The renowned German director discusses film-making, his evolving career in photography and the way every landscape tells a story
By C.G. | BERLIN
WIM WENDERS, a renowned German filmmaker, is having a big year. In February he received a lifetime-achievement award at the Berlinale, Berlin’s International Film Festival. In March, New York’s Museum of Modern Art celebrated him with a retrospective of around 20 feature films, including some new digital restorations of “Alice in the Cities” (1974), “Paris, Texas” (for which he won the Palme d’ Or at Cannes in 1984), Tokyo-Ga” (1985) and “The Salt of the Earth” (2014), a documentary about Sebastião Salgado, a Brazilian photographer, which was nominated for an Academy Award earlier this year (his third nomination after “Pina” and “Buena Vista Social Club”).
As part of the wave of “New German Cinema” in the 1960s and 1970s, Mr Wenders—with Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and others—breathed new life into a stagnated domestic industry. Influenced by the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealismo, these filmmakers were authors, directors and producers in one. Their radical narrative style, leftist politics and low budgets made them role models for new generations of filmmakers.
Mr Wenders has also been a devoted photographer since the early 1980s. But while he has been exhibited widely (at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, among other places), his photographic oeuvre is less well-known. Now the Blain Southern Gallery in Berlin, Mr Wenders’ adopted home, is presenting “Time Capsules. By the side of the road”, a show of his most recent large-scale photos, taken in Germany and America.
In September Mr Wenders met with The Economist at the Blain Southern Gallery to talk about his career as a filmmaker, his fascination with photography and his desire to tell stories through images of landscapes. His answers to our questions have been condensed and edited. A full audio recording of the exchange can be found below.
Wim Wenders: I had a camera when I was six. I had a darkroom when I was ten or 12. I’ve always taken pictures but I never took it seriously until the early 1980s, when I went on a journey that was strictly photographic. That also became my first exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Ever since, [photography has] become more like the second half of my life. I do my movies, and the other half of my life I travel in order to photograph. I can only do the one or the other.
As a kid I only wanted to become a painter. Photography and film-making was completely out of the question in post-war Germany. (You could just as well become an astronaut than a film director.) So I went to Paris to become a painter. I got side-tracked by the fact that some painters I liked started to work with film cameras, like Andy Warhol, Michael Snow and [Stan] Brakhage. I started to make my first film—a completely non-narrative film—as a painter, and then slowly realised that film-making was storytelling. I slowly became more and more of a storyteller and less and less of a painter until I embraced film-making as the only profession that really included everything I liked. It was photography and architecture, music and writing and acting—everything I liked together into one package that was called “film-making”.
I am not a landscape photographer. I am interested in people. I am interested in our civilisation. I am interested in what traces we leave in landscapes, in cities and places. But I wait until people have gone, until they are out of the shot. So the place can start talking about us. Places are so much more able to evoke people when people are out. As soon as there is one person in the shot everybody looks at that person. If there is nobody in the shot, the beholder is able to listen to the story of that place. And that’s my job. I try to make places tell their stories about us. So I am not a landscape photographer. I am really interested in people, but my way of finding out things about people is that I do photos about their absence, about their traces.
[He considers a photograph of the Elbe near a small East German city called Dömitz, pictured above.] It’s a very lovely, almost romantic river flowing through the fields. That river was the border between the two Germanys. I made a film [“Kings of the Road”, 1976] along that border, [when] the other [Eastern] side was like the other side of the moon. So finally, 30 years later, I could look at the river from the other side. Today it’s a unified country, [but] at the time it was dangerous. There were mines in this border area. There were soldiers with guns. So it was the opposite of this very peaceful, romantic landscape you see today.
It is the fate of all culture to be forgotten and to disappear. Sometimes it needs an archaeological effort to bring it back to light. I think it’s an exciting time to be making movies, to record these changes and sometimes to evoke things that are about to disappear, evoke things we might want to hold on to.
[On winning the Honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement, at the age of 70, at the Berlinale Film Festival in February] It’s a sad thing that many people are forced to end their achievement at the age of 65. It killed my father. He was a surgeon. At the age of 65 he had to stop. I know a lot of people who would like to continue working and who have to stop. It’s a privilege, as a film-maker you can continue to work and I intend to continue to work. Artists can do that in general. Some of my favourite painters have only started to get into their best work at the age I am now. Some of my favourite filmmakers continued to work until they were 80 or 90. So I don’t think a lifetime achievement [award] puts any full stop behind anything. I see it as an encouragement to continue achieving things.
