EMILY MANTHEI

Beyond the Visible: The Images of

Wim Wenders
We understand the outside of things, we think we have them: the Lord
puts his things in sub-dened, suggestive shapes, yielding no satisfactory
meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to the conscience
and the heart.
1
Ambiguity is sometimes an uncomfortable place. But, as George
MacDonalds words above suggest, sometimes a divine interaction makes
an imprint on the heart, where the mind ceases to recognise the meaning.
At times, lm achieves the same ambiguity: while there may be no set
interpretation of the message, the image itself makes an imprint on the
soul. In this essay I will argue that in the lms of Wim Wenders, what
we see reveals the truth, even more than what we understand. Wenders
asks his viewers to look, to see things as they really are, and thereby to
nd the truth. As his friend and collaborator Scott Derrickson explains,
He wont tell you what to feel, so when you watch his lms, you have
to think about what you are seeing [. . . ] you have to interact with the
lm. Hollywood movies manipulate your emotions, but his lms give you
freedom to respond without coaxing.
2
And it is this power to respond
that allows Wenders images to be aesthetic achievements while at the
same time moving beyond the immediacy of Kierkegaardian aesthetics.
As Wenders explains:
[Films] can reveal something that you cant actually see. When
I started out, because I started out as a painter, I strictly believed
in the visible, and [. . . ] that was it. [But] in the course of making
movies, I realised that something I hadnt actually seen in front of my
camera was then there in the movie.
3
The Images of Wim Wenders 177
FAITH IN FI LM
Wenders began his lm career as a reviewer in Munich in the 1970s,
after bouts as a student of medicine, philosophy, and painting. As a child
of post-war West Germany and one of the leading lmmakers in the
neue deutsche Kino, Wenders work has been recognised throughout the
world in the secular media, but his lms have largely been overlooked
by those studying Christianity and global lm. Besides featuring in Jeffrey
Overstreets Through a Screen Darkly and David Jaspers The Sacred Desert,
as well as the important interviews given to fellow lmmaker and friend
Scott Derrickson, mentions of his lms have been brief or altogether
missing from an ever-expanding theology and lm literature. As far as I
am aware, even journal articles recognising religious elements in his lms
are scarce.
4
This has come as a surprise to me, as I had always considered
him to be, thematically, one of the more overtly religious contemporary
European directors. As I elaborate upon in this essay, what I consider
makes him a religious lmmaker is his dedication to seeing something
spiritual by means of the image by revealing something that you cant
actually see to the conscience and the heart, hence demonstrating a new
way for lm to be an alternative language for religious understanding.
Wenders own relationship to Christianity similarly lacks written
examination. In essays collected in his books The Act of Seeing and The
Logic of Images, his agnostic viewpoint is obvious. But as he explains in a
2004 interview, his disdain for the Catholic faith of his parents was a path
that only took him back to Christianity:
I went as far away from the Catholic Church as possible, I thought
that all churches were the same. The Catholic Church had made some
tremendous mistakes, and I had taken these mistakes too personally.
For twenty years I never attended church anywhere. [. . . ] For twenty
years, being on the road itself became the topic [of my lms and life],
as the destination was so uncertain. Looking back, I was like a pilgrim
who didnt believe in the marked path anymore, but still believed that
being on the road had to lead somewhere as long as I was relentless
about it.
5
This relentless search eventually led him back to the church but this time
the Presbyterian Church in the early 1990s. Maybe it is no surprise that
the themes and structures have remained the same; it is only the very
prominent bent toward reconciliation that has changed. However, because
of the great thematic consistency and the intangible religious qualities of
178 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY
his road movies, I have chosen to focus on two of his lms fromthe 1980s,
Paris Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987), and their contribution to
Wenders religious aesthetics. Each makes a powerful case in spite of his
agnostic position at the time.
Thomas Martin denes the category of religious aesthetics as follows:
Religious consciousness is the sense of relatedness that the human
has with the others of the world as all are rooted in a common
greater whole. [. . . ] Awareness of the mystery and awesomeness of
all existences, of all beings, of all the expressions of life forces does
not necessarily lead to a sense of their radical interrelatedness but is
a prerequisite for this extraordinary sense of reality.
