As four of Wim Wenders's finest features continue their tour of UK arthouses, Cinema Paradiso reflects on the career of a German auteur who has just celebrated his 77th birthday.
In 1962, inspired by the nouvelle vague in France, 26 young West German directors launched an attack on the film-making establishment. Declaring 'Papas Kino ist Tot' ('Papa's cinema is dead'), they issued a manifesto at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, in which they called for cinema to become independent of the box office so that directors could take more risks with the style and content of their films in a bid to reconnect with audiences who had been sedated by a postwar glut of sentimental melodramas, broad comedies, homespun musicals and crime films drawn from the works of pulp novelists like Edgar Wallace.
One of the signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto was Edgar Reitz and he captured the excitement of the stirrings of this cinematic revolution in Die zweite Heimat (1992). Among those who would benefit from this surge of creative energy was Wim Wenders, who would become one of the leading lights of Das neue Kino, alongside Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who has already been the subject of one of Cinema Paradiso's Instant Expert guides.
While he was raised on Hollywood films, Wenders wanted to find a new way of telling stories that relied less on narrative convention and contrivance than an observation of the world and the ways in which people respond to their changing situations. What he envisioned was an outsider cinema that was based on reality and truth. Five decades later, he remains as committed to this ideal as ever.
All-American Düsseldorf-Style
Ernst Wilhelm Wenders was born in Düsseldorf on 14 August 1945, the day that Japan announced its unconditional surrender to the Allies. He might have missed the Second World War, but its effects shaped his childhood, as West Germany emerged from the rubble depicted by Roberto Rossellini in Germany Year Zero (1948). Known as 'Wim' (in a nod toward his mother's Dutch heritage), Wenders was the son of a doctor, who worked in a Roman Catholic hospital. Raised in the faith, he even considered becoming a priest during his youth.
As his parents were well-to-do, he received a hand-cranked projector when he was six and started collecting films by such slapstick pioneers as Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin. He also liked Walt Disney cartoons and Laurel and Hardy shorts and had hoped to see Stan and Ollie on his first trip to the cinema with his grandmother at the age of eight. However, he saw a horror film, instead, which put him off going to the pictures for a while.
Although life in his childhood towns of Benrath and Koblenz was somewhat tranquil, Wenders's enthusiasm for the moving image didn't wane. At 12, he was bought his first 8mm camera and he used it to take static views from his bedroom window, a technique he would repeat in his seemingly lost student film, Locations (1967). But the young Wim could most often be found tuning into the American Forces Network in order to listen to the rock'n'roll music being broadcast to US bases across the occupied Ruhr. Indeed, as a teenager, Wenders was obsessed with all things American, including pinball machines and hard-boiled crime fiction.
It was rock music that transfixed him, however, with Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley (again the subject of a Cinema Paradiso article ), Roy Orbison, Little Richard and Gene Vincent among his heroes. Wenders later claimed it had saved his life and that he deeply regretted not having had the courage to become a musician. Such was his passion for rock that he barely noticed the release of the Autorenkino manifesto at the short film festival in Oberhausen, where he was studying at the Gynmasium.
In 1963, he enrolled at the University of Freiburg to study medicine. But he found the routine restrictive and dropped out. Two years later, after a spell as a hospital porter, he returned to Düsseldorf to read philosophy. Having been on regular trips to Amsterdam to study the paintings in the Rijksmuseum, however, Wenders decided upon another change of course, when he left for Paris to seek a place at the École des Beaux-Arts. Despite being rejected, he remained in the city and spent his mornings as an apprentice at American print-maker Johnny Friedlaender's studio in Montparnasse.
With his afternoons free, Wenders gravitated towards Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française, which had already schooled such cutting-edge French directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol (the last three of whom Cinema Paradiso has featured in Instant Expert guides). By all accounts, Wenders saw four or five films a day during his sojourn and this thousand-film spree made him a lifelong admirer of John Ford, Michelangelo Antonioni, Truffaut, Fritz Lang and Yasujiro Ozu (the latter pair also being Instant Expert recipients). His new-found enthusiasm didn't qualify him for Paris's prestigious film school, L'Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (now La Fémis), however, and he returned to West Germany in 1967.
