The Logic of Images Wim Wenders was born on 14 August 1945 in Dusseldorf. He went to film school in Munich after abandoning studies in medicine and philosophy. Between 1968 and 1971 he wrote film reviews, and in 1970 he made Summer in the City, his first full-length feature film. In 1979 Wenders went to live in America for a number of years. In 1982 he directed the first performance of the play Uber die Dorfer (Over the Villages) by Peter Handke, with whom he has also worked closely on his films. Wim Wenders lives as a director and film-producer in Berlin. He has received the title of Doctor h.c. from the Sorbonne in Paris. s For his films, Wenders has won the Deutsche Filmpreis in Gold for Wrong Movement, The American Friend and Wings of Desire, as well as the following international prizes: The Golden Lion at Venice (for The State of Things), the Palme d'or at Cannes (for Paris, Texas), the Best Director Prize at Cannes (for Wings of Desire) and the first European Award (Felix) for Best Director for Wings of Desire. In 1989 he served as President of the Jury of the Cannes Film Festival. Films: Summer m the City, 1970; Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goal-keeper's Fear of the Penalty), 197.2; Der scharlachrote Buchstabe (The Scarlet Letter), 1973; Alice in den Stadten (Alice m the Cities), 1974; Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Movement), 197s; 1m Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road}, 1976; Der amerikanische Freund (The American Friend), 1977; Lightning over Water (Nick's Movie), 1980; Hammett, 1982; Der Stand der Dinge (The State of Things), 1982; Paris, Texas, 1984; Tokyo-Go, 1985; Der Hmmel iiber Berlin (Wzrzgs of Desire), 1987; Aufzeichnungen zu Kleidern und Stadten (Notebook on Cities and Clothes), 1989; Until the End of the World, 1991. The Logic of Images Essays and Conversations Wim Wenders Translated by Michael Hofmann faberand faber LONDON BOSTON First published in English in 1991 by Faber and Faber Limited 3 Queen Square London WCIN ~AU This paperback edition first published in 1992 First ~ublishedin German in 1988 by Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt, West Germany Photosct by Parker Typesetting Service Leicester Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic All rights reserved 10 Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt am Main, 1988 English translation a Michael Hofmann, 1991 Wim Wenders IS hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-571-16517-6 CONTENTS Why do you make films? I Time sequences, continuity of movement: Summer in the City and The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty 3 The Scarlet Letter 7 The heroes are the others: False Movement 9 Kings of the Road I 3 The American Friend I 8 Reverse angle: New York City, March 1982 21 Chambre 666 24 Film thieves 3 3 Goodbye to the booming voice of the old cinema: The State of Things 39 Impossible stories 5 I Tokyo-Ga 60 Like flying blind without instruments: Paris, Texas 66 The growth of a small dependency 68 An attempted description of an indescribable film: Wings ofDesire 73 For (not about) Ingmar Bergman 84 A history of imaginary films 86 Le Souffle de I'Ange 89 Why do you make films? Reply to a questionnaire Ever since this terrible question was put to me, I've done nothing but think of how to answer it. I have one answer in the morning and one at night, one at the editing-table, one when I'm looking at stills of earlier films of mine, another when I'm speaking to my accountant, and yet another when I think of the team I've been working with for years now. Every one of these different answers, these reasons for making films, is sincere and genuine, but I keep saying to myself there must be something 'more fundamental', some 'commitment', or even a 'compulsion'. I was twelve years old when I made my very first film, with an 8 mm camera. I stood by a window and filmed the street below, the cars and pedestrians. My father saw me and asked: 'What are you doing with your camera?' And I said: 'Can't you see? I'm filming the street.' 'What for?' he asked. I had no answer. Ten or twelve years later, I was making my first short film in 16 mm. A reel of film lasted three minutes. I filmed a crossroads from the sixth floor, without moving the camera until the reel was finished. It didn't occur to me to pull away or stop shooting any earlier. With hindsight, I suppose it would have seemed like sacrilege to me. Why sacrilege? 1'm no great theorist. I tend not to remember things I've read in books. So I can't give you Bila Balizs's exact words, but they affected me profoundly all the same. He talks about the ability (and the responsi- bility) of cinema 'to show things as they are'. And he says cinema can 'rescue the existence of things'. That's precisely it. I have another quote, from Cdzanne, where he says: 'Things are disappearing. If you want to see anything, you have to hurry'. So back to the awful question: why do I make films? Well, because. Something happens, you see it happening, you film it as it happens, the camera sees it and records it, and you can look at it again, afterwards. The thing itself may no longer be there, but you can still see it, the fact of its existence hasn't been lost. The act of filming is a heroic act (not always, not often, but sometimes). For a moment, the gradual destruc- tion of the world of appearances is held up. The camera is a weapon against the tragedy of things, against their disappearing. Why make films? Bloody stupid question! April 1987 Time Sequences, Continuity of Movement: Summerin the City and The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty Right at the beginning - and not much of that has survived - I thought making films meant setting the camera up somewhere, pointing it at some object, and then just letting it run. My favourite films were those made by the pioneer film-makers at the turn of the century, who purely recorded and were surprised by what they had captured. The mere fact that you could make an image of something in motion and replay it fascinated them. A train pulling into a station, a lady in a hat taking a step backwards, billowing steam and a stationary train. That's the kind of thing the early film-makers shot, cranking the camera by hand. They viewed it the next day, full of pride. What fascinated me about making films wasn't so much the possibility of altering or affecting or directing something, but simply watching it. Noticing or revealing things is actually much more precious to me than getting over some kind of message. There are films where you can't discover anything, where there's nothing to be discovered, because everything in them is com- pletely unambiguous and obvious. Everything is presented exactly the way it's supposed to be understood. And then there are other films, where you're continually noticing little details, films that leave room for all kinds of possibilities. Those are mostly films where the images don't come complete with their interpretations. Last year Robby Miiller and I made a film called Summer in the City: it's shot in 16 mm black and white, it's two and a half hours long, and we shot it in six days. It had a screenplay, more or less, so that when we see the film now we're pretty sure what pans of it we were responsible for - mostly the framing and the dialogue - and what was left to chance. The way the film turned out, there's something almost private about it, the people who appeared in it were friends, it was all shot straight off, we only went for a second take when something went totally wrong. That first film could have been of any length: it was my graduation film at film-school. It started off at three hours, but that seemed too long to me, so now it's two and a half. There's a shot in it of a cinema in Berlin and it's held for two minutes without anything happening, just because I happened to like the cinema; it was called the Urania. Or we drove the length of the Kudamm, shooting out of the car window. In the film that lasts eight minutes, just as long it took to shoot. We wouldn't have been able to use that shot of the cinema in The Goalkeeper: it would have been impossible, a withdrawal into an attitude of pure contemplation. It would have left a hole that the rest of the film would have disappeared into. The eight-minute drive would have had to be intercut with some- thing else, and even then it couldn't have gone on for eight minutes. In Summer in the City we drove through a tunnel in Munich, and I filmed out of the side window of the car. We drove through this long tunnel and out the other side. For about a minute all you see on the screen is blackness, with the occasional headlight, and when I did the mixing, the man who sits at the back and puts on the tapes came up and said to me that there were a lot of things he liked about the film, but why on earth didn't I cut when we drove into the tunnel.