Interview with Wim Wenders

(Excerpt)

NP: The philosopher Alain Badiou has written: "A film is contemporary,
and thus destined for everyone, inasmuch as the material whose
purification it guarantees is identifiable as belonging to the non-art
of its time. "Examples of such "purification" include Godard's use
of "dirty sound", Kiarostami's car sequences, and the meticulous
stylization of spectacularly lurid scenes; in all of these the attempt
is made to reclaim vulgarized images & sounds for a more powerful,
more universal aesthetic communication. Do you attempt to revitalize
old images, or are you searching for the entirely new? Do you believe
that the medium of film can purify the sensibilities of the culture?

WW: Now you’re exaggerating! How many days do I have to answer that?!
And where do I start, for Heaven’s sake! To begin with: I’m not sure I
want to sign that whole “purification” theory. A film is contemporary,
in my book, if the “non-art” of its time is present, period! But
there’s nothing wrong with the “art” coming along on the ride. And why
define the “non-art” only via contemporary “junk”, the vulgar or the
ugly? Why should the elaborate stylization of the lurid be a
privileged form of purification? Only because it is considered
more “commercial”? That makes me mad! I feel very strongly, in fact I
KNOW that stylization can be exercised on the “modest”, the “gentle”,
the “fragile” just as well. The LOUD and LURID are terribly overrated,
and just because everybody seems to have accepted that they rule, some
of us grudgingly, we shouldn’t exclude the TRANSCENDENTAL, the SILENT
or the GOOD as being part of our contemporary existence. “Wings of
Desire” was making that point, and NOT, I think, by dwelling on
the “art” aspects. And the way people all over the world embraced that
alternative way of “purification” sort of proved my point, didn’t it?
That doesn’t mean I can’t dig the vulgar. Faßbinder’s films as well
as, let’s say, Almodovar’s today have marvelously explored that
territory, without glorifying it like for instance Lynch or Tarantino.
With these guys I sometimes feel they try to prove their point so much
that it becomes redundant. Not that I don’t count them as two of the
most brilliant stylists and innovators of our times. (I just dread
their imitators...) But to come back to your question: I’m not sure
how to define the “contemporary” in the first place. And how to
protect it against the “fashionable” that so often replaces it today.
What can actually be considered contemporary in an era that almost by
definition needs to renew its parameters once a month? You’re almost
bound to anticipate the contemporary and be ahead of it. THEN you have
a slight chance to actually capture it when people see your film.
Otherwise you’re always trying to catch up. Also: It can be a painful
realization that your audience might be sick and tired of their
own “contemporary reality”, and that the last thing they want to see
on a screen is their mirror. That’s what happened, for instance, to
the German audience that entirely refused to even notice “FARAWAY, SO
CLOSE!”. I tried to make them look at a German post-reunification
reality with different eyes. Fat chance! They had enough of that in
their everyday life.

NP: Do you see your specific methods as transformative, as capable of
changing how a spectator sees the world?

WW: Yes. But don’t take that for a self-inflated view on filmmaking.
My “method”, whatever it may be, may have a transformative effect on
the viewer indeed. But that doesn’t make me a wizard or a guru. It
strictly reflects my opinion about the true existence of films. They
don’t exist because there are prints on the shelves, or because there
are box office results, or reviews, or whatever. They exist because
they are SEEN, and the place where they are stored is only and
exclusively in the eyes and the minds of the spectator. Now you might
say that goes for all films. I tend to disagree. There are films MADE
to exist as box office results first, or as reviews first, or as
expression of the author first. My films are meant to come to life in
people’s heads. They are incomplete before, actually they are meant to
be incomplete. I see them like open systems that need to be pulled
together by somebody. That somebody is each and every spectator. In a
way I think of films the same way I looked at stories in books, when I
was little. I realized very early on that the story was not in the
written words, but in the space between the lines. That’s where the
real reading took place: In my imagination, and that happened in all
the white between the letters and the lines. And when I started to see
films, I approached them the same way. In fact those films ALLOWED me
to perceive them like that, they were asking me to dream myself into
them. The classic American cinema has that same specific quality, and
this is also the great tradition of European Cinema. I did not invent
that “method”. It is an endangered process, though, these days. More
and more films come as “wall to wall” entertainment. What you see (and
hear!) is what you get. No more space between the frames, so to speak.
No chance to sneak in with your imagination, to dream on and to
project your innermost hopes or fears or desires into what you see and
thereby pushing it further. You come out of the theatre and feel
strangely empty. For two hours you were prevented from participating.
You were obliged to “witness” instead. And that is the opposite to
what you called my “method” which is in the true sense of the
word “interactive”.