Junger Deutscher Film
Succeding where Fassbinder failed, Wenders became part of the first intake at the newly opened Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film in Munich. As part of his preparation for the course, he spent three months as an intern at the Düsseldorf offices of United Artists. However, he was so dismayed by the way in which films were commodified that he wrote a damning essay about the distribution process entitled, 'Despise What Is to Be Sold', in 1969.
What's more, the experience forced him to rethink his admiration for America and several of his future features would reflect his disillusionment. Yet, while he protested against the war in Vietnam (even being detained for resisting arrest), Wenders continued to watch Hollywood films, including the Westerns that enshrined the attitudes he was demonstrating against. Even his second 16mm student film, Same Player Shoots Again (1967), reflected his fixation with film noir and pinball, although its use of slogans also revealed the influence of Jean-Luc Godard. He returned to the method of shooting three-minute elevated studies of the street scene below in Silver City and continued to rebel against classical forms of storytelling in his first 35mm outing, Alabama - 2000 Light Years From Home (1968), a study of alienation in which a dying man's last car journey is accompanied by the music of John Coltrane, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.
This marked a first collaboration with Dutch cinematographer Robbie Müller and Wenders also went on to forge close bonds with editor Peter Przygodda and sound recordist Martin Müller, as he continued to experiment with titles like Police Film and Three American LPs (both 1969). The former was a mockumentary made for Bavarian television, (although it was never transmitted), while the latter saw Wenders work for the first time with the Austrian writer, Peter Handke.
When it came to his graduation film, Wenders decided to shoot a feature on 16mm and cast Hans Zischler as a man who leaves prison and wanders the streets of a monochrome and much-changed country before he hops a flight to New York to evade some sinister pursuers from his criminous past. Dedicated to The Kinks and named after an Edward Hopper painting and a Lovin' Spoonful single, Summer in the City (1970) demonstrated a technical assurance that owed much to Müller's fluent camerawork and Przygodda's skill in editing down a three-hour rough cut to 125 minutes. This exercise in existential angst incurred problems when Wenders was hit with a bill for the pop songs he had used on the soundtrack. But it also resulted in Wenders being invited to join 11 other aspiring film-makers in the Filmverlag der Autoren, a collective that offered creative freedom through guaranteed distribution.
Ironically, his first 35mm feature was funded by the rival Kuratorium Junger Deutsche Film, which had been founded by Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz (among others) and had already backed works like Werner Herzog's debut, Signs of Life (1968). Adapted Peter Handke's novel, The Goalie's Anxiety At the Penalty Kick (1971) follows Josef Bloch (Arthur Brauss), as he is sent off following an altercation with the referee. He wanders into Vienna, where he meets and murders a cinema cashier (Erika Pluhar) before taking a bus to the Yugoslavian border.
Showing how a lack of common cause had led individuals to become detached from West German society, Wenders claimed the picture was 'a completely schizoid film, right in the middle of everything'. It was largely admired and led to a collaboration between Filmverlag der Autoren and Spanish producer Elias Querejeta on an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1972). Despite the casting of Senta Berger as Hester Prynne, the filming of this tale of adultery within a Puritan community proved such an unhappy experience (with Wenders declaring the film 'destroyed' when Querejeta cut 10 minutes) that he vowed never make another film in which a 'car, service station, television or jukebox' could not appear.
On the Road
Frustrated by this clash, Wenders came close to quitting cinema altogether when he attended a screening of Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon (1973) and discovered that it had much in common with his next project. Hollywood veteran Samuel Fuller persuaded him to rewrite the screenplay, however, and Alice in the Cities (1974) became the first part in a trilogy of road movies that established Wenders as a major arthouse talent.
Shooting in 16mm monochrome and using the passing landscape to determine the tone of the action, Wenders focussed on German journalist Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), who is so disenchanted with an assignment in the United States that he agree to take nine year-old Alice (Yella Rottländer) to her mother in Amsterdam. When she can't be found, the pair go in search of Alice's grandmother in Düsseldorf. As he travels across the continent, Winter finds his faith in Europe being restored after coming to the conclusion that America has betrayed the fabled 'Dream' that had been encapsulated by John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln (1939), which had been on television in a Florida motel.
