Chapter Four Mute Stories and Blind Alleys: Text, Image and Allusion In

Chapter Four Mute Stories and Blind Alleys: Text, Image and Allusion in Wrong Move „There‟s a lot you don‟t notice.‟1 „If only I could write.‟ [Shot 22] „Basically pictures have always meant more to me than stories, yes, and sometimes the stories were merely a hook for hanging pictures.‟2 1. Tendenzwende According to Wenders, he and Handke first mooted the idea of adapting Goethe‟s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1795/96) immediately after the filming of The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty: „since the time of The Goalkeeper, Peter Handke and I had talked vaguely about Goethe‟s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and a possible collaboration on it‟.3 However, other projects intervened for both writer and filmmaker between 1971 and July/August 1973, when Handke produced the original script for the film (according to the dates given at the end of the version published in 1975), and the late summer/early autumn of 1974 when Wenders shot Wrong Move.4 This period saw the publication of the works discussed in the previous chapter: Handke‟s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Short Letter, Long Farewell (both 1972) and Wenders‟s Alice in the Cities (1974). Whilst these three works demonstrate, as we have seen, continuity with both the text and film versions of The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, they also diverge from them in a number of significant ways. With the exception of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, which tells the story of Handke‟s mother, the protagonists in the work of both writer and filmmaker remain remarkably 1 Shot 310. Peter Handke, Falsche Bewegung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), p.58. Further references in the text as FB. References to the film appear in square brackets. 2 Wim Wenders, „Reverse Angle: New York City, March 1982‟, in Wenders, On Film: Essays and Conversations (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp.179-81 (p.179). 3 Wim Wenders, „Le Souffle de l‟ange‟, in Wenders, On Film, pp.248-73 (p.254). 4 In the director‟s commentary to the film Wenders initially claims that it was shot over four weeks in summer 1974, later, with reference to the colours of the landscape, he suggests they were shooting in the autumn. DVD released by Kinowelt Home Entertainment GmbH, 2006. 196 Wenders and Handke: Collaboration, Adaptation, Recomposition similar: alienated and disoriented young men struggling to come to terms with the relationship between self and world continue to provide the focus of interest. But for Handke the two novels from 1972 also represent a move away from the critique of language found in his earlier works towards a broader-based exploration of the subject‟s relationship to reality, with a new emphasis, particularly in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, on the social, historical and cultural determinants of an individual‟s life. Moreover, both A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Short Letter, Long Farewell are more transparently rooted in Handke‟s own experience than his previous texts. For Wenders, Alice in the Cities represents a return, for the first time since Summer in the City and following two literary adaptations (The Scarlet Letter and The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty), to filming from his own script, and thus also to a more spontaneous mode of filmmaking, one which allows him to explore the individual‟s relationship to reality from a more personal and autobiographical perspective. Later, as we saw in the previous chapter, he would maintain that: „With Alice in the Cities I found my individual voice in the cinema‟.5 The direction in which both Handke and Wenders move with these explorations of issues of (autobiographical) identity and the constitution of selfhood brings their work into line with the general cultural shift in the 1970s towards what has come to be known as „New Subjectivity‟. This literary and, to a lesser extent, filmic trend is associated with a rejection, in the wake of the perceived failure of the student movement, of political action and the language of politics, and a renewed concern with personal experience and the less reified kinds of language needed to give expression to it. This „change of direction‟, or Tendenzwende, is generally taken to be signalled in literary terms by the appearance in 1973 of two works that take as their theme the experience of political activism from the perspective of disillusioned (and quasi-autobiographical) protagonists, Peter Schneider‟s Lenz and Karen Struck‟s Class Love. As has been suggested, the appearance of the latter in a pivotal sequence in Alice in the Cities signals a conscious alignment of the film on Wenders‟s part with this cultural shift. Made a year after Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move can also be clearly located as a post-Tendenzwende work. It is this aspect of the film in particular that receives attention from Richard W. McCormick, who offers a convincing reading of the film as embodying the cultural debates of the 1970s, maintaining that it „is a unique reflection upon the interaction in West Germany during the mid-1970s of discourses about writing, politics, 5 Wenders, „Le Souffle de l‟ange‟, p.254. .

Load more