Wim Wenders and Peter Handke

Wim Wenders and Peter Handke
Collaboration, Adaptation,
Recomposition
147
Internationale Forschungen zur
Allgemeinen und
Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
Begründet von Alberto Martino und in Verbindung mit
Francis Claudon (Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne) – Rüdiger Görner

(Queen Mary, University of London) – Achim Hölter (Universität Wien) –
Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) – John A. McCarthy
(Vanderbilt University) – Alfred Noe (Universität Wien) – Manfred Pfister
(Freie Universität Berlin) – Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)
herausgegeben von
Norbert Bachleitner
(Universität Wien)
Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer
Anschrift der Redaktion:

Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Sensengasse 3A , A-1090 Wien
Wim Wenders and Peter Handke
Collaboration, Adaptation,
Recomposition
Martin Brady and Joanne Leal
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Cover image: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vampyr, 1932 (courtesy of Eureka
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© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011
Printed in The Netherlands
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Authors‟ Note 9
Introduction 11
1. Politics, Poetics, Film: The Beginnings of a Collaboration 35
2. Parallel Texts: Language into Image in The Goalkeeper’s Fear 113

of the Penalty
3. Accompanied by Text: From Short Letter, Long Farewell 163

to Alice in the Cities
4. Mute Stories and Blind Alleys: Text, Image, and Allusion in 195
Wrong Move
5. Leafing through Wings of Desire 243
Conclusion 281
Filmographies 289
Bibliography 293
Index 309
Acknowledgements
Joanne Leal would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council
which awarded her a grant for this project under the Research Leave Scheme.
She would also like to thank Birkbeck College for providing her with the
Faculty Research Grant which made study leave possible. Her thanks go too
to the friends, family, and colleagues who offered support, help, and
guidance over several years, and particularly to Richard Johnson who
remained convinced that this project could be finished.
Authors‟ Note
This book aims to make material on the collaborative films of Wim Wenders
and Peter Handke available to as wide a readership as possible. For this
reason all quotations from German texts have been translated into English. In
the case of the principal prose texts by Handke and Wenders‟s essays, we
have used published translations where available. Elsewhere, all translations
are by the authors. For the sake of simplicity, and in line with current
scholarship, we have chosen to refer to the longer prose texts of Handke as
novels rather than „stories‟ or „novellas‟. In the case of the films, we have
used the published script for Wings of Desire, but otherwise we have
produced our own protocols.
Introduction
film is film, literature is literature1
The feature film can step over every

border2
1. Cinema as a mixed medium

Cinema is a mixed or, in the terminology of André Bazin, an „impure‟
medium. In the case of German cinema, literature has remained the dominant
ingredient in the mix. In 1962 the Autorenfilmer (auteurs or writer-directors)
of the „Young German Cinema‟ in the Federal Republic programmatically
announced their intentions in print, in the form of the famous Oberhausen
Manifesto. According to Alexander Kluge the „new film language‟ called for
in this manifesto comprised an amalgamation of different media. In an article
co-authored with Edgar Reitz and Wilfried Reinke in 1965 he was forthright
in his assessment of the benefits of this mix:
Because it already includes language anyway, film would actually have the capacity to
articulate meanings that elude the grasp of verbal expression. [...] Thus we would have an
accumulation of subjective and objective, of literary, auditory, and visual moments which
would preserve a certain tension in relation to each another. [...] The combination of verbal,
auditory, and visual forms and their integration through montage enable film to strive for a
greater degree of complexity than any of these forms in isolation. [...] We could imagine,
however, an experimental film (albeit one of extreme artistic intensity) which forcefully
utilizes the oscillation between literary, visual, and auditory elements as well as the gaps
between these elements [...].3
Rather than simply reiterating the well-worn mantra that cinema is overly
dependent on literary models, although it does say this as well, the essay
asserts that it is only in the „epic ranges of film‟ that language itself could
„fully unfold‟, to such an extent, indeed, that ultimately „cinema could
surpass even the tradition of literature‟.4 The use of the term „epic‟ is of
course significant here: in their discussion of film form, Kluge and his co-
1
Robin Wood quoted in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. by Ginette
Vincendeau (London: BFI, 2001), p.xi.
2
Alexander Kluge, „Theses about the New Media‟, in West German Filmmakers on Film:
Visions and Voices, ed. by Eric Rentschler (New York-London: Holmes and Meier, 1988),
pp.30-32 (p.32).
3
Alexander Kluge, Wilfried Reinke, and Edgar Reitz, „Word and Film‟, in Film and
Literature: An Introduction and Reader, ed. by Timothy Corrigan (Upper Saddle River,
New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999), pp.229-45 (p.232, p.233, p.234, and p.238).
4
Ibid., p.231 and p.234.
12 Wenders and Handke: Collaboration, Adaptation, Recomposition
authors clearly have Bertolt Brecht in mind, and indeed at one point in their
discussion they go so far as to use the term Verfremdungseffekt (distancing
effect); montage, they assert, can generate „ambiguity, polyphony, and
variation‟.5
The „Word and Film‟ essay is, alongside the Oberhausen Manifesto, one
of the most important documents of the nascent „Young German Cinema‟ of
the 1960s. Written under the influence of Kluge‟s mentor and friend Theodor
W. Adorno, the essay demonstrates a degree of sophistication in its
argumentation and rhetoric which belies the suggestion that German
filmmakers were intellectually out of step with European New Wave film
theory until the „New German Cinema‟ of the 1970s. On the other hand, the
fact that it was published in a journal of linguistics might suggest that the
institutional framework for discourse on film was still wanting.
2. Literariness
The Brechtian tenor of the „Word and Film‟ essay was of course to become
both more strident and more explicitly political in the years immediately
following its publication, not least in the writings of Kluge himself. It could
be argued, indeed, that this seminal essay established the tone which was to
dominate auteurist discourse in Germany right through to the 1980s.
Interestingly it does not address the question of literary adaptation itself in
any great detail – over and above the customary dismissal of a cinema which
„makes every film conform to the model of the novella‟ 6 – although a telling,
if brief commentary on Alain Resnais‟s Hiroshima mon amour (1959), based
on the screenplay of Marguerite Duras, does applaud the film‟s „immersion
of language in image, the emergence of language from image, the mutual
pursuit of verbal and visual texts, figures of parallelism and collision,
polyphony‟.7 Again the terminology applied to this early classic of the French
New Wave is that of critical theory and dialectics. Kluge himself has
strenuously avoided literary adaptation across his 50-year career as a
filmmaker, and his disparaging remarks on the practice – most famously that
„literary adaptations are always weaker than literature‟ – have become
canonical.8 This does not mean, of course, that he has restricted his activities
5
Ibid., p.232.
6
Ibid., p.230.
7
Ibid., p.240.
8
Alexander Kluge, BESTANDSAUFNAHME: Utopie Film: Zwanzig Jahre neuer deutscher
Film / Mitte 1983 (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1983), p.436. Original sources
have been translated into English throughout this book. Where published translations are
available, these have been used. Otherwise all translations are by the authors. (See Authors‟
Introduction 13
to the medium of cinema or renounced literature. He has remained a prolific

writer of fiction and non-fiction who explicitly cultivates cross-media
fertilisation. As Olaf Möller has observed:
People often complain that Kluge‟s cinema is utterly disinterested in images, meaning that the
images contain no emotional or intellectual surplus. Certainly from The Female Patriot on this
is true: images, texts (their fonts, sizes and colours), sounds (music, language, diegetic noise)
are equal in expression in a way that is unmatched in the work of any other living film-maker.
[...]
Within this poetics, a title card has the same sensual and information value as a piece of
Wagner or footage from a warzone [...].9
As we shall see, there are parallels to be drawn here with the output of Wim
Wenders and Peter Handke: alongside essays on film and music, Wenders has
also published a number of volumes of his photographs; Handke has directed
four films, frequently includes his own drawings and photographs in his books,
and has even recorded improvisations on a Jew‟s Harp. The cross-fertilisations
made possible by their work across different media will be an important
component of the intermedial „displacements‟ discussed in this study.10
The question of the „literariness‟ of the New German Cinema provoked
fierce debate in the 1970s. The so-called „crisis of literary adaptation‟
(Literaturverfilmungskrise) of 1977 highlighted the heavy reliance of German
art-house filmmaking on literary pretexts and made it a topic of polemic and
debate. Many of the stars of Germany‟s New Wave – including Jean-Marie
Straub and Danièle Huillet, Volker Schlöndorff, Hans Jürgen Syberberg,
Edgar Reitz, Werner Herzog, Werner Schroeter, Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
Peter Lilienthal, Reinhard Hauff, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and, of course,
Wenders himself – had directed Literaturverfilmungen (literary adaptations).
In July 1977 Hans C. Blumenberg wrote an article for Die Zeit in which he
quoted Niklaus Schilling‟s diagnosis of the malaise of German cinema: „In
this country we once again find ourselves confronted with a fatal
Note.)
9
Olaf Möller, „Transformer‟, Sight and Sound, 18.2 (2008), 42-45 (p.45).
10
„Displacement‟ is a popular term in adaptation studies. In Concepts in Film Theory, Dudley
Andrew observes by way of explanation that: „Every interpretation is based on
displacement, since the interpreter redirects the original object by inserting it into a new
frame of reference‟. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford-New York-Toronto-
Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1984), p.154. Whilst Andrew‟s remarks relate to the
concept of „identification‟ and what he terms „the hermeneutic endeavor‟ (p.154) they could
also be applied to the notion, discussed in what follows, of cinematic adaptation as
„reading‟. The term „displacement‟ subsequently crops up in the writings of Robert Stam,
Brian McFarlane and others (see notes 25 and 26 below).
unwillingness to trust the power of the medium itself; instead films are
constructed on the basis of a literary source to avoid the dangers of having to
deal with images and tell stories with them‟.11 Kluge‟s laconic dismissal of
literary adaptation, which in fact post-dates the 1977 „crisis‟, has become a
mantra for those who, like Blumenberg, believe that German cinema has to
be saved from the hegemony of literature.
3. Adaptational events in the intersecting mode

The remarks of both Kluge and Blumenberg provide evidence of a well-
documented tendency to view literary adaptations as an inevitably inferior act
of homage to an aesthetically superior pretext. In a rather more nuanced vein,
Dudley Andrew identifies in his discussion of „Borrowing, Intersecting and
Transforming Sources‟ a specifically modernist strand to the transformation
of literary texts into cinema, or perhaps more accurately the interplay of
literature and cinema. His remarks, which at times echo Bazin‟s reflections
on adaptation four decades earlier, are relevant to the collaboration of
Wenders and Handke, and for this reason merit longer quotation:
The modern cinema is increasingly interested in [...] intersecting. Bresson, naturally, has
given us his Joan of Arc from court records and his Mouchette once again from Bernanos.
Straub has filmed Corneille‟s Othon and The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach. Pasolini
audaciously confronted Matthew‟s gospel, with many later texts (musical, pictorial, and
cinematic) that it inspired. His later Medea, Canterbury Tales, and Decameron are also
adaptational events in the intersecting mode. All such works fear or refuse to adapt. Instead
they present the otherness and distinctiveness of the original text, initiating a dialectical
interplay between the aesthetic forms of one period and the cinematic forms of our own
period. In direct contrast to the manner in which scholars have treated the mode of
„borrowing,‟ such intersecting insists that the analyst attend to the specificity of the original
within the specificity of cinema. An original is allowed its life, its own life, in the cinema.
The consequences of this method, despite its apparent forthrightness, are neither innocent
nor simple. The disjunct experience such intersecting promotes is consonant with the
aesthetics of modernism in all the arts. This mode refutes the commonplace that adaptations
support only a conservative film aesthetics.12
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are, as we shall see in the course of
this study, of seminal importance for both Wenders and Handke, and the
imprint of their work is unmistakable on both the early films of Wenders and
the later ones of Handke. Indeed Straub himself has characterised the
adaptational filmmaking process sketched by Andrew in strikingly similar
11
Hans C. Blumenberg, „Das Jahr des Teufels‟, Die Zeit, 8 July 1977.
12
Dudley Andrew, „Adaptation‟, in Film Adaptation, ed. by James Naremore (New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp.28-37 (p.31).
Introduction 15
terms: „you don‟t “film” a book, you enter into a dialogue with it, you want
to make a film out of a book because the book relates to your own
experiences, your own questions, your own loves and hates. So the first thing
I do is to copy things out‟.13 One implication of Straub‟s remarks is that
adaptations are not only highly subjective, and thus inevitably partial and
partisan, but also constitute – or at least begin with – a process akin to
reading.
As we will see, Andrew‟s concept of a disjunctive, modernist
„intersection‟ of medial forms in cinema as opposed to a notion of less
frictional „adaptation‟ is a distinction that will prove to be useful in relation
to the collaborative projects of Wenders and Handke. A note of caution does
need to be sounded here, however. Andrew‟s observations suggest that the
intersections he identifies invariably have a historical dimension to them: a
film „adapts‟ a pretext distant from itself not only medially, but also
temporally: the interplay is between „the aesthetic forms of one period and
the cinematic forms of our own period‟. In the case of the films discussed in
this study the intersections are more complex than this. Whilst there are
diachronic intersections – with Goethe, Rilke, Romantic painting and so on –
those in the collaborative films which constitute the central strand of this
study are more typically synchronic, not only in Wenders‟s appropriation of
Handke‟s texts (whether written specifically for a given film or not), but also,
for example, in the use of contemporary popular music. It could be argued
that the very title of the first collaboration, 3 American LPs (3 amerikanische
LP’s, 1969), points to this synchronicity as well as, rather more obviously,
the film‟s intermedial component.
Although Andrew‟s observations are clearly not intended to imply a
hierarchy of value, it is still difficult to escape a subtle yet insidious inference
that source material (or „hypotext‟) is primary and that an adaptation (or
„hypertext‟) is secondary. This problem is in effect comparable to that
associated with Bazin‟s terminology of „purity‟ and „impurity‟. One of the
conclusions to be drawn from our study is that the Wenders-Handke films
demonstrate that non-hierarchical adaptation and collaboration is possible.
Indeed it will be demonstrated that the relationship between writer and
filmmaker can itself be reconfigured in the act of collaboration.
13
Wolfram Schütte, „Gespräch mit Danièle Huillet und Jean-Marie Straub‟, in
Klassenverhältnisse: Von Danièle Huillet und Jean-Marie Straub nach dem Amerika-Roman
‘Der Verschollene’ von Franz Kafka, ed. by Wolfram Schütte (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,
1984), pp.37-58 (p.46).
4. Recycling, remaking, repetition

What Andrew fails to mention, or perhaps takes as read, is that the directors
he cites all belong to what might be termed the „golden age‟ of European
New Wave cinema and are also, most obviously in the case of Straub(-
Huillet) and Pier Paolo Pasolini, engaged political filmmakers. It is their
brand of intertextual and intermedial practice, often not unreasonably
abbreviated to „Godard-Straub‟ or Brechtian cinema, which dominated the
discourse on auteurist adaptation during the sixties and seventies in Europe,
fostered by such eminent forums as Cahiers du cinéma, Filmkritik and
Screen. In a disarmingly simple formulation, James Naremore has described
such modernist films as „willfully difficult and formally “experimental”‟.14
He also prefers to view film adaptation as a subset of a much broader and
perhaps less readily definable practice. His conclusion, which has been much
quoted elsewhere, is persuasive in its rhetoric:
The study of adaptation needs to be joined with the study of recycling, remaking, and every
other form of retelling in the age of mechanical reproduction and electronic communication.
By this means, adaptation will become part of a general theory of repetition, and adaptation
study will move from the margins to the center of contemporary media studies. 15
Echoing the terminology of Andrew, and at one remove from that of Bazin,
Naremore argues that every text is already intersected with multiple others,
that film should be understood within a broader theory of imitation, and that
all films question notions of originality, autonomy and (at least by
implication) authorship. Of course this conviction, coloured as it is with the
rhetoric of postmodernism, is some way removed from those held by Kluge,
Straub-Huillet, Pasolini and others in the mid-1960s. Inspired by Alexandre
Astruc‟s caméra-stylo, the auteurists held not only that the film director was
a writer (armed with a camera rather than a pen) whose principal motivation
was a desire for personal expression, but also that expression should manifest
itself in an inimitable style. Within the genre of literary adaptation proper,
this motivation asserts itself in the form of a first-person reader replacing, or
at least in dialogue with, the source text‟s narrator (first-person or otherwise).
In this context Naremore quotes Fassbinder‟s confident claim that his literary
adaptations – of Alfred Döblin (Berlin Alexanderplatz), Theodor Fontane
14
James Naremore, „Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation‟, in Naremore, pp.1-16
(p.5).
15
Ibid., p.15. As we shall see, there is a striking parallel here to Handke‟s theory and practice
of repetition, as demonstrated not least in the novel Repetition (Die Wiederholung, 1986)
which constitutes an important pre-text to Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1986).
Introduction 17
(Effi Briest) and Jean Genet (Querelle) – make no attempt to (re)construct a

general reading of the text but constitute „an unequivocal and single-minded
questioning of the piece of literature and its language‟. 16
There is a certain, one might argue productive, tension here between the
auteurist desire for personal expression, an individual authorial voice, and the
anti-auratic, mechanical apparatus of cinema itself. Naremore implicitly
alludes to Walter Benjamin in this context with his phrase „retelling in the
age of mechanical reproduction‟.17 In „The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction‟ Benjamin observes that cinematic reproduction
has a constructive and a destructive component to it: whilst reproduction
„reactivates the object reproduced‟ it is also „inconceivable without its
destructive, cathartic aspect‟.18
5. Affirmation and renunciation

Taking up Benjamin‟s distinction, it is clear from what has been said and
quoted thus far that there is a „destructive‟ component to much modernist
adaptation. Whilst its impetus is generally constructive politically, in the
sense that it explicitly or implicitly promulgates a (generally left-wing)
political conviction, it is correspondingly destructive in rejecting received
definitions of literature and film. To return to one of Andrew‟s own
examples: whilst Straub-Huillet‟s Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968)
faithfully and meticulously reproduces the composer‟s church music in
original locations, with original costumes and on original instruments, it is
also explicitly dedicated to the struggle of the Viet Cong against American
imperialism and is implicitly an interrogation of the status, value and
autonomy of Western „high art‟. Whilst celebrating Bach‟s music in long
uninterrupted, often static takes, it also questions the patronage that produced
this very music and documents Gustav Leonhardt‟s performances of it in
16
Quoted in Naremore, p.12. The original remarks, made in interview, appear in Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, „Preliminary Remarks on Querelle‟, in Fassbiner, The Anarchy of the
Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, ed. by Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing
(Baltimore-London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp.168-70 (p.168).
17
As early as 1968 Handke explicitly rejected Benjamin‟s claim that mechanical reproduction
deprived cinema of „ritual artistic aura‟. Peter Handke, „Theater und Film: Das Elend des
Vergleichens‟, in Prosa Gedichte Theaterstücke Hörspiel Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main:
Surhkamp, 1969), pp.314-26 (pp.322f.).
18
Translated by Andy Blunden (1998 and 2005): http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/
philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm (accessed August 2010). See Walter Benjamin, „Kunst
im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit‟, in Illuminationen (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1977), pp.136-69.
1967 in a manner that is now seen as „classically Brechtian‟ and that many,
then and now, find profoundly „uncinematic‟.
This destructive dimension – the dismantling of received notions of
cinema and the frictional realignment of its specific medial components – is,
we believe, axiomatic of Brechtian modernist adaptation and, as already
mentioned, dominated debates on political modernism in Screen and
elsewhere for well-nigh two decades. It is the contention of this study,
however, that there is another strand to modernist adaptation of that period,
one which distrusts the ideological constructions of political modernism: the
hegemony – real or perceived – of political, that is socialist, Brechtian
discourse within modernism and its strategies of adaptation. Whilst this
practice of „non-Brechtian‟ (or „post-Brechtian‟) adaptation may also,
especially in its earliest manifestations in the late 1960s, employ destructive
methods, they are adopted for regenerative, largely non-ideological ends.
Writing in 1968 Handke rejected what he termed Brecht‟s „lazy magic‟, an
„anti-illusionism that always requires illusions‟ and noted: „The method
adopted in my first play consisted of negating all previous methods. The
method in my next play will consist in reflecting on previous methods and
using them in the service of theatre‟.19
Handke‟s assertion, in summary, is that Brecht‟s political enthusiasm
prevents him from re-inventing or re-configuring his chosen medium, theatre
in this instance, because he requires its traditional communicative tools for
ideological purposes. An impetus potentially regenerative of theatre in its
destructive momentum remains unproductively trapped within the confines of
its medium or, more literally, within its four walls, because it must also serve
political ends. What we find in these early essayistic observations of Handke
and, as we will demonstrate, can also be identified in the collaborative films
that share these convictions, is a critique of mainstream political modernism
that not only manifests itself in advance of a widespread shift towards
postmodernist discourses, but which has also outlived the ideological battles
that engendered it.
At this point it is necessary to make three preliminary observations about
the body of films examined in this study. First, it should be noted that only
one of the collaborative works, The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (Die
Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter, 1972), is straightforwardly a literary
adaptation, by which we mean a cinematic rendering of a literary text already
in the public domain and thus potentially known to the audience of the film.
19
Peter Handke, „Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms‟, in Prosa, pp.263-72 (p.271). See
also: Peter Handke, „Straßentheater und Theatertheater‟, in Prosa, pp.303-07.
Introduction 19
However, as well as representing different approaches to the question of

collaboration, all four of the Wenders-Handke films are „adaptational‟ in a
number of ways. Not only does each film represent an intersectional
encounter between Handke‟s texts and Wenders‟s images, but also each is, to
a greater or lesser extent, „adaptational‟ in the sense that it appropriates,
incorporates, and often frictionally juxtaposes material from cinema‟s
„inherited media‟ (literature, painting, music, theatre and so on). 3 American
LPs re-presents tracks from the three vinyl albums of the title, accompanied
by commentary and moody city and landscape imagery; as well as realising a
co-authored script, Wrong Move (Falsche Bewegung, 1975) alludes in its
dramatis personae, genre, and in certain motifs to Goethe‟s famous novel
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1795/96) but
also quotes Romantic painting; Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin,
1986) quotes Handke, Rilke, Benjamin, and myriad other literary, pictorial,
musical and cinematic texts. Second, it follows from this observation that a
reading of the corpus of Wenders-Handke films using the „classic‟ tools of
literary adaptation discourse, what Andrew terms „frequently the most narrow
and provincial area of film theory‟, would be both inappropriate and
inadequate.20 It is our contention that the four jointly authored films of
Wenders and Handke represent a much wider spectrum of „adaptational‟
strategies than those implied by that ubiquitous but loaded German term
Literaturverfilmung with its implication of a hierarchy in which literature is
primary and cinema secondary. Third, our study will focus on the manifestly
productive tension in this particular creative partnership between „adaptation‟
and „collaboration‟, demonstrating that the four films represent a number of
strikingly different ways for Wenders and Handke to come together as
image- and text-makers within the medium of film. Moreover, it will show
that this coming together has significant aesthetic and conceptual
repercussions for both artists, resulting in a series of individually authored
works – both cinematic and textual – which are produced during the period of
the collaboration and which manifest the same kinds of disjunctive
intersection between a variety of medial forms within a single medium which
is also the hallmark of the collaborations. While the Wenders-Handke
partnership, as perhaps the most important collaboration between a writer and
filmmaker in the history of European cinema, is unique, it can also be
regarded as paradigmatic in that it demonstrates the variety of ways in which
the relationship between collaboration and adaptation can be played out. This
20
Andrew, „Adaptation‟, p.28.
study will in fact demonstrate that there is a direct but inverse relationship
between the two – put simply, the more adaptational the film, the less
collaborational its production.
6. Adaptation and beyond

It is in this belief that our study departs from others concerned with Handke
and Wenders. The striking overlap in themes manifest throughout their
creative careers is the subject of Carlo Avventi‟s overview of their oeuvres,
while David Coury is concerned to show how the work of both filmmaker
and writer provides evidence of a new interest in narrative in contemporary
German culture.21 Closer to our concerns is the detailed analysis of the
Wenders-Handke films offered by Simone Malaguti in her book Wim
Wenders’ Filme und ihre intermediale Beziehung zur Literatur Peter
Handkes („Wim Wenders‟s Films and their Intermedial Relationship with the
Literature of Peter Handke‟) published in 2008. Malaguti offers valuable
insights into the ways in which the collaborative films (and others directed by
Wenders during the same period, notably Alice in the Cities (Alice in den
Städten) of 1974 and Paris, Texas of 1984) adopt a range of what she
variously terms „transtextual‟ and „transmedial‟ strategies:
Theoretical discourse allows us to differentiate between four models of adaptational strategy

– imitation, transfiguration, evocation and interpretative transformation – which are in
essence based on two factors: the director‟s reaction to the source text (an affirmative or
negative position) and the traces of the literary aspect of the source text in the film [...].22
She argues that The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty is imitative in

replicating its source novel as „faithfully‟ as possible, Alice in the Cities
evocative in its allusions to Handke‟s Short Letter, Long Farewell (Der kurze
Brief zum langen Abschied), Wrong Move transformative in its refutation of
Goethe‟s Wilhelm Meister, and Paris, Texas transfigurative in its implied
reworking of motifs from Handke‟s Slow Homecoming (Langsame
Heimkehr) tetralogy. In combining aspects of all four approaches Wings of
Desire is, in Malaguti‟s opinion, a „conglomerate‟ adaptation. Her argument
is persuasive and detailed, yet in deliberately ignoring non-literary
21
Carlo Avventi, Mit den Augen des richtigen Wortes: Wahrnehmung und Kommunikation im
Werk Wim Wenders und Peter Handkes (Remscheid: Gardez, 2004); David N. Coury, The
Return of Storytelling in Contemporary German Literature and Film: Peter Handke and
Wim Wenders (Lewiston-Queenston-Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2004).
22
Simone Malaguti, Wim Wenders’ Filme und ihre intermediale Beziehung zur Literatur Peter
Handkes (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), p.189.
Introduction 21
intermedial (and in the case of film citations „intramedial‟) exchange her

analysis of the films remains necessarily partial. It is our intention to identify,
through close reading, ways in which in the course of the collaborative
process, and in other works of the same period, Wenders and Handke expand
intermediality beyond the literary to encompass a wider spectrum of
interactions and exchanges.
7. Non-Brechtian adaptation
Andrew has pointed out that every „representational film adapts a prior
conception‟.23 In the more limited sense that the term „adaptation‟ is
generally used in Film Studies, the text re-presented tends to be „already
treasured as a representation in another sign system‟, most commonly that of
narrative prose fiction.24 Without expanding the meaning of the term ad
absurdum, this study uses the term „adaptation‟ more flexibly (as its title
programmatically suggests). Across a twenty-year period Wenders and
Handke experimented with a multiplicity of intermedial transpositions, not
only in their four direct collaborations, but also in their independent works in
print and on screen. What is immediately apparent is that neither is willing,
even in the late 1960s, to adhere to the orthodoxy of the Brechtian models of
political modernist adaptation, despite their enthusiastic advocacy of certain
works by its practitioners. It is this which not only earned them a fair degree
of censure at the time, but which has also, we contend, impeded the
subsequent reception of their collaborative work. Their collaborations simply
fall outside the main thrust of the discourse on modernist adaptation. On a
more pragmatic level, of course, the generally lukewarm reception of more
recent Wenders films and growing hostility towards Handke in the wake of
his frequently intemperate interventions into debates on Serbia and its
neighbours have doubtless also played their part in re-directing interest away
from these films, as has the banal fact that the first two of the collaborative
films are not available commercially.
Yet these four films, and the numerous contemporary works of Wenders
and Handke related directly or indirectly to them, have much to add to
debates on adaptation and intermediality. In particular they exhibit a
rigorously critical take on image-making, linguistic expression, and narrative
(or story-telling) which we have chosen to term „recompositional‟. The
Wenders-Handke films dismember literature, cinema, and (less rigorously
perhaps) music. „Deconstruction‟, with its post-structuralist, post-68 and
23
Andrew, „Adaptation‟, p.29
24
Ibid.
post-ideological connotations, is not the appropriate term for this process. In

the films (and texts) examined here the adaptational process in which, for
example, one medium is redefined or recomposed in terms of others – film as
photography, as music, as painting, as poetry, for example, or alternatively
literature as film – must, of course, be categorised as modernist. The
processes employed are related to the kind of disjunctive intersections
described by Andrews, but they are neither underpinned by, nor subservient
to, ideological considerations. Remaining outside any dialectical
configuration, they are frequently unstructured, intuitive, melancholic even,
and only partially amenable to exegesis. It is this that makes these films not
only unusual in their own time, but also, as suggested above, of lasting
significance. Unlike many politically modernist films of the same period,
Brechtian or otherwise, they have not aged with an ideology that spawned
them. This is not to say that they are not, in Naremore‟s words, „willfully
difficult and formally “experimental”‟; at times they are both. However, the
process which we have chosen to term „recomposition‟ is sufficiently organic
and flexible to evolve from film to film in unpredictable, undogmatic and
stimulating ways.
Brian McFarlane has rightly noted in the introduction to his seminal
theory of adaptation, Novel to Film, that the process of adaptation can
encompass anything from near-reverential fidelity to „a commentary on or, in
more extreme cases, a deconstruction (“bring[ing] to light the internal
contradictions in seemingly perfectly coherent systems of thought”) of the
original‟.25 The collaborations of Wenders and Handke encompass, we
believe, precisely this range of approaches to „source‟ material, sometimes
even within one film, and in so doing constitute a unique body of work
amongst writer-filmmaker partnerships.
8. Adaptation as translation and transcription

In his essay „Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation‟, Robert Stam
describes cinema as a „composite language by virtue of its diverse matters of
expression – sequential photography, music, phonetic sound, and noise –
[which] “inherits” all the art forms associated with these matters of
expression‟.26 At times his enthusiastic endorsement of cinematic
heterogeneity even comes close to the rhetoric of Kluge in the „Word and
Film‟ essay, albeit stripped of the political subtext. He also suggests that the
25
Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996), p.22.
26
Robert Stam, „Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation‟, in Naremore, pp.54-76 (p.61).
Introduction 23
term „adaptation‟ be substituted by „translation‟ in discussions of what he

calls „intersemiotic transposition‟. 27 Translation is a concept important to our
study and one which will be examined in more detail at various points. It is
particularly relevant to discussions of Handke, given that he has worked as a
translator for many years. It is sufficient to note at this stage, though, that
„translation‟ and the associated term „transcription‟ have been central to
debates on intermediality across the arts throughout the modern period, albeit
subject to varying degrees of terminological slippage. In Understanding
Media, Marshall McLuhan described translation as „a “spelling out” of forms
of knowing‟,28 and more recently, in 2009, the British composer Harrison
Birtwistle described his reworking of John Dowland‟s Seaven Teares
Figured in Seavan Passionate Pavanes in terms which highlight the
affirmative nature of a translational practice:
arranging someone else‟s music is like translating a poem: it‟s something which can be quite
free – different poets can translate poems in different ways. This is a kind of translation onto
modern instruments. It‟s an act of love to arrange something, it‟s not an act of destruction –
it‟s a way of possessing it.29
One hundred years previously the German-Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni

had famously and controversially argued that transcription was as creative an
activity as so-called „original composition‟:
notation is, in itself, the transcription of an abstract idea. The instant the pen seizes it, the
idea loses its original form. The very intention to write down the idea, compels a choice of
measure and key. [...] The musical idea becomes a sonata or a concerto [...]. That is an
arrangement of the original. From this first transcription to a second the step is
comparatively short and unimportant. [...] Again, the performance of a work is also a
transcription, and still, whatever liberties it may take, it can never annihilate the original.30
Stam concludes his introduction to Literature and Film: A Guide to the

Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation in a similar vein with the
observation that „adaptations in a sense make manifest what is true of all
works of art – that they are all on some level “derivative”‟, not least given
27
Ibid., p.62.
28
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge,
1989), p.56.
29
Harrison Birtwistle in conversation with Gillian Moore in the programme to the London
premiere of Semper Dowland, semper dolens: theatre of melancholy (London: Southbank,
2009), p.5.
30
Ferruccio Busoni, Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (New York: G. Schirmer, 1911),
pp.17f.
that cinema inherits the different art forms of which it is comprised

(photography, sound recording, spoken language, music, performance and so
on).31
9. Recomposition
Given the variety of terms already available to describe (aspects of) the
adaptational or translational process, it seemed to us important to choose
carefully the terminological framework within which to discuss Handke‟s
and Wenders‟s particular contribution. „Recomposition‟, as we use it here,
refers to the process whereby a filmmaker exposes a film‟s „inherited media‟,
to use Stam‟s terminology, in order to reconfigure cinema‟s „synthetic
multiplicity of signifiers‟ and exploit the potential for „disunity and
disjunction‟ this multiplicity implies. 32 The musical connotation of our term
is not coincidental – the Wenders-Handke collaboration begins under the
auspices of American rock music and musical intertexts are fundamental,
both diegetically and non-diegetically, to the films that follow. Moreover, the
term is intended to imply a poetic realignment that steers clear of the rigours
of orthodox deconstruction. To illustrate by way of introduction what
recomposition in practice might look like, it is instructive to examine the
process at work in two related films by filmmakers much admired by
Wenders and Handke, one pre-dating their collaborative ventures and one
post-dating them: Vampyr (1932) by Carl Theodor Dreyer and Von heute auf
morgen (1996) by Straub-Huillet.
Vampyr makes its hypertextuality explicit and de-composes cinema
through intermedial figuration. In what was his first sound film, Dreyer re-
configures cinema into its „earlier modes of expression‟, 33 and in so doing
breaks, in his own words, „a new path for film‟. 34 Vampyr alludes to its
„inherited media‟ in a number of ways: it incorporates a printed book with a
31
Robert Stam, „Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation‟, in Literature and Film:
A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, ed. by Robert Stam and Alessandra
Raengo (Malden, Massachusetts-Oxford-Carlton, Victoria: Blackwell, 2005), pp.1-52
(p.45).
32
Stam, „Beyond Fidelity‟, p.61, p.62, and p.60. The term „recomposition‟ is used in Jean-Luc
Godard‟s Le Gai savoir (The Joy of Learning, 1969) in a sense close to the one proposed
here. See Chapter One, note 163.
33
Christian Metz quoted by Kamilla Elliott in „Novels, Films, and the Word/Image Wars‟, in A
Companion to Literature and Film, ed. by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden,
Massachusetts-Oxford-Carlton, Victoria: Blackwell, 2004), pp.1-22 (p.3).
34
Dreyer in Berlingske Tidende (13 May 1932), quoted in Jean Drum and Dale Drum, „Film-
Production Carl Dreyer‟, Vampyr, Masters of Cinema, 25 (Eureka, 2008), pp.14-43 (p.18).
This essay is in the booklet which accompanies the DVD.
Introduction 25
graphic frontispiece illustration and a theatrical shadow play, it ekphrastically

includes a print and a portrait painting, it recreates a Whistlerian landscape
and frames architectural details to echo modernist abstraction.35 It also
intramedially cites silent cinema both in a quotation from F. W. Murnau‟s
Nosferatu (1922) and in using intertitles alongside spoken dialogue; it meta-
textually points to the technology of sound recording in an unexpected use of
synchronous diegetic banjo music and to image-making as the protagonist
Allan Gray is shown observing his own funeral through trick photography.
Finally, in two images which self-reflexively refer to the cinematic apparatus
as a whole, we see a vanitas still-life composition of a printing press, box
camera, and framed picture and the film concludes with a still photographic
image as the wheels of the flour mill (and by analogy of the projector itself)
come to rest.
David Bordwell describes Dreyer‟s method as „counter-movement‟ and
„counter-gesture‟ and highlights Vampyr‟s „ambiguities and discontinuities‟,
whilst Jonathan Rosenbaum contends that the „conventions that it uses are
largely present only to be contested and dismantled‟. 36 What is significant
about Vampyr in the context of this study is that it is a modernist film outside
of Soviet, Brechtian or Godardian cinema which de-constructs its own
„matters of expression‟. In so doing it recomposes cinema not for political
ends, but rather, as Bordwell, Noël Burch, and others have convincingly
argued, in search of answers to psychological, ontological, spiritual, and
philosophical questions. As we shall see, this is a path closely followed by
Wenders and Handke in their collaborative and in some of their singly-
authored works. Rosenbaum‟s conclusion, that Dreyer‟s „breakdown‟ of
codes „is accomplished in a number of ways, each of which entails the
disruption of a language pattern in order to assert corporeal presences beyond
the formal co-ordinates which initially define and enclose them‟, is
comparable to our reading of the methodology underpinning the Wenders-
Handke collaborations.37 Without wishing to pre-empt any conclusions, it
could also be asserted that what also connects Dreyer with Wenders and
Handke is the adoption of modernist means for non-modernist ends. As
35
Many years later Dreyer himself was to describe the result as „an abstract‟. Quoted in Drum
and Drum, p.30.
36
David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley, Los Angeles-London:
University of California Press, 1981), p.116; Jonathan Rosenbaum, „Vampyr: Der Traum
des Allan Gray (Vampyr: The Strange Adventure of David Gray)‟, Monthly Film Bulletin,
43.511 (1976), 180.
37
Ibid.
Handke himself put it to Wenders, in a discussion following the premiere of

his own film The Absence (Die Abwesenheit, 1994), „I sensed [...] that all
images have to be destabilized in order that they can later be seen in a truly
new way‟.38
10. The dispositif of cinema

It has already been noted that certain kinds of modernist cinema are de-
constructive in their rejection of received definitions of literature and film,
and Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach has been cited as a classic example
of the more militant strain of political, Brechtian modernism. In later films,
however, Straub-Huillet were to become less strident and confrontational.
Von heute auf morgen, an adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg‟s comic twelve-
tone opera of 1929, is stylistically a homage to Dreyer and indeed offers a
tableau of „cinema de-constructed‟ which echoes the vanitas still-life in
Vampyr. Here it will serve as our second example of recomposition in
practice.
As ever with Straub-Huillet, Von heute auf morgen is not only a radical
staging of a cultural classic, but also a meta-textual discourse on film itself
and its history. In its opening pan across the auditorium in which the opera
was recorded, followed by a lengthy shot of a spray-painted graffito in
Cologne, the film certainly remains faithful to the Brechtian method that
Straub-Huillet had refined since their debut film Machorka-Muff in 1962. As
well as its stylistic debt to Dreyer in compositions and shadows – Straub has
acknowledged the Danish director‟s 1925 comedy The Master of the House
(Du skal ære din hustru) as an inspiration39 – there is also a manifest self-
citation in the film in a prominent Cézanne print which adorns a wall of the
single living-room set. Straub-Huillet had directed a documentary on the
painter in 1989. The picture in question is Houses on the Hill of 1900-1906.
What is striking – and quite un-naturalistic – about the constellation of
objects of which the Cézanne print forms a part, is that it can be read as a
deconstruction of film into its „modes of expression‟, a mini-history of
cinema told in clockwise rotation. We have the print itself exemplifying by
means of ekphrasis the visual component of cinema – the re-presentation of
reality on a white two-dimensional surface, the canvas as screen, film as
„moving pictures‟. The table lamp below and to the right can be read as the
38
Peter Handke, Die Abwesenheit: Eine Skizze, Ein Film, Ein Gespräch (Dürnau: Edition 350
im Verlag der Kooperative Dürnau, 1996), p.146.
39
Schönberg/Blonda/Huillet/Straub: Von heute auf morgen: Oper/Musik/Film, ed. by Klaus
Volkmer, Klaus Kalchschmid, and Patrick Primavesi (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 1997), p.93.
Introduction 27
cinematic apparatus – like the projector it too casts shadows and makes
visible. To the left is a telephone, which plays a decisive role in the opera,
here representing dialogue, the theatrical element, and its extension beyond
the confines of the theatre. This, clearly, is the function fulfilled by early
cinema, which borrowed from the stage and dismantled its three walls. Most
strikingly the radio, prominently located to the left of the telephone, is an
anachronism. It is not a set from 1928 (the year of the composition of the
opera), but rather a National Socialist Volksempfänger (people‟s receiver) of
a few years later, as much an ideologically encumbered apparatus as its
sibling the Volkswagen (the people‟s car). This almost altar-like composition
of objects not only deconstructs film – here at the service of that most
bourgeois of arts, opera – but also alerts the attentive spectator to the
ideological component of cinema. Moreover, Straub-Huillet, with no little
hauteur, place their film alongside two artistic pioneers – the composer
Schoenberg, who emancipated dissonance and gave us Modern Music and
serialism, and Cézanne, whose economy of expression took painting in the
direction of abstraction and who is held to be a precursor of cubism.
What is significant, and often overlooked, about Cézanne and
Schoenberg, is that unlike their myriad disciples they did not in any
simplistic way seek to break with tradition, which is why the terms „avant-
garde‟ and „revolutionary‟ sit uncomfortably alongside their work. The same
goes for Straub-Huillet‟s Brechtian materialism in the cinema. Von heute auf
morgen is not an experimental film in any straightforward sense, but it is
pursuing a discourse on the materiality and taxonomy of film as image,
music, and word. What we have, perhaps, is an illuminating median between
the two domains of modernism famously addressed by Peter Wollen in his
seminal essay „The Two Avant-gardes‟: the experimental, generally
structural, avant-garde on the one hand and Brechtian filmmaking on the
other.40 Von heute auf morgen and other recent films of Straub-Huillet,
including Sicilia! (1999) and Itinéraire de Jean Bricard (2008), represent a
kind of „post-Brechtian‟ cinema which, whilst not abandoning the
fundamental tenets of political modernism, is certainly more reflective,
restrained and lyrical than much Brechtian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.
Without wishing to overstate the case, this study suggests that the
collaborative films of Wenders and Handke pre-figure in certain important
ways this shift to a „post-Brechtian‟ aesthetic, lingering political differences
notwithstanding. It is worth noting at this point that one significant feature of
40
See: Peter Wollen, Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso,
1982), pp.92-104.
the common ground between the „post-Brechtian‟ aesthetic and the cinema of
Wenders is identified by Gilles Deleuze as the characteristic attribute of
Wenders‟s (early) films – self- reflexivity: „It was inevitable that the cinema,
in the crises of the action-image, went through melancholic Hegelian
reflections on its own death: having no more stories to tell, it would take
itself as object and would be able to tell only its own story (Wenders)‟.41
Extrapolating from this observation one might suggest that melancholy self-
reflexivity is the very tenor of the Wenders-Handke films. However, although
cinema and mortality will be the focus of our examination of the early short
films of Wenders, including 3 American LPs, in Chapter One, we would
contend that with an increasing degree of intensity, and certainly by Wings of
Desire, this melancholy gives way to a more affirmative evaluation of the
power of cinema.
As this study will demonstrate, it is no coincidence that both Handke and
Wenders have remained outspoken advocates of Straub-Huillet, despite their
obvious lack of sympathy for the pair‟s political fervour. Indeed it could be
asserted that Straub-Huillet are the single most important influence on the
films of both Wenders and, subsequently, Handke. The latter claimed, in
1999, that their Elio Vittorini adaptation Sicilia! (1999) had „made me
rediscover film, shown me cinema again, made it explode in my heart as
though for the very first time‟. 42 It is our contention that in each of the
collaborations examined in this study, Wenders and Handke approach film
„as though for the very first time‟ (albeit, perhaps, not always with quite such
explosive results).
11. Displacements: the field of study

Introducing yet another term to his discourse on intermediality, Robert Stam
describes adaptation as „a form of criticism or “reading”‟ 43 and it has been
noted above that Straub claimed „copying out‟ was the first stage of literary
adaptation. In the case of the Wenders-Handke films, source materials – these
include literature, music, photography, painting, and cinema itself – are
displaced through appropriation in the form of direct quotation, translation in
its broadest sense, and allusion. Stam offers a rather impressive list of the
transformative processes that such source materials can be exposed to:
„selection, amplification, concretization, actualization, critique, extrapolation,
41
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London-New York: Continuum, 2005), p.74.
42
For a reproduction of the original French language postcard see http://www.brdf.net/sicilia/
cartepostale.htm (accessed August 2010).
43
Stam, „Beyond Fidelity‟, p.58.
Introduction 29
analogization, popularization, and reculturalization‟. 44 In analyzing individual

films we will, to some extent at least, engage in the activity which Stam
considers to be a necessary tool of adaptation studies – comparative stylistics.
However, our readings of the four collaborations, and of the first and last of
them in particular, will also engage with the important claim made by
McFarlane that adaptation is „an example of convergence between the arts‟.45
The thrust of our study is thus to bring out the bi-directionality of the cinema
with which it engages, a series of films which participate in the separation or
disentangling of their „inherited‟ media, but which also stage their
(re)incorporation or synthesis, their recomposition.
12. Collaboration
I do believe that the way in which Peter sees and describes things has something to do with
my way of making films. And I do have the feeling that we‟ve accompanied one another,
mostly from a distance but somehow always together – or that Peter‟s texts have
accompanied me even when they‟ve not appeared in my films. 46
Whilst Wenders has repeatedly insisted that the influence of Handke on his
work goes beyond the confines of direct collaboration it is, not surprisingly,
at its most tangible in the four film projects that they undertook together in
the course of an extended collaboration over a period of nearly two decades.
Alongside the issues of adaptation and recomposition discussed so far in this
introduction, one of this study‟s aims is to identify and analyse four different
models of collaboration as they are represented by Handke‟s and Wenders‟s
four joint projects, films which have been claimed to „blur the parameters of
cinematic authorship‟.47 3 American LPs is an improvised dialogue on a
shared enthusiasm, The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty is, as already
claimed, closest to what might be understood as a conventional literary
adaptation, Wrong Move is a co-conceived project, while Wings of Desire is
an arm‟s-length commission in which the writer consolidates the filmmaker‟s
scenario.
We offer detailed close readings of each of these films as collaborative
models, both in relation to one another and as they shed light on the creative
44
Ibid., p.68.
45
McFarlane, p.10.
46
Wim Wenders in an interview with Reinhold Rauh in Wim Wenders und seine Filme
(Munich: Heyne, 1990), p.246.
47
Inez Hedges and John Bernstein, „History, Style, Authorship: The Question of Origins in the
New German Cinema‟, Journal of Contemporary History, 19 (1984), 171-87 (p.179).
and intellectual development of their authors: specifically we explore the

intellectual dialectics of an encounter between a filmmaker in search of
narrative and a writer with a distrust of conventional story-telling. But we
also endeavour to locate these works within the context of Wenders‟s and
Handke‟s broader oeuvres within the period of the collaboration in order to
demonstrate that, even when they work independently of one another, their
creative output exhibits many points of intersection – both thematic and
stylistic. This is particularly evident in three independently produced works
which will also be examined in detail here for the evidence they provide of
mutually enriching creative interaction: Wenders‟s Alice in the Cities, which
is read for its engagement with Handke‟s 1972 novel Short Letter, Long
Farewell, and those of Handke‟s film projects which fall within this period,
the Godard-inspired Chronicle of On-Going Events (Chronik der laufenden
Ereignisse, 1971) and his homage to Wenders-style filmmaking, The Left-
Handed Woman (Die linkshändige Frau, 1977).
13. An overview
Our initial chapter serves in the first instance to contextualise the
collaboration. It begins with an examination of the nature of Wenders‟s
cinema pre-Handke by looking briefly at the short Silver City Revisited
(1969), a meditative essay on place, identity and travel which exemplifies the
filmmaker‟s brand of „poetic minimalism‟ prior to the collaboration. The
focus then shifts to 3 American LPs, the short cinematic paean to American
music and the „American Dream‟ which represents the first mutual project
carried out by writer and filmmaker. As a model of collaboration, it offers a
dialogue between its two creators and between their words and the images
with which they interact. We offer a detailed analysis of framing and
documentation in the film, which takes as its starting point seminal books on
photography by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, with a view to
demonstrating how this initial, explorative, and diaristic collaboration
contains in miniature structures and themes, not least the method of
recomposition of inherited media, which will be taken up in the forthcoming
collaborative feature films. The chapter‟s final sections examine Handke‟s
and Wenders‟s creative development in the period of the first collaboration,
focusing particularly on their writings on cinema, and it ends by exploring
Handke‟s attempt to put his theories on film into practice in the television
production Chronicle of On-Going Events, a project which reveals striking
differences from as well as similarities to the collaborative films.
What is established by the first chapter is early evidence of the
development of Handke‟s and Wenders‟s mutual interest in adaptational
Introduction 31
strategies and the relationship between image, word, and narrative, as both
„inherited‟ and independent media, which will prove to be central to their
later work (both together and apart). What our subsequent reading of the
feature films demonstrates is that a discourse of adaptation as recomposition
not only provides a framework within which to read the films, it is also
central to their internal construction. Wenders and Handke share a mutual
interest in issues relating to the nature and function of story-telling, to
processes of translation and adaptation, to writing and learning to write, and
seeing and learning to see. The rest of this study is concerned to explore the
ways in which these concerns emerge as thematic and structuring elements in
the collaborative films themselves and also in a number of other works
produced independently by Wenders and Handke during the time of their
collaboration.
Their work together was consolidated during the 1970s, first with
Wenders‟s film The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty. This represents a
collaboration-at-one-remove, a literary adaptation which proves particularly
productive for Wenders‟s development as a filmmaker by generating free
space for visual, musical, and acoustic invention and recomposition around
the matrix of a given text. Chapter Two explores as parallel texts Handke‟s
novel and Wenders‟s treatment of it as a starting point for what is, despite
Malaguti‟s categorisation of it as an „imitation‟, a very different film. We
examine the linguistic issues at the heart of Handke‟s novel, and the crisis
facing its protagonist, before demonstrating how Wenders transcends these in
his adaptation, investigating how the film substantially reformulates the
protagonist‟s dilemma, and by analogy perhaps that of cinema itself, by
exploring it in terms which prioritise image and sound over language.
In Chapter Three we focus on a pair of apparently independent projects
with a view to exploring the reality of Wenders‟s claim that Handke‟s work
has always provided an accompaniment to his cinema, even in the case of
those films which do not represent an adaptation or translation of one of his
texts – or at least not ostensibly so. Alice in the Cities might at first glance
appear to have little to do with Handke. Shot in 1973, it falls within the
period of Wenders‟s most intense collaboration with the writer but is scripted
by Wenders and makes only oblique reference to Handke as a source of
influence for the project. As we shall see, however, a closer examination of
it, coupled with a comparison with Handke‟s novel Short Letter, Long
Farewell, demonstrates the overwhelming significance of Handke for
Wenders‟s early film production. It also reveals a shift in thematic concern in
the work of both writer and filmmaker as they begin to explore – alongside
the linguistic dilemmas that still concern them both – the existential and
ontological questions that will dominate their work of the 1970s.
Wrong Move was conceived from the outset as a collaborative project.
Wenders produced from Handke‟s script a film which exposes explicitly and
implicitly the tensions between pre-determined dialogue and the spontaneity
of the filmmaking process, revealing as it does so the limitations of
„imitative‟ literary adaptation. Chapter Four explores the relationship
between words and pictures in the film, examining it as a reflection on
Romanticism (in literature and painting), authorship, and role playing. A
close reading, particularly of its opening and closing scenes, suggests that
Wrong Move is a film embodying in its recompositions a tension between
word and image which makes logical and inevitable a parting of the ways for
author and filmmaker. Certain thematic elements of the film are also shown
to be close to Handke‟s concerns in two almost contemporaneous works: A
Moment of True Feeling (Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung, 1975) and The
Left-Handed Woman, a text which exists both in written form (1976) and as a
peculiarly Wenders-like film (1977).
In the late 1980s Handke and Wenders worked together for the final time
to date on a film project, Wings of Desire, which provides a fourth model of
collaboration and, as Malaguti suggests, a kind of résumé of the adaptational
strategies adopted in the previous collaborations. Wenders commissioned
Handke to write key passages for the principal protagonists, around which the
story and remaining dialogues are woven (co-authored by Richard Reitinger
and the cast). The result is a collage of voices and quotations – including
many from Handke‟s journal The Weight of the World (Das Gewicht der
Welt, 1977) – which constitutes an „intertextual web‟. Chapter Five explores
how the filmmaker integrates the literary texts produced by Handke to add a
lyrical dimension to the film‟s spoken language and to literarise what is a
self-consciously poetic allegory of the artist-filmmaker as redemptive
storyteller. The nature of the input of writer and filmmaker to this project is
additionally complicated by the fact that Wenders‟s initial outline for the
film, which predates Handke‟s contributions to it, was nevertheless itself
manifestly indebted to the writer both in general (in its thematic concerns)
and in detail – through Wenders‟s long-term engagement with Handke‟s Slow
Homecoming tetralogy and a reading of the author‟s other texts. We also
demonstrate here how Handke‟s influence on the film is evidenced by his
exploration of similar themes in The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire (Die
Lehre der Sainte-Victoire, 1980) and Child Story (Kindergeschichte, 1981).
In the process we return to a theme already prominent in the readings of the
earlier films, the depiction of children in the work of both Handke and
Introduction 33
Wenders, and bring the study full circle by returning to the issue of the
relationship between images, words, and narrative. On a metaphysical, or
more specifically religious level, it could be argued that recomposition is here
equated with rebirth and regeneration.
What the study as a whole will demonstrate is that it is possible to
identify over the course of the collaborative process a rhythm of, or
alternation between proximity and distance in the working relationship
between writer and filmmaker. Perhaps the secret to the collaboration lies, as
Handke puts it in another context, „in a spatially and temporally correct
relationship between close-up and long view (Nah- und Fernblick)‟.48
However, this binary pattern is also overlaid by a process of accumulation in
which each collaboration can be seen to draw on and develop a set of clearly
identifiable themes – in particular the dualisms of word and image, narrative
and picture, America and Europe, the fictional and the real – which also
constitutes the focus of this study. It will become apparent that the pattern of
collaboration is underpinned by a constant fascination with matters of
adaptation and ways of recomposing cinema. As will be seen, neither the
overall rhythm of the collaboration, nor the accumulation of ideas across its
duration can readily be appreciated from viewing the films in isolation: each
must be viewed as part of a process. Moreover, the films demonstrate an
interrelationship with many more of Handke‟s texts than are explicitly
claimed as their direct precursors, creating an intertextuality which functions
on numerous levels over and above the citations and allusions which will be
discussed in the coming chapters.49
At the end of this study it will be possible to draw some conclusions
about the development undergone by both Handke and Wenders within the
timeframe of the collaboration, although this is not its principal aim. Whilst
Wings of Desire is, in many respects, a variation on a set of themes common
to all four of the collaborations, it will be impossible in the final chapter to
overlook the distance both Wenders and Handke have travelled since 3
American LPs. For all the stylistic differences, the first three collaborations
have much in common; The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty and Wrong
48
Peter Handke, Die Geschichte des Bleistifts (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1985), p.229.
49
This intertextual recurrence can be compared to the reappearance of characters in Wenders‟s
films – not least amongst them Philip Winter as embodied by Rüdiger Vogler – and of
certain protagonists in Handke‟s novels: Gregor Keuschnig in A Moment of True Feeling
and My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay (Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht, 1994); Filip Kobal in
Repetition and My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay; Andreas Loser in Across (Der Chinese des
Schmerzes, 1983) and In a Dark Night I Left My Still House (In einer dunklen Nacht ging
ich aus meinem stillen Haus, 1997).
Move in particular share certain concerns which are very much of their time –
foremost amongst them a linguistic scepticism which is experienced by the
protagonists Josef Bloch and Wilhelm Meister as an enervating, at times
visceral disorder. This disorder is frequently accompanied by aural and
pictorial disorientation, a bi-product of recomposition, and is intimately
bound up with the political, historical, and cultural disorientations of the late
1960s and early 1970s. Whilst this disorder has not entirely vanished in
Wings of Desire, it will be seen to be no longer suffered by the protagonists
themselves (Damiel, Cassiel, Marion, Homer and Peter Falk), but rather
observed by them in others – principally in suicidal passers-by and ill-fated
historical extras. The compassion of these observers, their „humanity‟ and
tenderness, manifests itself in their words and, in the case of Peter Falk (like
Marianne in Handke‟s novel version of The Left-Handed Woman before him)
in image-making, drawing. Cinema‟s redemptive strength, as envisaged by
Wenders, is shown to lie precisely in the „earlier modes of expression‟ it
encompasses and the various ways in which they can be recomposed
poetically.
What is significant is that the disorder experienced by Josef Bloch and
Wilhelm Meister is very much of Handke‟s making – and is by no means
exclusive to his collaborations with Wenders. In the films in which they
feature, these characters repeatedly have recourse to such simple consolations
as music and photography denied them in Handke‟s versions of their stories.
A decade or more later, in Wings of Desire, the protagonists no longer
struggle to communicate, but are eloquent, effusive even, and benevolent in
their gaze on those who have not been redeemed by love, language, or an
urbane appreciation of the joys of materiality. Whilst it might superficially
appear that there has been a convergence of writer and filmmaker here, what
this study will demonstrate is that it would be more accurate to say that
Wenders‟s position has – despite obvious aesthetic shifts – remained
comparatively constant, whilst Handke‟s writing has undergone considerable
transformation. The commonality of interest evident in 3 American LPs, for
example, has all-but evaporated, and Handke‟s focus has shifted from the
cinematic to the scriptorial. One could go so far as to claim that – in contrast
to the proximity of interest that underpins the early collaborations – the
apparent congruities and correspondences between Handke and Wenders in
Wings of Desire are as insubstantial and illusory as the white pencil which
magically separates itself from itself in the Berlin library. It is this course
from (cinematic) closeness to (aesthetic) remoteness that this study of
recomposition charts.
Chapter One
Politics, Poetics, Film: The Beginnings of a Collaboration

I do believe that there‟s something there,
a way of seeing the world as it were,
where there is quite simply an affinity.1
1. First contact
Handke and Wenders met for the first time in the mid-1960s after Handke
had moved to Düsseldorf, not far from Wenders‟s home town of Oberhausen,
with his then wife, the actress Libgart Schwarz.2 According to Wenders, his
first encounter with Handke took place after a performance of one of the
writer‟s early plays: „The first time I saw him, a play was running in
Oberhausen called Self-Accusation (Selbstbezichtigung). I spoke to him after
the performance. The next time I met him, in Düsseldorf I think, he
remembered that I‟d asked very impertinent questions in Oberhausen‟.3 The
relationship continued to develop after Wenders left for Munich, where he
commenced his studies at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film (HFF,
University of Television and Film Munich) in 1967, and after Handke moved
via Berlin to Paris in 1969, to Kronberg in 1971, and back to Paris in 1973.
Handke was not only older than Wenders, but also the first of the two to
become established.4 His first prose pieces, collected in the volume Greeting
the Board of Directors (Begrüßung des Aufsichtsrats, 1967), were written
during the early 1960s while the author was still a law student in Graz. He
rose rapidly to cultural prominence later in the decade, initially when his
„language play‟ (Sprechstück), Offending the Audience (Publikums-
beschimpfung) – described by Reinhold Grimm as one of „the most exciting
events of German post-war theatre‟ – proved a critical success when it was
performed at Frankfurt‟s Theater am Turm at the „experimenta I‟ festival in
1966, under the directorship of Claus Peymann. 5 He garnered even more
acclaim when, in the 1968-69 season, Kaspar (1967) became the most
1
Wenders in Reinhold Rauh, Wim Wenders und seine Filme (Munich: Heyne, 1990), p.246.
2
She would go on to star in Wenders‟s first feature film, Summer in the City (1970),
Handke‟s own initial independent foray into filmmaking, Chronicle of On-Going Events,
and in The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty.
3
Rauh, p.246.
4
Handke was born in 1942 in Griffen in the Austrian district of Carinthia. Wenders was born
in 1945 in Düsseldorf.
5
Reinhold Grimm, „Der Sammelband von Peter Handke‟, in Über Peter Handke, ed. by
Michael Scharang (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp.56-59 (p.58).
performed modern play in the German-speaking countries, cementing his

international reputation:
Enthusiastic reviewers praised the play as a major theatrical event, suggesting a greatness
akin to that of Waiting for Godot […] and predicting a permanent place for Kasper in
literary history. Jack Kroll called Handke „the hottest young playwright in Europe‟ and
Clive Barnes referred to him as „one of the most important young playwrights of our time‟.6
In fact Handke became something of a literary phenomenon in the 1960s and

1970s. His controversial reputation was shaped by his own provocative
statements about the state of contemporary culture and the status of his own
works within it, and his creative output attracted extreme responses, ranging
from the passionately affirmative to the intensely hostile. But even those who
were critical of his literary achievements had to admit that his influence on
the German cultural scene in this period was considerable. 7
Wenders‟s work, on the other hand, began to receive sustained critical
acclaim only in the early 1970s. In the first years of Handke‟s success he was
writing film reviews, for the magazine Filmkritik and elsewhere, and working
on the six shorts and one feature which were to make up his film school
output.8 It was in fact the writer‟s reputation that helped him secure funding
for his first commercial feature, the adaptation of Handke‟s novel The
Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, and, despite the fact that he went on in the
course of the 1970s and 1980s to become a renowned filmmaker, his
comments in interview suggest that his admiration for – even awe of –
6
June Schlueter, The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), p.41. Jack Kroll‟s comments are taken from „Mind Bending‟,
Newsweek, February 26 1973, p.91; and Clive Barnes‟s are from „Theater: Handke‟s Kaspar
is Staged in Brooklyn‟, New York Times, February 16 1973, p.26.
7
Manfred Durzak, one of the critics most hostile to Handke‟s work of the 1970s, is
nevertheless clear about his importance as a cultural figure: „Certain reports of the
tendencies and marking of the trends of the contemporary literary scene were prompted and
clarified, so to speak, by the debates around Handke. Without him certain new positions
would not have developed with the same keenness and speed. In the process of ripping him
to shreds or praising him to the skies, battles for position were also being fought below the
surface at the same time, the outcome of which he undoubtedly determined in this way‟.
Manfred Durzak, Peter Handke und die deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur: Narziß auf Abwegen
(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982), pp.12f.
8
This includes the 10-minute 1967 film Locations (Schauplätze) which has not survived. The
five surviving films are: Same Player Shoots Again (1968), Silver City Revisited (1969),
Police Film (Polizeifilm, 1969), Alabama: 2000 Light Years (1969), 3 American LPs (1969).
He does not discuss the different versions of Silver City.
Politics, Poetics, Film 37
Handke has remained intact.9 Handke himself, who has maintained his
reputation as one of the German-speaking world‟s foremost intellectuals, has,
in contrast, made reference to Wenders in his public pronouncements only
rarely.10 Evidence of any artistic or intellectual affinity with the filmmaker is
provided only by the collaborations and Handke‟s independent film work.
The aim of this chapter is to establish a framework in which Wenders‟s
and Handke‟s early collaborative projects can be read. In order to determine
their point of departure, it will focus initially on what might be termed „pre-
Handke Wenders‟, that is on the filmmaker‟s early creative output, the film
school shorts which precede 3 American LPs and in particular the most
radical of them, Silver City Revisited. It will then turn to Handke‟s work prior
to their first collaborative project by examining The Innerworld of the
Outerworld of the Innerworld (Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt,
1969), a collection of poems written between 1965 and 1968 which not only
draws explicitly on cinema for its inspiration, but also displays the
characteristic synthesis of linguistic experimentation and intense subjectivity
which made Handke‟s work of this period so controversial. Following this
examination of two independent works, we will offer a reading of the first
collaborative piece itself with a view to establishing the extent of Wenders‟s
and Handke‟s shared interests at this earliest point of their interaction. With
the same aim in mind, the chapter will then investigate the nature of the
cultural context in which the friendship between writer and filmmaker
developed and in which their early works were produced, concentrating on
their equivocal responses to 1960s political activism and the calls by radical
artists for the politicisation of culture. We shall then turn to „the politics of
seeing‟ to explore in greater detail the nature of what Wenders has implied is
a way of observing and describing the world that he shares with Handke.
Evidence of mutual interests, influences and concerns will be sought by
9
In an interview published in 1990, for instance, Wenders not only claims that Handke‟s texts
are „the most beautiful things to be written in the whole world at the moment, in and of
themselves so perfectly structured that one can‟t critically take them apart‟; he also describes
Handke‟s film The Left-Handed Woman as „definitely one of my favourite films, a small
wonderfully beautiful film and way ahead of its time‟. Rauh, p.244 and pp.246f.
10
Handke himself has recently admitted that he is no longer quite the influential figure he once
was („I no longer have the voice I once had‟), a fact which his interviewer on this occasion,
Ulrich Greiner, regards as a consequence of his defence of Serbia during the Balkan conflict.
See: Greiner, „Ich komme aus dem Traum: Ein Zeit-Gespräch mit dem Schriftsteller Peter
Handke über die Lust des Schreibens, den jugoslawischen Krieg und das Gehen in den
Wäldern‟, Die Zeit, 1 February 2006: http://www.zeit.de/2006/06/L-Handke-Interv_
(accessed August 2010).
juxtaposing Handke‟s early essays (particularly those on film) with

Wenders‟s early film reviews and subsequently with Handke‟s own first film
project, undertaken independently of Wenders, Chronicle of On-Going
Events. The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on material that largely
pre-dates the pair‟s first feature-length collaboration, The Goalkeeper’s Fear
of the Penalty, most of which comes from the same period as the short 3
American LPs, providing a context for the analysis of that film, while at the
same time allowing for an investigation of the roots of what was to become a
protracted collaboration.
2. In the beginning was the image: Silver City Revisited
this age, which favours the picture over

the object, the copy over the original, the
representation over reality, appearance
over existence [...]; illusion is the only
thing sacred to it, but truth is profane.11
Silver City Revisited is a good starting point for examining Wenders‟s early
films for a number of reasons: it is an experiment in the recomposition of
film, in this case as still photography and silent moving image; it is the most
explicitly autobiographical of the student films; it embodies more clearly than
the others – which in line with HFF pedagogy at the time are „genre
exercises‟ – the distinctively „sensibilist‟, melancholic tone of his early work;
it marks, as Wenders himself has repeatedly stated, a turning point (albeit a
rather early one) in his career, insofar as it heralded the birth of story-telling
in his films.
2.1 The capricious photographer: Wim Wenders and still images12

One of the things that is striking about the collected essays and conversations of
Wenders, published under the title On Film in 2001, is the consistency (and at
times also the repetitiveness) of his utterances on certain key aspects of his craft.
One of these – central to this study – is the relationship between film-as-image
and film-as-story. Wenders worries away at this conundrum across the 500-odd
pages of this volume. On numerous occasions he points out that his own earliest
films – those he made at the Munich HFF – are those of a painter with camera in
11
Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, vol. 1 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1956),
pp.22f.
12
„I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice‟, Roland
Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), p.11.
hand; the following examples are from five different texts and interviews from
the 1980s:
It was an extension of painting for me, of landscape painting.

So when I began filming, I thought of myself as a painter of space engaged on a quest for time.
The shots were like the paintings and watercolours I‟d done previously, only in a different
medium.
My early films were just like paintings, only I used a camera.
The thing that mattered, back then, was the images.
But they were pretty much the films of a painter who was trying to paint with a camera instead of
canvas and oils.13
In an essay of 1971 on Summer in the City and The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the
Penalty, entitled „Time Sequences, Continuity of Movement‟, Wenders claims
that what initially fascinated him about film „wasn‟t so much the possibility of
altering or affecting or directing something, but simply watching it‟.14 It is this
stance of passive but attentive reception that characterises both the early short
films Wenders produced at the HFF and the film reviews that he published
during the same period in the journal Filmkritik and elsewhere.
Whilst Wenders characterises himself as a „painter manqué‟,15 not least
because for some years painting was his chosen medium, it is the photographer
and cine-photographer who have a uniquely privileged status in the fictional
world of his films. The director‟s most famous alter ego, Philip Winter,
personified from Alice in the Cities (1974) to Lisbon Story (1994) by that most
reserved of actors, Rüdiger Vogler, is first seen in Alice in the Cities admiring a
collection of his own Polaroids. Although not all can be viewed clearly, we see
enough to know that these photographs are – like the others he snaps in
America – as blank as the grey sky, sea, and rain that dominate the opening
scenes of the film. „It‟s so nice and empty‟ Alice remarks on seeing his
Polaroid of the view from the airplane window [shot 322].16 Lisbon Story, for
its part, concludes with a brash and colourful self-reflexive homage to one
hundred years of the cine-photographer‟s art.
Around the mid-point of the twenty or so years separating these two films,
in Wings of Desire, we are presented with a sombre homage to photography –
to the most renowned taxonomist of twentieth-century man, August Sander.
13
Wim Wenders, On Film: Essays and Conversations (London: Faber and Faber, 2001),
p.195, p.210, p.319, p.328, and p.474.
14
Ibid., p.161.
15
Ibid., p.406.
16
Shot numbers in this book refer to protocols compiled by the present authors from
commercially available copies of the films unless otherwise stated (see Authors‟ Note).
His anthology People of the 20th Century (Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts) is
lovingly and reverently leafed through by the old man, Homer, in the Berlin
City Library. In Wenders‟s epic survey of history, memory and German
identity, Sander‟s classification of Weimar society merits a place in a
triumvirate of books of mythical status: it is up there with the Bible and
Homer‟s Odyssey.
In the period that separates Alice in the Cities and Wings of Desire the
photographer has advanced from a private collector piecing together some
sense of selfhood from Polaroid snaps to a mythical chronicler of national
identity. Having likened the photographs from People of the 20th Century to
the fairytale narrative of „Once upon a time‟ (Es war einmal) in Wings of
Desire, Wenders made this connection between image-making and story-telling
even more explicit in 1997 by publishing a substantial anthology of his own
photographs, charting thirty years of filmmaking and global travel, under the
title Once (Einmal).17 Here photographs are straightforwardly used to tell a
very personal story. In the light of the unequivocal eulogy to the filmmaker as
„angel of history‟ in Wings of Desire, it would seem that for Wenders cinema
has, by 1986 at least, become a weighty synthesis of image-as-epiphany and
story-as-revelation. The poetry in this particular union was, of course, provided
by Peter Handke.
It is certainly the case that before the advent of Handke‟s voice with 3
American LPs Wenders‟s cinema was virtually wordless.18 Even during the
period of their collaboration, Wenders‟s own-scripted films remain, in
comparison to those co-written with Handke, conspicuously taciturn. The
trademark gangsters, loners and would-be-writers of his early films are
effectively or, in the case of Mignon in Wrong Move, „actually‟ mute.
17
Wim Wenders, Einmal (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2001).
18
The notable exception is the relatively untypical Police Film, where the whispered text (a
tribute, possibly, to the hushed tones of Godard‟s Two or Three Things I Know About Her /
Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, 1966) is as deliberately verbose as it is perfunctory.
It should be noted that the screenplay for this film was also a collaborative effort, co-
credited to the sociologist „Dr Albrecht Göschel‟. In 1971 Göschel co-authored a study of
the police: Albrecht Göschel, Michael Anselm Heyer, and Gertraud Schmidbauer, Beiträge
zu einer Soziologie der Polizei 1 (Contributions to a Sociology of the Police 1) (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971). He subsequently worked at the Institute of Urban Affairs (Difu)
in Berlin and his study of the police was re-published by Suhrkamp in 1984.
2.2 In the beginning was the word19

It should be emphasised, however, that the seemingly unending battle fought
out in Wenders‟s films is between stories and images, not between words and
images. Circumstantial evidence for this is provided by the film reviews he
wrote whilst producing his near-silent student films; they are certainly never
taciturn or lost for words – most are, as we shall see later in this chapter,
colloquial and relaxed in tone, some could even be described as garrulous.20
More significant is the very fact that he has consistently turned to writers as
collaborators and adapted literary texts (Nathaniel Hawthorne‟s The Scarlet
Letter and Patricia Highsmith‟s Ripley’s Game). It is also worth bearing in
mind in this context that it was a fascination with language that attracted
Wenders to Handke‟s work in the first place, leading to their initial encounter
following the performance Self-Accusation in Oberhausen.
The problem for the filmmaker, as Wenders was to characterise it later, is
the tendency of both words and images to gravitate towards story, in syntax and
montage respectively. It is for this reason surely that Wenders‟s early films – at
least those pre-dating his first collaboration with Handke – eschew both:
I think a picture stands on its own more readily, whereas a word tends to seek the context of a
story. For me, images don‟t automatically lend themselves to be part of a story. If they‟re to
function in the way that words and sentences do, they have to be „forced‟ – that is, I have to
manipulate them.
My thesis is that for me as a film-maker, narrative involves forcing the images in some way.
Sometimes this manipulation becomes narrative art, but not necessarily. Often enough, the
result is only abused pictures.
I dislike the manipulation that‟s necessary to press all the images of a film into one story; it‟s
very harmful for the images because it tends to drain them of their „life‟. In the relationship
between story and image, I see the story as a kind of vampire, trying to suck all the blood from
an image.21
It may seem surprising that despite the privileged status of the photographer in
his feature films, and his own active engagement with the medium, it is the
painter-filmmaker that Wenders sees in his early films, not the photographer-
19
„I don‟t believe many things in the Bible, but I do believe, passionately, in its first sentence:
“In the beginning was the word.” I don‟t think it will ever say: “At the end was the image...”
The word will endure.‟ Wenders, On Film, p.443.
20
Much later, in a lecture delivered in Munich in 1991, Wenders would go so far as to claim
that „our salvation in this land that so badly needs some salve is our German language. It‟s
delicate, precise, subtle, loving, sharp and careful all at once. It‟s rich. It‟s the only great
wealth in a country that thinks itself wealthy, but isn‟t. It‟s everything this country no longer
is, or waits to become again, or maybe never will be again‟. Ibid.
21
Ibid., p.212.
filmmaker. Aside from a perceived sense of continuity between his activities in

the two media, an explanation for this may lie in Wenders‟s claim that in a
photograph „the before and after is immanent [...] by virtue of the way a
photograph is a split second between past and future‟.22 Understood in this way
a photograph inevitably suggests a narrative – time past and time future are
implied in time present, but without actually being revealed. If this is the case,
then a film, which records actual time, is indeed closer to a painting, which also
bears the material traces of the passage of time required for its production.
There is, after all, no analogy in painting for the instant (or „instamatic‟)
photograph. Both film and painting, in the words of Béla Balázs (as quoted by
Wenders), „rescue the existence of things.‟23 It is precisely this awareness of the
passage of time, rather than the momentum of narrative, that dominates Silver
City Revisited and also affords it a distinctly melancholy tone.
2.3 After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more
whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin24
To understand the role of image-making, of cine-photography, in this perpetual
dialogue between image, word and story it is, as indicated above, necessary to
turn to the „pre-linguistic‟ (or more specifically the pre-Handke) Wenders.
Silver City Revisited is the first of his films to include still photographs. At
nearly thirty minutes it is the longest of his early short films, and the most
experimental (or at least minimal) in structure. It consists of fourteen
sequences, amounting to eighteen shots in all, generally separated by red-
orange flare-outs and flare-ins:
Sequence 1 [shots 1 & 2] 00.00

Title: SILVER CITY REVISITED;
VON WIM WENDERS (FÜR EDDA)
(separated by black) (b/w).
Sequence 2 [shots 3 & 4] 00.19
Archive footage (2 shots from an elevated
position and without a change of location)
of crowds moving from the right to the left
(probably early twentieth century) (b/w).
Sequence 3 [shots 5, 6 & 7] 00.56
22
Ibid., p.408.
23
Ibid., p.159.
24
Susan Sontag, quoting Jack Kerouac on the photographer Robert Frank, in Sontag, On
Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), p.66.
3 shots of waves on water from above.

Water flows in different directions (b/w).
Sequence 4 [shot 8] 01.13
Street scene from above with cars, trams,
traffic lights and a building site (colour).
Man 1 makes a phone call from a
telephone box (right middle ground) at a
road junction with two blinking traffic
lights in the background, and is watched
by Man 2 (left foreground). Man 2 lights a
cigarette with a match. Man 1 exits the
phone box and walks out of the frame to
the left, as a passer-by also crosses from
right to left in the middle ground. Man 2
continues to smoke for a few moments
and then walks out of the frame also to the
left. Second passer-by walks into the
frame from the right foreground and out to
the left middle ground, smoking. Birds
peck the ground (middle ground) and cars
pass by (background) (colour).
Street scene as sequence 4. More traffic
and light (colour). Interrupted irregularly
by 7 3-frame black „blinks‟.
Static shot from platform of a small, rural
station with railway line (to the right)
receding towards the horizon. After 20
seconds a man runs across the track, up
onto the platform and out of the frame to
the left. He is followed after 3 seconds by
a train which enters the frame at speed
from behind the camera and disappears
towards the horizon (colour).
Street scene from above with houses and a
road beyond a building site in the
foreground. Daylight, light traffic (colour).