6
Wenders lms full this prerequisite by depicting the inherent relation-
ships of things through the form and image of his mis-en-scne,
composition, and cinematography, implying religious awareness without
providing the viewer with clearly metaphorical or representational
religion. The nature of these physical, visual relationships on the screen,
and their ability to depict something beyond vision, is the area of my
exploration.
THE BLURRING OF VISION
The motif of seeing has been both the catalyst and the cataract for Wenders
throughout his career. While he began his profession as an image-
maker initially a painter, prior to becoming a lmmaker
7
essentially
to recreate vision, or the act of seeing, Wenders soon lost faith in the
truth of the images themselves, disconnected from narrative vision. The
tendency towards image-preserving in Wenders early lms leads lm
critic Alexander Graf to call Wenders cinema a documentary cinema,
because the cinema-image is ideally suited to the documentation of
the visual world, the illusion of actual presence.
8
But the troubling
proliferation of image-making in the 1980s, spurred on by easy access
to video technology and television, became cause for Wenders to doubt
the truth of images, considering these constantly changing, manufactured
images to be a violation of the trust he had previously placed in them. It is
this paradox that creates Wenders problem of vision, which he continues
to explore both thematically and visually in his lms. Through examining
Wenders own lm reviews of the late 1960s and essays of the early 1970s,
and comparing them to more recent interviews and published speeches
and essays, the progression of this problem and the different ways he
chooses to address it should become clear.
The Images of Wim Wenders 179
Schooled by the sweeping landscapes of the American West in Anthony
Mann and John Fords classic Westerns, Wenders began making lms for
the express purpose of capturing life seeing something, and seeing it
only. His task was to record time, changing the relationship of the viewer
to the present. Thus, he set his camera up and captured the moment, as
if it were a painting in time.
9
But this way of seeing soon gave way to
the deeper philosophical ideas of vision that Wenders had adopted from
those early Westerns, as he began to reect more on what had inuenced
him. He loved the lms with an openness that allowed the viewer to
continue noticing details, where the images dont come complete with
their interpretations.
10
Wenders own lms followthis logic, by employing
an open structure that allows the images (as well as the narrative) to be
interpreted by each audience member, just as events in life. This natural
act of seeing and of replicating that for his audience is what rst interested
him in making lms. Wenders reected,
The great thing about seeing for me is what distinguishes it from
thinking, namely that it doesnt entail having an opinion. In thinking,
every thought also contains an opinion. [. . . ] There are no opinions in
seeing; in seeing you can come to a view of another person, an object,
the world, that doesnt imply an opinion, where you just confront the
thing or person, take it on board, perceive it. I like the word insight.
It suggests you can have truth and understanding just from seeing.
[. . . ] For me, seeing is immersing myself in the world, while thinking
is distancing myself from it.
11
And in this way of seeing, the audience members are left to rely on their
emotions, associations, and image-consciousness to provide the message,
for latent in his vision of the world is an understanding of the divine
truth within it. Wenders belief in images to reveal truth mirrors St. Pauls
attitude towards the visible, in that Ever since the creation of the world
[Gods] eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have
been understood and seen through the things he has made.
12
While this careful way of preserving images disinterestedly and
truthfully was the only way Wenders could see to make lms with
integrity, he also considered story-telling a tremendous problem for his
images by forcing themto conformto a pattern of manipulation. He argued
that images had the right to stand on their own and that story functioned
as a vampire, stealing the true life from the images.
13
He considered the
journey of making a lm that of a day-by-day exploration, not an
180 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY
exploitation of predetermined values or ideas. Graf compares Wenders
way of capturing only tiny fragments of life and existence with Pasolinis
kino in natura, a conviction that the cinema should mirror reality by
showing real bits and pieces of life instead of trying to complete a circle
or t a dramatic pattern.
