Wim Wenders: Country roads took him home

A Wim Wenders meeting comes with two guarantees. There will be a celebration and there will be a ‘crucifixion’ with Wenders, one of the living legends of German New Wave cinema, gamely participating. Towards the end of his five-city tour with a Delhi masterclass--Pune is the last stop--the director, in India for the first time, was repeatedly asked about his cult films and characters, all great walkers if not talkers, in juxtaposition with his generation’s inheritance of Germany’s dark past.

From Travis Henderson in Paris, Texas (1984) stumbling through the desert, an act of getting away as much as an escape from failed family life, to Anselm Kiefer, the controversial painter, whose provocative act of enacting the Hitler salute, Wenders suggests in his film Anselm (2023), is inspired by the painter’s attempt to remind the present-day Germans of Nazism, which he said they are “in danger of forgetting”—most of his signature films, old and new, seem to have come out of pressing the same historical nerve.

Discovering Americana

Wenders, now 79, was born in 1945. Growing up in a post-war Germany in a bombed-out Düsseldorf heavily under American influence, he grew up thinking “everything American was more beautiful”. He was also of a generation mindful of how not to be a bad German.

Speaking to Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, founder director, Film Heritage Foundation, instrumental in bringing him to India, along with the Goethe Institute, for a 25-day, five-city tour with a screening of 18 films, Wenders talked of his discovery of American comics, Rock ’n’ roll and the Blues in conjunction with the feeling of wanting to get away from Germany. “At home, nobody wanted to talk of the past…people said it was all gone while it was still around…. I had a maths teacher who still sported a Hitler moustache…. I was interested in the world outside, so I went outside and shot most of my films outside Germany,” he said.
Wenders’ King of the Road the India tour—named after his 1976 eponymous movie—brought to Delhi Alice in the Cities (1974), a film set in the US, where he discovered how to make one in the road-movie genre. “If you have the road, you don’t need a script,” he said. “You can start the story slowly, tell it frame after frame chronologically, you don’t need to know what’s in the future. But the place must come through, the colours, the people of that place with their accents.”

On the road

Wenders’ road movies, his getaways, ironically repaired his soul and restored him to Germany. In a revelation that brought the house down, the director talked of how his American studio and Harry Dean Stanton, his lead actor in Paris Texas, tried to convince him to get him and Nastassja Kinski, who was playing his wife, back together as a family or at least let Stanton's car make “ a U-turn on the highway”, to suggest its possibility at the end…. Wings of Desire (1987), also shown in Delhi, marked Wenders’ “homecoming”, and was his first German film after eight years in the US. The main characters are guardian angels in trench coats who listen to the thoughts of mortals and attempt to comfort them.  

Wenders said he did not make too fine a distinction in his technique while shooting documentaries and features. For instance, the director sees The Buena Vista Social Club (1999), his Oscar-nominated film on forgotten artistes of Cuban music, as a fairytale. If you come to it thinking you will get a thumbs up or a thumbs down on Fidel’s Cuba or Communism, you may be disappointed.

“These were old people who loved their country and decided to stay. They asked me specifically not to make them say anything about Cuba but that they would be glad to tell him about their lives,” said Wenders. “By the end of it, they were playing in New York’s Carnegie Hall as if they were Beatles. Ibrahim Ferrer, the singer, took me to his home, showed me his refrigerator, and then took me down the street that had every home gifted a refrigerator bought by him…. I had recorded a fairytale…. I don’t think it lacked anything.”

Wenders said he loved every bit of fiction in the making of documentaries. “Reality, too, needs a good dose of fiction,” and he learnt it all the hard way, he said. “The core of it is that a story should not impose itself on the characters. Characters should live their lives and the story should come out of that. But you must have some idea the night before you film.” In other words, you can’t just take a boat and an actor to the river and expect things to start happening.  

Filming peace

An important part of the masterclass was the auteur’s advice on how to handle actors. “Actors are generally a bit lost. But there is nothing worse than an actor who wants to be fantastic in every scene. They have to find a balance…when to look tired, when to be gorgeous, when to come out all engines firing, when to be subdued…. But every actor has their own way of getting into character or building up to it. As a director, you have to be able to combine different approaches to acting, that at times, may contradict each other,” he said.

Wenders, whose first ambition was to be a painter, has shot other artists, including painters, a dancer (Pina Bausch in Pina) and a photographer (the Salt of the Earth on Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado). How did he arrive at another’s art through his own? “With Pina, for example, I wanted to find out why she moved me.” The camera, in this quest, can at times be a problem. “The camera is an intruder, it knows you want to find something. It is the person you are filming, who shows you how to represent him. You just have to forget about yourself. You don't have to seize it, you have to let it seize you,” he said.

Why is he drawn to characters who don’t speak much? “What moves me in movies is not language.... It’s like you like speaking if there's been silence before....” Next up is a feature on peace. Wars in his neighbourhood have been a deterrent though. “The war broke out in Ukraine…. You have an American President who is ready to change history…. Palestine again changed parameters. So, I’ve set the film in the future. The future is a safer place for a film on peace….” he said.