Interrupted irregularly by 11 3-frame
black „blinks‟.
Street scene from above with tram lines
between the carriage-ways and a modern
slab block in the distance. Trams pass,
light traffic (colour). Interrupted
irregularly by 7 3-frame incomplete black
„blinks‟.
Static rostrum shot of a photograph
(possibly a postcard) of a Swissair plane
on an airport runway with a propeller-
driven plane in the air overhead (colour).
Close-up shot of a television set (cut off to
the right and below by the frame with
room visible to left and above). Television
shows The Rolling Stones performing
(many changes of camera angle within the
programme). Hand enters from the right to
adjust the controls on the TV set (colour).
Static rostrum shot of a photograph (again
possibly a postcard) of an opulent hotel
lounge with plush chairs and potted palm
trees (colour).
Street scene from above with houses and a
road beyond a building site in the
foreground. Same point-of-view as
sequence 8 with different framing.
Daylight, light traffic (colour). Interrupted
irregularly by 11 3-frame black „blinks‟.
Street scene as sequence 9. Night, heavy
traffic (colour). Interrupted irregularly by
11 3-frame black „blinks‟.
Film ends 30.40
The film is without original sound but accompanied sporadically by a scratchy

recording of „mood music‟. It is, in effect, a silent film with seemingly arbitrary
and, especially in a film „featuring‟ The Rolling Stones [shot 15], somewhat
incongruous background music.25
Sontag opens her celebrated book On Photography by recounting the scene
in Jean-Luc Godard‟s Les Carabiniers (The Soldiers, 1963) in which the
mercenaries return from their blood-thirsty crusades with nothing more than an
old suitcase full of photographs loosely catalogued by subject. Like the stock
tourist returning home with a fist-full of photographs or films, Godard‟s
hirelings establish their credentials with a catalogue of images, albeit in this
case second-hand, public ones (given that they are postcards).26 „Photographs‟,
Sontag notes, „alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at‟, they
are „experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its
acquisitive mood‟.27
Silver City Revisited can be viewed as an experiment in juxtaposing a
subjective, private photographic gaze with objective, public record. This
recompositional dialectic is refined by further sets of binary oppositions
presented by the film. These include: stasis and movement (still photography
and moving images); original (auteurist) footage and archive (documentary)
footage; pseudo-documentary surveillance footage and proto-narrative fictional
moments; shots virtually devoid of life and scenes depicting crowds or traffic-
jams; daylight and darkness; repetition and singularity (acoustically as well as
visually, as the film includes one track of „mood music‟ repeated as in a
jukebox and another which is played only once).
Unlike Wenders‟s other shorts from the same period – in particular Same
Player Shoots Again and Alabama: 2000 Light Years – Silver City Revisited
does not make explicit reference to Hollywood genre cinema or America. It is
also less playful and more rigorously self-reflexive than his other student films.
However, the mini-dramas in sequences 5 and 7 can be read as skeletal spy and
chase scenarios, moments of suspense and reaction respectively. Genre
25
There are five short episodes of mood music, in two cases bridging two shots: shots 8 and 9;
shot 10; shots 12 and 13; shot 16; shot 18.
26
In a witty riposte and re-evaluation of this scene (which had attained mythical status in the
intervening four decades), Godard remade the episode in 1997 under the title The Soldiers
Revisited (Les Carabiniers révisités), substituting pictures from his own personal and public
history (press shots and film stills) for the impersonal postcards of the original. There are
strikingly similar scenes with „pornographic‟ postcards of buildings in Brecht‟s play
Schweyk in the Second World War (Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg, 1943) and Buñuel‟s The
Phantom of Liberty (Le Fantôme de la liberté, 1974).
27
Sontag, pp.3f.
associations are also engendered by the „mood music‟ of the soundtrack (with
its juke-box like repetitions) and the (necessarily imagined) music of The
Rolling Stones viewed second-hand on the television. The broad street scenes
with their trams and traffic jams are not distinctively evocative of Munich
(where the film was shot) and might conjure up associations of American
cityscapes despite the non-American cars. The photographs of the airport and
hotel in sequences 10 and 12 certainly betoken travel and, in the latter case, a
certain nostalgia for its sometime romance.
What the two still photographs do evidently capture, in stark and implicit
contrast to the two opening shots of crowds and water which they appear to
parallel structurally, is the arrest of time which both Sontag and Barthes
identify as the defining and most troubling feature of photography. In freezing
and preserving an instant a photograph is, for Barthes, a „micro-version of
death‟,28 whilst Sontag famously claims that „all photographs are memento
mori‟ because they „testify to time‟s relentless melt‟.29 Photography, she
concludes, is essentially an „elegiac art‟.30 For Barthes photographers are
„agents of Death‟ inflicting „profound madness‟ by provoking the viewer to ask
„why is it that I am alive here and now?‟.31
Death is the explicit theme of Same Player Shoots Again and Alabama:
2000 Light Years. In both it is, however, a quotation of death from the corpus
of Hollywood gangster movies. There is also a playful, intertextual dimension
to the exits in both films. In Same Player Shoots Again the fatal shots are both
„real‟ (the passenger in the car in the framework story and the soldier in the
central episode are clearly on their last legs), but also metaphorical, given that
the „shooting‟ is also that of the pinball machine and the camera. In Alabama:
2000 Light Years the protagonist, his victim, and accomplices are all fatally
wounded, but the deaths we actually encounter are of the film‟s music and the
light, which both fade out in the protracted final sequence. In both films the
expirations are very much cinematic clichés. Of Alabama: 2000 Light Years
Wenders has said: „The subject is death. You could say that much about the
story: it deals at least with death. In the end, the camera is dying – not the man.
28
Barthes, p.14.
29
Sontag, p.15.
30
Ibid., p.15.
31
Barthes, p.92, p.13, and p.84. Later, Wenders was to claim, rather more optimistically, that
in making films „for a moment, the gradual destruction of the world of appearances is held
up. The camera is a weapon against the tragedy of things, against their disappearing‟.
Wenders, On Film, p.160.
Well, the man is dying, but you don‟t see him dying – you see the camera
dying, which means you see a very, very slow fadeout‟.32
Similar caprices and intertexts doubtless occur in Silver City Revisited: the
extravagant flare-outs at the end of most of the sequences are self-referential
and possibly a homage to New American Cinema‟s fondness for unedited full-
reel takes (Andy Warhol is a prime example). They may also remind us of
early cinema – the short, single-reel, static shots of the Lumière Brothers, an
analogy underscored perhaps by the fondness for modes of transport in
Wenders‟s film (including, even, the passage of a train through a station
echoing Arrival of a Train at a Station / L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La
Ciotat, 1896 by the Lumières). What is striking here, however, is the way in
which these rather fanciful notions are embedded in an overarching structure
which pits quasi-objective images of time arrested against a subjective camera-
eye which seems to pose Barthes‟s question, but with a shift of emphasis: „why
it is that I am alive here and now‟. Concretely, the three street scenes in
sequences 4, 6, 8, 9, 13, and 14 consist of views shot from windows of flats in
which Wenders himself lived. More whimsically, in line with a conceit
favoured by the so-called „Munich sensibilists‟ of the time, to whom we shall
return below, these otherwise unedited sequences are „interrupted‟ by a brief
closing of the shutter to imitate the eye-blink of the camera-eye, or, in this case,
a fictionalised (albeit autobiographical) camera-I. Whilst Silver City Revisited
may indeed de-construct cinema and recompose it as still and real-time
photography it certainly does not de-personalise it.
It is thus not with the fictional persona of Philip Winter that Wenders first
introduces the notion of the photograph as framer of identity and intimation of
mortality.33 Whilst the opening shots of crowds and water can be read as a (not
especially profound) mini-statement on the inevitable and natural passage of
time, the two „postcards‟ – the first impossibly freeze-framing a moment of
flight, the second conjuring up a long-gone ancien régime grandeur – signify
that a photograph is, in Sontag‟s words, „both a pseudo-presence and a token of
absence‟.34
32
Wenders in interview with Jan Dawson in Dawson, Wim Wenders (New York: Zoetrope,
1976), p.18.
33
For a further discussion of these issues in relation to Alice in the Cities see Chapter Three.
34
Sontag, p.16.
2.4 The important thing is not to blink35

The blink of the eye, created in Silver City Revisited by a brief closing of the
shutter, is in effect the direct opposite of the process required to take a
photograph, which involves briefly opening the shutter to expose the film.
Whilst Barthes claims that the mechanical click of the shutter affords him some
relief from the horror of posing for a photograph, the same sound is for Walter
Benjamin as characteristic of the modern age of mechanical reproduction as the
striking of a match (an action which, coincidentally, occurs in sequence 5 of
Silver City Revisited):
With the experience of the match around the middle of the century a series of innovations
comes about which all have one thing in common – a complex sequence of events is launched
with a single, abrupt action. [...] Amongst the innumerable gestures of switching, inserting,
pressing, and so on, the „snapping‟ of the photographer was to be especially productive. A
single press of a button was sufficient to preserve an event for an unlimited period of time. The
apparatus gave the moment what you might call a posthumous shock. [...] The day would come
when a new, more intense desire for sensations would be satisfied by film. In film shock-like
perception comes into its own as a formal principle.36
The eye-blink – subject of two contemporaneous experimental Fluxus films of

Yoko Ono shot with a high-speed camera – is in effect a separator, an editor of
visual information. Whilst we can reasonably assume that the blink – both
physiologically and as simulated by Wenders – is the briefest of interruptions
of vision rather than a definitive cut in a given sequence (the world is not
generally transformed in the blink of an eye, except perhaps by Luis Buñuel
and Salvador Dali in Un Chien Andalou, 1929), it does generate a shock, a
flash of the kind Barthes terms a punctum.37
The momentary extinguishing of the light in these moving images (passing
cars and „blinking‟ traffic lights remind us that we are watching footage shot in
real time) transforms the uniform flow of cinematic time into equivalents for
still images, each „a neat slice of time, not a flow‟.38 The momentary „blinks‟
also point self-reflexively to the fact that film does not only consist of 24 image
frames per second, but also of 24 moments of darkness that separate them. In
Silver City Revisited Wenders experimentally recomposes motion pictures as
still images and translates photographs into cinematic texts. This transformative
35
Sontag, p.41. Sontag‟s remark relates to the proof apparently provided by the photographs of
Diane Arbus that photographing people is necessarily cruel and mean.
36
Walter Benjamin, „Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire‟, in Illuminationen (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 185-229 (pp.207f.).
37
Barthes, p.27.
38
Sontag, p.17.
process also helps to illuminate the film‟s title, with its echo of silver
photographic plates. Wenders himself was later unable to remember where the
film had got its title: „I still think it expresses the mood of the film very well –
just the sound of the two words. Maybe it‟s the alliteration that makes it. I don‟t
know‟.39
2.5 Absence and melancholy

Wenders has remarked light-heartedly that his early films involve activities that
he was not himself undertaking: „Film-making, in the beginning, was a
substitute, a compensation for not being able to play saxophone and drums and
guitar all at once. And I‟m sure if I‟d had the guts, I‟d be a rock musician‟.40
The implication is that presence in his films principally betokens absence, in
the manner diagnosed by Sontag.41 In a sense this is the logical corollary to the
process referred to by Kafka, in a famous remark quoted by Barthes, that
photographs are taken to „exorcise reality‟: „We photograph things in order to
drive them out of our minds‟.42 In Wenders‟s early films the medium of cinema
evokes its own inherited media and presents them as memento mori. One
senses in this recompostional process an ambivalence towards cinema itself as
a synthetic medium.
In the case of Silver City Revisited the contemplative photographic
reflection on mortality produces a „mood‟ of vague and indefinable
melancholy, underlined by the fading of the light in the final sequence. The
„anthropomorphisation‟ of the cityscapes is enhanced by the blinking and an
intimation that the alternating traffic lights, a recurring motif across the film,
are a kind of mechanical heart-beat: „Photography is a kind of Tableau Vivant,
a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the
dead‟.43 Barthes repeatedly stresses that the intimation of mortality engendered
by the act of viewing a photograph (rather than simply being photographed) is
the essentially „terrible thing‟ about photography.
In his commentary on Silver City Revisited, Stefan Kolditz claims that the
intention behind the inserted black frames was to simulate the „blinking eye of
the viewer‟, rather than a fictional camera-I.44 What is significant is that the
39
Dawson, p.18.
40
Ibid., p.11.
41
See Sontag, p.16.
42
Gustav Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka: Erinnerungen und Aufzeichnungen (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, 1951), p.25. For translation see Barthes, p.53; see also Sontag, p.206.
43
Barthes, p.32.
44
Stefan Kolditz, „Kommentierte Filmografie‟, in Frieda Grafe et al., Wim Wenders, Reihe
Film, 44 (Munich-Vienna: Hanser, 1992), pp.103-314 (pp.107f.).
focus of photographic interest in Silver City Revisited is shifted from

production (in the image manipulation through tinting in Same Player Shoots
Again, for example) to reception. This may help to explain the anecdotal
evidence that Silver City Revisited, the least narrative of all Wenders‟s films,
tends to generate irritation, frustration and vocal hostility whenever it is
screened. This may, of course, say as much about the expectations of an
audience acquainted with Wenders‟s otherwise „narrative‟ cinema as it does
about the film itself.
2.6 Romanticism and the middle-class flâneur

Certainly the irritation experienced by many viewers of the film is in stark
contrast to the common consensus amongst critics, and summed up neatly by
Klaus Kreimeier, that the film constitutes „pure reception‟ and is supremely
„contemplative, meditative‟.45 For Gerhard Theuring, in his landmark analysis
of Wenders‟s early films published in Filmkritik in May 1969 (and which,
significantly, includes a reference to Handke, implying that he, Wenders and
Theuring himself are all in agreement with one another), Silver City Revisited is
the apotheosis of Wenders‟s aesthetic:
Silver City is a film which expresses the longing for a prelapsarian speechlessness, a film of
complete peacefulness. The brutal violence inflicted by the ever-expanding cities on each and
every inhabitant has been banned from Silver City in a miraculous way. [...]
Silver City points in the direction of a place where cinematic reality par excellence comes into
being. Utopia, as it might be delineated, can be seen here at least in part. Silver City is a
completely defunctionalised world. Surely that is a pointer to a happy life!
The established, hyper-critical, frustratedly enlightened audience on right and left doesn‟t want
to understand this. That‟s why it reacts so brutally to films like Silver City: it is outraged by
anything that it cannot grasp hold of. It views a film which doesn‟t satiate the appetite to
rationalise with revulsion. That‟s how things have always been with the petit bourgeois: he
reacts furiously to anything which doesn‟t lower itself to his level. To this extent the left, right
and liberal shit are in league with one another – Handke is quite right about that! – as a skilful
agent in the service of a society which attempts to eradicate naïvety just as it punishes children
for being children. It‟s a shame that it is precisely those who shout loudest and see least who go
on and on about repression: Silver City is a document of a liberation. Anyone who can‟t see that
is simply blind.46
As we have seen, Wenders himself has noted on numerous occasions that his
student shorts were „motion pictures‟ in a very literal sense, attempts to
translate the experience of painting into moving images. The image of the
45
Klaus Kreimeier, „Die Welt ein Filmatelier oder: Herzkammerton Kino‟, in Grafe et al.,
pp.15-42 (p.17).
46
Gerhard Theuring, „Filme von Wim Wenders‟, Filmkritik, 13.5 (1969), 315-17 (pp.315f.).
painter that emerges from these films is not only that of a (photo-)realist, but
also very clearly a would-be Romantic. Silver City Revisited, after all, contains
no fewer than six „window situations‟, a fact which does not escape Kolditz:
„Almost invisibly immanent in this film is a Romantic impetus whereby the
camera adopts the subjective view of someone waiting at a window. In later
films Wenders‟s connection with Romanticism will become more explicit‟.47
What is clear from his early shorts is that the Romantic stance is essentially
synonymous with passive reception: „I like the word insight. It suggests you
can have truth and understanding just from seeing. Much more than from
thinking, where you can lose yourself, or lose touch with the world. For me,
seeing is immersing myself in the world, whilst thinking is distancing myself
from it‟.48
Wenders himself has described the genesis of Silver City Revisited in the
following terms:
And all of the shots were long shots, extreme long shots. And they were all done from the third,
fourth, or fifth floor of the apartments where I lived at the time. (I used to change apartments
rather frequently.) And they all showed streets or crossings, first very early in the morning, at
three or half past three when they were completely empty, and the lights were turning from
green to red to green again, when there were no cars or anything crossing the streets, and with
that morning light where everything is blue. And I used to shoot them even without cutting the
ends off the 30-metre rolls – at the end, the image would be turning yellow or red or quite
simply white. I didn‟t cut anything away. And the second half consisted of shots in the evening,
sometimes of the same places, the same streets, but with the heavy evening traffic going out of
the city. [...] The film was extremely contemplative. It was really like standing at a window and
looking down on the streets, either completely empty or, on the contrary, completely
„stocked‟.49
As well as being programmatically Romantic in its choice of vantage point –

above the jungle of the city – and of a contemplative mode, it is also the work
of a flâneur: „photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of
the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by
Baudelaire. [...] Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the
flâneur finds the world “picturesque”‟.50
For Sontag this is seemingly an unpolitical gaze, one which appears to
transcend „class interests‟,51 precluding action through meditative consumption:
47
Kolditz, p.109. This will be examined in some detail in relation to Wrong Move in Chapter
Four.
48
49
Dawson, p.18.
50
Sontag, p.55.
51
Ibid., p.55.
„In the past, a discontent with reality expressed itself as a longing for another
world. In modern society, a discontent with reality expresses itself forcefully
and most hauntingly by the longing to reproduce this one‟.52 If this is indeed
the case (and Warhol‟s films, for example, would support such a claim) then
Wenders‟s early films could certainly be read as expressing a „discontent with
reality‟ precisely in their „longing to reproduce‟ it. Although this does not
imply that they are, Police Film (Polizeifilm, 1969) apart, „political‟ in any
conventional sense, it certainly suggests they are temperamentally of their time.
2.7 The birth of fiction out of photography53

Wenders himself has noted, in a rather inaccurate summary of the film to Jan
Dawson,54 that Silver City Revisited contains „a hint of a story‟:
[the] shot was of a railway line – just an empty landscape, very early in the morning, too, and
after two minutes of a completely empty shot, someone crosses the rails from one side of the
frame, and leaves the frame on the other. Immediately after he has crossed the rails, the train
appears: that is to say – the camera is very close to the rails and – bang – the train is in the shot,
and he passes, and slowly disappears in the distance. You get the impression that maybe it‟s the
start of some kind of story, but nothing happens until the end. Just the empty streets, and the
views out of the windows.55
In a talk given in 1982 at a colloquium on narrative technique, Wenders

elaborated on this key moment in his career:
This tiny „action‟ – man crosses tracks ahead of a train – signals the beginning of a „story‟.
What is wrong with the man? Is he being followed? Does he want to kill himself? Why is he in
such a hurry? Etc., etc. I think it was from that moment that I became a storyteller. And from
that moment all my difficulties began too, because it was the first time that something
happened in a scene I had set up. [...]
So for the first time I had to consider the order of the shots, some kind of dramaturgy. My
original idea, simply to run a series of fixed-frame shots, one after another, „unconnected‟ and
in no special order, became impossible. The assembling of scenes and their arrangement in an
order was, it seemed already, a first step towards narrative. [...] From then on and until the
52
Ibid., p.80.
53
Sontag notes that „in the situations in which most people use photographs, their value as
information is of the same order as fiction‟, p.22.
54
In this interview and elsewhere Wenders talks exclusively about an earlier version of the
film which does not contain sequences 2, 3, and 11, or the still photographs. He also makes
no reference to shot 5 which surely also contains more than a „hint of a story‟. His remarks
on the music also bear no relation to the final version of the film. Further details of the
different versions are discussed by Kolditz (pp.107f.). He notes that the first version was
simply known as Silver City (p.108).
55
Dawson, p.18.
present moment, I have felt an opposition between images and stories. A mutual
incompatibility, a mutual undermining. I have always been more interested in pictures, and the
fact that – as soon as you assemble them – they seem to want to tell a story, is still a problem
for me today.56
This scene is also notable in relation to Wrong Move, which includes a shot of a
German station clock as the second hand reaches the top and pauses. Wenders
cuts just before the hand moves on, giving the impression that time has come to
a stand-still. A similar clock is clearly visible to the left of the frame throughout
the „mini-drama‟ in shot 11 of Silver City Revisited. Both scenes can be read as
a reflection on the relationship between photography, the arrest of time and
story-telling. This is a theme to which Wenders returns in his thoughts about
photography in Once:
Shooting pictures.57
Taking photographs is an action in time
in which something is ripped out of time
and transported into a different kind of duration.
[...]
And everything appears in front of the camera only ONCE (EIN MAL),
And then every photograph turns this once into an ALWAYS.
Only THROUGH
the fixed image does time become visible,
and in the time BETWEEN
the first photo and the second
the story appears,
which without these two images
would always be consigned
to obscurity for another ALWAYS. 58
In Silver City Revisited we already have the dialectic that will underpin the
recompositional process in the collaborative films: the de-constructive impetus
is compensated for by a narrative momentum which tends, by chance or by
intention, to glue together the disparate fragments of inherited media.
56
57
One is reminded of Philip‟s outburst in shot 30 of Alice in the Cities.
58
Wenders, Einmal, p.7 and p.15.
3. „“I ...” (end quote)‟: The early works of Peter Handke59
3.1 Language games

Before turning to 3 American LPs itself, it is important to examine briefly the
work of Handke prior to his first collaboration with Wenders. Such an
examination will demonstrate that there were, from the outset, striking
similarities in terms of ideas, aesthetics and also, perhaps less quantifiably,
temperament and disposition between the writer and the filmmaker.
Handke‟s earliest literary texts, the short prose pieces contained in Greeting
the Board of Directors, the poetry volume The Innerworld of the Outerworld of
the Innerworld and the „language plays‟ are all concerned, as the very term
Sprechstücke implies, with the relationship between language and reality, with
the way in which language mediates between the inner and outer realities
which make up an individual‟s world, but also with language as a reality in its
own right rather than a medium through which a reality outside of language can
be represented. All are intended to make the reader/audience aware of the kind
of „linguistic crimes‟ of which the speaker of the „language play‟ Self-
Accusation accuses him/herself:
I did not observe the rules of language. I have committed language violations. I have used
words without thinking. I have blindly given the objects of the world characteristics. I have
blindly given the words for the objects the characteristics of the objects. I have blindly viewed
the world with the words for the characteristics of the objects. I have named objects dead. I
have named diversity colourful. I have named sadness dark. I have named madness bright. I
have named passion hot. I have named anger red. 60
Handke gives straightforward expression to his primary concern with language

when he claims: „The only thing that preoccupies me as a writer […] is nausea
at stupid speechification and the resulting brutalization of people […]. One
should learn to be nauseated by language, as the hero of Sartre‟s Nausea is by
things. At least that would be the beginning of consciousness‟.61 To an extent
this concern grows out of his participation in the avant-garde literary forum of
the Grazer Group and his interaction with the Austrian tradition of the
philosophy of language, particularly the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.62 It
59
Peter Handke, Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1969), p.144. In what follows German titles are only provided when the poems do not
appear in the English translation (see note 64 below).
60
Peter Handke, Stücke 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), p.78.
61
Handke in Artur Joseph, „Nauseated by Language: From an Interview with Peter Handke‟,
The Drama Review, 15 (1970), 56-61 (p.61).
62
As Schlueter has noted: „the relationships among language, reality and perception which
continues to provide the central focus for his works up to and including the
novel The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty of 1970 (and will be explored in
more detail when this text, and Wenders‟s adaptation of it, are analysed in
Chapter Two).
Handke‟s first two longer prose works, The Hornets (Die Hornissen, 1966)
and The Peddler (Der Hausierer, 1967), can be read as precursors to The
Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty in the sense that they embody another of
Handke‟s primary concerns, one related to his – ostensibly apolitical –
fascination with language. Both are concerned above all with the function of
literary form in the perception and mediation of reality. The Hornets tells the
story of a blind man who attempts to make sense of his experiences by relating
them to the story of a blind man he had once read, or maybe heard, although
both he and the reader have difficulty distinguishing between what belongs to
his own – and thus the novel‟s – ostensible story and what belongs to the story
being remembered within the novel. This means that the reader‟s attention is
directed towards the processes by which she attempts to create order and
meaning in literature – and by extension in relation to reality – and how such
systematising perspectives can undermine our ability to perceive the world
around us. The novel also introduces a number of motifs that will be significant
not only for Handke‟s later works, but also for the collaborative works with
Wenders. Not least amongst these is the figure of the blind narrator, who, in the
guise of the myopic story-teller Homer, will resurface as the angelic narrator in
Wings of Desire.
The Peddler exposes the workings of genre fiction by playing with the
model of the detective story. It contains twelve chapters, each of which
represents one stage in the plot-line normally adhered to within the murder
mystery. The first half of each chapter sets out in theoretical terms how each
respective element of the pre-given plot functions, while in the second half the
reader is provided with a number of apparently random sentences of the kind
which could possibly be found in such a novel at the appropriate stage of the
proceedings, but which fail in this particular text to add up to anything that
resembles a story. It could be argued that The Peddler is Handke‟s most
experimental novel; in this and in its methodical deconstruction of generic
material – the detective story is appropriated „as found‟ – it is undoubtedly
reminiscent of Wenders‟s early gangster films, Alabama: 2000 Light Years in
particular, and also the fragmentary narrative episodes of Silver City Revisited.
Wittgenstein pursued are fundamental to all of Handke‟s work. A familiarity with linguistic
philosophy is manifest in the drama, and portions of Kaspar and The Ride Across Lake
Constance […] may well be read as dramatizations of Wittgensteinian ideas‟, p.11.
3.2 The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld

1969, the year in which Wenders and Handke first collaborated, is an important
one in Handke‟s career as it saw the publication of two important collections of
his work: the 355-page anthology Prose Poems Plays Radio Play Essays
(Prosa Gedichte Theaterstücke Hörspiel Aufsätze) which sealed his reputation
as the „favourite child of West German literary critics‟,63 even entering the
best-seller lists, and the poetry collection The Innerworld of the Outerworld of
the Innerworld.
Even the title of the poetry volume conjures up associations with Wenders‟s
Silver City Revisited (of the same year).64 The „window situations‟ of that film,
together with the eye blinks evoking a gaze into the private life of the
filmmaker and out onto the Munich cityscape, represent, as we have seen, the
encounter of private and public spaces. Commentators on the volume, and there
were many, were quick to identify in Handke‟s poems – the first dated 1965,
the last 1968 – an idiosyncratic juxtaposition of the linguistic rigour and
language games of the early Sprechstücke and an inwardness and hyper-
sensitive subjectivity that some found unpalatable, most vocal amongst them
perhaps Jörg Drews who, in a vitriolic attack entitled „Sterile Exercises‟,
characterised the writer‟s approach as „chic and hypersensitive self-
dramatisation‟.65 Twice in his article Drews uses the word „sensibel‟, in the
sense of „hypersensitive‟, as a term of abuse; „sensibilism‟ is, of course, the tag
attached to the Munich filmmakers of which Wenders was one of the leading
lights. Given the striking correspondence between the sensibility of Wenders‟s
earliest films and that of Handke‟s poetry – and, furthermore, the numerous
references to cinema in individual poems – The Innerworld of the Outerworld
of the Innerworld represents, as already mentioned, an ideal starting-point for
examining what Handke brings to their first collaboration in the summer of
1969.
The 42 poems in Handke‟s collection can be divided roughly into four
types: first, those which most readily fall into the category of „sensibilist‟ and
63
Karl Heinz Bohrer, „Die Liebe auf dem ersten Blick‟, in Über Peter Handke, ed. by Michael
Scharang (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp.52-56 (p.52). „Handke is “in”‟ is
Bohrer‟s laconic opening remark, p.52.
64
Exactly half of the poems (excluding all those that contain visual images) were published by
Continuum in a translation by Michael Roloff in 1974: Peter Handke, The Innerworld of the
Outerworld of the Innerworld (New York: Continuum, 1974). Nowhere in the volume,
which includes an essay by Roloff on Handke and his works, is there an explanation of the
selection criteria.
65
Jörg Drews, „Sterile Exerzitien: Zu Peter Handkes “Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der
Innenwelt”‟, Text + Kritik, 24 (1969), 50-55 (p.55).
which Karl Heinz Bohrer, a contemporary commentator better disposed to

Handke than Drews, describes as „existentially impregnated pieces‟ tending
towards an „esoteric new inwardness‟;66 second, documentary style
„sociogrammes‟67 consisting of „ready-made‟ texts (including the formation of
FC Nürnberg for a match on 27 January 1968, a Japanese Top 20 hit parade,
the credits for Bonnie and Clyde, and newspaper death announcements); third,
rigorously worked through grammatical exercises in which strings of linguistic
permutations are generated through „sentence games‟ (Satzspiele);68 fourth,
text-image constellations including a poem of collaged photographs and
headlines from newspapers, a reproduction of a banknote mangled by a
washing machine, and a crossword puzzle.69
As well as the Bonnie and Clyde poem a number of others in the collection,
belonging to different categories, make reference to cinema: „The New
Experiences‟ („Die neuen Erfahrungen‟) recalls the experience of seeing a one-
armed man in a film surrender on hearing the command „hands up‟;
„Augmentations‟ cites the shrill yellow of „the mailbox in a Hitchcock film‟;70
„Confusions‟ („Verwechslungen‟) claims „Discomfort is having your coat on
your knee in the cinema‟;71 „Comparisons for What‟s Incomparable‟ includes a
beer advertisement in a horror film amongst its comparisons; in „Captions‟
(„Legenden‟) the names Romy Schneider, Anthony Mann and Cathérine
Deneuve are discernible in typescript below the pasted strips of newsprint; „The
Edge of Words 2‟ mentions Cary Grant; „Measurements of Time, Periods of
Time, Local Times‟ („Zeitmaße, Zeiträume, Ortszeiten‟) refers to a cinema visit
to see the West German Edgar Wallace adaptation Five Golden Dragons (Die
Pagode zum fünften Schrecken, Jeremy Summers, 1967); the volume‟s title
poem describes an usherette imitating her on-screen counterpart and also
mentions a Western; „The Mourner Left Behind on the Hill‟ („Der trauernd
Hinterbliebene auf dem Hügel‟) includes the lines „We write a film with /
Ketchup:/ Bette Davis will be dead‟. 72
66
Bohrer, p.54 and p.55.
67
Ibid., p.54.
68
Handke, Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt, p.2.
69
It is worth noting that in the otherwise comprehensive 2007 anthology of his poems Life
Without Poetry (Leben ohne Poesie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), Handke omitted
the collage poems and did not include any of the texts from German Poems (Deutsche
Gedichte, see note 75). In a short afterword, the editor of the volume, Ulla Berkéwicz,
comments that „they no longer exist as far as he is concerned‟, p.235.
70
Handke, The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld, p.51.
71
Handke, Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt, p.68.
72
Ibid., p.145.
Even from the skeletal taxonomy of the collection offered above it is

apparent that there are significant parallels between The Innerworld of the
Outerworld of the Innerworld and Wenders‟s Silver City Revisited, over and
above the juxtaposition of public and private spheres already mentioned and a
shared interest in cinema. These include the use of documentary or „found‟
material (Handke‟s newspaper clippings, Wenders‟s archive footage), the
appropriation of popular culture (most obviously pop music),73 the repetitive,
experimental application of basic syntactical methods of formal construction
(„grammatical models‟ in Handke‟s poems, full-reel takes and transitional
flare-outs in Silver City Revisited), and the insertion of fragmentary narratives
(in a number of the „sensibilist‟ poems and „grammatical exercises‟ and in the
rudimentary narrative sequences of Wenders‟s film). At the point at which they
collaborate for the first time, both Wenders and Handke are engaged in
seemingly contradictory activities: on the one hand de-constructing the syntax
and generic categories of their chosen media in ways which at times verge on
the methodical and, on the other, identifying ways in which „authentic‟
experience can be enunciated, or recomposed, through what survives the de-
construction. In his perceptive essay on Handke‟s publications of 1969,
included in a Suhrkamp volume of essays from 1972, Bohrer suggests that
Handke‟s paradoxical strategy is akin to that described by Hölderlin in his
poem „Patmos‟:
But where there is danger / That which saves also grows.

(Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.)74
73
It has been suggested that the title of the volume was inspired by the Beatles song
„Everybody‟s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey‟ on the 1968 album The
Beatles (also known as The White Album): „Your inside is out and your outside is in / Your
outside is in and your inside is out‟. However, in the original volume the title poem is dated
1967.
74
Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. by Michael Hamburger (Cambridge-
London: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p.462. Hamburger‟s translation reads: „But
where danger threatens / That which saves from it also grows‟, p.463. See: Bohrer, p.53.
3.3 Some will say: 1. Those aren‟t poems. 2. I can do that too! To which
should be added:75
In a bravura 20-page analysis of what has probably become the most famous
poem in the collection, „The Formation of FC Nürnberg‟s First Team of
27.1.1968‟ („Die Aufstellung des 1. FC Nürnberg vom 27.1.1968‟), Volker
Bohn examines the self-reflexive dimension of Handke‟s „ready-made‟ poem
and its status alongside the „emphatically poetic, incredibly sensitive
(sensiblen), emphatically subjective texts‟ in the same volume.76 Bohn analyses
the way in which the original announcement‟s expositional value as „pure‟
information (presumably provided by a football magazine or newspaper) is
transformed, through its inclusion in a volume of poetry, into a poetic „text‟.
The „puzzle of a team formation in inverted commas‟ is exposed, Bohn argues,
through the transformation of a pre-match guide into a literary event as the
(relatively insignificant) football match gradually slips into historical obscurity:
„from a poetic point-of-view [the text] gets better the older it becomes‟.77 A
comparison can be drawn here to the use of archive images, both moving and
still, in Silver City Revisited: the black and white stock footage of crowds in
shots 3 and 4 and the postcards in shots 14 and 16 not only acquire a surreal
and timeless quality when juxtaposed with the contemporary street scenes, but
also assume the status of memento mori as defined by Sontag. It would also be
reasonable to view the list of football players in Handke‟s poem as a roll-call of
the dead, not least given the visual correspondence, which is not addressed by
Bohn, between the sequence of names on the page and a death announcement.
A similar roll-call of names appears in three other poems later in the
volume which are clearly related to „The Formation of FC Nürnberg‟s First
Team of 27.1.1968‟: „† Mourners include:‟ („† Um den Toten trauern:‟), a
newspaper-style list of institutions mourning an unnamed individual, „The
Japanese Hitparade of 25 May 1968‟, and „Warner Brothers and Seven Arts
present:‟ („Warner Brothers und Seven Arts zeigen:‟), also of 1968. As a poem
about, or more precisely of, a film the latter is of particular interest in the
context of this chapter.
75
From the introduction to Handke‟s experimental collection of German Poems, published in
the same year, and quoted in Volker Bohn, „“Die Aufstellung des 1. FC Nürnberg vom
27.1.1968”: Methodische Vorüberlegungen zu einer Interpretation‟, in Peter Handke, ed. by
Raimund Fellinger (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), pp.92-113 (p.94). The original
text appears in the fourth envelope of Peter Handke, Deutsche Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main:
euphorion-Verlag, 1969).
76
Bohn, p.93.
77
Ibid., p.112.
„Warner Brothers and Seven Arts present:‟ does not, as critics have
mistakenly claimed, consist of the opening credits of Arthur Penn‟s film
Bonnie and Clyde (in either the original or German versions). The titles to the
film in fact last nearly two minutes and consist of a sequence of 48 shots in
which the names of actors and the production team are interspersed with 30
sepia „snapshots‟ on a black background. The appearance of each photograph is
accompanied by the sound of a camera shutter release, and from shot 19
onwards the sequence is supplemented by music. In Handke‟s poem there are
26 credits rather than the 30 in the film, and the sequence is also different: the
names of the two leading players are followed by the film‟s title (in large,
outlined block capitals), supporting cast, set designer, costume, sound, special
effects, special guidance, script supervision, production supervision, make-up
of Miss Dunaway, costume of Miss Dunaway, editor, screenplay, photography,
music, producer, director. The list concludes with the information „A Colour
Film in TECHNICOLOR (Ein Farbfilm in TECHNICOLOR)‟.78 Given that
transcribing credits was difficult before video became widely available, it is
hardly surprising that Handke turned to a secondary source for his list,
presumably an advertisement, review or publicity material for the film.
This detail is important, because it demonstrates that despite the
symmetrical alignment of the credits and distinctive font for the film‟s title,
Handke has not simply translated a viewing experience into a reading
experience in his „film poem‟, even if there is – on a rather basic level – a
correspondence between the replacement of one title by the next in the film‟s
credit sequence and the act of turning the pages of the book. Instead he has, in a
method similar to that employed in the „football poem‟, drawn on published
information and reframed it within a literary context. Moreover, whilst
Handke‟s text potentially draws attention to the presence of written language in
the film (albeit German in place of the original English), it also, in its final line,
points to a notable absence: the absence of images and colour – specifically
„Technicolor‟ – in the poem.
The short lines of text on the page and the unusual font for the film‟s title
are, like the symmetrical formation of names in the football poem, on the face
of it reminiscent of the „constellations‟ of contemporary concrete poetry, a fact
which led a number of critics (including Drews and Bohn)79 to draw parallels
between The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld and the work of
78
Handke, Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt, pp.119-21.
79
Drews, p.54; Bohn, p.93. Bohn notes that certain critics have tended to conclude that
Handke‟s antecedents were „more thorough (Heißenbüttel), more comic (Jandl), more
complex (Bayer), more radical (Mon)‟, p.93.
such experimental poets as Helmut Heißenbüttel, Ernst Jandl, the Vienna

Group (Konrad Bayer in particular), and Franz Mon. In certain cases the
similarities are certainly inescapable: the poem „Breaking off in Mid-Sentence‟,
for example, employs deixis to draw attention self-reflexively to the physicality
of the script on the page – „Suddenly, in the middle of the last sentence, –‟80 –
in a manner which echoes, for example, the final line of Heißenbüttel‟s poem
„saying the sayable‟ („das Sagbare sagen‟), published in 1961: „do not end the
unendable‟.81 However, to accuse Handke of being a plagiarist, as Jörg Drews
does, seems unjustifiable, not only because the linguistic games of the Vienna
Group and others had become the common currency of experimental poetry by
the late 1960s, but also because the radical inwardness of many of the poems in
The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld is not shared by any of the
avant-garde poets Drews names.82
Certainly the volume experiments in numerous ways with the boundaries
between language and image, between words, letters and forms. In „The Letter
Forms‟ („Die Buchstabenformen‟), for example, a ship‟s captain is disturbed by
the way in which the letters on the page of the book he is reading appear to
merge with the things around him in his cabin, an experience Handke conveys
graphically by having certain letters almost jump off the page by enlarging
them massively. The captain is only able to halt this nauseating experience by
resolutely shutting his book.
However, the exchange between words and images is a two-way process. In
the poem „Distinctions‟, for example, we find a reversal of the process
described in „The Letter Forms‟: „Scarcely have I stopped hearing anyone
speak – already I am secretly translating objects I perceive into words, and
scarcely have I finished translating the objects – already I have a concept for
them‟.83 Handke, it could be argued, is quoting and experimenting with the
genre of concrete poetry rather as Wenders uses the gangster and thriller genres
80
Handke, The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld, p.151. Roloff adds somewhat
unnecessarily to the effect by placing this poem at the end of his selection.
81
Helmut Heißenbüttel, „das Sagbare sagen‟, in konkrete poesie, ed. by Eugen Gomringer,
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972), p.69.
82
To cite just one example: in the same year as The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the
Innerworld, Vlado Kristl published a poem entitled „Interjections‟ („Zwischenrufe‟) which
concludes with the line „So here the end of the poem‟. Vlado Kristl, Mundmaschine
(Munich: Unverlag, 1969), p.51. The same volume includes the distinctly Handkesque
maxim: „The inner life isn‟t any different from life, just different‟, p.96. Handke was later to
extract a passage from a poem of Vlado Kristl to serve as an epigraph to the film The Left-
Handed Woman.
83
Handke, The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld, p.135.
in his early films. In both cases the appropriations and transformations of

„found material‟ betoken enthusiasm for that material, rather than any simple
attempt to plagiarise. Moreover, the dynamic of both the texts of Handke and
early films of Wenders is considerably more affirmative, what we have termed
recompositional, than the deconstructive impetus of the more radical concrete
poets and structural, experimental filmmakers with which their works are often,
disapprovingly, compared.
3.4 The problems start with the word I84

To return to the point made at the beginning of this brief examination of
Handke‟s collection, one of the most striking features of The Innerworld of the
Outerword of the Innerworld is the insistent use of the word „I‟: „What I AM: /
It‟s me!‟ are the concluding lines of the poem „What I am not, don‟t have, don‟t
wish, wouldn‟t like – and what I would like, what I have and what I am‟,
subtitled a „sentence biography‟.85 Like Silver City Revisited this poem, along
with many of the other „sensibilist‟ poems in the collection, is unequivocally
autobiographical (although this has doubtless become easier to recognise with
hindsight). For Bohrer the collection embodies a clear dichotomy between
formal experimentation and subjective expression: „You don‟t have to look
very far to find an explanation for this dichotomy. It lies in Handke‟s extreme
sensitivity, in his experience of fright. He is frightened not only by the
meanings of words, but also by the things they refer to‟.86
As well as situating Handke within a tradition which derives from Rilke‟s
poetry, Bohrer also claims that Handke‟s „new inwardness‟ is a direct
consequence of the threat to individualism by the linguistic clichés of
conformist discourse. He concludes that Handke‟s defence against the „clichés
of everyday language‟ represents, in part at least, an affirmation of traditional,
albeit estranged, poetic language. In its assertion of the right to individual pain,
however, it is also unable to participate in a communal (and thus presumably
political) expression of grief or sorrow: „Unexpectedly, the surreal “dignity” of
the real, old European memories and individual fright emerge from behind the
abstractions – it is a fright which can no longer share in the more general,
socially mediated experiences of suffering‟.87
84
Ibid., p.43.
85
Ibid., p.17 and p.11.
86
Bohrer, p.54.
87
Ibid.
It is perhaps in this vulnerability, a consequence of what Rolf Günter

Renner terms „establishing the contours of a lyrical self‟,88 that the kinship with
Wenders‟s sensibilism becomes particularly apparent. The transition from day
to night in Silver City Revisited and its mournful flare-outs do not preclude an
intense engagement with the real (and a playful appropriation of cinematic
genres and topoi) but they do lend the endeavour a thoroughly melancholic
tone, one which also dominates the more personal poems of The Innerworld of
the Outerworld of the Innerworld:
Then someone stumbles over me – and I become a body.

And when I am then stepped upon – I become something soft.
[...]
Then, finally, I am left alone – and a single person remains behind alone.
Then, finally, I sit down next to someone in the grass – and am finally someone else.89
Melancholy, autobiography, and the attempt to probe the border between self
and world are all also constitutive features of Wenders‟s and Handke‟s first
collaboration, to which we will now turn. Here, though, these elements form
part of an exploration by author and filmmaker of two shared passions which
will remain integral to their mutual creative dynamic: Anglo-American music
and American cinema.
4. 3 American LPs
In the wake of Silver City Revisited, the singular Police Film (discussed below),
and Alabama: 2000 Light Years, Wenders‟s sixth short, 3 American LPs, is
sometimes seen as a résumé of his thematic and formal repertoire rather than as
a step forward. Whilst Kolker and Beicken describe it as „more fluid, less
introspective‟ than its predecessors, they also credit it with „greater self-
confidence‟.90 Stefan Kolditz, on the other hand, concludes that it is „less
radical than Wenders‟s other short films from this period‟, yet acknowledges
that it is a rudimentary forerunner to Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road (Im
88
Rolf Günter Renner, Peter Handke (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985), p.65. Renner tellingly
examines the collection at the beginning of a chapter entitled „The Re-discovery of
Subjectivity‟, pp.64-67.
89
Handke, The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld, p.107. This melancholic tone
is even more apparent in Handke‟s reading of a selection of the poems from the volume,
recorded in 1970 and released on CD in 2004 by Deutsche Grammophon (981 587-8). The
softness of tone and fragility in Handke‟s reading voice are reminiscent of his diffident
delivery in 3 American LPs (discussed below).
90
Robert Phillip Kolker and Peter Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and
Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.25.
Lauf der Zeit, 1976) and Paris, Texas.91 One could also add that, in his
contribution to the film, Handke touches – albeit embryonically – on motifs
that will recur in Short Letter, Long Farewell, the novel which can be read as a
partner text to Alice in the Cities. Indeed, the short film‟s reputation lies chiefly
in the fact that it is the first collaboration – and thus first joint articulation of
mutual interests – between Handke and Wenders, who speak the commentary
(alternately) and also appear briefly together on screen [shot 4]. In fact, this is
the only film in which the pair are seen and heard together and for this reason it
is also the most personal of their collaborations.
4.1 Protocol
00.00
Shot 1 Title: Peter Handke Wim Wenders 3 amerikanische LP’s
After 5 seconds camera zooms in fast to centre of text.
Shot 2 00.06
Image: LP covers leafed through by a figure off: Van Morrison, Astral
Weeks; Creedence Clearwater Revival, Green River; Quicksilver
Messenger Service, Happy Trails; Harvey Mandel, Christo Redentor.
Commentary P[eter] H[andke]: In Oxford in Mississippi, the
pavements are so high above the street that the children can barely
climb up onto them from the road.
Commentary W[im] W[enders]: It should be possible to make films
about America that consist entirely of wide-angle shots. You already
get that in music, in American music that is.
Shot 3 00.37
Image: woman (with red hair) looking out from the balcony of a high
rise building over to other high buildings. Back to the camera, she
smokes a cigarette and throws it down.
Moves out of shot to the right.
Shot to other blocks held (1 minute).
Woman returns into shot from right and exits to left.
Music: Van Morrison, „Slim Slow Slider‟
Shot 4 03.03
Image: shot down to street pavement from a window. Two figures
(Handke and Wenders) enter shot from bottom left and walk out top
left. Fallen hoarding bears the letters „NPD‟.
Camera pans up to dark Citroën DS under a tree. PH and WW get into
the car and drive off.
91
Kolditz, p.114.
Commentary WW: Van Morrison is the former lead singer of Them.

He has been living in America for three years. Astral Weeks is his
second solo LP.
Commentary PH: For example, in Nashville in Tennessee, you can...
Shot 5 03.36
Image: travelling shot from rear window of a car along a city road
with underpasses and blocks of flats.
Commentary PH (continued): ...descend from the hotel with your
luggage straight into the station – a coach station. There you hand over
your luggage and board the Greyhound. The Greyhound bus features
in the [... sigh] in the LP, in the third LP of Creedence Clearwater
Revival [sigh], [inaudible] from Nashville, West [sigh] to Memphis in
Tennessee.
Shot 6 04.21
Image: travelling shot from side window of a car travelling through
suburban (industrial) landscape. Camera facing slightly back.
Passes fields, factories and a car dump.
Music: Creedence Clearwater Revival, „Lodi Lyrics‟
Shot 7 05.37
Image: travelling shot from front window of a car driving along a dirt
road, past flooded gravel pits and into a drive-in cinema, showing
Heute Ich – Morgen Du (Today It’s Me ... Tomorrow It’s You!) and
Tom and Jerry.92 The driver‟s hand is visible on the steering wheel.
Car drives into car park, past a Coca-Cola advert and stops facing the
screen. Shot held (20 seconds).
Music (continued without break): ...Creedence Clearwater Revival
Shot 8 07.07
Image: camera pans to left over a city building site following a yellow
digger, which reverses to the left.
Commentary WW: Creedence Clearwater, they play as one man.
Jukeboxes were made for this sort of music. Their third LP, Green
River, is like a bar of chocolate, like a flight across the Alps without
turbulence, in a turbo-prop plane, in clear weather, contented.
Commentary PH: And it is a visible music, one which is audible and
visible at the same time. And that is why...
Shot 9 07.47
92
Today It’s Me ... Tomorrow It’s You! (Oggi a me ... domain a te!) is a spaghetti Western
from 1968, directed by Tonino Cervi.
Image: single slow (interrupted) pan from right to left across the same
building site. Pauses three times before continuing to pan.
Commentary PH (continued): ...you really can describe it as film
music, because the film is projected inside you. You don‟t see images
from other films, images you have already seen in American films, but
rather the film is created within you and runs inside you, a film which
has never existed before. And then you put the record on again on the
following day, at a different time of day, and you have a different
film. Such that you can hardly imagine the American landscape any
longer without music. With this landscape, if you talk about it, if you
... if you see it and talk about it, then the landscape is destroyed. But if
you listen to things like Harvey Mandel, which in fact are only
instrumental, without any lyrics or words, the landscape returns as if
you are seeing it again, as if you had already seen it before and are
now seeing it again, that is the result of this ... this music full of
pathos. It is a pathos which only comes after you have carefully
considered and surveyed every detail, not the kind of pathos that
comes in advance.
Shot 10 09.19
Image: slow travelling shot at dusk from a car driving along a city
road. View out to the right from the passenger‟s window. Passes light
industrial buildings, a petrol station, adverts for petrol and
transporters, hoardings, passers-by, parked cars.
Music: Harvey Mandel, „Wade in the Water‟
Shot 11 12.10
Image: close-up static shot from passenger seat of driver (WW) in
profile with cityscape passing behind (dusk).
Music: Harvey Mandel (fading out)
Shot 12 12.25
Title: Van Morrison Astral Weeks WARNER BROTHERS,
Creedence Clearwater Revival Green River AMERICA RECORDS,
Harvey Mandel Christo Redentor PHILIPS
Music: Harvey Mandel (fades out)
Shot 13 12.32
Title: Eine Produktion des HESSISCHEN RUNDFUNKS [A
HESSISCHER RUNDFUNK Production]
Silent
Film ends 12.35
4.2 Narcissism and self-surveillance93

In its combination of window shots of building sites and travelling shots from
cars – accompanied by music – 3 American LPs is, formally at least, a hybrid
of Silver City Revisited and Alabama: 2000 Light Years, but it differs
significantly from them in adding spoken commentary. It could perhaps best be
categorised, like Police Film, as an essay film. The „American-eye‟ views of
Munich and its environs are no longer simply presented for reflection (as part
of a topographical diary or gangster mini-drama), but as images self-reflexively
„in dialogue‟ both with the music and the spoken reflections on that music.
There is no explicit discussion of the Munich cityscapes (although the passing
reference to the Alps does hint at a European context), rather they are
simultaneously analogies and antitheses to the landscapes that Handke, in
particular, believes are evoked by American music. To some extent, the
conceptual structure of the film is thus dialectical, contrasting what is seen
(Germany) with what is not (America), and again – as in Silver City Revisited –
the emphasis is resolutely on what is not there.
The shots of Handke and Wenders, and their lugubrious voices on the
soundtrack, establish a frame of reference in which the Bavarian cityscapes and
roads become projections of a will to substitute them for something else. What
we see in 3 American LPs are cityscapes that are, in Sontag‟s terms, „pseudo-
presence and a token of absence‟.94 This is, on the one hand, in line with
Handke‟s claim in shot 9 that American music evokes imaginary landscapes: in
this case it conjures up images of Bavaria gradually being colonised by the
icons of America (Coca-Cola, a drive-in cinema, late-night filling stations and
so on). On the other hand, and less convincingly perhaps, these very shots also
recall the film‟s immediate predecessors, something which sits slightly uneasily
with Handke‟s suggestion that the music summons up images of imaginary
films rather than actual ones. What we see are, for the most part, consciously
self-referential quotations from Wenders‟s previous HFF films. 3 American
LPs can thus be described as recompositional on numerous levels: it transforms
German landscapes into their American counterparts, translates music into
image and words, and also, as we shall see, reconfigures the medium of cinema
itself.
In rudimentary form, Handke‟s final remarks – about Harvey Mandel [shot
9] – express scepticism about the capacity of language to depict place. Indeed
93
As Sontag maintains: „One of the effects of the newer technology (video, instant movies)
has been to turn even more of what is done with cameras in private to narcissistic uses – that
is, to self-surveillance‟, p.177.
94
Sontag, p.16.
he goes so far as to claim that mental images of the American landscape are
destroyed by verbalisation. This suggestion neatly ties in with the images that
are seen as he speaks – cityscapes that are unmistakably German rather than
American. These are therefore not mental images of the kind Handke attempts
to describe, and thus, in turn, cannot be dispelled by his words. Handke‟s
delivery – faltering and interspersed with prominent sighs [shot 5] – seems to
suggest that the attempt to articulate verbally the visual impact of music is an
impossible (perhaps pointless) task. Indeed, his tone (in keeping with the mood
of the film as a whole) is distinctly melancholic, implying perhaps his sense of
the potential futility of all linguistic engagement with reality. On this occasion
it is Wenders who speaks more fluently, albeit in a manner that suggests that
he, unlike his colleague, is reading from a script (in shots 2 and 4, and
particularly in shot 7). Extracts of the commentary to 3 American LPs do
indeed appear in a couple of articles published in 1970.95
What particularly sets this film apart from its predecessors – aside from the
collaboration with Handke – is its explicit commentary on image-making and
language. The recompositional process in this film is, for the first time, an overt
one. Wenders discusses how films about America should look [shot 2], and we
are driven to an American-style drive-in cinema on the outskirts of Munich
where you can buy Coca-Cola and watch Tom and Jerry cartoons [shot 7].
Here Wenders‟s camera captures a German landscape in a striking wide-angle
shot of the kind he claims should be used to record America.96 This multi-
layered image – a still image because the car has come to a standstill – frames
in wide-angle a panoramic (cinema) screen through a (car) windscreen [shot 7].
Earlier in the same shot, as the driver approaches the screen, we also see his
hands in the car‟s rear-view mirror. This reverses the gaze self-reflexively back
to the space occupied by the camera itself.
This kind of self-reflexivity is typical of late-1960s auteurist filmmaking,
and there are two shots in 3 American LPs which may remind one of specific
precursors. Both expand self-reflexively on the inadequacy of language, but
both also do so within an explicitly political, Brechtian framework of the kind
discussed in the Introduction to this study: Godard‟s Two or Three Things I
Know About Her (Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, 1967) opens with a
sequence strikingly similar to shot 3, and Straub-Huillet‟s The Bridegroom, the
95
The articles in question are „Tired of Waiting‟ (Wenders, On Film, p.45) of February 1970
and „Van Morrison‟ (Wenders, On Film, pp.58-60) dated June of the same year.
96
He uses just such a shot at the end of Alice in the Cities to signal the reconciliation of the
American and the European both in relation to the (autobiographical) protagonist and within
the film itself. See p.181.
Comedienne and the Pimp (Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter,
1968) begins with a night-time travelling shot along Munich‟s
Landsbergerstraße similar to the one which closes Wenders‟s film [shots 10
and 11].97
Godard‟s shot of „her‟ – Marina Vlady standing on the balcony of a high
rise block and, at the same time, the city of Paris itself (about which the film
purports to know a thing or two) – is juxtaposed with the director‟s whispered
commentary meticulously, albeit necessarily inaccurately, describing what we
are seeing. The first words spoken by the actress herself are a quotation from
Brecht to the effect that to be truthful an actor must always appear to be
quoting. The Straub-Huillet sequence is, like shots 10 and 11 in 3 American
LPs, accompanied only by music. It does, however, follow the opening shot of
an angry, barely articulate message scratched in English on the counter of a
Munich Post Office: „stupid old Germany I hate it over here I hope I can go
soon Patricia 1.3.68‟.98
Both scenes – Marina Vlady on the balcony in Paris and the travelling shot
of the Landsbergerstraße – are, as already indicated, from landmark examples
of engaged, political modernist filmmaking. Although this is the period in
which, as we shall see, Wenders made his only explicitly „political‟ film, Police
Film, what is striking about 3 American LPs is that the potentially political
gesture of self-reflection is content to refer only to itself. Shot 3 is particularly
revealing in this respect. The image of modern high-rise architecture seen from
afar is also to be found in Police Film (and later in Wrong Move). In 3
American LPs, however, it does not function as a shorthand for alienation and
„social cosmetics‟ (Police Film, shot 57), but rather as an icon of Romantic
longing (enhanced by the pre-Raphaelite tint of the hair of the woman over
whose shoulder the audience observes the view), establishing a certain
„sensibilist‟ affinity with the melancholy strains of Van Morrison‟s „Slim Slow
97
Straub-Huillet‟s sequence of travelling at night along Munich‟s Landsbergerstraße,
accompanied by Bach‟s Ascension Oratorio (BWV 11) from around its mid-point, reappears
in Fassbinder‟s debut feature, the gangster film Love is Colder Than Death (Liebe ist kälter
als der Tod, 1969). Straub-Huillet provided Fassbinder with an out-take of the shot for his
film, presumably in return for his appearing in theirs as the pimp.
98
Straub-Huillet, The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp, shot 1. The script describes
the Landsbergerstraße travelling shot as follows: „Night. Landsbergerstraße Munich. Girls
waiting on the pavement, in the background shop windows with neon advertising,
warehouses, sheds. Parked and moving cars on the side of the road. At the mid-point of the
shot music starts: BWV 11. (Text: Oh Day, when will you come... Let it be soon [„Du Tag,
wann wirst du sein... Komm, stell dich doch ein‟].)‟. Jean-Marie Straub, „Der Bräutigam, die
Komödiantin und der Zuhälter‟, Filmkritik, 10.11 (1968), 677-87 (p.681).
Slider‟.99 Similarly, in shot 4, Handke and Wenders ignore the abandoned

placard demonstrating support for the far-right National Democratic Party of
Germany (NPD) and instead get into their car, implicitly rejecting in the
process any kind of direct political engagement in favour of the experiential
pleasures of the road trip.
The references to American culture (the music, films at the drive-in cinema,
and products advertised on the roadside) also relate 3 American LPs to Police
Film, in which these things are embedded in an explicitly political context.
Within this subjective, diaristic framework, however, they have become objects
of desire and longing, rather than of repression and compulsive consumerism.
In fact the film articulates a largely depoliticised – albeit complex –
relationship to American culture – and this in a period in which anger at U.S.
imperialism in general and the Vietnam War in particular inspired mass protest
in Germany. Peter Buchka points out that the film confronts „American culture
with the reality of the Federal Republic‟, a reality which – with its car dumps,
empty streets, and aesthetically unappealing landscapes – is presented in
negative opposition to the more pleasurable vistas conjured up in the
imagination by the American music:
The endlessly spacious landscapes of the American West about which Creedence Clearwater
Revival and Van Morrison sing and on which Wenders and Handke reflect in their voice-off
dialogues are contrasted with images of Munich‟s decaying suburbs – images which, despite
their documentary perspective, give rise to an almost surreal sense of oppression.100
In fact the film presents two versions of the German reality with which it
interacts: an older, even „pre-modern‟ Germany, glimpsed in the traditional
Bavarian houses caught on camera, and a Germany in the process of embracing
the American way of life, represented above all in the film‟s final sequence
which records a German street scene by night. With its neon signs and
consumer goods on display it looks remarkably like a U.S. strip mall (of the
sort juxtaposed with the German landscape in Alice in the Cities). The process
of transition from old to new is captured in shot 9 when the camera lingers on a
busy building site, observing a construction worker, one of the only sequences
in which we see a resident of what would otherwise appear to be a largely
uninhabited and therefore alienating city. Equally, however, „America‟ also has
99
There is a certain (presumably unintentional) tension between the image and the lyrics of
Van Morrison‟s song here. The girl is not only „white as snow‟, but also walks down
London‟s (distinctly non-high-rise) Ladbroke Grove.
100
Peter Buchka, Augen kann man nicht kaufen: Wim Wenders und seine Filme (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, 1985), p.42.
a double reality in the film: whilst it may well be the „colonising‟ culture
transforming Germany into a globally homogenised environment, it is also the
land of freedom as represented by its cinema and its music; as Buchka puts it:
„The harmony of the rock music […] sets itself apart in utopian fashion from
the wrongly conceived Americanisation of a conquered country‟.101 The
utopian nature of that imagined reality is made clear in Handke‟s commentary
when he claims that it can exist only in the mind and is dispelled by its
representation. „America‟ as object of desire is in fact given visual form once in
the film but at one imaginative remove, in a way which emphasises its
unreality, its existence only in the fantasy world of American culture: the
illustration on the cover of Quicksilver Messenger Service‟s album „Happy
Trails‟ in shot 2 depicts a cowboy careering through a „typical‟ landscape of the
American West.
4.3 Moving photographs

3 American LPs is the last of Wenders‟s early shorts. The very fact that it is
less formally experimental than Same Player Shoots Again and Silver City
Revisited, less an exercise in genre than Alabama: 2000 Light Years, less
quirky (and fast) than Police Film,102 demonstrates that it looks forward not
only to the later collaborations with Handke, but also, as Kolditz suggests, even
to Wenders‟s feature films of the 1970s and early 1980s. It has the long shot
durations which characterise his student films, but of these long shots only the
view over the high-rise towers [shot 3] is actually static; elsewhere the film
demonstrates a mobility and fluidity of camerawork and diversity of framing
that is not otherwise to be found in the early films.
Thematically it is, like Same Player Shoots Again and Alabama: 2000 Light
Years before it, structured around the idea of death, although neither of a
fictional protagonist (as in Same Player and Alabama: 2000 Light Years) nor of
the camera (as in Alabama: 2000 Light Years) but rather of the film itself – its
light and its music (which fade out in the final shot). Like Silver City Revisited
it also charts a journey from light to dark and appears to span the passage of a
single day. This is a classic topos of documentary filmmaking – Walter
Ruttmann‟s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der
Großstadt, 1927) and Dziga Vertov‟s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) are
obvious examples – and it is here that 3 American LPs departs most clearly
from the template of its predecessors: in eschewing any suggestion of a
101
Ibid.
102
With 75 shots in 11 minutes, compared with 13 in as many minutes in 3 American LPs,
Police Film is much more tightly cut than the other early short films.
fictional narrative, either within individual shots (as in Silver City Revisited) or
across the film (as in Alabama: 2000 Light Years).103 Whilst it certainly has a
straightforward linear structure – Wenders and Handke drive around Munich
and its environs reflecting on American music – it is, put simply, a
photographic, verbal and acoustic record of a dialogue between two friends in a
given place (Munich) and at a given time (shortly after the release of three
important American LPs).
What is significant in the context of the present study is that the film
focuses on and documents common ground between Handke and Wenders. It
is, as already noted, a succinct review of the filmmaker‟s cinematic language
and iconographic enthusiasms as he approached the end of his studies at the
HFF. Wenders talks about music and images, Handke about music, images, and
language. Interestingly, comments made by the writer about the way in which
listening to music can provide a visual experience will be taken up by Wenders
and expanded upon in a number of the film reviews he produced in this period.
But just as 3 American LPs echoes Wenders‟s earlier shorts, and expresses
ideas he was soon to articulate more fully elsewhere, so it is also easy to find
parallels for Handke‟s ideas in his texts of the same period, as has been
demonstrated in the case of The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the
Innerworld and will be further explored below in the case of his non-fiction
writing. It is also the case that the investigation of language and its
inadequacies, not least in relation to images, is a central part of the novel The
Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, as well as a theme with which Wenders
engages explicitly in his adaptation of it. Equally, the attitudes towards the
United States – particularly the paradoxical relationship of desire and distance
to American culture – which are articulated here, will also provide a starting
point for the pair‟s interconnected „American‟ works, Alice in the Cities and
Short Letter, Long Farewell.
Put simply, then, in their first film together Handke and Wenders register a
mutuality of interest (and a friendship), record impressions and opinions, but do
not attempt to engage in a cinematic dialogue. It is the blank screen at the
drive-in cinema [shot 7] which is the mise-en-âbime of this first collaboration.
The sections that follow will focus on the pair‟s relationship to the cultural
context in which their first works were produced and their attitudes to language
and image as they emerge in their writings of the period in order to develop a
more detailed picture of their engagement with each other‟s working medium,
103
The woman in shot 3, for example, is entirely anonymous and cannot be linked narratively
to either Wenders or Handke.
with literature and cinema, and to define more clearly the parameters of their
mutual interests as they began to emerge in 3 American LPs.
5. The politics of language and the politics of seeing
5.1 Handke and politics: a marginal phenomenon

3 American LPs, with its seemingly apolitical aesthetic, might appear, like
the other films discussed above, to be thoroughly at odds with the cultural
climate in which it was produced. However, like Handke‟s early artistic
endeavours – including The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld
– the short films had their roots in the countercultural movements of the
1960s, coming into being at a time when the momentum for political change,
which would find a first point of culmination in the student demonstrations of
1968, was growing rapidly. In our Introduction we have suggested that in
their recompositional strategies the Wenders-Handke films have much in
common, formally and aesthetically, with modernist filmmaking of the
Brechtian kind which flourished in this highly politicised climate, but that
they must also be considered post-Brechtian in their rejection of the
ideological thrust of this kind of cinema. A useful place to start an
exploration of the disaffiliation of modernist (filmic) strategies from left-
wing politics is with an investigation of Handke‟s and Wenders‟s ambivalent
responses to the cultural climate within which their earliest works were
produced.
The student movement was the most significant factor in the political life
of the Federal Republic in the late 1960s, and the shifts in political climate it
promoted had important cultural repercussions. Prior to this point, the
postwar literary scene had been dominated by the Group 47 (Gruppe 47), an
assembly of intellectuals committed to an understanding of the social
responsibility of the writer and his or her art. At the Group‟s meeting in
Princeton in 1966, in a speech that brought him instant notoriety, Handke had
attacked its members as purveyors of a literary realism that refused to
recognise language as literature‟s only reality and that, in his view, failed for
this reason to fulfil any socially critical purpose. 104 Although the goal of his
diatribe was not to promote the political efficacy of literature (and he would
in fact go on to argue against the possibility of a littérature engagée),
Handke‟s comments found resonance in a climate in which traditional
104
See the 1966 essay „Zur Tagung der Gruppe 47 in den USA‟ („On the Meeting of the Group
47 in the USA‟), in Peter Handke, Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp.29-34.
notions of a socially critical literary practice were under attack from various,
generally highly politicised quarters. A couple of years later, for instance,
Hans Magnus Enzensberger would pronounce literature „dead‟ in an article
which criticised contemporary literature in terms which, despite their
ideological loadedness, were not dissimilar to Handke‟s. 105 The 1960s saw a
number of writers from different generations developing a more radical
political stance as literature came increasingly to be employed for expressly
political purposes, resulting particularly in a preference for so-called
documentary prose and plays.
As we shall see, dimensions of the early work of both Wenders and
Handke indicate the extent to which the two were affected by this highly
politicised cultural context. In Handke‟s case it also had significant
repercussions for the reception of his earliest productions. While initial
opinion was divided, critics consistently found it necessary to measure
Handke‟s work against a political standard which he was presumed either
(less frequently) to meet or (more often) radically to reject. Thus, writing in
1969 in a review of Prose Poems Plays Radio Play Essays, Reinhold Grimm
insists that even in the face of Handke‟s own rejection of the term „the
unavoidable concept of the engaged writer […] does in the final instance
characterise this volume‟ and describes the poems contained in it as
combining „human and political passion with all the techniques of
experimental poetry‟.106 On the other hand, the title of Peter Hamm‟s
scathing appraisal of Handke‟s early career – „The Newest Case of German
Inwardness‟, also of 1969 – already signals his dismissal of the writer as a
„petit-bourgeois intellectual‟ of whom he claims: „the only logical
explanation for Handke‟s compulsive artistry and his attempt to be always up
105
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, „Gemeinplätze, die neueste Literatur betreffend‟, Kursbuch, 15
(1968), 187-97. Enzensberger‟s essay provided perhaps the best known contribution to the
so-called „death of literature‟ debate in Germany. The attack on traditional conceptions of
literature was, though, an international phenomenon and, as Thomas F. Barry points out, at
least some of the authors associated with it acted as influences on Handke‟s work: „The
early 1960s were characterized by international movements which questioned the traditional
forms of the narrative genre. There was the “death of the novel” group associated with the
Iowa University Writers‟ Workshop in America with such authors as Donald Barthelme,
Ronald Sukenick, Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, and Steve Kratz. In Europe there were
Roland Barthes‟ early critical writings (Writing Degree Zero, Mythologies, S/Z) and the
French nouveau roman movement with such authors as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor,
Philippe Sollers, and Nathalie Sarraute‟. Thomas F. Barry, „Handke‟s Early Narrative
Fiction‟, in The Works of Peter Handke: International Perspectives, ed. by David Coury and
Frank Pilipp (Riverside, California: Ariadne, 2005), pp.10-45 (p.10).
106
Grimm, p.57.
to date is his total lack of interest in anything social – unless it has something
to do with language‟.107
As our reading of The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld
has already indicated, Handke‟s interest in language is clearly decisive at this
early stage of his career. Before exploring further its consequences for his
interaction with Wenders, however, it should be noted that the radically
different responses to his work at this stage are in part the result of the fact
that conceptions of what constituted the political – particularly within the
student movement – underwent a number of shifts in this period. In its early
phase (from about 1966 to 1968), the movement tended towards what has
been described as the „individualistic and existentialist‟, its politics
characterised by „the ideal of personal refusal‟: „each committed individual
would refuse to cooperate with a system seen as authoritarian and
immoral‟.108 In its later stages, however, which lasted through until the early
1970s, the movement splintered into a number of highly dogmatic, theory-
obsessed Marxist-Leninist and Maoist-influenced groups.109
Noting that Handke spent a considerable amount of time in Berlin – focal
point of student revolutionary fervour – in 1967, before moving to the city in
1969, Manfred Durzak insists that the writer was, in fact, „closely associated
with a student movement that had dimensions of a cultural revolution‟. 110
Handke‟s early works do certainly have something in common with the
politics of the day as they were practised during the early phase of the student
revolt (although they share nothing with the later dogmatism).111 Included in
collections of his early essays are four concerned expressly with issues
central to contemporary student activism, including the shooting of Benno
Ohnesorg and the campaign against the Springer publishing empire, although
107
Peter Hamm, „Der neueste Fall von deutscher Innerlichkeit: Peter Handke‟, in Scharang,
pp.304-14 (p.312 and p.308).
108
Richard W. McCormick, Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German
Literature and Film (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991), p.32.
109
The beginnings of this process are described by Handke himself in the 1969 essay „Die
Tautologien der Justiz‟ („The Tautologies of Justice‟), in Handke, Ich bin ein Bewohner des
Elfenbeinturms, pp.176-87.
110
Durzak, p.17.
111
Durzak goes on to suggest that it was in fact Handke‟s concern with the subjective which
brought him close to the student movement: „The journey of discovery towards a new
perception of self [...] is in the context of those years not an isolated position, but was
widespread. In the early phase of his reception Handke was certainly influenced by impulses
from this movement‟, p.18.
characteristically their criticism of West German hegemonic structures is

more often than not couched in terms of a critique of language. 112
It is the same concern with language, demonstrated in these essays in
ways which align him with the students‟ cause, which will eventually lead
Handke to distance himself from the student movement‟s later dogmatic
developments. In 1968 he published an article in Die Zeit criticising the
language of the student movement‟s leading body, the SDS, 113 a judgement
he reiterated in a 1970 interview where his own allegiance to Marxist rhetoric
competes with his awareness of the staleness of its discourses: „To me, at
least, this is true: when people are alienated from their language and their
speech, as workers are from their products, they are alienated from the world
as well‟.114
In the 1966 essay „Literature is Romantic‟, in which he expanded on some
of the criticisms levelled against the Group 47 at Princeton, Handke had
taken exception to Sartre‟s notion of a littérature engagée. Distinguishing
between the politically engaged person and the politically engaged writer, he
allowed for the existence of the former but not the latter: „Politically engaged
literature does not exist. The concept is a contradiction in terms‟ because
„literature turns everything real, including political engagement, into style‟. 115
In Handke‟s own work, explicit references to expressly political themes do
tend to be found only in the essays and not in his literary works where they
112
These essays can all be found in Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms: „Bemerkungen
zu einem Gerichtsurteil‟ („Notes on a Verdict‟, 1967), pp.161-62; „Zu Hans Dieter Müller,
“Der Springer Konzern”‟ („On Hans Dieter Müller, “The Springer Concern”‟, 1968), pp.69-
75; „Der Monopol-Sozialismus‟ („Monopoly Socialism‟, 1968), pp.163-68; „Die Tautologien
der Justiz‟ (1968), pp.176-87.
113
Renner, p.174.
114
Handke in Joseph, p.61.
115
Peter Handke, „Die Literatur ist romantisch‟, in Handke, Prosa, pp.273-87 (p.280 and
p.286). In the essay „Street Theatre and Theatre Theatre‟ Handke makes clear that it is his
understanding of any kind of literary form as „performance‟ which leads him to reject the
political efficacy of Brecht in particular and theatre in general (see: „Straßentheater und
Theatertheater‟, in Handke, Prosa, pp.303-07). This essay from 1968 does, however, like the
others from that year, evidence a degree of political engagement. Handke praises the
political possibilities inherent in „the engaged theatre‟ currently being practised by the
members of the Kommune I on the streets of Berlin or by students disrupting lectures. He
takes up a similar theme in another 1968 essay in which he complains that street theatre
groups have become too close in their practices to traditional theatre, and suggests a number
of strategies by which they could re-revolutionise themselves. Peter Handke, „Für das
Straßentheater gegen die Straßentheater‟ („For Street Theatre, Against Street Theatres‟), in
Handke, Prosa, pp.308-13.
remain, as Rolf Günter Renner puts it, „marginal phenomena‟. 116 However,
one could argue that some of Handke‟s texts, above all the early „language
plays‟, and particularly Kaspar, have not only a didactic thrust but also an
undeniable socially critical edge in that they reveal the way in which
language – particularly language as cliché – acts as an instrument of social
and political control that has been internalised by the individual. Certainly
they have been read in this way and, as we have seen, on occasion the writer
has been labelled in this period an exponent of a literature in keeping with the
highly politicised times. However, Handke himself insists that the theme of
his early plays is language and that they are not about a reality beyond the
language of the plays themselves: „In Kaspar I criticize no concrete social
model, capitalist or socialist. Instead, in abstracting from modes of speech
their basic grammatical elements, I point out the present forms of linguistic
alienation‟.117
The author does not, of course, have the final word on his own writing.
June Schlueter argues that Kaspar functions contrary to Handke‟s stated
intentions and that, similarly, the play without language that followed it in
1969, My Foot My Tutor (Der Mündel will Vormund sein), which takes the
master-slave dialectic as its theme, has a contemporary „social significance‟
of which Handke himself was not unaware:
for a 1969 article in Theater Heute concerning the play, Handke helped create a collage
which includes a newspaper clipping and several posters regarding „Mitbestimmung‟, the cry
of the German Trade Unions Congress, echoed by university student groups, actors, and
others, for a voice in their own government.118
Clearly then, and in keeping with the spirit of the times, what might be
described as political elements – anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois – can be
identified in some of Handke‟s early works. What occasionally brings his
texts of this period close to the individualistic and existentialist radicalism of
the first phases of the student movement is the evident mistrust they manifest
in those linguistic systems and abstractions which inhibit individual
perceptions and their concomitant commitment to an emancipation from the
alienation such systems promote.119 However, any expressly political
116
Renner, p.30.
117
Joseph, p.61.
118
Schlueter, p.56.
119
Thomas F. Barry points out that those who insist that Handke‟s early poetological
pronouncements are „devoid of social relevance‟ fail to appreciate „the explicit element of
ideological criticism‟. Thomas F. Barry, „Text as Life/Life as Text: Handke‟s Non-fiction‟,
message generally remains subordinate to the aesthetic and linguistic

concerns that the author himself was at pains to flag up. It is moreover the
case that, once the height of the political unrest associated with the student
movement had passed, Handke became increasingly reluctant to offer
anything in the way of explicit political commentary. In the 1973 essay
„What Shall I Say About That?‟ he justifies his unwillingness to comment on
the ceasefire in Vietnam with a critique of the media‟s monopoly on the
language of opinion which in turn, somewhat provocatively, justifies a focus
on self at the expense of the larger political picture:
I wanted to say something about Vietnam that came from me and I couldn‟t. That‟s why I
felt coerced and spoke of something else. Do other people feel like that? I at least believe
that it is not a private retreat but a general difficulty experienced by us as newspaper readers
and television watchers: our „personal opinions‟ are always completely impersonal. An
initially non-verbal engagement makes one active but the trivialised, enforced taking up of a
position in the style of a commentator makes one passive and dissatisfied with oneself. Out
of this helplessness an aggression develops which really is „personal‟ and „from me‟ in the
sense that it is directed at my personal everyday surroundings. That is MY Vietnam
problem.120
Similarly, his acceptance speech for the Büchner prize in the same year,
given the programmatic title „Security Under the Cranium‟, quickly moves
on from its opening question – „How does one become a political person?‟ –
to explore the more pressing issue of how to transform oneself into „a poetic
person‟, setting out in the process how a reified political discourse threatens
the individual‟s ability to perceive reality.121 Handke explicitly rejects his
„earlier coming down on the side of an ideology‟ as nothing more than a
„sporting crossing of the fingers‟, professing his faith instead in „the concept
defying and therefore future oriented power of poetic thinking‟.122 It would
be another twenty years before the Balkan conflict would draw him once
again into political controversy.123
in The Works of Peter Handke: International Perspectives, pp.283-309 (p.293).

