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On
the Road with Wim Wenders
Adam
Jahnke - Main Page
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Born
in Germany and now basically a citizen of the world, Wim Wenders is
a highly respected filmmaker whose reputation in this country
curiously seems to be based on a mere handful of movies. Best known
for 1987's Wings of Desire and
his 1999 documentary Buena Vista Social
Club, Wenders has in fact been prolifically making movies
since the early 1970s. There are those who also highly esteem his
1991 science fiction epic Until the End
of the World, a movie that struck me as badly muddled but
with enough redeeming qualities to make me curious to see his
280-minute director's cut. My own favorite of Wenders' films is Paris,
Texas, a 1984 drama boasting what may be Harry Dean
Stanton's finest performance.
It
isn't that Wenders' American fans aren't curious to see his other
work. It's just that for most of his career, a lot of his smaller
movies have been difficult to lay hands on over here. Anchor Bay
recently made that quest a whole lot easier with the release of The
Wim Wenders Collection, an 8-disc boxed set of movies
ranging from 1973 to 1995.
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This
is, in fact, a beefed-up version of a 3-disc collection the
company released a few years back. But with the addition of five
more movies, some of which have never been released in America
on any format, this new set is a lot more than your usual
double-dip.
While it would be a pleasure to report that every film here is a
masterpiece, the set kicks things off with one of Wenders' least
successful works. The Scarlet Letter
was Wenders' second feature as a professional filmmaker and it's
difficult to imagine a bigger sophomore slump. Tempted by the
opportunity to work on a larger canvas, Wenders plunged into
this adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel despite the fact
that he had little affinity for the period and knowing that
budget constraints would force him to cut corners. So we have
the coast of Spain playing the part of Colonial New England,
some community-theatre attempts at costuming, and an
international cast speaking their dialogue in whatever their
native tongue happens to be and then dubbed entirely into
German. Needless to say, none of this works particularly well.
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In
fact, the whole enterprise seems so ill-advised that it's somewhat
astonishing any of it works at all. Senta Berger's performance as
Hester Prynne almost makes the film worth watching on its own. It's
a strong piece of acting and you keep hoping that the rest of the
movie will rise up to her level. Unfortunately, that never quite
happens. Hans Christian Blech makes for an interesting Roger
Chillingworth but Lou Castel is far too much of a limp noodle to be
a believable Reverend Dimmesdale. Possibly the worst element of the
movie is the awful, cloying music by Jürgen Knieper, worth
noting because Wenders' use of music in film is usually impeccable.
In the end, the best that can be said of Wenders' Scarlet
Letter is that it's better than Demi Moore's version
twenty years later.
Happily, things improve with Wrong Move,
the second disc of the set. Released in 1975, Wrong
Move finds Wenders back in familiar territory, telling
the story of Wilhelm (Rüdiger Vogler), a wannabe writer sent
out into the world by his mother to find himself. His aimless
journey brings him into contact with an old man with a secret (The
Scarlet Letter's Blech), his silent teenage daughter
(Nastassja Kinski in her first film), an actress (Hanna Schygulla),
a young amateur poet (Peter Kern), and a suicidal industrialist
(Ivan Desny). The group goes for long walks, stays up late into the
night and discusses dreams, philosophy and abstract thought.
If Wrong Move doesn't exactly
sound like an action-packed thrill-ride... well, it's not. It's a
slow, often difficult movie to wrap your head around. It's an
extremely talky movie and not all of the conversations are equally
compelling. For that matter, Wilhelm is not a particularly
sympathetic central character. Even so, the movie is worth watching.
Most of Wenders' films are road movies. In fact, you could probably
make the argument that they all are on some level. Wrong
Move is a prototypical Wenders road movie, so it's
interesting to compare it to later films like Paris,
Texas and to see how he and frequent cinematographer
Robby Müller shoot their native country. Later films would
examine the globalization of different countries but Wrong
Move focuses exclusively on Germany, giving us a snapshot
of the country and its people in 1975.
The American Friend, the third
disc of the set, is the best-known film here and also the best.
Based on Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's
Game (remade in 2002 under that title), The
American Friend casts Dennis Hopper as Tom Ripley, an
amoral American living in Hamburg making a dishonest living selling
paintings by an artist believed dead who now lives in seclusion in
New York forging his own work. Ripley meets a picture framer (Bruno
Ganz) at an auction who refuses to shake his hand. He remembers the
insult later when an associate from Paris pays a call looking for an
assassin. Ripley sets the Frenchman onto the German and the game is
afoot.
