August 13, 2015
For Wim Wenders is the photographic work “the other half of my life,” he says. The Düsseldorf Museum Kunst Palast has the exhibition “Wim Wenders. Landscapes. Photography” just extended until 30 August. Photo: AP
What does he do, is great cinema in the literal sense. Irritating beautiful, serious and yet emotionally, a narrator. Director Wim Wenders is one of the great masters of his craft in Germany. And not only there.
If the art of cinema is to create images for eternity, then Wim Wenders has a whole gallery of them to his credit: Bruno Ganz as sad angel on the Victory Column under the “Wings of Desire”, Nastassja Kinski in which specular slice of a peep show in “Paris, Texas” or Pina Bausch’s dancers in front of the monumental industrial heritage of the district.
Who wonders why his name abroad mostly as the first coat when the German cinema is mentioned, will find the answer in these pictures. Only a visual theater “Travels” as the Hollywood producers say it sets out to travel and must not be afraid of language barriers. This does not mean that this film and photo artist’s words meant nothing.
In his current retrospective at the Düsseldorf Art Palace (until 30 August) he has the large-format prints added small texts, as the finest of his many photo books, the pictures and story collection “Once”. If he makes still images, Wenders moves into the role of the old travel photographer, and one is amazed not bad, what he has seen it all: “Once I met Martin Scorsese / road in Monument Valley / He lay under his car / and tried. to change a tire. / We then / taken him and Isabella in our car. / It was a hilarious journey. “
No wonder that the native of Düsseldorf his first production company” Road Movies “called. Even his early films narrated by itinerancy. The flowering of the road film of the 60s and 70s had Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider” triggered; this also acting as a photographer film artists association Wenders later a close collegial friendship. These films came the old former cinema literally the back. But you did not have to wander far to make the route to the destination. Wenders’ early masterpiece “Alice in the Cities” leads a stranded journalists and a 9-year-old girl across Germany – and finds the most beguiling venues in Wuppertal
Meanwhile Wenders are most important films. restored with the support of the Film and Media Foundation of North Rhine Westphalia. At the last Berlinale, where the restored versions ran into a showcase, one could observe hectic industry professionals in how they took a break. What one finds in early Wenders, is time itself: created at a time when the film industry struggled against the overwhelming power of television with white sharks and space operas, was discovered with Wenders slowness. His black and white films “Over time,” and “The State of Things” defended the beauty of even then endangered celluloid film to the beginning of the video age.
1984 Wim Wenders turned the melancholy road movie “Paris, Texas”. Photo: Imago
Whoever visits Düsseldorf Wenders Foundation, finds even archived the notepad in huge film cans. These silver doses have now been overtaken by the course of time, become obsolete by digital media. Although the restored color movies now shine again in fresh colors and hopefully keep the black and white film grain you have: Without sadness you can not enjoy the digital copies. If Rüdiger Vogler “Over time,” explained as a projectionist in that the Maltese cross just yet is not liquor, but a central part of any film projector, but from the projection booth no more rattling can be heard – then has the cinema forever from its roots dissolved. It has left its nest, it is to speak to the early Wenders, “twenty thousand light years” away from home. Whether it is grown up?
In his films, Wenders embraces the latest digital technology, right up to his recent 3D movie “every thing will be fine”. In June Wenders turned already the next stereoscopic chamber play, and again put the issue of time in the title. “The beautiful days of Aranjuez” by Peter Handke’s two-character play is the fifth collaboration with the author. While a pair on an idyllic summer day asked about their own love affair, one sees the world around them gradually disappear in an apocalyptic vision. At the end survived only a jukebox, which is filled with songs by Dylan and Nick Cave. Even more so than in his films is the photographer Wenders in the surf passing time.
It is the analogy to visible reality, the Wenders keeps faith. His insistence has something of that put forward forcefully innocence of his angels from “Wings of Desire”. As gently as Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander the restless human race lay in these roles their hands on his shoulders, the photographer Wenders approaches of reality and holds them.
Wim Wenders, here in 2005 at the film festival in Cannes. Photo: AP
“What I’m interested in a photograph”, Wenders writes in the catalog of his Düsseldorf Museum exhibition, “is solely that it shows me something that is that I no more and no less than you see in. That there are so “Potential doubters ahead haste, he adds:” Can I leave so, whether there is’? Should I not rather say in the past tense, if there was the ‘where a photograph always necessary points to something that once existed and now just are only on this screen. “
As a director Wenders was in the seventies, one of the few in the world to record on that found photographic spaces and narrative charge could, as it had led the way Michelangelo Antonioni. And the spectators proved those duplicate service that has become so rare in cinema, namely to see stories and images simultaneously. Then it looked in his later years at times like this, as if he had lost the way to radical masterpieces. In retrospect, it seems as if his talent in photography and documentaries wintered finally with the big films “Do not Come Knocking” and “every thing will be fine” return.
” When the child was a child, “begins one of the angels-monologues in” Wings of Desire “. Wim Wenders still can make images that look like a the world a child shows that she sees for the first time.
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