120
Peter Handke, „Was soll ich dazu sagen?‟, in Als das Wünschen noch geholfen hat
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp.25-29 (pp.25f.).
121
Peter Handke, „Geborgenheit unter der Schädeldecke‟, in Als das Wünschen noch geholfen
hat, pp.71-80 (p.71 and p.80).
122
Ibid., p.74 and p.76.
123
It should be noted, however, that this new political stance is not really at odds with his
original view of the relationship between literature and politics in that it does not manifest
itself so much in his novels and plays as in his essay writing. His essays in defence of
Serbia, which are critical of the media‟s reporting of the conflict, have nevertheless been
described as „a sharp departure from his previous apolitical stance‟, Coury and Pilipp, p.3. In
5.2 Wenders: the politics of showing

In interview with Peter W. Jensen, in 1989, Wenders was to summarise his
notion of political filmmaking in the following terms: „As far as politics goes,
the most political decision you make is where you direct people‟s eyes. In other
words: what you show people, day in day out, is political. Explicit political
content in cinema is about the least political side of it, as far as I‟m
concerned‟.124 Filmmaking exists, he told Taja Gut in the previous year,
„because that‟s what our century needed, a language that made things
visible‟.125 It is this concept of „a politics of showing‟ which characterises
Wenders‟s early shorts up to and including 3 American LPs.126 This makes the
film a quintessential product of the so-called „Munich style‟ of the period, a
style which – largely thanks to the professor who fostered it at the HFF,
Wolfgang Längsfeld – has become known as „sensibilism‟. The sentiments of
this „group‟ also informed Wenders‟s journalism for Filmkritik.127 On the basis
of discussions with Längsfeld, Eric Rentschler characterises the aesthetic of the
sensibilists in the following terms:
The Sensibilisten eschewed logical systems and political categories, insisting on the integrity of
the subjective experience in all its immediacy and directness. One relied on the momentary
uniqueness of lived encounters. There existed an unspoken taboo against intellectualizing what
one perceived: direct experience of the world was enough in and of itself. Munich‟s
Sensibilisten made films with extended travelling shots and long takes. They pointed their
cameras out of apartment and car windows onto streets. The works had a contemplative tenor
and little if any story line; they consisted of series of images meant to capture the ineffable feel
of things.128
May 2006 further controversy ensued when Handke‟s play Voyage to the Sonorous Land, or
The Art of Asking (Das Spiel vom Fragen oder Die Reise zum sonoren Land, 1989) was
removed from the 2007 programme of the Comédie Française as a protest against remarks
made by the author at Slobodan Milošević‟s funeral in March 2006. The same remarks also
sparked a row over the award of the Heinrich Heine Prize to Handke in May 2006.
124
125
Ibid., p.323.
126
In the latter, as we have seen, the issue is further complicated by Handke‟s suggestion that
„visibility‟ can extend to music [shot 8] and that this „visibility‟ can be undermined by language
[shot 9].
127
It is, in fact, a moot point as to whether this group ever really had an existence beyond the
pages of film histories. Rentschler‟s characterisation of sensibilism suggests that to all
intents and purposes the „group‟ is synonymous with Wenders himself. According to Uwe
Künzel it „did not in fact become one at all because Wenders abandoned it more quickly
than his numerous imitators‟. Uwe Künzel, Wim Wenders: Ein Filmbuch (Freiburg im
Breisgau: Dreisam, 1985), p.64.
128
Eric Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time: Reflections on the Twenty Years
since Oberhausen (Bedford Hills, New York: Redgrave, 1984), p.174.
Despite their political abstinence, the sensibilists exhibit points of (aesthetic)

intersection with the earlier phases of the student movement, as McCormick
has pointed out, suggesting that sensibilism combines „some of the older
avant-garde impulses so influential early in the student movement‟ with the
„pessimism and resignation‟ which dominated post-revolutionary German
culture.129 In this last respect, he argues, sensibilism must also be understood
as a reaction against the student movement‟s later stages: „The specific
influence of the experience of the student movement is also obvious in the
attitudes of the Sensibilists: the rejection of political and theoretical
categories that their more strident and dogmatic contemporaries were
dragging into discredit‟.130 Taken together, what these comments give
expression to is the remarkably fluid nature of definitions of the political at
the time. Given this, it is perhaps not as surprising as it might initially seem
that this period also sees Wenders engaging in an experiment in precisely the
kind of filmmaking he was later to characterise as „the least political‟ – the kind
which contains „explicit political content‟ – Police Film.
Described by Wenders himself – again somewhat paradoxically – as „one of
the few films of the period that is really political‟,131 it is a satirical piece on
changes to police tactics towards student demonstrators in the wake both of the
protests in Berlin in June 1967 against the visit of the Shah of Persia and the
„Easter disturbances‟ (Osterunruhen) of the following year. This film stands
out as atypical of Wenders‟s work not only because of its directly political
stance, but also because of its broad and sustained comedy.132 It can possibly be
129
McCormick, p.64. McCormick argues that similarities can be identified between the
aesthetic – but not political – agendas of the surrealists and the Italian neo-realists and the
sensibilists: „The formal program of the neorealists was similar to the Sensibilists‟ approach,
but the Sensibilists lacked a political program. The stance against logic and for subjective
experience is similar to the surrealist program, but the surrealists would find the Sensibilists
too fixated on the surface of reality, with no interest in the subconscious. For the
Sensibilists, such an interest would probably be rejected as part of another schematic system
for intellectualizing experience‟, p.65. He also suggests that it is the same avant-garde
influence on the early stages of the student movement that helps to explain „such disparate
phenomena of the 1960s as documentary theatre, Peter Handke‟s play Offending the
Audience […] , and the Commune No. 1‟, pp.43f.
130
Ibid., p.65. He suggests that the Sensibilists‟ concern with the object world is a consequence
of „the resignation so typical of the end of a decade that had revived so many utopian hopes.
This resigned, depressive state involved a withdrawal from social engagement so severe that
only the object world seemed safe‟, p.65.
131
Dawson, p.19.
132
Stefan Kolditz points out that structurally it is also an exception at least to Wenders‟s early
films: „The twelve-minute associative montage falls completely outside what is otherwise
understood as a product of the short period in which Wenders would appear to

have been in the thick of the political action – activism which briefly landed
him in gaol. But even if this is the case, he rapidly rejected any kind of political
extremism as having no real personal emotional basis:
I suppose I always thought a lot of their ideas were really good, but their need to put them into
action amounted to a kind of masochism: they were doing violence to themselves and their
feelings, so these ideas ended up destroying them, because they had nothing to do with their
feelings.133
Since the 1970s Wenders has consistently expressed his lack of interest in
German politics, a claim repeated in a recent interview:
Born immediately after the war, I belong to the generation which has lived from the very start
in the most peaceful epoch in German history. I went out onto the streets in 1968 but the
starting point for that was more the war in Vietnam than German politics. I‟ve always had a
distanced relationship to Germany as „Fatherland‟.134
As is the case with Handke, and as has been demonstrated in relation to the
shorts, a refusal to make art the locus of directly political statements is far more
characteristic of Wenders‟s early work. In fact, he describes his artistic
development in the wake of the student movement as driven by an explicit
rejection of those same totalising tendencies (as they manifested themselves in
the largely closed system of his early phase. Wenders juxtaposes documentary shots against
staged scenes, comics and advertising photos. It will be another 15 years before Wenders,
whose films up until that point largely consisted of a “then and then and then”, a slow and
chronological forward movement, returns to more complex structures once more‟. Kolditz in
Frieda Grafe et al., pp.115f.
133
Wenders in interview with Taja Gut in Wenders, On Film, pp.307f. Wenders was briefly
arrested for his involvement in the Easter disturbances in an incident recalled by Hark Bohm
in terms which imply that the filmmaker was not exactly a hardcore political activist:
„Wenders, who normally followed political discussions alertly but silently, ended up one day
in gaol. Along with other students he had stormed the printing works of the Bild newspaper
in the Schellingstraße. Perhaps he had also attempted to handle a printing press in such a
way that it could no longer print the Bild. When he came in front of the court in Munich he
made it clear in his characteristically laconic manner that: “This here is not my event”. For a
time we were always quoting that sentence‟. Hark Bohm, „Ein Wim ging durch die Felder:
Die Jungfilmer und der Filmverlag der Autoren‟, in Man of Plenty: Wim Wenders, ed. by
Volker Behrens (Marburg: Schüren, 2005), pp.11-22 (p.15).
134
Volker Behrens, „Der Geschichte einen gewaltigen Raum schaffen: Ein Interview mit Wim
Wenders‟, in Behrens, pp.133-38 (p.135). Despite his claim to have demonstrated against
the Vietnam War, in his first film about the United States, Alice in the Cities, he studiously
avoids all reference to the conflict.
the movement‟s later stages) which had already been dismissed by Handke in
similar terms. As Wenders put it in an interview with Gut:
I ended up by feeling I had to start all over again, so to speak, and the only things that had any
value were personal things. I felt that only private experience could be the basis for anything I
had to say, that it would somehow transcend the private and acquire general validity. It was the
opposite of what the ‟68ers believed, that they could speak in universals – the whole time they
claimed they could speak on behalf of everyone – but I thought they were doing violence to
themselves and to people in general.135
5.2.1 Inner space and time

That Wenders‟s initial understanding of the political is informed by the more
expansive politics of the earlier phase of the student movement is indicated by
the inclusion in a review of Godard‟s One Plus One (1968) of a lengthy
quotation from an influential anti-authoritarian work, R. D. Laing‟s The
Politics of Experience (1967), which could be understood as programmatic for
Wenders‟s, and indeed Handke‟s, early work:136
Some people wittingly, some people unwittingly, enter or are thrown into more or less total
inner space and time. We are socially conditioned to regard total immersion in outer space and
time as normal and healthy. Immersion in inner space and time tends to be regarded as anti-
social withdrawal, a deviancy, invalid, pathological per se, in some sense discreditable … We
are far more out of touch with even the nearest approaches of the infinite reaches of inner space
than we now are with the reaches of outer space … It makes far more sense to me as a valid
project – indeed, as a desperately, urgently required project for our time – to explore the inner
space and time of consciousness. Perhaps this is one of the few things that still make sense in
our historical context.137
It is, of course, significant that this quotation appears in a review of one of

Godard‟s more explicitly political films. Having aligned himself with a politics
of experience – closely related to what we have termed a „politics of showing‟
– which valorises the exploration of „inner space‟, Wenders is, perhaps not
surprisingly, disparaging of those aspects of One Plus One that carry the film‟s
Marxist message, criticising as formulaic the way in which the director treats
his political material. In contrast, he admires the scenes depicting The Rolling
Stones rehearsing and recording Sympathy for the Devil for the evidence they
offer of the filmmaker‟s unmediated engagement with his material. The aural
here overwhelms the visual, and in the process undermines ideological
135
136
Both what Laing says here and how he says it call to mind the title and content of The
Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld.
137
Wim Wenders, „One Plus One‟ (July 1969), in Wenders, On Film, pp.14-18 (pp.16f.).
strategies, forcing Godard to abandon „all his compulsive needs to show, all his
frustration at having to prove something‟ that otherwise mar the film.138 Given
Wenders‟s enthusiasm for these sequences, it is possible that the brief
appearance of The Rolling Stones, albeit mute, on the television in Silver City
Revisited represents an intertextual reference to Godard‟s film.
Wenders‟s own politics, insofar as they can be deduced from his reviews
and essays, are anything but doctrinaire. A rather nebulous understanding of the
political, one in keeping with the tenor of his early films, is expressed in a
review of Dennis Hopper‟s Easy Rider (1969), a film which would have a
considerable impact on his own road movies. He begins it with the (rather
naïve) suggestion that Columbia, the film‟s production company, should work
to make transparent its relationship to the current political situation in Germany
by providing „a catalogue with the sentences passed on everyone who‟s been
up before the West German courts on drugs or political charges, or a list of
those who are already imprisoned‟.139 He then ends it, with reference to his
own brief spell in prison, by expressing his personal sense of a connection
between the film‟s reality and life in contemporary West Germany: „I‟ve been
locked up in jail for nothing. There will come a time when people will shoot
here, too, I thought‟.140 In the main body of the article, however, he relates the
film‟s political quality to its aesthetic in a way which moves beyond the
concrete context of contemporary political reality:
Easy Rider isn‟t a political film just because it shows Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper dealing
in cocaine at the beginning, or because it shows them getting thrown in jail for nothing, being
simply shot down, or because it shows Jack Nicholson being shot by vigilantes, or how a sheriff
is allowed to behave. It is political because it is beautiful: because the country that the two huge
motor-bikes drive through is beautiful; because the images that the film gives of this country
are beautiful and peaceful; because the music you hear in the film is beautiful; because Peter
Fonda moves in a beautiful way; because you can see that Dennis Hopper is not only acting,
but that he is also in the process of making a film; between Los Angeles and New Orleans.141
Wenders‟s understanding of the political in cinema is clearly broad enough to

include the aesthetic experience the film – as self-aware cultural artefact –
offers the viewer. Such sentiments could have been viewed as potentially
provocative in the late 1960s – at least outside of the context of such groupings
as the sensibilists – a time when the more playful politics of the early student
138
Ibid., p.18.
139
Wim Wenders, „Easy Rider: A Film Like its Title‟ (November 1969), in Wenders, On Film,
pp.30-36 (p.30).
140
Ibid., p.36.
141
Ibid., pp.34f.
movement was giving way to ideological dogmatism. Justifying an aesthetic

with reference to its potentially political purpose, however, became
increasingly unnecessary as the revolutionary 1960s gave way to the
increasingly post-political and post-ideological 1970s, heralding the arrival of
„New Subjectivity‟ as the cultural trend which would dominate the decade.142
This tendency, as McCormick puts it, „rejected rationalistic objectivity‟ and can
be regarded as „a “politics of the self” that gloried in personal expression and
anarchistic spontaneity‟.143 He goes on to characterise a number of features of
this trend in terms which make clear the extent to which Handke‟s and
Wenders‟s aesthetics would move in the new decade from the margins to the
centre of cultural concerns:
Certainly a preference for „direct‟ visual experience over mediation by language can be
ascertained among the younger generation in West Germany during the 1970s, in part because
language had been so devalued by its function in the dogmatic jargon and grand, abstract
systems used by some political groups in the late 1960s.144
As we shall see when we turn in Chapter Four to the cultural context in which
Handke‟s and Wenders‟s third collaboration, Wrong Move, was produced, the
1970s proved to be a decade in which critics and audiences alike became
increasingly receptive to the largely apolitical aesthetic of both writer and
filmmaker.
To sum up: Wenders and Handke have in common in the early stages of
their development an aesthetic that is political only in the most expansive
definition of the term and, related to this, an ambiguous relationship of
attraction and repulsion to the cultural context in which their first works were
produced. This is, however, by no means all they share. The following section
will explore further facets of their mutual concerns by juxtaposing their essays
from the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly as they touch on a crucial area
of mutual interest, film, not least to explore whether the roots of the
recompositional strategies characteristic of their collaboration can be identified
in their own responses to cinema.
142
McCormick notes that sensibilism is sometimes regarded as an early manifestation of this
tendency, cf. pp.65f. Given that the New German Cinema proper is largely a phenomenon of
the 1970s – and under the influence of Kluge and feminism remained politically engaged
throughout the decade – it is perhaps less easy to identify a clear shift towards „New
Subjectivity‟ amongst filmmakers than writers.
143
Ibid., p.8.
144
Ibid., p.24.
6. Film: word and image
6.1 Einstellungen – the order of images: Handke on film

Reinhold Rauh suggests that the „friendship stretching over decades‟ between
Handke and Wenders:
is probably explained by their similar intellectual temperament which avoids the loud and
the brash, by their taste in music, by their shared cinephilia. That their friendship also
became a close artistic collaboration is probably the result of something that Handke had
expressly formulated as a goal even at that stage: an art that moves away from the prescribed
linguistic, narrative and genre rules and which orientates itself on the fixed point of one‟s
own perception, one‟s own reality. 145
The implication here is that their willingness to collaborate results from the
fact that Handke and Wenders have in common not just a similar disposition
and mutual interests, but also a commitment to a shared artistic vision. The
dimensions of this vision in the early phase of their collaboration, and,
importantly, the significantly different forms it can take in the thinking of
writer and filmmaker, can be explored via an examination of their writing on
the subject of their own artistic practice and that of others.
In an introduction to Emotion Pictures, a collection of his early reviews,
Wenders comments retrospectively on the significance of his writing on film
in terms which emphasise precisely the concern with a subjective perception
of reality noted by Rauh as central to the aesthetic of both writer and
filmmaker:
I didn‟t learn much in film school, but I learned a lot from writing. I had no critical method
and no other criterion than „the truth‟. No, certainly not any „objective truth‟, only the truth
of experience: I was watching movies, but as much as I was looking at the screen, I was also
aware of myself as the observer. Writing was as much self-observation as film-observation:
I was not reflecting upon movies, I was reflecting them, period. I felt films were
extraordinary, necessary; they were about life, they gave me life and life had given them to
me. I gave them life too, I passed them on. Writing „about a film‟ was passing on the
experience with it.146
The concern with the experiential expressed here, the emphasis on the
importance of self-discovery and on the recording and sharing of experience,
mirrors that articulated by Handke in the famous – and, at the time of its
publication, deeply controversial – 1967 essay with the programmatic title „I
Live in the Ivory Tower‟, in which he expanded on his criticisms of the
145
Rauh, p.11.
146
Wim Wenders, „Introduction to Emotion Pictures‟, in Wenders, On Film, pp.3-4 (p.3).
literary practices of the Group 47 and also set out dimensions of his own
aesthetic. As Wenders does in relation to film, so Handke communicates here
a very personal experience of the life-giving properties of the medium in
which he works, giving expression to his understanding of literature as an
instrument of self-discovery: „Literature has for a long time been for me the
means by which I can become, if not clear, than at least clearer about
myself‟.147 It can function in this way because it is defined as a locus of
shared experience, one which has allowed the author to distinguish his sense
of self in relation to others: „It was literature that first made me conscious of
this consciousness of self, it enlightened me by demonstrating to me that I
was not alone, that others had similar experiences‟. 148 Vitally, literature is
expected to provide the author with new ways of seeing the world and
himself in it:
I expect from a literary work something new for me, something that, even only slightly,
changes me, something that makes me aware of a possibility of reality that has not yet been
thought of, not yet come to consciousness, a new possibility of seeing, of speaking, of
thinking, of existing […]. I expect of literature the destruction of all those images of the
world that seem final.149
Handke expresses his conviction that this goal cannot be achieved via the
practice of the kind of literary realism generally assumed to be literature‟s
most „natural‟ form, insisting instead that, as one literary method amongst
many others, realism as it is currently practised is unable to offer new ways
of experiencing reality. In relation to his own literary practice, he goes a step
further, insisting that any „model of representation‟, if it is to allow him to
interact meaningfully with the world, can be used only once: „A
representational model when applied to reality for the first time can be
realistic, on the second occasion it is already a mannerism, it is unreal, even
if once again it wants to call itself realistic‟. 150 Most emphatically Handke
rejects the traditional narrative as, in the terms of his aesthetic at least, a mere
distraction from what is vital in relation to both literature and reality, namely
experience: writing „is more about the communication of experience,
linguistic and non-linguistic, and to do that it is no longer necessary to invent
a story‟.151 The experience he is concerned to convey is relentlessly his own,
147
Peter Handke, „Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms‟, in Handke, Prosa, pp.263-72
(p.263).
148
Ibid.
149
Ibid., pp.263f.
150
Ibid., p.264.
151
Ibid., p.268.
of a reality that can only ever be subjective: „It does not in any case interest
me as an author to show or to master reality, rather what concerns me is to
show (although also not to master) my reality‟.152
Handke makes a brief reference to film in „I Live in the Ivory Tower‟.
While he notes that the once avant-garde practice of transferring film cutting
techniques to literature has become just another hackneyed literary method,
he argues that contemporary thinking about film – at least as far as its
rejection of realism is concerned – „is already much more advanced than
literary criticism‟.153 Film – and in particular its engagement with reality –
seems to have concerned Handke from the earliest point of his writing. The
collection Greeting the Board of Directors contains a film scenario, „The
Father‟s Speeches and Actions in the Cornfield‟ („Die Reden und
Handlungen des Vaters im Maisfeld‟), along with partial retellings of two
films. In „Der Galgenbaum‟ he reproduces sequences from Delmer Daves‟s
The Hanging Tree (1959) and in „Sacramento (A Wild West Story)‟
(„Sacramento (Eine Wildwestgeschichte)‟) he offers a version of Sam
Peckinpah‟s Ride the High Country (1962).154 While critics have assessed
these efforts both negatively, as detracting from the films they describe, and
positively, as increasing our understanding of the way in which they function,
Handke himself has argued for their openness in a way which echoes
Wenders‟s assessment of his own film reviews, insisting: „the description of a
Western can certainly be a footnote to that Western, a formulation of the
enthusiasm of a viewer at the sight of a film, another kind of criticism, one
which perhaps gives the reader more freedom‟. 155 What is significant about
152
Ibid., p.269.
153
Ibid., p.270.
154
Peter Handke, Begrüßung des Aufsichtsrats (Salzburg: Residenz, 1967). That film has
continued to engage Handke throughout his career is signalled by the fact that more than
thirty years later, in The Journey in the Dugout Canoe, or The Play about the Film about the
War (Die Fahrt im Einbaum oder Das Stück zum Film vom Krieg, 1999), an American
director decides not to make a film about the recent Balkan conflicts because insufficient
time has elapsed since the events to be depicted, and because tragedy and film do not mix.
His colleague, a Spanish director, decides that he cannot do so because: „I have always been
a filmmaker who deals with social issues and I have come to realise here that there is no
society any more […]. And so not only will I not make this film, I will not make any films
any more‟. Peter Handke, Die Fahrt im Einbaum oder Das Stück zum Film vom Krieg
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), pp.123f.
155
Peter Handke, „Über Peter Hamm über Peter Handke‟, in Scharang, pp.314-19 (p.315). His
comment is a response to Peter Hamm‟s insistence that the synopses rob the films of
„precisely that liberating moment which they won on the way from ossified concept to
sensuous image‟, Hamm, p.306. Günter Heintz has argued convincingly that they should be
these experiments in the present context is that they engage in literary

recomposition, retelling a film in prose and investigating what of a film
„survives‟ the translation into literature. There is perhaps also a connection
here to The Hornets, Handke‟s first novel, in which a story is „repeated‟ by
the blind narrator.
A number of Handke‟s early essays concern themselves more centrally
with film, exploring some of the concerns of „I Live in the Ivory Tower‟ in
relation to this other medium. The most important of these for understanding
Handke‟s attitudes to cinema in the late 1960s is the 1968 essay „Theatre and
Film: The Misery of Comparison‟. The long essay „The Task of the
Audience‟ (1969) is also useful because it contains responses to a number of
the films screened as part of the 19th Berlin International Film Festival in
1969.
In „Theatre and Film‟ Handke calls attention to what he regards as the
dilemma of contemporary filmmaking – that it can no longer, as was once the
case, show reality directly. Rather, as audiences have become familiar with
cinematic images, its showing has become a describing of the sort otherwise
associated with literature:
What strikes me as even more remarkable is that such a big deal is made of film just at the
moment when avant-garde films are drawing attention to film‟s great dilemma: for a long
time film claimed simply to show images without recourse to the kind of description
necessary in literature, but now, precisely through the repeated showing of images, film has
gradually – a step closer with every new film – reached an ordering of images which can be
described as a film syntax. A film image is no longer an innocent image, through the history
of all the film images which precede this image it has become an Einstellung [...].156
Handke exploits two meanings of the word Einstellung here to signify not
just a „shot‟ but also an „attitude‟. It is no longer the things themselves but the
attitude of the filmmaker to those things that have become the subject of film.
Objects become „dematerialised‟ as „the shot (Einstellung) of the object
serves as a mode of expression for the filmmaker‟. 157 Because the Einstellung
is already known from other films and stands in a relation to other
understood as part of Handke‟s illusion-breaking attempt to expose the artificial nature of

(film) genre, although in insisting that Handke is concerned with „the rejection of an artistic
genre that is paralysed by cliché‟ he would seem to underestimate the writer‟s enthusiasm
for the work of certain proponents of the Western. Günter Heintz, Peter Handke (Munich:
Oldenbourg, 1974), p.25.
156
Peter Handke, „Theater und Film: Das Elend des Vergleichens‟, in Handke, Prosa, pp.314-
26 (pp.317f.).
157
Ibid., p.318.
Einstellungen which are also already familiar, Handke claims that it is

possible to speak of a (normative) film syntax. 158 Such a syntax is particularly
transparent in films which are made according to a set of genre rules – „crime
thrillers, spy films, Westerns, horror films‟. 159 But it has also become part of
those „arthouse‟ movies which regard themselves as having a less mediated
relationship to reality: „These artistic films profess to reproduce in images the
external world of the filmed objects, but all they do is present the inner
world, the rigid grammar of film form‟.160 Handke singles out Ingmar
Bergman, Resnais and Godard for particular criticism in this respect,
censuring the latter in terms similar to those used by Wenders in his review
of One Plus One: „Godard‟s film grammar has also, one could say, “fixed”
itself: the order of shots which he has worked out for himself is so ready to
use that with its help one could also produce a genre film: not a criminal film,
not a Western, not a horror film – a Godard film‟.161 To resolve this
predicament Handke proposes what sounds like a modernist, even Brechtian
solution – that films should become self-consciously aware of the syntax
which underpins them: „the way out for film from this dilemma would seem
to be that this syntax is reflected on, [...] that the syntax of the film appears
abstracted to the extent that it itself is shown as the film‟.162 Here, already,
one can detect a precursor of the recompositional method employed in the
collaborative films.
Interestingly, Handke‟s advocacy of self-reflexivity is not without an
ideological dimension, as becomes clear in his reflections on Godard‟s Le
Gai savoir (The Joy of Learning, 1969). Despite his reservations about the
dangers of the self-proliferating „Godard film‟, in the most extended and
positive response to a film in the 1969 essay „The Task of the Audience‟,
Handke singles out Le Gai savoir as the one that comes closest to illustrating
the critical-because-self-aware potential of contemporary cinema. According
to Handke, the film manages to show what Roland Barthes had described in
Mythologies – the language of things. It demonstrates the fact that: „there are
no neutral images, no neutral objects, all objects and images are language,
158
Ibid.
159
Ibid.
160
Ibid., p.319. Elsewhere Handke describes „problem films‟ as those in which „the audience do
not see the image, but simultaneously and instead of the image the predetermined meaning
of the image‟. Handke, „Probleme werden im Film zu einem Genre‟ („In Film Problems
Become a Genre‟), in Handke, Prosa, pp.327-31 (p.329).
161
Handke, „Theater und Film: Das Elend des Vergleichens‟, p.320.
162
Ibid.
statement, made into language and socialised (verstaatlicht)‟.163 Handke

clearly understands Godard‟s aesthetic in this film to be comparable to his
own; that is, one which unmasks the normative quality of what is generally
perceived to be an (ideologically) neutral reality. 164 This, according to
Handke, is what Godard‟s film makes transparent:
The revolutionary work of the filmmaker begins with the work on images, on television
images, photos, cinematic images. Anybody who fails to take that into account, he has
Patrice Lumumba say, anybody who simply takes over the images of the reactionaries, will
become a reactionary himself: „To apply bourgeois style to the writings of Mao is bourgeois
politics‟.165
Because it demands of its viewer „to learn to differentiate‟, that is, to

understand the constructed nature of images and sounds, and thus reality
itself, Le Gai savoir contributes to that project of exposing the „syntax‟ of
images that so concerns Handke.166
163
Peter Handke, „Die Arbeit des Zuschauers‟, in Handke, Ich bin ein Bewohner des
Elfenbeinturms, pp.88-125 (p.114). As part of their discourse on language, sounds, and
images in Le Gai savoir, the protagonists – Patricia Lumumba (Juliet Berto) and Emile
Rousseau (Jean-Pierre Léaud) – set out a three-year programme of revolutionary media
study which has „recomposition‟ as its explicit goal: „PATRICIA: The truth, it‟s the internal
place of these things and phenomenons, meaning the laws that govern them. EMILE: To
research is to study. We have to study. PATRICIA: I told him, otherwise there‟s no
possibility of television. EMILE: Not a true television, in any case. PATRICIA: And not a
commercial-filled television like in France. EMILE: I told her, no cinema either. Not a true
cinema, in any case. PATRICIA: Therefore, no true images, nor any true sounds, unless we
study them first. EMILE: What will we do the first year? PATRICIA: We‟ll pick up images,
we‟ll record sounds, like we said. It will create unorderly experiences. EMILE: Actions,
hypothesis. PATRICIA: Yes, and the second year, we‟ll criticize it all. We‟ll decompose,
we‟ll reduce, we‟ll substitute, and we‟ll recompose. EMILE: Okay. And afterwards, the
third year, we‟ll create a few samples of sounds and images‟. Translation from the Koch
Lorber Films DVD, 2008 (0.16.10-0.17.39). There is a striking parallel here to Handke‟s
study of the images and sounds of German television in the course of preparing the script for
Chronicle of On-Going Events. See pp.104-12 below.
164
In terms remarkably similar to those he uses to describe the conception of reality that
underpins The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, Handke insists: „Objects are not as they
are, they are as they are supposed to be. And things are norms, rules‟, ibid., p.114.
165
Ibid., p.115.
166
Ibid., p.117. In the same year as the essay „The Task of the Audience‟, Handke published a
scathing review of Alexander Kluge‟s The Artistes at the Top of the Big Top: Disorientated
(Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos, 1968) in which he compares the film unfavourably
with Godard‟s Two or Three Things I Know About Her. Peter Handke, „Augsburg im
August: trostlos: Peter Handke über Alexander Kluges “Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel:
ratlos”‟, Film, 7.1 (1969), 30-32, (p.32). He claims that the film‟s images are subjugated to a
Other filmmakers who participate, according to Handke, in this project

include François Truffaut (a passion shared with Wenders, as we shall see in
discussing Wings of Desire), even though he concludes in the essay „Theatre
and Film‟ that The Bride Wore Black (La Mariée était en noir, 1968) does
not go far enough in this respect. Klaus Lemke‟s 48 Hours to Acapulco (48
Stunden bis Acapulco, 1967) also receives an honorary mention, although
Handke claims that it is American underground cinema which offers the best
examples of „the showing of the syntax of the film as the film itself‟, that is,
of the kind of medial self-awareness that he advocates as the way for film to
avoid stagnation.167 He comments on „the tremendous constructedness‟ of
Gregory Markopoulos‟s The Illiac Passion (1967), while noting approvingly
of Michael Snow‟s Wavelength (1967) that it too reveals its constructedness
„because it does not allow people and objects to act but rather focuses on the
materials of the film, of the filming process‟. 168 The films, experimental or
otherwise, which earn Handke‟s approval are those which engage in a
process of de-construction that we have identified as a necessary component
of the recompositional process.
6.1.1 The extraordinary potential of film

It is because of their willingness to call attention within their films to the
process of their making that Handke repeatedly singles out for particular
commendation the cinema of Straub-Huillet. In „Theatre and Film‟ he
focuses on their Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach which he eulogises as a
successful example of an attempt „to abstract the film down to its syntax, and
then, after this reduction, to show images as examples of that syntax, so that
each shot at the same time as exposing the image also exposes its
artificiality‟, going on to claim that it „demonstrates the extraordinary
potential of film to combine the most rigorous calculation of framing with the
most precise and rigorous beauty (Anmut), or, to put it better, this film has
demonstrated that the most precise artificiality leads to the most rigorous
pre-Wittgensteinian literary language of formulaic and arbitrary utterances: „they demand

that the spectator seeks out connections and thereby restrict his freedom; instead of letting
images just be images, they become an imagepuzzle. Instead of just looking at something
and then really seeing it, one is expected to relate images to sentences!‟, p.31. Handke has
not included this review in any collections of his essays.
167
Handke, „Theatre und Film: Das Elend des Vergleichens‟, p.321.
168
Ibid., p.322. In another essay he also defends Hellmuth Costard‟s 1968 film Besonders
wertvoll because of its self-conscious awareness of its own form. Peter Handke, „Ein
Beispiel für die Verwendungsweisen grammatischer Modelle‟ (An Example for the Way
Grammatical Models are Used‟), in Handke, Prosa, pp.298-302 (see: pp.301f.).
beauty‟.169 In Straub-Huillet‟s work, therefore, Handke discovers a

constructive component to the process of recomposition which is not first and
foremost ideological: having de-familiarised film syntax, Straub-Huillet re-
construct film as self-reflexive and phenomenologically exact, as a
„redemption of physical reality‟ to use Siegfried Kracauer‟s terminology.
Both Wenders and Handke express their admiration for the work of
Straub-Huillet repeatedly in their early writings. Wenders, for instance,
concludes his 1970 essay on Van Morrison, somewhat cryptically, with a
quotation from Chronicle’s recently published script:
Where something really becomes indescribable: the last shot of The Chronicle of Anna
Magdalena Bach by Jean-Marie Straub.
113. (24.93m) Medium close-up to close-up of him (Bach) standing at the window,
daydreaming and looking out. The camera tracks to a close-up of his face. Commentary
(Anna Magdalena) starting immediately after the chorale: And suddenly his eyes seemed to
improve, so that by morning he could see quite well and even bear the light again...170
Given the explicitly political nature of their filmmaking, this admiration on

the part of both Handke and Wenders might seem rather surprising and is
worth exploring in more detail. Although Straub and Huillet were central
figures of the Munich film scene in the 1960s, their work is essentially
antagonistic to that of the sensibilists, including Wenders. Consistent with
their position as politically engaged Brechtian filmmakers, they labelled
Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach a „Marxist film‟,171 and it is as much an
exposé of the conditions under which Bach worked as it is a presentation, or
celebration, of his music. Consisting largely of extended performances of
Bach‟s compositions on original instruments, with harpsichordist Gustav
Leonhardt as Bach himself, the film is a „documentation‟ of authentic recitals
of baroque music interspersed with a voiced-over fictional journal of Anna
Magdalena recording Bach‟s daily life (written by Straub-Huillet and
stylistically scrutinised for them by Heinrich Böll). Straub-Huillet do not, of
course, claim that Bach‟s music was itself in any way insurgent, but rather
demonstrate that it was written in the face of considerable external pressure
and constraint. As Barton Byg concludes in his study of the filmmakers:
„Bach‟s artistic resistance against death and the constraints of his working
169
Handke, „Theatre and Film: Das Elend des Vergleichens‟, p.321.
170
Wim Wenders, „Van Morrison‟ (June 1970), in Wenders, On Film, pp.58-60 (p.60).
171
Richard Roud, Straub (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), p.87. The published script is
also accompanied by a quote from Marx. Jean-Marie Straub, Chronik der Anna Magdalena
Bach (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Filmkritik, 1969), back cover.
conditions complements the resistance of both Anna Magdalena and the

authors of the fiction against forgetting‟.172
In presenting the music largely unedited as „raw material‟, 173 Straub-
Huillet cited Robert Bresson as a source – a filmmaker also admired by both
Wenders and Handke174 – and defined the film as a „documentary film about
Mr Leonhardt‟.175 It is clearly their attention to authenticity (of location,
performance, sound, costume and so on), the so-called „materialist‟
dimension of their method, which appealed to both Handke and Wenders and
which, political antitheses and subject matter aside, also constitutes Straub-
Huillet‟s affinity with the Munich sensibilists. It is a method which Kluge
was later to define as an „austere, analytical search for authenticity, rightness
and truthfulness‟.176
Given the nature of their (a)political views, it is perhaps hardly surprising
that in their enthusiastic remarks on Chronicle Wenders and Handke do not
discuss the film‟s politics. Indeed, for Wenders, it is the film‟s depiction of a
fleeting moment of release from work and constriction, represented by
inserted footage of a seascape, that he picks out to head his 1969 essay on
tenderness in film, „Terror of the Outlaws‟:
61. (3.22 m) Long-shot: waves. Echo of the end of the chorale, silence. End of reel 6.
Jean-Marie Straub, Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach177
Wenders also pays homage to his and Handke‟s shared admiration for the
work of Straub-Huillet in Wrong Move, in which the protagonists watch
Chronicle on television, an episode which will be considered in more detail
in Chapter Four.178
172
Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Jean-Marie Straub and
Danièle Huillet (Berkeley, Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1995), p.69.
173
Roud, p.64.
174
See for example: Wim Wenders, „Critical Calendar‟ (December 1969), in Wenders, On
Film, pp.37-40; Peter Handke, „Kinonacht, Kinotiernacht: Vom Antivampirkino des Paares
Straub/Huillet, aus Anlaß des Films Antigone‟, in Peter Handke, Meine Ortstafeln Meine
Zeittafeln 1967-2007 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), pp.555-63.
175
Interview with Jean-Marie Straub, „Jean-Marie Straub: “Bach war kein Masochist”‟, Film,
6.4 (1968), 24-27 (p.26).
176
Alexander Kluge, BESTANDSAUFNAHME: Utopie Film: Zwanzig Jahre neuer deutscher
Film/Mitte 1983 (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1983), p.582.
177
Wim Wenders, „Terror of the Outlaws‟ (September 1969), in Wenders, On Film, pp.22-23
(p.22).
178
Handke‟s appreciation of Straub-Huillet‟s materialism remains consistent across and beyond
the period covered by this study. In the early 1990s he wrote an extended eulogy to their
Antigone, whilst distancing himself from its „moralising, prophetic‟ tone, comparing it
6.2 Clear and simple images: Wenders‟s essays and reviews 1968-70
Wenders‟s early essays on cinema – which frequently also double up as
commentaries on music – are written very much in the spirit of Munich
sensibilism. His basic point of departure, one he shares with Handke, is the
demand that film, like literature, should make „you rethink your habits of
seeing and showing‟.179 What becomes apparent, however, once their writing
on film is contrasted, is that for all the overlap of opinion and for all their
shared passions, there are certain differences in their conceptions of how film
might revitalise perception.
Reading the essays of Handke and Wenders in parallel it becomes clear that
they admire – and indeed dislike – many of the same films, although not
always for the same reasons. In contrast to their positive reception of the work
of Straub-Huillet, Fassbinder‟s early films, for example, find favour with
neither. Whilst Handke approves of the „filmic‟ quality (particularly the long
takes) of Love is Colder than Death (Liebe ist kälter als der Tod, 1969) and the
film‟s cliché-defying use of a gangster-film model, he remains unconvinced by
its tone, which he describes as „a routine film melancholy‟.180 For Wenders, the
only vital thing about the otherwise „joyless‟ Katzelmacher (1969) is the
performance of its leading actress: „In this dead film, only Hanna Schygulla
looks so alive that you think you‟re watching her in colour‟.181 As we have
already seen in the case of One Plus One, Wenders‟s opinion also coincides
with Handke‟s when it comes to Godard. He too criticises Godard‟s insertion
of himself – his attitudes, opinions, values – between the camera and the
reality he is filming because this leads to a distortion of the object world.
Equally, in the essay „The Task of the Audience‟, Handke seems more
persuaded by precisely those moments of the film which also appeal to
Wenders, going so far as to compare Godard‟s film to one of his friend‟s
early shorts:
In One Plus One you mostly see Brian Jones from behind, in a way similar to the doomed
man in Wim Wenders‟s Alabama. And you see the ends of the guitar strings standing so far
enthusiastically with the work of Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Alfred Hitchcock, Dreyer
and Bresson. Their work has remained, he concludes, „childlike sound film‟ in which detail,
such as the way an actor lifts a stone, is all-important. Handke, „Kinonacht, Kinotiernacht‟,
p.559.
179
Wim Wenders, „No “Exprmnts”: Filming is One Shot Only – Thoughts on “Exprmntl 4”‟
(February 1968), in Wenders, On Film, pp.5-7 (p.5). This is the earliest of the articles
included in the collection.
180
Handke, „Die Arbeit des Zuschauers‟, p.123.
181
Wim Wenders, „Critical Calendar‟, in Wenders, On Film, pp.37-40 (p.38).
away from the neck of the guitar that at first you take them for hairs. One Plus One is
already a legendary film.182
Wenders too singles out for praise The Rolling Stones scenes in Godard‟s film,
in particular the performance of Mick Jagger, noting the way in which the
camera replicates the singer‟s engagement with his art:
The concentration with which Mick Jagger sings, holds the microphone, moves his mouth,
becomes the same concentration with which the camera, in barely perceptible zoom and
tracking movements, shows the Rolling Stones. Its act of seeing is a visual fascination, so
intense that it turns into an act of hearing, a camera that begins to hear, that is all ears, that out
of complete fascination stops showing and forgets itself so completely, so that it only wants to
hear, and pans away from the Stones to wander off into the back of the studio, where someone,
separated from the band by a glass partition, is tapping out the beat, eyes closed.183
This passage provides further evidence of the particular fascination that the
relationship between film and music holds for Wenders and which, as we have
seen in 3 American LPs, he also shares with Handke. It emerges in a number of
(generally highly critical) reviews of films containing rock footage,184 and also
finds expression in commentaries on the way music has been used in film (he
is, for instance, critical of what he considers to be the superfluity of the images
in relation to the rock tracks of Easy Rider).185 Also significant in this respect is
the equation made in the comment on Godard‟s film between the eye and the
ear. Wenders implies that the two can merge synaesthetically, as filming
becomes hearing, with the result that the aural rather than the visual can dictate
the movements of the camera. Here again we can identify an interest in the
„inherited‟ media of cinema and in a re-formulation of their customary
hierarchy. Similarly, in a number of reviews – and again in line with Handke‟s
remarks in 3 American LPs – he proposes that watching film and listening to
music can provide equivalent experiences, or even become interchangeable.
Thus he can claim of Jean-Pierre Melville‟s An Honourable Young Man
182
Handke, „Die Arbeit des Zuschauers‟, p.125.
183
Wenders, „One Plus One‟, p.16.
184
See, for example, Wim Wenders, „A Non-existent Genre‟ (September 1970), in Wenders,
On Film, pp.70-74.
185
„In Easy Rider the film images have become superfluous already, because they only
illustrate the music, rather than the other way round. They are merely the relics of a visual
sense that‟s far more current in music than in pictures, which are no more than a cold and
exhausted shadow of films that could sustain their own beauty or nostalgia or pathos.
“Born to be Wild” by Steppenwolf or “Wasn‟t Born to Follow” by the Byrds are the real
“film” of the search for America, not Peter Fonda‟s images.‟ Wim Wenders, „Emotion
Pictures: Slowly Rockin‟ On‟ (May 1970), in Wenders, On Film, pp.55-57 (p.56).
(L’aîné des Ferchaux, 1963) that „the same experience of America and the
same peace is treated in the Van Morrison LP Astral Weeks‟, or with reference
to Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi‟s They Came to Rob Las Vegas (Las Vegas, 500
millones, 1968), he can comment „if you can‟t get to see that film, you can
listen to Harvey Mandel‟s LPs Christo Redentor and Righteous‟.186
He also insists, in a much-cited passage from the same short essay, „PanAm
Makes the Big Flight‟, – and one which is virtually lifted from the commentary
to 3 American LPs – that it is possible to structure music and film in the same
way: „Films about America should be composed entirely of long- and wide-
shots, as music about America already is‟.187 This would seem to imply that
music – at least in terms of its ability to reproduce an experience of the United
States – is at an advantage over film. Elsewhere, Wenders goes a step further
and suggests that only music can offer the visual encounter with America once
provided by cinema. Thus, in the essay „Emotion Pictures: Slowly Rockin‟
On‟, he describes how he misses „the friendliness, the care, the thoroughness,
the seriousness, the peace, the humanity of John Ford‟s films‟, complaining
that „seeing becomes an act of missing‟ in relation to new American movies
which are „bleak, like the new unusable metal pinball-machines from Chicago,
on which you try in vain to recapture the pleasure of pinball‟.188 In the
meantime: „Music from America is more and more replacing the sensuality that
the films have lost: the merging of blues and rock and country music has
produced something that can no longer be experienced only with the ears, but
which is visible, and forms images, in space and time‟.189 In a reversal of the
process described above in relation to Godard‟s film, in music, hearing
becomes seeing and thus, according to Wenders, „“Motion Pictures” has
become a definition of music‟.190
6.2.1 Lingering on the surface of the world

These remarks on the synaesthesia occasioned by American rock signal
Wenders‟s awareness of the potential of music, which is, of course, one of
cinema‟s inherited media, to communicate more effectively without images
than in combination with them, a conjunction that can effectively undermine
the communicative power of both, and they point forward to his own nuanced
construction of music-image relationships in the films to come. They also touch
186
Wim Wenders, „PanAm Makes the Big Flight‟ (June 1969), in Wenders, On Film, p.8.
187
Ibid.
188
Wenders, „Emotion Pictures: Slowly Rockin‟ On‟, p.55.
189
Ibid., p.56.
190
Ibid.
on a number of other motifs which recur in Wenders‟s writing on film. The

concern with the relative abilities of Anglo-American music and Hollywood
film to give expression to an experience of the United States draws attention to
the extent of his fascination with American popular culture, one that he shares
with Handke, as will emerge particularly in the examination of the pair‟s
respective „American‟ works, Alice in the Cities and Short Letter, Long
Farewell in Chapter Three. Their most obvious shared interest in this respect
(together with American experimental film) is the Western. The directors most
admired by Wenders include Ford, Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann, and Raoul
Walsh, and of the genre in general he speaks in the following terms:
Kracauer spoke of film as the „redemption of physical reality‟, meaning the tenderness that
cinema can show towards reality. Westerns have often brought out this tenderness in a dreamily
beautiful and quiet way. They respected themselves: their characters, their plots, their
landscapes, their rules, their freedoms, their desires. In their images they spread out a surface
that was nothing else but what you could see.191
This characterisation of the Western provides an example of another persistent

theme in Wenders‟s writing, one that also emerges from the remarks on music
cited above. He gives expression to the desire to see reality portrayed as it is
found, without any kind of interpretative layer inserted between it and the
camera.192 For this to happen, it seems, the filmmaker must be prepared to
linger on the surface of the world. In commenting on Bresson‟s Mouchette
(1967), Wenders pays tribute, in a manner reminiscent of Bazin, to the
camera‟s ability simply to record what has been seen:
Around seventy years ago someone set up a camera for the very first time to capture movement
in eighteen pictures per second, so that later on he could recognize on the screen what he had
already seen through the lens: how someone turns his head, how clouds move across the sky,
how grass trembles, how a face shows pain or joy.
The first cameraman would have understood this film by Bresson.
He would have been pleased to have invented something that could be used to such incredibly
beautiful effect.193
In keeping with such an „aesthetic of surfaces‟, Wenders regards with

sympathy those films which demonstrate a respect for the objects they depict.
191
Wim Wenders, „From Dream to Nightmare: The Terrifying Western Once Upon a Time in
the West‟ (November 1969), in Wenders, On Film, pp.28-29 (p.28).
192
Later, in interview with Taja Gut, he would claim that „the most beautiful thing you can do
in a film is a calm and quiet portrayal of something ordinary from which you grasp
something universal‟. Wenders, On Film, p.323.
193
Wenders, „Critical Calendar‟, p.40.
Thus he applauds a sequence from Reto Andrea Savoldelli‟s Lydia (1968) in

which a beer glass is knocked over in a way that „stops your breath‟ because
„it‟s filmed in slow motion, but for once it‟s a tender gesture and not a brutal
one‟.194 Similarly, he registers his approval of the languid pace of Walsh‟s The
Tall Men (1955) because it allows the film to do justice to its material:
„Slowness in this film means all the events to be shown are shown with utmost
precision and as thoroughly as possible‟.195 Sheila Johnston notes that in
general in Wenders‟s film reviews „contemplation is preferred to
manipulation; the emphasis is on showing, looking at phenomena remarkable
in themselves‟.196
He is, on the other hand, critical of films which are prepared to
instrumentalise the reality they record: „There are films which, from the start,
deal with nothing but the violence that has produced them. They don‟t even
show their own locations or the objects that appear in them, but only the lack of
love with which everything has been used‟.197 Moreover, Wenders‟s love of the
Western can give way to a suspicion of the genre when it becomes too self-
conscious – and here he parts company with Handke. It is precisely the
„tenderness‟ that he admires in so many examples of the genre that he feels is
missing from Sergio Leone‟s Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il
West, 1968) because it has become too aware of its genre status: „I realize that
this film isn‟t taking itself seriously any more, that it doesn‟t take its
predecessors seriously any more, that it no longer shows the “surface” of
Westerns but what lies behind: the inner side of Westerns‟.198
6.2.2 Van Morrison

Wenders‟s comments on both film and music draw attention to the ability of
these popular cultural forms to trigger responses from the audience‟s senses
and to work on and with their emotions rather than their intellect. His eulogies
to those moments in which film communicates in unmediated fashion testify to
the value he places on the ability of the cinematic image – at its best – to
transmit mood, speak to personal experience, and mediate the experiential. This
is well illustrated in a particularly striking essay ostensibly on the music of Van
Morrison in which he not only returns to one of the musicians featured in 3
194
Wim Wenders, „Lydia‟ (September 1969), in Wenders, On Film, pp.19-21 (p.21).
195
Wim Wenders, „Three Rivals: The Tall Men‟ (October 1969), in Wenders, On Film, pp.25-
27 (p.25).
196
Sheila Johnston, Wim Wenders, BFI Dossier, 10 (London: BFI, 1981), p.7.
197
Wenders, „Terror of the Outlaws‟, p.22.
198
Wenders, „From Dream to Nightmare‟, p.28.
American LPs, but also reiterates (and updates) the skeletal biography he had
presented there in his dialogue with Handke: „Van Morrison used to be the lead
singer with Them [...]. Since then he‟s made three LPs [...].‟199
The essay begins with variations on a recurrent theme in Wenders‟s early
journalistic work: an inventory of „memorable moments‟ in American cinema,
in this case with Robert Mitchum and Dean Martin, moments which „are
suddenly so unexpectedly direct and overwhelmingly concrete that you hold
your breath or sit up or put your hand to your mouth‟.200 In this instance the list
includes a landscape, cityscape, yellow taxi, and a petrol station and the
uninflected description of detail is at times strikingly similar to comparable
passages in Handke‟s writing.201 Following a simple line of description – „The
leaves tremble, the street is wet‟ – again stylistically reminiscent of Handke,
Wenders attempts to characterise the power of recognition in these cinematic
images:
But that wasn‟t all, something else happened. Suddenly there‟s nothing more to describe,
something‟s become too clear and leapt out of the picture, become a feeling, a memory, an
urgency that the words and also the following shots just don‟t express – don‟t come anywhere
near expressing.
For a moment the film was a smell, a taste in the mouth, a tingle in the hands, a draught felt
through a wet shirt, a children‟s book that you haven‟t seen since you were five years old, a
blink of the eye.
It‟s like walking out of the subway into broad daylight.202
He compares the experience to that of television channel-hopping, during

which an image may be chanced upon which is powerful precisely because it is
viewed out of context: „an unbelievably clear and simple image that didn‟t
mean anything because you were spared the shot leading up to it‟.203 As we
have seen, such „sensibilist channel-hopping‟ provides the structural principle
199
Wenders, „Van Morrison‟, p.59. Compare 3 American LPs, shot 4.
200
Wenders, „Van Morrison‟, p.58.
201
There is even a detail here – a momentary shadow on the ground as an object passes the sun –
which has become a leitmotif in his novels: „Or the shadow of a cloud wanders over the street
and darkens the front garden‟, Wenders, „Van Morrison‟, p.58. See, for example, the shadow
of a passing aircraft in A Moment of True Feeling (trans. by Ralph Manheim, New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, p.111), of a bird or plane in Slow Homecoming (Langsame
Heimkehr, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979, p.62 and p.195), and of clouds in My Year
in the No-Man’s Bay (Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1994, p.529) and In a Dark Night I Left My Still House (In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus
meinem stillen Haus, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997, pp.32f.).
202
Wenders, „Van Morrison‟, pp.58f.
203
Ibid., p.59.
for Wenders‟s early shorts prior to his first experiments with the possibilities of
feature-length linear narrative. There are, he concludes in the Van Morrison
essay, „only a few films in which that sense of the concrete is neither accidental
nor unwanted‟, going on to mention the work of Howard Hawks and John Ford
in particular.204 In typical „sensibilist‟ style, the essay then jumps abruptly to a
passage in which Wenders briefly describes the music of Van Morrison (it is
less than a quarter of the length of that devoted to film in the essay). Although
he draws no detailed connections to what has already been said, a parallel
between the mood evoked by Van Morrison‟s music and the cinematic
moments he has extolled is drawn in terms which valorise above all the
sensual, counter-analytical potential of popular cultural forms:
I can dare to say that I know no other music that is clearer or more full of feeling or more
perceptible to all my senses than this one. Not just every now and again, no, for extended
periods this music gives you a feeling and a notion what films could be like: perception that
doesn‟t always jump blindly at meanings and assertions, but rather lets your senses extend
further and further.205
6.3 Defiantly subjective, deliberately inconsequential

What emerges clearly from this juxtaposition of dimensions of Handke‟s
essay writing with the commentary on film contained in Wenders‟s early
reviews is just how much the pair have in common in the early stages of their
careers. Also evident, however, are the subtle – and sometimes not so subtle
– variations in their positions, as well as the different perspectives from
which they can observe similar themes and phenomena. One particularly
significant point of distinction concerns the linguistic scepticism to which
both subscribe and the relationship of this to their respective understandings
of the function of (cinematic) images.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the sensual (counter-analytical) dimension of
Wenders‟s aesthetic has as its concomitant a wariness regarding language
which leads him to trust images more readily than words. Thus he quotes
approvingly Anthony Mann on the primacy of the image in film: „Anthony
Mann says: “You could say that the best example of a good film would be one
that you would understand completely if you left off the soundtrack and only
watched the image. That‟s what directing films is about.” And: “Words are
only there to underline the image”‟.206 In the introduction to Emotion Pictures,
204
Ibid.
205
Ibid., pp.59f.
206
Wim Wenders, „Repertoire: Showing and Seeing, Places and People, Showdowns … About
the Forty or Fifty Old American Westerns on in Munich Cinemas Over the Last Few Weeks‟
Wenders addresses the problematic relationship between language and image

in film and in writing about it. Here, however, he claims to be able to connect
more easily to his early writings on cinema than to his own films of the same
period because of a certain transparency of language:
It strikes me that I feel more familiar with these reviews, rereading them now, than with my
first films from about the same period. When I see those again, they really create strange,
mixed feelings, whereas the writing seems so simple and easy, such a clear open book. I can
see through every word, every line, whereas the images on film seem to be hiding so much and
leave so many questions open: where did they come from? Why did I put them together in this
way? What did I see in the first place that created the urgency or necessity to show it?207
Language allows for the relationship between film and the viewer who helps to
create its meaning to be articulated: „The written word always explains itself,
maybe because it is the link between the image on that objective screen in the
dark theatre and the image on the most subjective screen of all, the mind‟.208
However, it is in this very process of transmission that the danger lies, because
language tends to damage the emotional content of images: „Images are fragile.
Most of the time words don‟t translate them well, and when they have carried
the image to the other side the emotion has all run out of it. Writing has to be
careful with (E)motion Pictures‟.209 What is significant here is that, while he
clearly articulates its potentially negative effect on the emotional content of
images, Wenders does not question in any theoretical or absolute way
language‟s ability to transmit meaning.
Handke‟s concern with language (not surprisingly given that it is his
principal instrument) is of a different order to Wenders‟s. The writer is
fascinated by language precisely because it inserts itself between the subject
and reality in such a way that reality becomes perceptible to the individual
only through and in language. More than this, language can take over from
reality, constructing the world with which the individual interacts. While
Handke allows that filmic images might once have been able to convey an
unmediated (pre-linguistic) experience of reality, he maintains this is no
longer the case. In the course of cinema history its images have developed
into a language in its own right, one which has the same reality-constructing
properties as the spoken or written word. The only way forward from this
position, according to Handke, is to work actively to draw attention to the
(June 1969), in Wenders, On Film, pp.9-11 (p.10).

207
Wim Wenders, „Introduction‟, On Film, pp.3-4 (pp.3f.).
208
Ibid., p.4.
209
Ibid.
normative function of words and images. While Wenders shares Handke‟s

anger at those films which fail to treat images with respect, where pictures
are manipulated to serve a purpose and become perverted in the process, he
also demonstrates, at this stage of his development at least, far more faith
than Handke in the power of images to produce – in the best case scenario –
an unmediated experience of the reality they are able to capture.
That both their concern for and their understandings of the relationship
between word, image, and reality are different is reflected in the forms in
which Wenders and Handke choose to couch their comments on film and, in
the latter‟s case, literature. In his essays, Handke is concerned to examine and
pass judgement on various kinds of contemporary cultural practice and to
establish his own aesthetic in contradistinction to them, to give lucid
expression to his concerns about language, and to reflect on their
repercussions for his own creative writing. Even as he articulates a highly
subjective poetics – one in which literature is valued above all as a means to
self-insight – Handke uses language with the kind of precision appropriate to
a discursive context while remaining aware of its normative potential,
providing nuanced analysis and subtle argument.
Wenders‟s style is very different. Sheila Johnston notes that „the general
tenor of the pieces […] is studiedly non-analytical […]. The discursive “I” is
much in evidence, almost provocatively so: students will seek here in vain a
carefully reasoned declaration of theoretical intent‟. 210 She posits as one
reason for this the state of film criticism in Germany at the time: „the lack of
any vigorous tradition of polemical debate and inquiry within which such a
position could assert itself, a lack betokened by the dearth of “serious”
publications on the cinema‟. 211 But she also notes that the climate in which
the film critiques were produced was one in which, in some quarters at least,
the personal was already beginning to win over the political and the
analytical. Most of Wenders‟s reviews were published in Filmkritik (founded
in 1957), which by the late 1960s:
Was then suffering something of an intellectual identity crisis. For the first ten years or so of
its life it had embraced a (rather bastardised) brand of Frankfurt theory, a deep distrust of the
popular cinema, articulated in those widespread concepts of the „culture-‟ or „consciousness-
industry‟ which had also helped to shape the face of the Autorenfilm. Towards the end of the
sixties, though, this „sociological orientation‟ was increasingly weighed in the balance and
found wanting, and the former Olympian detachment and prescriptive stance yielded to a
210
Johnston, p.5.
211
Ibid.
policy (of sorts) of „personal response‟: defiantly subjective and often deliberately
inconsequential.212
The personal and singularly non-discursive nature of Wenders‟s reviews

manifests itself particularly in the use of analogies to convey an emotional
response, an emphasis on sense impressions and, above all, in a penchant for
laconic description over analysis. Interestingly, when Handke moves away
from essayistic polemic or the communication of his own poetics and
responds instead to those literary works he admires, his style comes closer to
Wenders‟s. His review of Thomas Bernhard‟s Gargoyles (Die Verstörung,
1967) is largely descriptive, rapturous in tone, and, as part of its attempt to
emphasise the subjective nature of the response to the text, is concerned to
locate the reading within the context of the particular moment at which it
took place and to underscore its ongoing nature. Thus the review begins and
ends with the highly personal – Handke‟s attempts to contact the friend in
Hannover with whom he intends to spend the night:
In the meantime I‟d left the station café and had tried to ring again. Again nobody answered.
While speaking, said the prince, he could at least be misunderstood. It had got really dark. I
went into a park close to the Hannover Opera House and continued to read by the light of a
street lamp. The prince couldn‟t take them both into the house because everything was in
disarray. I‟d then got up and had carried on reading in a restaurant to the music of a café
violinist. I‟d tried without success to ring a couple more times. I had had something to drink
and read on. The prince was constructed entirely in opposition to reality. He was freezing
from the inside out. I read and read and read …213
A subjectivity just as defiant as Wenders‟s is identifiable here and one could

perhaps claim that it is this insistence on the primacy of the subjective in
terms both of their responses to the work of others and as they define their
own aesthetics that is the principal commonality shared by Handke and
Wenders. It is also the feature of their work which will help shift the artistic
practice of both writer and filmmaker to the centre of cultural discourse in the
„post-political‟ 1970s.
212
Ibid., pp.5f. Johnston suggests that Wenders‟s interest in American cinema also reflects a
shift of emphasis in Filmkritik: „The ascendancy of the American cinema in his critical
oeuvre also has to be seen a part of that same publication‟s backlash against its former view
of popular art, a backlash which was, indeed, taking place within West Germany‟s film
culture as a whole‟, p.6.
213
Peter Handke, „Als ich Verstörung von Thomas Bernhard las‟, in Handke, Prosa, pp.292-97
(p.297).
7. Postscript: Chronicle of On-Going Events
anybody who simply takes over the images

of the reactionaries will become a
reactionary himself.214
So far in this chapter we have explored Handke‟s and Wenders‟s first

collaborative project, 3 American LPs, within the context of both the writer‟s
and the filmmaker‟s early works and formative influences. That project can
also be read productively in relation to one undertaken by Handke
independently of Wenders and begun in the same year, his film for television
Chronicle of On-Going Events. This work also provides further evidence of
Handke‟s generally highly critical view of the function of televisual and
(although to a differing extent) cinematic images and indicates the extent to
which he was at pains to give some of the critical perspectives from the
essays examined above creative expression. Where this project shares
similarities with Wenders‟s early films is in its refusal of narrative coherence
and in its self-reflexivity. As with Silver City Revisited and 3 American LPs,
Chronicle of On-Going Events is concerned to interrogate its images,
language, and, to a lesser extent, sounds and their contribution to the
construction of a whole which remains highly disjunctive in compositional
terms. Where the film differs from Wenders‟s shorts (with the exception of
Police Film), and from the pair‟s first collaboration, is in its willingness to
engage with contemporary ideological discourses. In fact it could be argued
that, just as in his writing of the period (where he plays with a variety of
genre forms – the „experimental novel‟, the „detective fiction‟, „concrete
poetry‟), so too in this film Handke experiments with the (re-)production of a
pre-existing model. Here it is the „Godard-film‟, a mode of filmmaking he
had described as self-perpetuating but also praised for its critical self-
reflexivity. What makes this experiment in what might be described as
critical plagiarism more than simply that, however, is the tension it embodies
between its Godardian-style engagement with contemporary politics and the
highly idiosyncratic nature of the images it produces. While the film is not
autobiographical in the manner of Silver City Revisited with its blinking
camera-I or 3 American LPs with its personal reflections, it does embody
something of the dichotomy between formal experimentation and subjective
expression that characterises The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the
Innerworld. Indeed, despite the ideology critique it practises, the film is still
214
See footnote 165 above.
in many ways representative of the kind of „defiant subjectivity‟ we have

identified as the defining characteristic of the work of both Handke and
Wenders.
Towards the end of 1968 Handke took up the suggestion made to him by
the public television station Westdeutscher Rundfunk that he produce a film
script. When, on its completion, WDR failed to find a director for the project,
Handke himself took on the task, filming Chronicle of On-Going Events in
October and November 1970.215 The film was then screened by ARD on 10
May 1971 as part of the series „The Television Drama on Mondays‟.216 The
project provided an early film role for Rüdiger Vogler (who in his six years at
Frankfurt‟s Theater am Turm featured regularly in Handke‟s plays) in the
period before he became so firmly associated with Wenders‟s films.
In an afterword appended to the version of the script published in 1971,
Handke explains that he decided to pursue the project because of the
opportunity it provided to explore his own responses to television outside of
the normal „framework of cultural criticism‟ – presumably the kind of critical
essay he had himself been producing up until this point – which he
experienced increasingly as „a mere ritual‟ (CLE 128). As in the course of
1969 he made notes in front of the television, he grew aware not only of how
oppressive an activity television-watching can be, but also that there were
„far too many images and image sequences which made me anxious and
afraid‟ (CLE 128). The film is thus born out of a (subjective) fear of images
which the writer „wanted to turn around by describing them afresh‟ (CLE
128) – that is, he is using television images against themselves in the attempt
to expose and neutralise them. This amounts, in effect, to an attempt to
recompose television. As part of this process he claims that „while writing the
script, I imagined to myself that the film already existed and I was just
retelling it‟ (CLE 130), implying his awareness of the fact that, within the
framework of this project, it will be impossible for him to do other than work
with images that already exist. Rather like The Hornets, Chronicle of On-
Going Events is thus conceived as a repetition (or adaptation) of an imagined
pre-text.
215
According to Handke he took the title from a Soviet underground newspaper. See Heiko R.
Blum, „Gespräch mit Peter Handke‟, in Scharang, pp.79-84 (p.81). Manfred Mixner sees in
this choice an unmistakably political statement, claiming that it „characterises the intention
to escape the trap of pre-formulations, to practise resistance in the face of alienation‟.
Manfred Mixner, Peter Handke (Kronberg: Athenäum, 1977), p.115.
216
These details are provided in the published version of the film script, Peter Handke, Chronik
der laufenden Ereignisse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971). Further references in the
text as CLE. The film is in black and white and runs for 95 minutes.
From this starting point, the project developed as a record of the moment
of its own making in three distinct ways. First, and on a primarily politically
critical level, it became „a chronicle of the television images of political
events, above all of the student movement, which were shown in Germany in
the years 1968 and 1969‟ (CLE 128f.). Second, it embodied a critique of the
media, acting as „a chronicle of images, apparently timeless but in the
meantime much changed, from quiz shows, chat shows, animal programmes,
animal films, and shows of the period‟ (CLE 129). And third, in keeping with
Handke‟s insistence that his projects should always reflect his own personal
concerns, it is made up „of a chronicle of the images of my feelings, wishes
and fears from that time which I had to take into account in the script, if I
didn‟t want to write a critical pedagogic film about television‟ (CFL 129).
The script for the film is made up of 45 scenes which, in fragmentary,
disjointed and, in traditional narrative terms, unsatisfactory fashion, tell the
story of two young men who come to the big city to find freedom but whose
hopes are dashed by the corrupt and oppressive nature of its structures. 217 On
this level too the film is explicitly adaptational, with Handke claiming a
literary precursor for this story: „The whole film was supposed to be an
adaptation of Dashiell Hammett‟s The Glass Key, only in relation to the
situation here. Fragments of the story keep appearing‟. 218 Although, as
Mixner notes, many of the film‟s images reproduce the mood of Hammett‟s
novel, a sense of cold and unscrupulous political intrigue, 219 it actually
contains very little of its detail: the protagonists take on the names of
Hammett characters, (Sam) Spade and (Ned) Beaumont; there are a few short
sections of dialogue quoted verbatim; one of the figures narrates a dream
which has a central function in the novel.220 That is, the film is not an
217
In the published script a number of differences are pointed out between it and the film. It
contains six scenes which failed to make it into the filmed version and includes an appendix
providing details of the improvised dialogue, which in the film followed the script‟s scene
11, and of the film‟s extended version of the script‟s scene 18. It also contains 37 (quite
badly reproduced) images from the film and the afterword by its author which provides
details of the film‟s genesis and production. The images are all TV-screen shaped and
framed (at top and bottom) by over-sized sprocket holes, presumably to highlight the film-
television dialectic visually.
218
Blum, p.82.
219
See Mixner, p.116.
220
In the novel one of its central characters narrates twice a dream in which she and the
protagonist, Ned Beaumont, have to escape from snakes. On the first time of telling she
gives it a happy ending. At the end of the novel she provides the real version in which they
are both overwhelmed by the snakes. In the novel this acts as an image of their inability to
remain untainted by the corruption that dominates the city. In the context of Handke‟s film
adaptation in any straightforward sense. Rather, in a manner that prefigures

Wenders‟s use of Handke‟s own novel in The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the
Penalty, it brings a literary pre-text into a kind of disjunctive interplay with a
number of other source materials, as we will see below. The particular
significance of these literary references lies in the fact that their citation
signals both Handke‟s interest in the possibilities inherent in the play with
genre forms, here hard-boiled detective fiction, and his fascination with
American popular culture. Significantly, he set two of the film‟s scenes in the
United States, both of which are concerned to demonstrate the omnipresence
of advertising in American society. When the project‟s meagre budget meant
that these could not be shot abroad, Handke filmed them instead in „an
Americanised landscape near Cologne‟ (CLE 132), using them to reflect
critically on the Americanisation of German culture, a theme prominent in
both 3 American LPs and in Wenders‟s later cinema. Interestingly, the
sequence which was originally intended to take place in front of a long line of
advertising hoardings „now shows the screen of a drive-in cinema with a
“4711” logo at the top‟ (CLE 132). The drive-in cinema, which can be read
as a symbol of U.S. cultural hegemony in Germany (albeit one which has
been „Germanified‟ by the brand name of the famous Eau de Cologne) and is
here negatively invested as an image of the commodification of culture, still
had, as we have seen, more positive connotations when it occurred in the
earlier 3 American LPs. That Handke‟s film shares thematic territory with its
collaborative predecessor – uses it even as one of its several intertexts – is
suggested by the fact that this sequence, filmed with a hand-held camera
from a moving car, bears a strong similarity to that with which 3 American
LPs ends.
In keeping with our notion of this as a kind of exercise in Godardian
filmmaking, Manfred Mixner describes Chronicle of On-Going Events as „the
text in which Handke has up until now engaged most directly with political
phenomena‟.221 The film begins in revolutionary mood with the date „1969‟
overlaying an image of the film‟s first location – an English-style country
house – and a voice-over proclaiming that this is a hope-filled moment of
enormous political change. This is followed by a sequence in which a
theatrical example is added to the film‟s literary, televisual and cinematic
Mixner reads it as a „metaphor for the disappointment of the hope for change invested in the
political uprising of the 1960s‟, p.119. It can, however, perhaps be read more plausibly as
signifying the impossibility of escaping the influence of the manipulative images which
determine the nature of life in Handke‟s allegorical city.
221
Mixner, p.121.
points of reference. Handke quotes the scene from his own My Foot My Tutor
where the figure of the „ward‟ leaves behind his dead „guardian‟, escaping
the limitations of the countryside for the city and the Austrian theatre for
American film (the next scene shows the „ward‟ choosing his new American
identity). However, the film rapidly dispels any hope that might be implied
by this beginning. In scenes which resemble those of Handke‟s early
„language plays‟, Spade and Beaumont are depicted learning the language
which will allow them to conform to „appropriate‟ patterns of behaviour,
taught by senior figures from the city hierarchy who in other sequences are
revealed to be manipulative and corrupt.
Handke himself has claimed that the film should be read as an allegory:
I actually wanted to write an allegory of life in the Federal Republic in the year 1969 or the
immediately preceding years. The form for it was that of a chronicle. I wanted to show how
the television images influenced the image of history, of the time in which one lives […]. It
fitted with my project very well that the Federal Republic with its personalities, with the
politicians as allegorical figures, is shown in a kind of really simple story of two people who
arrive in the city. And the city stands for the Federal Republic.222
On the level of allegory the film reflects the way in which the revolutionary
fervour of the student movement – represented by Beaumont‟s and Spade‟s
hope-filled escape to the city – was contained and brought under control by a
state easily able to manoeuvre its citizens into conformity. What is implied
by Handke‟s comment is the significant part played by television images and
their manipulation in this exercise in state control.
The film‟s critique of contemporary media is contained largely within a
number of scenes which re-stage television images: mostly these are of chat
shows, but there are also sequences representing television reports,
interviews and game shows. With reference to the first of these scenes,
Mixner maintains: „This television sequence within a television film is
differentiated from the scenes which precede it only by the fact that the
names of companies and labels on ashtrays and bottles are turned away from
the viewer‟.223 Thus one element of the film‟s critique is that reality and its
reproduction have become difficult to distinguish within a West German
society in which advertising has become part of the everyday (a fact
hypocritically denied by the advertising medium par excellence, television).
More than this, however, the film implies that television is used in the service
of the state‟s interests: the chat show guests are all shown to have
222
Blum, pp.80f.
223
Mixner, p.117.
connections to the media, industry, and government, demonstrating the

inevitable interconnectedness of these spheres. Handke is also concerned to
show the extent to which images are used to manipulate the viewer –
emphasising their artificiality and lack of authenticity – and also implies that
television works to undermine the critical faculties of its audience.
Significantly, in its critique of the contemporary instrumentalisation of
images, Chronicle of On-Going Events distinguishes between television and
the cinema. With its reference to hard-boiled detective fiction in general and
Dashiell Hammett in particular, several of whose stories have been adapted
for the cinema, Handke‟s film begins by aligning itself with a tradition of
American moviemaking, one which is regularly referenced in the film in
genre sequences.224 However, increasingly the televisual images take over the
cinematic ones in a process that parallels the protagonists‟ loss of
revolutionary hope. As Handke describes it:
A memory of an old story, almost already forgotten and scarcely hoped for anymore came
together in a new way as a cinematic tale of two men who came to the city from the
countryside in order to experience something; and the less they experienced there, and the
more they fought against experiencing ever less, the more their cinema film turned into a
television film shown to them by other people. (CLE 137)
Handke has in fact suggested that his film should be read as an allegory not
only of the end of revolutionary dreams in the Federal Republic but also of
the death of cinema at the hands of television:
Chronicle of On-Going Events, in the process of becoming an allegory of two years in the
history of the Federal Republic, became also, and perhaps even more so, an allegory of the
mythical struggle between cinema and television images, at the end of which the cinema
images are suppressed by television images. The symbol of this victory is the television
clock which, after a point in the middle of the film where it did suddenly carry on ticking, is
followed after all at the end of the film by the old sounding of the gong and with the gong
the face of the announcer appears who can finally smile again. (CLE 137f.)
It is significant that Handke mentions the „sounding of the gong‟ here – it

heralds the start of a new programme at the scheduled time and thus stands
for the careful regulation of television images whose anarchic potential is
conversely signalled in the scene where the television clock fails to stop in
time for the next programme – because instruments that measure the passing
of time play an important part in the film. They stand for the state‟s control of
its citizens‟ lives and thus any sign that their functioning can be disrupted
224
Wenders was, of course, to address similar issues in his biopic Hammett (1982).
becomes an indication of revolutionary hope, just as the „sounding of the

gong‟ at the film‟s conclusion signals the end of political insurgence. It is
perhaps worth noting here both a similarity and a significant distinction
between Chronicle of On-Going Events and Silver City Revisited. Like
Wenders, Handke is concerned with the passage of time decoupled from the
momentum of narrative but, while the arrest of time in Silver City Revisited is
linked to the kind of melancholic reflection on existence and death which will
also be a feature of Wenders‟s later films, including the collaborative
projects, time and its passing in Handke‟s film carry with them the possibility
of political change. Chronicle of On-Going Events also finds a number of
ways to indicate not only the revolutionary potential of images, but also the
undermining of that potential through media control. Thus, for example, one
scene presents a number of typical film actions which do not reach their
expected conclusion. This sequence is clearly intended to convey to the
audience the – potentially political – point that in their viewing habits they
have become conditioned to accept some images as satisfactorily „natural‟
and others as unsatisfactorily aberrant. Later on this sequence of actions is
repeated, only this time they are allowed to come to their „logical‟
conclusion, implying, like the concluding „sounding of the gong‟, that in
response to the potential disruption to the usual order of things, the status quo
has been reaffirmed.225
In contrast to what happens within the diegesis – where potentially
revolutionary images are suppressed by ones which re-affirm the stability of
the existing social and political order – Handke‟s film itself refuses to
conform to any kind of televisual norm. In contrast to the more usual
television fare it cites, it lacks a coherent narrative, it has a fragmentary
montage structure, it combines and recomposes diverse pretexts in a
frictional fashion and it signals its own constructed nature through the play
with genre and through its highlighting of the means of its own production.226
225
While both these sequences appear in the script, the only trace of them in the film is in
scenes in which telephones sometimes ring when they are dialled and sometimes do not.
226
Although Handke himself insists that the film has a fairly traditional literary structure: „As a
television film Chronicle of On-Going Events has of necessity become a literary film:
literary in the sense that it describes specific television images, in part methodically, in part
playfully; literary in its “then ... and then … and then” structure of an old story; in the
consciousness of that story that it has been told many times; in its use of almost exclusively
familiar shot selections which are more demonstrated than used; literary as well in its overall
structure as an allegory whose story of individual people also means something else: the
interpretation of the story of an emancipatory political movement‟ (CLE 129f.). He also
goes on to claim, in what would seem to be an explicit rejection of sensibilist film, that the
It is precisely in these respects that it is so strikingly Godardian in style, and

very different from the contemporaneous works of Wenders which
demonstrate, as we have seen, a faith in the possibility that images can
provide an authentic experience of the reality they reproduce. The film plays
highly self-consciously with a variety of filmic techniques to the extent that
they begin, at least according to Handke, to take over the function of
providing the film‟s action, establishing another dimension to the film‟s
critique of the way in which contemporary images mediate reality. This in
turn is related to its political critique:
In the film I‟m making, there are no actions, only the precursors of action; the actions are
always left out. Here in Germany you really only experience violence through the media and
it seemed childish to me to depict actions directly and not through a medium. The action in
the film only really happens through the film itself, through the cutting or the nature of the
shot. When a cut happens, it is a violent action, just like a hook to the chin in an action film.
[…]
What is important is that the actions that you imagine would be necessary to do something
differently, to change something, are replaced by the techniques of the camera. In an action
film somebody would be shot and collapse – and in this film that‟s replaced by an effect that
suggests a television has been turned off and the picture gets smaller and smaller. 227
In his attempt to make the audience aware of the role of the media in the
construction of contemporary reality, Handke has, even in the face of his
critical stance on Brechtian theatre, produced a Verfremdung (distanciation)
of the usual television drama, taking over its images only to offer them back
to the audience in estranged form. That is, he has managed to find an
experimental – and potentially revolutionary – framework in which to
express his concerns about the reactionary nature of West German society.
Moreover, his refusal to conform to audience expectations in the film as a
whole goes some way to taking back its final image of a status quo
reaffirmed. In the process, however, he of course risks alienating his audience
– this is, in fact, a film as „willfully difficult and formally “experimental”‟ as
any in the modernist tradition228 – and contemporary responses to it seem to
movies he likes best are „literary‟ films by which he appears to mean narrative cinema: „if I
were writing a film for cinema it too would certainly be literary and the films I love best,
Tabu by Murnau, Young Mr Lincoln by John Ford, the films of Dreyer and Bresson, all the
great old films, are literary films, which never just take a sensitive pleasure in images and
sounds, but also alongside that undertake a stringent and inquisitive exploration of the
people who change with them, and who in turn change the images, and also of their
conditions and possibilities‟ (CLE 130).
227
Blum, p.82 and p.84.
228
James Naremore, „Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation‟, in Film Adaptation, ed.
confirm that he did just that. Writing in the Stuttgarter Zeitung on 12 May
1971 Wolfgang Ignée, for instance, complained that the disjunct experience
of Handke‟s project represents a backward step for an art form which has
learnt to deny in the name of entertainment (knowledge of) its constituent
parts:
Not only did he take away everything that we really have a right to expect on television –
this completely different, this not-art-medium: pace, tension, live atmosphere, yes,
entertainment. With still-photo sequences, with anti-fades (Anti-Blenden) of breathtaking
slowness he even catapulted us back to those times when pictures hadn‟t even learnt to walk
yet.229
Ignée‟s critique also suggests, of course, that Handke‟s method here is

recompositional in constructing a film around cinema‟s inherited media.
Chronicle of On-Going Events can be read as Handke‟s attempt, literally,
to visualise some of the concerns already expressed in his culturally critical
essays of the 1960s and particularly to explore the extent to which it is
possible – despite the apparent paradox – to use images to expose the
instrumentalisation of images and in the process rescue them from
manipulation. Handke will make another – and very different – attempt to
investigate this complex of ideas in film with The Left-Handed Woman in
1977, using a recompositional method not for political purposes, but to
address the same kinds of ontological questions which dominate Wenders‟s
cinema. In the meantime, however, he abandons the attempt to address them
in film on his own, instead joining forces with Wenders in the effort to
explore them further.
by Naremore (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp.1-16 (p.5).
See also the Introduction to this study, p.16.
229
Cited in Mixner, p.122. See also: „Wie ein Kinnhaken: “Chronik der laufenden Ereignisse”:
Fernsehfilm von Peter Handke: ARD: 10. Mai, 21.45 Uhr‟, Der Spiegel, 10 May 1971,
pp.180-82, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-43176455.html (accessed August 2010).
Chapter Two
Parallel Texts: Language into Image in The Goalkeeper’s

Fear of the Penalty
There are no rules for combining word
and image in film.1
1. „Every sentence is like a shot‟: the genesis of a project

Handke‟s The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty was published in 1970. It
appeared to substantial critical acclaim, accelerating the already rapid rise to
cultural prominence that had begun with the author‟s confrontational
appearance before the Group 47 in Princeton in 1966 and continued with
performances of his controversial „language plays‟. Today, forty years later,
it is still accorded a central position within his oeuvre and is generally
regarded as essential to an understanding of his literary development.
The position assigned to Wenders‟s 1972 film version of the novel is
quite different. At best, it tends to be regarded as an interesting transitional
piece with which the director moved from his early experimental filmmaking
towards the more polished feature films of his later career and in which it is
possible to identify first signs of some of the themes and filmic techniques
characteristic of the works to come. Reinhold Rauh, for instance, notes the
film‟s „common ground‟ with Wenders‟s first feature Summer in the City –
„Rock music, juke boxes, the stylised construction of images‟ – and finds
many connections to the later films, maintaining „the beginnings of new
stylistic methods and themes are also clearly recognizable: a subjective
emphasis through the use of aerial shots and fade-ins and fade-outs, railway
journeys, the masterly use of specially composed film music, the theme of the
provincial cinema‟.2 At worst, it is viewed as an aberration, a film made
before Wenders had found his own filmmaking voice and in which he relies
instead – to the detriment of his cinematic practice – on the borrowed tones
of Handke. Kolker and Beicken, for example, claim that this film (like the
later Wrong Move) suffers „from an overly intense and self-obsessed
subjectivity, which fails to attain clarification or satisfaction of desire‟ and
1
New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999), pp.229-45 (p.235).
2
Reinhold Rauh, Wim Wenders und seine Filme (Munich: Heyne, 1990), p.30.
suggest that this is „perhaps because of the collaboration with Handke on

both works‟.3
The purpose of this chapter is to explore in depth the precise nature of this
project as both collaboration and adaptation: to examine the relationship
between novel and film with a particular view to establishing what kind of
recompositional process is at stake in this example of a translation of text into
cinema‟s mixed medium, to identify which voice or voices emerge in the
film, and to consider the significance of Wenders‟s version for an
understanding of his development as a filmmaker and of the subsequent
course of his collaboration with Handke. What it will demonstrate above all
is the centrality of the film for an understanding of Wenders‟s and Handke‟s
work together, not least because it shows that even as he undertakes
something that comes close to more traditional literary adaptation, Wenders
is engaged in a profound scrutiny of cinema‟s constituent elements, exploring
the coming together of sound, word, and image in the service of story-telling.
According to Wenders, the idea for the film was mooted while the novel
was still in manuscript form:
I was already friends with Handke at that point. When Peter showed me the manuscript for
The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, that was before the book had been published, I
thought: that reads like a film; every sentence is like a shot. Then when we spoke about it,
Peter said half as a joke, well in that case you could make a film of it … Of course, I had to
write a script to finance the film, because I was completely unknown at that stage. I didn‟t
want to show WDR Summer in the City because I thought they will only get a scare from all
the long takes. So I had to produce a script and worked on it in a very naïve way. I took the
playful remark: every sentence is the description of a shot, very seriously. I divided the book
up into scenes and then simply edited accordingly. I didn‟t cut anything. I took the book as it
was.4
Wenders makes three statements here which are of particular interest for an
exploration of the relationship between novel and film and which require
further investigation: first, he suggests that he was attracted to the filmic
quality of a text in which each sentence resembled a film shot; second, he
implies that the script was his work alone without further input from
Handke;5 third, he claims to have written a script that reproduced the novel in
3
4
Cited in Rauh, p.29.
5
Elsewhere, though, he has claimed that Handke did make a contribution to the script: „Peter
had to add some dialogue because there were gaps in the structure of the novel‟. Jochen
Brunow‟s interview with Wim Wenders, cited in The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image,
Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition, ed. by Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemünden
Parallel Texts 115
its entirety – elsewhere he is at pains to emphasise its faithfulness to the text:

„I divided the entire book into scenes. I marked each scene in the text of the
novel and then split them up into individual shots. In this way I came up with
a script that was probably truer to the novel than in any previous adaptation‟. 6
Taking the first of these statements as a starting point, this chapter will
initially investigate the nature and construction of Handke‟s text with a
particular view to examining what might be described as its filmic qualities,
before analyzing in detail the film in relation to its pre-text.
2. The (world as) literary text: Handke‟s novel

To an extent The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty must be regarded as a
particularly literary text, centrally concerned as it is to explore – and question
– the medium of its own production: language. With this linguistic focus the
novel falls squarely within an area of interest which, as we saw in Chapter
One, dominated Handke‟s early work. In the 1966 essay „Literature is
Romantic‟ he had identified what he regarded as the problematic gap
between reality and a literature that understood itself as reflecting that reality,
a gap created by the self-referential nature of language: „Just as things when
they are named “lose their innocence”, so words lose their innocence through
literary quotation: surprisingly they no longer point to things but to
themselves: they display themselves‟. 7 The reflection on language and its
self-referentiality in The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, though, takes
place not at the level of a meta-discourse on language and literary realism
(although it inevitably becomes this too), but through the depiction of the
difficulties experienced by its protagonist, Josef Bloch, in his attempts at
basic everyday communication with the world around him. That is, its
primary focus is on ordinary language in day-to-day contexts.
The novel‟s plot – which, in contrast to Wenders‟s assessment, has also
been described as „not very promising material for a film‟ – is minimal.8
Bloch, a former goalkeeper, leaves his job, commits an apparently
unmotivated murder and goes on the run to a small town on Austria‟s
(Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1997), p.64. The film‟s final credit reads
„Dialogues in collaboration with Peter Handke‟.
6
Ibid.
7
Peter Handke, „Die Literatur ist romantisch‟, in Prosa Gedichte Theaterstücke Hörspiel
Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), pp.273-87 (p.284).
8
Peter Brunette, „Filming Words: Wenders‟s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1971)
from the Novel by Peter Handke‟, in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of
Adaptation, ed. by Andrew Horton and Joan Magretta (New York: Ungar, 1981), pp.188-
202 (p.188).
southern border. There he has various rather inconclusive encounters with

members of the local community while following the progress of both the
murder investigation and the search for a local missing schoolboy in the
newspapers and there, the novel hints, the forces of justice will eventually
catch up with him.
The text begins – famously – with an episode, not included in the film,
which provides a key to understanding the protagonist‟s dilemma and which
signals the focus of the novel‟s interest on his disturbed consciousness and
the way it distorts his relationship to a world which comes to reflect back at
him his own mental disturbance:
When Joseph Bloch, a construction worker who had once been a well-known soccer goalie,
reported for work that morning, he was told that he was fired. At least that was how he
interpreted the fact that no one except the foreman looked up from his coffee break when he
appeared at the door of the construction shack, where the workers happened to be at that
moment, and Bloch left the building site.9
Bloch is propelled out of the secure context provided by his job because he
identifies as a sign a gesture that probably has no meaning, or at least none
intended for him, and proceeds to interpret it idiosyncratically. This signals
one aspect of the predicament that will continue to define his interaction with
his environment for the rest of the novel: for reasons that never become clear,
he is unable or unwilling to engage with the world around him from the
secure point provided by shared systems of meaning.
His interpretative difficulties in this opening episode are with physical
gestures and this connects it directly to the novel‟s final pages. There Bloch
gives expression to another dimension of his problem as he describes the
dilemma faced by the goalkeeper trying to determine the meaning of the
movements of a striker preparing to take a penalty:
„The goalkeeper is trying to figure out which corner the kicker will send the ball into,‟ Bloch
said. „If he knows the kicker, he knows which corner he usually goes for. But maybe the
kicker is also counting on the goalie‟s figuring this out. So the goalie goes on figuring that
just today the ball might go into the other corner. But what if the kicker follows the
goalkeeper‟s thinking and plans to shoot into the usual corner after all? And so on, and so
on.‟ […] „When the kicker starts his run, the goalkeeper unconsciously shows with his body
which way he‟ll throw himself even before the ball is kicked, and the kicker can simply kick
9
Peter Handke, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, trans. by Michael Roloff (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p.3. Further references in the text as GA. References
to individual shots in the film are, as always, in square brackets. For the sake of clarity both
novel and film are referred to using the official English translation of the film title: The
Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty.
Parallel Texts 117
in the other direction,‟ Bloch said. „The goalie might just as well try to pry open a door with
a piece of straw.‟ (GA 133)
The goalkeeper‟s interpretative struggle is characteristic of the way Bloch has

come to respond to all aspects of reality. He seems largely incapable of
action, able only to react by reading the actions of others or responding to the
interpretative clues he perceives his environment as offering him, with
apparently little chance of understanding them. Scanning his environment for
information to interpret has become a highly conscious and indeed daunting
task for Bloch because from his disturbed perspective all forms of
communication have lost their naturalness, shared systems of meaning have
broken down, and thus anything and everything is open to potentially
limitless interpretation.
Moreover, Bloch is so utterly self-absorbed that he cannot believe that
there is anything, word, gesture, or object, that is not trying to transmit a
message directly to him which he must decode. Hence a lightning conductor
takes on metaphorical significance: „How should he interpret the lightning
rod? “Lightning rod”? Surely that was just another word game? Did it mean
that he was safe from harm? Or did it indicate that he should tell the landlady
everything?‟ (GA 116). In short, Bloch is unable to distinguish between what
needs to be interpreted and what can simply be registered and therefore, not
surprisingly, the details of the world crowd in on him, paralyzing him, and
leaving him unable to act.
Somewhat perversely, he attempts to use language to gain control over an
environment that threatens to overwhelm him precisely because it has taken
on linguistic properties.10 He feels in control of an object if he can quote its
price because monetary value functions as a secure and quantifiable
codification. Equally, if people can be metonymically reduced to a single
formulation they seem less threatening. He uses „names as insults against the
people themselves‟ (GA 89), berating a woman in a bar with „You Purse,
you!‟ and a man with „You Spot on your Pants‟ (GA 89). This strategy
backfires, however, when words become increasingly separate from and
eventually begin to take precedence over the objects they denote: „The
wardrobe, the sink, the suitcase, the door: only now did he realise that he, as
if compelled, was thinking of the word for each thing. Each glimpse of a
thing was immediately followed by its word‟ (GA 58). He even suffers
10
There is a parallel to Bloch‟s efforts to fight linguistic disorientation with language in Philip
Winter‟s attempt to combat imagistic overload with his Polaroid photographs in Alice in the
Cities. See p.177.
briefly from a complete breakdown between language and environment and

can think only in terms of simple pictures which replace words on the page of
the novel itself (GA 124f.).
What these examples demonstrate is that in his search for meaning, Bloch
is reading his environment as if it were language, or as Patrick O‟Neill puts it
„as if it were a literary text rather than “real life”‟. 11 This distinction between
„text‟ and „real life‟ is a useful one for understanding the oppositions that
structure the novel. Having abandoned the conventions governing shared
interpretative systems and having replaced them with private codes, Bloch
has no basis from which to negotiate meaning with others, leaving him,
unsurprisingly, isolated and alienated from the world around him. However,
it is through the heightened medium of Bloch‟s disturbed consciousness and
his hypersensitivity to the interpretative demands made by his environment
that the novel in fact sheds light on „normal‟ processes of signification
through which reality is imbued with symbolic significance. Handke claims
to have modelled Bloch‟s way of viewing the world on a schizophrenic‟s
interpretative perspectives, but insists nonetheless that Bloch himself is not
mentally ill, maintaining: „This process of regarding objects as norms should
not be played down by being presented as pathological, but should rather be
represented as normal (lebensüblich)‟.12 It is the case that nothing reaches his
consciousness without passing through an interpretative filter, but it is
actually only the idiosyncratic extreme to which he takes his obsessive
interpretation of the physical world which distinguishes Bloch from those
around him. As J. J. White has noted: „in treating an extreme case, Handke
provides a Verfremdung of normal semiotic processes and thus illuminates
the way in which our own sign-systems function‟.13 That is, the novel makes
transparent the manner in which the world is ordered and made coherent
through language and then read like narrative. But it also shows how in the
process the reality to which language is meant to refer disappears behind a
secondary reality created by language. Thus the novel opposes to language
and the reality it constructs a reality that exists before it or beyond it – that is,
somehow outside the realm of language – and explores whether it is possible
to experience this reality in any kind of unmediated fashion. 14
11
Patrick O‟Neill, „The Role of the Reader: Signs and Semiosis in Peter Handke‟s Die Angst
des Tormanns beim Elfmeter‟, Seminar, 27 (1991), 283-300 (p.292).
12
Peter Handke, „Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter‟, Text + Kritik, 24 (1969), 3.
13
J. J. White, „Signs of Disturbance: The Semiological Import of Some Recent Fiction by
Michel Tournier and Peter Handke‟, Journal of European Studies, 4 (1974), 233-54 (p.248).
14
In this sense the novel covers similar ground to Handke‟s subsequent text, Short Letter,
Long Farewell, although there the narrator, responding to the problem of reality‟s mediation
Parallel Texts 119
Others are just as involved in processes of interpretation which bring

down a veil between them and a reality they never perceive directly, and thus
Bloch‟s radical linguistic alienation serves to cast doubt on the „naturalness‟
with which they go about their semiotic business. This becomes apparent in
his encounter with a chambermaid in which her assumptions about what he
must mean do as much to undermine mutual understanding as Bloch‟s own
conversational ineptitude:
At a bend in the hallway they came upon a pile of used bedsheets lying on the floor. When
Bloch swerved, a soap box fell from the top of the girl‟s pile of towels. Did she need a
flashlight on the way home? asked Bloch. She had a boyfriend, answered the girl, who was
straightening up with a flushed face. Did the inn also have rooms with double doors between
them? asked Bloch. „My boyfriend is a carpenter, after all‟, answered the girl. He‟d seen a
movie where a hotel thief got caught between such double doors, Bloch said. „Nothing‟s
ever been taken from our rooms!‟ said the girl. (GA 43f.)
Bloch‟s disorientation highlights the unnaturalness of the conventions that

govern the behaviour of others and reveals that their firmer anchoring in the
community serves only to mask their alienation from their environment; it
does not relieve them of it.
2.1 The dangers of authenticity