Hopper wasn't the first or the last actor to play Ripley. Alain
Delon preceded him in the terrific Purple
Noon and years later, John Malkovich and, most famously,
Matt Damon would take on the part in Ripley's
Game and The Talented Mr.
Ripley. But Hopper plays the part differently than anyone
before or since. So differently, in fact, that author Patricia
Highsmith at first hated this film (she later reconsidered according
to Wenders' commentary track). But Hopper's interpretation works
beautifully. His Ripley is nuanced and complex. He's smart and
cultured enough to fit in with the art world but has a wildness
lurking just behind his eyes at all times. With his cowboy hat and
pack of Marlboros, he epitomizes the European image of Americans,
simultaneously attractive and dangerous.
Ganz is also outstanding as the artisan Zimmermann, carrying a sense
of doom about him throughout the entire film. Wenders populates much
of the supporting cast with other filmmakers including Nicholas Ray
as the supposedly dead artist, Sam Fuller as a gangster, and Gérard
Blain as Ripley's French associate (of course, Hopper himself is a
celebrated director in his own right). On one level this is just
stunt casting but the directors fit perfectly into the film. Wenders
also proves himself to be a skilled director of suspense, not losing
sight of the story's thriller aspects in two key sequences. The
American Friend is ultimately one of Wenders' best works,
a taut suspense thriller that works on multiple levels, working in
his recurring themes and motifs.
The success of The American Friend
led Wenders to America where he spent many years working on the film
Hammett for Francis Ford
Coppola's American Zoetrope company. During this time, Nicholas Ray,
who had befriended Wenders during the making of The
American Friend, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.
Frustrated by the slow development of Hammett
and prompted by a desire to spend time with his dying friend,
Wenders collaborated with Ray on what would turn out to be his last
work, the sort-of-documentary Lightning
Over Water. Ray hadn't worked in Hollywood since 1963 and
wanted to spend his last days making a film... any film. So he and
Wenders started shooting with no script and only the vaguest idea
what their film would be about. As Ray's health quickly
deteriorated, the movie took on a life of its own.
Too staged to be a documentary but too real to be considered a work
of fiction, Lightning Over Water
is a difficult film to watch. For fans of Nicholas Ray, it's
particularly painful. He often appears very frail and, especially in
his last scene, there's no escaping the harsh knowledge that we are
watching this man die before our eyes. But it is ultimately
rewarding. It's a very intimate look at the relationship between
these two friends and their shared love of film.
Death and dying hover over the next film in the set as well, the
short documentary Room 666. At
the Cannes Film Festival in 1982, Wenders ponders the future of
cinema, if any. He wonders if cinema is a dying art-form about to be
swallowed by television and other emerging technologies. To explore
this question, he set up a camera and a tape recorder in a hotel
room and invited a number of filmmakers to come in alone and give
their thoughts. The resulting 45-minute film is often fascinating,
especially now, 25 years later.
The filmmakers interviews in Room 666
include the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner
Fassbinder, Michelangelo Antonioni and Steven Spielberg. Some, like
Paul Morrissey, are ready to lower the coffin of cinema into the
ground while others, like Spielberg, remain optimistic. In many
ways, technology has evolved much faster than any of these
filmmakers dreamed possible at the time, so some of what they say
now seems curiously naïve and quaint. But some, like Herzog,
now seem remarkably prescient. Either way, Room
666 is a valuable document and a once-in-a-lifetime
gathering of film greats.
Wenders' experiments with the documentary form continue in Tokyo-Ga,
his appreciation of the films of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. In
theory, the idea behind this film is Wenders' quest to discover for
himself the Tokyo he became familiar with in the films of Ozu. This
never really seems to happen but the images of Tokyo he does capture
are often fascinating in their own right. Wenders hangs out in
pachinko parlors, pays a visit to a factory that specializes in
creating food replicas out of wax, and encounters some rockabilly
kids dancing in the rain. He ponders Ozu's films in voiceover and
interviews two of his collaborators, actor Chishu Ryu and cameraman
Yuuharu Atsuta.
The interview with Atsuta is very moving and is more of a tribute to
Ozu than anything else in the film. Tokyo-Ga
rambles a bit and if you're expecting a straightforward documentary
about Ozu, you'll be sorely disappointed. But it's engaging and
enjoyable. More than anything, it's like taking a vacation to Tokyo
with Wim Wenders with no real set agenda.
