Directed by Wim Wenders Credits: Manuel Braun
Wim Wenders closes his eyes as his face appears on my computer screen and keeps them closed most of our interview. “Sorry, I'm a little tired,” says the 78-year-old German director, speaking via Zoom from Lyon, where he has just added the Lumière Prize to the plethora of trophies he has won at various points in his career. brilliant career, BAFTA Award, Cannes Palme d'Or and Venice Golden Lion.
His best-loved films invite us to look at life from a big-screen perspective: Paris, Texas (1984) takes its hero (Harry Dean Stanton) into the windswept American desert to reunite with his family, while Wings world” “Desire” (1987), angels sit on the skyscrapers of Berlin and look down longingly at the human world, fueled by love. Wenders tells me that he recently experienced an unexpected change in perspective when, just a few days earlier, “the lens of my right eye gave way and sank to the bottom of my eyeball.” It was, as he says with a minimalist shrug, “a shock. Suddenly my right eye couldn't see, just a blur, unless I looked down at the ground, then the lens snapped back into place and my shoe came into focus.”
A quick operation seemed to solve the problem; a relief because “my vision is the pure essence of what I do. I could continue working with one eye, but I would have to give up 3D, and that would be a shame.”
Wenders first shot in 3-D with Pina, his remarkable 2011 Oscar-nominated documentary about German choreographer Pina Bausch, but he uses the technology to even more striking effect in the first of his two new films, praising the German artist Anselm Kiefer. In Anselm, Wenders' camera wanders across a sunlit French landscape where Kiefer's enormous sculptures are installed, slowly rotating around them in such high definition that we can almost feel the coolness of their shadows falling on us. We are also invited into the artist’s spacious studio, where his huge gray-yellow canvases rush by, rolling with a roar on the concrete floor.
Both Wenders and Kiefer were born in 1945 and grew up in the quiet atmosphere of national shame that followed the end of World War II. “We were both born in a country that no longer exists,” says Wenders. “We grew up surrounded by adults desperately trying to reinvent the future for themselves and the country, [acting as if] the past does not exist and can simply be forgotten.”
The One Who Came Forward, a 2007 documentary about Wenders' early life, streaming on Netflix, offers a rather bleak look at the director's family and the drab industrial environment in which he grew up. We feel the pain in his distant relationships with his silent father and anxious mother; his lack of childhood friends; his early fascination with the cold philosophies of existentialism and surrealism, which in turn led to his first experiments with black and white filmmaking. Therefore, I am not surprised when he tells me: “For as long as I can remember, I really wanted to get out of Germany and experience the world.” He smiles and shakes his head. “It took me a long time and a huge detour—living in America for a long time—to accept that I was German.”
Wenders lived “unhappily” in America from 1977 to 1984. “I spent time in Hollywood, but I realized I didn't have the strength to make these big American films,” he says. “I would prefer to make small films and make decisions without asking permission. It taught me that I am a German romantic.”
Romance is not a quality often associated with Anselm Kiefer, whose confrontational works draw heavily on images of the Third Reich. However, although critics accuse him of having “his Nazi cake and eating it too,” Wenders believes the artist has shown “courage” in his willingness to “delve into the history of his country and talk about forgetting and unforgetting; face the past and remind people of it.”
He pokes his thumbs at the bags under his eyes, insisting that “history is the greatest teacher of the future.” We need this right now, when all of Europe seems to be forgetting that nationalism brought chaos and war. This new nationalism growing everywhere will help nothing. I wish we took history lessons more seriously.”
Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas (1984). Photo: AJ Pics/Alamy Stock Photo
Wenders and Kiefer planned to make a film together back in 1991, but the project was derailed due to the sudden collapse of Kiefer's career. “Anselm was a huge success in America,” says Wenders. “He became the greatest living artist from the American point of view. He then had a huge exhibition at the National Gallery in Berlin, and the German reviews were disastrous. It was really torn down, and Anselm did not understand what was happening. He was very worried. Me too.”
Kiefer fled to the south of France, where over the years he created the work that dominates Wenders' film: at La Ribot, north of Nîmes, Kiefer's most monumental art is the dizzying towers tattered wreckage, concentration camp guard huts and sulphurous gray paintings. housed in barns and occupy an area of 40 hectares.
Wenders himself became embroiled in controversy back in 2009, when he joined Woody Allen, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and other film heavyweights in signing a petition calling for the release of Roman Polanski. The Chinatown director was arrested in Zurich after US law enforcement sought his extradition for allegedly sexually assaulting a 30-year-old minor.
Wenders looks a little down when I bring this up. “I thought this was such nonsense, and the Americans behaved so strangely. That he was allowed to live in Switzerland for 20 years and suddenly demanded extradition… I cannot defend his actions. But who am I to judge? He slowly opens his palms. “Anyway, I signed it because I thought they should leave it alone because it was a long time ago.”
Wenders, who lives in Berlin with his fifth wife Donata, rarely follows a predictable path and, as you might expect, his other new film could hardly be more different from Anselm. The first Japanese foreign-language Oscar entry not directed by a non-Japanese director, Perfect Days is a fictional paean to Tokyo's urban trees, including Hirayama, a toilet cleaner (a role for which Koji Yakusho won best actor). prize in Cannes) grows from shoots in his own small apartment. Like Wenders, Hirayama finds “magic” in old analog technologies; The tapes of American rock music with Patti Smith and Lou Reed that he plays give him a certain credibility among urban youth.
“There are a lot of stores in Tokyo now that only sell analog equipment,” says Wenders. “They sell vintage cassettes for huge prices.” He's glad that “kids today are discovering the big difference between a compilation tape and a playlist. A playlist is nothing more than an algorithm, even if it's based on your tastes, whereas a compilation is a statement – a letter with a beginning, middle and end – and you feel something, you tell a story. They realize the value of it.”
When Wenders lived in America, he and his brother Klaus sent each other weekly compilation tapes across the Atlantic. “That was our conversation,” he smiles. “We loved each other very much.” For the director of the influential 1999 documentary Buena Vista Social Club, “music is still the primary source of imagination.” At home, Wenders likes to play his old rock 'n' roll records on the vintage jukebox, although he admits that “the sound sucks.”
But there is another reason why Wenders is looking forward to returning to Berlin. “I have a tree in my garden,” he says, still closing his eyes. “A mighty ash tree, about 150 years old. It's losing its leaves at the moment and I'm not around to see them fall. But I'll go home and hug him. I always hug him when I return. And in the spring I will watch its leaves turn green again.”
Anselm will retire from the game on December 8th. Perfect Days will follow on February 9.
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