Nevertheless, the radical subjectivity of Bloch‟s perspective distinguishes
him from those around him and points to a second opposition underpinning
the novel, one between two positions which represent different ways of
responding to one‟s environment. What might be described as an „objective‟
stance – the position taken up by the majority of others with whom Bloch
interacts in the novel – is an adherence to a consensus way of viewing,
structuring, and experiencing the world, one that allows for the creation of
shared systems of meaning. However appealing the security provided by the
systematic ordering of reality might on occasion appear to be, Bloch recoils
from such organising processes at the point at which they threaten to take
over and distort his perceptions and experiences. This provides some sort of
explanation for the otherwise unmotivated murder of the cashier. Bloch is
attracted to her because of the immediacy of the (non-verbal) interaction
between them when he buys a cinema ticket, so much so that he follows her
in a fashion very different to Bloch, decides to make his peace with the suprapersonal myths
created to explain and structure his environment, in a process Mixner has described as „an
escape from the goalkeeper‟s fear‟, Manfred Mixner, Peter Handke (Kronberg: Athenäum,
1977), p.142. See also pp.183f. below.
home one evening. But on the morning after they have slept together he
appears to be disturbed by the way she attempts to appropriate his experience
and organise it systematically within a framework of familiarity that allows
her to create a relationship of intimacy with Bloch. This prompts the violent
outburst that ends in her death which, however, as with most of Bloch‟s
deeds, constitutes not an action but a reaction.
The novel demonstrates above all how linguistic structures determine the
way reality is perceived. It also indicates how ordering systems of other sorts
– both literary and more broadly cultural – can potentially distort the reality
they are ostensibly reflecting. For instance, it signals the extent to which pre-
defined structures can determine both the construction of literature and its
reception (and here Handke is revisiting concerns prominent in much of his
earlier work). It includes elements normally found within detective fiction
but then fails to fulfil the genre expectations these raise for its readers,
becoming instead a „story intended to ridicule the story‟.15 It demonstrates the
way in which within a capitalist economy an object can disappear behind its
monetary value. Knowing prices can provide the individual with a welcome
sense of being in control of the material world, but actually denies him or her
an authentic experience of it. The novel also contains an implicit element of
political critique in its demonstration of the way in which pre-determined
frameworks of prejudice condition responses to gypsies, who are
automatically assumed by a majority of villagers to have something to do
with the disappearance of the schoolboy. As one character puts it,
commenting on the fact that the police had been impressed by the cleanliness
of the gypsies‟ home, „it was just that neatness […] that actually fed their
suspicions, for the gypsies certainly wouldn‟t have scrubbed the floors
without good reason‟ (GA 63).16
Against the systematised structures of language and society, the novel sets
the protagonist‟s highly subjective response to his environment. That he is
unable or unwilling to work within shared systems of meaning makes
15
Peter Handke, „Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms‟, in Prosa, pp.263-72 (p.270).
16
In „Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeintrums‟, Handke claims to be an unpolitical writer
because he cannot construct solutions to political problems: „I can‟t be an engaged author
because I don‟t know of a political alternative to what we have either here or elsewhere (or
at best an anarchistic one). I don‟t know how things should be‟, p.270. As we have explored
in Chapter One, however, this does not mean that his writing cannot be claimed to have a
political edge in the sense that it diagnoses social or political ills, even if in a rather abstract
way. It should be noted that the novel connects contemporary prejudice against the gypsies
with their treatment during the Third Reich by mentioning that their homes are built with the
compensation they had received for being interred in concentration camps (GA 62).
Parallel Texts 121
communication decidedly difficult and is deeply disorienting, even

potentially dangerous, for both Bloch and those who interact with him. At
times, though, it does mean that he is able to have what appears to be a less
mediated experience of reality. For instance, in the bar when he is exhausted
after a fight:
He was so tired that he saw each thing by itself, especially the contours, as though there was
nothing to the things but their contours. He saw and heard everything with total immediacy,
without first having to translate it into words, as before, or comprehending only in terms of
words or word games. He was in a state where everything seemed natural to him. (GA
111)17
But states of tiredness or moments between sleeping and waking can also be
deeply disturbing, provoking an experience of intense self-alienation:
He must have just dropped off when he woke up again. For a moment it seemed as if he had
fallen out of himself. He realized that he lay in a bed. „Not fit to be moved,‟ thought Bloch.
A cancer. He became aware of himself as if he had suddenly degenerated. […] Nauseatingly
his insides turned out; not alien, only repulsively different. It had been a jolt, and with one
jolt he had become unnatural, had been torn out of context. He lay there, as impossible as he
was real; no comparisons now. His awareness of himself was so strong that he was scared to
death. (GA 80f.)
As this example demonstrates, an authentic experience of reality is not

necessarily a positive one. Here the sense impressions that overwhelm Bloch
are intense to the point of nausea. His distressed response points to the third
opposition underpinning the novel, that between inside/self and
outside/world. The process of structuring reality through language includes
defining the boundary between self and world (and between self and other).
Without the security of these kinds of ordering frameworks, those borders
become difficult to distinguish. That is, the novel demonstrates that language
and the systems of meaning it creates are fundamental for the construction of
identity. Without them the self becomes nauseatingly fluid and prone to
spilling over into an environment which is no longer distinct from it.
Thus ultimately the novel would appear to offer no solution to the
protagonist‟s dilemma. Bloch is unable to resolve the dichotomy between the
constructed nature of an interaction with the world which allows for
17
The potential for authentic experience inherent in a state of exhaustion is something Handke
will explore further in his later Essay on Tiredness (Versuch über die Müdigkeit, Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989).
individual stability but no authenticity and an authentic experience of the

world outside of language which undermines the coherence of the subject.
2.2 The filmic novel

So with its primary focus on the complex relationships between language,
reality and the self, what is it that makes up the particularly filmic quality
which Wenders claimed attracted him to Handke‟s novel?18 A number of
interrelated elements are of significance in this respect. First, the primarily
descriptive nature of the novel‟s language: for the most part the relatively
uncomplex sentences reproduce sequentially the protagonist‟s actions and the
environment as he perceives it without comment or analysis. 19 This relates,
second, to the fact that although the world as it is described in the text is
largely filtered through Bloch‟s consciousness, the reader is rarely privy to
any but his most basic thoughts. That is, the nature of his mental disturbance,
and its causes, can be understood, if at all, only through what is shown of
their consequences for the protagonist‟s response to his environment. This
helps to explain the fact that, third, the novel is centrally concerned with the
object world, that is with the materiality of Bloch‟s environment as he
perceives it and, according to Klaus Kanzog, the „phenomenological‟
character of the narrative in turn helps to account for its largely descriptive
nature: „A characteristic of this phenomenological narration is the
predominance of description generally in combination with a strongly
paratactical syntax‟.20
The following sections of this chapter will examine the extent to which
these „filmic‟ properties of the text find expression in Wenders‟s The
Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty and will also explore similarities and
differences in the structure, style, and thematic concerns of novel and film. In
doing so, we will attempt to avoid the kind of privileging of the novel over
the film that can result from viewing the latter only as literary adaptation.
18
Wenders has remarked that when Handke showed him half the finished novel „I thought it
was much more of a film script than a novel. It was more the prescription for a film than a
novel‟. Jan Dawson, Wim Wenders (New York: Zoetrope, 1976), p.22.
19
This brings Handke‟s writing close to that of Kleist whose „cinematic‟ prose provides a
model for reading the opening sequences of Wrong Move in Chapter Four.
20
Klaus Kanzog, „Die Standpunkte des Erzählers und der Kamera: Peter Handkes und Wim
Wenders Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter: Point-of-view-Probleme im Film-Text und
in der Text-Verfilmung‟, in Erzählung und Erzählforschung im 20. Jahrhundert
(Tagungsbeiträge eines Symposiums der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Bonn-Bad
Godesberg veranstaltet vom 9. bis 14. September 1980 in Ludwigsburg), ed. by Rolf
Kloepfer and Gisela Janetzke-Dillner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1981), pp.157-68 (p.157).
Parallel Texts 123
Peter Brunette, for instance, writes positively about the film‟s self-reflexivity,
yet argues that while Wenders „is sometimes able to find cinematic
equivalents for the verbal phenomena of the book‟, he is nevertheless „forced
to alter certain aspects of the theme to suit the exigencies of the film medium‟
and insists that these revisions „cannot help being somewhat reductive and
disappointing‟, concluding that the complexities of Bloch‟s linguistic
dilemma as portrayed by Handke have become „a more conventional tale of
the impossibility of human communication‟. 21 Using a similar formulation,
Ulrich Klingmann maintains that the film „strives to give form to the book‟s
material in the face of the restrictions which the medium of film places on
it‟.22 He identifies a characteristic feature of the novel as a problem for the
filmmaker:
The main difficulty that arose during the making of the film obviously resulted from the fact
that for the reader as recipient, the text of the book combines simple narration with a
complex level of reflection which refers to an identifiable thematic concern. The use of an
authorial narrative medium opens up to the prose text narrative possibilities and methods of
thematic abstraction which without authorial mediation cannot be directly taken over into
the medium of film.23
He then points to the different beginnings of novel and film as evidence of

the latter‟s inability to reproduce the levels of complexity he has identified in
the former: „The beginning of the film offers a clear example of the way in
which the thematic statement the story can make is limited by the realistic
representation that has been chosen‟.24
The opposite line is taken by an early reviewer who insists: „Wim
Wenders‟s film doesn‟t need to be compared with Handke‟s novel, which it
adapts, because it does not need to fear that comparison and because it has
become a completely new, independent artifact, a film which in its own way
is just as exciting and brilliant as the novel‟.25 This reading too will explore,
on the one hand, the ways in which the film constructs itself as an
„independent artefact‟, not least as a result of the fact that Handke‟s novel
21
Brunette, p.190. In this sense, Brunette argues, The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty is in
fact dominated by what the later films will reveal to be a typical Wenders theme.
22
Ulrich Klingmann, „Handkes Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter: Buchtext und
Filmtext‟, The Germanic Review, 70 (1995), 164-73 (p.167).
23
Ibid., p.168.
24
Ibid.
25
Siegfried Schober, „Anmutige Intensität, präzise Sinnlichkeit: Wim Wenders‟ Film Die
Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter‟, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2 March 1972,
http://www.filmportal.de (accessed August 2010).
represents only one point of reference amongst others, both visual and aural,
which make up the matrix of the film. On the other hand, it will also
demonstrate that the process of contrasting novel and film can shed light on
significant features of both. Reading them as parallel texts, we will argue that
while Handke‟s original concerns remain prominent in the film, it is without
doubt marked by Wenders‟s particular cinematic interests and therefore
represents a much more productive commingling of artistic voices than is
perhaps usually thought to be the case.
3. The „schizoid‟ film: Wenders‟s cinematic goalkeeper
3.1 Opening sequences and structuring principles

In his comment on the film‟s genesis cited above, Wenders claims that his
script reproduced Handke‟s novel in its entirety. If this was indeed the case,
much of that script‟s detail has been abandoned in the making of the film
(although Wenders does maintain that he followed the script „very precisely‟,
noting „I had to add some images, but I didn‟t alter the existing structure‟).26
Brunette regards this as the necessary consequence of the „laconic efficiency‟
of Handke‟s prose, his „terse shorthand in describing scenes‟ which makes it
particularly difficult to reproduce much of the detail of the novel in film: „so
many small “events” can be packed into one paragraph of Handke‟s stripped
prose that Wenders must omit many scenes that he would otherwise have had
to show in all their particularity‟.27 It is possible that the need to pare down
the novel‟s detail can account in part for the different beginnings of the two
versions.28 The film saves on exposition by simplifying Bloch‟s employment
status, making him merely a goalkeeper rather than an ex-goalie turned
construction worker, while still retaining an opening in which he is propelled
26
Cook and Gemünden, p.65. In the same interview he comments: „The script was basically
new territory for me. Summer in the City had been done with a two- or three-page exposé.
The shorts, too, were done without any script; there were only a few sketches of images. I
came to filmmaking through images and as a painter. The concept of story was foreign to
me, it was new territory. In those days, it was a process of gradually feeling out the
filmmaking process, and for me the script was the strangest part of it‟, p.65.
27
Brunette, p.189.
28
Wenders himself suggests this as a reason while at the same time signalling the significance
for the film of Bloch as goalkeeper: „In the novel he‟s a former goalkeeper, now working in
another job, but that was difficult to explain in the film and so we made him a real goalie.
That‟s the only thing we really changed from the novel. The fact that he‟s a goalkeeper is
sometimes important, in the way that he reacts, for instance‟. Tony Rayns, „Forms of
Address: Tony Rayns Interviews Three German Film-Makers‟, Sight and Sound, 44 (1974-
75), 2-7 (p.6).
Parallel Texts 125
out of the secure context provided by his job – he is forcefully removed from
the football pitch when he becomes aggressive after conceding a goal which
he made no effort to save. More significantly, however, this alteration has
consequences for our understanding of both the film‟s structure and its
protagonist‟s dilemma.
The structure of the film, starting and finishing as it does with a football
match, is more obviously circular than that of the novel. This circularity is
reinforced by the fact that after the first match, and before the last, the film
shows Bloch‟s largely ineffectual attempts to interact with his environment,
initially in the urban context of Vienna and subsequently in a small town on
Austria‟s border.29 These sections of the film are separated and also
connected by Bloch‟s journey. Filmed with a focus on vehicles and the
landscape through which they pass, these sequences imply a gesturing
towards the road movie, a genre already referenced in 3 American LPs (and
Wenders‟s first feature Summer in the City) and one which will become
central to his subsequent cinematic practice. 30 The director himself plays
down the significance of this scene for an understanding of the film while
stressing its importance for the development of his own style:
There‟s a scene I‟m still very proud of, and that I like the most in the film; and it was a
professional turning-point for me […]. It‟s the scene where Bloch is travelling on the bus
from Vienna to the border. It doesn‟t have very much importance in the film, it‟s a five-
minute sequence, perhaps less: he‟s taken the bus, and the bus has stopped, and he‟s looking
at this funny juke box; and the train is accompanying the bus and it‟s getting dark… that‟s
the scene where I felt, even while I was shooting it, that this was the way it was going to go
on for me […]. I realised that this was my story, and I happened to find the right way of
showing something. I lost this feeling again afterwards.31
These sequences are of greater significance for The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the
Penalty than Wenders implies here. The referencing of the road movie, as
well as Bloch‟s relaxed demeanour while he travels, define the journey as a
moment of liberation during which he is able to observe a landscape without
29
According to Wenders, the film was shot in the village where Handke wrote the novel (see
Rayns, p.6).
30
The road movie will not only provide a significant point of reference for understanding
Wenders‟s later films but, as we will see, also Handke‟s next novel, Short Letter, Long
Farewell. One could speculate whether this provides evidence of a degree of mutual
influence within the creative partnership, with Wenders providing Handke with artistic
impulses as well as vice versa.
31
Dawson, p.9. Several of the images anticipate travel sequences in both Alice in the Cities
and Kings of the Road.
pressure to interact with or locate himself within it. Similarly, the sequences,
while they clearly have a narrative function, are also a moment of hiatus
where the camera itself is allowed to dwell on landscape and the objects
moving through it while the movement of travel is by itself enough to propel
the story forward.32 This sense of the journey as a moment of release for both
the protagonist and the camera is underlined by the lyrics of The Tokens‟
1961 hit „The Lion Sleeps Tonight‟ which Bloch listens to on the bus. Thus,
this central sequence emphasises through contrast the extent to which the
other sections of the film are dominated not only by Bloch‟s anxiety, but also
by an anxiety that infects the film at a meta-level – that associated with the
narrative requirement to tell the protagonist‟s story. 33
The circular structure provided by the two football matches – and the fact
that Wenders‟s Bloch is still actively a goalkeeper – highlights the
importance the film attaches to this motif from the novel, although its
significance is somewhat altered. The film‟s opening shots have important
repercussions for the way we experience the protagonist‟s dilemma and
define his anxiety. The novel‟s beginning emphasises Bloch‟s interpretative
idiosyncrasies, signalling its concern with language and the construction of
meaning. The film‟s initial focus on Bloch as goalkeeper indicates that it too
is centrally concerned with the relationship between self and world, but it
addresses particularly the individual‟s attempt to locate himself within a
reality determined by ready-made structures – like those provided for football
by the rules of the game. The opening sequence highlights his passivity. As
Brunette has noted, Wenders‟s „isolation of the motionless, seemingly
catatonic goalie in a patently artificial shot‟, when Bloch watches
impassively as a goal is scored [shot 12], „sets the tone of the movie‟ by
32
Wenders has commented that „the sequence on the bus when he‟s going to the frontier, is
still, I think, if not the best shot, then the best way of showing time passing by. Maybe I
think so because the music is The Lion Sleeps Tonight, which adds a touch of perfection‟.
Dawson, p.22.
33
In this sense the journey sequences serve a different purpose in the film than in the novel
where they too are characterised by Bloch‟s anxiety. This manifests itself particularly as an
overwhelming sense of the intrusiveness of the physical world around him including his own
body: „Nobody sat next to him now. Bloch retreated into the corner and put his legs up on
the seat. He untied his shoes, leaned against the side window, and looked over at the window
on the other side. He held his hands behind his neck, pushed a crumb off the seat with his
foot, pressed his arms against his ears, and looked at his elbows in front of him. He pushed
the insides of his elbows against his temples, sniffed at his shirtsleeves, rubbed his chin
against his upper arm, laid back his head, and looked up at the ceiling lights. There was no
end to it any more. The only thing he could think of was to sit up‟ (GA 29).
Parallel Texts 127
adapting, and repeating the function of, the novel‟s epigraph: 34 „The goalie
watched as the ball rolled across the line …‟. Moreover, the sequence of
shots which precedes the goal, and which alternates between Bloch and the
game itself, shows the protagonist in isolation, rather than as part of a team
[shots 12-13], indicating that he might not be entirely at one with the game or
his colleagues. Most significantly, Bloch‟s initial passivity is replaced by
aggression when the rules by which he has been playing are made to appear
arbitrary. Just before the ball crosses the line, voices can be heard calling
„off-side‟. Immediately afterwards, Bloch‟s team mates are seen arguing with
the referee before Bloch himself approaches, claiming: „Even a blind man
could see it was off-side‟. When the referee refuses to change his decision,
Bloch becomes violent and is sent off. Thus it is possible to argue that the
film begins with Bloch‟s experience of the capricious nature of a reality he
had assumed to be stable, one which unsettles his sense of being able to
respond appropriately to it and one which will have consequences for his
subsequent interactions with his environment.35
3.2 Language and the problem of communication

What this opening clearly does not do is to reproduce the novel‟s focus on the
linguistic dimensions of Bloch‟s initial dilemma. However, Kathe Geist‟s
statement that „Wenders omits [the novel‟s] linguistic aspect, probably
because it is difficult to render on film and foreign to his own interests‟ is
only partially true.36 While it is not – and indeed as a piece of visual art is
unlikely to be – as centrally concerned with language, the film does give
expression to elements of Bloch‟s linguistic disturbance and in so doing
interrogates verbal discourse as one of cinema‟s constituent elements.37 In a
34
Brunette, p.191.
35
Taking a rather different line, Klingmann sees nothing in this opening that signals a
disturbance to Bloch‟s consciousness, claiming that the different beginning to the film
brings „with it a decided shift of emphasis as greater attention is focused from the start on
the figure of Bloch and what really happens than on the main character‟s psychological
problems and his disturbed relationship to reality. While the story therefore clearly
foregrounds at the start a symbolic crisis situation, the film begins realistically with an event
which does not yet signal a psychological disturbance‟, p.168.
36
Kathe Geist, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: From Paris, France to Paris, Texas (Ann Arbor-
London: University of Michigan Press, 1988), p.22.
37
Kanzog notes that the film nods towards the influence of Wittgenstein on Handke‟s novel by
including a sequence in which the tram with which Bloch is travelling into Vienna is shot
going past the philosopher‟s house, pp.166f. One could suggest that it might also imply that
the film shares at least some of the novel‟s linguistic concerns and indeed that via this image
it establishes a connection between philosophy, language, and cinema (see p.150 below).
general sense, his problems with communication are signalled at various

points in the film when his attempts to use telephones fail (he telephones
repeatedly in the novel too, but is much more likely to get through to friends,
acquaintances, or even the ex-wife and child with whom the film‟s Bloch has
not been furnished). The communicative difficulties such failures imply are
reinforced by the fact that on one occasion he ignores the warning of a
passer-by that the phone is out of order [shot 30] and more than once
becomes aggressive when he fails to get a connection, most notably in the
post office where he insults the operator [shot 344].38 More specifically, in
numerous encounters with others Bloch becomes distracted in the course of a
conversation in a way that makes meaningful interaction difficult. He can be
perturbed by individual words, as when he checks into the hotel in Vienna
and seems troubled by the porter‟s use of the innocuous „Ausgang‟
(permission to go out), immediately repeating it with a quizzical expression,
when the latter explains that Bloch will have to carry his own suitcase as it is
the boy‟s day off [shot 27]. An attempted interaction with the waitress in the
border town is halted when her reference to the sound of the vacuum cleaner
interferes with his attempt to comment on the object – an ashtray – she places
on his table [shot 177]. While the school caretaker tells him about the
linguistic handicaps of the local children, Bloch is more concerned with the
sound of the aircraft he can hear [shots 229-32] and walks away without
responding to find the source of the noise. A conversation with Hertha, the
landlady of the border inn, is paradigmatic of the kinds of miscommunication
Bloch experiences because neither seems willing to hear what the other is
saying and they therefore talk at cross purposes [shots 255-57]:
BLOCH: The waitress wears health shoes?

LANDLADY: I‟m sure it‟s the bicycle.
BLOCH: What bicycle?
LANDLADY: The dumb schoolboy‟s.
BLOCH: Health shoes in other colours might catch on. Seen the well-digger again?
LANDLADY: He couldn‟t even cry for help.
Aspects of Wittgenstein‟s significance for understanding the novel are considered in Dennis
Vannatta, „Wittgenstein, Handke‟s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and the
Language of Madness‟, Literary Review, 28 (1985), 606-16.
38
The first of these sequences is found only in the film, the second is a much expanded version
of the novel‟s equivalent: „Bloch swore at the postmistress and walked out‟ (GA 40).
Wenders will go on to use the same motif in Kings of the Road to represent Robert‟s
communicative difficulties with his wife whom he continually rings, but with whom he fails
to speak in the course of the film. The motif also appears in Alice in the Cities as Philip tries
to phone his ex-girlfriend in New York.
Parallel Texts 129
BLOCH: Who?
LANDLADY: The boy.
A similar form of miscommunication takes place in the two long scenes in

Hertha‟s kitchen. In the first of these [shots 261-82] Bloch makes a specific
reference to his problems with language‟s ability to determine reality, his
efforts to escape its strictures, and the dangers this brings with it when,
reproducing and expanding on dialogue from the novel, he refers to his
decision to start counting at the number two [shots 262-66]:
What number do you begin counting from? Recently I‟ve had the habit of starting to count
from two, not one. Crossing the street this morning I was almost run over because I hadn‟t
counted the first car, only the second one further away. Breakfast of one egg, one roll, one
coffee will never satisfy me. It‟s like having no breakfast. Only the second egg counts.39
Significantly, the film also reproduces the novel‟s concern with the inability
to speak: the missing schoolboy has a speech impediment; Bloch tells the
story of a former team mate called „Stumm‟ (Dumb), although the film does
not replicate the novel‟s ironic touch in having this word in the form of
Bloch‟s doodle on a newspaper in the cashier‟s flat „speak‟ the clue to his
identity to the police (GA 127); another goalkeeper mentioned by a
hairdresser has split his lip and now lisps; 40 the film takes over almost
verbatim the school caretaker‟s monologue about the inability of local school
children to communicate effectively.
The film also demonstrates that the strictures of verbal interaction can
irritate Bloch or even disturb him to the point of violence, as in the morning-
after-the-night-before scenes with the cashier which precede the murder. The
ability of the pair to communicate is shown to deteriorate in the course of
their conversation as Bloch becomes increasingly nervous and distracted. All
the time they are sitting at the breakfast table they are at least largely focused
on one another and their interaction can be construed as a dialogue, although
as Kanzog points out, the viewer through the alternating close-ups „has the
opportunity to observe mimetic modes of expression and reactions and to
39
While the first two of the examples in this section do not appear in this form in the novel,
the last three represent moments where its dialogue is reproduced almost verbatim,
suggesting that Wenders is both willing to take over some of the novel‟s references to
linguistic difficulties and apparently to introduce others of his own.
40
In the novel, it is Bloch who tells the hairdressers of a similar injury: „when Bloch told how
once he had slammed into a goalpost during a lunge and split his tongue, they immediately
replied that the school-boy also had a cleft tongue‟ (GA 65).
“read” their communication difficulties “directly from their faces”‟.41 The

final close-up of Gloria signals a more distracted phase in their interaction –
„both partners in the conversation are no longer connected to one another via
the breakfast table‟ – and an increase in Bloch‟s sense of disorientation and
oppression.42 Once he leaves the table only Gloria speaks again, while the
camera focuses on Bloch‟s obsessive fiddling with the objects in her room.
Significantly, Kanzog explains the high angle from which the murder is
filmed, and which allows both characters to remain in shot, as a consequence
of the fact that the physical interaction with which the sequence ends, at first
flirtatious and then violent, can be understood as a continuation of their
verbal exchange: „It is imperative to show Bloch‟s and Gloria‟s movements
as part of their communication continued with means other than the verbal in
order to make visible the game and the crossing of the boundaries of this
game‟.43 This interpretation of the scene allows the murder to be read at least
in part as Bloch‟s resort to physical violence in the face of the breakdown of
the ability to communicate meaningfully through language.
It is notable that the dialogue that precedes the murder is not simply taken
over from the novel, but has been written specifically for this sequence,
allowing for the development of a number of themes that are of particular
significance in the film and which will be discussed below. In general terms
it can be observed that we tend to experience the film‟s fairly muted Bloch as
nevertheless more talkative than the novel‟s because Handke‟s text contains
relatively little direct or even indirect speech. Where it does, it tends to be
taken over verbatim or with only minor amendments (for instance: the
conversation between the waitress and Bloch and the waitress and the
customs official on Bloch‟s first visit to the border inn [shots 199-209]; the
accusations the waitress addresses to the man who brings the beer [shots 316-
17]; Bloch‟s interaction with the tax inspector [shots 289-99]; the custom
officer‟s monologue towards the end of the film [shots 398-402]). Often,
however, Handke‟s text signals dialogue – it notes of Bloch and the cashier,
for example, that „while they ate, they talked a lot‟ (GA 19) and of Bloch and
the woman on the bus that „they began to talk to each other a little‟ (GA 27) –
of which only the film provides details.
Despite its interest in reproducing some of the novel‟s linguistic concerns,
it is nevertheless clear that Bloch‟s difficulties with language are not the
film‟s only or even primary point of focus. Thus, of the examples offered in
41
Kanzog, p.164.
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid., p.166.
Parallel Texts 131
the discussion of the novel above to illustrate the language games which
result from Bloch‟s linguistic alienation, only one, his contention that he has
begun to count with the number two, is taken over directly by the film. This
is in part a consequence of the fact that with its cognate interest in the
relationship between self and world, the film‟s attention has shifted to issues
which are present but less prominent in the novel. It is particularly concerned
with ways in which systems other than language can shape and organise the
individual‟s experience and perception and with the question of how a sense
of self can be maintained in the face of an external reality which threatens to
encroach on the individual.
3.3 Sensory perception: between self and world

To take this last issue first, it has been noted that Bloch‟s dialogue with the
cashier which precedes the murder is for the most part exclusive to the film.
It reveals the difficulty the protagonist experiences in distinguishing between
self and world, and therefore in locating himself successfully as a subject in
relation to the objects of his environment and in his interactions with others. 44
In the novel, Bloch is disturbed by the cashier‟s attempt to encroach on his
world, a move he counters by insisting on the distance between them:
Bloch soon noticed that she talked about the things he‟d just told her as if they were hers,
but when he mentioned something she had just talked about, he either quoted her exactly or,
if he was using his own words, always prefaced the new names with a hesitant „this‟ or
„that‟, which distanced them, as if he were afraid of making her affairs his. If he talked about
the foreman, say, or about a soccer player named Dumm, she could say, almost at once,
quite familiarly, „the foreman‟ and „Dumm‟ […]. Every word she uttered prevented him
from taking any deeper interest, and it upset him that she seemed so free to take over
whatever he said. (GA 19)
The film takes over this distinction in their conversational strategies –

Bloch‟s „Who is this Freddy‟ is set against Gloria‟s „poor old Stumm‟ – but it
also reveals how difficult he finds it to identify a sense of self that he can
assert in the face of the demands that others make on him, a failing which can
also be seen to offer an explanation for his recourse to violence in response to
the cashier‟s attempts to establish intimacy. Thus, he does not reply
immediately to her assertion „My name is Gloria‟, but waits until she asks
„What‟s yours‟ and even then only repeats her name before telling her what
44
In this sense his dilemma prefigures, as we shall see in Chapter Three, the difficulties
experienced by Philip Winter in Alice in the Cities in establishing himself as a subject who
sees.
he does: „I‟m a professional footballer. A goalkeeper‟. When he finally

announces „I am Josef Bloch‟ he immediately replaces this affirmation of his
identity with the more tentative „I mean, my name is Josef Bloch‟. His
reiteration of Gloria‟s name when asked for his own suggests that he has
trouble discerning the boundary between self and other. This is underlined
later in the film when his experience and the cashier‟s dream of being on fire
become mixed in a dream of his own [shot 353] – „Last night I dreamt I was
to act in a play. I had to appear with different sorts of fire extinguishers. I had
to keep shouting out their prices‟. Similar issues are at stake when he and
Hertha begin to mimic one another [shots 393-95], and when the image of his
interaction with others is mediated via a mirror, blurring the boundaries
between Bloch and the women he encounters [shot 55]. The fact that he states
his profession before his name (and insists on mentioning it on several other
occasions) signals its importance for his self-understanding. In the film – and
to an even greater extent in the novel – characters are referred to by job title
rather than name. Gerda/Gloria is „the cinema cashier‟, Hertha is „the
landlady‟ and figures like „the tax official‟, „the customs official‟, and „the
rep‟ are known only by their profession, indicating the extent to which
individuals identify themselves with and are positioned by others in relation
to their place in the social order they serve.45 As we have seen, the film
begins with Bloch forfeiting his position in the team, and by extension in that
social order, when his aggression gets him sent off the football pitch, a
moment of crisis augmented by the fact that he is forced to witness how
readily replaceable he is – the substitute goalkeeper is shown warming up
[shot 17].
The loss of his social role would appear to be a contributory factor in the
disturbance in Bloch‟s relationship with others, and this in turn has
repercussions for his interaction with material reality. Certain items give him
(and the camera) a kind of compensatory fetishistic delight. As Geist points
out: „Bloch‟s rapport with objects is illustrated by the pleasure he takes in
watching the records drop down in the jukebox when the bus makes a rest
stop and his cuddling up to his radio in the subsequent scene‟. 46 In fact, the
ease he appears to experience in interacting with objects bears a direct
45
In his reading of the novel, Russell E. Brown maintains that Bloch becomes a murderer as a
way of re-establishing the kind of socially acknowledged identity he has forfeited by leaving
his job, and more significantly, ending his career as a goalkeeper. See Russell E. Brown,
„Peter Handke‟s Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter‟, Modern Language Studies, 16
(1986), 288-301.
46
Geist, p.22.
Parallel Texts 133
correlation to the difficulties he has in responding to people. 47 This helps to

explain the significance assigned to the objects in the cashier‟s flat. They
might be assumed to offer Bloch soothing material anchor points in a
situation where human interaction is causing him discomfort. Thus, the first
sequence on the morning after he has slept with Gloria reveals Bloch
attempting to locate himself in relation to the environment both inside and
outside her flat. The first shot shows him looking out of the window before
turning to look around the room [shot 91]. The next two shots can be
assumed to be from Bloch‟s point-of-view and show the kettle on the kitchen
table and the sleeping cashier [shots 92 and 93]. Kanzog observes how at
breakfast Bloch‟s examination of the sugar bowl, which appears in close-up
[shot 103], indicates his discomfort with the conversation – „the film is able
through the focus on detail and the simultaneous use of the voice-off to make
clear the discrepancy between the observation of the object and the
conversation‟ – but it also signals the fact that he looks to objects to rescue
him from his anxiety.48 Geist has noted that in the sequences in Hertha‟s
kitchen [shots 261-82 and 383-94] objects take on a kind of comforting
substitute function for Bloch, allowing him to avoid confrontation with her:
„Hertha interrupts Bloch‟s contemplation of the objects; she notices the way
he fiddles with the things in her kitchen and scolds him for it, vaguely
perceiving that Bloch has displaced his feelings toward her onto the
objects‟.49 Thus when Hertha rejects his attempts at physical contact [shot
281] his response is to turn round and open a cupboard [shot 282].
However, while objects seem for a large part of the film to provide Bloch
with a point of contact to reality, his perception of them becomes
increasingly infected by his growing disorientation (possibly induced by the
knowledge that the police are catching up with him). That is, the film,
exploiting its synthetic nature, seems to shift the focus of Bloch‟s mental
disturbance from language and communication onto his sensory perceptions.
Thus over-loud sounds appear increasingly to trouble him (and the audience
– Bloch‟s perception of the acuteness of noise is reflected in the volume of
the soundtrack).50 He jumps as the waitress turns over a bottle and glass [shot
47
Nigel Andrews has pointed out that Bloch‟s „lack of response to people‟ is „matched by an
exaggerated response to his mechanical or inanimate surroundings‟. Nigel Andrews, „Wim
Wenders/The Goalkeeper‟s Fear of the Penalty‟, Sight and Sound, 42 (1972/73), 6-7 (p.6).
48
Kanzog, p.168.
49
Geist, p.23.
50
Michael Covino refers to „an unnerving amplified sound track that shows the influence of
Bresson‟. Covino, „Wim Wenders: A Worldwide Homesickness‟, Film Quarterly, 31.2
(1977-78), 9-19 (p.10).
198] and when a pair of shutters suddenly closes behind him [shot 423].
Perceptual disorientation is manifested at the occasional moments when the
objects Bloch normally finds comforting become strangely separated from
their contexts and therefore disturbing. Thus he suddenly asks the cashier
whether there are ants in her teapot.51 The film, in fact, shows that ordering
the world through the senses – including the gaze – can be as subject to
disturbance as any other way of creating stability and meaning, something
that becomes particularly apparent in the sequence in Bloch‟s room at the inn
[shots 407-11] where a point-of-view shot of the protagonist looking at an
object in his room [shot 409] is followed by two shots of him from different
angles, one of which shows him observing himself in the mirror [shot 410].
The rapid cuts and the unusual angle of the final shot – he is shown from
above, sitting on his bed [shot 411] – suggest that the sequence is giving
expression to Bloch‟s own perceptual disorientation. Indeed, the shot from
above can be regarded as analogous to the out-of-body experience he has in
the novel – „For a moment it seemed as if he had fallen out of himself. He
realized that he lay in a bed‟ (GA 80) – and can thus be understood as a kind
of bewildered – and for the audience bewildering –, disembodied point-of-
view shot, although it is not explicitly signalled as such to the audience.
Further sequences suggest that Bloch‟s ability to see has been
compromised. He often stands at windows at which the view is obscured by
curtains or where he deliberately shuts himself off from what he can observe
by closing blinds [shots 29, 90 and 412]. The window shots also imply that
Bloch has a problem orienting himself in relation to inside and outside, an
impression reinforced by two further sequences. When he walks past the
window of a shop where he has just bought a newspaper he seems perplexed
by the fact that he can look through it and see the spot where he had just been
standing (and where the camera has remained) [shot 46]. A more complex
representation of Bloch‟s disorientation is provided in a sequence which
takes place in the breakfast room of his Viennese hotel. On one level the
scene contributes to the classic Wenders theme of American culture‟s
invasion of the German-speaking world already present in 3 American LPs
and subsequently a primary point of focus in Alice in the Cities. Two
51
This is a moment where the film uses a sequence from the novel but actually increases the
disorientation of the viewer in relation to it. The novel provides access to Bloch‟s memory
which has the effect of making his comment appear slightly less random: „Were there ants in
the teapot? “Ants?” When the boiling water from the kettle hit the bottom of the pot, he
didn‟t see tea leaves but ants, on which he had once poured scalding water‟ (GA 18).
Parallel Texts 135
American tourists at a neighbouring table finish their breakfast and set off to
see the Stefansdom [shot 42]:
MAN [in English]: I want to see the cathedral.

WOMAN [in English]: Oh fuck!
The camera tracks round Bloch as he drinks his coffee and leafs through a
newspaper, casts it aside, and looks towards the window [shot 43]. In the
counter shot, through the window, we see an American car drive away.
Shortly afterwards Bloch appears from the right and walks across the window
and out of the shot to the left. What had been established unequivocally as his
point-of-view has unexpectedly (and seemingly illogically) become a
position from which to observe his actions. That the audience is so
disconcerted by the „disembodied gaze‟ represented by this shot indicates that
it, like the hotel room sequence, provides one of the rare occasions when the
film is made to embody Bloch‟s disorientation rather than simply depict it, a
distinction which will be discussed in further detail below.
The film‟s most explicit example of the difficulties Bloch experiences in
positioning himself unambiguously in relation to his environment is provided
by another of the hotel bedroom sequences. The equivalent scene in the
novel, already discussed above as an example of the potentially self-
alienating nature of an authentic experience of reality, describes Bloch as
having become acutely physically aware:
He thought he was touching himself unpleasantly but realized that his awareness of himself
was so intense that he felt it like a sense of touch all over his body; as though his
consciousness, as though his thoughts, had become palpable, aggressive, abusive toward
himself. Defenseless, incapable of defending himself, he lay there. (GA 81)
A shot of Bloch waking and looking dazed [shot 329] is followed by a pan of
the room which can be assumed to follow his point-of-view as he tries to
orient himself in relation to the objects around him [shot 330]. Finally we see
Bloch split between two panels of a three panel mirror [shot 330] before he
moves to the sink to vomit, an action we see doubled in the mirror. Wenders
has described Bloch as „somebody who suffered a story, and who reacted to
things that happened to him which he didn‟t understand‟. 52 Here his suffering
is made manifest: his nausea can be read, like the violence he uses against the
cashier, as a physical response to a reality which is constantly slipping from
52
Dawson, p.16.
his grasp in such a way that it undermines his sense of himself as a coherent
and unified subject.
3.4 Money as metaphor

Another of the film‟s central concerns is an exploration of the way in which
systems that can be regarded as in some way cognate to language can
determine how an individual perceives reality. It focuses in particular on two
such frameworks: on systems of financial exchange and on genre. References
to money are much increased and decidedly more prominent in the film than
in the novel to the extent that, as Avventi notes: „Communication and
interpersonal interaction are almost always connected to money […].
Intersubjectivity and communication come close [...] to being acts of
consumerism robbed of their human component and therefore also their
original meaning‟.53 This implies a kind of general (anti-capitalist) critique of
the way in which various kinds of human exchange have become tainted by
association with financial transactions. It is this critique which would seem to
be at stake in a sequence found only in the film. The cashier narrates to Bloch
a recurring dream in which the dress she is wearing made of banknotes
catches fire. In a violent finale, the dream normally ends with the
transformation into a flame-thrower of the fire-extinguisher with which a
friend attempts to save her. The tax official also provides in both novel and
film an example of the way in which an individual‟s perceptions can be
perverted when reality can be perceived only as it is mapped on to a financial
matrix. In a speech taken over in truncated form in the film he explains how
his job determines the way he experiences his environment:
The tax official explained that whenever he saw an item, say a washing machine, he always
asked the price immediately, and then when he saw the item again, say a washing machine
of the same make, he would recognize it not by its external features, that is, a washing
machine by the knobs which regulated the wash cycle, but by what the item, say a washing
machine, had cost when he first saw it, that is, by its price. The price, of course, he
remembered precisely, and that way he could recognize almost any item. (GA 59f.)
The fact that the tax official regards the stone Bloch has found as being
without value indicates the extent to which his systematisation of reality
leaves him blind to much of the world around him.
The tax official‟s peculiar perspective can, however, be understood in
another way as it also serves to expose the workings of language, with money
53
Carlo Avventi, Mit den Augen des richtigen Wortes: Wahrnehmung und Kommunikation im
Werk Wim Wenders und Peter Handkes (Remscheid: Gardez, 2004), p.117.
Parallel Texts 137
here becoming a metaphor for linguistic exchange. Prices come to stand for
the objects they designate, inserting themselves between reality and the
viewing subject who perceives only signifiers and not what is signified. As
has been seen, the novel‟s Bloch experiences similar problems with words as
they parade themselves before and thus conceal the objects they name: „The
chair, the clothes hangers, the key […] he had seen the things as though they
were, at the same time, advertisements for themselves‟ (GA 58).
Brunette has pointed to the fact that Bloch‟s experience here can be taken
to highlight a fundamental distinction between novel and film:
The film can only show the objects directly, of course, and not how they are immediately
followed in Bloch‟s mind by the words which stand for them. In the novel, on the other
hand, only the words are shown, even before the fact of the words following is mentioned.
As the reader realizes that all he sees is the abstracted, arbitrary word and not the thing, he
suddenly perceives the novel as participating in and actualizing Bloch‟s thought process in a
self-reflexive or metalinguistic way that is unique to the printed page. 54
Clearly, the film, communicating as it does through image, sound, and music
as well as the spoken word, does not embody Bloch‟s linguistic alienation in
the same way as the novel which communicates (almost) only through the
written word. The consequences of the film‟s synthesis of communicative
modes for its formulation of Bloch‟s dilemma, as well as the question of
whether it in fact embodies his peculiar perspective in a different fashion, are
issues which will be returned to below. Remaining with the prominence
assigned to money in the film, it is worth noting here that this motif allows it
to play with signs and signifiers, reality and referentiality, incorporating some
of the novel‟s linguistic concerns in a manner made possible by and
potentially more appropriate to the filmic medium. As the tax official makes
clear, money is itself a kind of language through which reality can be
understood, ordered, and communicated. In the film, the tokens of financial
exchange, the coins and notes which are only arbitrary signifiers of value,
draw attention to themselves in the same way as words in the novel as they
are put into juke boxes and vending machines, used to operate lifts, to pay for
cinema tickets or hotel bills, or simply fiddled and played with by Bloch
[shot 53, see also shots 123, 222 and 328]. More than this, the
communicative power of money is accentuated by the fact that it is
particularly U.S. coins and notes which recur. These do not just signify a
monetary value or stand in for the things they can purchase. In the film they
denote American culture.
54
Brunette, p.195.
3.5 Americanisation, the camera-I, and cinematic self-reflexivity

The coins, as well as a number of other references to the United States, add a
dimension to the film only latently present in Handke‟s text: the issue of the
Americanisation of German society in general, and the postwar generation of
Germans in particular. This is a theme already present in 3 American LPs and
it will become prominent in the films to follow where it is addressed, as it is
here, in ambiguous fashion. 55 Like Wenders‟s later heroes, Bloch takes
pleasure in and comfort from listening to Anglo-American music and a
fetishistic delight in the film‟s various juke-boxes and the discs they contain
[shots 155-157]. Playing records seems to provide him, like Philip in Alice in
the Cities or Bruno and Robert in Kings of the Road, with a way of giving
expression to emotional states which he cannot communicate directly,
indicating the potentially liberating effects of American culture.
Wenders has noted that the songs represent „a trip into the early Sixties‟
and as such they can also be understood as relating to Bloch‟s memories.56
Equally, though, they can serve as a link to the filmmaker‟s own youth, for
the inclusion of American music introduces the possibility of autobiography.
As is generally acknowledged, the occurrence of Anglo-American rock in
Wenders‟s early films often signals an autobiographical moment –
paradigmatically, perhaps, in the scene in the Wupperthal ice café in Alice in
the Cities in which the little boy sways obsessively to Canned Heat‟s On the
Road Again. A further autobiographical allusion is provided by a thinly
veiled reference to Silver City Revisited. Just before murdering the cashier,
Bloch examines a postcard she has received depicting a bridge in St Louis.
He holds it up to the Venetian blind covering her window and looks out [shot
115], withdrawing the card as a plane lands on the runway. This echoes not
only the use of postcard images in Silver City Revisited in general, but in
particular the image of the Swissair plane. Moreover, the view through the
blinds is doubly established as his point-of-view [in shots 114 and 116].
Bloch‟s position here is analogous to the window situation perspectives
which predominate in Silver City Revisited, reminding us that The
Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty is still located within the tradition of
subjective, sensibilist filmmaking. Given this, it seems entirely appropriate
that in a scene shortly after this Wenders should make his cameo appearance
55
As this will become one of the central themes of Handke‟s Short Letter, Long Farewell, it
might provide evidence, like the novel‟s referencing of the road movie, that Wenders‟s film
version of The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty exerted an influence on Handke‟s
subsequent literary practice.
56
Rayns, „Forms of Address‟, p.6.
Parallel Texts 139
as a passer-by – sporting his trademark braces – at the station in Vienna [shot

130]. In this context the question in the same sequence of an impatient
Frenchman as to whether his companion‟s stamped metal label is going to
become a „novel‟ [shot 128], and Bloch‟s knowing smile in response [shot
129], might be read as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the text on which the
film is so closely based (and, perhaps, even the inevitable and laborious
process of translation or recomposition from page to screen).
Unlike its references to music, the film‟s other allusions to the United
States tend to be associated with disorientation and disturbance, as in the
story Bloch tells to the girl he meets in the bar towards the beginning of the
film about its landlord who had been a former national football player: „He
went to America for an unofficial league team. A year later he went missing,
he just disappeared. His wife employed a famous detective bureau, but they
couldn‟t find him, only that he‟d lived in a trailer in Tucson, Arizona‟ [shot
49, also in the novel, GA 8]. The conversation with the cashier which
precedes the murder also contains references to the United States. While
Bloch examines her postcard she tells him: „That‟s from Bill, from St. Louis.
I collect postcards. Once he gave me an American quarter. By mistake I put it
in a cigarette machine and it never came out. In Frankfurt‟ [shots 113-15].
Whether it is because her experience overlaps disconcertingly with his own
(earlier in the film the girl from the bar had used one of Bloch‟s quarters to
start the lift), or whether it is just the reference to America that unsettles
Bloch, he continues to fiddle with the postcard, dropping it only when he
returns to the bed where he strangles the cashier, suggesting that it somehow
contributes to his recourse to violence. 57
Intertextual references to specific films in The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the
Penalty are to American movies. Bloch goes to see Howard Hawks‟s Red
Line 7000 (1965), Don Siegal‟s Madigan (1968), and The Tremor of Forgery
(not in fact a film but a novel by Patricia Highsmith of 1969).58 As well as
contributing to the theme of the American influence on German society, these
allusions form part of the film‟s self-reflexive dimension. For Wenders has,
in part, translated Handke‟s concern with language in the novel into a self-
57
Klingmann argues that „it is precisely the glance out of the window, the aeroplane motif, and
Bloch‟s interest in the postcard from Bill from Ohio that point symbolically to his resistance
to Gloria‟s attempt to “bind” him‟ (p.169) an attempt which is represented most obviously
by the cord she places around his neck before he strangles her.
58
Wenders would, of course, go on to adapt Highsmith‟s Ripley’s Game to the screen as The
American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund, 1977). Highsmith‟s work is another passion
the filmmaker shares with Handke.
conscious engagement with the communicative possibilities embodied by

film. While cinema plays an important but ambiguous role in both novel and
film, it is more prominent in the latter, reflecting Wenders‟s particular
concern with the medium in which he works. 59 In both versions, as Avventi
has noted, Bloch attempts to escape „the irritations of an overpowering
external world in the cinema‟.60 This suggests that both Handke‟s and
Wenders‟s Bloch would like to understand the reality of film as offering a
less troubling alternative to a real world in which they struggle to orient
themselves. Thus, in the novel, after a perplexing encounter with an
acquaintance whose trip to referee a football match he has been unable to
take seriously, Bloch feels more comfortable when he can realign himself
with an apparently more stable cinematic reality:
The feeling of pretense, of playing around – this business with the referee‟s whistle in the
duffelbag, thought Bloch – went away only when, in the movie, a comic snitched a trumpet
from a junk shop and started tooting on it in a perfectly natural way; all this was so casual
that it almost seemed unintentional, and Bloch realized that the trumpet and all other objects
were stark and unequivocal. Bloch relaxed. (GA 14f.)
However, the novel problematises this separating off of a cinematic reality

from the reality to which it refers by juxtaposing the two, and the film
reproduces the same image (if not the same confusion of sound): „Next to the
movie screen he noticed the illuminated dial of an electric clock. Half-way
through the movie he heard a bell; for a long time he couldn‟t decide whether
the ringing was in the film or in the belfry outside near the Naschmarkt‟ (GA
4) [shot 24].
On other occasions, Wenders‟s Bloch seems able to use the experience of
film not to disconnect himself from but to position himself in relation to his
environment. Twice he makes reference to film while interacting with others,
suggesting that cinema can help him order his reality in a way that makes its
communication possible. That is, it can promote intersubjectivity (although it
should be noted that on neither occasion does his attempt at interaction prove
particularly successful). In his second encounter with the cashier, Bloch tries
to draw her into conversation by relating the film he is about to watch to one
he has seen already (unfortunately she has seen neither) [shots 65-69], and
later he tells the chambermaid at the village inn about a movie in which a
59
Kanzog notes that the fact that the cashiers name in the film is changed from Gerda to Gloria
suggests a double reference p.167. One is to the fact that „Gloria‟ was a popular name for
cinemas in Germany. The other is to Van Morrison‟s „Gloria‟ which is played in the film.
60
Avventi, p.133.
Parallel Texts 141
thief is trapped between double doors before demonstrating the possibility of

such entrapment [shot 252]. Particularly the second of these examples
implies the possibility of using the encounter with cinema to communicate
something about one‟s experience of reality. 61
3.6 Film grammar: genre

Particularly significant both for the film‟s self-reflexivity and for its concern
with systematised modes of perception is its foregrounding of the issue of its
own genre status and the interpretative expectations of its audience. As we
have seen, in the 1968 essay „Theatre and Film‟, Handke had pointed to the
fact that cinema has become caught up in the same predicament he had
earlier diagnosed for literature: in the course of film history an „order of
images‟ has been established, a „film syntax‟ which has turned „innocent‟
images into mediated Einstellungen (shots/attitudes).62 In the same year, he
proposed a solution to this problem which resembles the one he found for his
own literary practice: „A film is conceivable, a genre film accepted by the
public as artificial, whose method consists precisely in the fact that it plays
with people‟s genre-conditioned viewing habits‟.63 In an article on Wenders‟s
early films, Michael Covino cites the director‟s contention that „film
language is always political: it is either exploitation or it isn‟t exploitation …
not only the story that is told, but the way it is told‟, before going on to claim
that what Wenders is talking about here is „the ability of films to change the
way we look at the world by changing the way we look at films, by calling
into question in the film itself the already codified grammars of other films‟. 64
This is particularly relevant to The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty which
61
Only the second of these two references to film is found in the novel and there Bloch‟s
mention of „a movie where a hotel thief got caught between such double doors‟ (GA 44) is
not related directly to the reality of his surroundings in the same way. However, on several
occasions the novel‟s Bloch refers to cinema to give expression to an experience of reality
which is coloured by the paranoia which dogs him after the murder. On entering a phone
booth he thinks: „“I make a good target.” Once in a movie he had heard somebody standing
by a window at night say that‟ (GA 28); while imagining an escape route across some fields:
„Bloch stopped short. “If it‟s a question of murder, your mind jumps from one thing to
another,” he had heard somebody say in a movie‟ (GA 100f.); when he suffers from a
distortion of vision: „“Like when somebody in a movie looks through a telescope,” he
thought‟ (GA 102).
62
Peter Handke, „Theater und Film: Das Elend des Vergleichens‟ (1968), in Prosa, pp.314-26
(p.318). See also pp.88f. above.
63
Peter Handke, „Probleme werden im Film zu einem Genre‟ (1968), in Prosa, pp.327-31
(p.330).
64
Covino, p.17 and p.18.
reads not only as Wenders‟s attempt to construct a „political‟ film (according

to his own anti-ideological definition of the term), but also as a response to
Handke‟s proposal for revitalising cinema. As the writer had done in his
novel, Wenders plays with the requirements of the murder mystery/thriller
format, failing to fulfil genre expectations and thus making the viewer aware
of the extent to which she is inclined to read film within pre-defined
interpretative frameworks.65
As Wenders himself has pointed out, this play with genre is also
connected with the film‟s exploration of the influence of American culture:
I see The Goalie as a completely schizoid film […]. Which was appropriate, really, because
that‟s the situation of the main character, Bloch. It was my own situation, too […]. I realised
while I was shooting The Goalie that I wasn‟t an American director; that although I loved
the American cinema‟s way of showing things, I wasn‟t able to recreate it, because I had a
different grammar in my mind.66
What Wenders calls a „different grammar‟ can be taken to refer to the

disruption of the normal processes of suspense and resolution an audience
might expect from a thriller in the Hollywood tradition. One of the ways in
which the film confounds expectations is that, like the novel, it too fails to
resolve the situation it sets up. Bloch is never caught – although the headlines
of the newspapers he reads imply ever more insistently that the forces of
justice will catch up with him. More significantly, the clues the police are
shown to be following might lead to Bloch but they offer no indication of
how the issue of his motivation for the murder might be resolved. The film
introduces the motif of the American coins which will give him away earlier
than the novel, offering a close-up of them on the cashier‟s breakfast table
[shot 120], and in this way, according to Kanzog, it „reinforces [...] the
65
Covino refers to the film as „ostensibly, a murder thriller‟ but points out that „the thriller,
which we are prepared for early on, simply falls by the wayside‟, p.10. It has also been
designated a „mystery thriller‟ (Tony Rayns, „Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The
Goalkeeper‟s Fear of the Penalty)‟, Monthly Film Bulletin, 42.503 (1975), 255) and an
„existential thriller‟ (Derek Elley, „The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty‟, Films and
Filming, 22.5 (1976), 36-37, p.36). Wenders himself has claimed that the film, and indeed
the novel, are influenced by Hitchcock: „The Goalkeeper owes a lot to Hitchcock, more than
any of my other films. Hitchcock was an inspiration behind Handke‟s book too. For the shot
where Bloch wakes up and sees his jacket hanging on a chair, I used the same technique as
Hitchcock in the famous tower shot in Vertigo: the camera rolls forward and simultaneously
zooms backwards. As for the old lady who watches Bloch in the bus, she‟s straight out of
The Lady Vanishes‟. Wim Wenders, „Le Souffle de l‟ange‟, in Wenders, On Film: Essays
and Conversations (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp.248-73 (pp.251f.).
66
Dawson, p.9.
Parallel Texts 143
detective story template of the text‟. 67 Covino too remarks of the images of
coins that they make us „sit up straighter, for in the conventions of the thriller
they foretell [Bloch‟s] doom‟ but he also notes that „it is a doom that never
arrives. The framework of the thriller […] here dissolves into nothing‟. 68 One
way in which the thriller‟s collapse is reinforced is by allowing the coins to
share their status with a number of other objects offered up as clues whose
significance it is difficult to assess. As in many thrillers, an ominous musical
motif (provided by the film‟s composer Jürgen Knieper) recurs to draw the
viewer‟s attention to a detail of action or setting (often combined with a
close-up, „a favoured method‟, as Kanzog notes, „of stressing the
semiological nature of objects‟69). So, for instance, in a sequence that takes
place in the morning after Bloch has slept with the cashier, we are shown the
wind blowing the curtain through the open shutter of the window and Bloch‟s
jacket over a chair followed by a fade-out [shot 86], a shelf with a plant and
TV set [shot 87], and finally the curtains again with a plant pot in front of
them [shot 88]. The difference from the genre practice normally associated
with the thriller or the murder mystery here is that these objects seem
arbitrary and the promise of significance implied by the fact that they are
singled out is never fulfilled.
Early on in the film there is an extended sequence in which its referencing
of the settings, characters, and conventions of the thriller is at its most
obvious.70 Bloch arrives at the reception of the seedy hotel at which he is
staying in Vienna and knocks on the desk until the dishevelled receptionist
appears and hands him his key. That Bloch replies „no‟ to the receptionist‟s
question „You want something?‟ before immediately asking for a newspaper
is another example of his inability to follow normal conversational
conventions [shot 37]. More significant in this context, though, is the
receptionist‟s response – „I could give you a crime story‟ – and the fact that
as he disappears behind a curtain the camera focuses on a box with bread
67
Kanzog, p.163.
68
Covino, p.11.
69
Kanzog, p.162.
70
The equivalent sequence from the novel focuses on Bloch‟s obsession with detail and his
idiosyncratic interpretation of his environment: „the desk clerk came out of the checkroom.
Bloch immediately asked him for a newspaper and at the same time looked through the open
door into the checkroom, where the clerk had evidently been napping on a chair he‟d taken
from the lobby. The clerk closed the door, so that all Bloch could see was a small stepladder
with a soup bowl on it, and said nothing until he was behind the desk. But Bloch had
understood even the closing of the door as a rebuff and walked upstairs to his room‟ (GA
11).
rolls spilling onto the floor [shot 38], offering them up as objects of
significance – which, of course, they will prove not to be. When the
receptionist reappears with a handful of paperbacks, the camera moves to his
face which registers surprise [shot 38], before shifting to a shot of Bloch
where we don‟t expect him to be, already turning the corner of the stairs
leading away from the reception [shot 39]. On the landing he almost bumps
into a blond woman emerging from a room from which an American voice
can be heard. She pulls her coat around her as she makes eye contact with
Bloch who slips off his shoes and enters his room [shot 40]. The highlighting
of a possible clue, the mention of the crime stories, the American voice-off,
the encounter with the mystery blond, as well as Bloch‟s uncommunicative
response to the receptionist taken together imply that the protagonist could be
read as a figure who shares – and is possibly driven to violence by – the
existential loneliness of the film noir gangster. At the same time, however,
the film plays with these thriller staples and the audience‟s expectation of
them – neither the rolls, nor the American, nor the blond will play any further
significant part in the film – and this casts doubt on the possibility of using
the film noir reference as a starting point for understanding Bloch‟s actions.
The play with genre encourages the viewer to become conscious of the
framework of expectations within which she views the film and attentive to
the interpretative strategies she brings to bear in the attempt to extract
meaning from it.71 Writing on the novel, Patrick O‟Neill has argued that „the
central narrative strategy of Tormann […] is precisely to place the reader
[…] in the position of Bloch. Bloch‟s multiple confusions on the level of
story are reflected in the multiple possibilities for confusion that are put in
the way of the reader on the level of discourse‟. 72 It can also be claimed that
using a variety of strategies the film similarly acts to frustrate the attempts of
the viewer to piece together the significance of its images, and that it too
therefore places its audience in a position which resembles that of the
protagonist as he struggles to make sense of his environment. Yet these
dislocations are certainly less comprehensive than those experienced by
Handke‟s protagonist; put simply, in adapting Handke‟s novel, Wenders has
generally chosen genre, and its associated narrative causalities, as the object
of de-construction rather than cinematic language itself. It is this, perhaps,
71
Brunette remarks of the film‟s self-reflexivity that it „challenges us at regular intervals
throughout to question the nature of the process we are engaged in, to remember that this
work takes its place in a tradition of other films which have conditioned us to see reality and
its filmed image in certain specific but arbitrary ways‟, p.199.
72
O‟Neill, pp.284f.
Parallel Texts 145
which has led some commentators to see the film‟s defamiliarisations as less
fundamental (and less urgent) than those of the novel. It could, perhaps, be
argued that in this film the recomposition is enacted, principally but not
exclusively, on the level of narrative and narrative expectations. It is,
perhaps, in its manipulation of modes of audience reception that Wenders‟s
adaptation of The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty is at its most radical. We
shall return to this issue below.
It is certainly the case, however, that as the film progresses the viewer
comes to associate Knieper‟s ominous music less with a signalling of the
significance of objects or actions and more with the state of Bloch‟s mind.
His anxiety is communicasted by analogy, for example through non-diegetic
music, and is not presented as a crisis of cinematic language itself. Knieper‟s
music intimates moments where he feels threatened or merely surprised by
his environment.73 The „suspense‟ motif is heard, for instance, when he drops
a playing card and on leaning down to pick it up is startled by the particularly
unmenacing figure of the landlady‟s four-year old daughter under the table.
That is, the musical motif can be seen to flag up moments which are of
subjective significance to the protagonist but, contrary to expectation, that
significance is not always explained to the audience. The music thus
contributes to the interpretative uncertainty of the viewer. The film also
utilises to the same end the heightened sensitivity to detail required of the
thriller‟s audience searching for the clues to a crime; for instance in the
classic genre scene in which Bloch wipes his finger prints from the objects he
has touched in the cashier‟s flat and picks up all but one of the coins he has
left on the table before leaving the scene of the murder [shot 120]. 74 Such
scenes allow the audience to experience something of Bloch‟s
hypersensitivity to his environment and, because it is not allowed the
satisfaction of piecing together the solution to the puzzle of his crime, is also
given an inkling of his frustration at the lack of coherent meaning in the
world he encounters.
There are other ways too in which the film undermines the audience‟s
expectations that it will be able to create meaning from its images. Wenders
73
The fact that the signifying power of music is not questioned in the film in the way that the
signifying power of language is in the novel will be considered in more detail below.
74
With reference to literature, Kanzog sees this heightened attention to detail on the part of the
reader as a characteristic consequence of „the so-called phenomenological narration‟: „the
writer expects from his readers a different kind of attitude to the material: a more precise
feeling for time, a more pronounced attention to detail and thus a greater degree of
awareness‟, p.157.
has commented that „the film‟s narrative style, the way one take follows
another, is a lot like the book‟.75 Its tendency to let one image follow the next
without necessarily allowing clear causal links to emerge between them has
been noted by several commentators. In an early review of the film, Ulrike
Czybulka, for instance, describes The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty as a
film „that strings together images (and words) as if they were things that had
nothing to do with one another – without the usual indication of motive,
without an interpretive clue for the audience whose tolerance threshold is
tested to the limit‟.76 An example of this piling up of apparently unconnected
images might be the sequence which shows Bloch playing a one-arm-bandit,
then, in what would become a trademark Wenders shot, at a photo booth
picking up pictures of himself and laughing, and then emerging from the
back of the shot to be accosted by two men who demand money and finally
assault him [shots 59-61]. Czybulka insists that such sequences are
essentially meaningless and therefore rejected by the viewer: „Sequences of
images in which each image so obviously denies responsibility for the next
have given up on their ability to communicate. They have renounced any
characteristic quality, have relativised and made interchangeable every image
to such an extent that the audience finally has no questions left to ask of the
film‟.77 One could argue that it is precisely because such sequences are
inserted between others where a clearer causality and a more obvious
narrative thrust are present, and because they work within the thriller
framework where unusual details are often invested with significance, that
the viewer is prepared to struggle to extract a meaning from them. Covino,
however, indicates two further strategies by which the film frustrates the
viewer‟s search for coherence and signals their consequence:
The effect of cutting short those scenes that we expect to be significant, and arranging them
without any particular emphasis, is to confuse our normal sense of emotional involvement
while at the same time intensifying our perceptions of transition shots that would normally
pass over us, so that an empty village square can actually set us on edge. Bloch‟s
disconnection, his dread […] becomes our own.78
The implication here is that a montage technique which juxtaposes causally

logical sequences with others that undermine their logic and the film‟s refusal
75
Rayns, „Forms of Address‟, p.6.
76
Ulrike Czybulka, „Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter‟, Jugend Film Fernsehen, 16.4
(1972), 32.
77
Ibid.
78
Covino, p.11.
Parallel Texts 147
to privilege potentially significant scenes over those which have no obvious

meaning for Bloch‟s story, represent two strategies by means of which the
film turns the protagonist‟s disorientation into a first-hand experience for its
audience.
Within the context of this notion of a dislocation shared by the
protagonist and the reader or viewer, more than one critic has pointed to the
correlation between the film‟s exploration of genre and the novel‟s
investigation of language referred to above. Jeffrey M. Peck suggests
something of the nature of this relationship when he notes:
Both the text and Wenders‟s film record the disintegration of Joseph Bloch‟s existence by
presenting the dilemma of the respective mediums when the bond of representation, which
holds man and his understanding of the world together, no longer offers a solid and secure
context of reference and meaning.79
Brunette‟s more direct claim that it is through „the manipulation of genre

convention [...] that Wenders is ultimately able to approximate the verbal
disturbances of the novel‟ is right to the extent that the film‟s viewers are at
least potentially as unsettled by its refusal to conform to genre type as readers
are by the novel‟s semiotic slippage.80 However, two important distinctions
can be made here.
First, the novel, with its focus on the way in which Bloch‟s perception of
reality is mediated through language, becomes caught up in the same
dilemmas as its protagonist precisely because, as a written text, it has no real
way of exploring that relationship other than through words. At one point, as
already mentioned, the novel attempts to reproduce Bloch‟s perceptions at a
moment when language has broken down by introducing simple pictograms.
Not only does the restricted amount of information offered imply the
conceptual limitations of perception without language, the use of the
pictograms also flags up the obvious: that without words there can be only
the most limited communication between text and reader. To the extent that
the film also posits linguistic slippage as a cause of Bloch‟s dilemma, it
observes rather than shares it precisely because it communicates not simply
via language, but also through sounds and images and thus has the potential
to remain outside of the protagonist‟s linguistic predicament.
Second, because in the novel reality has become text – words insert
themselves in front of objects, taking their place, or the objects themselves
79
Jeffrey M. Peck, „The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick: Words and Interpretation‟, Kino
German Film, 12 (1983), 44-45 (p.44).
80
Brunette, p.190.
insist on being read as metaphors or messages – Bloch‟s reality and the

textual reality experienced by the reader are similar. That is, it is the novel‟s
medium – i.e. language – that disorients both the protagonist and the reader
of Handke‟s text. As O‟Neill has pointed out the situation of the one mirrors
that of the other:
in the literary game that is being played here, not only is the reader cast in the role of Bloch
as a wanderer in an informational wilderness vainly looking for reliable signposts. Bloch
himself, as a completely unreliable reader of the world he inhabits, is also a parodic mirror
of the real reader‟s attempted sense-making activity.81
In the film, for all his confusion, there is apparently no such layer of
mediation between Bloch and material reality, and this distinguishes him
from the viewer for whom filmic reality is mediated by the camera.
Moreover, the „cinematic disturbance‟ experienced by the film‟s audience is
not shared by Bloch, the causes of whose crisis are largely unrelated to the
filmic medium in which it is depicted.
The consequence of these distinctions is that, while the film through its
genre play offers the viewer a sense of disorientation which parallels that
experienced by Bloch, it nevertheless for the most part describes his dilemma
rather than directly embodying it as the novel does. In other words, the
disorientation is predominantly of a secondary rather than primary nature,
and the recomposition of film consequently less fundamental than in Silver
City Revisited and 3 American LPs. There are, however, a number of
significant exceptions to this rule and these can be illuminated via an
investigation of point-of-view in both novel and film.
3.7 Points-of-view
The different ways in which the reader or viewer experiences Bloch‟s
dilemma are to some large extent determined by the novel‟s narrative
standpoint and the positioning of the camera in the film. Both narrator and
camera are omniscient, third-person instances, but their relationship to Bloch
is different. Klingmann has argued that the presence of the narrator allows
the text to include an objective corrective to Bloch‟s subjective distortions:
As is made clear in the first two sentences of the story, it is part of the basic narrative
structure of the text that the narrative medium provides the reader throughout with limited
insights into Bloch‟s subjective psychological and emotional state, but at the same time
relativises it by means of authoritative, objective statements, thus providing the reader, in all
81
O‟Neill, p.292.
Parallel Texts 149
the shifting between various levels of abstraction and theme, a consistent point from which
to evaluate the text.82
It is the case, however, that intimations of alternatives to Bloch‟s perspective

diminish as the text progresses and it is fairer to say that the reader
experiences the narrator through most of the novel as „markedly
inconspicuous‟, as withdrawing „almost completely into the disturbed
perspective of the central character, allowing the story to “tell itself” as
experienced by Bloch‟.83 As a consequence the novel‟s reality is, to a large
extent, Bloch‟s. We read his disturbance via its consequences for his
perception of reality, but conversely what we know of that reality comes to us
filtered through his unstable consciousness and we are therefore generally
almost as confused as he is.
Covino has argued that the position of the camera is also essentially
subjective:
The film is really about anxiety, and through a remarkably simple series of static shots that
make us identify with Bloch‟s passive point-of-view, alternations of long shots and
claustrophobic close-ups that serve to quickly involve and detach us […] Wenders manages
to induce in us a state of anxiety similar to that of Bloch.84
Tony Rayns is, though, perhaps closer to the mark when he refers to „the
film‟s central ambivalence‟:
its extraordinarily disconcerting balance between a subjective mode (almost every shot in
the film – the exceptions are striking – either shows Bloch or shares his field of vision) and
an objective mode (the Hawksian compositions, the steely precision of the images in
general, the absence of psychological explications).85
However, the film‟s „ambivalence‟ is not only a consequence of the fact that
Wenders has been unwilling to provide the audience with the kind of access
to Bloch‟s consciousness which would help explain his actions and reactions
– no commentary, spoken or written, of the kind he was later to use in Wrong
Move, for instance.86 It is also the fact – contrary to Rayns‟s claim – that the
82
Klingmann, p.165.
83
O‟Neill, p.284.
84
Covino, p.10.
85
Rayns, „Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter‟, p.255.
86
This is a decision on which Wenders has commented explicitly: „I completely rejected any
idea of any psychological explanation of anything. In a way, that was already a very
important break from the American cinema. In fact, that was one of the conflicts in every
frame: whether or not to explain something. That was why I so much appreciated Ozu, when
film has shifted the novel‟s emphasis in its presentation of Bloch to show him
from without as well as within. To quantify this statistically, the film presents
us with Bloch‟s own point-of-view in around ten percent of its shots,87 which
represents a substantial shift of perspective from that in the novel. Point-of-
view analysis in fact makes evident the extent to which Wenders and his
cameraman have found economical equivalents for Handke‟s descriptions of
Bloch‟s state of mind and his linguistic predicament, and in so doing have
estranged the problems experienced by the novel‟s protagonist at the remove
of a translation from one medium to another.
It is also the case that point-of-view is not completely stable in the film
and undergoes a number of shifts. During the opening scene the camera
captures the match and the fracas over the goal from an elevated position on
the sideline, almost adopting the perspective of an adjudicating line judge. It
is only with Bloch‟s separation from his team that there is the first, tentative
suggestion that the camera is adopting his point-of-view. The shot of a tram
passing the north-west façade of the Wittgenstein House on the
Kundmanngasse in Vienna [shot 20] is followed by what, at least
retrospectively, may be interpreted as the first time the camera occupies
Bloch‟s position [shot 21]. We see a cinema which, the montage appears to
imply, has magically materialised opposite the house built by the great
Austrian philosopher (see footnote 39). The conjunction of philosophy,
language and cinema is intimated (at least for the observant spectator!).
This first point-of-view shot is paradigmatic, insofar as the shot
establishing it as the protagonist‟s perspective is retrospective – Bloch is seen
leaning against the counter of a snack bar, eating and looking out [shot 22].
I first saw his films, after The Goalie. I saw that, in a way, I was right: that refusing to
explain things was right and that you could explain them well enough by just showing
them‟, Dawson, p.10.
87
There are 48: 21, 24, 28, 34, 44, 53, 72, 74, 76, 80, 90, 92, 93, 115, 118, 128, 130, 135, 149,
156, 158, 178, 180, 182, 208, 212, 214, 227, 236, 242, 248, 250, 256, 262, 275, 288, 301,
303, 308, 312, 324, 325, 332, 408, 415, 422, 426, 428. As can readily be seen from this list,
these point-of-view shots are fairly evenly distributed across the film, although there are
none in the opening and closing scenes, and none in the lengthy episode at the Windisch-
Minihof cinema and subsequent brawl. To this list could also be added those shots which are
very close to being from Bloch‟s point-of-view as „over-the-shoulder‟ point-of-view shots.
These include: 38, 85, 168, 197, 200, 202, 206, 220, 240, 259, 312, 328, 330, 384, 397, 406,
411. Finally, and for comparative purposes, it is worth noting that there are, of course, also
shots from the point-of-view of other characters, including sequences of near-conventional
shot-counter shot. These include shots from the perspective of Gloria (shot 33), the hotel
receptionist (shot 39), the woman who explains the route to Hertha‟s inn (shot 184) and the
waitress (shot 241).
Parallel Texts 151
This shot is followed by two others, in quick succession, which can also be
read as representing Bloch‟s gaze – the (dubbed) Western in the cinema with
the digital clock alongside the screen [shot 24] and the snatch of football on
the portable television in the hotel lobby [shot 28]. In the latter case the
gentle tracking back of the camera mimics his turning away from the
reception desk to go to his room at the end of the previous shot [shot 27].
It is this sequence in the Viennese hotel which provides the first instances
of the ambiguous or contradictory points-of-view which recur in the film.
Bloch‟s exchange with the receptionist is followed by a close-up which
initially appears to be from Bloch‟s point-of-view [shot 38]: the receptionist
tucks in his shirt, walks out of the shot and we see the box of bread rolls that
has spilled across the floor in the backroom – a view of a clue that is not a
clue, complete with ominous music. As the man exits, Bloch enters the frame
from the right, and then walks out of the frame to the left to go to his room.
What appeared to be his point-of-view turns out to be outside him. This
splitting, which in its most extreme manifestations – the shots discussed
above of Bloch walking past the window of the hotel breakfast room [shot
44] and the shot of him on his bed from above [shots 411] – amounts to a
cinematographic out-of-body experience, constitutes an instability of gaze,
reference, and perspective which inevitably disorients, or at least
momentarily confuses, the viewer.
This simple but startling cinematographic „sleight of hand‟ is used
sparingly in the film. Indeed there is only one further episode in which it is
applied with comparable effect. At one point Bloch visits the castle owned by
the family of Alfons, suitor of the border inn‟s landlady. 88 He is given a tour
of the public rooms by a steward who reads the story of a man who went mad
because „the darkness in the fir forests [...] had caused him to take leave of
his senses‟ [shot 323] (GA 75). Bloch is suddenly left alone at this point and
looks around the room. In the following shot, already established as his point-
of-view, we see a sofa draped in a blue cloth. After a few seconds Bloch
enters the frame from the right and the camera pans to the left to follow him
to the window, which he then opens. Less dramatic than the example in the
hotel breakfast room, because his attention has not been drawn to the sofa by
any action (as was the case with the car driving away in shots 43 and 44), the
effect is nevertheless essentially the same.
88
A reference to Kafka here seems unmistakable. Brown, who identifies a number of literary
allusions to Kafka and others in the text, suggests that the protagonist‟s name is an amalgam
of that of two characters from The Trial (Der Proceß, 1925), Josef K. and Kaufmann Bloch,
p.288.
Although these are the only examples of this striking effect, there are
other ambiguous perspectives which de-stabilise the integrity of the point-of-
view. To cite an example discussed above in another context: playing
patience in Hertha‟s inn, Bloch drops a card and, bending down to pick it up,
notices her little daughter sitting quietly under the table smoothing out a
plaster on her knee. In shot 312 we see the girl from his perspective but in
shot 314, when we see her again from exactly the same angle, he has already
collected the card and returned to his game. The point-of-view has taken on a
life of its own independent of the gaze which established it; this is confirmed
acoustically as cards can be heard falling on the table above when the child
appears for the second time. It is not only the camera which complicates the
interpretation of this scene. Accompanied by Knieper‟s ominous motif, the
image might be taken to suggest a connection between the death of the mute
schoolboy and Bloch, who is seen face-to-face here with another vulnerable
child, but this is, of course, a red-herring as the boy turns out to have died of
natural causes. It is the conjunction of disembodied point-of-view and non-
diegetic, indeed incongruous, musical accompaniment which generates the
sense of dislocation and the uncanny that characterise this scene. Here it is
the audience which is disorientated and misled rather than Bloch himself.
Once again it is audience reception which is the primary focus of Wenders‟s
de-familiarisation.
These are moments when the film seems to become infected by Bloch‟s
unease and take on a kind of „deranged quality‟. On another occasion it
seems to embody his confusion when it inserts an apparently random shot – a
close-up of a cup (which may remind one of the iconic coffee cup in
Godard‟s Two or Three Things I Know About Her [shot 417]) – into an
otherwise coherent sequence depicting Bloch leaving the inn [shot 416] and
walking along the road outside [shot 418].
Across the film it is, frequently, not only the camera which establishes a
mobile, unstable perspective. During the bus journey from Vienna to the
border town the soundtrack is layered in a particularly rich manner. As Bloch
reclines in his seat at dusk [shot 163], following the rest stop with the
jukebox, he listens, as we have seen, to The Tokens‟ „The Lion Sleeps
Tonight‟ on his mini transistor radio. Although the music is no more audible
to his fellow-travellers than Knieper‟s non-diegetic music on the soundtrack,
it dominates the acoustic space in this scene, suggesting that the viewer has
been displaced into the mind, or at least the ear, of the protagonist. At the
same time the viewer is also reminded, in the lingering shots of two
mechanical devices for sound reproduction in this episode (the radio and
jukebox), of cinema‟s inherited media. The slightly disconcerting acoustic
Parallel Texts 153
shift, which might suggest a more comprehensive recomposition of film, is

not repeated for the viewer, although unexpected sounds frequently disorient
or distract Bloch himself: the aircraft noise which threatens to drown out the
caretaker‟s discourse on the linguistically handicapped local children, for
instance [shots 229-234] – coupled with the man‟s halting, breathless
delivery this sound adds a surreal, faintly comic touch as it threatens to
undermine his own comprehensibility.
But such disorienting moments are the exception rather than the rule, as
the camera and sound recording apparatus generally remain outside Bloch‟s
peculiar world. To understand his state of mind the audience must interpret
the protagonist‟s interaction with his environment with only the occasional –
often misleading – piece of extra-diegetic music to help, and the film‟s genre
play makes this difficult. The „reality‟ it depicts, however, does remain stable
for the most part and the viewer thus tends to be less unsettled by Bloch‟s
idiosyncrasies than the reader of Handke‟s novel.
This relates to a second sense in which the film seems ultimately less
disorienting than Handke‟s text. Of the latter, O‟Neill notes: „Language, the
means by which most of us instinctively make sense of the world we live in,
is no guarantor of semiotic order for Bloch, for its guarantee is valid only as
long as you believe in it, and Bloch‟s faith has lapsed‟. 89 While Handke‟s
faith in the power of language to signify has clearly not been completely lost
– even amongst all the confusion his text continues to communicate in words
its story to the reader, drawing back from the precipice represented by the
pictograms – it is in no way unproblematically intact as his demonstration of
the inherent instability of words clearly shows. The same cannot be said of
Wenders‟s belief in the power of music – the film might play with the (genre)
signals its music sends out, but it never casts doubt on its ability to
communicate something about the emotional state of the protagonist – or his
faith in images. There are moments where the film shows an awareness of the
way in which media images condition our perception and understanding of
reality (a theme that will become far more prominent in Wenders‟s later
films): a photographer sits behind the goal Bloch is defending [shot 14];
Bloch views the same or possibly another match on television [shot 28]; in
keeping with the thriller references, a likeness of Bloch appears in the
newspaper [shot 414], although the gap between image and reality means that
the waitress fails to identify him from it. However, for all the genre games it
plays, the film keeps faith with the potential of its own images to
89
O‟Neill, pp.287f.
communicate something phenomenologically meaningful – even authentic –

about reality. For long stretches it is without dialogue, a fact that reflects
something more than simply Bloch‟s communication difficulties. Its speech-
lessness also connotes the faith the film places in the power of its images to
signify and on occasion to do so outside of the framework of the film‟s
narrative. One dialogue-free sequence which, while moving the story
forward, at the same time represents a hiatus in the narrative – the shots of
the bus travelling through the night – has been considered above. Another
sequence without words which can be understood as being in a similar
fashion both inside and outside the narrative, is the one in which Bloch walks
from one of the village‟s two inns to the other [shots 190-92]. While the walk
is necessary for the story‟s forward movement, the shots linger over his
progress in a way that allows the viewer to contemplate Bloch simply moving
through his environment.
3.8 Openings, closings, signs

