Chapter Three

Accompanied by Text: From Short Letter, Long Farewell to Alice in the Cities

„On the road again‟1

Today life with a woman sometimes strikes me as an artificial state of affairs, as absurd as a filmed novel. (SL 24)

1. Shared fascinations The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty can be regarded as marking the end of an early phase of Handke‟s career in which his primary interest lies with language and the ways in which it constructs reality. With his next novel, Short Letter, Long Farewell, his focus, while still on the relationship between the individual and a systematised reality, begins to shift to what might be described as more existential concerns. In keeping with his own insistence that a literary form or technique used once cannot be made creatively productive a second time, he becomes less centrally interested in the play with genre forms in general, and detective fiction in particular, and more concerned to explore the nature of individual consciousness and the construction of selfhood. That is, what have been described as the „sensibilist‟ dimensions of his early works disentangle themselves from and essentially supplant his earlier engagement with semiotics. It is perhaps not surprising that in this period when their collaboration is at its most productive, Wenders treads a similar path. He abandons the formalist experimentation of his early shorts – elements of which were still present in the more radical sequences of The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty – for a more pronounced, one might argue more conventional, focus on interests already apparent at the earliest point of his career. He continues and expands his investigation of individual subjectivity and the relationship between self and world through the medium of a more narratively-organised filmmaking practice. Although he had first to go through the painful experience of making The Scarlet Letter (Der scharlachrote Buchstabe, 1973), a film over which he felt he had too little artistic control for it to be productive for his development as a filmmaker, he was able in 1974 to

1 , Short Letter, Long Farewell, trans. by Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1977), p.15. Further references in the text as SL. 164 Wenders and Handke: Collaboration, Adaptation, Recomposition produce the first film in which he claims truly to have found his „individual voice in the cinema‟, Alice in the Cities.2 In the Introduction to this study we quoted Wenders‟s claim that Handke‟s texts have accompanied him „even when they‟ve not appeared in my films‟.3 It is the aim of this chapter to explore the reality of that claim by examining the extent to which Alice in the Cities, a film which ostensibly has little to do with Handke, can nevertheless be understood to be a product of the shared interests and mutual passions which make the collaboration between writer and filmmaker both possible and productive in this period, and more specifically to result from Wenders‟s direct engagement with Handke‟s novel Short Letter, Long Farewell. Gerd Gemünden has claimed of Handke‟s and Wenders‟s collaboration that it:

is only possible because both agree in fundamental ways about questions of aesthetics and the role of the artist in contemporary society and because both are fascinated by similar topics and stories. Even when they disagree, as they do perhaps in Wenders‟s more critical view toward contemporary American cinema, they seem to argue like close friends do when they are basically in agreement with each other.4

It is precisely the extent of this agreement when their collaboration was at its most dynamic which this chapter sets out to determine. In doing so it will establish areas of mutual interest which provide a central point of focus not only in Alice in the Cities and Short Letter, Long Farewell, but which recur as issues of importance in the later collaborations and in relation to which it is possible to measure the extent of their aesthetic and intellectual convergence. Also to be identified are those moments – perhaps more numerous than is commonly assumed to be the case – when they move aesthetically and intellectually apart from one another. The chapter will also explore the different kind of „adaptational‟ process Alice in the Cities can be seen to represent in comparison with The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty. Brian McFarlane has claimed that adaptation can mean many other things besides fidelity in varying degrees to a pre-text, including the provision of „a commentary on or, in more extreme

2 , „Le Soufflé de l‟ange‟ in Wenders, On Film: Essays and Conversations (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp.248-73 (p.254). 3 Wim Wenders in interview with Reinhold Rauh in Wim Wenders und seine Filme (Munich: Heyne, 1990), p.246. 4 Gerd Gemünden, Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemp- orary German and Austrian Imagination (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p.158.