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Friday, February 02, 2007

The Wim Wenders Collection: Volume 2
The Scarlet Letter (1973)
Wrong Move (1975)
The American Friend (1977)
Lightning over Water (1980)
Room 666 (1982)
Tokyo-Ga (1985)
Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989)
A Trick of Light (1995)
Directed by Wim Wenders
(Anchor Bay)

Reviewed by Michael Joshua Rowin

With the possible exception of Nic Roeg, one would be hard pressed to name a director fallen so far from art house grace as Wim Wenders. Ever since Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, the most accessible and “American” director to emerge from Germany has seen the credit he accumulated from those mid-Eighties crossover successes squandered on ambitious, misunderstood projects like Until the End of the World and Land of Plenty and outright bombs and pointless retreads like The Million Dollar Hotel and last year’s Don’t Come Knocking. When the Voice’s Michael Atkinson proclaims “Wenders has never seemed more of a tourist” in regard to Land of Plenty’s Ground Zero-set coda, it’s almost hard to stomach — Wenders’s outsider view of foreign cultures and locales was once considered as observant as Marker, his existential genre play and meditations on identity as insightful as Godard. But now with fellow neue deutsche Kino alumni like R.W. Fassbinder and Werner Herzog receiving permanent canonization amidst career retrospectives and resurgences, Wenders’s approach — wavering between intellectual analysis and fuzzy lyricism — has never seemed more compromised or undisciplined. Anchor Bay’s second volume of The Wim Wenders Collection (which includes all three films from the first installment) would be a chance to refurbish the poor reputation the director has earned over the last two decades if the mixed bag didn’t draw attention to his conspicuous deficiencies.

The 8-disc set begins chronologically with the weakest and most anomalous work of Wenders’s career, an uninspired adaptation of The Scarlet Letter. There’s a good reason this 1973 film version of Hawthorne is the first and last period piece Wenders ever attempted: like Godard, Wenders is a director only at home among the dislocations and detritus of modernity, and in a straightforward interpretation of 17th-century Puritanism run rampant in colonial New England (with the coast of Spain ridiculously doubling as Salem), he is lost. In an attempt to make the most of the circumstances surrounding this needless European co-production, Wenders uses The Scarlet Letter’s source material and international cast to exercise his thematic and visual concerns, but to no avail; for his third feature, Wenders’s obsession with the wide-open spaces and possibilities of the American landscape just couldn’t be fully expressed. On the voice-over commentary for the film (each disc contains one from the director himself, along with some worthwhile extras and suitable liner notes by Godfrey Cheshire) Wenders admits to “going through the motions” in The Scarlet Letter, and it shows.

But Wenders learned the lesson of never doing anything that didn’t fully reflect his vision. The next step was Alice in the Cities, Wenders’s defining work and the strongest realization of his ideas on wanderlust, childhood, American culture and rock ‘n’ roll, and the mystery of images. Instead of Alice this set includes its successor Wrong Move (1975), a Wenders work just as much in need of discovery. Like Alice, Kings of the Road, and Paris, Texas, Wrong Move exemplifies Wenders’s philosophy of motion equaling emotion in a character’s pursuit of meaning and identity. Wenders and frequent collaborator Peter Handke adapt Goethe’s The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister to structure Rüdiger Vogler’s traveling adventures, incorporating Fassbinder’s monologue-heavy angst and Sturm-und-Drang pace into an archetypal “road movie” format. Wrong Move is singular, however, among those similar works from Wenders, for confronting the scar of German history, represented here by a former concentration camp commander (played by Hans-Christian Blech) whom Vogler contemplates assassinating.

Wrong Move is Wenders’s most “German” film; The American Friend (1977), another of his widely recognized triumphs, belongs to the cross-cultural, cross-national cinema with which he is closely associated. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, The American Friend works on intersecting planes: as unaffected noir homage (of all the films in the set, it’s the most representative of his interest in America and American cinema), as tribute to an international legacy of filmmaking mavericks (all its underworld characters are played by directors), as psychological and philosophical treatise on shifting identity (Bruno Ganz’s everyman is coerced into committing evil to support his family), and as visual ode to the melancholy of the global village, the indomitable anonymity of urban life and travel fostering the same sway over states of mind in Paris, New York, and Hamburg. Wenders’s unmistakable — and, at the time, unrivaled — sensibility imbues The American Friend with a foreboding through mood and texture: beyond the revelation of wrangled wild man Dennis Hopper as the seductive, manipulative Ripley, the film is ultimately, thanks to the camera of Robby Muller, patiently voluptuous (and pulsating, as Wenders puts it, with “poisonous greens”), its urban compositions as evocative of loneliness as of paranoia. Along with Alice, The American Friend is a high-water mark in Wenders’s career.

Interestingly, Anchor Bay’s selections for The Wim Wenders Collection lean heavily toward the director’s many documentaries on cinema, and the last five movies in the set, each in its own way, investigate the history and future of the medium. Lightning Over Water, credited to both Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray, is the most striking of these, and surely the only film of its kind. In it Wenders attempts to direct a feature film starring Ray in which the maverick Hollywood director takes up his painter character from The American Friend. But Wenders inserts himself in the film and, due to the declining health of the cancer-ravaged Ray, proceeds to film a documentary of the legend’s last days. The result is a delicate, heartfelt metafilm that shows nothing but respect for the cinematic past (the dignity of Ray), its unsure future (inserted video footage representing the decay of disease and aging), and the artistic struggle to stave off death or else transcend it with images that ironically are just as ephemeral as life.

