Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 6, February 2004
Peter Ruppert
The Perils and Possibilities of Story:
Alexander Graf's _The Cinema of Wim Wenders_
Alexander Graf _The Cinema of Wim
Wenders: The Celluloid Highway_ London: Wallflower
Press, 2002
ISBN
1-903364-29-9 ix + 179pp. 'Stories are impossible,
but it's impossible to live without them.' Wim
Wenders Alexander Graf's
perceptive and intelligent introduction to the cinema of Wim
Wenders recalls Godard's astute observation that the French
don't tell stories; they do something else. According to
Graf, Wenders has been trying to do 'something else'
throughout his long career as a filmmaker. Convinced that
the film image and the filmic story are incompatible,
Wenders has explored the possibilities of a cinema without
the need for stories, or, more accurately, a cinema in which
stories provide the minimal framework for the presentation
of images. Graf's book examines the elementary theoretical
positions that motivate Wenders's rejection of traditional
movie narratives and his passionate commitment to a cinema
of unmediated visual perception based on the affective
richness of the moving sound image. Graf's thesis is that
this fundamental conflict between image and story informs
Wenders's themes, production methods, and critical writings,
and constitutes the unifying factor in his diverse work in
film and other media. This conflict, I would add, and
Wenders's uneven success in resolving it, also accounts for
the recurring criticism that his films are narratively weak,
and for his reputation as a failed storyteller. Citing theorists like Bela
Balazs, Andre Bazin, and Siegfried Kracauer, Wenders has
made the film image the technical and aesthetic basis of his
cinema. Graf shows how, like his mentors, Wenders is
impressed by the idea that photography is a mechanical
process for recording the physical world. It is this
capacity of photography to objectively record reality,
Wenders believes, that promotes our awareness of physical
existence, making it transparent and bringing us to a closer
connection with the real world. The accurate pictorial
reproduction of physical reality -- highlighting its
fleeting nature and rescuing it from the transience of time
-- is, for Wenders, not only an aesthetic goal, but also a
profoundly ethical one. The mission of the cinema, as
Wenders's sees it, is to preserve and protect the integrity
of the image from anything that threatens the freedom of
vision that it can provide. Foremost among these
threats, in Wenders's view, is our pernicious need for
stories. Although Wenders recognizes the therapeutic
importance of stories, he deeply distrusts them: 'In the
relationship between story and image', he writes, 'I see
story as a kind of vampire, trying to suck the blood from an
image' (3). His conviction, as Graf demonstrates, is that
stories falsify and pervert the truth latent within the
filmic image; they manipulate the free flow of images,
destroy their temporal relationships to reality, build
illusory connections between phenomena, and bring about
'lies, nothing but lies, and the biggest lie is that they
show coherence where there is none' (3). Graf's book focuses
on theoretical issues underpinning Wenders's preoccupation
with this story/image conflict, analyzes how these two
elements interact in the films, and investigates the various
strategies that Wenders has employed to circumvent this
conflict. Divided into three long
chapters, plus a brief Introduction and a Conclusion, Graf's
book pursues the contradiction between Wenders's claim that
he rejects stories, and the obvious fact that his films do
tell stories. Chapter One focuses on Wenders's views on the
filmic image and its intimate relationship to reality.
Chapter Two analyzes the narrative structures of the kinds
of stories that Wenders does manage to tell. And Chapter
Three provides close readings of six of Wenders's films,
including the kind of meditative documentary for which
Wenders is well known. In the Introduction Graf
notes the great diversity of theme, form, and genre of
Wenders's prolific output -- 17 feature films, 11 short
films, 7 documentaries, 2 television films, music videos,
and numerous advertising films, along with his work as a
photographer. He sketches Wenders's relationship with
directors of the New German Cinema, and documents the
sources of inspiration and influence -- Nicholas Ray, John
Ford, the road film, film noir, the Western, American music.