14
What gives this thesis credulity is that in so
capturing fragments of existence with truthful images, the director also
captures truth in the plot, a situation we call life, and this is what provides
meaning to each individual viewer.
In the early eighties, after Wenders rst international success, The
American Friend (1977), Francis Ford Coppola chose Wenders to direct
Hammett (1982), his rst Hollywood feature. The process, which Wenders
considered completely contrived and unnatural, caused him to react
against the monster of story by making The State of Things (1982) during
a break in the shooting of Hammett. This European art-house lm about a
directors struggle with the story, developed on the set while being shot,
was a way to help Wenders deal with his ongoing ght to protect the
image from story. Whether in spite of or because of The State of Things, he
reached a turning point in his career as he came to realise that his future
as a lmmaker was wrapped up in story-telling. His ultimate realisation
was that
peoples primary requirement is that some kind of coherence be
provided. Stories give people the feeling that there is meaning, that
there is ultimately an order lurking behind the incredible confusion
of appearances and phenomena that surrounds them. This order is
what people require more than anything else; yes, I would almost say
that the notion of order or story is connected with the godhead.
15
The realisation that story could and, most fundamentally, does function
on a spiritual level led Wenders in a new direction, cinematically. He
discovered that what is true of people and their need for stories is also
true of himself: everything I want to tell cannot be narrated without
stories.
16
And so his stories, instead of blood-sucking vampires, became
the lifeblood of the images.
Along with this new faith in narrative as an essential component in his
lmmaking, Wenders eventually began to trust images less and less. This
began a series of lms in the eighties that explored the idea of untruthful
images in lm, television, and media. In his two documentary notebook-
lms, Tokyo-Ga (1985) and Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989), both
shot in the rapidly-evolving centre of technology, Tokyo, the disparity
The Images of Wim Wenders 181
between truth and image is addressed most directly. In Notebook on Cities
and Clothes, he narrates:
Everything changes. And fast. Images above all change faster and
faster, and they have been multiplying at a hellish rate ever since
the explosion that unleashed the electronic images; the very images
which are now replacing photography. [. . . ] With photography and
then lm it began to get complicated: the original was a negative,
without a print it did not exist, just the opposite; [. . . ] each copy was
the original. But now, with the electronic image and soon the digital,
there is no more negative and no more positive. The very notion of
the original is obsolete.
17
He continued his analysis on the difference between the image of and the
reality of something in Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987),
both of which I will look at in greater detail below. This served to further
solidify the link between image and story to preserve truth and document
life as images, for Wenders could no longer be trusted to transmit insight
and truth.
In an interview in the early nineties, Wenders says, Films in general
nd it very easy to dazzle, can claim to show something that they
actually cant. In fact, the better something looks in a lm, the more wary
you ought to be: you might be being deceived. [. . . ] In the context of
a narrative, it can be terribly destructive putting in a shot for its own
sweet sake, instead of helping the story.
18
It seems to be at this point that
Wenders has discovered the synchronicity of the lmic story: the ability to
show things that are impossible to tell, achieving a narrative both beyond-
words and beyond-images by the collaboration always collaboration, and
co-operation of both. It is this insight with which Wenders provides us
that makes his lms so important in the contemporary landscape. Now
is the time when we need Wenders images so much: when the images
around us are plentiful, and the artists concerned with using them to tell
the truth are few. It is the great care Wenders takes in preserving the truth
of images that led him to comment, Only the story [gives] credibility to
each image; it [furnishes] a moral, so to speak, to my profession as an
image-maker.
19
In his most successful lms, this synthesis of image and narrative
reassures the audience of the divine power of stories to function truthfully
and reveal something beyond. Wenders images highlight emotional and
spiritual contrasts and chasms visually, as well as physically, in the spaces
that mediate these differences. If an image is empty, or almost empty, and
182 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY
sparse, it can reveal so much that it completely lls you, and the emptiness
becomes everything,
20
Wenders states. The essential composition for
Wenders is one that emphasises spaces. He laments the death of cinema,
citing the rise of the televisions paltry close-up that has eliminated the
beauty of the wide shot and cramped the freedom that viewers of the old
cinema had, to live and breathe and walk alongside the characters, in the
spaces.