Disconcerted by the compromises made to eradicate the Nazi legacy, Wenders shared Winter's sense of cultural and historical unease and his restlessness resulted in him taking to the road again in Wrong Move (1975), which adapted by Peter Handke from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1796 Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Essentially a treatise on the 'dead souls of Germany', the action follows blocked writer Wilhelm Meister (Rüdiger Vogler), whose search for inspiration and identity takes him through Bonn, Hamburg and Frankfurt to West Germany's highest mountain, the Zugspitze.
Punctuating this crisis of confidence are encounters with a busker with a sinister Nazi past (Hans Christian Blech); his silent acrobat companion (13 year-old debutant Nastassja Kinski); a world-weary actress (Hanna Schygulla); a vagabond poet (Peter Kern); and a castle-owning industrialist (Ivan Desny), whose suicide shakes Wilhelm from his torpor.
Photographed in sinuous tracking shots by Robbie Müller, the film takes visual cues from artefacts as different as Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the landscapes of the 18th-century Romantic artist, Caspar David Friedrich. It also sought to replicate Goethe's naturalism, although some critics complained that Wenders had produced an anti-narrative that said more about his own intellectual preoccupations than the emotional state of his characters.
Taking inspiration from one of his own dreams, Wenders made Kings of the Road (1976) for his newly formed Road Movies company. Filming in 16mm and 35mm monochrome, he used the Zonenrandgebiet border between East and West Germany to contemplate the country's economic, political and cultural shortcomings. At its heart are Bruno Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), who repairs projectors in the rundown region's cinemas, and Robert Lander (Hanns Zischler), who is nicknamed 'Kamikaze' after he drives his Volkswagen into the River Elbe after separating from his wife. Travelling in Winter's truck, the pair say little, but discover common ground through old rock'n'roll records.
In an ironic ending, Kamikaze declares 'everything must change', as he seeks to prevent American culture from colonising his subconscious. Yet Robbie Müller's roadside views are clearly influenced by the Depression photography of Walker Evans, while Winter's homecoming pays homage to a scene from Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men (1952). Intriguingly, however, the measured pacing and lengthy passages of stillness and silence suggest the growing influence of Yasujiro Ozu.
All Gone to Look For America
Encouraged by a prize at Cannes, Wenders turned to Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game - which was filmed by Liliana Cavani in 2002, with John Malkovich and Dougray Scott - for The American Friend (1977). Set in Paris, Hamburg and New York, the story follows Swiss picture restorer Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), who is persuaded by amoral American Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) to commit a murder on behalf of gangster Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain) so that his wife to can claim an insurance policy. However, Zimmermann, who is dying from a rare blood disease, is coerced into committing a second crime that makes him a target for the mafia.
Intended as a homage to Alfred Hitchcock and postwar film noir, this stylised thriller became something of a celebration of cinema itself, as Wenders found guest roles for fellow directors Daniel Schmid, Peter Lilienthal, Jean Eustache, Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray. However, the shoot didn't get off to the best start, as Ganz took exception to Hopper arriving in a state of inebriation from the Phillipine location of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). After a night out and a fist fight, however, the pair became pals, which is apt given the picture's focus on accidental friendship.
Edward Hopper's distinctive paintings informed Robbie Müller's imagery, as Wenders sought what critic Pauline Kael called a 'poetic urban masochism'. Jürgen Knieper's ominous score reinforced the mood, while Peter Przygodda's editing kept the audience on edge.
Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life (1956) underpinned the film's anti-heroic approach to the characters and Wenders decided to pay tribute to his mentor in Lightning Over Water (1980). Ray knew he was dying of lung cancer and was keen to commit to celluloid his recollections of working with such stars as Joan Crawford and James Dean. However, as his condition deteriorated, the camera became more intrusive and Wenders cut a number of the more distressing scenes after being accused of vampiric voyeurism at the Cannes premiere.
He made this prototype of scripted reality during the difficult period surrounding his first experience of American-style film-making. In 1978, executive producer Francis Ford Coppola had recruited Wenders to direct an adaptation of Joe Goress's novel, Hammett. Much of the filming (with veteran Joseph Biroc behind the camera) was done on location, as the story followed crime novelist Dashiell Hammett (Frederic Forrest) into San Francisco's Chinatown in order to investigate the disappearance of a prostitute for Jimmy Ryan (Peter Boyle), his old comrade in the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. However, Coppola was unhappy with the rushes and ordered a major rewrite.