Often seen as one of the key figures of the New German
Cinema, Graf argues that Wenders was actually 'more an
outsider . . . than and insider' (7), and that American
culture and Hollywood are the strongest influences on his
work. (In _Kings of the Road_, for example, one of the
characters utters the famous line 'the Yanks had colonized
our subconscious'. Critics generally agree that they have
certainly colonized Wenders's films. Probably no other
filmmaker has dealt with the American presence in the
European subconscious as directly and as often as Wenders
has.) Given the wide variety of genre and media that
Wenders's work encompasses, Graf rejects an approach to his
work along the lines of a national cinema as too
restrictive. He finds the term 'European director'
insufficient. What best summarizes Wenders's diverse output
and constitutes its unifying feature, Graf maintains, is the
image/story problematic. Graf's detailed analyses
of the six films, then, are performed within the context of
Wenders's preoccupation with the conflict between image and
story. For Graf, all of Wenders's films are motivated by the
search for a narrative structure that allows the images to
retain their affective richness and integrity. Avoiding
conventional patterns of plot, Wenders's understated and
diffuse narratives provide little more than a coherent
context for the presentation of images. Graf notes that
Wenders avoids conventional plot constructions, opting
instead for episodic, fragmented, open-ended structures in
which each sequence remains autonomous and yet relates to
others 'like beads on a necklace' (48). From the perspective
of the image/story dialectic, Wenders's entire oeuvre is 'an
ongoing exploration, an experiment in progress'
(92). It is not surprising that
Graf finds in each film a variation on Wenders's central
dilemma. _Alice in the Cities_ (1974), Wenders's first
independent production, is a road movie with a linear, open,
episodic narrative. Graf cites scenes and sequences that do
not build up meanings or further the narrative -- they are
just there, sufficient unto themselves, documenting an event
in space and time. The film also foregrounds perception, the
act of seeing (children in Wenders's films seem to enjoy the
purest perception, a pure ontological gaze), and a favorite
theme of Wenders's: the inflation and commodification of
images on American television -- 'an optical toxin' (80) --
and how advertising has eroded and degraded American
cinematic traditions. _Paris, Texas_ (1984),
another experiment in cinematic form, exhibits one of the
strongest narrative structures in Wenders's work, recalling
for Graf the narratives of the earlier _The American Friend
_ (1977) and _Hammett_ (1982). This time Wenders worked from
a script by Sam Shepard, allowed the narrative to develop
within a closed space, and relied more on dramatic tension.
The film even culminates in a dramatic peak and a sense of
closure. Graf finds again that 'the film is about images,
about degraded images, and about the degraded images men can
have of women' (103). More than _Paris, Texas_,
_Wings of Desire_ (1987) is, in Graf's reading, 'a
fragmentary collection of impressions, without ever seeking
to develop a story out of these' (130). Scripted by Peter
Handke, the film thematizes both the image and the search
for a story, and deals with the tensions between European
and American cultural identity. This remarkable film seems
to blend Wenders's desire for meaning-making hypnotic images
with an episodic structure and a diffuse, unassertive story.
Unlike many critics who see the story in this film as a more
positive force in Wenders's work, Graf insists that the film
reiterates Wenders's position regarding the role of stories,
as expressed in _The State of Things_ (1982): 'Stories only
exist in stories (whereas life goes by without the need to
turn it into stories)' (131). Wenders's goal, according
to Graf, is to accommodate the demands of spectators for
story, without compromising his passionate position on the
film's image. The result, as Graf demonstrates again and
again, is that Wenders uses story only as a frame to
structure his films: the films are episodic, with minimal
editing, and avoid as much as possible unrelated time
sequences and changes in location. The moving sound image
transmits most of the information in these films, and none
of Wenders's films tell stories so assertive that the images
are subordinate to the story. Graf's primary interest is
to describe and elaborate the basic premises of Wenders's
film aesthetic. Although he admits that Wenders's
meditations on the cinema 'can sometimes leave an impression
of puerile idealism' (151), Graf generally refrains from
staging a full-scale critical interrogation and refutation
of Wenders's premises. No doubt Wenders's film aesthetic is
more of personal moral stance than a substantial theoretical
position on the nature of cinema. Wenders's weighty
statements about unmediated visual perception and the
redemption of the real can strike the reader as naive,
essentialist, and ahistorical, especially at a time when
current theory emphasizes the inaccessibility of the real,
and the constitutive process and mediating structures of
representation. Wenders's belief that cinematography bears
an unimpeachable witness to 'things as they are', and
