Fleeting image

The early wanderings of Wim Wenders

by Peter Keough

"WIM WENDERS: THE FIRST 15 YEARS," At the Harvard Film Archive, October 15 through 31.

Even alienation demands a context. If not the pre-eminent then certainly the most durable European filmmaker of the past 25 years, Wim Wenders has made a career out of exploring the no man's land of disaffection and anomie, the modern void of identity and the failure of such traditional consolations as relationships, stories, and images to fill it. Yet as the current retrospective of his work at the Harvard Film Archive -- "Wim Wenders: The First 15 Years" -- suggests, his oeuvre of obsessive rootlessness may have been rooted in a strictly defined state of things: the Cold War.

Not that he paid much mind to the geopolitical realities of that conflict -- but it still permeates the meandering search for identity, love, and reconciliation in every picture he made in those first 15 years. In the first (actually Wenders's second feature; his Summer in the City is mercifully not included here), 1972's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (screens October 30 at 7 p.m. and October 31 at 9:30 p.m.), a random killer holes up in an Austrian town near the Eastern Bloc frontier. In his last film represented here, 1987's Wings of Desire (October 30 at 9 p.m. and October 31 at 7 p.m.), his angelic hero worries about the division between spirit and flesh in a Berlin overshadowed by its omnipresent Wall.

In all Wenders's films of this period, the blurred borders of his characters are framed by the world's insistence on them. With the Wall having come down, his subsequent films -- Until the End of the World (1991); Wings' uneven sequel, Far Away, So Close! (1993); The End of Violence (1997) -- seem to have lost their edge. Has the auteur of aimlessness lost his way in this brave new world of amorphousness? His next project, Million Dollar Hotel, based on a story by Bono and starring Mel Gibson with a shaved head, sounds ominous.

But as a character says in his adaptation of Austrian writer Peter Handke's stringent novel The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, "Nobody loses their way these days." Given that film's labyrinth of verbal and visual fragments, its glut of detail and lack of affect, getting lost really has no meaning. Bloch (Arthur Brauss), a professional soccer goalkeeper, takes that most passive of positions to its extreme -- he refuses to try to stop a shot during a match. After the game he picks up a cashier at a local movie house, and when their physical intimacy leads to something more, he perfunctorily kills her. He flees eastward to a town on the border where the children no longer know how to talk and the horns of a stag killed wandering onto the minefield are hung up in the local tavern. Passing the time engaging in non-sequitur conversation, attending generic movies, or inciting pointless fistfights, he compulsively reads the paper, enjoying the story his life has become for other people.

The border fortifications aren't the only superpower presence in Goalie; dominating its kitschy detritus -- and every Wenders film thereafter -- are American jukeboxes, pop tunes, and, fatally for Bloch, US currency. Money is the least of the problems for Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler) in 1974's Alice in the Cities (October 23 at 7 p.m.), a German journalist touring highways and motels for a story on "the American scene." His publisher in Manhattan is not impressed when Winter hands him a box of Polaroids most notable for their vacancy in lieu of a story.

Out of a gig, alienated from his experience, Winter heads to the airport, where he meets a German woman, Lisa (Lisa Kreuzer), and her daughter Alice (Yella Rottländer). Their flight back to Germany delayed, they spend the night together, and the next morning Winter wakes to find his story thrust on him; Lisa has left, abandoning Alice to his care. What follows is a kind of chaste Lolita, with Winter and Alice returning to Europe in search of first the girl's mother, then her grandmother. The film may well be Wenders's most successful fusion of sentiment and abstraction, a delicately moving exercise in existential romantic comedy.

"The Yanks have colonized our subconscious," is the most quoted line from 1976's Kings of the Road (October 24 at 7:30 p.m. and October 26 at 7:45 p.m.), perhaps the only movie ever made about an itinerant movie-projector repairman and a pediatric psycho-linguist roaming the East German border. The two team up when the former, Bruno Winter (Wenders never quite shakes that name, or vulpine actor Rüdiger Vogler), saves the latter, nicknamed "Kamikaze" (Hanns Zischler), from a comical suicide attempt. Kamikaze has broken up with his wife, Winter has broken up with the past in general, and the void of the passing roadway is filled with fractured, angst-filled talk and random lyrics from American pop tunes. Nearly three hours in length, almost entirely extemporized (scripts were never Wenders's strong point), Kings alternately illuminates and enervates.

A more plot-oriented treatment of the anxiety of Yankee influence is Wenders's 1977 adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel The American Friend (October 15 at 9:30 p.m. and October 16 at 7 p.m.), one of his most cogent narratives and, not coincidentally, one of his best films. Hamburg framemaker Jonathan Zimmermann (incomparable European Everyman Bruno Ganz) has a wife, a son, and an incurable disease. Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper in one of his best performances), art dealer, shady entrepreneur, and embodiment of all that's attractive and sinister about the American image, involves him in a contract killing, guaranteeing his family's future at the price of his own.