Accounts differ as to what happened next. It has long been claimed that Coppola took over the reshoot and that only around 30% of the original footage made the final cut. However, Wenders has stated that he had supervised the retakes, but on a studio soundstage, with Coppola keeping a tight rein on proceedings. He would later release a diary short about the editing of Hammett, entitled Reverse Angle (both 1982). But, when Wenders tried to get hold of his discarded footage in order to make a director's cut, he discovered it had all been destroyed.
Adding to the stress of the situation, Wenders broke up with longtime partner Lisa Kreuzer (who had acted in several of his films) and married singer Ronee Blakely, whom he had first noticed in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975). However, the marriage didn't survive the Hammett rigmarole, which dragged on for so long that Wenders had time to go off and make another film, in which he gave Sam Fuller (playing a gnarled cinematographer) the line that summed up his mood: 'life is in colour, but black and white is more realistic'.
Having flown to Lisbon to provide Chilean auteur Raúl Ruiz with the film stock to complete The Territory (1981), Wenders had an idea for a film of his own. Borrowing Ruiz's cast and crew (which included veteran cinematographer Henri Alekan, whose career dated back to 1938), he centred The State of Things (1982) on a cash-strapped science-fiction movie entitled The Survivors, which is closed down so that director Friedrich Munro (Patrick Bachau) can leave Portugal to track down the producer (Allen Garfield) who has decamped to California to raise the rest of the budget.
With the unit left at the seaside musing on the overlap between life and art, Wenders found himself rediscovering the love for film-making that had been seriously tested during his time in America. As he confided in the short documentary, Fish Flying Over Hollywood: 'It's an investigation into my profession. I started it in a very dark mood - a film noir if ever there was one. And then this film did a magic trick - it pulled itself up and me with it by its own bootstraps.'
You can gauge for yourself the effect of a droll monochrome film that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival by ordering it on high-quality DVD from Cinema Paradiso. And why not seek out some more peeks behind the scenes in our two-part Brief History of Films About Film 1 and 2 ? Or even our Lions on the Lido article about Venice?
While toiling over Hammett, Wenders met actor-writer Sam Shepard, who was in an adjoining studio co-starring with wife Jessica Lange in Frances (1982), Graeme Clifford's poignant biopic of tormented Hollywood actress, Frances Farmer. Shepard showed Wenders the manuscript for a collection of poems and stories that would eventually be titled, Motel Chronicles, and Wenders was suitably inspired to produce a screenplay about estranged brothers. However, the script for Paris, Texas (1984) was written by Shepard and L.M. Kit Carson, whose son with actress Karen Black, was cast alongside screen stalwarts Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell in a redemptive road movie that stands as a summation of Wenders's first 15 years as a director.
With Ry Cooder's haunting score complementing Robbie Müller evocative imagery, the story opens near the Mexican border town of Terra Lingua, where the morose Travis Clay Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) is in self-loathing exile. He is driven back to Los Angeles by his brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), to see Hunter (Hunter Carson), the eight year-old son who has been raised for the last four years by his uncle and his French wife, Anne (Aurore Clément). As Travis begins to pull himself together, he realises that he has to make his peace with Hunter's abused mother, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and the pair set off to find the peep show where she now works in Houston, Texas.
Operating with a crew of 20 (some of whom only had tourist visas), Wenders had to agree to join the Teamsters Union to prevent the production from being closed down. As it was, he ran into difficulties over Travis and Jane's reunion and Shepard had to dictate new script passages down the phone. Some critics detected a similarity between the film and John Ford's The Searchers (1956). It certainly trades on Western mythology in bringing the American phase of Wenders's career to a close with the Palme d'or at Cannes.