Wenders continues to explore Tokyo in Notebook
on Cities and Clothes, a documentary on fashion designer
Yohji Yamamoto. Like its title suggests, Notebook
has a loose, improvisatory feel about it. Wenders freely admits that
he has little interest in fashion and uses the movie primarily as an
experiment in combining film and video and exploring his own
interests in the similarities between fashion and film.
I perhaps might have enjoyed this film more if I had a deeper
interest in fashion design myself. As it is, it's easier to admire
the movie's technique than to embrace the thing itself. After the
gloom and doom scenarios threatened by video in Room
666, it's interesting to watch Wenders experiment with
the technology and ultimately grow to embrace it. Notebook
is as much about Wenders as it is about Yamamoto, although scenes
showing the designer at work definitely hold some interest.
The final film in the set, A Trick of
Light, is a real buried treasure. Made in collaboration
with Wenders' students in Berlin, the film pays tribute to the
Skladanowsky brothers, a trio of German inventors and entertainers
whose Bioscope projector was unveiled at the Wintergarden weeks
before the Lumière brothers premiered their Cinematographe in
Paris. The film begins in the style of an old silent film with Udo
Kier playing Max Skladanowsky. It then switches to the present with
Wenders and a film crew interviewing Max's daughter Lucie, then in
her 90s. The past intrudes on the present as we ultimately switch
back to the silent film style.
A Trick of Light is an
affectionate and playful movie. The spot-on silent sequences display
a genuine love of filmmaking rarely seen in similar recreations.
Even Wenders' best films often feel deathly serious so it's a
delight to see him having fun here. It's not a perfect film, by any
means. In an attempt to pad the film out to feature-length, the
movie ends with a seemingly endless credit sequence. But even this
feels light and amusing, as it's so immediately transparent why
these credits are taking so long to unfold. A
Trick of Light is a respectful and light-hearted tribute
to the early days of film and an appropriate capper to this set.
Anchor Bay's previous Wenders collection included only The
American Friend, Lightning
Over Water and Notebook on
Cities and Clothes. Those discs seem to be identical to
those found here. All the films look remarkably good with vibrant
colors and clean transfers that are too often atypical for movies of
this vintage. Audio options are equally fine with unspectacular but
effective 5.1 remixes given to the three films mentioned above.
Wenders provides a commentary on each disc and they're all worth a
listen. He's upfront about his displeasure with The
Scarlet Letter, provides insight into the making of his
skeleton-crew documentaries, and fills in the blanks that show how
each of these films influenced later movies like Wings
of Desire and Until the End of
the World. He's joined on The
American Friend by Dennis Hopper, who clearly still holds
a special place in his heart for the film. The
American Friend and Notebook
also include a selection of deleted scenes with optional commentary
by Wenders. The American Friend
also includes the original trailer and bios for Wenders, Hopper and
Bruno Ganz. Lightning Over Water
includes Nicholas Ray's lecture at Vassar College (shot on video)
and bios for Wenders and Ray. Notebook on
Cities and Clothes throws in a short featurette called
Twelve Years Later reuniting
Wenders and Yamamoto and Wenders' bio. The box also includes a
booklet with informative, well-written liner notes by Godfrey
Cheshire.
My only complaint with this set comes on Tokyo-Ga.
Despite what it says on the back cover, the disc does not include
subtitles. For the most part, this isn't a problem as Wenders
narrates the film in English. But the clips from Ozu's Tokyo
Story are taken from a print with French subtitles and
Werner Herzog appears briefly, speaking in German. So unless you
speak Japanese or French and German, you're out of luck with those
scenes.
The Wim Wenders Collection is
a fantastic set, reminiscent of Anchor Bay's great work with Werner
Herzog's films. I hope they can do a follow-up including such films
as The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty
Kick, Alice in the Cities,
Kings of the Road and The
State of Things. Until that happens, this box is a
treasure trove for Wenders' fans, including one of his best films
and some that you are almost guaranteed to be discovering for the
first time.
FILM RATINGS:
The Scarlet Letter: C-
Wrong Move: B-
The American Friend: A
Lightning Over Water: B+
Room 666: B-
Tokyo-Ga: B
Notebook on Cities and Clothes: C+
A Trick of Light: B+
DISC RATINGS (Overall - Video/Audio/Extras): A/B+/A-
Adam Jahnke
ajahnke@thedigitalbits.com |
Adam
Jahnke - Main Page |
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