21
For Wenders, these spaces frame a solitary, isolated individual
against nothing but empty space, as in the iconic opening images of 1984s
Paris, Texas in which Travis is framed against the breadth and width of the
nothingness of the desert, or the spaces reveal the layers of separation and
continuity that create physical space, as in his 1968 short lm, Silver City,
shot from an apartment window onto the street below, or in the windows
overlooking the vast emptiness of downtown Los Angeles in 2001s The
Million Dollar Hotel.
Thematically caught up in these spaces are Wenders own feelings about
isolation and belonging, home and the German notion of Heimat
22
that so
heavily provide the inspiration for his images: critics Kolker and Beiken
explain, his lms attempt to establish a transnational space, unstable and
full of longing for someplace else.
23
Wenders says of his characters, They
are longing to belong to a different context, both physically and spiritually.
[. . . ] As I look back at my movies, I think that is the story of my life right
there
24
. This is the ongoing journey of the artist that David Jasper, in
his meditations on the spirituality found in the uninhabitable desert, calls
the wandering in the desert, staring into an abyss.
25
Thematically, this
explains the lure of the images and the inability to translate them into
words or thoughts that constitute the spiritual searching and discovery
Wenders lms allow the audience. With this in mind, I will now turn
briey to a discussion of these key questions how to nd the truth in
images, what is the function of story, and where the visual and thematic
journey in Wenders spaces takes us in his two most popular feature
lms of the 1980s, Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987).
AFTER THE FOG HAS LIFTED
Paris, Texas (1984)
In Jaspers The Sacred Desert, he uses the image of the desert as a
place in which artists, poets, theologians, prophets and mystics have
gone for inspiration and cleansing. Out of a place of emptiness and
drought, one can uncover solemn, sovereign truth. The desert meditation
is about what it means for each of us to be the unique human being
The Images of Wim Wenders 183
that I am. [. . . ] This place is where the divine as God empties
itself into nite human being and where nite human being discovers
its own deep participation in transcendence.
26
The main character of
Paris, Texas, Travis, shares this desert experience through his journey
in the lm. He rst appears on a speck of screen space amidst the
rocks and plateaus of an uninhabited wasteland desert. Many critics
see Travis journey through the lm as a metaphor for Wenders own
journey through the abyss
27
that eventually led him to his dedication to
storytelling: [t]he unobstructed vision, and the lack of any recognisable
landmarks in the desert sequence establish the desert as the realm
of the image
28
in the beginning of the lm, whereas the ending, a
heavily-worded sequence, will signify Wenders shift into the realm of
story. In the still, oppressive heat and the unobstructed space of the
desert opening, Travis walks on until nally returning to some sort
of civilisation: a rundown roadside gas station rest stop, where he
subsequently collapses. From his denitive gait in these rst wide shots,
Wenders shows us what we will only nd out later in the narrative. Kolker
and Beicken explain that Travis emerges with a clear understanding
of complicity, guilt, and the necessity of taking denitive action that
will place him on the edge of closeness and separation.
29
As clearly
metaphorical as this sequence might appear to be, from Wenders own
version of events, it was only later that he acknowledged this supposed
turning point in his career, which seems to be marked so clearly by
the character of Travis. In some way, the images to which Wenders had
sensitised himself foreshadowed his own journey. While Paris, Texas was
a denite turning point in his career, it was just another step along his
path to reconciliation with God:
In the twenty years I had been absent from church, my lms main
subject was alienation, being on the road, being on some sort of
pilgrimage toward understanding, or realization, or fulllment. Even
though most of those characters didnt know what it was they were
after, they were on the way somewhere.