Citizen of the World
After a decade of globe-trotting, Wenders came home to make Wings of Desire (1987). Set in the divided city of Berlin, this lament for a nation that seemed to have lost its way follows angels Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander), as they watch over citizens who have no idea of their existence. Cassiel follows Homer (Curt Bois), a poet brooding on the need for peace, while also noting the arrival of American actor Peter Falk, who has come to West Germany to make a film about the Second World War. He turns out to be a 'fallen angel' and persuades Daniel to experience the pleasures of the corporeal world after he becomes entranced by a lonely trapeze artist named Marion (Solveig Dommartin).
Dedicated to 'former angels', François Truffaut, Yasujiro Ozu and Andrei Tarkovsky, this bittersweet rumination took its inspiration from such seraphic sources as the Angel of Peace atop Berlin's Victory Column, a painting by Paul Klee, writings by Rainer Maria Rilke and Walter Benjamin, and a song by The Cure. Using monochrome for the celestial realm and colour for everyday reality, Henri Alekan achieved a visual lyricism that matched the blend of scripted and improvised dialogue. Peter Handke collaborated with Wenders and Richard Reitinger on the screenplay, while Jürgen Knieper returned to co-score with Laurent Petitgand, who would become a regular member of Team Wenders. Assistant director Claire Denis (who had suggested casting Falk) would move on, however, to make her feature bow with Chocolat (1988).
Among many awards, Wenders won the Best Director prize at Cannes. He also sold the remake rights to Warner Bros, who teamed Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan in Brad Silberberg's City of Angels (1998). Five years earlier, Wenders had himself revisited Daniel and Cassiel in Faraway, So Close! (1993). But, rather bafflingly, this is currently unavailable on disc.
In fact, Wings of Desire had been a stop-gap, as Wenders had been midway through planning his most expansive picture. He had first conceived the premise of Until the End of the World during a trip to Australia in 1977, but the scope and boldness of this sci-fi road trip meant that he had to wait until he could demonstrate a box-office clout to match his artistic ambition before being entrusted with a $20 million budget. Writing with novelist Peter Carey, Wenders concocted a millennial angst saga that took Solveig Dommartin across the planet in search of William Hurt, who is guarding the visualisation device that his scientist father (Max von Sydow) had invented to share images with his blind mother (Jeanne Moreau).
Originally released in Europe in 1991 at 179 minutes, the film has since been expanded to 287 minutes in a director's cut that isn't available to rent. However, Cinema Paradiso users can lose themselves in this labyrinthine noir, which was filmed in 11 countries and anticipates an impressive number of technologies and gadgets that we now take for granted.
Having scaled down to release the children's short, Arisha, the Bear and the Stone Ring (1992), Wenders moved on to Faraway, So Close! and Lisbon Story (1994). In many ways a sequel to The State of Things, this city odyssey accompanies sound technician Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler) on a car journey from Berlin to Portugal, where he is due to record some ambient sound for his old friend, Friedrich Munro (Patrick Bauchau). However, he has gone AWOL and Winter wanders around Lisbon seeking a director who has lost faith in his hand-cranked silent movie.
Featuring cameos by legendary fado singer Teresa Salgueiro and nonagenarian film-maker Manoel de Oliveira (who does an impromptu Charlie Chaplin impression), this treatise on the history of cinema and its future direction is also a love letter to the 1994 European Capital of Culture. Wenders was no stranger to producing such promotional images, having made numerous commercials and pop videos. Moreover, he was also devoting an increasing amount of time to photography. But he undertook his most unusual assignment at the behest of Michelangelo Antonioni, who needed an amanuensis to guarantee the insurance for Beyond the Clouds (1995), which was to be the Italian's first feature since suffering a debilitating stroke a decade earlier. The all-star vignettes were based on stories from Antonioni's 1987 tome, That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, and he was most unhappy that the bookend and transitional segments directed by Wenders made the final cut.
Undaunted, Wenders moved on to make two contributions to the 1995 celebration of cinema's centenary. In addition to the snippet included in the anthology, Lumière and Company, Wenders also delved into cinema's prehistory in A Trick of the Light (both 1995). Made with students from his old Munich film school, photographed with a hand-cranked camera and featuring the recollections of 91 year-old Lucie Hürtgen-Skladanowsky, this is an affectionate and imaginative tribute to the achievements of her father, Max Skladanowsky, who claimed with siblings Eugen and Max to have demonstrated the Bioscop projector before Louis and Auguste Lumière unveiled their Cinématographe in 1895.