The final scenes, which depict Bloch‟s morning walk to the football pitch,
provide an echo of his earlier walk between the two inns, while at the same
time functioning as a concluding résumé of the film‟s principal motifs. They
are punctuated by Bloch‟s encounter with advertisements – signs which in
Handke‟s novel are described as a source of nausea:
he had seen the things as though they were, at the same time, advertisements for themselves.
In fact his nausea was the same kind of nausea that had sometimes been brought on by
certain jingles, pop songs, or national anthems that he felt compelled to repeat word for
word or hum to himself until he fell asleep. (GA 58)
The sequence of the walk opens with something that the film has otherwise
strenuously avoided – explicit references to politics. The camera frames the
posters of the Austrian political parties SPÖ and ÖVP behind Bloch as it
tracks alongside him [shot 418]. Although they tower over him oppressively,
boldly advertising „clarity of relations‟ and a better life, Bloch ignores them
entirely, and it is only after he has passed them that the frame opens up
behind him. What follows is a sequence of shots of watching and being
watched. We see a man in a courtyard who appears to observe Bloch [shot
419]. Following a further tracking shot of the protagonist walking [shot 420,
a continuation of 418], we see a woman lowering the shutters on a bakery.
This cuts to an article reporting that there is a „Hot Lead in the Murder of
Gloria T.‟ [shot 422] which is retrospectively established as a headline in the
paper Bloch reads whilst leaning against the wall of a building [shot 423].
Parallel Texts 155
In a gesture which mirrors the closing of the bakery‟s shutters [shot 421],
Bloch is startled by the thud which accompanies the shutting of the green
shutters next to him from within. In both cases these gestures appear to
suggest either that the world is protecting itself from Bloch, or – rather more
metaphorically – that possible openings for him are closing. As he walks
away down the street he adroitly skips over a pile of pumpkins [also shot
423]. These have already been established as semiotically associated with the
local children – the heap is next to the school and the neighbour‟s child was
killed by falling pumpkins. This will be picked up shortly in the newspaper
report on the closing of the case of the mute schoolboy.
The suggestion that this sequence demonstrates the closing of avenues of
escape for Bloch is confirmed by the next station in his walk, in which he
comes across yet another non-functioning telephone [shots 424 and 425].
Bloch sits down on a bench next to the kiosk and reads the article about the
„Solving of the Case of the Mute Schoolboy‟ [shot 426] which contains an
image of the bridge seen during the previous walk [shot 352], this time
viewed from the position of the corpse. As Bloch reads about the closing of
the case he is „offered‟ a final escape route, which he refuses to take. A bus
stops next to the bench and the driver opens the door and looks straight into
the camera, establishing this as a point-of-view shot from Bloch‟s
perspective, indeed what subsequently turns out to be the last one [shot 428].
Bloch‟s response is simply to shake his head [shot 429]. Finally he walks past
a fence, tracked by the camera, and passes a poster advertising a local dance
to music by a group called The Jets [shot 430].
Surprisingly, perhaps, this sequence of closures (the two sets of shutters,
the bus door, the case of the missing schoolboy), 90 entrapments (the report on
his own case), and obstructions (the pumpkins, the broken telephone, the
fence) concludes with an opening (through the fence) and, as has been noted
above, a pleasingly symmetrical turn as the film returns to the football pitch
[shot 430]. The film‟s final dialogue with the rep finds Bloch on „home
territory‟ and thus, like the tax inspector and border guard before him, at his
most articulate. This dialogue also provides at least part of the answer to the
question of whether the film offers a resolution to Bloch‟s dilemma.
90
This is a leitmotif in the film. A particularly striking example is the closing door in shot 252
as Bloch stands between the hotel‟s double doors (a narrow vertical opening is left) and the
abrupt cut to Bloch posting a postcard through the letter box in the bus (a narrow horizontal
opening).
3.9 Resolution
It was suggested above that Handke‟s novel leaves unresolved Bloch‟s
difficulties: he remains stranded between a language which orders but distorts
reality and a mode of perception unmediated by language which undermines
the stability of the subject. However, the novel does seem to hint that there
might be a positive dimension to a non- or possibly pre-linguistic
consciousness that allows Bloch access to a less alienating experience of
reality. It is perhaps precisely because his perceptual disturbances result from
his reluctance to order reality according to pre-determined structures of
meaning that he also seems able to recognise that a less mediated relationship
to the world might be possible. There is at least one instance in the text where
he is apparently able to stop interpreting, and in that moment can perceive
what others until that point have failed to see, the body of the missing
schoolboy who has been the object of a search by villagers and the police:
Outside his field of vision something began to bother Bloch, who was staring fixedly at the
water. He blinked as if it was his eyes‟ fault but did not look around. Gradually it came into
his field of vision. For a while he saw it without really taking it in; his whole consciousness
seemed to be a blind spot. Then, as when in a movie comedy somebody casually opens a
crate and goes right on talking, then does a double-take and rushes back to the crate, he saw
below him in the water the corpse of a child. (GA 71)
Given Bloch‟s otherwise disturbed relationship to his environment, this

moment when he is able to see something precisely because he makes no
attempt to do so could be read as offering up the possibility that a more direct
relationship to the natural world is obtainable if normal interpretative
processes are somehow transcended.91 It appears that the village idiot, who
also seems to be mute, has made this discovery too, suggesting perhaps that
those outside the normal systems of perception and interpretation have a kind
of privileged access to reality. Interestingly, however, the novel does not
extend this privilege to children, who are negatively rather than positively
speechless and who in fact appear to be even more damaged than the adults:
the dead schoolboy was dumb and according to the school caretaker all of the
local children are „linguistically handicapped‟.92 Not surprisingly perhaps, if
Bloch can be said to experience a moment of epiphany here then it is not a
perspective on reality that he can sustain or make productive beyond the
91
Although an interestingly artificial dimension is added to this apparently unmediated
moment by the cinematic analogy in the text.
92
This is in contrast to the film, in which the (sentimentalised) notion so prominent in
Wenders‟s later work that children view the world via a more innocent and therefore more
authentic gaze is already embodied in the figure of the landlady‟s daughter.
Parallel Texts 157
instant. Moreover, the fact that his visionary moment is associated with death
underscores the ultimately gloomy nature of a novel which – as we shall see
– ends inconclusively without offering any sustained alternative to Bloch‟s
alienated perspective.
In Wenders‟s version of The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Bloch also
stares into the river and presumably sees the body [shot 308]. That it remains
difficult for the viewer to determine what, if anything, has caught his eye
makes it hard to read this moment in the same potentially optimistic terms as
the novel‟s equivalent. Its uncertain status is enhanced by the shot that
precedes it: the close-up of an apple [shot 305]. Apples recur elsewhere in the
novel as a motif which O‟Neill reads as providing a „parodic biblical echo‟:
„Tormann is the story of a fall from hermeneutic grace, an expulsion from a
semiotic Eden‟.93 If this is the case, then the fact that an apple appears
precisely at this point in the film gives an ironic twist to Wenders‟s version of
what in Handke‟s text can be interpreted as a prelapsarian moment for Bloch.
Presenting his moment of perceptual clarity in relation to an image as
symbolically overloaded as the apple makes it impossible to read it
innocently as a moment in which reality is perceived authentically. 94
It could be argued that the film has no need to present this moment as
offering evidence of a possible alternative to Bloch‟s generally disturbed
perspective precisely because, unlike the novel, it can use its own images to
this end. The film is on occasion at pains to emphasise the fact that the
camera is for the most part not caught up in Bloch‟s disorientation by
including a number of images which play no obvious part in his story (and
arguably are so separate from it that they are not even part of the clue/red-
herring game played in some parts of the film), seeming to have been
included for their own sake alone. Thus, for instance, we are offered two
apparently inconsequential village street scenes, one with a tractor [shot 175],
the other with a milk lorry [shot 238].
On another occasion, an apparently arbitrary shot of a bowling alley with
a woman‟s legs as she picks up the pins [shot 284] is followed by a shot of a
93
O‟Neill, p.296.
94
Klingmann, on the other hand, does understand the apple as an unironic image „as an image
of ripe and undamaged nature‟ offered as a point-of-view shot from Bloch‟s perspective „for
we see him immediately afterwards on the bridge at the river‟ (p.170) and one which
„supplements symbolically the various motifs relating to nature and the natural in contrast to
the images of damaged nature‟, p.170. However one wants to read this image, it is worth
noting that Wenders himself claims that the decision to include it did not rest wholly with
him: „There was one shot I was never sure about, it was my cutter who convinced me I
should keep it. It‟s a shot of an apple: in close-up‟, Dawson, p.22.
juke box [shot 285]. These are included in a complex sequence which taken
as a whole serves to illustrate the intricacy of the process of translation of the
novel from page to screen. It begins at dusk when Bloch, on leaving Hertha‟s
inn at the end of his second visit, looks through the window of a
neighbouring house and hears snippets of stories apparently about the mute
schoolboy and the child killed by falling pumpkins [shot 283]. These elusive
narrative fragments, delivered by disembodied female voices off, are in fact
extracted from a longer passage of dialogue in the novel – amounting in all to
about a page – in which the peasant woman from the neighbouring house
tells Bloch about the death of her child (GA 53f.), and they remain as baffling
to the viewer in this truncated form as they clearly are to Bloch. 95 These
decontextualised quotations from the novel are followed by a rapid sequence
of images and sounds which can be described as quintessential Wenders: the
bowling alley, the Wurlitzer jukebox playing a frenetic tune, and a helicopter
shot of the Burgenland landscape [shot 286]. The sequence, which ends with
Bloch in bed in his hotel room [shot 287], presents the audience with a point-
of-view conundrum. Are the images of the bowling alley and countryside
simply atmospheric non-diegetic images or are they scenes dreamt (or
imagined) by Bloch in bed?96 The question is complicated, first, by the fact
that there is a possible derivation for the aerial shot in the novel –
„Everything seemed to be out of his reach. He was so far away from what
happened around him that he himself no longer appeared in what he saw and
heard. “Like aerial photographs,” he thought while looking at the antlers and
horns on the wall‟ (GA 70)97 – and second, by the fact that the image of
Bloch in bed is followed by a shot of objects in his room (his jacket over a
chair, a lamp on the table) which can certainly be read as his point-of-view.
Seen as a whole – the neighbours, bowling alley, countryside, Bloch in bed,
and objects in the room – this sequence might be read as paradigmatic: in it
unreconciled Handke text meets Wenders‟s imagery, and the result is a
vertiginous juxtaposition of weightless reverie and solid material objects. It is
also, we would suggest, a self-reflexive figuration of film‟s „inherited‟ and
constituent media: disembodied sound (the women‟s voices), sound
reproduction (the juke-box), aerial photography (from the helicopter), music
95
In the film these isolated scraps of dialogue have something of the terseness of the text
fragments in Straub-Huillet's Not Reconciled, although, unlike the digest of Böll‟s Billiards
at Half Past Nine (Billard um halbzehn, 1959), they do not add up to a coherent statement in
their new context.
96
Examples of the latter are to be found in both Alice in the Cities (the dream sequence with
the freeway in the Skyway Motel) and Wrong Move (the ship passing in the night).
97
The term in Handke‟s novel is „Luftaufnahmen‟.
Parallel Texts 159
(Jürgen Knieper‟s dramatic chords). What is striking about this juxtaposition

is that it is inextricably linked to the state of mind of the protagonist and, if
Wenders‟s remarks in interview quoted above are to be believed, the
director‟s own „schizoid‟ disposition at the time. In this episode, unusually,
estrangement verges on derangement, recomposition on disorientation.
Whereas in the other collaborative films the reformulation of film is
potentially, or in the case of Wings of Desire metaphysically, a liberating
experience, here it engenders nausea and even disgust. It is this, perhaps,
which goes some way to explaining the sense that this film expresses a
certain degree of trepidation, dread even, when confronting processes of
transformation and change.
Depending on how one answers the point-of-view question in this
episode, the camera ascending to the skies can be read as offering a filmic
equivalent of the out-of-body experiences of the protagonist in the novel and
thus as providing one of the neatest translations of text into image in the
entire film. Alternatively, it can be read as a moment in which the camera
frees itself from the protagonist, accentuating the unrestricted but also
disembodied nature of its vision in comparison to Bloch‟s limited
perspective.
Notwithstanding what has been said about the nausea engendered by the
out-of-body (or even out-of-cinema) experience in this important sequence, it
is the camera‟s liberty to detach itself on occasion from Bloch‟s restricted
field of vision which goes some way to explaining why the ending of the film
seems ultimately less pessimistic than that of the novel. Both close in a
similar fashion. As we have seen, Bloch explains to the rep he meets in the
stands at a village football game how difficult it is for the goalkeeper to
predict the actions of the striker and therefore to save the penalty. The final
lines of the novel read: „The kicker suddenly started his run. The goalkeeper,
who was wearing a bright yellow jersey, stood absolutely still, and the
penalty kicker shot the ball into his hands‟ (GA 133). This goalkeeper‟s save
has been interpreted in various ways and, as O‟Neill has noted, many critics
have been tempted to assume his success „is due to his ability to gauge
instinctively – that is to say, pre-linguistically rather than as the result of
conscious reflection‟.98 O‟Neill goes on to argue convincingly, however, that
this ending does not transcend but remains ultimately caught up in the
interpretative complexities that neither the goalkeeper, nor the novel, nor by
extension its reader can evade:
98
O‟Neill, p.297.
The point of the goalie‟s final save is far less some idealistically inspired demonstration of
how a lost harmony can be restored malgré tout on the level of story than it is to function as
the punchline of a joke on the level of discourse, unrelentingly provoking the reader to
renewed reflection even in that very last sentence when he might reasonably have hoped for
hermeneutic peace and semiotic order.99
In the final sequences of the film, the camera focuses on Bloch and the rep as
the former discourses on the goalkeeper‟s interpretative difficulties [shot
454], before panning away to the pitch and zooming in on the goalkeeper as
he saves the penalty [shot 455]. It goes back to the rep who turns to look
quizzically at Bloch [shot 456], before returning to the pitch [shot 457] as the
closing credits appear over the top of a sequence in which the players line up
in the centre circle and leave the pitch. Here the distinction – emphasised by
the rep‟s enquiring look – is between what Bloch says and what he and the
audience see. In contrast to the novel, which remains endlessly embroiled in
Bloch‟s semiotic confusions even as it offers a perspective which contradicts
his, the film is able to transcend Bloch‟s dilemma – signalled not least by the
fact that the camera rises up over the pitch, in this instance slowly and calmly
rather than vertiginously as in the helicopter shot discussed above. Film, it
would seem, can offer images that present an alternative reality to the one
created by the protagonist‟s words. It is in this sense, one could argue, that
the film offers a response to the linguistic conundrums of the novel it takes as
its starting point by valorising the visual as a means of communicating reality
over the verbal.
Looking back to the film in 1991, Wenders commented that at this point
in his career: „The restrictions caused by a script were still new to me, so at
that time I didn‟t think of them as restrictions, but rather as an adventure. It
wasn‟t until much later, with Wrong Move, that I developed a real freedom in
working with a script‟.100 What he appears to be implying here is that while
working from his script version of Handke‟s novel did not appear at the time
to be restrictive, in retrospect he recognises that this way of working did
place limits on his ability to realise his own creativity. The analysis of the
film in relation to the novel undertaken here, however, suggests that
Wenders‟s achievement with his version of The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the
Penalty is greater than he is able, or willing, to acknowledge. Although the
analysis makes clear how close the filmmaker remained to his source text –
and indeed to its author, even collaborating with Handke on dialogues for the
film – it also demonstrates that Wenders unquestionably does much more
99
Ibid., p.298.
100
Cook and Gemünden, p.65.
Parallel Texts 161
here then speak in the writer‟s borrowed phrases. While the film remains at
one level an adaptation of a literary pre-text in a „traditional‟ sense, at another
it is also a far more complex cross-medial re-configuration. Within it
Wenders has been able to re-vision the story of Bloch‟s semiological crisis in
a way which has allowed him to translate – and indeed estrange – Handke‟s
linguistic concerns within his own cinematic medium, producing in the
process an independent filmic text which can be read in parallel with the
written one. Moreover, just as Handke‟s novel represents a meta-discourse on
the medium of its own production, so Wenders engages with the
communicative power of cinema in ways which necessarily go beyond the
novel‟s concerns. While his images reproduce the sparse narrative of
Handke‟s novel, they also pull against the story being told, often calling
attention to themselves and taking on a life of their own in ways which
threaten to decompose the literary narrative. Similarly, Wenders employs
cinema‟s other constituent elements – dialogue, sound, and music –
sometimes in the service of narrative continuity and at other moments to
disrupt it. Moreover, these elements sometimes work in harmony with the
images they accompany and at others undermine their coherence, calling
attention to the synthetic nature of a cinematic medium whose coherence is
artificial – as Wenders‟s film demonstrates, it can at any point be made to
break down into its constituent parts. As such the film offers a disjunct
viewing experience in which different dichotomies – narrative versus non-
narrative, language versus image, the aural versus the visual, object versus
subject – are brought into frictional contact with one another in striking,
refreshing, and cinematically revitalising ways.
The question as to whether working with Handke‟s script for Wrong
Move really allowed Wenders more freedom to experiment with cinematic
possibilities and to give greater expression to his own artistic vision than he
found in translating his own script for The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty
will be considered in Chapter Four. In the meantime, the next chapter will
explore the interim period between the two collaborative and scripted
projects when Wenders worked without a conventional script and –
ostensibly at least – without Handke.
Chapter Three
Accompanied by Text: From Short Letter, Long Farewell to

Alice in the Cities
„On the road again‟1
Today life with a woman sometimes

strikes me as an artificial state of affairs,
as absurd as a filmed novel. (SL 24)
1. Shared fascinations
The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty can be regarded as marking the end of
an early phase of Handke‟s career in which his primary interest lies with
language and the ways in which it constructs reality. With his next novel,
Short Letter, Long Farewell, his focus, while still on the relationship between
the individual and a systematised reality, begins to shift to what might be
described as more existential concerns. In keeping with his own insistence
that a literary form or technique used once cannot be made creatively
productive a second time, he becomes less centrally interested in the play
with genre forms in general, and detective fiction in particular, and more
concerned to explore the nature of individual consciousness and the
construction of selfhood. That is, what have been described as the
„sensibilist‟ dimensions of his early works disentangle themselves from and
essentially supplant his earlier engagement with semiotics.
It is perhaps not surprising that in this period when their collaboration is
at its most productive, Wenders treads a similar path. He abandons the
formalist experimentation of his early shorts – elements of which were still
present in the more radical sequences of The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the
Penalty – for a more pronounced, one might argue more conventional, focus
on interests already apparent at the earliest point of his career. He continues
and expands his investigation of individual subjectivity and the relationship
between self and world through the medium of a more narratively-organised
filmmaking practice. Although he had first to go through the painful
experience of making The Scarlet Letter (Der scharlachrote Buchstabe,
1973), a film over which he felt he had too little artistic control for it to be
productive for his development as a filmmaker, he was able in 1974 to
1
Peter Handke, Short Letter, Long Farewell, trans. by Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre
Methuen, 1977), p.15. Further references in the text as SL.
produce the first film in which he claims truly to have found his „individual
voice in the cinema‟, Alice in the Cities.2
In the Introduction to this study we quoted Wenders‟s claim that
Handke‟s texts have accompanied him „even when they‟ve not appeared in
my films‟.3 It is the aim of this chapter to explore the reality of that claim by
examining the extent to which Alice in the Cities, a film which ostensibly has
little to do with Handke, can nevertheless be understood to be a product of
the shared interests and mutual passions which make the collaboration
between writer and filmmaker both possible and productive in this period,
and more specifically to result from Wenders‟s direct engagement with
Handke‟s novel Short Letter, Long Farewell.
Gerd Gemünden has claimed of Handke‟s and Wenders‟s collaboration
that it:
is only possible because both agree in fundamental ways about questions of aesthetics and
the role of the artist in contemporary society and because both are fascinated by similar
topics and stories. Even when they disagree, as they do perhaps in Wenders‟s more critical
view toward contemporary American cinema, they seem to argue like close friends do when
they are basically in agreement with each other.4
It is precisely the extent of this agreement when their collaboration was at its
most dynamic which this chapter sets out to determine. In doing so it will
establish areas of mutual interest which provide a central point of focus not
only in Alice in the Cities and Short Letter, Long Farewell, but which recur
as issues of importance in the later collaborations and in relation to which it
is possible to measure the extent of their aesthetic and intellectual
convergence. Also to be identified are those moments – perhaps more
numerous than is commonly assumed to be the case – when they move
aesthetically and intellectually apart from one another.
The chapter will also explore the different kind of „adaptational‟ process
Alice in the Cities can be seen to represent in comparison with The
Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty. Brian McFarlane has claimed that
adaptation can mean many other things besides fidelity in varying degrees to
a pre-text, including the provision of „a commentary on or, in more extreme
2
Wim Wenders, „Le Soufflé de l‟ange‟ in Wenders, On Film: Essays and Conversations
(London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp.248-73 (p.254).
3
Wim Wenders in interview with Reinhold Rauh in Wim Wenders und seine Filme (Munich:
Heyne, 1990), p.246.
4
Gerd Gemünden, Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemp-
orary German and Austrian Imagination (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998),
p.158.
Accompanied by Text 165
cases, a deconstruction [...] of the original‟. 5 As we shall see, in its

relationship to Short Letter, Long Farewell, Wenders‟s film can certainly be
said to offer the former and possibly even to act in places as the latter.
Particularly important in this respect is the fact that the film does more than
simply take over and reconfigure a number of settings, characters, and
themes from Handke‟s novel. It also engages with its own medial
specificities and with those of its source text in an exploration of the role of
the image and the function of the spoken and the written word in relation to
story-telling in general, and the construction of those narratives through
which individuals give meaning to their lives in particular. What is
significant here is that this self-reflexive gesture is as much a part of
Handke‟s text as it is of Wenders‟s film. As we shall see, Short Letter, Long
Farewell engages with processes of image-making, linguistic expression, and
narrative as critically as does its co-text and can, moreover, be viewed as a
striking attempt to recompose literature cinematically. Given this, in
responding to the novel with Alice in the Cities, Wenders can be said to be
opening up with Handke an intermedial dialogue in which the relationship
between literature and cinema has the potential to be recomposed.
To investigate these issues in detail, this reading will focus above all on
Handke‟s and Wenders‟s concern in their respective works with the
construction of selfhood and the role of writing and image making in that
process, their interest in the complexities of the (autobiographical) subject‟s
relationship to reality and the ways in which a perception of that reality is
mediated, their contradictory reception of American popular culture and the
exploration of its influence on European identity, and their examination of
the themes of writing and seeing in relation to the figure of the child.
2. Word and image: books and pictures

In a key early sequence in Alice in the Cities in the New York apartment of a
former girlfriend of Philip Winter, Wenders‟s protagonist, the film cuts, in an
apparently unmotivated shot, from the two characters in discussion to a table
on which a number of books are displayed: Karin Struck‟s Class Love
(Klassenliebe, 1973), F. Scott Fitzgerald‟s Tender is the Night (1934), and
Peter Handke‟s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Wunschloses Unglück, 1972)
[shot 212]. The two contemporary works are autobiographical and as such
could serve to signal the autobiographical impulse behind Alice in the Cities
in general and this scene in particular (Philip is played by Rüdiger Vogler
5
Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996), p.22. See also Introduction, p.22.
who often acts as a kind of alter ego figure for the director in his films). Here
the former lover with whom he expects to spend the night (played by
Wenders‟s own soon-to-be-ex-wife Edda Köchl) condemns Philip‟s egotism
before throwing him out. In response to his complaint that on his journey
through the United States, documented in the first part of the film, „I lost my
sense of hearing and seeing‟, she offers what would seem to be a fairly
accurate diagnosis of his dilemma, linking his excess of self-concern to a
fundamental self-alienation which in turn estranges him from others:
But you lost those long ago. You don‟t need to travel through America for that. You loose
your sense of hearing and seeing when you‟ve lost your feeling for yourself and you lost that
a long time ago. And that‟s why you always need proof, proof that you really exist. Your
stories and your experiences, you treat them as if they were raw eggs, as if you were the
only one to experience anything. And that‟s why you‟re always taking those photos. So that
you‟ve got something in your hand. Another piece of evidence that you were the one who
saw something. That‟s why you‟ve come here, so that somebody will listen to you, you and
your stories which you really only tell to yourself. But it‟s not enough, not in the long run,
my dear.6 [Shots 201-11]
With hearing and vision impaired, Philip is unable at this point to grasp the
lesson offered him here. The rest of the film, however, charts his steady
progress in overcoming self-obsession as his sensory perceptions are
reawakened and he is able to re-establish a relationship with his environment
and those who inhabit it.
Struck‟s Class Love, which details the (autobiographical) protagonist‟s
attempts to come to terms with the disappointments of her experiences as a
political activist in the late 1960s, and in which she asserts her right to
explore personal concerns in a literary context, is generally held to mark a
turning point in German literary history.7 It signifies a „new subjective‟ shift
in the early 1970s on the part of many young Germans no longer willing, as
they had been in the late 1960s at the height of the student movement, to
subordinate the personal to political commitment. In the post-1968 period
they displayed instead a renewed concern – in life and in literature – with the
intricacies and intimacies of individual experience. Gemünden, with
6
English quotations from the film are taken from the subtitles of the Connoisseur Video
release of the film on VHS. It should be noted that this version of the film is not identical to
Axiom Film‟s DVD which, for example, omits certain shots.
7
Although it is often referred to by critics as belonging within the same literary context as
Handke‟s writing of the 1970s, he himself expressed his loathing of her work in a scathing
review of a later text. See „Karin Struck: “Die Mutter”‟, in Peter Handke, Meine Ortstafeln
Meine Zeittafeln 1967-2007 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), pp.143-47.
particular reference to the work of Handke, Wenders, and Wolf

Wondratschek, describes this shift as a move towards „an anti-intellectual and
antitheoretical sensibility that favors experience over meaning and sensuality
over sense‟.8 Thus the novel‟s appearance in this sequence relates Philip‟s
difficulties in defining his subjectivity to the shared struggle of a generation
to find a post-political anchor point for their identities in an exploration of the
personal in the 1970s.
The image of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams adds a further dimension to this
contextualisation of Philip‟s dilemma and provides another indication that the
film can be understood as part of a broader contemporary cultural project to
define a post-1968 literary and filmic aesthetic. This novel, like Struck‟s, is
also generally understood to signal a further shift away from the
predominantly linguistic concerns of Handke‟s early works towards an
interest in the individual in relation to his or her social and cultural context in
keeping with the „new subjective‟ Zeitgeist. It is in many ways a highly
personal work in which Handke explores the strictures of his mother‟s life in
postwar Austria, his response to her suicide, and the significance of the
creative process for the construction and maintenance of his own sense of
identity.
This latter theme provides a particular link to Alice in the Cities, which
depicts Philip as a writer whose journey of self-discovery allows him to re-
vitalise his creative talents in the service of identity formation at the film‟s
end. Its opening sequences confirm that he is suffering from some form of
linguistic and perceptual alienation which results in writer‟s block. He is
unable to finish an article about the trip across the United States which makes
up the first part of the film and which clearly represents a failed attempt to
locate a distinctly fragile sense of self in response to the reality of American
culture.
In relation to this American theme a further function of the display of
books in Alice in the Cities can be identified. It offers a representation in
miniature of the dilemma to which Philip is shown to be exposed in the
course of the film. He finds himself caught between two cultures whose
contradictory impulses he finds difficult to reconcile within himself. While
his cultural roots are signalled by the German-language novels of his
contemporaries, these are juxtaposed with images of an American culture
which had had an immense influence on the construction of the identities of a
generation of postwar Germans unable to turn to a cultural heritage tainted by
8
Gemünden, p.14. This cultural shift of the early 1970s will be discussed further in relation to
Wrong Move in Chapter Four.
its association with Nazism to secure a sense of self. A picture of Disney‟s

Dumbo stands in for U.S. mass culture, while more high-brow American
cultural traditions are represented by Tender is the Night. On top of Handke‟s
book, and obscuring everything but its title, is a photograph of the Empire
State Building, an iconic image of American modernity overlaying a text
which explores notions of Heimat: the narrator‟s relationship to the familial,
geographical, historical, and cultural aspects of his Austrian identity. This
provides a visual representation of the film‟s central thematic concern with
Philip‟s failed attempt to root his identity in an American culture which
disappoints his expectations and his return „home‟ to Germany to complete
his quest for a secure sense of selfhood.9 It is significant that a composite
image of literary texts and still photographs – two of cinema‟s inherited
media – communicates meaning to the audience at a moment where the
spoken word is shown to be woefully inadequate for securing mutual
understanding between its protagonists. It also anticipates the notion of
cinema as a synthetic medium which is superior in its communicative
potential to its constituent (or „inherited‟) elements, a idea which, as we shall
see in Chapter Five, is key to understanding the redemptive conception of
cinema articulated in Wings of Desire more than a decade later.10 The books
and photographs also make the attentive viewer aware of the adaptational
dimension of the film and its sophisticated use of intertextuality.
2.1 Intertexts
It is the centrality of the United States to Alice in the Cities which provides
one indication that Wenders‟s visual reference to A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,
while it clearly signals Handke‟s importance for the project, might act to
9
There is one further component to this tableau: a „Sew and Stitch‟ needle book printed with
the image of two impeccably groomed blond women, one sewing, the other clutching a rose.
This clichéd marker of classic femininity may have been included here to contextualise the
struggles of both Philip‟s former girlfriend in this sequence of the film and Struck‟s narrator
in Class Love to give expression to their sense of self. If one adds to this Handke‟s
representation of his mother‟s life and death in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, as well as taking
the Disney film‟s portrayal of Dumbo‟s mother and the problematic female protagonist of
Tender is the Night into account, then one could argue that this composite image offers on a
small-scale a problematisation of female subjectivity to complement the film‟s larger-scale
discourse on troubled masculinity.
10
Malaguti also expresses something of this idea when she notes of this sequence „that in the
film the dialogue in a traditional sense seems to be too little developed to make clear the
intensity of feeling, so that the novels have to serve as a supplement to the actual dialogue‟.
Simone Malaguti, Wim Wenders’ Filme und ihre intermediale Beziehung zur Literatur Peter
Handkes (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), p.132.
obscure a more significant source of influence. A number of intertextual

parallels can be identified in the film to Short Letter, Long Farewell,
Handke‟s novel published in the same year, which act as a marker of the
shared themes underpinning the two works to such an extent that it is
productive to read Wenders‟s film, at least in part, as a response to Handke‟s
text.11 Both represent a coming-to-terms with American culture on the part of
their protagonists, each of whom can to an extent be read as standing in for
his creator.12 Both begin by positioning their self-alienated protagonists in
relation to American landscape, history, and culture as they attempt to deal
with a crisis of selfhood rooted in their troubled identities as German-
speaking Europeans. Travelling through the United States – in Handke‟s
narrator‟s case from East to West coast, in Philip‟s, more modestly, across
North Carolina – becomes an attempt to use the familiar strangeness of this
not-so-foreign culture to realign an identity out of kilter. For neither
protagonist is the undertaking an unmitigated success as both have to
confront linguistic and perceptual difficulties which are tied up in different
ways with their efforts to experience America.
11
This has also been suggested by some earlier commentators. Thomas Elsaesser, for example,
focuses on the similarities between the two works with perhaps too little acknowledgement
of their differences: „Alice is in many ways a parallel story to Short Letter, Long Farewell.
The motifs and situations which they have in common are almost too numerous to list. It is
as if Wenders were entering into a dialogue with Handke‟s novel, as one argues with a
friend with whom one is basically in complete agreement‟. Thomas Elsaesser, „Germany‟s
Imaginary America: Wim Wenders and Peter Handke: America – Antagonist and Catalyst‟,
in European Cinema, ed. by Susan Hayward (Aston: AMLC, 1985), pp.31-52 (p.43).
Malaguti also offers a detailed account of the relationship between the film and its source
texts, amongst which she includes Lewis Carroll‟s Alice in Wonderland (as a „secondary
pre-text‟, p.126) and Fitzgerald‟s Tender is the Night, while still maintaining that Short
Letter, Long Farewell represents the most significant point of reference.
12
Kurt Fickert is particularly adamant in his equation of Handke‟s protagonist with the writer
himself, maintaining that in this work „in the form of fiction […] Peter Handke recounts the
events of a journey he has recently made across the American continent‟, and refers to the
novel as „Handke‟s confessional story‟ which „examines the results of the interaction
between a prominent post-World War-II Austrian author and the land of democracy in its
mythological dimensions‟. Kurt Fickert, „The Myth of America in Peter Handke‟s Der kurze
Brief zum langen Abschied‟, German Studies Review, 21 (1998), 27-40 (p.27). Handke had
undertaken a lecture tour across the United States in 1971, the year in which the novel is set.
The fact that Wenders had also spent time in America signals, according to Kathe Geist, the
autobiographical basis of Alice in the Cities: „Philip‟s reaction to the U.S. exactly parallels
Wenders‟ reaction to a three-week, cross-country trip he made during his second visit to the
U.S.‟. Kathe Geist, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: From Paris, France to Paris, Texas (Ann
Arbor-London: University of Michigan Press, 1988), p.38.
Most of the intertextual links to Short Letter, Long Farewell in Alice in

the Cities serve to highlight the two works‟ mutual interest in the influence of
American culture on European identity and, related to this, their
foregrounding of an exploration of the relationship between American reality
and its cultural reproduction. Returning to the thematic issues of 3 American
LPs, they use similar indicators to signal the importance of American
literature, rock music, images, and film for the identity formation of their
protagonists. The appearance of Tender is the Night in Alice in the Cities can
be read as an allusion to the fact that the narrator‟s reading in Short Letter,
Long Farewell of another F. Scott Fitzgerald novel testifies to the
transformative potential of literature: „As happens occasionally when
something I‟ve read makes me want to have the same experiences for myself,
the great Gatsby now commanded me to transform myself instantly‟ (SL
11).13 In Alice in the Cities a small boy – usually understood, as we saw in
the previous chapter, to stand in for Wenders himself as a child experiencing
the life-saving properties of American music – listens to a jukebox playing
Canned Heat‟s „On the Road Again‟ [shot 536],14 while the protagonist of
Short Letter, Long Farewell mourns intensely the death of the band‟s first
singer: „I still ached with his death, and his short life, which I then thought I
understood, often came back to me in painful half-waking thoughts‟ (SL 15).
Polaroid photographs of American landscapes serve in each work for the
exploration of the relationship between reality and its reproduction: just as
Handke‟s protagonist lines up the pictures he takes from the car on the
windshield and looks „back and forth between them and the countryside‟ (SL
60), so Philip compares his snaps of an empty beach with the reality before
him only to discover to his disappointment that „they never show what
you‟ve seen‟ [shot 29]. Both works pay homage to the cinema of John Ford
in general and Young Mr Lincoln in particular. In Alice in the Cities its
appearance on the television in Philip‟s motel has the power to inspire the
13
The allusions to The Great Gatsby provide only one of the novel‟s many intertextual links.
In an article on the significance of Short Letter, Long Farewell‟s various literary allusions,
Fickert notes that in this case: „Critical consensus holds that the significance of the novel lies
in its evocation of an era in which the myth of an America of streets paved with gold, an
America of prosperity for everyone, was on the point of becoming reality‟, pp.31f. That is,
the novel is linked, as is Tender is the Night in Alice in the Cities, to a notion of America as
a mythical land of opportunity, a version of the United States also celebrated in the films of
John Ford which, as we shall see, provide another intertext in both Handke‟s and Wenders‟s
works.
14
Geist notes of the boy: „Probably he is Wenders‟ image of himself as a youngster‟, Geist,
p.41.
film‟s only dream sequence [shot 46-51], while Handke‟s narrator describes
the film‟s similarly strong impact on him: „I lost myself only once […] I went
to see John Ford‟s Young Mr. Lincoln; then I dreamed as I watched‟ (SL
114). Ford is referenced a second time at the end of Alice in the Cities when
Philip‟s disappointment with the reality behind the American culture he
knows and loves is underscored by the headline given to the director‟s
obituary: „Lost World: On the Death of John Ford‟ [shot 766]. It suggests that
the mythical America of the Western to which he had hoped to connect on his
trip across the United States is itself a „lost world‟. This is in contrast to the
potentially more reconciliatory assessment of the relationship between
American reality and the myths produced by its cultural mediation in the final
section of Short Letter, Long Farewell where the narrator and his estranged
wife, on a visit to the director in his Bel Air home, seem willing to accept
Ford‟s assertion that his films must be understood as a reality in their own
right: „Nothing is made up […]. It all really happened‟ (SL 165).
These shared points of reference signal that both Alice in the Cities and
Short Letter, Long Farewell are concerned with what Gemünden in his
reading of the novel has described as „a hyperreal America‟: „As Short Letter,
Long Farewell insists, America is first and foremost an imaginary America,
prefabricated out of images, characters from novels and films, landscapes and
buildings familiar from advertisements and billboards‟. 15 In engaging with
this theme, Handke‟s novel picks up on ideas already explored in Chronicle
of On-Going Events. Handke‟s and Wenders‟s works, however, respond to
this imaginary America differently, reaching differing conclusions about the
role the experience of American culture can play in determining the
protagonist‟s sense of self and structuring his relationship to his environment.
In the following section we will explore in more detail these differing
responses to the realities experienced by the protagonists, looking first at the
novel and then the film. Subsequently we will investigate further significant
elements of correspondence and divergence that emerge from a comparison
of the two works, focusing particularly on both the novel‟s and the film‟s
self-reflexive dimensions: their exploration of the relationship between
selfhood and seeing, their investigation of the part played by language and
image in the experience of reality, and their examination of the relationship
of word and image to narrative.
15
Gemünden, p.144.
3. Experiencing America
3.1 Going West

Handke‟s narrator has left his native Austria in order to recover from the end
of a disastrous marriage. Desperate to change, he wants to leave behind a self
he experiences as less than satisfactory, but with which he is nevertheless
obsessed to the detriment of his ability to respond to the world around him:
„determined to be alert and open to my surroundings, I quickly looked away
from everyone who approached me on the sidewalk, soured by the sight of
another face, disgusted as usual with everything that was not myself‟ (SL 12).
That he travels to a different continent to effect a transformation, one with an
environment familiar from its cultural reproduction (particularly in film) and
yet still unfamiliar in its real physical manifestations, points to the fact that
here identity is intimately tied up with the way the individual perceives
reality and thus the narrator‟s desire to redefine his sense of self inspires him
to begin a journey „where I had decided for once to observe rather than
participate‟ (SL 5f.).16 He is attempting to find new ways of seeing and
through them establish a revitalised relationship to the world, one no longer
defined by the limiting perspectives that have determined his perceptions in
the past: neither by his own self-absorption, „my exaggerated feeling for
myself‟ (SL 14), nor by the fear that has dominated his response to the world
since childhood, nor by his readiness to resort to systematised modes of
thought – „concepts, definitions, and abstractions‟ – to interpret reality (SL
14).17
In striking contrast to Philip Winter‟s experience of the American
landscape as detrimental to his desire to see, the narrator‟s journey across the
16
June Schlueter notes that: „It is only natural that Handke‟s hero, attempting to ease the
emotional trauma of an intensely personal experience – a slowly deteriorating marriage and,
finally, separation – would head for the land which could offer him the oblivion of
impersonality, the relief of superficiality, and the surreality of dream‟. Schlueter, The Plays
and Novels of Peter Handke (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh University Press, 1981),
p.94.
17
Towards the end of the novel the narrator relates this desire to avoid abstractions to
problems he is encountering in completing a play he is currently engaged in writing: „“You
must know people,” I said, “who try to reduce everything they see, even the most
extraordinary things, to a concept, to do away with it by formulating it, so they won‟t have
to experience it any more. They have words for everything. […] That‟s how it is in my play.
As soon as somebody says something, if only with a gesture, the character is reduced to a
concept and I can‟t do anything more with him”‟ (SL 128). Such difficulties with writing,
while not as prominent as in Alice in the Cities, provide another point of connection between
the narrator and his counterpart in Wenders‟s film.
United States initially enables him to experience brief and largely

unmotivated moments of unmediated access to the world, moments „in which
one has no desire but to see, and in which to see is to know‟ (SL 27). On
occasion, in revelatory moments not dissimilar to the one in which Bloch
sees the corpse of the drowned schoolboy in The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the
Penalty, this experience becomes one of mystical union with nature, a quasi-
Romantic occurrence in which the boundary between self and world is
overcome, „in which the dualism of subject and object gives way to an
experience of the one-ness of the Self with the universe‟:18
Some distance away there was a cypress on a little hill. Its branches looked almost bare in
the evening light. It swayed gently back and forth in a movement that resembled my own
breathing. I forgot the cypress, I also forgot myself and stared into space. But then the
cypress, still gently swaying, moved closer with every breath and finally penetrated my
chest. I stood motionless, the pulse in my temples stopped beating, my heart stopped. I
ceased to breathe, my skin died away, and with a sense of will-less well-being I felt that the
movement of the cypress was taking over the function of my respiratory center, making me
sway with it, and freeing itself from me. At length, feeling that I no longer offered
resistance, that I was superfluous, I detached myself from its gentle motion. (SL 78f.)
This kind of sensual interaction with the environment clearly blurs rather
than firms the contours of the narrator‟s identity precisely because it
destabilises his sense of himself as the subject of the act of seeing. Losing
himself in the contemplation of nature, he is pleasantly relieved of the burden
of selfhood. However, the association of his visionary moment with death (as
was Bloch‟s) provides a potentially negative image of a willing and
thoroughly passive self-annihilation.
In fact, in the course of his journey this epiphanic vision is revealed to be
potentially nihilistic:
[…] overcome by a feeling of universal bliss, free from fear and tension, I myself, as in the
play of the cypress, ceased to exist, and for a moment I was so horrified at that empty world
that I experienced the child‟s boundless dread at suddenly seeing nothing in a place where
only a moment before it had seen something. (SL 84)19
18
Alan Menhennet, The Romantic Movement (London: Croom Helm, 1982), p.20.
19
Elsewhere in the novel the epiphanic moment is associated with the notion of „another time‟,
described by Christoph Bartmann as the „idea of a desired time which is both a-social and a-
subjective‟. Bartmann, „“Der Zusammenhang ist möglich”: Der kurze Brief zum langen
Abschied im Kontext‟, in Peter Handke, ed. by Raimund Fellinger (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1985), pp.114-39 (p.131).
It is significant that the narrator re-evaluates this moment in the light of his
experience of „the child‟, Benedictine – daughter of Claire, a former lover
with whom he briefly rekindles a relationship – because the two-year old is
associated with the possibility of seeing reality differently. Travelling with
these American friends in the novel‟s second half, the narrator is less inclined
to loose himself in the passivity of the contemplation of nature, opening
himself up instead to the possibility of a more active relationship to his
physical environment, one mediated via interaction with the human beings
who shape it. It is Claire, with a dig at both his egotism and his tendency to
mystify the world, who makes a connection between his self-alienation and
his failure to take up a position of agency in relation to reality (and in so
doing she performs a pedagogic function close to that of Philip‟s ex-
girlfriend in Alice in the Cities):
[…] you just let the world dance past you. As if life were taking place on stage and there
were no need for you to get mixed up in it. As if the world were a big bundle of Christmas
presents, all for you. You watch while it‟s being unpacked; to help would be rude. You just
let the world unfold, and if something happens to you, you take it with surprise, you marvel
at its enigmatic aspects and compare it with past enigmas. (SL 80f.)
As a kind of counter-perspective, Claire and her friends introduce the narrator

to what the novel presents as a typically American way of determining the
relationship between self and world, teaching him that Americans read their
landscape through the filter of history and the human beings who made it:
„Everything we‟ve seen since we were children had stories connected with it,
and all those stories were heroic. So what we see in the landscape isn‟t
nature, but the deeds of the men who took possession of America, and at the
same time a call to be worthy of such deeds‟ (SL 101). The lesson to which
the narrator is exposed here would appear to be that a mediated relationship
to a reality which can be read for the stories it contains is potentially positive
if it helps the individual to define a sense of self in relation to a communal
identity in whose continuation he or she actively engages. This seems
confirmed at the end of the novel when the narrator visits John Ford, the
director in whom „American cinema is personified, both as the great modern
visual medium generally, and as the form in which the American national
myth finds its most valid expression‟. 20 The director‟s films are presented as
epic narratives which offer the ultimate expression of an American
conception of communal selfhood. Ford himself in the novel distinguishes
20
Christoph Parry, Peter Handke’s Landscapes of Discourse: An Exploration of Narrative and
Cultural Space (Riverside, California: Ariadne, 2003), p.77.
this from a peculiarly European notion of the uniqueness of individual

identity in which everyone „takes himself for something special‟ and of
which he is highly critical precisely because it promotes isolation: „Here in
America nobody sulks and nobody crawls into his own shell. We don‟t long
to be alone; when a man‟s alone, he‟s contemptible; all he can do is poke
around in himself, and when he hasn‟t anybody but himself to talk with, he
dries up after the first word‟ (SL 161).
The distinction made here between American and European conceptions
of selfhood leaves open the question as to whether the narrator of Short
Letter, Long Farewell will be able transfer his positive experience of the
mediated relationship between self and world to his native environment. If he
is to be able to do so, then he will need to emulate Benedictine, the
quintessential American child, who has embraced the idea that reality is its
representation and whose name, as Kurt Fickert points out, „indicates
someone blessed‟.21 Experiencing the environment with her has a liberating
effect on the narrator‟s perceptions, freeing him from the self-absorption that
blinds him to aspects of reality: „Gradually I learned to observe certain
happenings from beginning to end, instead of just gaping and saying “Aha!”‟
(SL 98). However, the reality to which Benedictine herself is shown to have
access is a world of signs; she has no relationship to a reality behind signs or
even any conception that such a reality might exist:
To my surprise, Benedictine took little notice of nature; to her the artificial signs and objects
of civilization had become nature. She was much more likely to ask questions about
television antennas, the stripes on the pedestrian crosswalks, and police sirens than about
forests and fields. The presence of traffic lights and electric signs seemed to soothe her and
at the same time to make her more lively. She took letters and numbers for granted and felt
no need to decipher them; they stood for themselves […]. (SL 98f.)
The narrator, who as a child had assumed representations in image or word

would always correspond to a reality beyond the sign – „I myself as a child
had always wanted to know where the object represented actually was‟ (SL
99) – expresses himself „jealous of this child, who from the first looked on
symbols and representations as having an existence of their own‟ (SL 100).
3.2 Finding home

In this respect, Benedictine performs a very different function in Handke‟s
text to Alice, the child in Wenders‟s film, and that difference is tied up with,
on the one hand, the filmmaker‟s more negative view of the United States
21
Fickert, p.33.
and, on the other, his greater faith in the possibility of accessing a reality
beyond its reproduction, at least in a European context. In contrast to
Handke‟s narrator, Philip experiences America in Alice in the Cities as
unremittingly bleak, and the construction of the first part of the film reflects
his sense of alienation from it.22 His drive through North Carolina is filmed
with a series of rapid cuts, reflecting the fragmentary nature of his perceptual
experience: „his frantic behaviour […] finds an echo in a series of
disconnected images, empty compositions, music that begins and ends
abruptly, a camera whose random attentions parallel the imagistic desperation
of Philip‟s persistent Polaroid shots‟. 23 He is, in fact, regularly absent from
shots establishing point-of-view (the car in which he is travelling often stands
in for him in this respect) and this offers a visual counterpart to his sense of
estrangement from the world around him [e.g. shots 9, 14 and 30].
Philip blames the monotonous nature of the American landscape, at least
in part, for the difficulties he has in reproducing it in narrative. In an
encounter with his publisher towards the end of the American sequences, he
admits to having taken on his travels a box full of pictures without having
been able to construct the narrative that would make them meaningful. With
this he signals one of the film‟s central themes, what Roger Bromley has
described as „the failure of articulation between telling and showing,
narration and image‟, while at the same time connecting that theme to
another of the film‟s dominant concerns, the exploration of the role of
America in the construction of postwar German identity.24
Philip also blames the estrangement from his environment, as the origin
of his writer‟s block, on the way in which both words and images are
perverted in contemporary American culture. His rage is directed at „the self-
aggrandising radio‟ when a voiceover cuts short a song before it is finished
[shot 38] and at „this inhuman television‟ when adverts interrupt the
broadcast of Young Mr Lincoln [shot 53]. Acting to disrupt the relationship
between the experiencing consciousness and reality, television images
clamour for the attention of the viewer in their capacity as „an advertisement
for the status quo‟ [shots 269-70] that has largely come to replace the actual
conditions they represent, a state of affairs which, in contrast to Handke‟s
22
Elsaesser describes Handke as „the most optimistic and serene writer about America and
self-estrangement‟ and Wenders‟s interpretation as „more nuanced and ambivalent‟, p.35.
23
Eric Rentschler, „How American is it? The U.S. as Image and Imaginary in German Film‟,
The German Quarterly, 57 (1984), 603-20 (p.612).
24
Roger Bromley, From Alice to Buena Vista: The Films of Wim Wenders (Westport,
Connecticut-London: Praeger, 2001), p.18.
vision of American life, can be read in Wenders‟s only negatively. 25

Somewhat paradoxically, Philip, in his utter self-absorption at the beginning
of the film, attempts to use images to re-establish his relationship to a reality
that has become increasingly unreal precisely because of its constant
reproduction in film and television. The Polaroid photos he takes – described
by Elsaesser as „the necessary yet insufficient frame to hold the image of the
self, which, in its contact with the world is constantly threatened by
dissolution‟ – represent an attempt to confirm to himself his identity as a
subject who sees.26 He is repeatedly disappointed by the failure of this
strategy, however, because the reality he has perceived never corresponds to
its reproduction.
What becomes clear is that Philip‟s problem lies less in the nature of the
landscape he observes than in the fact that he is unable to see it, in part
because reality has disappeared behind the images its cultural mediation
produces, but even more so because to see one needs to be able to position
oneself as a subject in relation to what is observed and Philip, with his
distinctly fragile sense of self, finds this difficult. This connection between
identity and sensual perception is made clear in the expression Philip himself
gives to his sense of self-alienation, already cited above: „I‟ve become a
stranger to myself. I‟ve lost my sense of hearing and seeing‟.
Thus in order to overcome alienation Philip needs to learn to see anew.
His guide to revitalised ways of perceiving the world is Alice, the nine-year-
old girl unexpectedly entrusted to his care, with whom he undertakes a mini-
odyssey through Germany in search of her grandmother with only a photo of
the old lady‟s house to guide them. As is the case with the children who
feature in Wenders‟s later films, but unlike the much younger Benedictine,
Alice has a more immediate relationship to her environment than the
damaged adults who surround her.27 She articulates her needs directly,
25
As such, Alice in the Cities offers an early treatment of the theme of the distortion of images
in U.S. culture that Wenders expands on ten years later in the essay „The American Dream‟
and which continues to provide a motif in his filmmaking up to and including Don’t Come
Knocking (2005). See: Wenders, On Film, pp.123-54. One is also reminded of the critique of
television in Handke‟s Chronicle of On-Going Events.
26
Elsaesser, p.35.
27
Geist compares Alice to the child Pearl, also played by Yella Rottländer, in The Scarlet
Letter and Hunter in Paris, Texas (1984), arguing that they „represent an ideal view of
personhood. They are whole, not yet forced into roles, uninhibitedly themselves. They are
open to new experiences, unafraid, and wise‟. Kathe Geist, „Mothers and Children in the
Films of Wim Wenders‟, in Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions, vo1. 1
(Gender and Representation in New German Cinema), ed. by Sandra Frieden, Richard W.
demanding food when she is hungry, she is able to express difficult emotions
like anger and hurt when necessary, and she favours the concrete over the
abstract, objecting to Philip‟s use of the word „dream‟ in a game of hangman
[shot 340]. Perhaps most importantly, she sees differently, the implication
being that her less conditioned gaze allows her to view the world innocently
in a way as yet uncorrupted by the culturally predetermined modes of
perception that govern the adult‟s view of the world. On top of the Empire
State building Philip‟s gaze remains fixed on buildings or on the ground
below, whilst Alice, looking through the viewing glass, follows the soaring
flight of a bird, and something of the bird‟s freedom even in the confinement
of the city imparts itself by association to Alice herself [shot 302]. In this
shot, in which Alice‟s gaze through the telescope is repeated by the „eye‟ of
the camera recording it for the audience, there is a suggestion that the magic
and spontaneity of cinema, represented in absentia by John Ford and the „lost
world‟ of American Cinema, can be regained if cinema adopts a child-like
gaze. This is a utopian motif which, as we shall discover in Chapter Five, will
come to dominate Wenders‟s conception of cinema around the time of Wings
of Desire.
While Handke‟s narrator follows in the footsteps of the pioneers, Philip,
as Stuart Taberner points out, inverts „the Hollywood fantasy of travelling
West towards freedom when he later returns East to Europe‟.28 The journey
through Germany in the second half of Alice in the Cities is filmed in a very
different manner to the American road trip to which it forms a counterpart.
Long takes are accompanied by the languorous music of the German
Krautrock band Can and as much attention is paid to the face of the viewing
subject as it is to the landscape being viewed, giving expression to the
process by which a relationship between self and world is established through
the immediacy of sensual perception. We see Alice‟s face overlaid by
McCormick, Vibeke R. Petersen, and Laurie Melissa Vogelsang (Providence-Oxford: Berg,

1993), pp.11-22 (p.17). Similarly, Kolker and Beicken give expression to the Romantic
perspective associated with children in Wenders‟s work which, strikingly, is missing from
Handke‟s early texts, maintaining that „the Wenders child represents the richness and
immediacy of being, where connection rather than fragmentation prevails‟. Robert Phillip
Kolker and Peter Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.53. Soon Handke too will attribute to
children a more holistic perception of the world than the damaged adults around them. Thus,
like Alice, Agnes in A Moment of True Feeling (Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung, 1975)
helps her father to access an alternative vision of his environment. See p.233 below.
28
Stuart Taberner, „Alice in den Städten‟, in European Cinema: An Introduction, ed. by Jill
Forbes and Sarah Street (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp.120-31 (p.124).
reflections in the car windscreen of the landscape through which she and
Philip are passing [shot 636]. This offers a counterpart to a scene earlier in
the film where Alice‟s face is reflected in a Polaroid shot of Philip, indicating
the vital part she will play in his rediscovery of a sense of self [shot 384].
Here what is implied is the importance to individual identity of the
development of a relationship to one‟s environment and to the people who
inhabit it, albeit in a process that is also inextricably linked to technology
(here the automobile and the Polaroid camera).
Taking responsibility for Alice allows Philip to share in and learn from
her ability to view the world in ways other than those determined by cultural
conditioning. It also propels forward in a purposeful fashion his otherwise
goalless journey, while at the same time allowing him to reconnect to his
childhood, the landscape of which (the Ruhr district) he and Alice pass
through. Philip has come home to a more stable sense of self because
learning to see the world again has enabled him to relocate himself as a
subject in the narrative of his life.
Technology also plays its part in the conclusion to the search for Alice‟s
grandmother. It is brought about by photography, the snapshot of her house.
This suggests that the kind of seeing Philip must practise, if his self is to
remain stable, is in fact a social one in which landscape is perceived in
relation to the matrix of human relationships which overlay it. That matrix is
here photographically mediated. A similar point is made by Eric Rentschler
when he describes what is wrong with Philip‟s mode of perception in the first
half of the film:
Philip thinks at first that observing the world will help him to understand it better. But his is
a disinterested gaze and specularity alone does not yield insight or a sense of perspective.
Memories and impressions remain empty signifiers when unbound in a larger field of
signification, a Zusammenhang.29
At the point at which Alice spots her grandmother‟s house, Philip takes up
the photo, compares it to reality and, for the first time, finds that they
correspond [shot 679]. The fact that the grandmother no longer lives in the
house seems not to matter as it has already served its purpose in teaching
Philip that one can only see reality if one inserts human subjects within it,
and only under these circumstances will one‟s gaze confirm a sense of
selfhood. Moreover, this photograph indicates that, unlike the Polaroids of
the film‟s first half, images can be perceived as meaningful because they are
29
Rentschler, p.612.
viewed within the context of social relations, and in this sense act to relay the
narrative of one‟s own life. This is confirmed when Alice, her faith in the
developing security of her relationship with Philip briefly shaken by his
encounter with an attractive woman, reassures herself of the significance of
their story together by taking out and examining her strip of photo booth
pictures of them pulling faces together [shot 716]. With a firmer sense of self
secured by his revitalised ability to see reality and read its images, Philip can
finally overcome his problems with language: in the final sequence of the
film he confirms to Alice that he will complete the story he began in America
[shot 769]. The ending remains open, but there is a clear sense in which
Philip is now moving forward as the subject of his own life and its narrative.
4. Correspondence – divergence
This brief examination of the two works in parallel makes abundantly clear
that Handke and Wenders address similar questions even when they work
independently of one another during this phase of their collaboration. One of
their primary interests is the complexity of the (autobiographical) subject‟s
relationship to reality, and thus they probe in Alice in the Cities and in Short
Letter, Long Farewell the nature of selfhood, the relationship of self to
other(s), the constitution of reality and the kind of access the individual has to
it, the various ways in which a relationship to reality can be mediated, and the
consequences of processes of mediation for the experiencing subject, this
latter constituting the self-reflexive dimension of both novel and film.
More precisely, they are concerned with these issues in relation to a
particular type of subjectivity: that of the thirty-something male in crisis, for
whom relationships with women have become problematic. The failure of
male-female relationships clearly plays a causal part in their self-alienation
and in both works the protagonists strive to overcome their estrangement
from women. For each, a sexual encounter that takes place towards the end of
their journeys acts as a marker of their progress towards overcoming
alienation from self and others, and each text ends with a reconciliatory
movement towards or away from a woman: the cessation of hostilities
between Handke‟s narrator and his ex-wife implies that they will be able to
undertake their „long farewell‟ without bitterness, while Wenders‟s film
leaves open the possibility that, in accompanying Alice to Munich to meet
her mother, Philip will be able to continue his association with both in some
form.
Vital to a probing of the nature of these subjectivities in Short Letter,
Long Farewell and Alice in the Cities is an investigation of the relationship
between selfhood and seeing. As has become clear, both film and novel insist
that identity is intimately tied up with the way the individual perceives
reality. At the outset, Handke‟s narrator and Philip Winter suffer similarly
from perceptual disturbances growing out of their self-obsession. Both learn
in the course of their travels to see differently, and in each case this means
engaging in what might be described as a kind of „social seeing‟, learning
how to observe the environment through the lens provided by relationships
with the individuals who inhabit it. There is a distinction, however, between
the form this „social seeing‟ takes in Short Letter, Long Farewell and in Alice
in the Cities. In Wenders‟s film it is tied up with literal and metaphorical
notions of Heimat, of belonging at once physically and emotionally:
revitalised perceptions allow Philip to re-find himself in Germany, within the
context of his own cultural heritage, and the relationships which make such
perceptual shifts possible are with real human beings. His new-found acuity
enables him finally to resolve the misapprehension that made him confuse
„Americanization with America‟, leading him to look „to the U.S. for self-
validation‟, and instead to accommodate the influence of that other, foreign
culture within his sense of himself as German. 30 Such a reconciliation,
already hinted at when Philip sips Coca-Cola at a Chuck Berry concert in
Wuppertal [shot 577], is made manifest in the film‟s final sequence. Having
opened with Philip reading about the „lost world‟ of John Ford, the film‟s
final sequence ends with a helicopter shot where the camera moves further
and further away from the train to reveal a wide-angle European landscape
that references its American counterpart [shot 776]. In Short Letter, Long
Farewell, by contrast, „social seeing‟ remains more abstract. It is related to
the narrator‟s assumptions about a typically American version of
communally-anchored selfhood and based on his reading of a mythical rather
than a real United States. Therefore it is not connected directly either to „real‟
relationships with „real‟ people or to his identity as a European.
This distinction also signals the extent to which the two texts move
towards different conceptions of what might constitute an ideal form of
selfhood. Although Alice in the Cities insists on the importance of
constructing a social matrix in which to locate the self, its final sequence
valorises the self-contained and self-assertive individual. That opening
himself up to another has enabled Philip to regain a sense of himself as the
subject of his life is signalled by the fact that, as they travel together towards
their destination, he informs Alice that he is at last ready to take up his
writing again, to author „this story‟ – i.e. the one we have just witnessed as
30
Geist, The Cinema of Wim Wenders, p.38.
film, the story of his own development towards confident selfhood. This
location of Philip as the putative author of the film‟s narrative aligns him, of
course, with the filmmaker himself. Short Letter, Long Farewell is more
ambivalent about this kind of self-contained subjectivity. The ideal to which
the narrator is drawn is that of a „communal‟ self, defined and maintained by
its place within a (mythical) community. That he appears to have achieved
his goal is signalled by the fact that in the final paragraphs he virtually
disappears from the text. It is Judith who tells John Ford their story: „In the
narrative his “I” is replaced by a “we”‟. 31 However, as the novel concludes at
this point „with a fairy-tale happy ending‟,32 proposing but not spelling out
the narrator‟s subsequent development, the reader is given no clue as to how
he might live out this kind of selfhood in practice, particularly in the
European context in which, according to the text, the notion of the sovereign
– and thus isolated – individual retains its currency.
The differences established between the two works so far relate to a more
general distinction in their depiction of the United States. In neither text is
America – its people, its culture, its history, its geography – of interest for its
own sake, it is significant only for the role it has played in the construction of
postwar German/Austrian identities and to the extent that interaction with it
acts as a catalyst for self-exploration. It is „an imaginary, a site where the
subject comes to understand itself through a constant play and identification
with reflections of itself as an other‟.33 Wenders‟s attitude to America in this
regard is, as we have seen, generally assumed to be a degree more negative
than Handke‟s, a view that would appear to be confirmed by the fact that
while in Alice in the Cities Philip‟s quest to find himself founders on the
stultifying nature of the American reality he encounters – „the real, non-
mythical, non-John-Ford America‟ – for Handke‟s narrator the trip from East
to West coast is productive in terms of his personal development.34
The difference in the assessment of the positive potential of the United
States for each of the protagonists would also appear to be confirmed by the
landscapes on which they choose to let their gazes linger. While the camera
in Alice in the Cities makes a mockery of (European faith in) the American
dream by recording from Philip‟s point-of-view a series of dilapidated
31
Sigrid Mayer, „Im “Western” nichts Neues? Zu den Modellen in Der kurze Brief zum langen
Abschied‟, in Handke: Ansätze – Analysen – Anmerkungen, ed. by Manfred Jurgensen
(Berne-Munich: Francke, 1979), pp.145-64 (p.157).
32
Bartmann, p.128.
33
Rentschler, p.607.
34
Peter Sternberg, „Going Down the Road: German Claustrophobia and American Space‟,
German Life and Letters, 38 (1985), 165-76 (p.173).
streetscapes, run-down diners, motels, and gas stations, Handke‟s narrator

lets his eyes wander with pleasure over a landscape cultivated in a fashion
that allows for the kind of reassuring amalgam of artificiality and naturalness
recognizable from its reproduction in cinema and elsewhere: „The sky was
cloudless, the hops and wheat had begun to sprout. Smoke rose from towns
tucked away behind the hills. Although every inch of ground looked as if it
had just been cultivated, there wasn‟t a living soul in the fields, which were
impersonating unspoiled nature‟ (SL 59).
However, it could also be argued that this version of American reality can
provide a positive experience for the protagonist of Short Letter, Long
Farewell only as long as he is prepared to blind himself to the existence of a
„real‟ America beyond its myths, allowing himself to perceive only those
dimensions of the country at one with the world contained within the epic
narratives of John Ford. That is, he can still locate the „lost world‟ that Philip
by contrast has sought and most definitely failed to find. That a „real‟ United
States of social inequity exists beyond the narrator‟s harmonising vision of
communal identity is signalled only occasionally in the novel, but the very
fact that the narrator does register it, as for example when he glimpses from
the window of a Greyhound bus Harlem‟s „wrecked cars and tumbledown
tenements‟ (SL 21), implies that its exclusion from what he is well aware is a
construction of an American reality is wilful. In a similar fashion – and in
contrast to Wenders‟s film from which all traces of Vietnam are absent – the
novel indicates its awareness of and therefore deliberate refusal to engage
with contemporary U.S. foreign policy.35
4.1 Handke: cinema and narrative

The various ways in which the novel and film depict the United States relate
in turn to differences in their understanding of the part played by both
35
Particularly significant in this respect is the narrator‟s encounter with a disturbed marine
who has clearly seen action: „I‟m not crazy about being a marine, but it‟s my job. One time I
saw a reed growing in shallow water. There were a few other reeds nearby, but they all
moved. This one reed didn‟t move. We had to kill somebody now and then or we‟d have
been killed ourselves‟ (SL 43f.). The novel‟s refusal of any kind of engagement with the
reality of American politics is summed up neatly by Reinhard Baumgart who asserts that
„Handke‟s book reads as if over there Marcuse and not Richard Nixon had become
president‟. Baumgart, „Vorwärts, zurück in die Zukunft‟, in Scharang, pp.90-94 (p.92).
Gemünden points out that, in the light of the generally more critical views about the United
States expressed by other German-speaking writers such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger and
Reinhard Lettau, „the polemical stance behind Handke‟s purely descriptive and apparently
apolitical style becomes evident‟, p.137.
language and images in the experience and/or construction of reality. While

Handke‟s narrator does undergo mystical moments of union with a reality
that appears to exist before or beyond language and outside of the
frameworks of cultural mediation (although, of course, in textual terms this
experience has to be reproduced within language), the novel implies that
there are positive dimensions to living with a reality mediated via an
understanding of the human history that has been played out within it. That
history – and the myths it has inspired – are reproduced and reiterated
throughout the narrator‟s journey in a variety of sometimes unlikely forms,
such as the images of decisive historical moments on the curtains in his hotel
bedroom or the restaurant menu containing items including „a steak Alamo, a
Louisiana pullet, a bear hock à la Daniel Boone, a cutlet à la Uncle Tom‟ (SL
37). So pervasive is this imaginary America that the narrator comes to read
the American landscape via the signs that provide it with an artificial, and
therefore potentially disturbing, but paradoxically rather comforting
connectedness, as in the moment when he hears the signal sounded on the
riverboat Mark Twain:
So overpowering was that signal that, splintered by fear, I lived a dream of America that up
until then I had only heard about. It was a moment of expertly organized resurrection, in
which the things around me ceased to be unrelated, and people and landscape, the living and
the dead, took their places in a single painful and theatrical revelation of history.
Theatrically flowed the Mississippi, theatrically the tourists moved from deck to deck, while
an old man‟s deep, far-carrying voice told the story of the great riverboats over the loud
speaker […]. Sick as I was of loudspeaker voices on tours, I could have listened to that
dramatic voice forever. (SL 102f.)
While this experience has an aural trigger, the text generally associates the
revelation of a reality in which the individual can transcend his or her
isolation by grasping the interconnectedness of the world (of signs) with its
visual mediation. This is achieved not only via cinema, but also through
pictures of the kind created by Claire‟s painter friends who reproduce those
„historical moments in historical landscapes‟ which make up the myth of
America such as „the first wagon to cross the Mississippi bridge at St Louis
or Abraham Lincoln being shot at the theater‟ (SL 100). In keeping with this
valorisation of the visual, Handke is also concerned in the novel to explore
whether an „imagistic‟ language and a „cinematic‟ structure might provide an
apposite means to articulate the relationship between the narrator‟s self and
the reality he inhabits: that is, he plays in this text with the possibility of
recomposing literature as film.
At first sight, the novel might appear to be a particularly literary text,

saturated as it is with allusions to other literary works from a variety of
periods and contexts. Some intertexts are external to the story itself: the title,
for example, alludes to Raymond Chandler‟s The Long Goodbye (1953) and
with it to the American genre of hard-boiled detective fiction; mottos from
Karl Philipp Moritz‟s Anton Reise (published in four parts between 1785 and
1790 and subtitled „A Psychological Novel‟) precede each of Short Letter,
Long Farewell‟s two sections. The status of others – whether they are
conscious allusions on the part of the narrator or not – is less clear. This, for
instance, is the case with the novel‟s opening line – „Jefferson Street is a
quiet thoroughfare in Providence‟ – a quotation from a Patricia Highsmith
novel and thus another reference to the detective fiction genre (SL 3).36 But
Short Letter, Long Farewell is also „a book about reading‟, 37 and many
intertextual references are to novels the narrator reads along the way,
including The Great Gatsby and later Green Henry (Der grüne Heinrich,
1854-55 and 1879-80), a Bildungsroman (novel of self-development) by the
Swiss author Gottfried Keller. Particularly the passages he reads aloud from
the latter to Claire provide him with a way of articulating his sense of self
and his relationship to reality. Perhaps more importantly in relation to its
exploration of the theme of America as myth, the literary allusions help to
blur the distinction in the text between the real and the fictional. They are
given equal status to „memories, experiences, and hopes‟ and, as June
Schlueter points out, this „interplay of fiction and reality […], when
juxtaposed with the development of the identity of America, leads Handke‟s
hero to the realization that fiction is an integral part of what most people
think of as real‟. 38
However, the fictional models represented by these intertexts are
ultimately rejected as inadequate to the task of providing a form for the
reproduction of the narrator‟s experiences. Handke, with a nod to his earlier
works, plays ironically with their genre conventions – Judith‟s pursuit of the
narrator across America provides a plot-line straight from the detective novel,
while the distinctive features of the Bildungsroman are alluded to on several
occasions, not least in the narrator‟s Bildungsgespräch (enlightening
discussion) with John Ford as mentor figure at the novel‟s end – only to
36
The reference has been spotted by Schlueter who notes that it „serves not only to connect
this novel with detective fiction (as the title already has), but also to suggest the indirect
experience which is to color the protagonist‟s responses to reality‟, p.95.
37
Parry, p.76.
38
Schlueter, pp.95f.
reject them all as „no longer able to grasp the imagistic reality experienced by
the narrator‟.39 This reality would appear to demand a more open-ended and
descriptive prose style than that represented by these literary models and, in
response to it, Handke produces what many critics have identified as a kind
of „cinematic‟ text whose antecedents, in genre terms, are filmic rather than
literary: the Western (referenced not only in the allusions to John Ford but
also in the journey westwards towards the old frontier and in the narrator‟s
„showdown‟ with Judith which immediately precedes their reconciliation and
subsequent visit to Ford‟s home),40 but especially the road movie, described
by Gemünden „as the most adequate genre to give expression to Handke‟s
cinematic imagination‟.41 On the one hand, the influence of the road movie is
felt in the novel‟s various settings, „littered with names of streets, places, and
highways and with the paraphernalia of the road: gas stations, motels,
restaurants, drive-in theatres, highway billboards etc‟, 42 all of which „express
the idea of mobility and lack of permanence‟. 43 On the other hand, it is also
felt, as Parry notes, in the way the novel gives form to the experience of the
journey through the American landscape: „it is in translating unbounded
space into linear narrative that this novel comes closest to the film,
particularly the road movie with which it shares its narrative structure‟. 44
Several commentators have also noted Handke‟s deployment in this novel
of a kind of „cinematic‟ prose, his tendency „to use filmic techniques as a
stylistic element‟:
This is typified by Handke‟s preference for landscapes, moments and situations over past
history of characters or development of story […]. This can be traced not only in Handke‟s
landscape depictions which are reminiscent of the cinematography of the road movie, but
also in his illustration of epiphanic moments which have distinctive filmic qualities.45
39
Gemünden, p.154.
40
Mayer reads the whole momentum of the text towards its potentially positive ending as
evidence of its indebtedness to the structure of the Western: „At the end of this sometimes
dangerous search for “new land” waits a dream of independence from old ties and freedom
from persecution and threat. It is hard not to see in this dream the fantasy of the traditional
“Western”‟, p.150.
41
Gemünden, p.153. He also argues that this genre does in fact provide the best point of
reference for the creation of a „cinematic‟ text: „If Handke wanted to write a film, then the
road movie was the adequate genre because it is itself an allegory of cinema: driving in a car
creates the same sensation as sitting in a movie theatre‟, p.156.
42
Ibid., p.154.
43
Parry, p.79.
44
Ibid., p.77.
45
Robert Halsall, „Place, Autonomy and the Individual: Short Letter, Long Farewell and A
Sorrow Beyond Dreams‟, in The Works of Peter Handke: International Perspectives, ed. by
Thus this „cinematic‟ style is seen to be related to the fact that the text is to
some large degree descriptive, recording as it does the narrator‟s reactions
rather than his actions.46 According to both Parry and Gemünden, it is
precisely his passivity that makes the narrator a kind of „cinematic‟ subject.
Parry notes that the text separates „the “I” as agent or actor from the “I” as
observer or camera. The latter is almost always present, whereas the former
regularly disappears from view‟, 47 and Gemünden links the narrator‟s
characteristic specularity to his attempt to construct a relationship between
self and world:
Time and again the novel provides examples of how the I-narrator captures the world in a
fashion similar to the lens of a camera, asserting himself as a veritable eye-narrator whose
primary occupations consist in watching, watching himself, and watching himself watching
– thus establishing a link between the inner world of the protagonist and the world viewed
outside, between his subjectivity and the continuous flow of moving images. 48
Thus Handke‟s „cinematic‟ prose style would appear to be the most adequate
mode in which to represent the narrator‟s subjectivity in its relationship to an
external world he observes while travelling, but with which he generally fails
to engage, linking theme with form.
This suggests that Handke‟s novel is, to some extent at least,
recompositional in the sense defined in this study. Certainly, Handke‟s
creation of a „cinematic‟ text is generally understood to imply a critique of
those literary intertexts which prove not wholly satisfactory as models for the
expression of the narrator‟s subjectivity. Gemünden, for instance, argues that
the author‟s textual re-working of a filmic form undermines the certainties of
the Bildungsroman as „the genre of the road movie criticizes the notion of
travel as leading to a more stable spiritual or social state‟.49 Other
commentators argue that Handke‟s openness in prose to the techniques of
David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp (Riverside, California: Ariadne, 2005), pp.46-79 (p.55).
46
Bartmann notes that it is „not action and deeds, but reaction and perception which determine
the narrator‟s practice and thus the structure of the narrative‟, p.122.
47
Parry, p.78.
48
Gemünden, pp.134f. Similarly, Elsaesser makes a cinematic connection between the
narrator‟s concern with self and his observation of the world outside himself – „Handke‟s
narrator has an intense experience not of America, but of himself – as if projected on a
screen three thousand miles wide. Travelling becomes scanning this gigantic screen, motion
becomes interchangeable with vision, and vision requires motion, with the world passing
either in front of one like a movie, or oneself being in motion, as in a car, a plane‟ – and he
goes on to suggest that „most of Wenders‟ films are focussed on this reciprocity‟, p.42.
49
Gemünden, p.155.
cinema is the result of his suspicion of narrative: thus Robert Halsall

maintains in relation to Short Letter, Long Farewell that „the use of filmic
elements is a metafictional technique, by which one fictional medium, film,
comments on another, the literary narrative, the former calling the latter into
question‟,50 while Parry makes a more general point about Handke‟s work in
comparison with Wenders‟s cinema: „Like his friend the filmmaker Wim
Wenders, Handke has always been suspicious of the foregrounding effect
implicit in the narrative mode. This made him highly critical of the traditions
of his own genre and open to stimuli from other arts‟. 51
However, with John Ford offered up as the apotheosis of American
cinema in the text, it could be argued that it is precisely a tradition of
narrative cinema with which the narrator desires to engage in the attempt to
determine a relationship between self and world. Quite rightly, both
Gemünden and Parry point to the novel‟s unwillingness to contain the events
it depicts within a rigid narrative framework. Gemünden argues that „the
narrator‟s aesthetic experience abroad‟ is characterised by „an emphasis on
randomness, a world waiting to be discovered where everything and
everyone warrants equal and sustained attention, and a refusal to impose a
narrative or psychological order that would “explain” or contextualise the
events unfolding in front of the perceiving eye‟. 52 Likewise, Parry notes the
text‟s unwillingness „to tell a rounded off story‟, arguing that „the book
presents a sequence of images, linked above all by the slow journey across
the United States. The line on the map replaces the string of events as the
narrative backbone of the book, which is essentially about the spatial
experience of passage‟.53 However, while the narrator might spend the text
observing, and the text itself record those observations, he is also searching
for a way to give form to his experiences. That is, he is driven by a desire for
narrative. Part of his fascination with an American conception of selfhood is
that he understands it to be located in relation to a communal history
providing a narrative framework within which the individual life can be held
and contained. While the literary texts he reads might no longer provide a
model for the telling of contemporary selfhood, the pilgrimage to John Ford
demonstrates to the narrator that the story of the self can still be narrated. As
Christoph Bartmann maintains: „What John Ford presents to the reconciled
pair at the end as the American way of telling stories is an aesthetic ideal to
50
Halsall, p.55.
51
Parry, pp.5f.
52
Gemünden, p.147.
53
Parry, p.77.
which the narrator aspires‟. 54 The whole text leads towards the story that
Judith narrates of their experiences, the story in which the narrator can feel
his desire for a sense of „communal‟ selfhood at last realised: „When Judith
tells John Ford the story of Short Letter, Long Farewell, the novel‟s I-
narrator is contained within this story, he is “depersonalised”, the object of a
story‟.55 That is, for all its „cinematic‟ qualities – its open-endedness, its
concern with images, and its focus on the subject seeing – the novel at its end
reasserts, albeit playfully and ironically, the importance of narrative, filmic or
otherwise, for the construction of self in relation to an experience of reality
and those who inhabit it:
„Now tell me your story,‟ said John Ford.