30
Through the lm Travis attempts to reintegrate himself into society
are marked by his space in the frame, where the compositions reveal the
singleness and seriousness of Travis situation. When his brother Walt
comes to Texas to pick him up, Travis refuses to sit in the front seat
with Walt and instead remains separate from his brother, the messenger
from civilisation, by sitting in the back seat. Even when he returns to
Los Angeles with Walt, he is repeatedly seen on the outside or separated
184 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY
from society and the other characters in the frame. He washes dishes in
the kitchen, framed from the outside behind a window. In another scene,
Walts wife, Ann, is making the sofa into a bed for Travis in the living
room. A hallway wall between them, the frame separates Travis, who is
standing in the hallway, from the living room with the sofa, Walt, and
Ann. Travis is standing on the steps, facing the wall, while on the other
side of it are Walt and Ann, facing away fromthe wall and towards the sofa.
When Travis nally crosses to the other side of the frame into the family
and community of the others, Ann and Walt immediately leave the scene.
Wenders separation of Travis from others places him perpetually in the
loneliness of the desert in which we rst found him. As the camera gives
itself completely and wholly to its subject, as Nathaniel Dorsky suggests
is the nature of devotional cinema, the audience develops an empathetic
afnity to Travis, which allows them to see beyond what is on the screen
directly to the heart of the object.
31
The heart of the object, the spiritual
centre, surpasses the act of seeing and takes the viewer beyond vision. And
this insight allows for a personal journey Travis journey a journey of
solitude through the desert.
For Wenders, solitude in the desert allows for a whole new way
of seeing, as he explains in the foreword to his 1982 collection of
photographs, Written in the West:
Solitude and taking photographs are connected in an important way.
If you arent alone, you can never acquire this way of seeing, this
complete immersion in what you see, no longer needing to interpret,
just looking. Theres a distinct kind of satisfaction that you get from
looking and travelling alone, and its connected with this relation of
solitude to photography.
32
The meditative solitude of which Wenders speaks permeates Travis
journey as well as the audiences journey from their seats in the darkened
theatre from the wilderness of separation back to repentance and, in a
way, reconciliation. It is only through this rst journey of vision both
Traviss and the audience that we are allowed participation in the
language of forgiveness, for each image ha[s] a truth only in relation to
the character of [its] story.
33
First Travis re-introduces himself to his son, who eventually grows to
accept him, and then he ultimately seeks to mend the relationship between
his wife and his son. Through the lm, Travis must take the long way
across the desert to overcome its hardships;
34
a journey Wenders takes
us on through the images of the harsh desert landscapes and the wide
The Images of Wim Wenders 185
shots through which his characters move. At the beginning of his road
trip with his son, Hunter, the two are framed in Traviss car beneath four
merging freeway interchanges. This is the rst time Travis is framed in
a two-shot: several roads meet, symbolising the blending of chaotic with
resolute movement through this space, and the fact that a decision is made
here that will decide the shape of the future for the protagonists.
35
In the climactic sequence within the peep-show parlour where
Travis nds his wife, Jane, working, Wenders rst demonstrates the
transformative power of sight through the composition, but also nally
takes a denitive step in his journey towards a cinema of story and
language. Travis sits on one side of a glass window separated from Jane,
who is captured inside the demeaning parlour walls as an object to be
looked upon. The lights are positioned both in Janes box and in Travis
viewing area such that Travis can see Jane inside her world, but Jane
is refused entrance into Travis; she can only see a reection of herself
in the glass. Dorsky reects on the nature of cinema itself to create this
non-reective separation, this immersion into the world of seeing, which
precedes meditation and reection in the afterglow of devotional cinema:
We sit in darkness and watch an illuminated world, the world of
the screen. This situation is a metaphor for the nature of our own
vision. In the very process of seeing, our own skull is like a dark
theatre, and the world we see in front of us is in a sense a screen.
[. . . ] Film, insofar as it replicates our experience of vision, presents
us with the tools to touch on and elucidate that experience. Viewing
a lm has tremendous mystical implications; it can be, at its best, a
way of approaching and manifesting the ineffable. This respect for the
ineffable is an essential aspect of devotion.