Shake, Rattlebag and Roll
For the last 40 years, Wenders has had a dual career as a documentarist. In 1982, he invited directors of the calibre of Jean-Luc Godard, Steven Spielberg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Yilmaz Güney, Susan Seidelman, Monte Hellman, Paul Morrissey, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog to his Cannes hotel room and posed the question, 'Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?' He organised the answers into Chambre 666, which serves as a snapshot of world cinema at a time before blockbusters had totally taken over.
Three years later, Wenders ventured into cineaste territory again for a tribute to Yasujiro Ozu. Doubling as an exploration of how much Japan had changed in the quarter-century since Ozu died, Tokyo-Ga (1985) includes discussions with his frequent star, Chishu Ryu, and cinematographer Yuhara Atsuta. Similar themes inform Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989), a profile of Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto that afforded Wenders the opportunity to muse on the creative process, changing technology and the fate of the individual in the urban jungle.
Music took over for the next few years, as Willie Nelson at The Teatro (1998) and Ode to Cologne: A Rock'n'Roll Film (2002) were followed by The Soul of a Man, the second part of Martin Scorsese's series, The Blues (2003), which focussed on the music of Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James and J.B. Lenoir. In between came The Buena Vista Social Club (1999), in which Wenders and Ry Cooder alerted the world to the brilliance of veteran Cuban soneros musicians like Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer, Rubén González and Omara Portuondo. The latter trio were still performing when Lucy Walker made Buena Vista Social Club: Adios (2017) - now what a double bill that would make, courtesy of Cinema Paradiso.
It's a bit trickier to see many of the shorts that Wenders made during the first decade of the 21st century. the highly revealing 'Twelve Miles to Trona' can be found on the portmanteau Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet, which comes in a twin presentation with Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (both 2002). In addition to the stand-alone shorts The Other Side of the Road (2003), If Buildings Could Talk and Il Violo (both 2010), Wenders also contributed 'War in Peace' to Chacun son Cinéma, 'Invisible Crimes' to Los Invisibles (both 2007), 'Person to Person' to 8 (2008), 'Ver ou Não Ver' to Mundo Invisível (2012) and'The Berlin Philharmonic' to the excellent Cathedrals of Culture (2014).
Wenders didn't stop making fictional features, however. He used CinemaScope for the first time on The End of Violence (1997), which sees Hollywood producer Mike Max (Bill Pullman) go into hiding after receiving a mysterious FBI email and evading the attentions of a couple of bungling hitmen. Wife Paige Stockard (Andie MacDowell) takes control of the company, while Detective Dean Brock (Loren Dean) searches for clues. But how does the snooping Ray Bering (Gabriel Byrne) fit into the scenario from his hilltop observatory?
Amidst so many plot strands and provocative concepts, many felt the highlight of the picture was a meticulous reconstruction of Edward Hopper's famous 1942 painting, 'Nighthawks'. This inquisition into the nature of violence in modern society failed to find critical favour or an audience. But Wenders returned to Los Angeles for The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), which was based on a story conceived by U2 frontman, Bono. This also puzzled more than it beguiled, as the relationship between savant Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies) and the mournful Eloise (Ella Jovovich) distracts from the investigation being conducted by Detective Skinner (Mel Gibson) into the demise of billionaire's son Izzy Goldkiss (Tim Roth).
Bearing echoes of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Sam Mendes's American Beauty (1999), the action is slickly scripted by Wenders and Nicholas Klein and boasts a fine soundtrack. But, despite earning a Silver Bear at Berlin, it is not considered among the director's best efforts. The same is true of Land of Plenty (2004), which was co-scripted by Michael Meredith and took its title from a Leonard Cohen song. Reflecting on the American psyche post-9/11, the action follows Lana (Michelle Williams), as she returns to Los Angeles following a prolonged period in the Middle East and takes a journey across the country with her xenophobic cousin, Paul (John Diehl), to deliver the body of a murdered Pakistani boy to his family.