And Judith told him how we had come to America, how she had followed me, how she had
robbed me and wanted to kill me, and how at last we were ready to part in peace.
When she had done telling our story, a silent laugh spread over John Ford‟s face.
„Ach Gott!‟ he said.
He grew grave and turned to Judith.
„Is all that true?‟ he asked in English. „None of it‟s made up?‟
„No,‟ said Judith, „it all happened.‟ (SL 167)
4.2 Wenders: significant images

Elsaesser has argued that, like Handke, Wenders assumes that reality – and
identity – can be experienced only as mediated: „Wenders like Handke,
seems to accept that selfhood, identity are only possible across the
(mechanical, technological, disinterested) otherness of the image, and the
processes of mediation this entails‟.56 As Alice in the Cities demonstrates,
however, Wenders‟s attitude to images and their role in the mediation of
reality is distinct from that of his author friend. Whereas Handke‟s narrator
seems largely happy to inhabit the „reality‟ of an imaginary America,
accepting non-judgmentally the images through which it is constructed, Alice
in the Cities creates, as does Wenders‟s cinema in general, an evaluative
distinction between images which can be assessed positively and those which
are ultimately negative. Gemünden points out that:
The project of discriminating between good and bad images, between false and authentic
representation, between autonomy and manipulation or seduction, is omnipresent in the
cinema of Wim Wenders. Against the threat of seduction and manipulation Wenders
heroically upholds the notion of the image as something pure, transparent, and autonomous
54
Bartmann, p.135.
55
Manfred Mixner, Peter Handke (Kronberg: Athenäum, 1977), p.158.
56
Elsaesser, p.47.
– an image that does not derive its meaning through a network of signification but is
meaningful in itself.57
In Alice in the Cities this distinction has a specific geographical and cultural
resonance. America – at least as Philip perceives it – is the land of perverted
images which act to construct reality as advertisement, and it is ultimately
rejected by the protagonist because its (urban) landscapes do not allow him to
invest seeing with significance – hence the box of Polaroid photographs for
which he fails to find a story. Germany, however, has the potential to be
different and thus, as Taberner notes, Philip‟s „return to Europe is linked with
his efforts to reinvest images with meaning following their reduction to one-
dimensionality by the American culture industry‟. 58
His journey across Germany takes the form of a lesson in which he learns
to see more meaningfully. His mentor in this undertaking is Alice who, as a
child, has, in Wenders‟s world, a gaze less culturally encumbered than that of
the adults around her. Wenders is fascinated – in this film and elsewhere – by
the idea of the child‟s ability to see „pre-culturally‟ and the possibility this
opens up that his adult figures can regain access to a reality that exists
beyond the linguistic systems or perceptual frameworks in which it is
interpreted, contained, or simply reproduced. Later he will associate the
camera with the gaze of ahistorical, apolitical, acultural angels who are in
turn connected to the children as the only human beings actually able to see
them. At this early stage, the association of the child with the camera is also
already present, as we have seen, when the film reproduces Alice‟s gaze
through the viewing glass on the Empire State building, tracking the flight of
the bird, implying in the process that she and the camera are one. This
correlation of child and camera intimates that the filmmaker is able to share
something of the child‟s innocence, freeing images from the cultural baggage
that accrues detrimentally to them. 59
Evidence for the child/filmmaker‟s potentially uncorrupted vision is
provided in the second half of Alice in the Cities where images act as
testimony to Philip‟s (and by extension, Wenders‟s) revitalised perception.
We witness a series of shots of towns in the Ruhr and the surrounding
57
Gemünden, p.174.
58
Taberner, p.123.
59
Bromley notes that in a documentary made by Paul Joyce „Wenders says that the child‟s eye
is the ideal point-of-view for a camera – blank, curious, no opinion‟, p.19. It could also be
argued that if Alice is aligned with the camera and Philip‟s gaze becomes aligned with
Alice‟s, then this strengthens the idea that Philip is the source of the film‟s images and thus
author of its narrative, a point which will be explored further below.
countryside which appear to have no real function – specifically no narrative

function – other than to act as testimony to the existence of that landscape
and to record the experience of moving through it. 60 In this context,
Gemünden‟s assessment of the task of Wenders‟s cinema seems exactly
right: „to perceive and at the same time to authenticate by ascribing truth and
beauty – hence the preserving gesture of many of his films that seek to
capture what is about to disappear‟.61 In this sense, the film would seem to
assert that it is possible, in Germany at least, to rescue images from the kind
of manipulation to which they are subjected in American culture in general,
and in contemporary, mainstream Hollywood cinema in particular. But the
implication would appear to be that, for this to happen, the images must be
functionless – not forced to become part of a system of meaning beyond
themselves – including having no purpose within a narrative. Elsaesser
maintains that this is indeed the case within Wenders‟s cinema, where
„images are composed in view of their discontinuity, so that the very
elaboration of composition tends to drain them of narrative potential‟. 62
However, the film also insists that Philip must make images meaningful
for himself – he needs to find the story that connects the Polaroids in his box
– and to do so he must invest them with a significance beyond their mere
existence, one that relates them to his own life. Filtered through the lens
provided by his growing emotional bond with Alice, the film‟s images of the
Ruhr landscape do in fact come to represent more than themselves. For him,
they are a return to childhood, and thus a coming home to a more stable sense
of self anchored in relation to past experience. That is, in this process of
making images signify, Philip does in fact harness them to a narrative,
finding a way at the end of the film, like his counterpart in Short Letter, Long
Farewell, to construct his life as a story.
4.3 Ambiguities and contradictions

There is a comparable contradiction in both novel and film in terms of their
exploration of the relationship between image and narrative, one which
grows out of their complex and ambiguous view of the role of each in the
reproduction of reality. Handke‟s narrator rejects the literary models of
earlier periods as inadequate to the expression of contemporary subjectivity,
finding instead an anchor point for his sense of self in a version of reality and
60
Wenders maintains that a similar sequence in The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty
represents the moment where he finally found his own cinematic voice. See p.125.
61
Gemünden, p.175.
62
Elsaesser, p.49.
a construction of communal identity offered by the narrative cinema of

Hollywood‟s earlier twentieth-century heyday as represented by the films of
John Ford. However, that the novel‟s „cinematic‟ happy end, in which the
narrator finds his place in the narrative constructed by Judith, should be
understood ironically is signalled by the fact that his story is contained in a
literary text whose images are created by words and, moreover, one which
structurally has more in common with the open-ended road movie than the
closed narratives of the films lauded by the narrator.
Similarly paradoxical is the tension between word and image in Alice in
the Cities. Being unable to see is offered up as the root cause of Philip‟s
writer‟s block. The implication is that if Philip could see meaningfully he
would be able to make the kinds of connections between images that would
allow them to signify within the framework of a story. That Philip has
succeeded in doing so is implied by the film‟s end, when he announces to
Alice that he is going to put „this story‟ down on paper. This implies that in
the final instance it is words – and by extension literary form – which give
images meaning. That is, for all its structural openness and the (sometime)
independence of its images from the narrative, the film ends by valorising
narrative and writing – Philip will write the story of his life. Taberner goes so
far as to claim „the road movie becomes a Bildungsroman. Winter‟s
automobile tour through the streets of West German cities is metamorphosed
into a “novel of self-development” in which the protagonist finally achieves
maturity and social integration‟.63 If this is the case, then this must be
understood as an ironic reversal – a deconstruction even – of Handke‟s
rejection in his prose of this literary form in favour of more productive,
cinematic models. However – just to complicate matters – if the
autobiographically constructed Philip can be understood as the narrative‟s
putative author, as is implied by his claim to Alice in the film‟s final
sequence that he is at last in a position to tell the story the viewer has just
witnessed, then he becomes the author of a film rather than a novel.
Moreover, he becomes the author of a film which exhibits within itself a
tension between image and narrative: it argues against the coercion of images
to mean something more than simply themselves, while at the same time it
implies that images must become part of the narrative of an individual‟s life
if meaningful relations between self, world, and others are to be constructed.
What these contradictions in both the novel‟s and the film‟s exploration
of the tensions inherent in the relationship between word and image imply is
that, despite their primary allegiance to a particular creative sphere, both
63
Taberner, p.125.
writer and filmmaker are fascinated by the possibilities inherent in the artistic
field in which the other predominantly works, to the extent that they are
willing to re-configure their own medium in terms of the other‟s. Clearly this
represents a different process for filmmaker and author. For Wenders it
involves engaging with cinema as a synthesis of word and image in which the
two components compete with one another in an ambiguous relationship to
narrative. The possibility of transcending language, which on occasion
Wenders succeeds in doing, is not open to Handke, but as a novelist he can
use it to simulate the experience of cinema in ways which can, on the one
hand, reveal the limitations of literary models in relation to the construction
of a contemporary experience of reality, while on the other still celebrate the
seductive power of the literary narrative. Ultimately, each seems unable to
determine which medium is better able to provide scope for exploring the
nature of reality, the individual‟s relationship to it, and the ways in which
both can be reproduced. It is perhaps this ambivalence which helps to explain
the initial attraction of each to the work of the other and their mutual
willingness to come together in the attempt to find new ways of exploring the
questions that fascinate them both.
Despite numerous intertextual references, neither Alice in the Cities nor
Short Letter, Long Farewell is as obviously a work of adaptation as the other
four films considered in this study, but, as we have seen, each explores, in
ways which are often remarkably similar yet decidedly contradictory,
questions about the relationship between text/language/narrative/reading and
writing on the one hand, and film/image/description/viewing and seeing on
the other. Alice in the Cities, moreover, does so with implicit reference to
Handke‟s novel, which undoubtedly acted as source material for it. As the
other chapters of this study demonstrate, complex and shifting attitudes
towards these issues recur as central points of focus in the work of both
Wenders and Handke, apart and together. Perhaps not surprisingly, though,
given their complexity, neither Wenders‟s nor Handke‟s position on the
concerns that have been identified here as common to them both has
remained static. Already the standpoints taken in Alice in the Cities and Short
Letter, Long Farewell are different from those assumed in their earlier works.
These will shift again in the course of their collaboration, taking them
initially along similar paths and leading them eventually in directions
different to the point of incompatibility. The next chapter will focus on the
way in which their third collaborative project, Wrong Move, offers a new
reflection on many of the issues discussed here. At the same time, however, it
will investigate the nature of the creative tensions manifest in the process of
translation from Handke‟s script to Wenders‟s film, tensions which suggest

that even as they work closely together for the last time, writer and filmmaker
are asserting their independence from one another.
Chapter Four
Mute Stories and Blind Alleys: Text, Image and Allusion in

Wrong Move
„There‟s a lot you don‟t notice.‟1
„If only I could write.‟ [Shot 22]
„Basically pictures have always meant

more to me than stories, yes, and
sometimes the stories were merely a
hook for hanging pictures.‟2
1. Tendenzwende
According to Wenders, he and Handke first mooted the idea of adapting
Goethe‟s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre, 1795/96) immediately after the filming of The Goalkeeper’s Fear
of the Penalty: „since the time of The Goalkeeper, Peter Handke and I had
talked vaguely about Goethe‟s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and a
possible collaboration on it‟.3 However, other projects intervened for both
writer and filmmaker between 1971 and July/August 1973, when Handke
produced the original script for the film (according to the dates given at the
end of the version published in 1975), and the late summer/early autumn of
1974 when Wenders shot Wrong Move.4 This period saw the publication of
the works discussed in the previous chapter: Handke‟s A Sorrow Beyond
Dreams and Short Letter, Long Farewell (both 1972) and Wenders‟s Alice in
the Cities (1974).
Whilst these three works demonstrate, as we have seen, continuity with
both the text and film versions of The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, they
also diverge from them in a number of significant ways. With the exception
of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, which tells the story of Handke‟s mother, the
protagonists in the work of both writer and filmmaker remain remarkably
1
Shot 310. Peter Handke, Falsche Bewegung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), p.58.
Further references in the text as FB. References to the film appear in square brackets.
2
Wim Wenders, „Reverse Angle: New York City, March 1982‟, in Wenders, On Film: Essays
and Conversations (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp.179-81 (p.179).
3
Wim Wenders, „Le Souffle de l‟ange‟, in Wenders, On Film, pp.248-73 (p.254).
4
In the director‟s commentary to the film Wenders initially claims that it was shot over four
weeks in summer 1974, later, with reference to the colours of the landscape, he suggests
they were shooting in the autumn. DVD released by Kinowelt Home Entertainment GmbH,
2006.
similar: alienated and disoriented young men struggling to come to terms

with the relationship between self and world continue to provide the focus of
interest. But for Handke the two novels from 1972 also represent a move
away from the critique of language found in his earlier works towards a
broader-based exploration of the subject‟s relationship to reality, with a new
emphasis, particularly in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, on the social, historical
and cultural determinants of an individual‟s life. Moreover, both A Sorrow
Beyond Dreams and Short Letter, Long Farewell are more transparently
rooted in Handke‟s own experience than his previous texts. For Wenders,
Alice in the Cities represents a return, for the first time since Summer in the
City and following two literary adaptations (The Scarlet Letter and The
Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty), to filming from his own script, and thus
also to a more spontaneous mode of filmmaking, one which allows him to
explore the individual‟s relationship to reality from a more personal and
autobiographical perspective. Later, as we saw in the previous chapter, he
would maintain that: „With Alice in the Cities I found my individual voice in
the cinema‟.5
The direction in which both Handke and Wenders move with these
explorations of issues of (autobiographical) identity and the constitution of
selfhood brings their work into line with the general cultural shift in the
1970s towards what has come to be known as „New Subjectivity‟. This
literary and, to a lesser extent, filmic trend is associated with a rejection, in
the wake of the perceived failure of the student movement, of political action
and the language of politics, and a renewed concern with personal experience
and the less reified kinds of language needed to give expression to it. This
„change of direction‟, or Tendenzwende, is generally taken to be signalled in
literary terms by the appearance in 1973 of two works that take as their theme
the experience of political activism from the perspective of disillusioned (and
quasi-autobiographical) protagonists, Peter Schneider‟s Lenz and Karen
Struck‟s Class Love. As has been suggested, the appearance of the latter in a
pivotal sequence in Alice in the Cities signals a conscious alignment of the
film on Wenders‟s part with this cultural shift.
Made a year after Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move can also be clearly
located as a post-Tendenzwende work. It is this aspect of the film in particular
that receives attention from Richard W. McCormick, who offers a convincing
reading of the film as embodying the cultural debates of the 1970s,
maintaining that it „is a unique reflection upon the interaction in West
Germany during the mid-1970s of discourses about writing, politics,
5
Wenders, „Le Souffle de l‟ange‟, p.254.
Mute Stories and Blind Alleys 197
specularity, filmmaking, and history – political and literary history, both

recent and more remote‟.6
The most significant manifestation of the film‟s inscription of
contemporary debates is found in the disquisition of Wilhelm Meister, its
would-be writer protagonist, on the impossibility of writing politically, as he
walks with his travelling companion, Laertes, through the vineyards of the
Rhine valley:
It was actually as I began to write that the political became incomprehensible to me. I
wanted to write politically and noticed that I was missing the words to do so. That is, the
words existed alright, but then again they had nothing to do with me. I didn‟t feel anything
at all in the process. That doesn‟t come from me, I thought. I wrote as perhaps progressive
politicians speak, only more helplessly, because I wasn‟t doing anything, and more
trenchantly, but out of helplessness. (FB 51)
Laertes points out that this might be an argument for giving up writing and
becoming politically active, but Wilhelm counters with the assertion that it is
not politics but poetry that speaks to his personal needs: „But I had just
discovered through writing that I was unable to formulate my desires in a
political way. They have never yet been roused by a politician, only ever by
poets‟ (FB 52).
McCormick makes the salient point that this debate can be read „as almost
a summary of arguments on the relation of literature and politics heard in
West Germany between 1968 and the Tendenzwende‟.7 While Laertes‟s
words echo the sentiments of the late 1960s „when literature was proclaimed
dead‟, Wilhelm gives voice to the „new subjective‟ response: „at a time when
political activism seemed futile, literature seemed once again viable, and, in
literature‟s greater suitability for the communication of authentic subjective
experience, it was argued that literary endeavors were indeed political‟.8
McCormick also points out that because this dialogue takes place
immediately prior to Laertes‟s revelation that he is a former Nazi directly
responsible for the murder of Jews in Vilnius, the debate about the
relationship between poetry and politics is linked explicitly to the problem of
the German past. Laertes, who is troubled by the memory of the crimes he
has committed (every time he remembers them he has a nosebleed and he
6
Richard W. McCormick, „The Writer in Film: Wrong Move‟, in The Cinema of Wim
Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition, ed. by Roger F. Cook and Gerd
Gemünden (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1997), pp.89-109 (p.90).
7
Ibid., pp.92f.
8
Ibid., p.93.
scourges himself at night), makes a direct connection between the separation

of politics and art, as a realm of the „natural‟, and the rise of fascism, offering
his insight up as a warning to Wilhelm: „Those were completely different
times, you have to understand that. We distinguished – almost in the same
way as you are doing now – between the natural and politics, and in the end
what developed out of our defence of the natural against a hated politics was
a politics of the most terrible kind‟ (FB 73).
This allusion to the Nazi past represents only one way in which
Wilhelm‟s attitudes and experiences in Wrong Move are given historical
resonance. Further historical contextualisation is provided by the film‟s
references to its source text. Specifically, it offers a visual representation of
the changing face of Germany from the late eighteenth to the twentieth
century, which in turn reflects shifts in the nature of human consciousness in
the same period. Asked about the relationship between Wrong Move and
Wilhelm Meister, Handke responded:
I wasn‟t aiming at a total reconstruction of the story; I was just taking the historical situation
of someone setting out, going on the road, trying to learn something, become somebody
different, just become somebody. I‟m pretty sure that that‟s what Goethe had in mind too: a
movement, or the attempt at a movement. Where the difference lies is in consciousness and
in the German landscape, which have both changed a great deal and have turned rather
miserable.9
The film opens in Wilhelm‟s home town of Glückstadt where the half-
timbered houses clustered around the marketplace give the impression of a
world unchanged since Goethe‟s day. Towards the end of the film the
travellers find themselves in the suburbs of Frankfurt where deserted squares
in the shadow of looming high rises seem designed to induce alienation. As
Roger Bromley notes: „The urban and rural imagery articulates a series of
questions about recent German history and politics which, while they are not
answered, stubbornly insist on being asked‟. 10 These questions are made
more acute in the film because Wenders has swapped, as a stopping-point on
Wilhelm‟s journey, the Soest of Handke‟s script for Bonn, the little town (the
provinciality of which is emphasised by Wenders‟s images) given undue
significance as the capital of the Federal Republic by military defeat and
Cold War politics. Taken together the film‟s shifting landscapes provide
9
Wim Wenders, „The Heroes are the Others: An Interview with Peter Handke and Wim
Wenders on False Movement‟, in Wenders, On Film, pp.167-70 (p.167).
10
Roger Bromley, From Alice to Buena Vista: The Films of Wim Wenders (Westport,
Connecticut-London: Praeger, 2001), p.24.
visual indices for the historical changes that can account for the
transformation of Goethe‟s eighteenth-century notion of movement into a
contemporary „wrong move‟.
A further historical reference point is offered in the second monologue on
loneliness, held by the suicidal industrialist with whom Wilhelm and his
travelling companions spend a night, a speech which Wenders has described
as „the core of the film‟. 11 Again an explicit connection is made here between
the failings of German culture and the disasters of recent German history and,
in this case, both are linked to the kind of contemporary alienation
encountered by Wilhelm in Frankfurt:
I would also like to speak briefly about loneliness here in Germany. It appears to me to be
more hidden and at the same time more painful than it is elsewhere. The history of ideas
here could be responsible for this, with everybody searching for a way of living in which the
overcoming of fear would be possible. Preaching virtues like courage, perseverance and
industry was simply supposed to distract from fear. At least let us assume that is how it is.
Like nowhere else, philosophies could be utilised as state philosophies, so that the
necessarily criminal methods by which fear was to be overcome could even be legalised.
Fear here is taken for vanity or ignominy. That is why loneliness in Germany is masked by
all these tell-tale lifeless faces which haunt supermarkets, recreational areas, pedestrian
zones and fitness centres. The dead souls of Germany … (FB 44f.)
Neither this history lesson nor that offered by Laertes is heeded by Wilhelm,
who refuses to shift from the position he takes up at the beginning of his
travels. He maintains throughout his stubborn insistence, as it is formulated
in the script, that „I don‟t want to know anything about what happened back
then. I have no feeling for the past‟ (FB 28).12
This refusal to learn – inverting, of course, the tradition of the
Bildungsroman (novel of self-development) of which Goethe‟s Wilhelm
Meister is the classic example – means that Wilhelm can respond only
inadequately to both the industrialist and the old man. In Handke‟s script his
passive reaction to the former‟s speech is suggested by the subsequent image
of „Wilhelm writing‟ (FB 45). A more complex sequence in the film reflects
even more negatively on the protagonist. During his monologue the
industrialist stabs himself in the hand with a pen. Once he has left the room,
Wilhelm picks it up, wipes off the blood in his notebook and proceeds to
11
In the director‟s commentary on the Kinowelt DVD.
12
The ending of the film suggests that Wilhelm‟s view is beginning to change, a point that will
be returned to below.
write, implying that he is willing to engage with the suffering of others only
insofar as it provides an impetus for his own creativity. 13
The blood motif links Wilhelm‟s response to the industrialist with his
reaction to Laertes. Ostensibly shaken out of his passivity by the heinous
nature of the old man‟s crimes, he decides to drown him in the river Main.
Instead of tipping him over the edge of the boat, however, Wilhelm shies
away from completing his violent act, bringing the encounter to an end in
almost reconciliatory fashion by offering Laertes a handkerchief for his
bleeding nose and allowing him to run off when they reach dry land. Clearly,
this failure to deal effectively with the old man can be taken to stand for the
inability of his generation to respond in any kind of active way to the German
past. As Kathe Geist puts it: „Wilhelm feels the older generation has plunged
his into darkness but neglects to find a constructive way out of this darkness,
waiting instead for the older generation to die‟. 14 McCormick contends that
his failure to deal with Laertes is unsatisfactory on two counts: „Besides the
obvious insight that Wilhelm seems caught in repeating (on a very small
scale) the old man‟s crimes, it also seems that Wilhelm is trying to eliminate
the man in order to destroy the memory of those crimes‟. 15 He goes on to
argue that Wilhelm‟s violent response to this embodiment of the Nazi past,
far from representing an alternative to his normal passivity, is in fact
intimately tied up with it:
Wilhelm‟s alienation from politics, when disturbed in confrontation with the old man, brings
about a desire for violence that in its knee-jerk, reflex-like nature betrays more a need to
eliminate an obstacle to his narcissistic impassivity than any concern about justice for the
old man‟s victims.16
13
Bromley reads this as a more political image: „This suggests that the one story he has to
come to terms with before he can write anything else is of Germany‟s immediate blood-
steeped past‟, p.27. Peter Harcourt, on the other hand, interprets it as an indication of the
creation of a bond between Wilhelm and the industrialist. This, however, seems unlikely as
the film generally insists on his inability to cross the divide between self and other. See
Harcourt, „Adaptation through Inversion: Wenders‟s Wrong Movement (1974)‟, in Modern
European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. by Andrew Horton and Joan Magretta
(New York: Ungar, 1981), pp.263-77 (p.272).
14
Kathe Geist, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: From Paris, France to Paris, Texas (Ann Arbor-
London: University of Michigan Press, 1988), p.62. In relation to this episode too,
Wilhelm‟s responses to his environment are presented more negatively in the film than in
Handke‟s original script. While the latter allows for Wilhelm‟s reaction to Laertes to be read
as a response to his crimes, the film‟s Wilhelm explicitly maintains that this is not the case,
and that he has simply directed a general sense of rage at the old man.
15
McCormick, p.104.
16
Ibid.
In this respect, McCormick claims, Wilhelm must be understood as

exemplifying „two “postrevolutionary” responses, both of which stem from
resignation‟ – that is, he embodies not only the „withdrawal into aesthetics‟,
so characteristic of the 1970s after the Tendenzwende, but also the decade‟s
alternative – but equally narcissistic – response to the perceived failure of
political action, „terrorist violence‟. 17
If this is the case – and McCormick‟s argument is compelling – then,
paradoxically, Wrong Move is at once representative of the post-political
cultural shift in the 1970s and, at the same time, the most political of
Wenders‟s early films (again with the exception of the anomalous Police
Film). Wenders himself notes that, apart from a few extras in Wings of
Desire, this is the only one of his films in which an (ex-)Nazi appears,
although he uses an oddly hesitant formulation in which to signal the
significance of the engagement with the fascist past for Wrong Move: „If
politics were to play a part in this basically unpolitical film then it would be
this conflict‟.18 The political import of this „unpolitical‟ film betrays the
formative influence of the highly politicised last years of the 1960s when
both Handke and Wenders began their careers and their collaboration. By the
same token, Wrong Move also points forward to Wings of Desire, made some
twelve years later. Not only is this the next film project Wenders will
undertake with Handke, it also represents the first time he will return in any
kind of substantial way to issues of German history. In this sense at least,
Wrong Move can in retrospect be taken to represent the mid-point of their
collaboration.
In 1975, however, it marked the end of what had been an intense period
of interaction over six years. Once again the film explores those areas of
mutual interest which had brought the pair together in the first place and
around which all their collaborations circle. However, the differences that
emerge between the script and the film version of Wrong Move – including,
importantly, the understanding expressed in each work of the relationship
between politics and poetry – suggest that Handke‟s and Wenders‟s interests
and views were by this stage beginning to diverge in ways that made the
temporary cessation of their filmic collaboration inevitable, as the following
analysis of the film and its script will attempt to show.
17
Ibid., p.105.
18
Wenders in interview with Roger Willemsen on the Kinowelt DVD.
2. Collaboration
The basics of the collaborative process on this film are well documented.
Having decided together to develop a script based loosely on Goethe‟s
Wilhelm Meister, Handke sent Wenders the screenplay in 1973.19 Wenders
revised this text and returned it. Handke made further revisions and Wenders
used this as the basis for the shooting script. Wenders noted, in interview
with Jan Dawson in 1976, that this was the only time he had used a script
which was largely authored by someone else: „Wrong Movement by Peter
Handke is the only script I didn‟t write myself; but even there, I wrote the
final draft. [...] The Goalie was based on a novel by Peter Handke but my
own script. [...] Wrong Movement was Peter‟s script‟.20 At the editing stage
Wenders decided to abridge the dialogue by using a voice-over commentary
spoken by Wilhelm.21 Handke provided the text for this voice-over and,
apparently, was also involved in the editing.22 When asked about his source,
Handke claimed at the time that the relationship with Goethe‟s text was a
very loose one, and that he was „just using one or two things from Goethe
that had lodged in my memory‟; movement, he noted, was the motif that
most interested him in the novel – Wilhelm‟s „great journey‟.23
Most commentators summarise the resulting film in terms reducible to a
neat formula: text equals Handke, image equals Wenders. Even a cursory
comparison of text and film, however, proves this to be an over-
simplification. Handke‟s text, composed as a screenplay with details of
sound, image, and mise-en-scène, is at times quite specific on matters of finer
detail. For example, when Mignon is asked to recount her dream over
breakfast at the industrialist‟s villa she shrugs her shoulders. Handke
describes the gesture as follows: „Mignon gestures her refusal, not to the
front but casually and to the side, in the manner of Cary Grant in “Blonde
Venus”‟ (FB 49). Handke repeats the Cary Grant analogy when Wilhelm asks
Mignon to decide whether she wants to travel with him to the Zugspitze or
stay with Therese (FB 78). In the film the gesture is rendered precisely in line
with Handke‟s description on the first occasion [shot 286], but on the second,
Wenders replaces it with a more engaged nod of agreement, a response rather
19
This was the version published by Suhrkamp in 1975.
20
Jan Dawson, Wim Wenders (New York: Zoetrope, 1976), p.4. According to Wenders the
film made 80,000 DM, as against 20,000 DM for Alice in the Cities and 300,000 DM for
Kings of the Road, Dawson, p.8.
21
Geist, p.48. Stefan Kolditz, „Kommentierte Filmografie‟, in Frieda Grafe et al., Wim
Wenders, Reihe Film, 44 (Munich-Vienna: Hanser, 1992), pp.103-314 (p.162).
22
See Geist, p.48 and p.55.
23
Wenders, „The Heroes are the Others‟, p.167.
more appropriate to the seriousness of the decision she is being asked to

make [shot 402]. To cite another example, Handke provides a precise
description of the industrialist‟s wife‟s self-portrait – she depicted herself
hanging stretched between two trees (FB 44). The painting appears in the
film exactly as described [shot 246].
Elsewhere, Wenders expands passing references in the text to create
leitmotifs. A good example is the blood on the train seat [shots 36 and 39].
Although Laertes‟s nosebleeds are a recurring motif in Handke‟s text, they
are the only reference to blood in the story. Wenders develops the motif first
by lingering on Wilhelm‟s bleeding hand after smashing his bedroom
window [shots 7, 9 and 14], and second by adding the striking – if not
especially subtle – image of the industrialist piercing his hand with the
ballpoint pen, leaving a stigmata-like wound [shot 252]. On other occasions,
Wenders takes Handke‟s suggestions and develops them into iconic images.
Although there is only a vague reference to an establishing shot of the town
at the beginning of the text, Handke does note that the train taking Wilhelm
away from his home should be seen „from above‟ (FB 16). Wenders expands
this into the film‟s three helicopter shots: for the opening credit sequence
[shot 2], a tanker on the open sea [shot 25] and the departure of the train [shot
34]. In summary, it is an oversimplification to claim that in making Wrong
Move Wenders and Handke have simply shared film‟s inherited media
between them, recomposing filmmaking as a collaboration in which the
former handles the photography, the latter the literary component.
However, it is certainly also true that substantial sections of Handke‟s
proposed mise-en-scène are ignored. In particular the more surreal tableaux
are consistently avoided. A notable example is the somewhat baroque
description of madness in Soest (Bonn in the film), apparently brought about
by the local inhabitants‟ obsession with mundanity, which reminds one of the
stage directions of his play The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other (Die
Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wußten, 1992):
Passers-by: a man hits himself on the forehead with his fist as he passes. The next man
giggles dreamily and skips every so often. A woman quietly crying to herself. A man writing
in the air with his finger. Another who gesticulates wildly as he passes by, clearly wanting to
explain something. A woman with a gentle expression which she rehearses with a smile. A
man who suddenly stops walking, lost in thought clicks his heels and continues on his way.
Wilhelm, runs after him on all fours and bites his calves.
The man gets his leg free and leaves without turning round. (FB 36)
Similar characters encountered by Wilhelm and Therese in Frankfurt are also

omitted. Elsewhere Wenders is at pains to incorporate seemingly
insignificant details – for example a Jehovah‟s Witness selling the

Watchtower (FB 33, although she appears in an earlier scene in the film [shot
145]),24 Bernhard‟s struggle with the umbrella as the group walk through the
vineyard (FB 54) [shot 309], and the fountain in the penultimate scene (FB
81) [shot 410]. Thus Wenders has not simply – as is commonly suggested –
taken the dialogue and omitted the mise-en-scène. The translation from page
to screen is considerably more complicated.
It is also not the case that the dialogue is adopted wholesale and uncut. It
is certainly true that virtually all of the substantial dialogues in the film are
lifted verbatim from the screenplay (albeit with numerous inconsequential
changes of expression and word order, for which the actors may be in part
responsible). Wenders has repeatedly justified this faithfulness to the letter of
the text by extolling the qualities of Handke‟s prose: „And then there‟s
Handke‟s grammar – either you respect it or you don‟t work with Peter‟.25
However, most of the longer exchanges and monologues are discreetly cut.
Whilst this cropping is employed relatively consistently across the film, it is
clear that Wenders has chosen to omit a large number of Wilhelm‟s remarks
on politics and his inability to engage with it. These include some very clear
statements of this disengagement: as he leaves home he remarks that „I
couldn‟t think of anything political‟ (FB 16), and he later tells Laertes that:
„It seems to me that politics gets in the way of a relaxed, care-free life, and I
think that it will only be possible to live a humane way of life when politics
has been abolished, i.e. has become unnecessary‟ (FB 28). Laertes‟s response
is dismissive: „You are talking about paradise Wilhelm, and, it seems to me,
an animalistic rather than a human one at that‟ (FB 28). As we shall see,
Wenders does provide a neat visual equivalent for Wilhelm‟s disengagement
– a leftist poster glimpsed in passing from an escalator – but possibly
concluded that, at least as far as the text was concerned, the famous exchange
on poetics and politics during the walk through the vineyards gave adequate
expression to Wilhelm‟s position. He also omits images of low-flying
aircraft, which punctuate the group‟s sojourn in Soest (FB 26), and which on
one occasion Handke refers to specifically as a „NATO bomber‟ (FB 33).26
There is, however, an acoustic suggestion of an aircraft overhead as the group
arrives at the industrialist‟s villa [shot 215]. What is striking about Wenders‟s
24
Perhaps a clever reference to Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix in Alabama: 2000 Light Years.
25
Interview with Wenders in Reinhold Rauh, Wim Wenders und seine Filme (Munich: Heyne,
1990), p.244.
26
The sounds of the hunters‟ guns, heard throughout the walk, have similar militaristic
overtones.
editing of Handke‟s text, as with The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, is his
unerring ability to distil the text to its bare bones. 27 Repetition and slack are
consistently cut away and – the asides on writing politically apart – there is
little of substance that Wenders has chosen not to incorporate.
One important area of departure from the text – and one which will be
considered again below – is in the self-reflexive allusions to the medium of
film itself. This issue is significant in relation to the collaborative process
because cinephilia is, as their work of the late 1960s demonstrates, an
important area of common ground between Handke and Wenders. Handke
makes direct reference to cinema on a number of occasions in his text. The
repeated Cary Grant gesture has already been noted, and in Therese‟s flat the
television is showing Carl Theodor Dreyer‟s The Passion of Joan of Arc (La
passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 1928). This film, an early classic of what Paul
Schrader was to term „Transcendental Film‟, 28 is significant not only because
of its political subject matter, the individual tormented by the powers that be
(and as such neatly replaced by Wenders with Straub-Huillet‟s Dreyer-
influenced Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach), but also because of its silent
(and silenced) heroine, suggesting possible parallels with both Mignon and
Therese (who suddenly finds herself unable to speak on stage). 29 The fact that
it is a silent film (being shown on television, moreover) reinforces this: as
Wilhelm ironically remarks, in a passage omitted in the film, „Have you
heard the old man? He even keeps going on about nature during a silent film‟
(FB 70).
There are two other notable references to filmmaking in Handke‟s script.
When Bernhard finally remembers his dream, it is of the industrialist running
along a coastal path and plunging to his death with the immortal lines „End
oppression! Long live the exploited of the world!‟ (FB 60). In his dream
Bernhard watches this rather melodramatic scenario „on film‟ and is
impressed by the sound quality. Wenders omits the detail, but preserves the
self-reflexive moment with the added suggestion that film footage can serve
27
Wenders notes that in the case of The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty „the script was so
confident: it was written in shots‟, Dawson, p.22.
28
Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (New York: Da Capo,
1972), pp.109-47.
29
One might also speculate that Handke had Godard in mind here. In Vivre sa vie the
prostitute Nana goes to the cinema to see The Passion of Joan of Arc and weeps. A poignant
parallel is drawn between the iconic close-up of Falconetti prior to her martyrdom – loomed
over by Antonin Artaud – and Godard‟s naïve heroine soon to be killed by mistake in a
gangster-style shoot out. From Same Player Shoots Again on, gangster motifs in Wenders‟s
work can, of course, be traced back to the French New Wave.
as evidence (Bernhard is forced to watch it again as a witness [shot 316]).

The final reference in Handke‟s text is to home movie-making rather than
cinema. As Wilhelm and Therese separate they accidentally get in the way of
a man filming his child, and Wilhelm remarks that „one day I want to write a
poem about all the photos and films that I am accidentally in‟ (FB 79). In the
film the leave-taking takes place in front of a comparably paradigmatic
passport photo booth [shot 409], a reminder perhaps of the booth in Alice in
the Cities which cements the friendship of the protagonists (rather than
marking its dissolution as here). Wenders not only picks up on the home
movie motif in the penultimate scene, but also peppers his film with
references (explicit and implicit) to famous and not-so-famous films,
including his own. Indeed in his sleep Wilhelm even mutters the title of
Wenders‟s next film „Im Lauf der Zeit‟, („as time goes by‟ – Kings of Road
[shot 26]). Seen in its entirety, Wrong Move presents a catalogue of different
ways in which film can be produced and broadcast: there is a local cinema in
Glückstadt, a city-centre screen in Bonn, an open-air cinema in Frankfurt,
film on television, and home movie-making.
2.1 The opening sequences: narration, perspective, sound

From its opening shot – an aerial view of the German coast over which the
credits are run – Wrong Move signals that it is a „literary film‟: „Script: Peter
Handke‟ and „freely based on “Wilhelm Meister‟s Apprenticeship” by J. W.
Goethe‟ [shot 2]. And what follows is certainly Wenders‟s most wordy film.
In Handke‟s text there is no explicit mention of the Goethe source, although
the protagonist‟s name and those of his companions leave the reader in no
doubt as to the reference.
Wrong Move is the story of a group of characters whose lives are all
inextricably tied up with literary language (or its denial). Wilhelm is a would-
be writer, and the opening helicopter shot, mirroring the one which closes
Alice in the Cities, suggests a loose kinship with that film‟s aspiring writer-
protagonist Philip Winter. Therese Fahner, the woman he first sees out of a
train window and with whom he subsequently begins a fitful relationship, is
an actress who has trouble learning her lines, Laertes is a storyteller, and
Bernhard Landau, a poet who introduces himself to Wilhelm in Bonn, is the
author of some distinctly purple verse. Mignon, Laertes‟s companion and
also, in name at least, another figure derived from Goethe‟s novel, is the odd-
one-out. Her relationship with language is ex negativo in that she is mute and
communicates throughout in gestures and, as we shall see, colour. 30
30
It has been noted that sources for all the members of the group can be traced back to
What is most striking about the credits, however, is the cinematography –

the helicopter shot already mentioned, which recalls The Goalkeeper’s Fear
of the Penalty as well as Alice in the Cities.31 As we have seen, the aerial shot
in The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty is particularly significant as a point
of reference that can be read as a mini-review of the Wenders-Handke
collaboration itself and a précis of its recompositional method. 32 The opening
helicopter shot in Wrong Move establishes the camera in an „omniscient‟
position, essentially that of a third-person narrator, zooming in on the
protagonist in the manner of the famous opening sentence of Heinrich von
Kleist‟s most cinematic story The Earthquake in Chile (Das Erdbeben in
Chili, 1807):
In St Jago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, in 1647, at the very moment of the enormous
earthquake which killed many thousand people, a young Spaniard called Jeronimo Rugera,
who had been accused of a crime, stood by a column in the prison in which he had been
incarcerated and was about to hang himself.33
In this convoluted opening sentence we zoom in on an instant in the mind of

a single man at a particular place and time, standing next to a pillar in his
prison cell about to commit suicide. The precision and economy of this
„zoom‟, which even finds space to inform us of the outcome of the
catastrophe, along with its date, has the control of a tightly edited pre-credit
sequence in a Hollywood thriller. In Wrong Move the cine-literate spectator is
also alerted to the possibility that detective work will be demanded, and the
melancholy music and weather suggest that the outcome may not be entirely
happy. The camera fulfils the function of the „all-seeing‟ narrator, is mobile
and airborne in comparison to the protagonist Wilhelm who, on his first
appearance [shot 3], is seen trapped in his room. 34 Whilst the pillar here is
Goethe‟s novel. See: Kolditz, p.160.

31
In The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, as here, it is accompanied by atmospheric music
from Jürgen Knieper.
32
See pp.158f.
33
Heinrich von Kleist, Das Erdbeben in Chili, in Sämtliche Erzählungen (Stuttgart: Reclam,
1984), pp.164-182 (p.164).
34
McCormick notes that the raindrops visible on the helicopter‟s window in this sequence
„come very close to a direct foregrounding of the camera‟s lens‟, p.97. This is in fact one of
several self-reflexive moments, where the audience is made aware of the mechanics of the
filmmaking process, and their significance for the film as a whole will be returned to below.
McCormick further suggests that: „The film‟s opening illustrates the distanced attitude that
the film takes toward its protagonist, an attitude reflected in the filmmaker‟s admission of
some personal dislike for the character‟, p.97.
nothing more than a simple window frame, the smashing of the glass that
follows [shot 4] suggests a desperate state of mind comparable to that of the
protagonist of Kleist‟s Romantic novella.
In Handke‟s text the narration is in the third person – as is to be expected
from a screenplay with stage directions – and Wilhelm‟s reflections on what
he sees and hears are described as appearing on-screen either as a close-up of
his diary or as hand-written text superimposed on the image. Although
Wenders was later to adopt the latter device himself, in Lightning Over Water
(1980), it is not used in Wrong Move.35 Instead Wenders opts for the simple
solution of voice-over commentary. As well as saving time – text takes
longer to read than to listen to, and Wenders explicitly used the commentary
to shorten the film – this device also avoids the rather facile implication that
Wilhelm has actually become the author of his own text, that the
Bildungsroman has a „happy end‟ rather than just „THE END‟ (FB 81, in
English in the original).36 This is in line with the omission of Handke‟s none-
too-subtle device of concluding the film script with the sound of a typewriter
clattering away, a significant alteration to which we shall return. 37
Although in a joint interview Wenders explicitly disagrees with Handke‟s
suggestion that Wilhelm is not actually the „hero‟ of Wrong Move, he does
recognise that there is, as in Handke‟s script, an interweaving of first and
third person narration in the film. He describes this neatly in relation to its
two opening shots:
I think I made it very clear in the first two shots of the film that he‟s the person the story‟s
about, but at the same time the things you get to see are a part of him too. The first shot is
flying across the River Elbe, until you see the town of Glückstadt. Then it moves lower until
you see the whole of the marketplace and the church. Then there‟s a cut, and in the next shot
you see the marketplace and the church out of a window, and there‟s a helicopter passing
behind the church, and then the camera withdraws and shows you who‟s just seen the
helicopter, which is Wilhelm looking out of the window. So the film begins with a narrative
position like Goethe‟s, from above and all-seeing. And then it goes into a subjective view. I
35
See Wim Wenders and Chris Sievernich, Nick’s Film: Lightning Over Water (Frankfurt am
Main: Zweitausendeins, 1981), p.327.
36
As has been noted, an implication of this kind is made at the end of Alice in the Cities, when
Philip remarks to Alice in the train that on arriving in Munich he will complete „this story‟.
Wenders reserves „THE END‟ for Kings of the Road (the third film in the loose trilogy of
which Alice in the Cities and Wrong Move form the first two parts), where the word is
wittily made up of the surviving letters of the neon display „WEISSE WAND‟ („WHITE
SCREEN‟), the name of a cinema seen in the film‟s final sequence.
37
However, Wilhelm is seen working at a typewriter in Therese‟s Frankfurt flat. The
typewriter motif also crops up prominently in a later film: in a striking shot in Hammett the
writer is seen from below through the keyboard of his typewriter.
think those first two shots make the blend clear: that it‟s someone‟s story that is being told,
and also that he‟s dramatizing himself.38
Whilst the camera-eye descends from the sky (as it will again in the opening
sequence of Wings of Desire) and is able to move at will from exterior to
interior space, Wilhelm seems somehow akin to the blind passer-by who
crosses the square below him and looks up as he smashes his window [shot
5].39 Wilhelm‟s position as „blind observer‟ is similar to that of the
protagonist of Thomas Mann‟s Tonio Kröger who famously peers out at the
world through an opaque blind whilst in fact looking into himself:
he stood, with his hands behind his back in front of a window with the blind down, without
thinking that one couldn‟t actually see anything through the blind and that it was therefore
ridiculous to stand there and pretend to look out.
In fact he was looking into himself, where there was so much grief and yearning.40
This motif of the „window situation‟ is, as we have seen, a recurring and
decisive one in Wenders‟s films. It is the structuring point-of-view in Silver
City Revisited, for example, and a leitmotif in both The Goalkeeper’s Fear of
the Penalty and Alice in the Cities. It is, of course, a well-worn topos of
Romantic poetry (there are many in the poems of Eichendorff and Mörike,
for example). Indeed Kolditz notes that „WRONG MOVE is the Wenders
film which most clearly and directly formulates his connection with
Romanticism‟.41 The „window situation‟ is paradigmatically represented in
Romantic painting by Caspar David Friedrich‟s Woman at the Window of
38
39
Edward Plater suggests that „like the man with the yellow armband, Wilhelm, too, has
difficulty seeing‟. This may indeed be the case, the motif recurs after all, but, if so, it is a
singularly crude analogy. Edward Plater, „Taking Another Look at Wim Wenders‟s Wrong
Move‟, Literature/Film Quarterly, 30 (2002), 65-73 (p.65). Plater‟s commentary
concentrates on what he refers to as the „symbolic level‟ of the film – the little girl on the
coin-operated horse in the penultimate scene, for example, represents movement without
getting anywhere, Plater, p.66 and p.71. He does not, however, question the nature or
function of these analogies within the film‟s visual language. The blind man himself does
not appear in Handke‟s text although he does crop up, much later, in his film The Absence,
which Handke has suggested might be a sequel to Wrong Move. Peter Handke, Die
Abwesenheit: Eine Skizze, Ein Film, Ein Gespräch (Dürnau: Edition 350 im Verlag der
Kooperative Dürnau, 1996), back cover.
40
Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger, in Schwere Stunde und andere Erzählungen (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, 1987), pp.16-90, p.33.
41
Kolditz, p.160. This claim is backed up by a list of narrative and visual topoi. As with other
commentators (Plater in particular) the metaphorical language itself is not problematised
here.
1822 where, as in our first view of Wilhelm, the figure is in darkness and
looks out to a (metaphorically distant or future) world suffused with light
beyond the confines of the interior space. As Karsten Visarius has pointed
out, Wenders is fond of the Romantic topos of the viewer viewed. 42 The
absence of conventional motifs of hope in Wrong Move – such as the sailing
ship in Friedrich‟s painting – and the gloomy weather suggest a rather less
happy scenario.43 The conventional Romantic dialectic of darkness within
and light without, as typified by the opening lines of Eichendorff‟s poem
„Yearning‟ („Sehnsucht‟) – „The stars shone so golden / As I stood alone at
the window‟ – is replaced by a correlation between the mood of the
protagonist and the prevailing weather conditions which verges on pathetic
fallacy.44 In Handke‟s text the basic situation is briefly described – Wilhelm
is seen at the window „from behind‟ (FB 7) – but there is no mention of the
weather or the blind passer-by. Wilhelm‟s isolation and frustration are
evoked in a sequence of conventional, easily recognised Romantic images
which include the lonely figure in an expansive, inhospitable landscape, in
this case a wind-swept beach [shot 20], and the reiteration of the window
motif [shot 21].
While Wilhelm‟s smashing of the window [shot 4] acts as a rather
histrionic demonstration of his sense of frustration, it can also be construed as
a symbolic attempt to break the Romantic illusion which constrains him here,
to overcome isolation by eliminating the barrier between inside and outside,
self and world. However, the negative imagery of the opening sequences
already points forward to the less than positive outcome of this attempt in
what has been described as an „inverse Bildungsroman‟.45 The violent gesture
in this scene, untypical both of the film and Wenders‟s work more generally,
42
Karsten Visarius, „Das Versagen der Sprache oder: His Master‟s Voice‟, in Grafe et al.,
pp.43-64 (p.60). The final shot of the film is another obvious example. When asked by Jan
Dawson whether Romantic landscape painting holds much appeal for him, Wenders replied
„Yes. Quite a lot. I‟ve been a great admirer of Kaspar [sic] Friedrich‟, Dawson, p.23. In the
same interview Wenders acknowledges that the Romantic idea of travel was what drew him
(and Handke) to the Bildungsroman in general and Wilhelm Meister in particular, Dawson,
p.23.
43
A tanker passes by briefly at one point [shot 25]. This appears to be in Wilhelm‟s dream, an
echo perhaps of the freeway in Alice in the Cities which we see as Philip sleeps in the
Skyway Motel.
44
Joseph von Eichendorff, „Sehnsucht‟, in Deutsche Gedichte, ed. by Dietrich Bode (Stuttgart:
Reclam, 1984), p.162.
45
This is a term used by Harcourt in his discussion of the relationship between the Handke-
Wenders response to Wilhem Meister and Goethe‟s original novel: „As much a critique of
the novel as a rewriting of it, Wrong Movement is an adaptation through inversion‟, p.265.
can also be read to allude metaphorically to the recompositional thrust of the

film‟s opening scenes. Having established a literary framework in the credits,
it presents a sequence of shots which invoke two of cinema‟s constituent
media: photography (the aerial shot and its reverse angle) and music (the
record player which Wilhelm switches off after smashing the window). The
recompositional gesture is, however, anything but liberating – image-making
is associated with blindness (as the blind man passes by and the window is
smashed), and the invigorating potential of music which we have come to
associate with Wenders‟s films is denied. This equivocal, even pessimistic
tenor is maintained throughout the film and underscored in the final scene, in
which Wenders challenges the (ambiguously) optimistic cadence with which
Handke‟s script concludes. Recomposition in this film is shown to be not
only difficult but also potentially painful.
From the outset Wenders uses sound, and of course music, both diegetic
and non-diegetic, as a means of underlining the dualisms of the story – not
only the division between inside and outside, but also the juxtaposition of
engagement and alienation.46 As well as the quotations from popular music
one has come to expect from Wenders – in this case The Troggs [shot 13]
and Bob Dylan (three lines from „A Hard Rain‟s A‟Gonna Fall‟ ingeniously
distributed across the film to avoid allegations of copyright infringement) 47 –
there are also snatches of classical music: Bach on the soundtrack of Straub-
Huillet‟s Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (replacing the Vivaldi of
Handke‟s script, FB 68) and Mignon and Therese whistling the famous theme
from the final movement of Beethoven‟s Choral Symphony towards the end
of the walk [shot 306] (in place of a fragment of an Italian song and lone
trumpeter in the text, FB 52 and 55).
Handke‟s text is detailed in its description of sound, particularly in the
urban settings. In one instance there is an explicit reference to film itself and,
symbolically, an instance of confusing „fact‟ and „fiction‟: „Television sounds
from all directions. The end of a dramatic film. The lift comes. Sobbing
sounds from one of the flats, from a film?‟ (FB 64). In some cases Wenders
preserves these sounds – the NATO bomber of Handke‟s text, heard but not
seen, has already been mentioned. Elsewhere he uses sound or its absence to
underscore Wilhelm‟s detachment, like the gun-shot sounds which he
apparently fails to register during the walk up the Rhine valley or, in the
46
The characters (and, for that matter the majority of commentators) tend to ignore the striking
sounds of the film, although Bernhard recalls that in his dream of the industrialist‟s
melodramatic suicide he was „amazed how good the sound was‟ (FB 60).
47
See Dawson, pp.23f. (where the song title is given incorrectly).
opening sequences, the Troggs record which abruptly stops when we see his
window from without [shot 6].
2.2 Literary allusion – cinematic politics

The visual and aural exposition of the themes of frustration, isolation, and the
desire to escape from them is reinforced not only by the explicit, perhaps
over-determined, enunciation of Wilhelm‟s condition by his first-person
narrative commentary and the remarks by his mother, but also by literary
allusions: to Goethe of course (as noted above, all the main protagonists are
named after characters from his Bildungsroman),48 to Shakespeare (Laertes
being Hamlet‟s companion as well as a character in Wilhelm Meister), to
Flaubert‟s Sentimental Education (L’Éducation sentimentale, 1869), and
especially to Eichendorff‟s Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing (Aus dem Leben
eines Taugenichts, 1822/1823, published 1826), visual references to which
bridge the expositional episodes at home with the encounters on the train. 49
What is striking about these early scenes is the sheer excess of allusions
and references to literary and visual, predominantly Romantic, sources. The
quantity and explicitness of them is burdensome for the viewer and, one
might surmise, Wilhelm himself. Certainly they colour, for example, the way
we are introduced to Mignon, whose face is merged with images of landscape
(the flatlands seen from the train [shot 48]) and travel (the speeding railway
tracks [shot 52]) – well-used imagery of travel and self-discovery from
literature, art, and film (and already used by Wenders himself in Alice in the
Cities). Like Wilhelm, Wrong Move is both self-reflexive and self-conscious
to a fault, and the literary allusions thus reinforce the idea that the camera, as
well as occupying the position of omniscient, third-person narrator, is also
close to Wilhelm‟s point-of-view. Beyond this, the sheer weight of visual and
literary intertexts seems to suggest that literature and cinematography can be
forced into close proximity, but not necessarily amalgamated. The Friedrich-
inspired tableaux and the allusions to the literary cannon stubbornly refuse to
48
Geist summarises Handke‟s borrowings from Goethe succinctly in her chapter on Wrong
Move and Kings of the Road, pp.46f.
49
Shelley Frisch reads the drops of blood on the train [shots 36 and 39] as a veiled reference to
Wolfram von Eschenbach‟s Parzival. Shelley Frisch, „The Disenchanted Image: From
Goethe‟s Wilhelm Meister to Wender‟s [sic] Wrong Movement‟, Literature/Film Quarterly,
7 (1979), 208-14 (p.212). Frisch also considers the Hamlet reference as mediated by
Goethe‟s Wilhelm Meister, p.213. The conclusion reached is that: „The modern Wilhelm
Meister must fail in what Goethe‟s Meister had achieved so effortlessly: to effect a
successful synthesis of individual goals and societal realities. The society in which Wenders‟
Wilhelm Meister must function only serves to paralyze him‟, p.214.
transcend their status as quotations, with the result that for the viewer the
recomposition stops short of productive assimilation. Wrong Move is a film
in which the friction between the constituent or inherited media is neither
allayed nor resolved.
This massing of referentiality culminates in a neat tableau in shot 125
which would seem to be almost an emblem of cinematic literary adaptation.
Having landed on his knee in the train carriage, Mignon discovers Wilhelm‟s
copy of the Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing and leafs through it casually.
Goethe‟s characters meet Eichendorff, so-to-speak. Mignon, however, shows
little interest in the book. What is significant about this incident is that it
marks a point of transition: from this scene on, up to the point when Wilhelm
is again on his own following his final „wrong move‟ (in the scene on the
Zugspitze), the torrent of reference abates somewhat. Although – like Philip
Winter before him – Wilhelm may not be aware of it, his encounters and
„moves‟ with Laertes, Mignon, Therese, and Bernhard, wrong or otherwise,
are the stuff of stories, the raw material of fiction in lived experience. On
changing trains at Hamburg-Altona [shot 54], Wilhelm moves out of the
nostalgic and somewhat self-indulgent space of Romantic Sehnsucht
(yearning) into the realm of contemporary fiction. His „wrong move‟ will be
to discard this opportunity and return, self-consciously, to the rarified heights
of Romanticism, signalled in the film by the recurrence of its over-used
motifs. Unlike the other collaborations with Handke, Wrong Move ends with
frustration rather than reconciliation. It is this, perhaps, that makes it so
important a document of its period. What is significant in the context of this
study is that the frustration manifests itself in formal as well as narrative
terms.
This is not to say that the story-within-a-story of Wenders‟s film, the
episodes with Wilhelm and his companions travelling aimlessly across
Germany, is non-referential, far from it, indeed. The point, however, is that
the references, explicit and implicit, are now chiefly to cinema itself rather
than its inherited media, notably to that of Wenders‟s colleagues Jean-Marie
Straub and Danièle Huillet. In shot 152 the homage is to a place – the hotel
room in Bonn with the view over the square is a quotation from the
expositional scene of their debut short Machorka-Muff in which the
protagonist, a restorative militarist of the old school, „occupies‟ the capital in
the manner of a cowboy in a John Ford Western or the hero of a Budd
Boetticher gangster movie.50 As already mentioned, an episode from the
50
This allusion also sheds light on the mysterious unfinished phone call [shot 151] which
Geist (p.55) and others attempt to explain. This too is a quotation from Machorka-Muff, in
Bach film Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach is running on the television in

Therese‟s apartment. These allusions are not specified in Handke‟s
screenplay, although, as we have seen, he too has expressed his admiration
for the work of Straub-Huillet on numerous occasions.
Both Machorka-Muff and Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach are
explicitly political films – the former a satirical indictment of remilitarisation
and the unholy alliance of church and state in the FRG of the late 1950s, the
latter a study of artistic patronage, and resistance to it, dedicated to Holger
Meins, a prominent member of the Red Army Faction. As with the allusions
to Romanticism discussed above, these references serve to reinforce
Wilhelm‟s – and the film‟s – distance and estrangement from the political.
They represent an „observational‟, quotational engagement with, or rather
disengagement from, politics. A further paradigmatic example of this kind of
passive response to the political is provided by the scene in the subway
station towards the end of the film in which Wilhelm comes across Laertes
playing the part of the „blind‟ beggar. 51 As he descends the escalator he sees,
and the camera frames in passing, a poster for the KPD/ML (a Marxist-
Leninist party, founded in 1968 in opposition to the German Communist
Party [shot 335]), a strange, rather melancholy reminder of activism in a
cityscape which is dominated by monolithic structures, real and
metaphorical, and petty hierarchies (as demonstrated by the snobbery of a
group of children on a climbing frame [shot 342]).
„If only poetry and politics could be one‟, Wilhelm laments to Laertes in
the pivotal walk through the vineyards (FB 52) [shot 303]. „That would be
the end of yearning and the end of the world‟, is Laertes‟s reply (FB 52). This
warning – one is reminded of Benjamin‟s famous remarks on the dangers of
aestheticising politics – is rigorously heeded by the film.52 Wilhelm and his
companions are constantly shown struggling to engage with the world around
them, but this engagement is unequivocally non-political.
which the soon-to-be General also receives a call from his girlfriend whilst surveying Bonn
from the hotel. He delays picking up the receiver for effect, presumably to convey his
relaxed control of the situation. Wenders maintains that he was unaware that he had chosen
the hotel featured in the Straub-Huillet film to shoot in until he entered Wilhelm‟s room and
saw the view from the window. Director‟s commentary on the Kinowelt DVD.
51
Echoes here, perhaps, of Brecht‟s The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper, 1928).
52
Translated by Andy Blunden (1998 and 2005): http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/
philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm (accessed August 2010). See Walter Benjamin, „Kunst
im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit‟, in Illuminationen (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1977), pp.136-69 (p.169).
2.3 The visual and the verbal

Having decided to exorcise any trace of the political from his own artistic
endeavours, Wilhelm is confronted with another potentially problematic
dualism. The struggle he now faces in attempting to articulate himself is the
opposing pull of the visual and the verbal. On the one hand, in the encounter
with the industrialist for example, he is confronted with powerful, distracting,
often over-emphatic or crass images – the self-portrait of the man‟s former
wife [shot 246], so stressed that she is literally suspended in mid-air, the
flickering television wrapped in cellophane (reminding one, perhaps, of
Tonio Kröger‟s closed blind [shot 254]),53 the glimpse of Laertes prostrate on
the floor of his bedroom with a whip [shot 258]. On the other hand, he is also
bombarded by recitations: Bernhard‟s preposterously baroque poem – in
which, as Wilhelm‟s vexed expression during the reading suggests, he
recognises a hyperbolic and embarrassing version of his own attempts at self-
articulation – and the two mini-lectures from the industrialist on loneliness.
Again the inherited media of cinema are evoked (literature, painting, and
theatrical performance in the form of the industrialist‟s monologues), and
again they represent a challenge to Wilhelm‟s detachment, but now they are
no longer simply presented as quotations of canonical works of art and
literary history. To some extent at least, intertextuality (invariably an
engagement with the past) has given way to self-reflexivity (an engagement
with the present), implying, perhaps, that a „right move‟ – self-motivation
rather than „going with the flow‟ – might be possible if Wilhelm could
overcome his passivity. Wilhelm‟s inability to move forward is what gives
the film, unlike the script, an overwhelmingly melancholy quality.
The verbal realm is presented negatively in Handke‟s script as well as in
the film. The characters, even when they do manage to articulate something
meaningful (at least to themselves), as the industrialist does in his
monologues, fail to communicate with their companions, and to create some
kind of connection between self and other. And it seems that the more
„literary‟ the language in which they articulate their concerns, the less likely
the act of communication is to succeed. The film, however, goes further in its
illustration of the negative effects of language. Writing is repeatedly
associated with physical injury in the film: on the beach Wilhelm writes with
a bandaged hand [shot 21], the industrialist pierces himself with the pen [shot
251], and Wilhelm has plasters on his fingers when he makes notes in his
diary immediately afterwards [shot 253]. Moreover, as a number of critics
53
And, perhaps, the wrapped jukebox in The American Friend.
have pointed out, Wenders estranges Handke‟s text in two ways: by having it
delivered in a foreign accent, and by retaining takes where the actors stumble
over their words. In doing so he draws attention to the problematic nature of
the language being used. The most obvious example of the former is
provided by Ivan Desny, who plays the industrialist, and of whom Wenders
has noted: „He had a very strong accent. Although the accent turned out to be
the best possible thing for the things he had to say; it made them much more
intense. Without the heavy French accent, you‟d stop listening to the
character after a while, because all he does is complain‟.54 One of the most
conspicuous examples of verbal stumbling occurs – appropriately enough –
to Hannah Schygulla as the actress Therese in the scene in which she and
Wilhelm are sitting on the bed in her flat [shot 330]: „Deine läch... deine
sachliche Miene ist nämlich sehr lächerlich‟ („Your laugh... your serious
expression is in fact quite laughable‟).55 This verbal slip flags up the
artificiality of the text. At the same time, it calls attention to the film-making
process itself in a way which brings Wrong Move, at this point at least, close
to the kind of modernist Brechtian cinema represented by Straub-Huillet. The
sequence is also accompanied by obtrusive camera noise. Whilst it is a matter
of speculation whether this is intentional or accidental, it is played upon in an
ingenious acoustic dissolve between this scene and the following one
(Wilhelm walking across a pedestrianised square in broad daylight [shot
331]). The mechanical sound of the film transport mechanism in the camera
cross-fades to the sound of a rather different kind of transport – a moped
speeding away from the camera as Wilhelm approaches it on his way to the
underground railway station. This startling juxtaposition of two seemingly
unrelated machines – the camera and the moped, both generating forward
movement out of circular motion – draws attention to the cinematic apparatus
itself and seems to suggest that just as travel and transport represent for
Wenders a means of attaining identity, so film, recomposed and self-
reflexive, can perform a similar function.
This would suggest that at this point the film valorises cinematic images
as a potential means of self-realisation over text and its performance.
However, the film‟s characters are completely unaware of cinema‟s
potentially positive effects. They are shown to have just as dysfunctional a
relationship to cinematic images as they do to language, essentially ignoring
their presence. As in so many of Wenders‟s other films, the protagonist
54
Dawson, p.24.
55
The English language subtitles of the BFI (Connoisseur) video of the film faithfully render
this in translation.
passes a cinema showing a film with a title, telling for the audience but not
for him – here it is Return of the Blind Dead (Die Rückkehr der reitenden
Leichen, a German version of Amando de Ossorio‟s Spanish horror film El
Ataque de los muertos sin ojos, 1973) which Wilhelm cycles past in his home
town [shot 17].56 To Plater‟s suggestion that the title refers to the townsfolk,
or even Wilhelm itself, one might add the un-dead Romantics, who inhabit,
vampirically, the opening and closing sequences of the film. 57 When Wilhelm
and Therese first meet in Bonn, we, but not they, see Francis Ford Coppola‟s
The Conversation (1974) and Marcelo Fondato‟s comedy thriller Watch Out,
We’re Mad (...Altrimenti ci arrabbiamo!, 1974) advertised in the background
[shot 162].58 In Therese‟s apartment it is only Laertes – the man with a story
to tell – who seems to be watching Straub-Huillet‟s Bach film [shot 354], and
Wilhelm and Therese visit the drive-in cinema showing Peter Lilienthal‟s La
Victoria (1973) only as an opportunity to discuss their imminent separation
[shot 386]. Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach [shot 375] and La Victoria,
the latter shot in Chile less than a year before the murder of Salvador
Allende, are both pieces of engaged political filmmaking, and both are
ignored by Wilhelm and Therese. The apparent irrelevance of these films to
their lives is highlighted by the unusual screening circumstances – the
Straub-Huillet film is untypical television fare, and few drive-in cinemas
would show Lilienthal‟s tale of political struggle and poverty in South
America.59 According to Eric Rentschler, four of the films „quoted‟ directly
in Wrong Move (he does not mention Fondato‟s) encompass the „possibilities
inherent in the cinematic medium‟.60 Whilst this is a convincing
interpretation of their function, what matters is that the protagonists ignore
them entirely. Once again Wrong Move seems to be offering a rather
pessimistic outlook on film and its potential for bringing about change.
56
The German title translates literally as „The Return of the Mounted Corpses‟. The film is
also known as The Return of the Evil Dead, and is the second in the director‟s Blind Dead
series.
57
Plater, p.66.
58
The German title of Fondato‟s film, Zwei wie Pech und Schwefel, translates as „two as thick
as thieves‟. Given the release dates of all three films in Germany, it is more than likely that
they were in fact running in cinemas at this time. Whilst in certain films Wenders has
strategically placed film titles in the mise-en-scène (for example Ford‟s 1959 The Searchers
in The State of Things/Der Stand der Dinge, 1982), here they may well be as found.
59
It is possible that, alongside the flashback to 3 American LPs (which also features a drive-in
cinema), a throwaway pun is intended: this is an „Autokino‟ (drive-in cinema) serving as an
„Autorenkino‟ (cinema of auteurs).
60
Eric Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time: Reflections on the Twenty Years
since Oberhausen (Bedford Hills, New York: Redgrave, 1984), p.178.
Whilst Wilhelm and Therese discuss their own personal crisis behind a
protective „screen‟ [shot 388] – the car windscreen so often equated
metaphorically with a film screen – Mignon is the only one responding
emotionally to the film at the drive-in cinema.61 Tears roll down her cheek as
she sits on the ground with a classic Wenders icon by her side, a Coca-Cola
bottle [shot 387]. While it is not clear whether she is crying at the film (which
seems unlikely as we have only reached the title) or because she has been
sidelined by Wilhelm, it would certainly be appropriate for Mignon to be the
only character moved by images – not only because she is wordless, but also
because she is associated with the medium of cinema itself in a number of
ways in the film.
In the film‟s penultimate scene, Wilhelm is forced to pick up a movie
camera [shots 409 and 410]. For the first time he sees the world (observes it)
through a camera lens. The resulting image is circumscribed by a broken
white framing line and is a „silent‟ image of a circus-type routine. Cinema, it
is being suggested, is, or at least can be, magic. 62 Magic, and in particular
juggling, is a leitmotif in Wrong Move that is associated with Mignon.
Unable or unwilling to communicate linguistically (there is no evidence to
draw a definitive conclusion), she interacts with Wilhelm, earns money, and
later entertains the industrialist with various tricks (conjuring and juggling).
She is the nexus of colour in the film and is explicitly associated with the
visual realm via the „handkerchief trick‟ in particular, significant for the
striking constellations of (primary) colours it generates: green and yellow,
blue and red [shots 289 and 291].
McCormick notes that it is this „seductive and silent character‟ who
embodies the tension that runs throughout the film between speaking and
seeing, word and image, and also points out that her appearance in both script
and film demonstrates that the „tension between the visual and the verbal was
already built into Handke‟s script‟.63 It is also given expression in both text
and film in Wilhelm‟s conception of the writing process. He admits that he
does not have „what one calls a gift for observation‟: „I generally have to
force myself to observe. Everybody sees more details in a thing than I do‟
61
The windscreen is a key motif in Straub-Huillet‟s History Lessons (Geschichtsunterricht,
1972), in which we repeatedly see the main character driving through the streets of Rome.
62
This notion will recur in Wings of Desire and is reminiscent of the iconic circus-as-film
motif in Alexander Kluge‟s The Artistes at the Top of the Big Top: Disorientated. It is
possible to see in this a reference to the origins of cinema itself, specifically to the circus
films of the brothers Max and Emil Skladanowsky (about whom Wenders was later to make
a film, A Trick of the Light/Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky, 1996).
63
McCormick, p.100.
(FB 58). He does, however, claim for himself a special kind of perceptual
ability, „the capacity for a kind of erotic gaze‟ (FB 58):
Suddenly I‟ll notice something that I‟d overlooked. But then I don‟t just see it, I get a feeling
for it at the same time. That‟s what I mean by an erotic gaze. What I see is then no longer
just an object of observation, it‟s also a very intimate part of me. In the past it was referred
to as seeing the essence of a phenomenon (Wesensschau), I believe. A part comes to stand
for the whole. Then I don‟t just write about something that‟s just been observed, as most
people do, but about something experienced. And that‟s the reason why I want to become a
writer. (FB 58)
Despite the fact that Wilhelm insists to Bernhard that the writing process
should have more to do with „noticing‟ (auffallen) than „imagining‟
(einfallen) (FB 56),64 a later diary entry suggests that this notion of an „erotic
gaze‟ has, in fact, more to do with looking inwards than outwards (and it is
thus given visual expression in Wenders‟s images of Wilhelm gazing out of a
window and into himself):
Sometimes I just stared into space for ages, deliberately not looking at anything. Then I
closed my eyes and it was only on seeing the afterimage this produced that I noticed what
I‟d had in front of me. When I write I also close my eyes and see some things very clearly
that I refused to see with my eyes open. (FB 61f.)65
Both Handke and Wenders operate with a separation of words and images:
writers, it seems, tend to be „blind‟, and image-makers „mute‟. Here too, it
could be argued, recomposition as a productive realignment or synthesis of
text and image is only present in Wrong Move, if at all, as an unattainable
ideal.
2.4 Endings
The question remains as to whether either script or film offers any suggestion
that the tension between the visual and the verbal can be resolved. Neither
Handke nor Wenders allows for the idea that the contemporary struggle for
identity and self-articulation can find expression within what is a traditional
literary form, even when that form is given filmic expression as it is here. 66
As Peter Harcourt notes: „Goethe‟s energetic quest for wholeness is answered
in Handke and Wenders by a withdrawn passivity, a sense of hopelessness
64
See also ibid., p.94.
65
McCormick notes that „Wilhelm maintains that the process of remembering is more
important than registering whatever visual impressions offer themselves‟, p.95.
66
As such, Handke offers another variation on a theme already explored, as we have seen, in
Short Letter, Long Farewell.
when faced with the complexities of contemporary life‟. 67 Wrong Move

subverts the Bildungsroman tradition not only by placing at the centre of its
story „a young man on educative travels who is, in terms of the education
these travels offer, virtually ineducable‟, 68 but also by reversing the direction
in which the journey takes him – towards renewed solipsism rather than
inclusion in a social context.69 However, it is important to note that Handke‟s
and Wenders‟s endings differ markedly both in the way they present the
isolation into which the protagonist moves and the degree to which they
imply that he has learnt anything. These distinctions in turn reflect on the
attitude writer and filmmaker demonstrate to the opposing pull of the verbal
and the visual.
In Handke‟s ending Wilhelm disappears – we see his proposed
destination but not him:
The fountain from above. Wilhelm goes off with his suitcase. Slow cross-fade: the Zugspitze
in the snow. At the same time the rising sound of a snowstorm.
A white wall of snow against the grey sky, held for some time. The sound of the storm. A
typewriter is heard which gradually becomes louder. (FB 81)
The noise of the typewriter seems to imply that Wilhelm has achieved his
ambition to become a writer, and the fact that he has left his companions and
headed into the mountains indicates that social isolation is the pre-requisite
for, or perhaps the consequence of, this kind of artistic creativity.
Wenders‟s ending is quite different. As Wilhelm himself acknowledges,
in a final spoken commentary, the snowstorm fails to materialise. The ironic
tone of his remarks is reminiscent of the Tonio Kröger passage quoted above:
„I stood on the Zugspitze waiting for an experience like a miracle. But there
was no snowstorm‟ [shot 411].70 Not only is Handke‟s blizzard absent, but
67
Harcourt, p.265.
68
Geist, p.48.
69
Wenders describes the film‟s negation of the Bildungsroman in the following terms: „We
both adored Goethe‟s book, but felt that its emancipatory movement couldn‟t get you
anywhere today. Travel as apprenticeship, as something towards understanding the world,
that wasn‟t an idyll we could seriously share. So our film would be the journey of someone
hoping to understand the world, but actually the opposite would happen: he would realize
that his movement had taken him to a dead end; effectively he wouldn‟t have moved an
inch. Hence the title: False Movement‟. „Le Souffle de l‟ange‟, p.254.
70
Several commentators note that both Handke‟s and Wenders‟s endings also contain a
potentially ironic reference to the famous „snow chapter‟ of Mann‟s already ironic novel of
self-development, The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924). Frisch, for instance,
compares Wilhelm with the novel‟s protagonist, Hans Castorp, whose insights come as he
wanders through a snowstorm, p.213.
we see Wilhelm standing next to a rubbish bin behind a garish safety barrier,
an image imbued with bathos and a certain melancholy. The Romantic
grandeur invoked by the mountain scene, echoing Caspar David Friedrich‟s
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), and arguably still present in
Handke‟s final sequence, is unmistakably debunked. Moreover, Wenders
gives no indication that Wilhelm is any closer to reaching his creative goal,
although his final remarks certainly do suggest a degree of self-awareness.
The emblematic typewriter noise has been replaced by a voiceover in which
he questions the moves he has made.
The implication would seem to be that Wenders‟s Wilhelm may be
beginning to see the error of his solipsistic ways. This would in turn imply
that while Wenders has worked with a number of Romantic intertexts
throughout the film, with a view to challenging them in this final image,
Handke saves his Romantic vision until the end and affirms its spiritual
import. Reading Handke‟s ending in this way, as a positive affirmation of the
connection between isolation and creativity, McCormick further maintains
that it asserts the primacy of the verbal over the visual. He argues that the
snowstorm provides an image in which: „Visual experience is replaced by the
whiteness of a blank page to be written upon; specularity is replaced by the
solitary process of writing and remembering‟. 71
However, this argument is based on reading Handke‟s ending straight and
Wenders‟s ironically. While the irony at the end of the film is transparent, it
is also possible that Handke‟s conclusion is less po-faced than is sometimes
assumed: after all, his text is also called Wrong Move. In the script‟s final
sequence, Wilhelm, in fact, appears only acoustically. If the off-screen
typewriter noise represents the protagonist being creative, then he is not
present on the mountain and fails to see the snowstorm, the experience that
Wenders‟s protagonist also laments having missed. Read in this way, the
ending confirms the separation of the verbal and the visual implicit in
Wilhelm‟s conception of the writing process, but leaves the audience with a
powerful image – one associated via the Romantics with artistic creation.
This might imply that Wilhelm‟s false step at the end of Handke‟s Wrong
Move is to assume that he will be able to write without first seeing.
If Wenders‟s Wilhelm fails to become a writer, he is – at least potentially
– given a different option. The penultimate sequence, in which he takes up
the home movie camera, indicates that filmmaking might offer him a more
71
McCormick, p.94.
outward-oriented creative alternative to writing, for, as Margaret McCarthy

notes:
Unlike the solitary realms of reading, writing and reflection, making films is by definition an
interactive process which requires the efforts of many individuals, plus numerous forms of
connection and collaboration. Simply put, film necessitates that selfhood direct itself
outwards towards a camera, director, and audience.72
The idea of Wilhelm as filmmaker also accords with autobiographical

readings of Wrong Move.73 If one assumes that Rüdiger Vogler is performing
his usual function here as the director‟s alter ego, then the outcome of
Wilhelm‟s quest appears more positive than in Handke‟s script: after all, we
witness the film‟s protagonist with a camera in his hand, while the typewriter
is heard but not seen. However, it is difficult to read Wilhelm-as-filmmaker
as a viable proposition for precisely the same reason that Handke‟s Wilhelm-
as-writer is problematic: his „blindness‟. As McCarthy points out, „Wilhelm
is too visually impaired for the filmic medium to provide a viable alternative
to literature‟.74 Certainly the scene he shoots with the home movie camera is,
film-historically speaking, extremely primitive and takes us back to the
origins of the medium in circus and spectacle. The fact that he stands next to
a passport photo booth underscores the historical point (none too subtly) with
a reference to cinema‟s inherited media. The scene is not, however, without a
certain magic, especially given the apparently fortuitous synchronicity of the
juggling and the water feature. Although Wilhelm has left her behind, the
spirit of Mignon appears to be present in what is Wilhelm‟s first encounter
with the apparatus of cinema.
In fact, the film does not seem in the final instance to come down
definitively on the side of either the verbal or the visual. It is hard not to
conclude that Wenders has left the battle of word and image unresolved here
72
Margaret McCarthy, „Mapping Goethe‟s Wilhelm Meister onto Wenders‟ Wrong Move‟, in
Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen, ed. by Robert Mayer (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), pp.175-91 (p.188). She also notes that Wilhelm‟s mumbling of the
name of Wenders‟s next film in his sleep hints at „film‟s ability to lead Wilhelm out of his
artistic cul-de-sac‟, p.188.
73
Peter Buchka is one amongst many who have noted the manifestly autobiographical
dimension to this film: „At the beginning his [Wenders‟s] situation was probably similar to
that of Wilhelm in WRONG MOVE‟. Peter Buchka, Augen kann man nicht kaufen: Wim
Wenders und seine Filme (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1985), p.39. When asked by Buchka,
Wenders admitted that the helicopter shots in his films have an autobiographical subtext:
„Whenever I felt very insecure as a child I always wished I could be somewhere very high
up. I would then have a better overview‟, p.68.
74
McCarthy, p.188.
and to see in this uncertainty a reflection of the problematic nature of this

particular collaboration between writer and filmmaker. The Friedrich-like
view of Wilhelm atop the Zugspitze is overlaid acoustically with his rushed
concluding voice-over and visually with the garish title. This final shot of the
protagonist, virtually a static image, is overloaded with verbal exposition
which serves to circumscribe the audience‟s reading of it. As Kolditz puts it:
WRONG MOVE is Wenders‟s most artificial film; there is an artificiality in it which has a
lot to do with Handke‟s texts. Wenders has stressed that he changed many of the locations
but none of the dialogues. The press at the time criticised the contradiction between
Handke‟s artificial language and Wenders‟s images. Although Wenders was able to bring
together a collection of very good actors, it is telling that the only figure in the film that
comes alive is Mignon – a mute girl.
WRONG MOVE demonstrates, like THE GOALKEEPER‟S FEAR OF THE PENALTY
before it and later TOKYO-GA, the fundamental contradiction which is inscribed into
virtually all of Wenders‟s films: the contradiction between his search for authentic,
meaning-free images and a highly differentiated, at times rather superficial, system of signs
which burdens everything with meaning.75
These remarks highlight a fundamental conflict which surfaces not only in

