Preoccupied with his ambivalent feelings about the incompatibility, or conflict, that he perceives to exist between film image and the filmic story, Wim Wenders has managed to turn a personal obsession into an intriguing and rewarding artistic career of strong cinematic and cultural relevance.
The tendency, as Wenders views it, for a story to falsify or pervert the truth latently contained within photographic and film images by creating connections that may not exist in the corresponding reality, is a threat to the integrity of the image. This is the central thematic of Alexander Graf's new study which concentrates throughout on the reflexive debate on image and narrative in Wenders' work, and the search for a balance that simultaneously grants the spectator a story without allowing the story to determine or influence the meaning of a film's images, and that provides a framework structure for the presentation of the images.
Graf explores the ways in which Wenders has consistently sought methods of coping with, indeed promoting, the idea of cinema as a medium capable of incorporating forms of narrative without falling back on established narrative traditions, and how Wenders attempts to guard the integrity of the image against manipulation through narrative influences, as a means to survey the relevance of his work for cinema as a whole. The recurrent question therefore appears; how can Wenders say at one and the same time that "I totally reject stories" but also acknowledge the fact that he does try to tell stories, and then what kinds of stories are these?
In Paris, Texas (1984) a man in a red baseball cap (Harry Dean Stanton) comes stumbling over the Mexican border and into the Texas desert, mute, bowed but driven by an obsessive quest. When his brother (Dean Stockwell) drives him home to LA, the shards of his broken life are painfully pieced together in fits and starts of emerging speech. Four years ago he 'lost' his family; now he has returned to find them. Reunited with his seven-year-old son, he travels to Houston, where he finds his wife (Nastassja Kinski) working in a peep-show. Wenders once again, is locating his emotional register on the limits of experience, finally achieving an unprecedented declaration of the heart, even if two people can only perceive each other through a mirror of distortion. Wenders' collaboration with Sam Shepard renders the space between the images in the film effective enough to hold the film together - there is a strong narrative structure, a clearly defined space in which narrative unfolds. It is inside this self-contained enclosed space that Wenders chooses his tool for the exploration of the filmic image: commercialised images of women, which for Wenders, with his belief in the moral responsibility of the image, constitute the archetypal degraded image. The film begins and ends with Travis who, having recognised his intrinsic weakness, drives away into the Texan night, still unable to fit into the social world, to leave his emotional desert. The film is left open because the dilemmas (for Wenders, of the image, and, for Travis, the relations to his wife) are not resolved. But this is just the beginning: a sign that the battle to restore and preserve the integrity of images is not lost.
In Wings of Desire (1987) Wenders reinvigorates his valuation of cinema's ability to present an image of physical reality 'photographically', because, as he states 'no other language is as capable of addressing itself to the physical reality of things'. More so than in Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire remains a fragmentary collection of impressions without ever seeking to develop a story out of these. Part romance, part comedy, part meditation on Walter Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', Wenders' remarkable film poists a world haunted by invisible angels listening in to human thoughts. Such narrative that there is concerns two benevolent spirits (Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander) surveying pre-reunification Berlin, who encounter a myriad of mortals, including an ageing writer blighted by memories of a devastated Germany; actor Peter Falk on location shooting a film about the Nazi era; and a lonely trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), with whom Ganz falls in love, thus prompting his desire to 'return' to mortal form. A film about the Fall and the Wall, it is suffused with hypnotic images (courtesy of Henri Alekan) and manages seemingly effortlessly to turn Wenders' and Peter Handke's poetic, literary script into pure cinematic expression. The conclusion for Wenders is thus less a discovery of story as a positive force, it is merely a more resolute re-affirmation of his consistently held position regarding the role of stories - that stories only exist in stories, whereas life goes by without the need to turn it into stories.
As opposed to mainstream cinema, Wenders, like some of his colleagues of the New German Cinema, most notably Werner Herzog, moves away from conventional patterns of plot construction in his films and towards an episodic narrative structure, most famously the 'road movie', in order to grant his films a degree of coherence that story can offer, while at the same time respecting the role and integrity of the image as the principle carrier of information.
Graf's book conveniently divides into two sections, the first part examining some elementary theoretical positions that inform and are of primary relevance to Wenders' film aesthetic. Chapter one focuses on the particularly intimate relationship the filmic image has with reality, by virtue of its photographic nature, but also on the conflicts that emerge from the assertion that this reality is in fact illusory, existing as it does, only in the films' images. Chapter two addresses the filmic narrative, first in the context of Wenders' belief in the incompatibility of images and stories, and then moving on to an analysis of the narrative structure of the stories that Wenders does, despite his mistrust, tell in his films. As both of these two chapters, comprising the first section, are heavily theoretically orientated, Chapter three, the second half of the book, closely analyses a representative section of six of Wenders' films - Alice in the Cities (1974), Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, The Million Dollar Hotel (1999), Lisbon Story (1994) - with the aim of animating the problematic exhaustively detailed from the outset, and covering in depth Wenders' career from the first to the latest independent features, and including one of the meditative documentary films Tokyo Ga (1985) for which Wenders is well-known.
Cogently argued and well balanced, this, together with The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image Narrative and the Postmodern Condition (ed. Roger Cook, 1997) and The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire (Robert Phillip Kolker, 1993) is an innovative and significant contribution to the appraisal of Wenders' imaginative celluloid odyssey.
Reviewed by Adrian Gargett