Wenders took to the road again in Don't Come Knocking (2005), which saw him reunite with Sam Shepard. He stars as Howard Spence, a washed-up film actor who walks off a desert set and heads off to find the mother he hasn't seen in 30 years. A detour takes him in search of a woman (Jessica Lange) he met two decades earlier while working in Butte, Montana, which is also the destination of Sky (Sarah Polley), who is carrying her mother's ashes.
Compared unfavourably in some quarters to Sydney Pollack's The Electric Horsemen (1979), this was considered a disappointment by those hoping for another Paris, Texas. But it was more widely seen than Palermo Shooting (2008), which was dedicated to Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman (who had died on the same day in July 2007) and featured cameos by Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed and Milla Jovovich. However, the plot involving a German photographer (Campino) discovering a new zest for life after a meeting a young woman (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) in Sicily failed to capture imaginations.
Following a seven-year hiatus, Wenders returned to drama with Every Thing Will Be Fine (2015), which saw him working in 3-D for the first time. James Franco headlined as a novelist whose life changes after he accidentally kills a child on a snowy street in Quebec. Despite being based on a play by Peter Handke and filmed in 3-D, The Beautiful Life of Aranjuez (2016) fared no better after debuting at Venice. Reda Kateb and Sophie Semin play the women chatting about life and love in a Parisian garden.
Cinema Paradiso users will be relieved to hear they can access Wenders's next offering. Adapted from a novel by British journalist, J.D. Ledgard, Submergence (2017) sees bio-mathematician Danielle Flinders (Alicia Vikander) and secret agent James More (James McAvoy) recalling their encounter in Normandy after he is kidnapped by Somali jihadists and she goes on an underwater research mission in the Greenland Sea. Once again, Wenders left the critics underwhelmed. Yet they couldn't get enough of his documentaries.
It looked as though Wenders was going to have to abandon his profile of Pina Bausch when the choreographer died unexpectedly during the shoot. However, her dancers at the Tanztheater Wuppertal insisted on continuing with the project and Pina (2011) became a glorious celebration of bodies in motion. Originally released in 3-D, the study intersperses interviews about Bausch's style and legacy with four full-length dance pieces - 'The Rite of Spring', 'Café Müller', 'Kontakthof' and 'Vollmond' - which are variously staged in the theatre and in its environs.
Almost becoming the first film ever to be nominated for Best Documentary Feature and Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards, this exhilarating paean to movement was followed by The Salt of the Earth (2014), which showcases the work of Brazilian photographer, Sebastião Salgado. Co-directed by his son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, this fascinating study won a special prize at Cannes and a César before earning another Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. Chronicling Salgado's journeys to conflict zones, as well as areas of social deprivation and ecological crisis, this is a thought-provoking snapshot of the planet and its people through the eyes of a deeply compassionate exile.
The same description could be applied to Jorge Bergoglio, the Argentinian cleric who succeeded Benedict XVI on the Papal throne in March 2013. As Wenders shows in Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (2018), the pontiff is very much a man of action, as he visits heads of state and ordinary people in prisons and hospitals. But he also has a simple faith and deep conviction, as he proves in the intimate sequences in which Pope Francis looks directly into the lens to explain his mission to modernise the Catholic Church.
In addition to completing the 3-D short, Two or Three Things I Know About Edward Hopper (2020), and the short fashion romance, A Future Together (2021), Wenders has also been busy producing. Sadly, none of these items has been released on disc in this country, but Cinema Paradiso members can seek out his contributions to Maurice Hatton's Long Shot (1978), Richard Lowenstein and Lynn-Maree Milburn's Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard (2011), Fariborz Kamkari's Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, the Colours of Life (2016) and James Franco's Zeroville (2019).
In his capacity as the unofficial Patron Saint of Road Movies, Wenders has also served as associate producer on Christopher Petit's Radio On (1979) and as executive producer on Michael Meredith's Open Road (2009), with Jeff Bridges and Justin Timberlake. According to his website, his next project will be a short centring on the high-class toilets in the Shibuya district of Tokyo.
He may no longer be making the soaringly exhilarating features recalled in Marcel Wehn's One Who Set Forth: Wim Wenders' Early Years (2007). But he remains one of cinema's most vital and valuable artists. Don't take our word for it, though. Get clicking now to discover Wim Wenders for yourself!