36
But as Travis rst begins to speak, he unlocks the reection that has thus
far been excluded in the discovery of images it is nally only in words
that recovery is to be found is Jaspers conclusion.
37
This mirrors the
beginning of Wenders journey towards a cinema of narrative, as both Graf,
and Kolker and Beicken recognise, without compromising the honesty of
the image. [N]ot just Travis confession, but the whole lm relies, in the
end, on Travis regaining the power of language that enables him to tell a
story. [. . . ] Wenders suggests, through Travis monologue, that this kind
of narration can co-exist with photographic images without threatening
the integrity of the lm image.
38
Now, when image and language nally coalesce after Travis speech,
he tells Jane to turn the lights out in her prison and focuses the light of
186 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY
his own lamp on his face. Travis nally fully reveals himself, his sins,
and all that he has been wandering and hiding from. While Travis is
still physically separated from Jane by the glass, it is he who is now
revealing himself in the frame of his own accord and this image reveals
his own penitence, his nakedness and complete surrender, which has
nally brought him to contrition. This, in turn, allows Jane to tell her
own story to Travis and to complete the narrative circle. Wenders is able
to afrm both the power of language to heal and the power of the image to
truly see things as they are.
SPACES IN LANGUAGE
Wings of Desire (1987)
With the dramatic nish of Paris, Texas, Wenders embarked on a whole
new stage in his career marked by the use of language as providing a
message and a moral for his images. From the rst words and images
of Wings of Desire, the mood of the story is already in place: When the
child was a child. . . begins the poem. The lofty cameras, ying above
the clouds in the Berlin air,
39
glide down over the city and into an
apartment building past several tenants, whose passing reections become
momentarily audible arbitrary moments, thoughts that icker like sparks
before dying as the camera moves to another scene and another character.
When the child was a child. . . continues the poem, and the atmosphere of
childlike wonder permeates the screen. The lm continues gently gliding,
looking through the eyes of detached angels seeking the joy of a child
in each experience while the audience rediscovers those same pleasures
through the discoveries made in each shot. In this lm, Wenders seems to
return again to trust in the cameras faithful gaze, allowing it to reveal
a truth latent in our everyday surroundings that we usually look past,
instead of through the angels, who tenderly coax people to observe the
evidence of God right in front of them, whispering rumours of meaning,
giving them cause for peace.
40
Wenders uses the German word Einstellung
to describe this notion, that lm can be a screen mediating things both in
front of and behind it. Einstellung means both a take, a shot, a position
of the camera to capture something, and also the ideological stance, the
take, or the approach one takes to the shot.
41
In Wings of Desire, it is the
angels who are at the centre of the Einstellung, both showing the audience
what happens on the surface and practising a certain approach to it that
reveals the spiritual dimension of these things.
The Images of Wim Wenders 187
To Wenders, there seemed no better place for re-discovery or such a
need of angelic guidance to achieve it than in the haunted spaces of Berlin,
a city torn apart by war, divided by walls, and hiding from its open wounds
pointing back into the past. In the images of this divided city Wenders
found a truth he could apply to the rest of the world:
Berlin is an historical site of truth.
No other city is such a meaningful image,
such a PLACE OF SURVIVAL,
so exemplary of our century.
Berlin is divided like our world,
like our time,
like men and women,
young and old,
rich and poor,
like all our experience.
42
Wenders attempt at reconciliation in this broken and divided world
(and thus redemption of the destroyed home/Heimat notion) through the
beauty of his images affects a restoration of faith in the darkest of times.
What is in front of the screen, the city itself, can only be understood
through the people whose lives the angels silently witness again, the
Einstellung. This is the way in which the stories of people are indelibly
bound to the images of those people, if truth is to be discovered.
The separation that provides the catalyst for the stories in this lm is
apparent through the use of colour and black-and-white cinematography
to represent the perspective of humans and that of the angels. The black-
and-white demonstrated for Wenders that angels see things for their
essence, for what they really are, as opposed to the distraction of ashy
surfaces that colour represents.
