Changing Patterns of Resistance in the Films of Wim Wenders
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AT A STANDSTILL OR IN MOTION, ALWAYS LOOKING FOR THE "FREEWAY": CHANGING PATTERNS OF RESISTANCE IN THE FILMS OF WIM WENDERS by BENJAMIN ALEXANDER ELLISON B.A., The University of British Columbia, 1996 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC STUDIES We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA April 2000 © Benjamin Alexander Ellison, 2000 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date DE-6 (2/88) 11 ABSTRACT Wim Wenders's cinematic projects have recently changed from the anti-narrative road movies of previous decades. This shift in the German director's stance is only noted in an article (1996) by Roger Cook, and here, a reading is given as to why Wenders has switched over to films that embrace narrative form. The more recent release of Wenders's 1998 film The End of Violence (1998), however, now casts doubt on these limited remarks made about "the post-road movie." The End of Violence can be seen as a valuable cipher that suggests an alternate understanding of this new direction for Wenders in the 1980s and beyond. In this movie, many details seem to coincide with the plots of the other three major pictures following the road movie period. In each movie, protagonists possess technological "super speed," but in each, this capacity is renounced by characters. In nostalgic returns to the world of physical motion, life for characters is then portrayed as being only marginally better. In the four different films there appear surveillance systems that are used to control all who do not use the "technology." With the exact repetition of this pattern of events in all his movies, one must believe Wenders is trying to communicate some sort of specific message with his post-road movie. Indeed, it is believed that in the post-road movie, Wenders is repeating the theoretical focus he has had since the very beginning of his career; he is considering the ability of speed to obtain freedom for the individual from metanarratives. The older road movies centered on the idea of motion as being the great liberator for images from film narrative. With the pre-millennial "death of real speed," however, how one might free humans caught within the "(inter)net" of a computer-covered world changes. Given the modern advent of disembodying computer speed, the German director must re-evaluate his take on how stasis confines and speed frees elements from within total systems. Ul With today's evolutionary shift in the nature of speed, Wenders decides to opt for using the message, not the medium of film to encourage audiences to resist a totalizing world system. In accepting narrative, Wenders is now changing his cinematic mode, but nonetheless, his spirit of "metanarrative-busting" is intact. Wenders maintains his postmodern questioning in art, as, in his new films, he continues to cry out for the freedom provided by velocity. The only difference is that Wenders's films now have the complexity to recognize the impossibility of liberty in a world codified by information-gathering total systems. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 11 Table of Contents 'v INTRODUCTION Introduction 1 A Shared Postmodern Quality 2 The Quality 6 CHAPTER I EARLY WENDERS Start-up 15 Life in a Depressurized Cultural Cabin 17 Don't Let It Escape 24 How to Fight Narrative Without Resorting to It 28 Freedom for All 30 Cooling Down the Engines 33 CHAPTER II THE SPEED OF THE ROAD MOVIE AND THE POST-ROAD MOVIE Beginning 36 Clean Narrative Boxes? 38 The Road Movie Takes a U-Turn 41 The End of Violence 42 Until the End of the World 46 The Angels Diptych 48 Tracing over Steps 51 CHAPTER III NARRATIVE AS METANARRATIVE, AND WORLD AS METAWORLD Idling , 53 Listening to the Hum of the Engine 54 Using Narrative to Combat Metanarrative 56 Traffic Alert! 57 Checking out the Car 63 Re-W(e)nd 67 CONCLUSION BELL LAP Last Time Round 70 The Thesis 74 Finding Commonalities 76 The Framework that Binds 79 Through the Finish Line 81 Bibliography 84 Appendix I 88 Appendix II 90 1 INTRODUCTION Wim Wenders's movies are artistic projects that often appear as confirmations of various aspects of postmodern theory. The result of so many near perfect past correlations has been the recent collection of critical essays, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition (1996). This thesis takes its impetus from Roger Cook's contribution to the anthology, the article entitled "Postmodern Culture and Film Narrative: Paris, Texas and Beyond." Cook's article documents the substantial shift in Wenders's outlook on film occurring in the early 1980s, and of this period, makes the important observation that there comes about for Wenders, "a cinema that combines more traditional narrative control with a strong critique of postmodern culture" (123). The 1998 release of Wenders's The End of Violence, however, begs the continuation of these introductory remarks about the filmmaker's changed cinematic vision. For with this new film, additional clues are given as to the precise nature of Wenders's generation of films following the road movie. Looking at the imagery and plot of Wenders's The End of Violence, one realizes there is a distinct pattern at work that binds it in with the other three major films following Wenders's identified transition stage of the 1980s. When considering The End of Violence along with Wings of Desire, Faraway, So Close!, and Until the End of the World, henceforth referred to as the two "Angel" movies and the two "Ends" movies, one is presented with essentially one identical plot-line, simply being repeated with different actors in changed settings. Such an emphasis suggests that Wenders has a specific message in mind for audiences. In delineating the nature of this idea, not fully visible at the time that Cook was writing, and placing it within the wider context of Wenders's long-term directorial approach, this thesis then sees itself as a valuable continuation of the original article. Furthermore, this thesis will argue the usefulness of regarding these new, 2 narrative-driven movies as being closely related in spirit to the road movies that preceded them. Indeed, if one agrees that freedom, motion, and the interplay between these two ideas are the key elements in Wenders's early films, then the new generation of post-1985 movies appears as not such a career aberration for the director. These post-road movies chart a world where the real motion of people has given way to the instantaneous, out-of-body speed of computers. Implicitly and using analogy, these films consider the total systems that are created using computer capabilities—through information directories, consumer profiling, traffic cameras, satellite tracking programs, data-bases—and ruminate on whether this lessening of freedom for the individual is so extreme that we might be better off to avoid "progress." In determining the answer to this question, the old issues of liberty and how speed may aid or hinder its pursuit are again, thirty years later after the first road movie, at the forefront of Wenders's cinematography. The work before you serves finally as an appropriate continuation to Cook's initial inquiry and as an addition to The Cinema ofWim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition. Its appropriateness for inclusion derives from the clear postmodern picture that appears when Wenders's two mini-film traditions are joined together under the one rubric of understanding of "systems and motion." It is hoped that by the end of this thesis, the entirety of Wenders's film body will appear to readers as meditations on the nature of totalizing systems and the means for resisting them. A Shared Postmodern Quality In comparing the films acknowledged to be Wenders's early road movies and the four films of the period 1986-1998, much could be made of the apparent dissimilarities between the groups. In stark contrast to the open form in road movies such as Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road, The State of Things, and others of what Wenders terms his "A-type movies" (Wenders, Logik 72), the four films of the last decade are structured 3 projects that accept script and tight narrative control. Nonetheless, seeing as Cook suggests that by 1982 the German director begins searching for new "oppositional strategies for his feature films" ("Paris, Texas and Beyond" 122), perhaps there need not be a discrepancy in the fact that these movies are so very different in terms of form. Perhaps Wenders is changing just the medium of his work, not the message for these film groups from opposite sides of the divide of 1982. Indeed, this will be precisely the argument, that Wenders's insistence on resistance and freedom remains the same throughout both periods of filmmaking, while merely the location for the deployment of this ideological program changes. In particular, starting in 1986 with Wings of Desire, Wenders trades in a medium for resistance (the road movie) for a message that resists (narrative content in films).