provides an ontological bond between representation and what
it represents, invokes a metaphysics of presence that leads
to the misrecognition that images can exist somehow in an
unmediated, nonmedialized, nonedited form. For Wenders, only
film can redeem the real. The temporal and spatial
separation of images from the realities they depict --
making them reproductions, mere illusions of reality, and
spectacle -- seems to have little bearing on Wenders's
desire for an unmediated representation of reality. Unlike
Farber's special high tech camera in _Until the End of the
World_ (which records not optical images, but the
neurological event of seeing), moving film images (even
'true ones') do not automatically imprint on our brains --
they are negotiated, mediated by our point of view, our
experiences, our memories. Even if we grant that film images
have a latent truth-telling potential and can preserve the
real world, they are also, as Graf points out, highly
fragile and open to abuse. Just like stories, they can be
used to manipulate, distort, and tell lies. But there is also much
that is attractive and appealing about Wenders's film
aesthetic. His ideal, after all, is to restore an
existential openness and visual richness to the film
experience and to safeguard the viewer's freedom. Cinema,
for Wenders, is not just as sensuous object, but a sensual,
sensing, sense-making process -- a performative act that
implicates the viewer in a kind of double seeing: the film
sees the world as visible images and the viewer sees the
images both as world and the seeing of the world. Wenders's
respect for the appearance of physical reality, his desire
to waken the spirit in things, to narrate the flow of time
in images, suggests that he remains committed to the high
modernist aesthetic and ethical project to redeem everyday
life in and through film. Graf observes that Wenders's
approach to filmmaking is 'purely phenomenological' (70), an
approach that promotes creative perception of images,
remains open to the visible world, and allows things to
present and represent themselves, in order to uncover their
secret. Unlike Eisenstein's montage, which represents an
analytic and violent approach to life, showing our
maladjustment to the world we live in, Wenders's cinema
patiently probes, offering us a poetics of film which values
contemplation, harmony, accord. Wenders's desire is to show
things 'as they are', to avoid the consumption of images by
story, a cinema that carries on an incessant dialogue with
reality. Like Balazs and Bazin, Wenders sees a genetic link
between the image and the physical world, a link that allows
for discourse with the real world, and opens the possibility
that we might see what we had previously ignored. Overall, Graf provides a
balanced, penetrating, and coherent introduction to the work
of Wim Wenders. The strength of Graf's book is in its
exposition of Wenders's film aesthetic, and the clarity of
his explanations. Unlike many introductory books of this
kind, Graf manages to take us to the core of Wenders's
cinema. It may seem churlish, then, to criticize a book that
is so insightful and informed. But I must say that I found
the 13 stills from Wenders's films arbitrarily chosen and
not always helpful as illustrations. There are no captions
explaining the relevance of the images shown and there is
little or no direct discussion of their significance in
Graf's text. Obviously, the poor quality of the
reproductions are especially disappointing given Wenders's
valorization and hypostatization of images. Furthermore,
Graf's provides little in terms of Wenders's international
career as a filmmaker, a career that extends over four
decades. There is, for example, only a brief mention of
Wenders's misadventures in Hollywood and his disputes with
Francis Ford Coppola. Nor is Graf interested in pursuing
Wenders's friendship with Bono and Salmon
Rushdie. More significant, perhaps,
is Graf's failure to mention the slate of critical and
box-office failures that Wenders has made since the demise
of the Berlin Wall. _Until the End of the World_ (1991) was
generally dismissed by critics as an addled futuristic
drama, _Far Away, So Close_ (1993) was seen as a dull and
drab sequel to _Wings of Desire_, and _The End of Violence_
(1997), was criticized as a pompous and lugubrious
meditation on identity. Wenders's only success in this
period was _The Buena Vista Social Club_ (1999), a
documentary on the legendary Cuban jazz musicians, which was
nominated for an Academy award and which made for compelling
viewing. At a recent London
screening of _The Soul of Man_ -- Wenders's most recent film
-- he stated that the narrative only came together during
the editing process, as if by accident. Still obsessed with
the salutary power of the image and still struggling with
story, Wenders's comment after the screening was: 'It's
funny, but the one thing they didn't teach me in film school
was that you could say cut.' Tallahassee, Florida,
USA Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2004. Peter Ruppert, 'The Perils
and Possibilities of Story: Alexander Graf's _The Cinema of
Wim Wenders_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 6, February
2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n6ruppert>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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