, then, Wings of Desire transcends the two-way mirror of Paris, Texas by giving the woman a voice to express her desire. Nonetheless, Marion expresses her desire in hopelessly idealistic terms, which brings 3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 103
into doubt the idea that her relationship with Damiel can be long term. Even the relationship in the more optimistic Until the End of the World, between Claire and Eugene, breaks down by the end of the film.
formalelementSInthefIlmSofWenDerS
In recent debates in film studies, the auteurists’ opposition between mise-en-shot/ mise-en-scène versus the script has been redefined as an opposition between image and narrative. This is important to keep in mind because Wenders talks about his own films in these terms.
In the majority of narrative films, the elements of the film image (camera movement, camera angle, cutting, etc.) are completely motivated by the script’s narrative logic. What this means is that camera movements, cutting and so on simply serve the function of presenting the actions and events of the narrative to the film spectators. But in European Art Cinema, there is a more ambiguous relation between the film image and the script’s narrative. In other words, the image is not completely subordinated to the narrative, but is largely separate from the narrative.
Wenders’s films show this ambiguous relationship between the image and narrative. Yet, his films do not simply eliminate narrative logic either. However, their images are not completely subordinated to the narrative logic. Wenders describes his films, in an interview by Jochen Brunow, as consisting of carefully composed and framed images:
Summer in the City [1970] had been done with a two- or three-page exposé. The shorts, too, were done without any script; there were only a few sketches of images. I came to filmmaking through images and as a painter. The concept of story was foreign to me, it was new territory. In those days, it was a process of gradually feeling out the filmmaking process, and for me the script was the strangest part of it.
The Cinema of Wim Wenders, p. 65
Wenders’s films avoid action and drama in favour of
observation – the camera simply observes and shows events 104
from a detached viewpoint. In temporal terms, these moments are called dead time.
Only a cinema of the image and dead time can reply to the hectic pace of Hollywood action films, its explosions, car chases and gun battles. Wenders’s cinema challenges the supremacy of narrative causality by foregrounding the space and time of the image. This is particularly evident in Alice in the Cities and Wings of Desire. In Alice in the Cities, Alice and Philip search for the home of Alice’s grandmother. The grandmother’s home could have been found almost immediately. A narrative event would then have been completed, leading to another event. Instead, the grandmother is never found. The process of searching becomes the main focus of the film. What we see is a catalogue of events loosely linked together by the search for Alice’s grandmother.
Part of the search consists of the following actions:
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Alice and Philip have breakfast (14 shots).
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They drive to Essen (9 shots).
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They stop to ask a couple sitting on a bench if they recognize the grandmother’s house from a photo that Alice has (6 shots).
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Alice and Philip drive through an area of town full of empty houses (6 shots).
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One shot of the industrial landscape.
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Alice and Philip stop to ask some children and a cab driver if they recognize the photo of the grandmother’s house (14
shots).
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Alice’s views of the passing townscapes (5 shots).
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Alice and Philip in a photo booth having their photographs taken (1 shot).
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Alice and Philip in a car park doing warm-up exercises for swimming (1 shot).
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One shot of the industrial landscape.
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Alice and Philip drive around Gelsenkirchen and find the grandmother’s house, but Alice’s grandmother no longer lives there. They decide to go swimming (25 shots).
3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 105
Most of the events in this segment are unimportant to the narrative; for example, the shots of the empty houses, the shot of Alice and Philip doing the warm-up exercises and the shot of the two of them in the photo booth. Furthermore, the order of the events is not important. We can change around many of these events without creating confusion. Is it important that the shot of Alice and Philip doing the warm-up exercises comes before or after the shot of the two of them in the
photo booth? Unlike the opening three scenes of Psycho, analysed in Chapter 2, the events in Alice in the Cities are not linked together by a strong cause–effect logic. We can say that Alice in the Cities has an episodic structure, because each scene consists of an autonomous episode.
Yet, this is not to suggest that the actions are totally arbitrary.
Many scenes described above do have a symbolic meaning.
To give just two examples: the empty houses symbolize the loss of stability that both Philip, the German writer, and Alice, the temporarily abandoned girl, feel as they drive around Germany.
And in the shot of the warm-up exercises, Alice closely mimics Philip’s actions, symbolizing both the child’s innocence and her total dependency on the adult.
Part of Alice in the Cities was set in the German city of Wuppertal. Wenders returned to the city to make Pina (2011), a documentary based on the life and work of the legendary choreographer of modern dance, Pina Bausch. The film is based around several of Bausch’s dance-theatre works (including ‘Café Müller’ and ‘The Rite of Spring’) which, Wenders felt, could only be filmed in 3D. Yet, Pina is not a film ‘driven’ by 3D, the way many blockbusters employ 3D as a special effect. Instead, the 3D becomes another technical tool, one that the director can use to capture and enhance the choreography of the dancing body.
Film Studies- An Introduction Page 13