Room 666 is also concerned with mortality: the death of cinema. Wenders sets up a camera and microphone in a hotel room during the 1982 Cannes Film Festival and individually asks fellow directors, many legends among them, to answer “a question in the air”: roughly, can and will cinema survive as an art form? Like the other documentaries in the set, Room 666’s inquiry is framed by the ascendance of television and video images as the new prominent visual aesthetic. Given the current climate of digital and computer technologies in which cinema must exist, adapt, and thrive, the question is now more important than ever, and thus the context of Room 666 is still pertinent and barely dated. Using mostly a straight interview format, Wenders constructs a simple but effective setting (with the room’s flickering television providing fitting counterpoint) that allows his respondents ample opportunity to make the film their own: Godard eloquently provides historical background in his usual epic stream of measured aphorisms; Paul Morrissey nonchalantly proclaims cinema long deceased, devoid of characters at the expense of the director’s ego; Herzog, barefoot, offers a stirring rebuke of the thickening dread; and the government-persecuted Turkish filmmaker Yilmaz Güney, speaking via previously recorded tape, intrepidly clings to cinema as a means of resistance. The myriad responses express the controversial nature of encroaching commercial demands and “outside influence” from newer technologies, making Room 666 a fascinating document and the closest Wenders has ever come to uninhibitedly confronting this many-headed dragon.

Later films would yield lesser results. Tokyo-Ga has its perpetual traveler-director embarking on Tokyo circa 1985 to find traces of the lost mythical city of Yasujiro Ozu, whose films he deems the “sacred treasure of the cinema.” What Tokyo-Ga ends up becoming, however, is an extended expression of disbelief at the inauthentic Westernization of modern Japan — trekking through Pachinko parlors, golf ranges, and a nightscape of bars and vacuous television, Wenders discovers the traditional beauty of Ozu’s time irrevocably faded. Comparisons to Chris Marker’s contemporaneous Sans Soliel are unavoidable (in fact, the two filmmakers cross paths in Tokyo-Ga, with Wenders sneaking a rare glimpse at Marker’s rarely photographed mug): Both films gather images of urban confusion, from the chaos of crowds to the din of advertising, employing montage and voiceover to parse from them an inchoate humanity. The major difference is that Marker does and Wenders does not. He describes Ozu’s genius as presenting “an image of man in our century, a usable, true and valid image in which he not only recognizes himself but from which, and above all, he may learn more about himself,” but Tokyo-Ga demonstrates Wenders’s exasperation at the impossibility of achieving the same level of comprehension through his art in the face of the industrial and commercial takeover of everyday life. Bookending the film with clips from the beginning and ending of Ozu’s masterwork, Tokyo Story, Wenders retreats to the security of his hero’s triumphant artistic encounter with the radical transformation of Japan from before and after WWII, and in effect abandons his own search.

That search is taken up again in 1989’s Notebook on Cities and Clothes. An unofficial companion piece to Tokyo-Ga, Notebook finds Wenders back in Japan, as well as Europe; between the two films came his return to German filmmaking with 1987’s Wings of Desire. Thankfully, Wenders jettisoned for Tokyo-Ga and Notebook the lugubrious romantic mysticism that made Wings the most overrated (and overblown) effort of his career, but however distanced, the “Japan films” are far from objective sociology. Notebook’s study of fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, commissioned by the Centre Pompidou, inevitably leads back to Wenders’s favorite subjects: cities and cinema. Just as he swerves around the issue of fashion as commodity in order to dwell on Yamamoto’s expert craftsmanship, so does Wenders avoid the economic and cultural ramifications of video by asserting his own mastery as Auteur. Notebook contains a ton of noodling, with the director holding video screens and cameras in front of the cinematic apparatus to create a mosaic of dueling images and textures, an outwardly playful showcase that masks an inability to venture any further (as he would eventually do in Until the End of the World). It seems that Wenders, despite all signs of intellectual skepticism, believes in the Artist’s creative power to transcend the social and cultural dimensions he’s taken upon himself to investigate. For a filmmaker so committed to difference and the instability of identity, Wenders often disconcertingly settles on safe directorial approaches.

But if the tension between Wenders’s incompatible methodologies is at least palpable in Tokyo-Ga and Notebook, allowing those films the dignity of contradiction, A Trick of Light ends the set on a slight, insignificant note. Produced in collaboration with a class Wenders taught at the time, the film is a too-cute trifle made for the centenary of the birth of cinema. Wenders tells the story of the Skladanowsky brothers — German inventors whose dual-projector Biograph predated the Lumieres’ advanced and far more recognized apparatus — by combining silent film-style recreations of the Skladanowsky saga, straightforward documentary interviews with Max Skladanowsky’s surviving 91-year-old daughter, and scenes where these disparate modes miraculously interact. It’s a pleasant concoction but also a lightweight one that only achieves grandeur (or anything beyond innovative quirk) when silent-film Max and his young daughter journey by horse and carriage through modern-day Berlin. Wenders emphasizes the awe and sadness for their vanished world and the rise of an intimidating, less cohesive one, unleashing the sentimental longing barely contained in his usually less precious work.

And so, even as it jumps seemingly at random through his career, The Wim Wenders Collection charts Wenders’s general decline as a great director. Though Anchor Bay’s selections so far don’t tell the entire story behind this often self-sabotaging filmmaker’s diverse hits and misses (lately, mostly misses), the set nonetheless contains important puzzle pieces, a trail of diminishing returns, for anyone concerned with how a once vital presence in the cinema gradually dimmed.