Wenders‟s literary collaborations with Handke, but in literary adaptation in
general: „the contradiction between a fixed structure with pre-ordained,
highly artificial dialogues and the spontaneous discoveries made whilst
shooting‟.76
Kolditz points out that Therese aptly characterises Wenders‟s own
dilemma with her claim that „it is so artificial always having to express
yourself in the words of others‟ (FB 69). 77 This problem is aggravated in the
case of Wrong Move (and again, albeit differently, in Wings of Desire) by the
studied artificiality of the dialogues and many of the situations in which the
characters find themselves. In the case of Handke‟s screenplay the
descriptions of the concrete townscape in which Therese lives are a case in
point. Reminiscent of the street scenes and buildings in Wenders‟s early
shorts, and in Police Film in particular, they add up to a vision of
contemporary city life which is ritualised, theatrical, and depressing.78 The
75
Kolditz, p.166.
76
Ibid., p.168.
77
Ibid.
78
These images are also very similar to Handke‟s photographs of Paris in When Hope Still
Helped, also of 1974. See: „Die Reise nach La Défense‟, in Als das Wünschen noch geholfen
hat (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp.37-52.
massing of images of alienation in Handke‟s prose certainly has, in the

terminology of the text itself, as much to do with „imagining‟ as „noticing‟:
A street in front of the tower block, late afternoon. A woman stands still and suddenly goes
mad. She laughs and screams in a high-pitched voice and dances clumsily in a circle. She
laughs and screams rhythmically, the same sequence repeats itself. Some people, amongst
them children, stand around and watch her. The caretaker sweeps up between her legs and
all around her. (FB 67f.)
Some of the scenes Wenders substitutes for Handke‟s images are relatively
unobtrusive – a dog tethered to a tree [shot 332], children stroking guinea
pigs [shot 333] in a particularly impersonal corner of Frankfurt‟s „concreted
over landscape‟. Nevertheless, within the literary and poetic framework of
the film, they seem to demand an allegorical reading. In these scenes the film
struggles to translate adequately onto screen the tension in Handke‟s text
between observation and allegory.
No image in Wrong Move – irrespective of its assumed ordinariness – can
escape the poetic aura of Handke‟s prose. The problem is exacerbated by the
fact that the process of signification – of imbuing the everyday with symbolic
potential – is not itself explicitly problematised as it was in The Goalkeeper’s
Fear of the Penalty. Nor is the poetic language divorced from the images
(and narrative) in the manner of Wings of Desire. The result is a poeticisation
of the everyday which lays itself open to the criticism set out by Laertes in
his remarks to Wilhelm on poetry and politics. Not unlike his hero, Wenders,
it would seem, has failed to learn from the old man and, like the protagonist
of the film, remains where he began, being, in Wenders‟s own words, „very
faithful to the text‟.79 The problem he faces is that the text (like the play
Therese has to learn) is someone else‟s: Wrong Move „had a static script and
had to be a static film. But for me personally, this requirement got on my
nerves‟.80
Wenders has himself attempted to pinpoint the quality that drew him to
Handke‟s texts, but his conclusions remain relatively vague: he refers, for
example, to the shared „way of seeing the world‟ already explored in earlier
chapters.81 Whilst commentators agree that the initial attraction was one of
compatible temperaments, this artistic kinship is also based on a common
interest in the subjectivity of perception, what Handke simply termed „my
79
Geist, p.48.
80
Ibid., p.49.
81
Rauh, p.246.
reality‟.82 Certainly Wenders‟s claim that Wrong Move is a film about „how
we grasp the world through language‟ suggests a close congruity of interest
(and one which implies the film is almost a sequel to The Goalkeeper’s Fear
of the Penalty).83 Yet in explaining to Jan Dawson his admiration for the
„representational‟ quality of Yasujirō Ozu (who, he claims, was the only
filmmaker he learnt from), Wenders also pinpoints the problem at the core of
the collaboration on Wrong Move:
Cinema started as a phenomenological affair. People who invented the first film cameras,
when they shot things, were only interested in representation. All the other ideas of cinema
were developed later. In the beginning, there was nothing but plain representation of reality.
[...]
It gets more and more complicated. Especially if you stick to the idea of representation, but
on the other hand tend towards stories that are too complicated to tell simply by
representation. When I started shooting, I wasn‟t interested in stories at all. Even in The
Goalie, I wasn‟t that interested in the story. I‟m getting more and more interested in stories.
Personally, in my own life, too. Doing this, and not losing the other, is getting more and
more difficult.84
This is a strikingly candid and revealing admission from a filmmaker who, at

the time of the interview, was working on the first of his more conventionally
narrative „American films‟, The American Friend (Der amerikanische
Freund, 1977).
Despite its repeated naming of objects, Handke‟s script is certainly not a
text of „plain representation‟ (if one accepts such a problematic notion in the
first place) and its chronicle of the everyday, at times bordering on the
epiphanic, sometimes sits uncomfortably with the more laconic detail one
associates with Wenders‟s self-scripted (black and white) films and which
surfaces at certain points in Wrong Move (Kinski/Mignon‟s inept juggling,
for example [shot 115]). What Wrong Move demonstrates is that as Wenders
develops his own voice, and becomes keen to speak with it as a cinematic
story-teller, so his approach to language becomes increasingly incompatible
with that of Handke. Ultimately, despite being a reflection on the
„relationship of literary language to reality‟ and a „confrontation between
Handke‟s literary system and a cinematic one‟, Wrong Move testifies to a
collision of voices rather than a dialogue.85 As already noted, the
recomposition of film through the collaboration of writer and filmmaker is
82
Quoted in Rauh, p.11.
83
Quoted in Rauh, p.47.
84
Dawson, p.10.
85
Rauh, p.213 and p.47.
raised as a possibility at certain key moments in the film, but ultimately it

remains unrealised. Although the film is in colour, and thus clearly signalled
as being „someone else‟s [...] story‟, 86 it is also very much the story of Wim
Wenders, not least as the centrepiece of the „Rüdiger Vogler trilogy‟. In
Wings of Desire Wenders was to find appropriate expression for this „bi-
lingualism‟ in a pattern of dualisms which include that of colour and black-
and-white, albeit without resorting to the overly simple equation of colour as
other and black-and-white as self.
Geist claims that a principle theme of the film is the way in which
„literary formulations block true communication‟. 87 Given the problematic
nature of the collaboration in Wrong Move, it is tempting to read the different
conclusions to the script and the film as paradigmatic: Handke‟s Wilhelm
turns to the typewriter, while Wenders‟s picks up a camera. This allows for
the film to be understood by extension as a discourse on the processes of
literary adaptation and collaboration, ending with writer and filmmaker going
their separate ways. If the film, signalling as it does a dead end for a
particular kind of German Romantic yearning, provides ample justification
for the separation of author and filmmaker, then one might speculate that this
goes some way to explaining Wenders‟s own definition of it as a „sad film‟
but not a pessimistic one.88 Certainly Wrong Move signalled the end (to date
at least) of the close collaboration, albeit not the friendship between Wenders
and Handke.
3. Communication
Before moving on in the next chapter to an examination of the fourth and
final collaboration between writer and filmmaker, on Wings of Desire, it is
helpful to take a brief look at another work by Handke, one contemporaneous
with Wrong Move, the novel A Moment of True Feeling, written in Paris
„during the summer and autumn of 1974‟ as Wenders was filming in
Germany.89 Not only does this novel cover similar thematic ground to the
film, it sheds further light on Handke‟s position regarding the relationship
86
Dawson, p.12. „[There] must be a connection between my own stories being in black-and-
white and other people‟s being in color. [...] I think black-and-white is much more realistic
and natural than color. It sounds paradoxical, but that‟s the way it is. [...] I would never,
ever, shoot a documentary in color‟, Dawson, p.12. Subsequently Wenders was to do just
that. The most famous example, perhaps, is Buena Vista Social Club, 1999.
87
Geist, p.58.
88
Dawson, p.19.
89
Peter Handke, A Moment of True Feeling, trans. by Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1977), p.133. Further references in the text as MTF.
between the verbal and the visual and, by extension, the possibilities inherent
in writing and filmmaking. On completing the novel, Handke turned once
more to film, this time as director of The Left-Handed Woman, a project that
has been described in at least one commentary as a further Handke-Wenders
co-production.90 Taken together, these works are often viewed as
representing the end of Handke‟s early period before he began to develop his
mature style in the novel Slow Homecoming, the first part of the tetralogy
published between 1979 and 1981.91 That is, they too can be said loosely to
belong within the period of Handke‟s early collaboration with Wenders,
rather than to the later period in which he produced the works which, as we
shall see, become such important intertexts for Wings of Desire. Certain
aspects of both A Moment of True Feeling and The Left-Handed Woman will
be explored here as illustrative of the texts‟ further problematisation of the
relationship between the word and the image at the heart of Wrong Move, and
for the light they shed on the end of a productive six-year collaboration.
As has been noted, Wenders‟s version of Wrong Move forms part of a
loose trilogy with Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road, „unified by
Rüdiger Vogler‟s persona and by the fact that all three combine the American
road movie genre with that of the German Bildungsroman‟.92 In these films,
Wenders explores from different perspectives a group of recurring themes:
the subjective nature of perception, the relationship between self and world,
words and images, the innocence of children, and the problematic nature of
male-female relationships. Handke, in an interview with Heinz Ludwig
Arnold after the publication of A Moment of True Feeling, makes it clear that
he similarly regards his early works as a series of different journeys from one
(highly personal) starting point:
90
Inez Hedges and John Bernstein maintain that Wenders‟s and Handke‟s „co-productions‟,
amongst which they include The Left-Handed Woman, „blur the parameters of cinematic
authorship‟. Hedges and Bernstein, „History, Style, Authorship: The Question of Origins in
the New German Cinema‟, Journal of Contemporary History, 19 (1984), 171-87 (p.179).
Not only did Wenders produce the film, but it was shot using key members of his team –
actor Rüdiger Vogler, cameraman Robby Müller, and editor Peter Przygodda. Nevertheless,
adapted from his own novel and directed by Handke, if this film can be called a
collaboration at all, it is clearly one of a different order to the four considered in this study.
91
The other parts are The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire (Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire,
1980), Child Story (Kindergeschichte, 1981), and the dramatic poem The Long Way Round
(Über die Dörfer, 1981).
92
Geist, p.56. Geist also points out that the trilogy „nevertheless lacks stylistic and
philosophical unity‟, with Wrong Move proving to be the odd film out: „In conception,
shooting, acting, and editing Alice and Kings are spontaneous, documentary, unhurried, and
hopeful, while Wrong Move is static, precise, literary, disjunctive, and pessimistic‟, p.56.
I would like […] to see all these different figures in relation to one another. If you think
about what I‟ve written before: that I-narrator in Short Letter, Long Farewell who goes to
America, then the goalkeeper, Josef Bloch, then the businessman Hermann Quitt from They
are Dying Out, then the mother in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, and then in my last book this
Gregor Keuschnig – they all have similar attitudes to life, but they are all taken in different
directions. And that makes me proud: the attitude is mine, but the possibilities, the
realisations, the perspectives are all very different.93
Critics too have been tempted to read the early works as intimately
interconnected, as Frank Pilipp does in an article on The Goalkeeper’s Fear
of the Penalty, A Moment of True Feeling, and The Left-Handed Woman
entitled „The Quest for Authenticity, a Trilogy‟.94 That the latter two works
can also be regarded as forming a loose grouping with Wrong Movement is
suggested not only be their shared themes, but by a number of references and
motifs which link them.
Each, for instance, pays homage to Goethe. While Wrong Move re-
imagines Wilhelm Meister, the novel The Left-Handed Woman ends with a
quotation from Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandschaften, 1809), and the
final scene of A Moment of True Feeling, in which the protagonist, Gregor
Keuschnig, crosses a Paris square wearing a light blue suit, white socks and
yellow shoes, has been read as an allusion to The Sorrows of Young Werther
(Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774). The motif of writing at the heart of
Wrong Move also links all three texts. While neither Marianne, the central
figure in The Left-Handed Woman, nor Gregor Keuschnig writes (although
Marianne is a translator), both have significant encounters with ironically
conceived writers in the course of their stories. The „corpulent writer‟ (MTF
83) in A Moment of True Feeling, with his „affectation of omniscience‟ (MTF
84), appears to know all about Gregor‟s crisis, parodying his self-obsession
in their first encounter: „When I […] catch myself observing something out
of old habit, I suddenly think: But what about myself? I have a horror of
looking to right or left; there‟s always something waiting to be looked at‟
(MTF 72). He seems to be using Gregor‟s predicament for his own creative
purposes, initially making notes about his behaviour and then trailing the
protagonist – „“I‟ve been following you all day, Gregor,” he said. “I have
tempered my idea with observations and now I‟m satisfied.”‟ (MTF 125) –
93
Heinz Ludwig Arnold, „Gespräch mit Peter Handke‟, Text + Kritik, 24/24a (1978), 22-44
(p.44).
94
Frank Pilipp, „The Quest for Authenticity, a Trilogy: The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty
Kick, A Moment of True Feeling, The Left-Handed Woman‟, in The Works of Peter Handke:
International Perspectives, ed. by David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp (Riverside, California:
Ariadne, 2005), pp.80-130.
before declaring, once the climax of his crisis has passed, that he no longer
has any use for him.95 Marianne‟s father, in The Left-Handed Woman, was
once a successful writer, „now he sent carbon copies of short sketches to the
papers‟.96 Like his corpulent colleague in A Moment of True Feeling who
refuses to see, Marianne‟s father is also characterised by poor perception, in
his case an apparently self-inflicted colour-blindness of which he claims: „It‟s
just that I never learned to see colors‟ (LW 56). One could argue that Wrong
Move, A Moment of True Feeling, and The Left-Handed Woman present a
triumvirate of perceptually-challenged writers at various representative points
in their careers, and that their potential fates are encapsulated in the final
portrait of the old man in the latter. With a nod towards Wilhelm‟s false step,
the decline of his career is linked to the isolation into which he has sunk:
„I believe that at some time I began to live in the wrong direction – though I don‟t hold the
war or any other outside event to blame. Now writing sometimes strikes me as a pretext‟ –
he giggled – „and then again sometimes it doesn‟t. I‟m so alone that before I go to sleep at
night I often have nobody to think about, simply because I haven‟t seen anyone during the
day. And how can anyone write if he has no one to think about?‟ (LW 59f.)
3.1 From wrong moves to true feelings

Contrasting the freedom available to Goethe‟s protagonist with Wilhelm‟s
limited room for manoeuvre in Wrong Move, Handke commented:
What Goethe had a couple of hundred years ago as a great gesture, a great movement, a
great journey, being on the road, setting off, in my version is possible only in little moments
of rebellion that fizzle out, are extinguished by what has changed in the landscape, and, of
course, also in the inner life of the guy who calls himself the hero. The heroic allure of
Wilhelm Meister is beyond him, even if he tries to see himself as the hero of his personal
story. He keeps setting off on really serious, monumental movements. But who can live like
that, where every possibility can be computed?97
Gregor Keuschnig‟s problem in A Moment of True Feeling is similar. In

contrast to Wilhelm, the ingénue without experience who goes in search of
meaning, Keuschnig, press attaché at the Austrian embassy in Paris and
married with a daughter, is a man with a clearly defined existence, apparently
95
Manfred Durzak does in fact make out of Keuschnig a writer of sorts when he maintains that
„the protagonists are interchangeable‟ and that both Keuschnig and the writer are versions of
the author himself. Manfred Durzak, Peter Handke und die deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur:
Narziß auf Abwegen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982), p.126.
96
Peter Handke, The Left-Handed Woman, trans. by Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1977), p.55. Further references in the text as LW.
97
experienced as meaningful. That is until he wakes one morning from a

disturbing dream to discover that his life has fundamentally metamorphosed:
„Something had been done that could never be undone‟ (MTF 4).98 Suddenly,
and without explanation, everything that structured his existence and gave his
life meaning – his functions as husband, father, and lover, as well as the
various roles demanded by his work – appears arbitrary and senseless:
„Things would never again be the same as before, thought Keuschnig, nor did
he want them to be. Actually they never had been‟ (MTF 23f.). 99
The novel focuses on Keuschnig‟s anarchic, sometimes brutal response to
this loss of meaning, as he frees himself from the domestic ties which have
defined his existence, abandoning his wife and rejecting his lover, before
losing his daughter at a children‟s playground in what is clearly a case of
wish-fulfilment. The disgust that dominates Keuschnig‟s response to his
environment as he wanders the streets of Paris in his post-crisis state is
directed at a world that had been held together by the suprapersonal
discourses and systems which, like the ties of marriage and fatherhood, had
formally helped to anchor his life in a shared context. Suddenly aware of
their constricting nature, he now rejects these frameworks: „To be initiated
had become absurd, to be taken back into the fold had become unimaginable,
to belong had become hell on earth. The swindle had been exposed and he
was disenchanted‟ (MTF 28). Without them, however, his once stable
environment begins, frighteningly, to fragment. As Handke himself put it:
For this hero [there is] no wholeness, no unity, no harmony [...]. Every detail can mean
something different from one second to the next, and above all the protagonist Keuschnig
suddenly perceives the world, which before he had imagined to be harmonious, as nothing
more than a disorderly world of details.100
98
The fact that Keuschnig dreams that he has murdered an old woman (later he admits to
himself that it was a sexually motivated crime) provides a link, as Durzak has pointed out, to
Bloch‟s murder of the cashier in The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty and Judith‟s
murderous intentions towards the narrator in Short Letter, Long Farewell, pp.130f.
99
The novel‟s opening contains a distinct echo of the strange transformation in Kafka‟s The
Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915) reinforced by the fact that the main characters
share the same first name. Like Kafka‟s story, Handke‟s work depicts a fundamental
alteration in the protagonist which takes place overnight, surprises him when he wakes in the
morning, hinders him from continuing with his former life, and alters his relationship to both
his physical environment and the people around him. In other respects the transformations
are dissimilar. Keuschnig‟s has no physical repercussions and, in fact, no one but the
protagonist is aware of his metamorphosis. Unlike Gregor Samsa, he is able, at least
superficially, to go about his business as if nothing had happened.
100
Arnold, p.32. This clearly puts him in a position not dissimilar to Bloch‟s, as Richard Arthur
Firda notes: „he becomes neurotically obsessed with the details and objects of the outer
Having been dislodged from the securities of his old existence, Keuschnig
can now discern how they were constructed. His new insight into the way
socio-political frameworks act to provide meaning is articulated in the
episode of the press conference which he attends as part of his job. Having
wandered the streets all day in a state of utmost disorientation, he willingly
gives himself up to the sense of security afforded by this public forum in
which he experiences his own future being mapped onto the new political
programme as set out by the President of the Republic. The formulations in
which the policies are couched act to define Keuschnig, allowing him to
become „inconspicuous, even to himself‟ (MTF 56) and providing him with
„a foolproof system by which to redefine himself at any time‟: „If I can
manage that, Keuschnig thought contentedly, no one will ever find out who I
really am!‟ (MTF 56f.).
This final observation highlights what the protagonist regards as a
positive discovery in the context of this momentary respite from the trauma
of disorientation. But it also points to the negative effect of the structures of
meaning provided by society: they hinder individuals from perceiving deeper
truths about themselves and the world around them. They do this by creating
a superfluity of surface meaning which masks the fact that they are
essentially meaningless – „Altogether nothing made sense; the world only
pretended to be sensible; much too sensible‟ (MTF 27). Keuschnig‟s
response to this insight is ambivalent. On the one hand, as his reaction to the
press conference demonstrates, he craves the security which social constructs
can provide. On the other, he resents the fact that they alienate him from
himself and his environment.
Keuschnig‟s discoveries here clearly parallel Wilhelm‟s insistence in
Wrong Move that the political blocks access to the personal. Another point of
reference between the two works is provided by what can be read as a kind of
counter episode to the press conference. Here Keuschnig expresses his
antipathy towards society‟s meaning-giving structures by responding
aggressively to a variety of symbols of political protest which he regards as
an unwanted intrusion into his private life:
On the rue Mirabeau, Keuschnig […] saw, out of the corner of his eye, a plaque with the
word autrichien on it affixed to the wall of a house. It had been put there in memory of an
Austrian who had joined a French Resistance group to fight the National Socialists, and had
been shot down by the Germans on this spot some thirty years before. The plaque had been
cleaned in preparation for the fourteenth of July, the French national holiday, and a tin can
world. Like Bloch‟s, Gergor‟s alienation is characterized by “seeing” too much and the
inability to conceptualize‟. Firda, Peter Handke (New York: Twayne, 1993), p.87.
with a sprig of evergreen in it had been placed under it. The asshole, thought Keuschnig, and
kicked the tin box, but stopped it when it kept on rolling. He crossed the Avenue de
Versailles and saw on a hoarding a poster advertising a meeting: „Hortensia Allende will
speak to us …‟ TO US! he thought, turned away and spat. Rabble! Passing a newspaper
stand […], he read that the Turkish invaders of Cyprus had entered Nikosia, the capital, and
that war was imminent. How annoying, thought Keuschnig; what intolerable interference in
my life! (MTF 10)
As we have seen, McCormick argues in relation to Wrong Move that

Wilhelm‟s aggressive response to Laertes, as the embodiment of the Nazi
past, is simply the flip side of his normal passivity, a reaction to the fact that
his withdrawal from politics has been disrupted. The same can be said of
Keuschnig‟s aggression towards the signs of the Nazi past and contemporary
politics, none of which he is able to make sense of in relation to his own life.
Through its protagonist‟s aggression, A Moment of True Feeling, like Wrong
Move, signals the danger inherent in the individual‟s failure to make
meaningful for his own life his experience of the external world, a
perspective reinforced by the quotation from Max Horkheimer with which
the novel opens: „Violence and inanity (Sinnlosigkeit) – are they not
ultimately one and the same thing?‟ (MTF 1).
McCormick describes the opposition Wrong Move sets up between
politics and poetry in the following terms:
The politician uses language that is unauthentic, impersonal, and reified, a co-opted,
conformist language that alienates the individual and thus increases social isolation. Poetry
is thus the only means to intersubjective communication, and in its glimmer […] Wilhelm
sees the hope for a utopian future where those intensely subjective needs can be fulfilled,
where the longing for individuality and community are not mutually exclusive. For Wilhelm
does see the need for the sort of „political‟ community that is a synthesis of the two. 101
Keuschnig too longs for meaninglessness to be alleviated through the

creation of a connection between self and the world outside of the reified
discourses determining the way the individual perceives reality. In A Moment
of True Feeling, however, such a connection is made not via poetry, but
perception – the epiphanic vision, „a moment of pure sensation, where the
perceiver is not concerned with meaning but rather views the perceived
objects divested of meaning and context‟: 102
Then he had an experience – and while still taking it in, he hoped he would never forget it.
In the sand at his feet he saw three things: a chestnut leaf; a piece of a pocket mirror; a
101
McCormick, p.92.
102
Pilipp, p.104.
child‟s barrette. They had been lying there the whole time, but then suddenly they came
together and became miraculous objects. „Who said the world has already been discovered?‟
(MTF 63)
In Short Letter, Long Farewell the epiphanic vision was rejected as

idiosyncratic and asocial. Here it convinces Keuschnig that there is an
inherent meaning to the world, independent of a socio-political context, but
also not entirely generated by himself. It seems to be a property of the objects
themselves and is thus not purely private, but potentially available to
anybody: „I haven‟t discovered a personal mystery in them, addressed to
myself; what I‟ve discovered is the IDEA of a mystery valid for all!‟ (MTF
64). Thus the „magical proximity‟ (MTF 64) of the three objects inspires in
him a sense of community, „a helpless affection for everyone‟ (MTF 64).
While not immediately resolving his crisis – he still needs to escape the
confines of his previously secure bourgeois existence by abandoning wife,
lover, and child – this exposure to the possibility of authentic experience does
set in motion a gradual movement back towards reconciliation with the social
world.103 In the work‟s final section, Keuschnig appears to be able to
reconcile the fact that the world around him constitutes a social whole,
governed by its own laws of meaning, with his faith, inspired by the vision of
the three objects, that there is a reality which exists independently of a social
context: „Now the idea that had come to him on seeing those three things in
the sand of the Carré Marigny seemed usable. In becoming mysterious to
him, the world opened itself and could be reconquered‟ (MTF 121). This
insight inspires him to find a place for himself within society, secure in the
knowledge that there is an existence which goes beyond it: „suddenly he felt
103
It is significant that the child, Agnes, represents the last of Keuschnig‟s ties to his previous
existence to be severed – she does not disappear until he has learnt from the experience of
spending time with her. The clearest example of the educative influence she exerts is
provided by an incident in a restaurant which reveals the protagonist momentarily gratified
to share with the other diners the sense of invulnerability provided by their familiar
bourgeois context: „Outside on the square a half-naked drunk was bellowing; at the sight of
him a mood of smug complicity enveloped many of the diners, who were not only clothed
but also more or less sober. A few began talking from table to table, even to Keuschnig‟
(MTF 108). He is disconcerted by his own reaction to the incident but impressed by
Agnes‟s: „The innocence of the child, who, while all the others were smirking at each other,
was merely frightened by the bellowing! For the first time he was glad to be alone with her‟
(MTF 108). The fact that the child‟s responses are not (yet) socially conditioned seems to
strengthen Keuschnig‟s faith in the possibility that meaning can exist outside the framework
of prescribed social norms. It also, of course, brings Agnes close to both Wenders‟s and
Handke‟s other „pre-social‟ children.
a profound joy at the thought of the time that lay ahead of him. He needed
work, the outcome of which would be as valid and unimpeachable as a law!‟
(MTF 129). He can live within society because his eyes have been opened to
the fact it is not the only source of meaning: „Although he saw the same
things as before, and from the same angle, they had become alien and
therefore bearable‟ (MTF 130).
It is the reconciliation of a social existence with the knowledge that there
is more to the world than this which allows for the transformation which
takes place on the final pages of the novel. Keuschnig sets off in a new suit to
begin a fresh social existence, starting with an appointment he has made with
a woman whose telephone number he found on a paving stone. As he does
so, the narrative perspective shifts. The reader no longer views the world
through Keuschnig‟s eyes, rather he has become „a man‟, just another
anonymous member of the society in which he has found a place for himself
once more, with the new experiences awaiting him signalled by the dots with
which the story ends (MTF 133). The change of perspective also suggests
that, in the wake of the resolution of his crisis, Keuschnig can again be
reinserted into the narrative of his life (and thus be seen as the subject of a
story), a position he shares with both the narrator of Short Letter, Long
Farewell and Philip in Alice in the Cities. What distinguishes all three
characters from Wilhelm in Wrong Move, whose ability to master his life
remains less certain, is that the place of each as the subject at the centre of his
own existence is confirmed by successful interaction (admittedly putative in
Keuschnig‟s case) with others and the reality they inhabit.
4. Translation
Confronted in 1975 with the question „Are you influenced as a writer by
cinema?‟, Handke responded „No, not in the least. No, not the prose‟, before
adding: „If you use cinematic techniques in literature you get craft rather than
art‟.104 Stylistically then, he would seem to want to insist on the separation of
the visual, or at least the cinematic, and the verbal. The evidence of his early
works, however, casts doubt on Handke‟s statement. As we have seen, he
regularly problematises the relationship between literature and film precisely
through a blurring of medial boundaries. Thus the film script he produced for
Wrong Move is self-consciously literary rather than explicitly cinematic: it
not only references a literary genre, the Bildungsroman, but, with its highly
artificial dialogues and deliberately poetic language, is also linguistically one
of his most overtly „literary‟ texts of this period. What is more, the very
104
Arnold, p.26.
literariness of its language is used to question the communicative potential of

literature itself. As Geist points out: „Every character remains isolated behind
a screen of literary formulations through which he or she apparently hopes to
deal with but not be touched by other human beings‟. 105 The novel Short
Letter, Long Farewell, on other hand, couples its rejection of a variety of
traditional literary genres, as inadequate to the articulation of its protagonist‟s
experiences, with the development of a kind of „cinematic‟ prose form which
references in particular the road movie. Christoph Parry maintains that A
Moment of True Feeling similarly has cinematic as well as literary
antecedents: „The Paris of the cinema belongs to the unspecific intertextual
environment of Handke‟s novel in much the way the road movie made its
presence felt in Der kurze Brief‟.106 He also argues that the narrative
perspective, linked to the protagonist‟s point-of-view for most of the novel, is
cinematic, that a camera analogy „applies implicitly to the way the street
scenes of Paris are described‟.107 Or, reversing his cinematic gaze, Rentschler
argues that Keuschnig is a „specular subject‟, one of Handke‟s many
protagonists for whom „seeing is being‟: „Their mode of vision has much in
common with the moviegoer who sits in the dark and partakes of filmic
spectacles‟.108 While Keuschnig may on occasion interpret his experience in
cinematic terms, as, for instance, when he perceives himself and his fellow
diners in a restaurant as „characters in a film, the story of which was obvious
after the very first frame‟ (MTF 107), the structure, language, and themes of
A Moment of True Feeling are not as consistently filmic as those of Short
Letter, Long Farewell. To some extent, therefore, A Moment of True Feeling
can be taken as evidence for the claim that Wrong Move marks a parting of
the ways for writer and filmmaker, and this despite the fact that shortly after
finishing it Handke was to embark on directing his most Wenders-like film. It
might, perhaps, be more accurate to suggest that Handke as both writer and
filmmaker is keen to explore the specificity of different media, rather than
their correspondences. Nevertheless, taken together, Short Letter, Long
Farewell and A Moment of True Feeling do demonstrate that Handke is
concerned in the works of this period to explore the relationship between
word and image and to re-draw the boundary between prose and film (as
Wenders will go on to do, most explicitly in Wings of Desire).
105
Geist, p.58.
106
Christoph Parry, Peter Handke’s Landscapes of Discourse: An Exploration of Narrative and
Cultural Space (Riverside, California: Ariadne, 2003), pp.86f.
107
Ibid., p.86.
108
Rentschler, p.167.
Offering another example in Handke‟s work of the kind of re-evaluation

and re-visioning of a small number of related themes, The Left-Handed
Woman represents a continued investigation of the possibilities inherent in
the word and the image for the articulation of the relationship between self
and world. Corrigan, indeed, asserts that „the dialectic between the visual and
the verbal, so dominant in Handke‟s career and literary work, becomes
concentrated and emphasized as never before‟.109 Originally conceived as a
film script, it appeared first in novel form in 1976 and then, in the following
year, as a film directed by Handke himself. Its central character, Marianne,
more generally referred to as „the woman‟, is a translator. This creates a
connection between thematic content and creative process, one which is also
sustained in other ways in the film, as Handke undertakes an act of
translation from film treatment to novel to film, reversing „the usual pattern
of adaptation‟.110
In some respects The Left-Handed Woman can be regarded as a
companion text to A Moment of True Feeling, not least because it re-enacts,
this time from a woman‟s perspective, Keuschnig‟s breaking open of the
secure context of domestic life – Marianne asks her husband to leave and
withdraws into herself in a way which alters the dynamic in the relationship
with her son. She also undergoes a sequence of metamorphoses similar to
those experienced by Keuschnig, from secure social context to self-inflicted
isolation and tentatively back again towards social reconciliation.
The novel, perhaps not surprisingly given its origins as a film treatment,
represents Handke‟s most concerted effort to write cinematically: the text
neither enters its characters‟ heads nor describes their states of mind, using
only imagistic descriptions of actions to imply emotion or motivation. The
author has commented on his method as follows:
I rewrote the filmscript in the form of a narrative for the following reasons: after several
books in which „he thought‟, „he felt‟, „he perceived‟ introduced many sentences, I wanted
to make full use of a prose form in which the thinking and the feeling of the figures would
not be described, where, therefore, instead of „she was afraid‟, we would have „she went‟,
„she looked out of the window,‟ „she lay down next to the bed of the child,‟ etc. And I
perceived that this kind of limitation with regard to my literary work was liberating.111
109
Timothy Corrigan, „The Tension of Translation: Handke‟s The Left-Handed Woman
(1977)‟, in German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, ed. by Eric
Rentschler (New York-London: Methuen, 1986), pp.260-75 (pp.260f.).
110
Ibid., p.261.
111
Handke quoted in June Schlueter, The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke (Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), p.154.
Although its paired down prose can at times be striking in its simplicity, the
novel has not been received as enthusiastically as the film. This is perhaps
precisely because, when read in comparison with its film adaptation, it makes
evident the limits of this kind of „visual‟ narration. As Corrigan points out,
what is an arresting presence in the film can only remain an absence in the
text – the image:
Ultimately one might argue that the inadequacy of this particular novel follows from just
these austere limits which Handke chooses to impose on his language – for it seeks to
convey an imagistic order which, by definition, can never really be made apparent in the
novel and which, as a function of the work‟s conception, has preceded it.112
The film, in stark contrast to Wrong Move, also pares back language. As
several commentators have noted, the protagonist does not speak during its
first twenty minutes, and, indeed, as it spends much of its time observing
Marianne watching herself and the world, the film consistently uses language
only very sparingly. In fact, apart from the occasional use of the music of
Bach to add emotional intensity, its soundtrack remains largely empty aside
from the striking sounds of the everyday: noises from the outside world
including planes, trains, and cars, or the sounds of Marianne‟s domestic
environment such as the repeated opening and closing of the lid of the
kitchen bin as she clears food from the refrigerator.113 This absence of
dialogue forms part of Handke‟s endeavour to rescue the visual – and the
aural – from discourse. As Rentschler puts it: „The Left-Handed Woman was
Handke‟s attempt to create a film with the intensity of myth, a work whose
pristine images speak so directly that they do not require interpretation: they
are adequate in and of themselves‟. 114 For Handke this amounts to a rigorous
recomposition of film. His previous films, for cinema and television, both
with and without Wenders, had all been markedly wordy. The Left-Handed
Woman, on the other hand, is closer to the phenomenological condition of
early silent cinema as described by Wenders. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this is
the film of Handke particularly admired by Wenders himself.115
112
Corrigan, p.261.
113
This represents a striking difference to Wenders‟s films of the same period. While there is a
nod in Handke‟s film to the influence of American culture on contemporary European
identity in the station café‟s pinball machine, which appears twice, and the Donald Duck
comic read by Marianne‟s son, the sounds of rock music are remarkably absent.
114
Rentschler, p.167.
115
See for example, the discussion between Wenders and Handke, „Das war für mich eine
große Erfreulichkeit, lakonisch sein zu können im Erzählen der Bilder‟, in Handke, Die
Abwesenheit, pp.143-67 (p.159).
In The Left-Handed Woman both the protagonist and the film itself are
trying to disentangle themselves from the pre-determined systems of meaning
that make impossible authentic existence of the kind Handke had already
explored in A Moment of True Feeling. According to Rentschler, the film
depicts Marianne‟s attempt to „find a means of preserving subjective life
against the onslaughts of ideology and technology, to maintain a semblance
of individuality in the face of the challenges of modern life under advanced
capitalism‟.116 She struggles to escape the pre-ordained roles for women in a
patriarchal society, a dimension of the film which gives it a distinctly
(gender) political edge, although it deliberately distances itself from the
discourses of the women‟s movement as embodied in the figure of
Marianne‟s friend Franziska, through whom „Handke suggests that the
women‟s sub-culture embraces new dogmas equally dissatisfying as the ones
it wishes to replace‟.117 Through the figure of Franziska and particularly
through Marianne‟s husband Bruno, who in the early sequences continually
berates his wife for leaving him, the film demonstrates how both language
and the gaze – the stare Bruno uses to intimidate his clients – can be used to
oppress others.
Marianne withdraws from social contact, demarcating for herself a
territory outside of conventional roles and social interactions, in an effort to
escape determination by the discourses of others and to (re-)gain a more
authentic version of self, a subjectivity liberated from the reifying meanings
and definitions by which it has been constrained.118 As Corrigan aptly puts it,
relating Marianne‟s struggle to the film‟s visual concerns, The Left-Handed
Woman represents „a series of negations or resistances through which
Marianne holds off different individuals and different discourses which
attempt to coopt her (image) into their language‟, becoming herself in the
process „almost pure image, a negation of social languages‟. 119 The process
by which she re-imagines herself outside of discourse has the potential to
116
Rentschler, p.171.
117
Lori Ann Ingalsbe, „Woman Beyond the Myth: A Feminist Reading of Peter Handke‟s
Linkshändige Frau‟, New German Review, 7 (1991), 1-14 (p.10).
118
That Handke understands his protagonist as accessing a kind of „pre-social‟ self is indicated
by a formulation he used in an interview in Le Monde in which he describes Marianne‟s
decision to leave her husband as „a return to a kind of childlike autonomy‟. Quoted in
Schleuter, p.51. This formulation also suggests the importance of her interactions with her
son Stefan for her development in the film, although he, unlike Alice in Wenders‟s Alice in
the Cities, is obviously already feeling the effects of social expectations and demands, as his
interactions with his friend, Philip, demonstrate.
119
Corrigan, p.263 and p.264.
reconstitute her relationships with others, not least to allow her to re-invent
the complex attachment to her son. That she is moving tentatively back
towards renewed social contact, undertaking the „translation of herself slowly
and subtly back into the human realm, a translation of the image she has
claimed into a language for its communication‟, is signalled by the fact that
in a sequence towards the end of the film she gathers around her all the
figures with whom she has interacted.120 Such gatherings were to become a
leitmotif in the later novels of Handke.
The film not only depicts its protagonist‟s attempt to rescue her self-
image from the reifying power of discourse, it enacts that same struggle,
itself embodying the „tension between an imagistic independence and the
languages that seek to appropriate it‟.121 Stylistically, with its long takes,
unusual framing, and unconventional editing, as well as its resistance against
the pull of narrative, it represents an attempt to create a cinematic space
outside of filmic conventions and therefore marks a significant shift in
Handke‟s approach to filmmaking. Inez Hedges and John Bernstein respond
enthusiastically to the film, noting that Handke‟s „genius […] consists in
having called to his aid, in the definition of an alternate autonomous space, a
new film language that also speaks from outside the dominant Hollywood
narrative mode‟.122 Perhaps most characteristic of Handke‟s style here is his
focus on objects, sometimes for the indication they offer of the state of mind
of the protagonist – like the drooping flowers that shed their petals in the
restaurant where Marianne eats with her husband in an early sequence – but
often for their own sake in extra-diegetic shots of, for instance, papers being
blown along railway lines. Equally characteristic is a willingness to linger on
the natural landscape in a way which allows for changes in the time of day,
the weather, or the seasons to be registered: clouds crossing the moon in a
night-time sky, Marianne turning her face up to the snow, blossom being
blown from May trees. The film minimises language and disrupts narrative to
allow these images to emerge out of the filmic discourses which would
normally contain them. That this „film language‟ has its antecedents is made
clear by the references within The Left-Handed Woman to Ozu, whose so-
called „pillow shots‟, images of objects unconnected to the film‟s narrative,
are, as many critics have noted, influential not only for Handke but also for
Wenders. Like those „pillow shots‟, Handke‟s images here act to suggest „a
concrete world existing outside our everyday consciousness, a world waiting
120
Ibid., p.268.
121
Ibid., p.261.
122
Hedges and Bernstein, p.179.
to be discovered, a living world beyond the compositional center of the film‟s

narrative‟.123
For all the film‟s focus on images outside of discourse, however,
language remains vital to it. Marianne‟s work as a translator is significant in
her re-definition of the self in isolation, as Ingalsbe has noted: „Creative work
is to offer her a means of survival in a hostile environment which threatens to
obliterate her as an individual‟. 124 More significantly, it is through
Marianne‟s recitation of the text she is translating that Handke demonstrates
towards the film‟s end the power of literature to speak a subjective truth. Just
before the film‟s dialogue-free final sequences, which return to the extra-
diegetic images of train stations and grass with which it began, 125 Marianne
declaims the last lines of Flaubert‟s A Simple Heart (Un Coeur simple, 1877)
which she has made her own in the process of translation, and which, the
images suggest, affect her deeply. The film cuts from a close-up of her
speaking, to a shot of her wide-open eyes as the text continues in voice over.
This image takes back previous associations of writing with blindness,
implying instead that literature can make one see. Significant too is the fact
that the film ends with text on screen, two lines from a poem by Vlado Kristl
superimposed over its final shot which function as an epigraphic summary of
the film‟s principle idea: „“...Yes, haven‟t you noticed that there is only room
for the one who brings room with him...”‟.126
Just as the film ends with language, so the novel ends with images. It is
not the word that has the power to move the woman and open her eyes to the
world at the end of the text, rather she starts to draw, and in so doing signals
the power of the image to create a connection between self and world:
Suddenly she jumped up, took a pencil and a sheet of paper, and began to sketch: first her
feet on the chair, then the room behind them, the window, the starry sky, changing as the
night wore on – each object in every detail. Her strokes were awkward and uncertain,
lacking in vigor, but occasionally she managed to draw a line with a single, almost sweeping
movement. Hours passed before she laid the paper down. She looked at it for some time,
then went on sketching. (LW 87f.)
123
Rentschler, p.169.
124
Ingalsbe, p.7.
125
The film‟s final sequence, in which an underground passageway at the railway station
begins to fill with people, would seem to reinforce the idea that Marianne is moving back
toward social integration.
126
The original is in verse: „Ja, habt ihr nicht bemerkt, daß / eigentlich nur Platz ist / für den,
der / selbst den Platz mitbringt‟, Vlado Kristl, „Unerlaubte Schönheit‟, published as a special
edition of Filmkritik, 20.5 (1976), 211.
In what constitutes a reversal of the film‟s movement from image to word, in

the written text Marianne „has found a new visual language that absolves her
from silence‟.127 Thus, taken together, the novel and the film of The Left-
Handed Woman would appear to imply that in articulating the individual‟s
relationship to reality neither the word nor the image can stand completely
alone: for the power of each to be fully realised, each needs to interact with
the other: word in(to) film, image in(to) text. This is, in effect, a
manifestation of the process we have termed recomposition.
5. Wrong moves, new directions

The Left-Handed Woman has been identified as Handke‟s attempt to make a
film not only with Wenders‟s team, but also in Wenders‟s style. Indeed, one
could almost say that, given the extreme sensitivity to the presence of the
image he demonstrates here, Handke has almost „out-Wendered‟ Wenders.
Hedges and Bernstein point out that Handke, like Wenders, practises what
they describe as „a cinema of silence, of absence‟. 128 In a more negative
assessment of the connection between the two, Corrigan remarks that in The
Left-Handed Woman the „use of the image as a discrete entity and value
follows almost too patently Wenders‟s sensibility from his first student films
to the more recent The State of Things‟.129 Ironically this sensibility is most in
evidence in the films Wenders made independently of Handke – the early
shorts, Alice in the Cities, and Kings of the Road. The evidence of Wrong
Move suggests that, at least at the end of their close collaboration, when
filmmaker and writer come together, image and language are forced to
interact in a way potentially detrimental to the expressive power of both.
Imaginative recomposition, as we have seen in this chapter, is ultimately
frustrated in Wrong Move, and to some extent The Left-Handed Woman
should be read as a riposte to that film.
The evidence of The Left-Handed Woman suggests what might be
understood as a further ironic turn in the development of both writer and
filmmaker. Originally Wenders looked to Handke to provide him with the
(loose) narratives to accompany the images that had stood alone, outside of
narrative, in his earliest works. As he developed as a filmmaker, however, he
increasingly gained confidence in his own powers as a storyteller and at the
same time became more interested in narrative cinema. As Rentschler notes:
„Wenders less and less shared Handke‟s radical fascination with found
127
Hedges and Bernstein, p.181.
128
Ibid., p.179.
129
Corrigan, p.264. The original title is Der Stand der Dinge (1982).
objects and isolated images as he developed‟, moving instead towards

„narratives [centered] around character‟.130 Both the subject matter of The
Left-Handed Woman and its cinematography point to the fact that by the mid-
1970s Handke had moved some distance from his scepticism, recorded in
Chapter One, towards film as a purveyor of recycled images that generate
only a closed-circuit of cinematically self-referential meaning. Instead, he
had shifted towards a position to be found both in Wenders‟s first films and
his early writing on cinema. That is, Handke reveals his faith in the power of
(certain kinds of) cinematic image to provide an unmediated experience of
reality and, for the time being at least, remains sceptical of the kind of
narrative structures that coerce both the words and images into (inauthentic)
signification. Thus The Left-Handed Woman, like Wrong Move, provides
evidence to suggest that a parting of the ways for Wenders and Handke was,
in the first instance at least, inevitable.
130
Rentschler, p.176.
Chapter Five
Leafing through Wings of Desire

film has a much greater affinity with
literature than with photography1
1. Prompting words, many words

The fourth and, to date at least, final collaboration of Wenders and Handke,
Wings of Desire, is undoubtedly the most famous, having even received the
accolade of being given away in the UK as a free DVD with the Independent
newspaper in 2006. It is also the least „collaborative‟ of their collaborations:
Handke refused to write a screenplay, pleading exhaustion following
completion of his novel Repetition (Die Wiederholung, 1986), and was not
involved in any way in the production of the film. In what follows, the
discussion will concentrate on the relationship between Handke‟s
contribution to the film – a series of poetic monologues – and Wenders‟s
integration of these texts into his narrative. In order to understand the
difficulty, impossibility even, of the task facing Wenders it will be necessary,
in the first instance, to consider some of the ways in which Handke‟s writing
had developed since Wrong Move, A Moment of True Feeling, and The Left-
Handed Woman.
Wings of Desire has prompted a torrent of commentary, exegesis, and
discourse like no other film of Wenders. In 1999 Richard Raskin compiled a
bibliography on the film which includes 18 interviews with the director and
96 reviews and analyses of the film, and the torrent has not abated since
then.2 It is also the film of Wenders which has been most eagerly taken up by
literary scholars, in particular Germanists, who doubtless feel at home with
the film‟s literary style and erudite allusions. These articles tend to draw on
an impressive range of critical tools to interpret and deconstruct the film; to
take just one example: in his article on popular music in the film, Andrew
Murphie draws on Deleuze, Guattari, Nancy, Kristeva, Foucault, Klossowski,
Freud, and Spinoza.3 Benjamin and Derrida are especially popular in the
more learned articles, and there is much engagement with the film‟s explicit
1
New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999), pp.229-45 (p.243).
2
Richard Raskin, „A Bibliography on Wings of Desire‟, p.o.v., 8 (1999), 171-76.
3
Andrew Murphie, „Sound at the End of the World as We Know It: Nick Cave, Wim
Wenders‟ Wings of Desire and a Deleuze-Guattarian Ecology of Popular Music‟, Perfect
Beat, 2.4 (1996), 18-42.
intertexts, in particular the allusions to Rilke and Homer.4 Rather than simply
supplementing this body of scholarship, or surveying the critical positions
occupied by the film‟s vociferous apologists and detractors, what follows will
concentrate on identifying the nature of the „collaboration‟ that produced it,
one which was founded on absence rather than participation. We will explore
what an understanding of it can contribute to a reading of the film, and
examine the extent to which Wings of Desire, through and beyond its
collaborative dimension, constitutes a recomposition of film as „angelic
adaptation‟.
1.1 Cerebral origami

Of course the film itself, opening with a hand writing and closing with a
homage to a trinity of film auteurs, legitimises, prompts, even demands the
kind of scholarly effort that has been lavished on it, not least thanks to its
seductive multiple citations, often within a single scene, and an almost
fetishistic obsession with the inherited media of film. Shot 1078, which lasts
a mere 8 seconds, is an example among many. 5 In Hans Scharoun‟s Berlin
State Library, frequented by Wenders‟s uniquely bibliophile, German angels,
Damiel (Bruno Ganz) passes a young woman studying. The camera, adopting
roughly the angel‟s point-of-view, looks over her shoulder as she writes. On
the desk we see – amongst other things – musical scores, a library book (with
a photograph on its cover), a notebook, and some writing instruments. The
young woman is copying a text, which the published screenplay identifies as
a letter of the Austrian composer Alban Berg. Next to the writing paper is the
title page of a bi-lingual score to Hans Werner Henze‟s radio opera Das Ende
einer Welt (The End of a World, 1953 and revised 1964, based on a short
story by Wolfgang Hildesheimer). The title is clearly visible in German and
English. Resting on the open page is a small origami frog made of light
paper. Alongside the score is a small, closed „Aufgabenheft‟ (exercise book).
After a couple of seconds we see Damiel‟s hand reach down to „take‟ a
white pencil from its case. In a striking double-image the hand lifts away a
ghostly, semi-transparent „copy‟ of the pencil. In what is an echo of the
film‟s opening shot, we see a hand writing and, as in that first sequence, the
4
See, for example, Robert Smith, „Angels‟, Film Studies, 1 (1999), 32-40. Smith discusses
Kundera, Hegel, Rilke, Benjamin, and Derrida.
5
The published script is divided into seven acts (of 87, 88, 125, 149, 78, 89, and 56 shots).
They are numbered 1001, 2001 and so on. Wim Wenders and Peter Handke, Der Himmel
über Berlin: Ein Filmbuch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990). References in the text as
HB.
Leafing Through Wings of Desire 245
text is spoken simultaneously by the writer, although on this occasion it is

barely audible through the „chorus of voices which fills the State Library like
a cathedral‟ (HB 23). What we are shown in this single shot is a multitude of
transcriptions, copies, and adaptations: a hand transcribing a letter (possibly
from the library book, although it is closed), the frontispiece of the score for a
radio opera which is itself an adaptation, a printed page of sheet music
(which may be from the same opera), a hand-written line of music (which
may or may not be a quotation from the printed score), and a closed exercise
book (which may or may not contain notes). Of course this layering invites
interpretative questions: why is the woman transcribing Alban Berg? Whose
face adorns the book cover? What is the relationship, historical or otherwise,
between Berg and Henze? Is there a connection between the apocalyptic title
of the score and the presence of the angels in the library? Is it significant that
the title of the opera is translated? What, if any, is the connection between the
white pencil and the white folded paper frog? Are we to bracket together the
origami and the lifting of the pencil as sleights-of-hand, one worldly, the
other other-worldly? Do the sheets of white paper, closed exercise book, and
white pen (incongruous in the absence of dark paper) signify palimpsests or a
tabula rasa? With the published script to hand further questions arise: what is
the relationship between Berg‟s comments on the suffering of „thousands of
poor dogs‟ at the front in World War One and the discussions about angels
and DNA that frame this shot (HB 28)? Is there an analogy to be drawn
between the destruction of the First World War and the downfall of the island
of San Amerigo and its inhabitants as narrated in Hildesheimer‟s story? Is
there perhaps some erudite wordplay on „heanzerisch‟ (in Berg‟s letter) and
„Henze‟?
According to Alice Kuzniar, one of the commentators who
enthusiastically accepts the invitation to interpret this scene, the image of the
Doppelgänger pencil is a metatextual gesture:
When Damiel takes the pencil, he grasps only its shadowy reproduction. The after-image
(achieved through the technique of double-exposure) reminds the viewer of the artifice of
the cinema, in other words, that we like Damiel are watching a form of irreality with which
we do not interact. This self-criticism of the visual, exercised through the pencil, elevates the
written word [...].6
One might counter that the shadowy immateriality of the writing implement
in fact elevates the image. Then again one might simply read the little paper
6
Alice Kuzniar, „Ephemeral Inscriptions: Wenders‟s and Handke‟s Testimony to Writing‟,
Seminar, 31 (1995), 217-28 (p.220).
frog as signifying that the intellectual games being played by the film and its
commentators – in this instance with the aim of identifying allusions to the
history of music and literature – are nothing more than rather sophisticated
intellectual origami, folding in references to pass the time or create attractive
configurations. Certainly many commentators have keenly taken up the
film‟s invitation to engage in this cerebral game.
What is significant, however, is the striking similarity of shot 1078 to the
vanitas still-life composition of a printing press, box camera, and framed
picture in Dreyer‟s Vampyr discussed in the Introduction. In both shots the
inherited media of cinema are self-reflexively revealed. In Dreyer‟s film, as
in Murnau‟s Nosferatu a decade earlier, there is an unmistakable implication
that the cinematic apparatus, technology itself perhaps, is uncanny
(unheimlich) and somehow bound up with the forces of evil and black magic.
Numerous commentators have interpreted this, in Murnau‟s case at least, as a
critical response to the misuse of technology during the First World War. In
Wenders‟s film, on the other hand, technology and its tricks are not only
benign, but positively angelic: the cinematographic sleight-of-hand that
allows the pencil to acquire a Doppelgänger is, like all the other „special
effects‟ in the film, a manifestation of the benevolent supernatural power of
the (cinematic) angels.
2. More poetry than storytelling

While Handke is alluded to in many of the articles on the film, although by
no means all, he is not one of the intertexts that many commentators have
chosen to engage with. Indeed, despite Wenders‟s insistent claims that
Handke‟s dialogues are the cardinal points for the film and the source of its
poetry, many critics have, as we shall see below, been less than charitable
about his contribution, particularly in the case of the lyrical passages which
accompany the climactic encounter between Damiel and Marion. For his part,
Wenders remains unequivocal about the quality of Handke‟s texts. His
comments are particularly revealing about the nature of their friendship and
collaboration, and for this reason merit quotation at length:
I‟ve known Peter for about twenty years, and he is one of my closest friends. He is really the
only contemporary writer whose work I am close to and really understand and have been able
to follow. When I had this crazy idea with the angels, I wasn‟t sure about my two page
treatment of the idea. I called Peter to whom I hadn‟t spoken in two years. And Peter said, „I
am exhausted, I just finished a novel. I‟m not going to write anything for six months‟. I told
him that I needed him, and that I really had called him because I hoped he could help me with
these angels, that we could maybe do the script together. He didn‟t like that idea at all. He said,
„I‟m all written out. There is not a word left in me. The last thing I want is to be behind a
typewriter‟. He was very adamant about it, but when he realized how disappointed I was, he
said, „Come over and tell me about it at least. Maybe I can give you some advice‟.
I flew to Austria and told Peter everything I knew about this film. I think I got him hooked on
the idea of the angels, and he agreed to work on some of the key scenes. He would write the
angels‟ dialog, no more. That was where I felt I really needed help, because these guys had
seen language arrive and get better and better and then deteriorate. So he thought they shouldn‟t
speak like anybody else. They should certainly speak better German than I was able to write.
In the course of the next five weeks, I‟d get an envelope at the end of each week with another
scene or two. Strictly dialog, no description. We never talked again after that. Even when I got
the envelopes, I didn‟t know where he was, and he only later saw the finished film. He wrote
Marion‟s speech at the end, and the three scenes in which the angel‟s meet. That was the
backbone of the movie. For the rest of it we were in the dark, trying to go from one island to
another, and the lighthouses were Peter‟s dialogs. [...]
I have complete trust in Peter. I knew that if he would do it, he was going to make a big effort.
Peter understood right away where the idea of the angels came in and how much it had to do
with the children, and the innocent view, and how much of it was a metaphor. The form of this
thing was much more that of poetry than storytelling. What he wrote for the film is very poetic
and really gave the film a lot of dignity.7
In Le Souffle de l’ange Wenders refers to Handke as his „archangel‟: „Peter‟s

scenes – though beautiful and poetic – were like monoliths from heaven‟.8
These monoliths were, Wenders goes on to explain, initially difficult to
reconcile with his own scenes and the chosen locations. In the same text he
also explains the genesis of the Homer character:
In a very early version of the story that I told Peter Handke, there was the character of an old
archangel who lives in a library. Peter had no use for him, but on the wall in front of his
writing desk was a reproduction of Rembrandt‟s Homer: an old man seated and talking – to
whom? Originally Rembrandt had him speaking to a disciple, but the picture had been cut in
two and the storyteller had been separated from his listener, so he‟s now merely
soliloquizing. Peter was very fond of the painting and changed my idea of the archangel to
an immortal poet. Now I, for my part, had no idea of how to integrate Homer into my script.
Finally we had Homer living in a library, and Peter‟s dialogues became a voice inside his
head. Curt Bois was neither man nor angel, but both at once, because he‟s as old as the
cinema itself.9
The story of the collaboration, as retold by Wenders, appears with minor

variations in various interviews. What is clear, is that this was, as already
mentioned, a very different kind of collaboration from its predecessors. If 3
7
Coco Fusco, „Angels, History and Poetic Fantasy: An Interview with Wim Wenders‟,
Cineaste, 16.4 (1988), 14-17 (p.17).
8
Wim Wenders, „Le Souffle de l‟ange‟, in Wenders, On Film: Essays and Conversations
(London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp.248-73 (p.270).
9
Ibid., p.272.
American LPs was an improvised dialogue, The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the

Penalty a literary adaptation, and Wrong Move a co-conceived project, then
this was very much an arm‟s length commission. Once the basic concept had
been agreed on, there was, according to Wenders at least, no further
discussion or contact. The dialogues supplied by Handke were treated as
material in very much the same way that the film handles other material, such
as the archive footage, the music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and the
Berlin cityscape. The film is, as most commentators acknowledge, „a
document of documents‟,10 a web of visual, literary, and musical citations and
allusions. Wenders – in sharp contrast to some of his apologists and
commentators – has been at pains to stress the personal, serendipitous, and
contingent nature of this collage of fragments and cultural debris. The arm‟s-
length nature of the collaboration at its centre can doubtless be explained, in
part at least, by the length of the interregnum and the extent to which writer
and filmmaker had moved apart both physically and intellectually since
Wrong Move.
2.1 Reverse angles

Whilst the first three Wenders-Handke collaborations took place in relatively
quick succession, across a period of six years, more than a decade separates
Wrong Move and Wings of Desire. During this period both Wenders and
Handke produced a substantial body of work, including titles rightly viewed
as key works in their individual careers. Wenders directed six feature-length
films – Kings of the Road (1976), The American Friend (1977), Lightning
Over Water (1980), Hammett (1982), The State of Things (Der Stand der
Dinge, 1982), and Paris, Texas (1984) – and two shorts – Reverse Angle
(1982) and Chambre 666 (1982) – establishing his reputation as a leading
European auteur. Across the same period, from 1975 to 1986, Handke
published a substantial body of prose, poetry, and drama consolidating what
commentators frequently refer to as his „mature‟ style; these include the Slow
Homecoming tetralogy (Slow Homecoming, 1979; The Lesson of Mont
Sainte-Victoire, 1980; Child Story, 1981; Über die Dörfer/The Long Way
Round, 1981), the novels Across (Der Chinese des Schmerzes, 1983) and
Repetition (1986), and the journals The Weight of the World (Das Gewicht
der Welt, 1977), The History of the Pencil (Die Geschichte des Bleistifts,
1982), and Phantasies of Repetition (Phantasien der Wiederholung, 1983). In
10
Gilberto Perez, „Modernist Cinema: The History Lessons of Straub and Huillet‟, in The
Cinema of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, ed. by Jonathan Rosenbaum (New York:
The Public Theatre, 1982), pp.9-14 (p.12).
terms of sheer quantity alone, there is thus a significant body of work

separating the pair‟s third and fourth cinematic collaborations. There are,
however, also moments across the decade when their paths cross: in 1977
Handke‟s second independent film, The Left-Handed Woman, is produced by
Wenders‟s Road Movies, shot by Robby Müller and edited by Peter
Przygodda; in 1982 Wenders directs the premiere of The Long Way Round at
the Salzburg Festival starring Libgart Schwarz as Nova and Rüdiger Vogler
as Hans.
These sporadic encounters apart, however, the careers of Handke and
Wenders develop along independent, at times seemingly antithetical lines.
For the majority of the decade Wenders battles to establish his reputation in
America as a European director, whilst Handke moves from Paris back to his
native Austria; as America‟s grip on Wenders tightens, Handke‟s focus shifts
eastwards from Paris (The Weight of the World) to Slovenia (Repetition).
However, in his review of Wings of Desire Tony Rayns suggests that with
this film Wenders‟s focus too has shifted back across the Atlantic to Europe,
describing it as an „angelic remake‟ of Paris, Texas:
There are, in fact, so many inverse correspondences between the two films that they form an
improbable diptych: an American fable of love gone wrong and a European fairy-tale of
love requited. [...] The Europe/America interface has dominated Wenders‟ films since the
very start [...]: European anomie and depletion versus American ebullience and conflict,
tired European sophistication versus dynamic American ingenuousness, and so on. After the
highly self-conscious exorcism of his fascination with Americana in the last feature, Wings
of Desire very clearly represents a kind of homecoming for Wenders, less a rediscovery of
German roots than a renewed faith that Europe can produce characters, themes and soul
states worth making a film about.11
The perceived geographical and cultural gulf between America and Europe,
which had been such a prominent theme in Wenders‟s earlier work, the
divide between the American Wenders and the European Wenders, between
Wenders and Handke even, is eloquently highlighted in Wenders‟s diaristic
„Letter from New York‟ Reverse Angle. A personal meditation on the place
of the European filmmaker in Hollywood, and another variation on
Wenders‟s perennial theme of the „exploitation and abuse‟ of the American
Dream and „gaping wound‟ of US identity,12 this melancholic essay film on
vanishing words and images concludes with Wenders seeking escape from
11
Tony Rayns, „Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire)‟, Monthly Film Bulletin, 55.654
(1988), 203-05 (p.204).
12
Wim Wenders, „The American Dream‟, in Wenders, On Film, pp.123-54 (p.154 and p.150).
his malaise in preparing what he announces as his next film, Slow

Homecoming. The sequence in question runs as follows:
A montage of TV images ending with interference is followed by a shot of a hand holding a

paperback edition of Emmanuel Bove’s Mes Amis which is then opened to show the first
page of the text (zoom in). [Shot 22]
WENDERS: After days of this blindness, it‟s two books that once more open my eyes to
pictures and put me in the mood for peaceful looking:
A hand is shown leafing through vinyl LPs: Psychedelic Furs, ‘Talk Talk Talk’; Echo & the
Bunnymen, ‘Heaven Up Here’. [Shot 23]
WENDERS: a novel by Emmanuel Bove, who observes
An LP is placed on a turntable. [Shot 24]
WENDERS: and relates his subjects simply and with great respect for detail, and a book
with reproductions of
A hand is shown leafing through a volume of Edward Hopper reproductions, including
Morning Sun (1952), showing a woman at a window. [Shot 25]
WENDERS: Edward Hopper‟s paintings. These books remind me that the camera is capable
of equally careful description, and that things can appear through it in a good light: the way
they are.
A shot of a woman sitting on a window ledge with parkland below (music: Echo & the
Bunnymen, ‘Turquoise Days’). [Shot 26]
WENDERS: With these newly acquired images, a new story can begin right away: „She sat
by the window, waiting. She looked up at the cloudless sky, and then down over the expanse
of park, and let time pass ...‟
A hand turns up the volume on an amplifier. [Shot 27]
Medium shot of the woman (louder music). [Shot 28]
[...]
A shot of exposed granite with a road in front (music: The Del-Byzanteens, ‘Girl’s
Imagination’). [Shot 85]
WENDERS: In front of the house where I‟m staying in New York, you can see a bit of the
granite rock the city‟s been built on.
A shot of a desk with typewriter and books by a window with a Venetian blind overlooking a
park. [Shot 86]
WENDERS: I hope my next film, Slow Homecoming, based on four books of Peter Handke,
A pan from right to left: Kindergeschichte, manual typewriter, Über die Dörfer, Die Lehre
der Sainte-Victoire, Langsame Heimkehr, pencils, small decorative figure, loose sheets of
paper. [Shot 87]
WENDERS: will be about this rock. During work on the script, I come across this quote
from the painter Paul Cézanne: „Things are looking bad. You have to hurry if you want to
see anything. Everything is disappearing‟.
A shot of the New York subway: graffiti in train carriage. [Shot 88]13
13
Wenders first published the commentary for this film as an essay in the volume The Logic of
Images. See: „Reverse Angle: New York City, March 1982‟, in Wenders, On Film, pp.179-
81 (pp.180f.). The published version makes no mention of the Slow Homecoming project,
referring to it simply as „my next film, the next story‟, p.181.
This sequence is quintessential Wenders in its meditation on the struggle

between irreconcilable cultural values, between words and paintings, between
narratives and pictures, between the fictional and the real, and in its
insistence on the ability of cinema to preserve an otherwise rapidly changing
reality. There are, perhaps, also personal echoes of previous collaborations
with Handke here: the shot of the young woman by the window, to the strains
of Echo & the Bunnymen‟s „Turquoise Days‟, reminds one of the redhead on
the balcony in 3 American LPs; the stack of records in Wenders‟s flat is
similar not only to the American LPs in the same film, but also to Wilhelm‟s
collection in his bedroom in Glückstadt; the open books are also a motif that
can be traced back to Wrong Move and, beyond that, to the iconic shot of
Handke‟s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams in Alice in the Cities.14 Moreover, the
artful still life arrangement of books and writing implements on the desk
reappears, as we have seen, in shot 1078 of Wings of Desire. In Reverse
Angle too it signals a reflection on the constitution of the cinematic medium –
elsewhere in the film we see Wenders cutting Hammett and discussing the
film with Francis Ford Coppola – and draws attention to the fact that
Wenders‟s auteurist cinema (here in explicit contradistinction to the
Hollywood norm) is grounded in literature, is „high art‟.
Wenders‟s commentary in Reverse Angle also indicates the extent to
which his attitude to the relationship between words and images has shifted
since his „sensibilist‟ days. Whereas in his student films images were
invested with the power to reproduce reality authentically and words were
treated with suspicion, here it is initially the work of two writers (Bove and
Handke) – whose powers of observation are made manifest in prose – which
is needed to re-activate his awareness of the reality-capturing capacities of
the camera. Between the beginning of his career and the point represented by
Wings of Desire, Wenders‟s understanding of words and images and their
cinematic interaction had in fact undergone a number of quite complex
shifts.15 These can briefly (if somewhat schematically) be summarised as
follows: his initial faith in the authenticity of images gives way to a growing
distrust of their signifying power, not least as his awareness of their co-option
14
The film‟s closing sequence, a journey on the New York subway, including a shot from the
driver‟s point-of-view, is also reminiscent of the subway scene in Alice in the Cities.
15
These have been the subject of much of the critical commentary on Wenders‟s work. It is,
for instance, the main concern of David Coury‟s study which deals with Wenders‟s and
Handke‟s developing attitudes to storytelling, primarily in their work apart rather than
together. David N. Coury, The Return of Storytelling in Contemporary German Literature
and Film: Peter Handke and Wim Wenders (Lewiston-Queenston-Lampeter: Edwin Mellen,
2004).
and manipulation by the entertainment and advertising industries grows. As

he becomes more suspicious of the image, his belief in the auratic power of
literary language increases, precisely because it would seem able to resist the
co-option for nefarious purposes to which images are so susceptible. A
growing commitment to language as integral to cinematic signification is
coupled with an increased conviction in the vital function of narrative in the
process of structuring and making human experience liveable. As he puts it in
the 1982 essay „Impossible Stories‟:
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. Stories are substitutes for God. Or maybe
the other way round.16
Gradually, however, this is accompanied by mounting disenchantment,

following his struggles with the American studio system, with cinema‟s
potential to construct meaningful stories, at least within the context of
Hollywood cinema.17
It is this shift, evident in the commentary to Reverse Angle, which helps
situate Wings of Desire. It was preceded by the famously disillusioning
experience of making Hammett in Hollywood which fundamentally changed
Wenders‟s relationship to America and to American cinema. By the time he
left the United States to return to Germany in 1984, after a seven year
absence, it was clear that his earlier love-hate relationship with America – as
home of the classic cinema he had loved, but whose reality failed to live up to
the promise held out by its films and its music – had changed radically. Now
he rejected a United States envisioned as the land of the image‟s corruption
through advertising, second-rate filmmaking, and television:
Once there was

the „American Cinema‟
and its language
was the legitimate narrative form of America
and, in its finest moments,
a fitting expression of the American Dream.
That cinema no longer exists.
That‟s why I‟ll have to describe „American Television‟ once more,
as the apotheosis,
16
Wim Wenders, „Impossible Stories‟, in Wenders, On Film, pp.210-18 (p.213).
17
The poem-essay „The American Dream‟ gives particularly powerful expression to this
disillusionment. See note 12.
the destruction of that language,

the hollowing out of any morality inherent in images
and of storytelling through images.18
Some of these negative emotions had been worked through in Paris, Texas,
Wenders‟s final „American‟ work of the 1980s, and Wings of Desire can be
understood to represent a coming home to both Germany and to European
cinema, and more specifically to a Berlin which, in Wenders‟s words, „isn‟t
just the heart and incarnation of Germany, but of the whole world‟.19
3. Slow homecomings
Although, as already mentioned, Wenders directed the final part of Handke‟s
tetralogy in Salzburg in the same year as he made Reverse Angle, the Slow
Homecoming project was not realised, and the extent to which it ultimately
fed into Wings of Desire remains a matter of conjecture. Rayns, as quoted
above, refers to the film as „a kind of homecoming‟, and it is certainly
tempting to read the „diptych‟ of Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire as an echo
of the movement across Handke‟s tetralogy, in other words from the novel
Slow Homecoming to the play The Long Way Round, which charts a spiritual
return from North America to Europe. Wenders‟s films manifest a desire to
construct a cinematic alternative to what Hollywood film has become, a
cinema appropriate to the representation of the complex interplay of history,
memory, and culture as part of the reality of Cold War Europe and beyond.
Perhaps, indeed, it is this „reverse movement‟ – a disavowal of the
magnetism of America articulated in 3 American LPs – which the title of
Wenders‟s diary film heralds. If so, Reverse Angle is a significant stage in the
passage to Wings of Desire, not least given that it predates Paris, Texas by
two years.
In his article „Ding-Bild-Schrift: Peter Handke‟s Slow Homecoming to a
“Chinese” Austria‟, Hugo Caviola describes the change of direction in
Handke‟s writing in the following terms:
While Der kurze Brief [Short Letter] describes an emancipatory, „avant-gardist‟ westward
movement across the American continent, Langsame Heimkehr [Slow Homecoming]
presents a European‟s emotional and intellectual preparations for returning home.
Orientation in physical space, narration, and writing now emerge as Handke‟s dominant
themes, themes that indicate the self-reflective, allegorical dimension of the book.20
18
Wenders, „The American Dream‟, p.141
19
Wenders cited in Wim Wenders, ed. by Jason Wood and Ian Haydn Smith (London: Axiom,
2008), p.73.
20
Hugo Caviola, „Ding-Bild-Schrift: Peter Handke‟s Slow Homecoming to a “Chinese”
Caviola suggests that the novel which follows the „homecoming‟, Across, set
in Salzburg, presents „a new perception of Austria‟. 21 This would suggest that
a useful parallel can be drawn between Across, as a novel of return to a
historically-charged European city, and Wings of Desire as a film of an
analogous return. Over and above this broad structural equivalence, there is
also a more specific correspondence in the novel‟s investigation of threshold
spaces – the main body of the text ends with the storyteller‟s enigmatic
assertion that „The narrator is the threshold‟22 – and the border motif in Wings
of Desire: between (or „across‟) the two Germanies, between the American
and the European, between spiritual and material being.23
These parallels should not, however, obscure some significant differences
between the paths of Handke and Wenders, not the least of which is, as
Caviola suggests, a gradual shift in Handke‟s novels away from the
„cinematographic existence‟ of Short Letter – epitomised by the idealised
encounter with John Ford in its final pages – to „a natural space, a terra
incognita‟ in Slow Homecoming and beyond.24 The emphatic focus on nature
and landscape in Handke‟s novels of the 1980s – presaged in The Lesson of
Mont Sainte-Victoire – is certainly not something we find replayed in Wings
of Desire, in which (a distinctly idealised, Tarkovskian tree aside) the
dominant material is bunker-grey concrete.25 Moreover, staying with what are
only the most obvious of differences, from Slow Homecoming to Across the
prophetic voice in Handke‟s texts is invariably the writer. By contrast in
Wings of Desire the angels are a triumvirate of filmmakers (Ozu, Truffaut
and Andrei Tarkovsky). This reinforces the impression that with his Berlin
film Wenders remains in thrall to what, in the binary thinking of Reverse
Angle, is the quintessentially American activity of image-production, despite
relying so heavily for inspiration on an Austrian author and a French
cameraman. A „transatlantic‟ juxtaposition of literary language and iconic
Austria‟, Modern Fiction Studies, 36 (1990), 381-94 (p.384).

21
Ibid.
22
Peter Handke, Der Chinese des Schmerzes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), p.242.
23
Joachim Paech notes in an essay reflecting on the role of writing in the film, that „Angels are
threshold figures, messengers, and a medium of communication […] who mediate between
different worlds and therefore also, on the border between the inside and the outside of the
film, between writing, voice, and images‟. Joachim Paech, „Die Szene der Schrift und die
Inszenierung des Schreibens im Film‟, in Schrift und Bild im Film, ed. by Hans-Edwin
Friedrich and Uli Jung (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2002), pp.67-79 (p.69).
24
Caviola, p.384.
25
In Edgar Reitz‟s The Night of the Filmmakers (Die Nacht der Regisseure, 1995) Wenders
admits to his discomfort at the German forest, about which his fellow New German Cinema
filmmakers wax lyrically in the same film.
images is, indeed, neatly prefigured in Reverse Angle in the two books that
provide the filmmaker with solace in New York during the struggle to
complete Hammett – Emmanuel Bove‟s Mes Amis and a volume of
reproductions of paintings by Edward Hopper.26
In an article on motifs from the works of Handke present in Wings of
Desire, Thomas Barry draws a direct analogy between the angel Damiel and
Valentin Sorger, the geographer-protagonist of the novel Slow Homecoming:
„The salvation that he [Sorger] and Damiel seek is a mode of orienting a
disembodied and estranged consciousness to a concrete and physical
reality‟.27 He also notes a precedent for the film‟s obsession with colour in
The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire and Child Story. However, his article
further identifies sundry parallels to works as diverse as The Goalkeeper’s
Fear of the Penalty, A Moment of True Feeling, The Left-Handed Woman,
Across, and the journals, which indicates that he does not afford the tetralogy
any special status within the genesis of the film. In one of many
commentaries critical of Handke‟s contribution to Wings of Desire, Christian
Rogowski notes that: „Marion‟s protracted declaration of love is reminiscent
of the near endless soliloquies of Nova, the symbolic female character in
Peter Handke‟s Über die Dörfer [The Long Way Round]‟.28
However, a note of caution has to be sounded here when embarking on a
spirited search for Handke-isms in Wings of Desire. As will become apparent
in the discussion of the film below, the script is not only co-authored by
Handke, by post, but also contains numerous quotations from the first
instalment of his journals, The Weight of the World, selected by the actress
Solveig Dommartin for Marion‟s soliloquies. In the light of Wenders‟s
repeated claim that Handke is the author he feels closest to, and the fact that
the writer‟s work, at least since A Moment of True Feeling, has been
conspicuously consistent in many of its concerns – with the quotidian, epic
story-telling, inscription, landscape, children, and so on – it is hardly
surprising that their collaboration should contain echoes, on any number of
levels, of many different works of Handke.
26
Both the novelist and the painter are mentioned, incidentally, in Handke‟s The History of the
Pencil. See: Peter Handke, Geschichte des Bleistifts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985),
p.225, p.227, p.242, p.243 (Bove), and p.241 (Hopper). Further references in the text as GB.
27
Thomas F. Barry, „The Weight of Angels: Peter Handke and Der Himmel über Berlin‟,
Modern Austrian Literature, 23.3/4 (1990), 53-64 (p.56).
28
Christian Rogowski, „“Der liebevolle Blick”? The Problem of Perception in Wim Wenders‟s
Wings of Desire‟, Seminar, 29 (1993), 398-409 (p.408).
To illustrate the point with one example amongst many, The History of
the Pencil, the second instalment of his journal, returns repeatedly across its
370 pages to Homer as a source of inspiration, offers myriad observations on
children and childhood, muses at length on writing and story-telling, and
even posits an angelic dimension to gestures of affection: „Stroking her
across the temples he gave her wings‟ (GB 209). On a structural level,
moreover, it is easy to identify a precedent for the montage of thoughts
overheard by the angels in the film in this collection of jottings, questions,
aphorisms, quotations, and observations, a point made by Barry in relation to
The Weight of the World:
Just as the two angels evidence an omniscience of the myriad details of the world, Handke‟s
diaries indicate his acute sensitivity to the random events, objects, and details around him.
The similarities between the angels‟ notebooks, which chronicle the history, both great and
small, of humanity and Handke‟s observant diaries suggest a parallel between the
conception of the angelic characters in the film and the nature of the writer‟s personality. 29
This final assertion is problematic, however. Aside from the questionable

assumption that the journals – which are in fact defined by Handke as
Aufzeichnungen (notes) rather than diary entries30 – are transparent
revelations of the author‟s personality, the claim that Handke views the
author‟s role as angelic is not fully supported by the texts, despite Wenders‟s
rather fanciful description of him as an „archangel‟. „Divinity‟ is only to be
found, if anywhere, in the forms the writer can articulate: „God Form! I must
finally become an artist‟ (GB 190). It is not only the exclamation mark, but
also the term „Künstler‟ (artist), rather than „Schriftsteller‟ (writer) which
appears elsewhere in the journals, that signifies a certain irony of tone here. It
should also be remembered that, according to Wenders at least, the idea for
the angels was his, and that it initially met with some resistance from
Handke, who apparently „didn‟t like that idea at all‟.31
3.1 His objects are like children32

One of the most obvious connections between Wings of Desire and Handke‟s
work since Wrong Move is the fascination with children and childhood,
epitomised in the film not only by the emblematic „Song of Childhood‟, but
29
Barry, p.55.
30
GB 2; Peter Handke, Das Gewicht der Welt: Ein Journal (November 1975-März 1977)
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), p.7. Further references in the text as GW.
31
Fusco, p.17.
32
GB 284. This remark relates in Handke‟s text to Cézanne.
also by the array of children captured by the „angelic‟ eye of Henri Alekan‟s
camera, which itself opens the film with a programmatic bracketing together
of the idea of childhood and story-telling [shot 1001].33 One is reminded here
of Alice in the Cities on a number of levels, for example the scene in which
the camera adopts Alice‟s point-of-view as she gazes through the telescope
from the Empire State Building (discussed in Chapter Three) and also the
fairytale which Philip tells Alice in the Wuppertal guest house.
Explicitly drawing on his own experience as a single father, Handke has
made children a dominant motif in his texts from A Moment of True Feeling
to Wings of Desire. The portrayal of Agnes and her relationship with her
father in the former are representative in this respect, and it is entirely
appropriate that the novel‟s titular „moment‟ – the protagonist‟s epiphanic
encounter with the three „miraculous objects‟, a leaf, shard of mirror, and
child‟s barrette – should occur close to a playground.34 It is such revelations
of the everyday that have prompted some commentators to speak of the
writer‟s „idealistic‟, „naïve‟, and „false‟ concept of childhood.35 Whilst it
would be wrong to deny the transfigurative dimension of Handke‟s portrayal
of children and parent-child relationships, the concentration on this idealistic
component has tended to obscure the more mundane and brutally ordinary
component.
In A Moment of True Feeling, for example, Keuschnig comes close to
attacking his daughter physically:
He wanted to go out. But Agnes wanted to stay home. He tried to dress her. When she
resisted, he came very close to forcing her into her clothes. [...]
Agnes sat painting watercolors, at the same time eating a piece of cake and smacking her
lips. Suddenly he saw himself throw a knife at her. He hurried over and touched her. She
pushed him away, not out of hostility, but because he was interfering with what she was
doing. He wanted to throw the dirty paint water in her face. [...]
The child prevents me from thinking! – But maybe, through the child, I could learn a
different way of thinking. (MTF 96f.)
Keuschnig clearly experiences day-to-day life with his daughter as both banal
and transfigurative. In The Weight of the World Handke not only
33
Around one in ten shots in the film depict children.
34
Peter Handke, A Moment of True Feeling, trans. by Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1977), p.63. Further references in the text as MTF. See also the reading
of this novel in Chapter Four.
35
In this instance the terms are all used by Rolf Zschachlitz in „Angelus Novus – Angelus
Postnovus: “Der Himmel über Berlin”‟, Weimarer Beiträge, 40 (1994), 29-43 (p.40 and
p.41).
acknowledges the difficulty of spending an entire day with a child, but also
finds himself identifying with a child murderer (GW 261). Equally striking is
the meticulous attention to physical and anatomical detail: Keuschnig
smelling his sleeping daughter (MTF 93), the sound of Stefan‟s ineptly cut
toenail scraping on the sheet at night in The Left-Handed Woman,36 a child‟s
foot warming up on falling asleep in The Weight of the World (GW 227).
Indeed generally Handke‟s more serene observations on his daughter are of
her asleep:
Placing my hand on the head of the sleeping child I lost the feeling of depravity, of
forlornness, of futility, of superfluity which often comes at the moment of waking up (GW
163)
The child as a beautiful line in the morning in bed (GW 192)
What these observations demonstrate is the wide range of register in

recording children, their behaviour, and his response to them, a spectrum
which can encompass the comic and the banal:
I asked A. when crying at least not to pull such a revolting face (which, of course, she
couldn‟t) (GW 148)
A child whose antipathy to adults derives from the fact that it so often has to wait for the
toilet until the adults have finished, only to be forced out of necessity to use a toilet which
still stinks from the adults (GW 193)
Those criticising the „return to naïvety‟ in Handke‟s writing from the mid-
1970s frequently overlook the humour and the informal detail which
underpins his portrayal of children and childhood. 37
In the case of Wings of Desire the complexity of register which
distinguishes Handke‟s writing in this area is compromised by the markedly
two-dimensional and decidedly un-prosaic presentation of children. Whilst it
would be wrong simply to suggest that the childless Wenders lacks insight
into the banalities of childhood – its depiction in Alice in the Cities is, after
all, both subtle and nuanced – it is clear that the poetic fervour present in
Handke‟s „The Song of Childhood‟ is not embedded by the filmmaker in
everyday observation of the kind we invariably find in Handke‟s own texts.
As Fritz Wefelmeyer rightly points out, „a child is thus not defined as an
individual but in its childness, as a type‟. 38 It is in this simple distinction that
36
Peter Handke, The Left-Handed Woman, trans. by Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1977), p.87. Further references in the text as LW.
37
Zschachlitz, p.42.
38
Fritz Wefelmeyer, „Das Theater der verlichteten Erzählung bei Peter Handke und Wim
a more fundamental disparity between the realism of Wenders and that of

Handke can be identified, one which might ultimately contradict the claim,
proposed by many commentators, and seemingly confirmed by Wenders‟s
own remarks in interview, that the filmmaker‟s task was to ground the poet‟s
flights of fancy, to „break the high tone‟ with a more „profane‟ timbre. 39
3.2 The necessary focus on the everyday: the calm experience of the
everyday40
Across the three volumes of his journal published prior to Wings of Desire,
and in The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Handke sets out his relatively
straightforward project as a writer: to capture the universal through observing
the minutiae of the quotidian: „Organising, organic fantasy: as the lustre of
the everyday‟ (GB 75). As he puts it in The History of the Pencil: „in the
sandy path I saw, one after another, the drops of rain from the previous day
(they too brought calm with them). I felt the weight of the world‟ (GB 67). In
the same text he concludes that „for my vision I need the commitment of the
everyday‟ (GB 120). In The History of the Pencil, and subsequently in
Repetition, his guide is Homer; in The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire his
mentors include Paul Cézanne and Adalbert Stifter. The goal is to „remain in
the realm of the normal and therein create the extraordinary‟ (GB 223), „to
describe the world: a feeling unites, finally, with an object‟ (GW 88). This
folding-in of the everyday and the universal, of the object and its
representation, of image and sign is characterised in a much-quoted passage
on Cézanne‟s late landscapes from The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire:
And then I understood, through the very act of paint being applied to canvas: at that
historical moment these things, the pines and the rocks, had, on a pure surface – that
definitive end of spatial illusion – yet still dependent on the colours and the forms of their
place of origin („au-dessus de Château-Noir‟)! – that they had been folded into a coherent
visual script unique in human history.
Thing-Image-Script in one: it is something unheard of – and yet does not entirely correspond
to my all-embracing sense of closeness. – To this must be added that single house plant
which I once saw through a window, before the landscape, as a Chinese character:
Cézanne‟s rocks and trees were more than those characters, more than pure forms without a
trace of ground – they were also, through the dramatic stroke (and brushstroke) of the
Wenders‟, in Centre Stage: Contemporary Drama in Austria, ed. by Frank Finlay and Ralf
Jeutter (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), pp.205-22 (p.211).
39
Wim Wenders in interview with Roger Willemsen, in Wim Wenders, Der Himmel über
Berlin, Wim Wenders Edition, Arthaus DVD, 2005. The interview, which is unsubtitled, can
be found on the „Bonus DVD‟ which accompanies the film itself.
40
GB 113 and GB 339.
painter‟s hand, interlocking conjurations – to me, who had previously been able only to
think „how near!‟, they seemed related to the earliest cave drawings. – They were the things;
they were the images; it was the script; it was the stroke – and all of this in harmony.41
According to Caviola, Handke‟s „Chinese characters‟ are „physically

analogous to real-world objects, recognizable images of the things
themselves‟ which inhabit „a middle ground between the signifier and the
signified‟.42 They enact a merging of objects and script which enables
language to function performatively, as in the striking opening lines of
Across: „Close your eyes, and the city lights will appear from the black of the
letters‟.43 In effect Handke recomposes (literary) language as a quasi-
cryptographic code in which the signs preserve something of the
phenomenological presence of the things they denote. Caviola characterises
this as follows:
Handke‟s ideal of a Chinese „Ding-Bild-Schrift‟ [Thing-Image-Script] ties in with the [...]

performative use of language [...]. Handke attempts to reinstate as an aesthetic program a
transparency of language in which thing and script are consubstantial and saying approaches
doing. The imaginative act of „freiphantasieren‟ [recognition] aims to decipher and recreate
the language set down in the world.44
As Kuzniar concludes, nature in Handke‟s later texts is „not apprehended

unmediatedly or unfiltered but is read like a book‟, „the natural object
anamorphotically leaves the visual impression of a hieroglyphic
inscription‟.45 To take another famous example from Handke‟s tetralogy: in
the last lines of Child Story, as the text finally utters the word that has been
its objective („cantilena‟), the notion of a holistic (or „holy‟, GB 175)
inscription is related explicitly to the theme of children, in a way which
prefigures the alliance of child, writer, and story in Wings of Desire:
The brightness in the image is the balcony rails and the flashing square windows down the
street, and in the foreground the metal catches and name plates on the bags on the back of
the children as they walk along. Both come together, uniting as a single, the single, fiery,
eye-blinding, still-to-be-deciphered script; and the eye-witness remembers here, and again
and again, that phrase of the writer which should apply to the story of any child, not only
one that is written: „Cantilena: immortalising the fullness of love and every moment of
intense happiness‟.46
41
Handke, Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire, p.62.
42
Caviola, p.388. Cézanne and Stifter provide examples of this in Handke‟s text.
43
Handke, Der Chinese des Schmerzes, p.7.
44
Caviola, p.389. The translation of „freiphantasieren‟ as „recognition‟ is Caviola‟s.
45
Kuzniar, „Ephemeral Inscription‟, p.222.
46
Peter Handke, Kindergeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), p.109. Other
What characterises both this passage and that from The Lesson of Mont
Sainte-Victoire quoted above, is their rigorous dialectic of the conceptual, the
abstraction of reality, and the concrete – the same dialectic we have already
identified in the depiction of children across Handke‟s work. It allows the
narrator of Child Story to identify, on the one hand, a different „history of the
world‟ (KG 20) in the line formed by the sleeping child, 47 whilst, on the
other, freely acknowledging that the same child interrupts his work pattern
and generates in him a growing sense of animosity (KG 66). The letters or
hieroglyphs of the script, here also musical notes in the melodic line of a
cantilena, are the meticulous everyday observations of the narrator (light
reflecting off rails, windows, catches, and name plates).
It is this dialectic which, ultimately, is absent from Wenders‟s images of
childhood in Wings of Desire. It is inconceivable that one could feel
animosity – of the kind, for example, that induces Marianne to throttle and
shake Stefan in The Left-Handed Woman (LW 46) – towards any of the
children Wenders musters in his Berlin film. The images of children in the
film demonstrate clearly their depiction as types, or personifications, as
described by Wefelmeyer. Ethnically diverse [shots 1010, 1047, 3082, 6003],
engaged in stereotypical activities – drawing [shot 1021], playing a video
game [shot 1035], on the street [shot 2006],48 sitting on a football [shot
2008], captivated by spectacle [shots 3082, 3083, 3105] – or presented as
victims – be they disabled [shots 1039, 1074], war dead [shots 2073, 2074],
victims of history [shots 3026, 3047], bullying [shot 2010], or family conflict
[shot 4070] – there is a wide-eyed innocence which allows the children to
face the gaze of the camera and the angels head-on. Whilst this doubtless
illustrates the notion, expressed in Handke‟s „Song of Childhood‟, that
children do not pull a face when being photographed, it also becomes a cliché
in its reiteration [shots 1009, 1010, 1013, 1015, 1019, 1039, 1074, 2003,
2010, 3083]. The images of everyday disgust and discomfort, present in
Handke‟s poem, have no equivalent in the film, where the children – with the
exception of the screaming girl in the rapid-fire sequence depicting
metropolitan chaos [shot 4070] – remain serene to the point of inscrutability.
Handke‟s children, on the other hand, are disgusted by inedible food and
wince at fresh walnuts: „When the child was a child, / it gagged on spinach,
on peas, on rice pudding, and on steamed cauliflower‟ (HB 78).
references in the text as KG.