43
The colour that humans see, however,
is also manifest in the human ability to texturally, sensually experience the
world for the aesthetics that God created. Therefore, while the angels can
see the essence, they can only see the sensory world from a distance; they
seem to highlight the unique gift of being human.
Wenders notion of space is again apparent in its relation here to the
very heart of the city, and the city-lm:
The empty spaces allow the visitor and the people of Berlin to see
through the cityscape. Not only in the sense that they can see through
the space, and even see the horizon, which anyway is a pleasant
experience in a city, but they can also see through these gaps in a
188 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY
sense that they can see through time. [. . . ] Only those lms with gaps
in between their imagery are telling stories, that is my conviction.
44
Utilising the spaces in framing his shots and the citys holes in his
mis-en-scne allows these powerful city images to tell their stories between
the gaps, as it were. The Circus Alekan, Marions troupe, performs on
a plot of grass surrounded by several buildings. When their circus pulls
out of town, Marion is left with literally an empty place, a large gap
between the city blocks, an urban desert which parallels her own hollow
emptiness outside of the companionship of the troupe, contemplated in
her inner monologues heard only by the angels. Hallowed wandering
ground for Homer, the old storyteller, is in the no-mans-land of Potsdamer
Platz, the abandoned eld surrounding the Berlin Wall, overrun with tall
grass and weeds (where the Sony Centre is today, offers Wenders in the
commentary
45
). The angels themselves walk through the twenty feet of
space between the two walls separating East and West, unseen by the
soldiers standing guard. Jeffrey Overstreet notes
That historic barrier comes to represent not only the political divide
but also the divide between angel and human, observation and
engagement, restraint and indulgence. [. . . ] Yet Wenders has given
us the privilege of drifting through these barriers to acknowledge just
how close these people are, not only to each other, but to us as well.
46
The spaces of this city are acutely the spaces of our world, the spaces
between people and the spaces to which we conne ourselves. But again,
Wenders uses his restored vision, built by the engagement of image and
narrative, to show in the nal scene between Marion and Damiel that these
spaces can be broken down by love.
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION
In their article about his later lm, Until the End of the World (1991),
S. Brent Plate and Tod Linafelt recognise that Wenders concern with
image has led him to offer a way of seeing that binds vision to words
and to silence, to the body and to memory.
47
It is through this complex
network that Wenders has been able to continue to bind image-making
to truth, and to justify his profession as a guardian of images in a world
of ever-proliferating, dishonest images. Wenders realised that nding
the truth in images is not just about seeing; it requires the vision to
nd a story that provides both order and honesty: a story in which the
spaces allow the events, as well as the audience, to ourish. As I have
The Images of Wim Wenders 189
attempted to demonstrate, he seems to achieve this careful balance in
Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, as the numerous awards and critical
responses easily signify. But the ethereal quality of devotion, or religious
aesthetics that is at the heart of his cinema is what I have tried to
illuminate particularly. And this quality of religious aesthetics is what
makes Wenders an important subject for understanding lm as a global
theological language.
By inextricably linking story and image, separation with ways in which
to return to closeness, and vision with what is beyond, Wenders has given
his audiences a cinema of discovery and devotion. He does not tell us
what to think but he asks us to respect what he has shown, and to ask
for ourselves how to perceive it. Most of all, he asks us to participate in his
stories, bringing our own experiences to the interpretation of the lm.
48
And as viewers open their hearts and their subconscious understanding to
see what lies beyond the image, the openness of Wenders cinema provides
a hallowed spiritual ground for reection and truth. Its strange, Wenders
comments, especially for a director, to nd out that you are not the
creator. You are instrumental in creating something, but even if you fancy
the idea that you pulled it out of yourself, you have to acknowledge that
you could not have done it alone.
49
The image provides a perfect example.
As a photographer, or an image-maker, the elements are already in place.
The objects in front of the camera are latent with meaning, with stories,
with experience. As God has layered the world with signs of a spiritual
existence and the presence of his spirit, so also is the image layered. It is
only up to the viewer, led by the prodding of Gods spirit, to perceive it.
