The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire (Cambridge Film Classics) by Robert P. Kolker

The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire (Cambridge Film Classics) Reviews

• 
  Neil R. Coulter

  Though this book is nearly thirty years old, most of the analysis is still very worthwhile. The authors trace the development of Wim Wenders’s main themes—movement along the road vs. static domesticity; the fracturing and limitations of images; the wanderer; the redemptive innocence of children—through his films up to Until the End of the World. The commentary is especially apt in regard to the earlier films, in the 1970s and early 80s. The authors clearly feel that Wenders peaked with The State of Things.
  
  The authors suggest that, at the time he was making those films, Wenders was “becoming increasingly aware of the fracturing of image and meaning, signifier and signified, the dispersal of individuality, creativity, history, and the authentic, all of which are dissolving amid the pastiche of images and sounds generated by communications media—images and sounds that are static, unredeemed, without patrimony or lineage, past or future” (90). In those ways and in many others, his perspective on filmmaking and the world anticipated a lot of other cultural expressions in the decades that followed.
  
  I enjoyed the biographical sketch of Wenders as a child, with his first movie camera (positioned in a window in his home, looking down at the street below). His father walked by and asked, “What are you doing there with your camera?” Wenders: “I’m filming the street, can’t you see?” Father: “And what for?” Wenders: (silence). As a director, Wenders continued to film almost just for the joy of filming, and many people unused to that slow gaze have impatiently watched a Wenders movie and asked, “And what for?”
  
  When the chronology of the book’s criticism moves to Paris, Texas, my opinion of Wenders’s films begins to diverge from the authors’. They see Paris, Texas as Wenders beginning to give up on his restless pondering along the road and starting to see domesticity as almost inevitable—though in that film, the harm of patriarchy can possibly be healed in a specific situation but not ultimately resolved within the protagonist.
  
  It’s in their assessment of Wings of Desire, however, that I completely disagree with the authors. To say that I don’t read that film as “cryptofascist fantasy” is an understatement. They are enormously disappointed with what Wenders did in Wings of Desire and Until the End of the World (though it’s unclear whether they’d seen the original, longer version or the drastically reduced cut; it probably wouldn’t have made a difference to them, though). For me, I think Wenders grew and developed as a person, and those later films reflect different outlooks; but the authors seem to want Wenders to continue pursuing the same path he’d commenced many years before. They see The State of Things as the peak, but I see Paris, Texas to some extent and Until the End of the World most definitely as the culmination of Everything Wenders up to that point.
  
  Anyway, these criticisms aside, the book until the final chapter is excellent, and even that chapter is interesting in showing how differently people can interpret the same film.
• 
  Jeff Thompson

  A thoughtful and thought provoking analysis and reflection on the films up to 1991. At times it skirts pretentiousness, but there are so many insights and references that it's a worthy read for anyone interested in Wenders' work. It could be read as a whole or dipped into when one is watching, or has recently watched, a particular film. I wish there were more books in this series.