As the framing of his life disintegrates, Jonathan develops a vaguely homoerotic bond with Tom, who covers his flip estrangement from his past, his identity, and the human race with the now familiar Wenders fetishes of Polaroids, jukeboxes, and other artifacts of American pop culture. A wry, slow-moving tragedy, Friend passes beyond noirish atmospherics to oneiric revelation, its seemingly extraneous imagery convulsing into epiphanies.

The international success of this film helped Wenders win his own American friend, Francis Coppola, who hired him for his first studio film, Hammett, a seeming golden opportunity that ended in four years of frustration and a mediocre movie. During one of that production's many hiatuses Wenders shot The State of Things (1982; October 25 at 9 p.m.), in which Friedrich Munro (Patrick Bauchau), a director much like Wenders with apologies to F.W. Murnau, has his first Hollywood movie cut short when funding -- and his Coppola-like producer -- disappear. For 90 minutes cast and crew dither idly on location on the Portuguese coast (stunningly photographed in black and white by Henri Alekan). As Munro whines about how stories are impossible because life has no obligation to tell any, and as Wenders's trademark motifs deteriorate into mannerisms, the film plays like a self-parody, and the climactic Hollywood confrontation between director and producer proves melodramatic and portentous.

State provided a needed purgative, however, for a director caught between a "European" sensibility of depicting "life as it is" and the Hollywood compulsion for storytelling. The two fuse in 1984's Paris, Texas (October 23 at 9:15 p.m. and October 24 at 4 p.m.), a film important also because it acknowledges at last another unbreached wall, that between men and women. Except for the redoubtable Alice 10 years before, women in Wenders's films had been most notable for their absence.

Paris opens with the womanless Wenders hero in extremis: a mute Travis Anderson (Harry Dean Stanton) wandering the desert, a place where, as he later explains, "there are no roads or words." His brother (Dean Stockwell) rescues him, and after an hour of touching, restrained rehabilitation (the laconic, note-perfect screenplay is by Sam Shepard), Travis and his young son search for his estranged wife, Jane (Nastassja Kinski, poignant and precise), whom they track down to a Houston peepshow parlor. In one of Wenders's most inspired (and, as is his wont, overdone) conceits, Travis and Jane face off in a booth separated by a two-way mirror, each reciting apologies to the dividing wall of narcissistic reflection and solipsistic projection.

This wall does not tumble, unlike the one in what many consider Wenders's masterpiece, Wings of Desire. Angels Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are the ultimate voyeurs -- or moviegoers: they can look at and listen to but not touch the lives of the broken souls of Berlin. Brooding high above the city or below in its libraries and streets, they behold its mundane wonders (photographed again by Alekan in sublime black and white) and hear the ongoing narratives of its inhabitants' thoughts. They are forbidden to intervene, but Damiel wants not just to smell the coffee but to taste it, and when he beholds a circus aerialist (Wenders's then wife, Solveig Dommartin) in chicken-feather wings, love, living color, and mortality transform him.

To embrace women, then, is to accept death, and it's this final wall that Wenders ponders in his two feature-length documentaries. Of those, 1980's Lightning over Water/Nick's Film (October 17 at 9 p.m.) -- a diary of the last days of Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel Without a Cause and The Lusty Man and a Wenders idol whom he cast in a small role in The American Friend -- is heartfelt, pretentious, and confused. But Tokyo-Ga (1985; October 16 at 9:30 and October 17 at 7 p.m.), an homage to another mentor, the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, is one of Wender's most mature works.

Adrift in the city immortalized in Ozu's films, most famously in his masterpiece Tokyo Story, Wenders observes such oddities as the Japanese taste for golf, rock and roll, and meticulously crafted fake food, all surrealistically limned in Ed Lachman's witty, haiku-like cinematography. In this welter of images of apocalyptic silliness, Wenders ponders the debasement of the imagination, the Americanization of all experience in a universal culture where "any shitty little TV was the center of the world . . . made to pick up the American images." From this morass he turns to the purity of Ozu, whose minimalist repetition of the same story in the same place with the same people in film after film Wenders contrasts with the inanities that prevail in contemporary cinema. But he's troubled by a visit to Ozu's gravesite, its headstone inscribed with the single Chinese character mu -- nothingness.

"No concept," Wenders says, "is more useless for a filmmaker. Film tries to present reality, and it is when a film crosses the gap between the screen and reality that we recognize greatness." Perhaps so, but one suspects that Ozu would disagree, that it is the absence that the image seeks to hide that is more significant -- the blank screen (or Weisse Wand, the name of the last cinema visited in Kings of the Road) that light, shadow, and sound confound only for a moment, and whose crossing is where all our wanderings cease.