Emily Manthei writes and directs lms and documentaries that are visual,
contemplative, and philosophical. She lives and works in Los Angeles,
California. She also holds a Masters in Theology from the University of
Edinburgh and researches and writes about lm and theology. Email:
emanthei@gmail.com
NOTES
1. Jeffrey Overstreet, Through a Screen Darkly (Ventura: Regal Books, 2007), 57.
2. Ibid: 48.
3. Ibid: 129.
4. Plate and Linafelts article, Seeing Beyond the End of the World in Strange Days and
Until the End of the World in the online Journal of Religion and Film (Vol. 7 No. 3, April
2003) is a notable exception.
5. Grace Cathedral, excerpt from The Best Christian Writing of 2004: An Interview with
Wim Wenders.http://www.gracecathedral.org/enrichment/excerpts/exc_20031126.shtml
190 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY
6. Thomas Martin quoted in John R. May, Contemporary Theories Regarding the
Interpretation of Religious Film [Excerpts] in Jolyon Mitchell and S. Brent Plate (eds),
The Religion and Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2007), 3301.
7. Wim Wenders, The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations, translated by Michael
Hoffman (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1997), 33.
8. Alexander Graf, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway (London:
Wallower Press, 2002), 21.
9. Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations, translated by Michael
Hofmann (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1991), 3.
10. Ibid.
11. Wenders 1997: 46.
12. Romans 1: 20.
13. Wenders 1991: 53.
14. Graf 2002: 49.
15. Wenders 1991: 54.
16. Wim Wenders. Impossible Stories, in Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemnden (eds), The
Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1997), 36.
17. Ibid: 81.
18. Ibid: 41.
19. Ibid: 97.
20. Ibid: 99.
21. Wim Wenders. High Denition, in Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemnden (eds), The
Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1997), 46.
22. The more general word for homeland or nationality in German. Wenders is
fascinated by the English equivalent, home, to represent both a physical place and a
broader sense of belonging and association. He speaks at length about this in the chapter,
Talking About Germany in Cook and Gemndens The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image,
Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition, 535.
23. Robert Phillip Kolker and Peter Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision
and Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 36.
24. Overstreet 2007: 124.
25. David Jasper, introduction to The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art and Culture
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), xii.
26. Ibid.
27. Paris, Texas was shot following the dilemma that resulted in The State of Things,
Nicks Film: Lightning over Water, and Tokyo-Ga, all shot during a break in the fractured
production of Hammett. Scholars refer to this period between 1981 and 1983 as Wenders
darkest time, which I here call the abyss.
28. Graf 2002: 94.
29. Kolker and Beiken 1993: 120.
30. Derrickson 2004.
31. Nathaniel Dorsky. Devotional Cinema, in Jolyon Mitchell and S. Brent Plate (eds),
The Religion and Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2007), 413.
32. Wim Wenders, Written in the West (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, 1996), 8.
33. Wenders 1991: 97.
The Images of Wim Wenders 191
34. Jasper 2007: 137.
35. Graf 2002: 94.
36. Dorsky 2007: 409.
37. Jasper 2007: 137.
38. Graf 2002: 104.
39. The literal translation of the German title means The Sky over Berlin.
40. Overstreet 2007: 119.
41. Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemnden, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative,
and the Postmodern Condition (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 54.
42. Wenders 1991: 74.
43. Wenders speaks about this on the DVD commentary to Wings of Desire.
44. Wenders 1997: 99.
45. Martin Jesinghausens The Sky over Berlin as Transcendental Space: Wenders, Doblin
and the Angel of History, in Spaces in European Cinema (Konstantarakos, 2000), offers
that Potsdamer Platz is the locus of paradigmatic city space, extending beyond this city, the
national situation, and even the real, taking us into the metaphysics of twentieth century
history, p. 83.
46. Overstreet 2007: 119.
47. Place and Linafelt 2003.
48. Cook and Gemnden 1997: 69.
49. Wenders quoted in Overstreeet 2007: 133.
DOI: 10.3366/E1354990109000483