47
This is an interextual reference to The Weight of the World.
48
Rayns sees the two boys in this shot as „Truffautesque schoolboys‟, p.205.
It is difficult to identify in the children of Wings of Desire, or in their

activities, the „ordinary incidents‟ referred to by Kuzniar, or the „everyday‟
quality which Rayns considers to have been informed by Handke. 49 The
abstraction of reality, the conceptual dimension, is certainly there, but the
concrete, believable quotidian detail – believably dirty for example – has no
place in this cinematic fairytale. It is this that makes Wenders‟s own remarks
about the „elevated tone‟ of Handke‟s texts and his response to it so
misleading.
3.3 The threshold of no-man‟s-land50

In interview with Roger Willemsen, Wenders describes the monologues
delivered by Handke as a „treasure trove‟ of „wonderful texts‟, and considers
„the elevated tone [...] to be appropriate to the roles‟: „it wouldn‟t have
worked with everyday texts [...] I really liked the juxtaposition of such
differing tones‟.51 In a rather surprising metaphor, given the elevated nature
of the texts themselves, he describes the ten Handke passages to Willemsen
as „land under our feet‟ in a film which had „no story whatsoever‟. This point
underlines Wenders‟s assertion in the audio commentary to the film that
Handke‟s texts were „things to hold on to in this non-existent story‟.52 He
justifies what he describes as the absence of linear narrative quite prosaically
as a refusal to rise to the expectations of those who felt that Paris, Texas had
finally demonstrated that „Wenders can now at last tell a good story‟. 53
Whilst this certainly accords with Rayns‟s reading of the film as being in a
direct but dialectical relationship with its predecessor, it can also be argued
that Handke‟s texts are given neither the mundane detail nor the narrative
„structure‟ (the word is Wenders‟s own) they require. 54 Whilst Wenders
believes that the monologues lend the film literary gravitas (give it weight)
and commentators have complained that in so doing they overburden it
(weigh it down), they are in fact articulated in what is largely a spatially and
temporally indeterminate space, an insubstantial (re)construction of Berlin
49
Alice Kuzniar, „Suture in/Suturing Literature and Film: Handke and Wenders‟, in
Intertextuality: German Literature and Visual Art from the Renaissance to the Twentieth
Century, ed. by Ingeborg Hoesterey and Ulrich Weisstein (Columbia, South Carolina:
Camden House, 1993), pp.201-17 (p.203). Rayns, p.205. Rayns‟s comments are notable in
that they refer specifically to The Weight of the World.
50
HB 60.
51
Wim Wenders in interview with Roger Willemsen.
52
Wim Wenders, audio commentary to Der Himmel über Berlin (2005, Disc 1).
53
54
Ibid.
past and present which is, in Homer‟s phrase, „at the threshold of no-man‟s-
land‟ (HB 60): the angels roam freely across a GDR death strip which is not
real, but a set designed for the film; Homer and Cassiel wander, according to
the script, „towards that no-man‟s-land that was once the city centre‟ (HB
58); the Third Reich is depicted as a reconstruction for a historical costume
drama. In the library (or is it a church?) Homer claims he is protected from
the „confusions of the here and now‟ (HB 56) by story-telling, but these
confusions have to be taken largely on trust, because, for all the depiction of
contemporary malaise the film offers as it records the angels‟ watch over
Berlin‟s alienated inhabitants, there is no sustained space for them in this
fairytale. Damiel might long for the visceral reality of the everyday, and Peter
Falk might tempt him to give up his angelic form with the aroma of coffee
and the pleasure of smoking, but Wenders‟s auratic metropolis nevertheless
remains a place of poetry, myth, and religion, and not of „pungent smells‟
(HB 84) and cigarette butts rolling across the road (HB 85). It is – both
before and after Damiel‟s fall from grace – „outside‟ time and space.55
The film‟s reluctance to commit wholeheartedly to narrative, readily
acknowledged by Wenders, rests uneasily both with Homer‟s status as „the
angel of story-telling‟ (HB 60) and the seemingly quite reasonable claim by
commentators that the film is „a call for a new era of cinematic storytelling
and narrative filmmaking‟. 56 Barry sees in the climactic union of Damiel and
Marion a conjoining of filmmaker and writer:
This film of romantic and sensuous cinematic images becomes itself an incarnation of the
collaborative spirit of its two authors, Wenders and Handke, or to quote Damiel after his
erotic night of union with Marion: „Kein sterbliches Kind wurde gezeugt, sondern ein
unsterbliches gemeinsames Bild‟ [No mortal child was born, but an immortal, unified
image].57
The film itself, however, does not readily support this claim of authorial
wedlock. A conjunction of „Thing-Image-Script‟, a language inseparable
from the real, is neither inscribed into nor enacted within the cinematic space
of Wings of Desire, perhaps because, as Handke puts it in The History of the
Pencil, „ulterior motives (Hintergedanken) and sidelong glances
(Seitenblicke) prevent fantasy from uniting individual details‟ (GB 215). As
55
In interview with Roger Willemsen Wenders repeatedly states that the film is religious.
56
Coury, p.85. Coury‟s claim that Wings of Desire represents both a „culmination of both
artists‟ reflections on the loss of the oral narrative tradition‟ and „a caesura of sorts in their
respective oeuvres‟ is not borne out by their subsequent work, ibid.
57
Barry, p.63.
Wenders‟s own remarks on the genesis of the project suggest, this was a film
born of Hintergedanken – not least of reading and interpreting Rilke. In
Wenders‟s film, observation is invariably rooted in pre-conception, as the
taxonomy of children set out above demonstrates. The filmmaker‟s
interpretative gaze precludes disinterested observation of the kind Handke
proposes as the bedrock of storytelling: „You have only interpreted and
changed the world; what matters is to describe it‟ (GB 287). A difference in
the development of writer and filmmaker would appear to emerge clearly
here. As had already become apparent towards the end of their last
collaboration, on Wrong Move, Handke in his later writing begins to move
close to a position articulated by Wenders both in his early filmmaking and
his writings on cinema, one from which the filmmaker himself has
subsequently departed. As he put it in 1982: „I must have been very naïve. I
thought filming was simple. I thought you only had to see something to be
able to depict it, and I also thought a storyteller (and of course I wasn‟t one)
had to listen first and speak afterwards. Making a film to me meant
connecting all these things. That was a misconception […]‟. 58 To put it at its
simplest, from the mid-1970s onwards Handke moves, to some extent at
least, towards a position that Wenders had abandoned at the beginning of the
same decade.
3.4 Inner irony

The no-man‟s-land in Wings of Desire is not only the physical and historical
space inhabited by Wenders‟s children-as-personifications-of-childhood –
reflecting, according to Roger Cook, „not a real state of childhood [...] but
rather an already compensatory conception of childhood‟ 59 – but is also, as
has been suggested above, the topography through which Homer wanders
across the entire film, a poetic space devoid of the dialectic which underpins
Handke‟s notion of the „real‟ as set out in the Slow Homecoming tetralogy.
Homer is defined in Wings of Desire, both through Handke‟s text and
Alekan‟s fairytale lens, by a sequence of absences of the „real‟: the absence
of Berlin landmarks (the Potsdamer Platz, the Wertheim department store,
and so on), the absence of the history they represent, the absence of kindred
spirits („my heroes [...] my children‟, HB 59), of an audience, of his voice,
sight, and mobility, of peace, of story-telling, and, consequently, of childhood
itself: „But no-one has managed to strike up an Epic of Peace. Why does
58
Wenders, „Impossible Stories‟, p.210.
59
Roger Cook, „Angels, Fiction and History in Berlin: Wim Wenders‟ Wings of Desire‟, The
Germanic Review, 66 (1991), 34-47 (p.42).
peace not inspire people for long and why is it almost impossible to talk
about? Should I give up? If I give up then mankind will lose its story-teller.
And if mankind loses its story-teller, then it will have lost its childhood‟ (HB
57). This was not the case, for example, with Homer‟s kindred story-teller in
Handke‟s Repetition, the narrator of the novel‟s final eulogy to story-telling,
whose musings – otherwise strikingly similar to those of the prophet in Wings
of Desire – remain embedded in the observation of the everyday:
I [...] observe the spring sunlight on the empty paper and think back to the autumn and the
winter and write: story, nothing more earthly than you, nothing more just, that which is most
holy to me. [...] Eye of story, reflect me, for you alone know me and honour me. Blue of the
heavens, come down to earth through story. Story, music of involvement, forgive, bless, and
consecrate us. [...] Blind windows and empty cattle paths shall be the spur and watermark of
stories. Long live the story. The story must go on.60
The difference, perhaps, lies in the absence in Wings of Desire of the „inner
irony‟ that Handke calls for in the performance of Nova in The Long Way
Round and which has already been identified in earlier Handke texts. 61 As has
been noted, critics, film critics in particular, have tended to be harsh in their
evaluations of Handke‟s monologues for Wings of Desire. Whilst Rayns was
able to acknowledge that „the film‟s aesthetic stand is overtly against
Hollywood “prose” and for the cinema of “poetry”‟, others attempted to save
Wenders‟s film from Handke‟s texts:62
Wenders [...] puts his achievement at risk with an excess of words. The text, often
mannered, yet exerting its own hypnotic seduction when spoken to the pictures, threatens to
inflate the love story into something pretentious and to obscure the essential simplicity of its
happy end. The lightness and wit with which the simple things in life are rediscovered in
actions and taut dialogue are here weighed down with literary ballast.63
Wenders, as we have seen, is adamant that Homer and the angels could not
have been furnished with „everyday texts‟ (Allerweltstexten), just as he
believes that the fairytale camera of Henri Alekan was the decisive factor in
„translating the affectionate gaze of the angels‟ into images. 64 An important
60
Peter Handke, Die Wiederholung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p.333.
61
Peter Handke, Über die Dörfer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), p.7. This instruction
to the performers is followed by epigraphic quotations from Nietzsche and Creedence
Clearwater Revival, one of the bands featured in 3 American LPs.
62
Rayns, p.205.
63
Peter Green, „Germans Abroad: Herzog, Wenders, Adlon‟, Sight and Sound, 57 (1988), 126-
30 (p.129).
64
question within the framework of this study, however, is whether Handke‟s

poetry, rather than being reinforced by dialectical juxtaposition (by
Allerweltsbildern (everyday images), for example), is not undermined by
visual iteration. This conundrum is one which, much later, the protagonist of
Handke‟s The Loss of Images (Der Bildverlust, 2002) tries to sidestep by
demanding that her narrator tell her story uncinematically: „History? Rather
more like this: just as others wanted to go down in history, so she wanted to
go down in “story”. And it should be unfilmable, or at least only for a film of
a kind that had never existed‟. 65 This is unmistakably a call for a
recomposition of film which goes beyond what is achieved in Wings of
Desire.
4. Leafing through books

In Le Souffle de l’ange Wenders notes that the idea for a film with angels
came from reading Rilke: „I was reading Rilke at the time – nothing to do
with films – and realizing as I read how much of his writing is inhabited by
angels. Reading Rilke every night, perhaps I got used to the idea of angels
being around‟.66 In interview with Willemsen, Wenders jokingly suggests
that the film owes its very existence to the little Reclam volume of Rilke that
he read in order to refresh his German on returning to Berlin to edit Paris,
Texas.67 Reading, alongside writing, plays – as we have seen from the
examination of shot 1078 towards the beginning of this chapter – an
important role in the film itself as well as in its genesis. This is hardly
surprising, of course, given that the angels inhabit a library. Reading is,
moreover, an important activity in all three feature-length Wenders-Handke
collaborations: Bloch is constantly scrutinising newspapers in The
Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty and Wilhelm immerses himself in
Eichendorff. Indeed Wrong Move offers a set of variations on the theme of
reading and reciting: Wilhelm is sent off on his journey with books from his
mother, Bernhard recites his baroque poem with comic gravitas, and Therese
attempts to memorise her lines. In all these cases there is an intensity to the
activity which, perhaps surprisingly, is largely absent from Wings of Desire.
Homer himself is seen scrutinising a fat book, August Sander‟s People of
the 20th Century, in shots 2070 and 2075, but this is a book of photographic
images rather than words, and he leafs through it distractedly rather than
studying it carefully. Even the readers in the library are only caught fleetingly
65
Peter Handke, Der Bildverlust (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), pp.15f.
66
Wenders, „Le Souffle de l‟ange‟, pp.268f.
67
by the camera and the microphone. Although the film is heavy on references,
it makes light work of its texts; the quotations it incorporates are leafed
through rather than studied. It is this practice of „leafing through‟ which
might be seen to determine the rhythm of the film and give it a certain
lightness of touch (at least in the earlier scenes).
4.1 The weight of the world

There is a further way in which the process of reading is significant for the
film. Commentators have not, generally, picked up on some interesting
remarks made by Dommartin in interview regarding the way in which her
opening monologues in the circus caravan came about. Asked by Raskin
whether all her monologues were written by Handke she responded:
No, not all of them. The one in the bar was. Mostly there were inner thoughts, which were
largely an amalgam of sentences I had underlined in a book by Peter, Le Poids du monde,
which Wim had asked me to read. And when I read it, I underlined the sentences that made
the biggest impression on me. So a number of lines come from that book. If you read it,
you‟ll see what I mean. For example: „Se regarder dans un photomaton et il en sort une
image avec un autre visage.‟ All the inner thoughts in the trailer. At the same time, it‟s an
amalgam, since I also improvised when we recorded the inner thoughts, so there are some
completely personal thoughts among them. And finally there are some little things that Wim
himself had written. Those three kinds of elements went into that mixture. [...] So Peter
wrote the song of childhood, the two long dialogues between the angels, and then my final
monologue, nothing more. Practically everything else was written by Wim the night before.
And all the inner thoughts [of the other characters] were done with the actors, after the
shooting was finished, watching the screen.68
This passage is revealing for a number of reasons. Most importantly it

confirms that Handke‟s direct presence in the film is not restricted to the texts
he wrote specifically for it at Wenders‟s request: it also contains a series of
quotations from The Weight of the World (Le Poids du monde). Unlike the
Rilke allusions, however, these are not simply passages found by Wenders.
Here too, as with „commissioning‟ Handke, he delegates the task of
generating the script to someone else, in this case by asking Dommartin to
select entries in Handke‟s journal that impressed her.
This means that her experience of reading Handke‟s book is also
incorporated directly into the film. This doubtless has a significant impact on
the choice of extracts. Surprisingly, in a film which foregrounds the
68
Richard Raskin, „“Seeing with a Child‟s Heart”: An Interview with Solveig Dommartin‟,
p.o.v., 8 (1999), 58-64 (pp.58f.). Rayns refers to this process in his review of the film
(p.205).
„presence of children‟,69 and in a caravan adorned with a picture of herself as

a child [shot 2048], Dommartin does not select any of the many passages
(including those mentioned above) in which Handke reflects on his daughter
and his feelings towards her. Instead, she has favoured the pithier and more
lyrical of Handke‟s autobiographical reflections. They are not, moreover,
delivered in the film in exactly the original wording. In shots 2026 and 2027
she says „Die Zeit wird alles heilen ... aber was ist, wenn die Zeit selbst die
Krankheit ist?‟ (Time will heal everything ... but what if time itself is the
sickness); in Handke‟s text this reads „“Die lindernde Zeit” – wenn aber diese
selber die Krankheit ist?‟ („Soothing Time‟ – but what if this itself is the
sickness?) (HB 41; GW 115). This suggests either that Dommartin has
translated the French translation back into German herself, or that she has
reformulated it in her own words. Certainly Wenders appears not to have
provided her with the original German texts for the French passages she
chose: „“Draußen”, in der Stadt, herausfinden, wer ich bin, wer ich geworden
bin‟ („Outside‟, in the city, discover who I am, who I have become) becomes
„Endlich draußen, in der Stadt. Wer bin ich, wer bin ich geworden?‟ (At last
outside, in the city. Who am I, who have I become?) (GW 91; HB 43); „Ich
denke oft so falsch, so ungültig, weil ich so denke, als spräche ich dabei zu
jemand anderm‟ (I often think so falsely, so illegitimately because I think as
though I were speaking to someone else) becomes „Manchmal denke ich so
falsch, weil ich so denke als ob ich dabei zu jemand anderem spräche‟
(Sometimes I think so falsely because I think as if I were talking to someone
else) (GW 18; HB 47); in the case of Dommartin‟s own example, „Vor dem
Fotoautomaten auf ein Foto warten; dann käme ein Foto mit einem andern
Gesicht heraus – so finge eine Geschichte an‟ (Waiting for a photograph
outside a photo booth; then a picture comes out with a different face – that‟s
how a story could begin) becomes „Vor einem Fotoautomaten warten, und
dann kommt ein Foto mit einem anderen Gesicht heraus ... so könnte eine
Geschichte anfangen.‟ (Waiting outside a photo booth, and then a picture
comes out with a different face ... that could be the beginning of a story) (GW
15; HB 46). In this process of translation and appropriation the texts become
Dommartin‟s own, not least when delivered with her pronounced French
accent (which seems particularly appropriate given that Handke‟s journal was
written in Paris, and on occasion reflects on the issue of translation itself).70
69
Wenders, „Le Souffle de l‟ange‟, p.271.
70
For example: „Mir fällt auf, wie oft ich die Möglichkeitsform verwende, wenn ich
französisch spreche‟ (I notice how often I use the conditional when speaking French) (GW
50). See also Wenders‟s comments on Ivan Desny‟s French accent in Wrong Move in
4.2 Book reading and mind reading

Much of the dialogue in Wings of Desire is overheard by the angels as they
travel around Berlin. Whilst the students in the library avidly read their books
– in a Babel of different languages – on tropical rainforests, Walter
Benjamin, aeronautics, ectopic pregnancies, value added tax, and so on, the
multilingual angels read the minds of the readers. As they listen or reflect on
what they have heard, Damiel and Cassiel repeatedly close their eyes, an act
which brings us back to the text read out by the music student in shot 2078.
In the letter she is transcribing, Berg complains about his eyesight:
Today I have a stye on my left eye which I began to notice yesterday.

I do hope it won‟t spread! Strangely a number of people are suffering from similar
complaints: inflammations of the eye, conjunctivitis etc. You may remember that Charly,
who used to frequent the same bar, also got something in his eye. (HB 28)
As in Wrong Move, attention is drawn to a dissonance between word and

image, between language and vision. The reference to eye disorders in shot
2078 is followed in shot 2087 by a comic routine as Homer – the short-
sighted seer – attempts, initially unsuccessfully, to put on his glasses. Wings
of Desire, according to its director, is a film which strives to overcome this
dissonance, to balance linguistic and visual poetry. Asked about directing a
film structured by a series of poetic texts Wenders replied:
Well, there is also the poetry of its images. I did this film with Henri Alekan. For Cocteau he
photographed The Beauty and the Beast, probably the most beautiful and poetic black and
white film I know. That‟s his specialty – poetry. His lighting helped the film enormously to
create a poetic universe.71
It is by no means clear, however, whether anything but the most precarious of

balances between word and image is established in the film, despite what
would appear to be its desire to transcend such dichotomies.
4.3 Embodied and disembodied texts

As we have established, the film‟s words and its images were in part
conceived independently of each other, and a sense of the two elements as
discrete, and yet capable of various forms of interaction, is explicitly
generated by its opening and closing shots. These help to establish what
David Caldwell and Paul W. Rea have called „the film‟s central polarity of
Chapter Four, p.216.

71
Fusco, p.17. In interview with Willemsen he claims that the film owes more to Alekan than
any other individual, and bemoans the lack of credit he has been given for his contribution.
images and words‟.72 It is framed by shots of a hand writing words which the
viewer can read, while a voice-over speaks the words being written [shots
1001 and 7050]. The opening version of this sequence precedes the credits
and contrasts with what are the first shots of the film proper: an image of
clouds cross-fades to an extreme close-up of a blinking eye; this in turn is
followed by an aerial view of Berlin, established in retrospect as a shot from
Damiel‟s point-of-view.
These sequences juxtapose the spoken word (orality) and the gaze, as well
as the written word and the image, in a way which allows something of the
complexity of their relationship to emerge. In the first sequence, while the
spoken word remains disembodied (although the voice will eventually be
identified as Damiel‟s), the written word is embodied.73 We witness the
corporeality of the writing process: although the pen acts as a mediating
instrument between the hand and the script, there is nevertheless a physical
immediacy to the process of making letters. Indeed the pen – or rather the
pencil whose afterimage is seized by Damiel in the library – becomes one of
two symbols for the physical, tangible, sensual nature of human existence
(the other is the pebble he grasps in Marion‟s caravan). Language is
associated in this sequence, via Damiel‟s incantation of Handke‟s poem, with
childhood and in particular with a childhood sense of unity between self and
physical reality. Moreover, childhood and language are also linked to
narrative via the poem‟s fairytale motifs.
In contrast, the eye in the second sequence, as the organ of seeing,
remains strangely disembodied and is associated with the heavens rather than
the earth. The gaze, which the audience shares, is linked to the angels, whose
look is also that of the camera. Indeed, in dedicating the film to the three
filmmaker angels, Wenders reinforces this connection between those
heavenly beings and the camera, and establishes their gaze as, therefore, in
some sense mediated by the cinematic apparatus and thus also outside the
realm of the immediately corporeal. Kuzniar makes a similar distinction
between writing and the visual in the film: „The image of the hand writing
across the paper […] emphasises the direct imprint of the body as opposed to
the intervening instrumentality of the camera‟. 74 Joachim Paech has pointed
72
David Caldwell and Paul W. Rea, „Handke‟s and Wenders‟s Wings of Desire: Transcending
Postmodernism‟, The German Quarterly, 64 (1991), 46-54 (p.46).
73
Kuzniar points out that the way in which „the written word thus generates the film‟ – the
story it narrates turns out to be the product of the protagonist‟s attempt to write his story –
relates this film‟s structure to that of Alice in the Cities, „Ephemeral Inscriptions‟, p.221.
74
Ibid., p.220.
out that the identification of Damiel as the author of the writing in the first
sequence not only creates another link between the filmmaker, in this case
Wenders specifically, and the angels, but also allows angelic status to accrue
to Handke: „The film‟s pre-text is connected to the name and the authority
(Au/c/torität) of an author. The angel Damiel, writing diegetically, presumes
an extra-diegetic writer [...] whose words are repeated by the angel‟.75
Moreover, emphasising the independence of their contributions to the film,
Paech also argues that this represents the moment when one author takes over
from the other: „The scene of text and inscription before the beginning of the
film can also be taken as the representation of the transition from the written
(Handke) to the filmed (Wenders) film; writing transforms itself into the
film‟s moving image‟.76
Despite these dichotomies, however, a point of connection between
language and image, writer and filmmaker is established precisely by the
theme which so fascinates both Handke and Wenders: childhood. It is only
children – and the audience – who are able to see the angels. Given the
positive connotations that accrue to childhood in Wings of Desire, this
association between different kinds of viewing subject inside and outside the
film – between child and audience – brings with it the promise of a return to a
state of innocence for the film‟s viewers, at least in the form of a
revitalisation of perception through a cinema which has the potential to
mediate between word and image, the earthly and the transcendent. The film
begins, quasi-biblically, with the genesis of film out of writing and seeing
and ends in a panegyric to cinema as an angelic „redemption of physical
reality‟, to use Kracauer‟s famous phrase once again. In the epilogue to his
book of that name, in the section entitled „Art with a difference‟, Kracauer
notes that art films tend to exploit rather than respect reality. He concludes
that if art cinema is to use reality rather than abuse it, the filmmaker must
have the „traits of an imaginative reader‟.77 This is very much the goal of
Wenders‟s recomposition of film in Wings of Desire: in adapting his sundry
pre-texts – literary, cinematic, historical, topographical, material – his aim is
to combine the two activities denoted by the German word „lesen‟: gathering
and reading.
75
Paech, p.72.
76
Ibid, p.73.
77
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), p.302.
4.4 Dialogues and discourses

The investigation of the significatory resonances of words and images, and
the cinematic consequences of their coming together, forms part of a dialogue
the film opens up between its own sounds and images, its visual and its
textual components, including those supplied by Handke. This dialogue in
turn constitutes part of the film‟s extended meta-discourse on the nature of
cinema. It explores, as we have already suggested, the constitution of film
itself, not least its „inherited media‟, how moving images can be assembled
and how they signify (in the sequences incorporating documentary archive
material, for example), what constitutes mainstream filmmaking (in the
episodes with Peter Falk), and whether there are alternatives to it (the various
kinds of auteurism represented by the three angelic filmmakers, for example).
In examining the relationship between cinema and the visual, linguistic, and
performative media that it has inherited (photography, poetry, music, and
circus, for instance) it also explores what happens when film consciously
reincorporates media that can exist independently of it.
In its exploration of what film is, or indeed could be, Wings of Desire
investigates, for example, the codification of meaning in different kinds of
still and moving image. By incorporating a range of documentary footage it
questions the potential of images to bear witness, and probes the authenticity
and veracity of the historical testimony they apparently provide. That such
images can help the audience make sense of the relationship between past
and present is signalled by the sequence in which Homer wanders across the
wasteland of the post-Wall, pre-Wende Potsdamer Platz in search of the
square he remembers in all its Weimar glory. He can reconstruct this historic
location in language, but is unable to relate his memories to the reality before
his eyes [shots 2079-2088]. A missing link between what he describes and
what he sees before him is provided, for the audience at least, by inserted
(colour) documentary footage of bombed-out houses standing metonymically
for the destruction unleashed by German fascism, only the origins of which
Homer actually recounts [shots 2081]. The footage is used here to extend the
time-frame forwards from the memories of the narrator and backwards from
the „present‟ of both the diegesis and the audience.
By means of the film-within-a-film – the detective story set in the Third
Reich and starring Peter Falk – Wings of Desire also examines the
relationship to history of the mainstream entertainment film on the
Hollywood model. In contrast to its potentially more positive assessment of
the ability of documentary footage to mediate between past and present, it
would appear to suggest that within genre film, history tends to serve, at best,
as a mere backdrop. As Peter Falk himself puts it in a brief excursus on
realism to a boy dressed as a member of the Hitler Youth: „Let me explain to

you: people like detective stories. So they use any excuse to make a detective
story. You understand. [...] It‟s dopey. I grant you, it‟s dopey. But this is
dopey, too‟ (HB 65-66).
However, the film does not set up a simplistic model in which
documentary footage equals historical veracity and fiction film untruth. In
interview with Raskin, Wenders explained how searching for appropriate
footage for the film (in this case for shots 3053 and 3054) in fact led to some
significant discoveries about the „truth content‟ of documentary film:
We used film stocks from Russian cameramen and from American cameramen. The
Russians had shot an incredible amount of footage when they came into Berlin, while they
took the city as well as afterwards, after the end of the war. The Russians shot every-thing in
b/w 35mm. All the footage we had from Russian cameramen was in 35mm and everything
was done on tripod. Even the action scenes, the tanks going into the streets, everything was
clearly done from tripods. Therefore everything looked like it was done in a studio. It‟s very
strange. And some of it was clearly staged. Some camera point-of-views were only possible
if the cameraman had already arrived. So we then found out that the Russians actually had
taken streets, gone back, and shot their arrival on the street once more. It was actually
rehearsed, so to speak. Especially the day when they took the Reichstag, they shot that scene
with the guy putting up the flag over thirty times!
Whereas the Americans – well, of course they arrived later – when they arrived, they shot
everything in 16mm, color. So the strange thing is that the Russians, who really „directed‟
their shots, and really sort of did fake documentaries, made it look very documentary. And
the American footage, although really shot handheld 16mm, because they shot it in color,
looked completely as though it had been shot in a studio.
So paradoxically, the American footage that was clearly true documentary footage, looked
like it was filmed on the back-lot of an American studio, and the Russian footage that was
clearly staged, looked like true documentary.78
Moreover, in another sequence [shots 2070-2076] the exploration of

photography as documentation and trace is broadened and made more
complex by the inclusion of still photography: as Homer sits in the library
leafing through Sander‟s People of the 20th Century, lamenting the fact that
no-one has ever succeeded in striking up „an Epic of Peace‟ (HB 57),
Wenders inserts (black and white) footage of victims of a bombing raid laid
out on the street, including a baby and two young children [shots 2071-2074].
Whilst the juxtaposition of moving images, archive footage, and still
photography in this episode may act as a distant reminder of Silver City
Revisited, the conceptual frame of reference here – thanks not least to the
78
Wenders in interview with Richard Raskin, „“It‟s Images You Can Trust Less and Less”: An
Interview with Wim Wenders on Wings of Desire‟, p.o.v., 8 (1999), 5-20 (pp.9f.).
allusions to Benjamin in the previous library sequence – is Critical Theory

rather than Munich sensibilism. Sander‟s still photographs (static images
outside of time) and the moving images (the reproduction of brief passages of
time) are presented side by side as memento mori in what Homer terms the
„confusions of the here and now‟ (HB 56). The conjunction of still and
moving photography is underscored by the presence of a soldier
photographing the corpses in one of the street scenes [shot 2071]. With the
cut from the almost still image of the dead children to Homer leafing through
People of the 20th Century [shots 2074, 2075], Wenders appears to be
implying that film can (perhaps indeed must) inherit the great humanistic
project begun by August Sander in the Weimar Republic.
Caldwell and Rea, however, also identify this sequence as one of several
which demonstrate that the „interplay of word and image creates tensions for
both angels and humans‟: „Homer, the poet of memory who has lost his
listeners, turns to examining photographs in Berlin‟s Staatsbibliothek‟.79
They identify similar tensions in the angels‟ relationship to words and images
– „Damiel and Cassiel write down observations; they love words but move
toward seeing‟ – and in Peter Falk‟s: „Falk never fails to find an audience
when he talks, but he also struggles to express himself visually through
doodling and acting‟.80 It is this experience of the potential limitations of
words and images, they argue, which leads both angels and humans –
amongst them presumably filmmakers – to „seek fuller means of
perception‟.81
The question remains, however, whether a film in which so many visual
and literary intertexts are embedded can be something more than simply the
sum of its disparate parts, whether it can go beyond the expositional gestures
of Reverse Angle and recompose cinema as „a film of a kind that had never
existed‟. The film itself may suggest a number of answers to this question.
First, the process of incorporation itself – the massing of different media –
could be said to represent not only a meta-discourse on the cinematic
apparatus, but also proof of Alexander Kluge‟s contention, quoted in the
Introduction, that „the combination of verbal, auditory, and visual forms and
their integration through montage enable film to strive for a greater degree of
complexity than any of these forms in isolation‟.82 Second, there is a
suggestion that limitations associated with different kinds of image (both
79
Caldwell and Rea, p.49 and p.50.
80
Ibid., p.49 and pp.49f.
81
Ibid., p.50.
82
See Introduction, footnote 3.
moving and still) can be overcome by film‟s performance of more than one
cinematic function, its ability to incorporate fiction and documentary, for
example. Thus Wings of Desire represents, particularly in the first five of its
seven acts (before Damiel joins the flow of human experience) an attempt to
document – or at least portray – the divided city of Berlin and the alienated
lives of its inhabitants, not one of whom, at least initially, is singled out as
having a privileged place within the narrative. In this respect the film can be
seen to perform what Cassiel defines as the work of the angels: „to look,
gather, bear witness, testify, preserve‟ (HB 21).83 Again we are reminded of
the different meanings of the German word „lesen‟: Wings of Desire is a film
which, like its angel-protagonists, both gathers in and reads. On the other
hand, and increasingly as it homes in on the singular story of Damiel and his
love for the earthly angel Marion, the film accedes to what Wenders has
defined as the very human desire for stories, stories which provide meaning,
context, connection, narrative. Thus in its refusal to commit to a single
cinematic function, or indeed one kind of filmic structure, the film contains
within it – within its heterogeneity and, in the terminology of Bazin, its
„impurity‟ – at least the possibility that it can transcend them. It is in this
sense that the film recomposes film as „angelic adaptation‟.
4.5 Film and the oral tradition

A further level of reflection on film‟s potential in this respect is opened up by
the dialogue which it enters into with other cultural forms and media. In this
context still photography, discussed above, is only one modern medium
amongst many. In one of the film‟s early sequences the camera, associated
with the gaze of the angels, leaves the interior of a Berlin-bound aeroplane
and descends, past the radio tower from which emanates a Babelesque
confusion of multilingual broadcasts, past the over-sized advertisements on
the sides of the houses overlooking the city‟s ring road, down into one of the
tenement blocks where it moves from room to room, unhindered by the walls
separating apartments, in order to record the lonely, fragmented existences of
its residents [shots 1028-1041]. They are shown engaging – or more precisely
not engaging – with different media: televisions play – some watched, some
unwatched – music blares from radios and record players, children play video
games, a man ignores a table full of photographs that belonged to his mother.
The camera testifies here to the fact that contemporary media may not only
83
In this sense, Kuzniar argues: „They bear witness to the potentially auratic powers of the
camera, the lens that by isolating an incident, frames it with significance and beauty‟,
„Ephemeral Inscriptions‟, p.219.
fail to surmount individual isolation, but actively contribute to its

perpetuation. Even rock music – to which Wenders once attributed life-
saving properties – may bring people together physically in the film (at the
Crime and the City Solution and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds concerts), but
it does not alleviate isolation: each person dances alone with only the angels
privy to their existential anxieties.
This media-saturated and lonely existence is presented in the film as the
end point of a process that began with the demise of primal orality, or more
specifically of communal story-telling. As Homer, the film‟s representative
of those traditions, puts it: „In the course of time my listeners have become
readers and they no longer sit in a circle but by themselves, and the one
knows nothing of the other‟ (HB 30). What a written rather than an oral
culture looks like becomes clear in the library sequence. Not only do these
readers remain isolated from one another, they are engaged in a particular
kind of reading – the study of texts, a kind of exegesis which associates them
not with the immediacy of lived experience, but with the less visceral world
of the angels – the library is, after all, their favourite place, part of „the world
behind the world‟ (HB 85). It is this world of Geist (spirit) that the angel
Damiel is so anxious to escape. What is implied here is not a rejection of
enlightenment, but rather that „reading‟ has to be expanded to include broader
cultural, social, and metaphysical insights.
Roger Cook has argued that „the film and the narrative it envisions differ
from the discursive practice encountered in the library‟, where „the concrete
or poetical presence of the text is abandoned for the world behind it‟. 84 It
should also be noted that the kind of reading practised here stands in marked
contrast to Handke‟s conception, discussed above, of his own texts as rooted
in a reading of the real and thus opposed to academic exegesis and „ulterior
motives‟ (Hintergedanken).85
Damiel would appear to swap the world of books for the sensual, the
corporeal, and the concrete at the point at which he quite literally falls to
earth. That experience of being in the here and now, is made manifest in
images and sounds – the audience shares something of Damiel‟s sensual
awakening as the film stock changes from black and white to colour to reveal
a vividly painted Berlin Wall [shot 5058]. But it is also made clear that
seeing is not enough: Damiel can only make this experience of physical
reality his own by naming it – he asks a passer-by for the names of colours
which only become „real‟ through linguistic differentiation [shot 5071]. Thus
84
Cook, p.39 and p.40.
85
Peter Handke, Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), p.82.
the film, in keeping with its dual provenance as the work of both a writer and
a filmmaker, does not simply set up a contrast between the unreal realm of
language and the real realm of images: rather, it implies that images require
linguistic mediation if they are to signify meaningfully.
If language‟s ability to make the real manifest is a facet of both oral and
written traditions, specific to the oral tradition is its directly performative
dimension, with the storyteller engaging with the audience through his or her
physical presence. This aspect of storytelling connects it to the circus
performances in the film, watched by a circle of children who share with one
another their enthusiasm for the endeavours of the artistes. The fact that the
film‟s „Zirkus Alekan‟ is named after its cameraman links it and its magic to
cinema. What this means is that, via this series of associations, we are
confronted with the possibility that film, with its integration of words and
images, can take over the lost art of storytelling for a new generation who, in
the process of listening and looking, are able to recover the rapt attention and
the superior gaze of children. In this sense cinema is recomposed not simply
as reading, but as „reading aloud‟.
The implication of the film‟s engagement with the oral tradition – its
language and its performative dimensions – would appear to be that film,
rather than the written word, is uniquely able to assume its life-saving
narrative functions. If this is the case, then Handke would presumably part
company with Wenders here. 86 As we have seen, his conception of a „Thing-
Image-Script‟ also allows for a performative dimension to the written word
which links his own writing to the oral tradition whose passing is mourned by
Homer – a figure who, after all, owes his very presence in the film to Handke
– rather than to the bibliophilia of the readers in Berlin‟s Staatsbibliothek.
However, it cannot be denied, of course, that in being inspired by Rilke,
Handke, Benjamin, and a triumvirate of literary filmmakers, Wings of Desire
is more than a little contradictory in its apparent distrust of books and
bibliophilia. Perhaps this is one dichotomy that the film does not attempt to
transcend, at least in any explicit way, providing instead a space in which
potentially contradictory positions of this kind can co-exist.
86
However, in discussion with Wenders in 1994, following the premier of his film The
Absence, Handke admitted that film is also capable of a laconism that literature can struggle
to achieve. Wenders and Handke, „Das war für mich eine große Erfreulichkeit, lakonisch
sein zu können im Erzählen der Bilder‟, in Handke, Die Abwesenheit: Eine Skizze, Ein Film,
Ein Gespräch (Dürnau: Edition 350 im Verlag der Kooperative Dürnau, 1996), pp.143-67
(pp.154f.).
4.6 Dissonance and cadence

The film-within-a-film episodes of Wings of Desire imply that in order to be
a true heir to oral traditions of storytelling, cinema must abandon those
„dopey‟ narrative and generic practices which stifle its creative potential. It
has already been suggested that the film does this by adopting an
unconventional narrative arc – even if its published script is divided into
„acts‟ – and further evidence of its willingness to challenge convention is
provided by the sequence at its end in which Marion declares her love for
(and defines the nature of her relationship to) Damiel. While it does, in part,
represent the culmination of its love story narrative, the scene also signals a
refusal to conclude the film with a straightforward cadence in accord with the
conventions of the cinematic romance. It „eschews the male-female roles of
the conventional love story‟ in allowing Marion to determine the significance
of the couple‟s love, lets spoken poetic language dominate the filmic space,
denies the audience the narrative pleasure of their physical union, and allows
the rhythm of the film to slow almost to the point of stasis. 87 Furthermore,
when Marion and Damiel look directly into the camera, their gazes imply that
the audience is also an explicit recipient of the film‟s discourses; they draw
attention to the film‟s „circle‟ of „listeners‟ and „viewers‟ who bear witness to
a message of epic proportions.88 Daniela Berghahn suggests that the audience
is „drawn into the diegesis of cinematic narration, becoming one of its
multiple narratees‟ and concludes: „If we recall Homer‟s chagrin at the loss
of his circle of listeners, it becomes clear that through cinematic narration
Wenders aims to reinstate the principle of collective storytelling‟. 89 By
concluding the film with this romantic „story of giants‟ (HB 163) the
implication is that cinema can embody a counter-discourse to the history of
destruction – what Homer termed the „Epic of Peace‟.90 That this is a
discourse of vision and insight, as well as a celebration of poetic language, is
underlined not only by the gaze to camera, but also by Marion‟s meta-textual
remarks on it: „Look, my eyes! They are the image of necessity, the future of
everyone on the square‟ (HB 163).
87
Cook, p.41.
88
This is a point made by several commentators. Cook, for example, argues that „the
reciprocal close-ups create a triad of looks that includes the audience‟, p.42.
89
Daniela Berghahn, „“…womit sonst kann man heute erzählen als mit Bildern?” Images and
Stories in Wim Wenders‟ Der Himmel über Berlin and In weiter Ferne, so nah!‟, in Text
into Image: Image into Text, ed. by Jeff Morrison and Florian Krobb (Amsterdam-Atlanta:
Rodopi, 1997), pp.329-38 (pp.336f. and p.337).
90
According to Berghahn: „The epic of peace is the utopia of love fulfilled‟, p.333.
For all its intermedial discourses and its hybridity, Wings of Desire
therefore ultimately respects the dichotomies that are at the heart of the
collaboration between Handke and Wenders. In its apotheosis, the encounter
of the two lovers, the film conjures up „an immortal / mutual image‟ (HB
167), but it does so in words. In the brief „coda‟ [shots 7049-7055] that
follows, film‟s capacity to encompass literary language and poetic imagery is
underscored not only by the return of the writing hand and the final image of
the sun breaking through the clouds over Berlin, but also by the dedication to
the three angelic pioneers of auteurist film and the ambiguous final words
„To be continued‟. These words may relate to the love story, the narrative, or
simply the film itself, but in conjunction with the image of a single sky above
the divided city they appear to suggest that on a mythical, poetic level at
least, film is able to transcend boundaries and differences. What is more,
their appearance as script on the screen compels the viewer to become a
reader in the final seconds of the film.
In Wings of Desire itself such a transcending of boundaries (both physical
and metaphysical) does not entail a suppression of difference or dissonance.
Just as the film embraces a proliferation of voices and narratives, so
distinctions between different media tend, as we have seen in the final scenes,
to be highlighted rather than blurred. It is notable, for example, that the
sumptuous black and white images of Berlin and the striking transitions to
colour are generally accompanied by music rather than words, whilst the poetic
texts of Handke are accompanied by the writing hand, static shots of the angels
discussing and, in the case of the final encounter between Damiel and Marion,
simple point-of-view close-ups. Where the text is foregrounded, the visual
poetry is often checked, and where the visual poetry prevails, language is
frequently withheld or kept back. Interestingly, the one sequence of dialogue
between the angels which is accompanied by lyrical images (of reflections of
light on water, a flooded landscape and trees [shots 4001 – 4007]) is, first, one
of the most straightforwardly illustrative in the film – the images depict the
beginning of time described by Damiel – and, second, is clearly, as already
noted, a homage to one of the trinity of angelic (poetic) filmmakers to whom
the film is dedicated: Andrei Tarkovsky.
What is significant, perhaps, is that in Wings of Desire – unlike Wrong
Move (and certain non-Handke scripted films such as Alice in the Cities) – the
relationship between words and images, while it might be central to the film, is
not of explicit interest to the protagonists themselves: they do not – unlike
Wilhelm or Philip – agonise over the dissonance between words and images.
Moreover, the film is not a cinematic Bildungsroman – rather, it traces a
descent from the Olympian heights of the spirit, not an ascent to a mountain
peak (with or without a snowstorm). Cassiel explicitly defines the state from
which Damiel wishes to escape as one in which they are forced „to remain in
words‟ (HB 21). Whilst this is clearly not a desire shared by the film – which,
after all, becomes increasingly verbal in its final scenes – there is no sense that
either Damiel or Marion are heading towards careers as writers. With Handke
providing the verbal poetry and Alekan the visual magic – both in the manner
of fairytales – Wenders‟s film preserves, even where its discourses suggest it
might be transcended, the dissociation of word and image that we have
identified as a leitmotif in the previous Wenders-Handke collaborations: in the
attempt to describe music in 3 American LPs, the linguistic crisis facing Bloch
in The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, and the writer‟s block and
underdeveloped observational skills of Wilhelm in Wrong Move. As we have
also seen, it is a dissociation which, since his tetralogy, Handke has worked to
overcome through inscription of the real in his „Thing-Image-Script‟.
Thus Wings of Desire – despite its obvious differences in ambition, scale,
and narrative – remains in the final reckoning largely consistent with the
previous Wenders-Handke collaborations. It certainly aspires to an intensity of
sentiment which sets it apart from its predecessors, and it develops and refines
the recompositional process considerably, but even at its most „angelic‟ this
adaptation of Handke and sundry other pre-texts does not attempt to eliminate a
plurality of voice. It does, moreover, testify to a further dissonance which it
would, in any case, be unable to suppress: the differences in the conception of
the relationship between word and image that have developed in the thinking of
writer and filmmaker since the earlier – and closer – phase of their
collaboration. Thus it does not resolve the contradictions that in different ways
characterised each of those earlier collaborations. In particular it does not in the
final instance, despite its discourses on this relationship, move „beyond
oppositions‟ or seek to enact some magical or mystical union of word and
image.91 However it does, ultimately, manage to find an accommodation
between the writer and the image maker which might allow for future
collaboration: the storyteller may be visually impaired and the image-maker
taciturn, but they can work together if they keep a polite distance from one
another.
91
Caldwell and Rea, p.46.
Conclusion
so film really could still be art1
Restoring our belief in the world – this is

the power of modern cinema (when it
stops being bad).2
1. Writable films
In 1993 Wenders was asked whether his faith in storytelling had strengthened
over the years, to which he replied:
It was just a matter of my own attitude, not the fault of stories, but only my own attitude
towards them, that I lost faith in them. But then they taught me to believe in them more and
more, and so I started to trust them more and more. [...] I think I feel almost strangely the
opposite now: that it‟s images you can trust less and less.3
A little over a decade before, in 1982, his position had been very different:
I was pressed into telling stories. From then on and until the present moment, I have felt an
opposition between images and stories. A mutual incompatibility, a mutual undermining. I
have always been more interested in pictures, and the fact that – as soon as you assemble
them – they seem to want to tell a story, is still a problem for me today. [...] I totally reject
stories, because for me they only bring out lies, nothing but lies, and the biggest lie is that
they show coherence where there is none.4
Whilst it would be tempting to see Wings of Desire – mid-point between

these two pronouncements and a paean to the pleasures of narrative – as
responsible for this damascene conversion to storytelling, it is important to
remember that Wenders‟s career as a filmmaker tells a rather more
differentiated story than do his own pronouncements. The „painterly‟ student
shorts and largely wordless Summer in the City were immediately followed
by two literary adaptations, and what is frequently seen as Wenders‟s most
productive period – from Alice in the Cities to Paris, Texas and Wings of
Desire – is marked by an alternation of self-scripted road movies with
taciturn protagonists and literary collaborations or adaptations.
1
Peter Handke, „Kinonacht, Kinotiernacht: Vom Antivampirkino des Paares Straub/Huillet,
aus Anlaß des Films Antigone‟, in Handke, Meine Ortstafeln Meine Zeittafeln 1967-2007
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), pp.555-63 (p.562).
2
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London-New York: Continuum, 2005), p.166.
3
Wenders in interview with Richard Raskin, „“It‟s Images You Can Trust Less and Less”: An
Interview with Wim Wenders on Wings of Desire‟, p.o.v., 8 (1999), 5-20 (p.20).
4
Wim Wenders, „Impossible Stories‟, in Wenders, On Film: Essays and Conversations
(London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp.210-18 (p.211 and p.218).
Wings of Desire, as we have seen, does not thematise the conflict between
image-making and story-telling diegetically in the way that Alice in the Cities
and Wrong Move do, in part perhaps because its protagonists cannot be read
as autobiographically as their predecessors. It has certainly, however,
provoked a wealth of critical discourse on this conflict. In discussing the film,
Kolker and Beicken take the opportunity to reiterate the widely-held opinion
that Wenders‟s films with Peter Handke are less successful than those
without him: „The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Wrong Move, and,
later, Wings of Desire suffer a kind of self-consciousness and static
dramaturgy not found in the films written by Wenders himself or with other
collaborators‟.5 In essence, the accusation levelled here – and it is one that is
repeated by some of the commentators who discuss Handke‟s own films 6 – is
that the collaborative works that have been the subject of this study are in
some way „uncinematic‟. Indeed the claim that they „suffer‟ from self-
consciousness and dramaturgical stasis would seem to imply that cinema, or
at least Wenders‟s cinema, should ideally be un-selfconscious and dynamic.
This may seem a strange accusation to level at a filmmaker whose mentors
include Straub-Huillet, Ozu, and Tarkovsky – their films, after all, are often
painstakingly self-conscious and pointedly static – yet it is one that has come
to dominate the discourse on the Wenders-Handke films. Wenders, it would
seem, is „expected‟ to resist the deleterious influence of his literary
collaborator, and in so doing preferably comply with at least some of the
basic premises of Hollywood dramaturgy. As we observed in Chapter One in
noting hostility towards Silver City Revisited, it would appear that Wenders‟s
dealings with Hollywood and also, perhaps, his affectionate adoption of
classic Hollywood genres, narratives, and topoi, have aroused expectations
that many feel he is obliged to meet.
Even Richard W. McCormick, as we have seen one of the most insightful
commentators on Wrong Move, not only acknowledges that Handke‟s
contributions to this film are generally „considered somewhat stilted and
wordy‟, but also concludes himself that they are „at times somewhat
5
6
John E. Davidson, for example, concludes that Handke‟s film The Absence is „sparing in its
use of film language‟ and suffers from „a literary, rather than cinematic, use of film‟ in
which „words and symbols [...] clearly overshadow sounds and images‟. John E. Davidson,
„Handke as Director: The Absence‟, in The Works of Peter Handke: International
Perspectives, ed. David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp (Riverside, California: Ariadne, 2005),
pp.264-82 (p.277, p.271, and p.279).
Conclusion 283
ponderous‟.7 In attempting to rescue Wrong Move from Handke, McCormick

claims not only that „the tension between Wenders‟s camera and the scripted
speeches is integral to the film‟, but also defines Wenders‟s cinema more
generally as „writerly‟ in the positive sense that Barthes used the term – it
expects the audience to participate actively in the production of meaning
rather than engage in passive consumption. 8 As we have suggested in the
previous chapter, Wings of Desire is not only scriptible („writerly‟) but also
lisible („readerly‟).
Wenders and his apologists frequently appear to be participating in an
unending struggle for a resolution to a notional conflict between images,
words, and stories. Unlike, for example, the more Brechtian filmmakers and
commentators of the New German Cinema, who develop and exploit the
dialectics of the medium for their own political ends, the „sensibilists‟ at
times seem unable to accept that there may not be a ready resolution,
dissolution, or transcendence of the fundamental dichotomies of cinema. One
sometimes senses that Wenders, at least in reflecting on his own films, would
like the constructive recomposition of cinema that he performs to be more
conclusive and definitive. Handke too continues to wrestle with this problem,
as demonstrated by the title of his most substantial novel to date, The Loss of
Images. On completing his most recent film, The Absence, he concluded:
It seemed to me that with this film in particular I had the sense that I can achieve a laconism
with images which, for some reason, as I grow older, I can no longer achieve through
language. [...] Film can allow itself to be much more laconic. It was a great pleasure for me
to be able to be laconic in telling a story through images. That is something I can‟t do in
literature.9
Yet, as we noted in the last chapter, the protagonist of The Loss of Images
was to claim, less than a decade later, that her story must, above all else, be
„unfilmable‟.
7
Richard W. McCormick, „The Writer in Film: Wrong Move‟, in The Cinema of Wim
Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition, ed. by Roger F. Cook and Gerd
Gemünden (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1997), pp.89-109 (p.100).
8
Ibid., p.100 and p.101.
9
Peter Handke and Wim Wenders, „Das war für mich eine große Erfreulichkeit, lakonisch
sein zu können im Erzählen der Bilder‟, in Handke, Die Abwesenheit: Eine Skizze, Ein Film,
Ein Gespräch (Dürnau: Edition 350 im Verlag der Kooperative Dürnau, 1996), pp.143-67
(pp.154f.).
2. Literary films and literate cinema

Beyond the specific case of Wenders and Handke, the conflict between word
and image is, as discussed in the Introduction to this study, symptomatic of
the New German Cinema and its complex relationship to literature. In the
years that followed the proclamation of a new Autorenfilm by the Oberhausen
filmmakers in 1962, the New German Cinema favoured, for a multitude of
historical, cultural, and economic reasons, literary cinema in general and
literary adaptations in particular. The collaborative films of Wenders and
Handke are undoubtedly paradigmatic in this respect. However, whilst the
established hierarchy which views the literary pre-text as primary and the
cinematic hypertext as secondary may indeed underpin many classic
adaptations of the New German Cinema, and is frequently axiomatic to
commentaries on them, it can also be contested and defied, as this study has
sought to demonstrate.
Although Handke has not addressed this matter explicitly in commenting
on his collaborative films with Wenders, he has repeatedly taken it up in his
enthusiastic remarks on the films of Straub-Huillet. Particularly relevant in
this respect is a lengthy commentary on their Sophocles-Brecht-Hölderlin
adaptation Antigone (1989), first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung under the title „The Night of the Cinema, The Night of the Cinema
Animals: On the Anti-Vampiric Cinema of Straub-Huillet on the Occasion of
their Film Antigone‟. In his analysis, Handke claims that an austere but
respectful handling of language and text, coupled with meticulous attention
to delivery, sound recording, and framing can return cinema to its creative
roots and strip it of inessential baggage. Whilst their early short The
Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp was a „truly childlike sound film
like those in the early years of cinema‟, Antigone too is:
rudimentary, primary, incapable of grasping all those secondary and tertiary things which in
the eyes of the professionals constitute progressive or refined cinema. [...] It proves that
there are still films, like those of Dreyer and Bresson before, which run (and run) without
what has become a vampiric kind of magic.10
As well as suggesting that Straub-Huillet‟s film decomposes cinema,

separating the elements as Brecht would have called it, Handke also attempts
to define the recomposed medium that he admires in Antigone, characterising
the film‟s approach to story-telling, for example, as „pictorial‟ (bildsam).11 In
order to achieve a measured conjunction of image and narrative, the
10
Handke, „Kinonacht, Kinotiernacht‟, pp.558f., p.559, and p.563.
11
Ibid., p.561.
Conclusion 285
filmmakers have, he contends, „remained faithful to an elementary mode of

making and combining‟.12 The rhetoric Handke employs in extolling a
cinema he deems primary and childlike manifestly echoes the pathos of „The
Song of Childhood‟ and the homage to angelic cinema with which Wings of
Desire ends.
It is significant that in contextualising Straub-Huillet‟s film historically,
Handke should refer once again to Dreyer, whose Vampyr we cited as a
classic example of recomposition in the Introduction to this study. Dreyer
represents for Handke, and indeed for Straub-Huillet, a paradigmatic figure
from and of cinema‟s „youth‟.
In his detailed analysis of Vampyr, Bordwell concludes that its formal
gesture of disruption – its modernist momentum so-to-speak – is ultimately
balanced by a counter-movement that is driven by the „authority‟ of words,
text, and script.13 He acknowledges that in this movement there is a tendency
to rehabilitate narrative, but that this rehabilitation remains incomplete and
problematic. There is, to put it another way, an unresolved (and productive)
tension in Dreyer‟s film between, on the one hand, a modernist impulse and,
on the other, a restorative undertow. The same, we would suggest, can be
said of the collaborative films of Wenders and Handke, in particular Wrong
Move and Wings of Desire. Although they intimate that text (profane or
sacred) and, more specifically, the act of writing can resolve the conflicts of
separation and disjuncture present in cinema, the assertion is not definitive.
Yet in their manifest respect for words and texts they do, ultimately, advocate
a cinema that, if not exclusively literary, is necessarily literate.
3. Collaborative films
It is, therefore, precisely in the context of the notorious „literariness‟ of
German cinema, addressed at the beginning of this study, that the
collaborations of Wenders and Handke are so important – not, as we have
seen, in the sense that they resolve the conflicts, but rather because the films
manifest, express, and reflect on them in the varied and complex ways that
we have attempted to identify. Even the basic parameters of the oppositions
in this debate can at times be blurred – a dichotomy of images and words, for
example, can metamorphose seamlessly into a conflict between image-
making (or photography) and story-telling. Thus for his first cinematic
encounter with Handke, Wenders chooses to reflect essayistically and in
12
Ibid., p.559.
13
David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley-London: University of
California Press, 1981), p.116
dialogue with the writer, on music, images, and the inadequacy of language;
for his second, he takes a novel on the constraints of language as his source
material and opens it up to assimilate images and music; for his third, he
collaborates on a script that addresses the „problem‟ of writing through the
iconography of German Romantic painting; for his fourth, he commissions
poetic dialogue to signify the capacity of film to tell stories that were once
the province of the oral tradition. Seen together the collaborations can be read
both as a tetralogy on the strengths and weaknesses of literary cinema and as
a protracted experiment in different modes of collaborative production.
Inevitably, all four collaborative films are self-reflexive, at times even
self-conscious, not least in their recurring images of text and image
production (perhaps most insistently in Wrong Move). To see this self-
reflexivity as a weakness is, we believe, profoundly mistaken. Deleuze
rightly views it as the dynamic impulse behind Wenders‟s cinema. He claims
that the director‟s obsession with modes of transport should be read as a
discourse on the movement of the cinematic apparatus, and thus also as a
self-reflexive exploration of the cinematic medium and its inherited media:
One might conceive of a series of means of translation (train, car, aeroplane...) and, in
parallel, a series of means of expression (diagram, photo, cinema). The camera would then
appear as an exchanger or, rather, as a generalised equivalent of the movements of
translation. And this is how it appears in Wenders‟s films. 14
These films, according to Deleuze, introduce „into the cinema a particularly

concrete reflection on the cinema‟.15 Seen in this light, the collaborative films
not only amount to a protracted experiment into the nature of cinematic
collaboration and adaptation – each representing, as we have demonstrated, a
different model of co-authorship – but in fact constitute the intellectual
backbone of Wenders‟s cinema. They also, we believe, shape Handke‟s
theoretical and practical approach to the medium: while detailed proof of this
assertion lies outside the domain of this study, the films by Handke which fall
within the timeframe of the collaboration, Chronicle of On-Going Events and
The Left-Handed Woman, certainly provide evidence for it. What is beyond
doubt is that the works of Handke and Wenders, both within cinema and
beyond it, are consistently and programmatically hybrid, and as such demand
to be read intermedially. It is in this respect that this study has been able to
demonstrate that the four collaborative films of Wenders and Handke are not
14
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (London-New York: Continuum, 2005),
p.5.
15
Ibid., p.24.
Conclusion 287
epiphenomena in the career of either the filmmaker or the writer but essential
for an understanding of their work.
We have also seen how other readily accepted orthodoxies on their
collaboration – in some cases stoked by Wenders‟s reverential admiration for
Handke and by Handke‟s at times rather patronising remarks about Wenders
– do not stand up to close scrutiny. 16 It is frequently claimed, for example,
that the flow of inspiration between the two is entirely in one direction, from
writer to filmmaker. Whilst Wenders has always acknowledged that Handke
provides a dimension or register that he himself is not able to supply, it is
equally apparent not only that Handke‟s own filmmaking would be
inconceivable without Wenders‟s inspiration (Kolker and Beicken suggest as
much in discussing The Left-Handed Woman),17 but also that concerns
generally associated with the later works of Handke, such as the intense
concentration on quotidian detail, are prefigured in earlier works of Wenders,
implying perhaps a greater degree of dialogue and cross-fertilisation than has
hitherto been acknowledged. Our discussion of Wings of Desire also
challenges another myth about their collaboration – namely that it is Handke
who supplies the erudition and intellectual profundity to buttress Wenders‟s
sensibilism. Even if it is not always apparent where Handke‟s texts end and
Wenders‟s begin in this film, it is quite clear that it is the filmmaker who
supplies the allusions which, in the words of Kolker and Beicken, provide
„the textual weave‟.18 The intertextual references to Rilke, to Benjamin, and
to the numerous scholars and writers cited in the library sequences are
Wenders‟s, and are not to be found in either „The Song of Childhood‟ or
other texts provided by Handke. Handke‟s contributions may be poetically
dense, but they are not conspicuously bookish.
4. To be continued...
Finally, however, we believe that our close scrutiny of these four films,
alongside a number of associated singly-authored works, demonstrates that it
is wrong to compartmentalise them (affirmatively or negatively) and to view
16
Handke has claimed that when they first met Wenders „was a directionless A-level student
who didn‟t know what to do‟. He also describes Wenders‟s early shorts as „rather childish
experimental films‟, takes the credit for directing Wenders towards narrative cinema by
forcing The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty on him, and claims that the idea for Wrong
Move was his. Peter Handke and Peter Hamm, Es leben die Illusionen: Gespräche in
Chaville und anderswo (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), p.145, p.146, p.148, and p.149.
17
They also claim that the film „is more fluid and coherent than any of the Handke material
directed by Wenders himself‟. Kolker and Beicken, p.146.
18
Ibid., p.138.
them in isolation from other works of either Wenders or Handke. Wenders

himself has not only highlighted the fact that the collaborative projects have a
serendipitous rather than programmatic quality – claiming, for example, that
over the years he has lost the recipe for Wings of Desire – but also hinted that
the path may still be open for further collaborations. 19 Whilst it may be hoped
that this will indeed prove to be the case, the evidence provided by the films
themselves, as charted in this volume, would seem to suggest that such a
venture would – once again – have to be of a very different kind. In the
course of their collaboration, Handke and Wenders have moved from a point
at which their overlapping interests allowed them to exert a productive
influence on each other‟s work to positions of marked aesthetic difference,
particularly in their understanding of the relationship between language and
image. This might imply that close collaboration of the kind considered in
this analysis is unlikely to happen again, yet evidence suggests that Wenders
has in recent years contemplated filming a Handke text once more. 20 To date,
however, nothing concrete has emerged. Even without further contributions,
the collaborative experiment we have examined here testifies unequivocally
to the cinematic and literary significance of one of the most productive
collaborations between a writer and a filmmaker in the history of European
cinema.
19
Both claims were made in an interview at the National Film Theatre in London on 10
January 2008.
20
Several internet sources suggest that in 2005-2006 Wenders planned to make a film of
Handke‟s story Kali, which subsequently appeared in 2007 (Kali: Eine Vorwintergeschichte,
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp) with no mention of it having been conceived as a film script.
References to the project include: http://www.focus.de/magazin/archiv/periskop-wenders-
verfilmt-handke_aid_21516 4.html and http://www.voneinemderauszog.de/tbt.htm (accessed
August 2010).
Filmographies
All dates here and in the body of the text refer to premiers.
Wim Wenders
Locations (Schauplätze), FRG, 1967, 10 mins, b/w (lost)
Same Player Shoots Again, FRG, 1968, 12 mins, b/w
Silver City Revisited, FRG, 1969, 25 mins, colour. Screenplay: Wenders;
Director of Photography: Wenders; Editor: Wenders
Police Film (Polizeifilm), FRG, 1969, 12 mins, b/w
Alabama: 2000 Light Years, FRG, 1969, 22 mins, b/w
3 American LPs (3 amerikanische LP’s), FRG, 1969, 12 mins, colour.
Screenplay: Wenders, Handke; Director of Photography: Wenders;
Editor: Wenders; With: Wenders, Handke
Summer in the City, FRG, 1970, 116 mins, b/w
The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (Die Angst des Tormanns beim
Elfmeter), FRG/Austria, 1972, 100 mins, colour. Screenplay: Wenders,
based on the novel by Handke; Director of Photography: Robby Müller;
Editor: Peter Przygodda; Original Music: Jürgen Knieper; Leading
Players: Arthur Brauss (Josef Bloch), Kai Fischer (Hertha Gabler), Erika
Pluhar (Gloria), Libgart Schwarz (Anna, Chambermaid)
The Scarlet Letter (Der scharlachrote Buchstabe), FRG/Spain, 1973, 90
mins, colour
Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten), FRG, 1974, 110 mins, b/w.
Screenplay: Wenders, Veith von Fürstenberg; Director of Photography:
Robby Müller; Editor: Peter Przygodda; Original Music: Can; Leading
Players: Rüdiger Vogler (Philip Winter), Yella Rottländer (Alice), Lisa
Kreuzer (Lisa, Alice‟s Mother), Edda Köchl (Ex-Girlfriend in New York)
The Island and From the Family of Reptiles (Die Insel and Aus der Familie
der Panzerechsen), FRG, 1974, 2 x 25 mins, colour
Wrong Move (Falsche Bewegung), FRG, 1975, 104 mins, colour. Screenplay:
Handke, based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre); Director of Photography:
Robby Müller; Editor: Peter Przygodda; Original Music: Jürgen Knieper;
Leading Players: Rüdiger Vogler (Wilhelm), Hanna Schygulla (Therese),
Hans Christian Blech (Laertes), Nastassja Nakszynski (Kinski) (Mignon),
Peter Kern (Bernhard), Ivan Desny (Industrialist), Marianne Hoppe
(Wilhelm‟s Mother)
Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit), FRG, 1976, 175 mins, b/w
The American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund), FRG/France, 1977, 126

mins, colour
Lightning Over Water, FRG/Sweden, 1980, 90 mins, colour
Hammett, USA, 1982, 128 mins, colour
Chambre 666, France/USA, 1982, 50 mins, colour
Reverse Angle, USA/France/FRG, 1982, 16 mins, colour. Screenplay:
Wenders; Director of Photography: Lisa Rinzler; Editor: Jon Neuburger;
With: Wenders, Francis Ford Coppola
The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge), FRG/Portugal/USA, 1982, 121
mins, b/w
Paris, Texas, FRG/France, 1984, 148 mins, colour
Tokyo-Ga, FRG/USA, 1985, 92 mins, colour
Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin), France/FRG, 1987, 128 mins,
b/w and colour. Screenplay: Wenders, Handke; Director of Photography:
Henri Alekan; Editor: Peter Przygodda; Original Music: Jürgen Knieper;
Leading Players: Bruno Ganz (Damiel), Solveig Dommartin (Marion),
Otto Sander (Cassiel), Curt Bois (Homer), Peter Falk (Himself)
Notebook on Cities and Clothes (Aufzeichnungen zu Kleidern und Städten),
FRG, 1989, 79 mins, colour
Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt), Germany/
France/Australia, 1991, 179 mins and 270 mins (director‟s cut), colour
Arisha, The Bear, and The Stone Ring (Arisha, der Bär und der steinerne
Ring), Germany, 1992, 29 mins, colour
Faraway, So Close! (In weiter Ferne, so nah!), Germany, 1993, 146 mins,
b/w and colour
Lisbon Story, Germany/Portugal, 1994, 100 mins, colour
A Trick of the Light (Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky), Germany, 1995, 79 mins,
b/w and colour
Beyond the Clouds (Al di là delle nuvole), France/Germany/Italy, 1995,
linking episodes for the film by Michelangelo Antonioni (112 mins,
colour)
The End of Violence, France/Germany/USA, 1997, 122 mins, colour
Buena Vista Social Club, Germany/USA/UK/France/Cuba, 1999, 105 mins,
colour
The Million Dollar Hotel, Germany/UK/USA, 2000, 132 mins, colour
Ode to Cologne: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Film (Viel passiert: Der BAP Film),
Germany, 2002, 101 mins, colour
Ten Minutes Older – The Trumpet, Spain/UK/Germany/Finland/China, 2002,
11 mins, colour (episode in compilation film)
The Soul of a Man, Germany/USA, 2003, 103 mins, b/w and colour
Filmographies 291
Land of Plenty, USA/Germany/Canada, 2004, 123 mins, colour

Don’t Come Knocking, France/Germany/USA, 2005, 122 mins, colour
Palermo Shooting, Germany/France/Italy, 2008, 108 mins, colour
Peter Handke
Chronicle of On-Going Events (Chronik der laufenden Ereignisse), FRG,
1971, 95 mins, b/w. Screenplay: Handke; Director of Photography: Bernd
Fiedler; Editor: Heidi Murero; Leading Players: Rüdiger Vogler (Spade),
Ulrich Gressieker (Beaumont), Didi Petrikat (Kelly), Libgart Schwarz
(„Girl‟), Gerd Mayen (McNamara)
The Left-Handed Woman (Die linkshändige Frau), FRG, 1977, 113 mins,
colour. Screenplay: Handke; Director of Photography: Robby Müller;
Editor: Peter Przygodda; Leading Players: Edith Clever (Woman), Bruno
Ganz (Bruno), Angela Winkler (Franziska), Markus Mühleisen (Stefan),
Bernhard Minetti (Woman‟s Father), Bernhard Wicki (Publisher)
The Malady of Death (Das Mal des Todes), Austria, 1985, 65 mins, colour
The Absence (Die Abwesenheit), France/Germany/Spain/UK, 1993, 112
mins, colour
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(Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1981)
–– and Peter Handke, Der Himmel über Berlin: Ein Filmbuch (Frankfurt
am Main, Suhrkamp, 1990)
– –. Einmal (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel: 2001)
– –. On Film: Essays and Conversations (London: Faber and Faber, 2001)
– –. Pictures from the Surface of the Earth (London: Haus, 2007)
Bibliography 307
White, J. J., „Signs of Disturbance: The Semiological Import of Some Recent

Fiction by Michel Tournier and Peter Handke‟, Journal of European
Studies, 4 (1974), 233-54
Wollen, Peter, Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London:
Verso, 1982)
Wood, Jason and Ian Haydn Smith, eds, Wim Wenders (London: Axiom,
2008)
Zschachlitz, Ralf, „Angelus Novus – Angelus Postnovus: “Der Himmel über
Berlin”‟, Weimarer Beiträge, 40 (1994), 29-43
Index
Adorno, Theodor W., 12 Bresson, Robert, 93, 94 (n.178), 97, 111

Alekan, Henri, 257, 264, 265, 269, 269 (n.226), 284; Mouchette, 97
(n.71), 277, 280 Buñuel, Luis, Un Chien Andalou, 48; The
Allende, Salvador, 217 Phantom of Liberty, 45 (n.26)
Arbus, Diane, 48 (n.35) Busoni, Ferruccio, 23
Artaud, Antonin, 205 (n.29)
Astruc, Alexandre, 16 Can, 178
Canned Heat, 138, 170
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 17f., 69 (n.97), Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland, 169
92f., 211, 214, 217, 237 (n.11)
Balázs, Béla, 42 Cave, Nick and the Bad Seeds, 248, 276
Barthes, Roland, 283; Camera Lucida, 30, Cervi, Tonino, Today It’s Me ... Tomorrow
46, 47, 48, 49; Mythologies, 89 It’s You, 65 (n.92)
Bayer, Konrad, 61 Cézanne, Paul, 26, 27, 250, 256 (n.32),
Bazin, André, 11, 14, 15, 16, 97, 275 259f., 260 (n.42)
Beatles, The, 58 (n.73) Chandler, Raymond, The Long Goodbye,
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 211 185
Benjamin, Walter, 17, 17 (n.17), 19, 48, Coppola, Francis Ford, 251; The
214, 243, 244 (n.4), 269, 274, 277, 287; Conversation, 217
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Costard, Hellmuth, Besonders wertvoll, 91
Mechanical Reproduction’, 17 (n.168)
Berg, Alban, 244, 245, 269 Creedence Clearwater Revival, 64, 65, 66,
Bergman, Ingmar, 89 265 (n.61)
Berto, Juliet, 90 (n.163) Crime and the City Solution, 276
Birtwistle, Harrison, 23
Boetticher, Budd, 213 Dali, Salvador. See Buñuel, Luis.
Bohm, Hark, 81 (n.133) Daves, Delmer, The Hanging Tree, 87
Bois, Curt, 247 Deleuze, Gilles, 28, 243, 281 (n.2), 286
Böll, Heinrich, 92; Billiards at Half Past Deneuve, Cathérine, 57
Nine, 158 (n.95) Derrida, Jacques, 243, 244 (n.4)
Bove, Emmanuel, 250, 251, 255 Desny, Ivan, 216, 268f. (n.70)
Brecht, Bertolt, 12, 16, 18, 21f., 25, 26, Disney, Walt, Dumbo, 168, 168 (n.9)
27f., 68, 69, 73, 76 (n.115), 89, 92, 111, Döblin, Alexander, Berlin Alexanderplatz,
216, 283, 284; Antigone, 284; Schweyk in 16
the Second World War, 45 (n.26); The Dommartin, Solveig, 255, 267f.
Threepenny Opera, 214 (n.51) Dowland, John, 23
Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 25 (n. 35), 26, 94 Ganz, Bruno, 244

(n.178), 111 (n.226), 284, 285; The Master Genet, Jean, Querelle, 17
of the House, 26; The Passion of Joan of Godard, Jean-Luc, 16, 25, 30, 45, 45
Arc, 205, 205 (n.29); Vampyr, 24f., 26, (n.26), 69, 82f., 89f., 94, 104, 107, 111; Le
246, 285 Gai savoir, 24 (n.32), 89f., 90 (n.163);
Duras, Marguerite, 12 One Plus One, 82f., 89, 94f., 96; Les
Dylan, Bob, 211, 204 (n.24) Carabiniers, 45; Les Carabiniers révisités,
45 (n.26); Two or Three Things I Know
Echo & The Bunnymen, 250, 251 About Her, 40 (n.18), 68f., 90 (n.166),
Eichendorff, Joseph Karl Benedikt 152; Vivre sa vie, 205 (n.29)
Freiherr von, 209, 210, 213, 266; Memoirs Göschel, Albrecht, 40 (n.18)
of a Good-for-Nothing, 212, 213 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 15, 198,
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 74, 74 199, 208, 212, 212 (n.48), 228, 229;
(n.105), 183 (n.35) Elective Affinities, 228; The Sorrows of
Young Werther, 228; Wilhelm Meister’s
Falconetti, Maria, 205 (n.29) Apprenticeship, 19, 20, 95, 195, 198f.,
Falk, Peter, 34, 263, 272f., 274 202, 206, 208f., 210 (n.42, n.45), 212, 212
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 13, 16f., 94; (n.49), 213, 219f. 228, 229
Katzelmacher, 94; Love is Colder Than Grant, Cary, 57, 202, 205
Death, 69 (n.97), 94 Grazer Group, 54
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 38 (n.11) Group 47, 73, 76, 86, 113
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, Tender is the Night, Guattari, Félix, 243
165, 168, 168 (n.9), 169 (n.11), 170, 170
(n.13); The Great Gatsby, 170, 170 (n.13), Hammett, Dashiell, 109; The Glass Key,
185 106f.
Flaubert, Gustave, Sentimental Education, Handke, Peter, passim; The Absence
212; A Simple Heart, 240 (film), 26, 209 (n.39); 277 (n.86), 282
Fondato, Marcelo, Watch Out, We’re Mad, (n.6), 283; Across, 33 (n.49), 248, 254,
217 255, 260; Child Story, 32, 227 (n.91), 248,
Fontane, Theodor, Effi Briest, 16f. 255, 260f.; Chronicle of On-Going Events,
Ford, John, 96, 97, 100, 170, 170 (n.13), 30, 35 (n.2), 38, 90 (n.163), 110 (n.226),
171, 174f., 178, 181, 182, 183, 185f., 104-12, 171, 177 (n.25), 286; Essay on
188f., 192, 213, 254; Young Mr Lincoln, Tiredness, 121 (n.17); German Poems, 57
111 (n.226), 170f., 176; The Searchers, (n.69), 59 (n.75); The Goalkeeper’s Fear
217 (n.58) of the Penalty, 18, 20, 36, 55, 72, 90
Frank, Robert, 42 (n.24) (n.164), 107, 113-61, 163, 173, 195, 228,
Freud, Sigmund, 243 230 (n.98), 255, 287 (n.16); Greeting the
Friedrich, Caspar David, 209f., 210 (n.42), Board of Directors, 35, 54, 87f.; The
212, 221, 223 History of the Pencil, 248, 255 (n.26), 256,
259, 260, 263, 264; The Hornets, 55, 88,
Index 311
105; The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each 249, 255, 256, 257f., 259, 261 (n.47), 262
Other, 203; In a Dark Night I Left My Still (n.49), 267f.; When Hope Still Helped, 223
House, 33 (n.49), 99 (n.201); The (n.78); Wings of Desire (film book, with
Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Wim Wenders), 244 (n.5); Wrong Move,
Innerworld, 37, 54, 56-63, 72, 73, 75, 82 32, 160, 161, 195-242, 243, 256, 282f.
(n.136), 104; The Journey in the Dugout Hauff, Reinhard, 13
Canoe, or The Play about the Film about Hawks, Howard, 94 (n.178), 100; Red Line
the War, 87 (n.154); Kali, 288 (n.20); 7000, 139
Kaspar, 35f., 77; The Left-Handed Woman Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter,
(film), 30, 32, 37 (n.9), 61 (n.82), 112, 41
227, 227 (n.90), 236-41, 242, 249, 286, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 244 (n.4)
287; The Left-Handed Woman (novel), 32, Heißenbüttel, Helmut, 61
34, 227, 228, 229, 236-41, 243, 255, 258, Hendrix, Jimi, 204 (n.24)
261; The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Henze, Hans Werner, 244, 245
32, 227 (n.91), 248, 250, 254, 255, 259f., Herzog, Werner, 13
261; Life Without Poetry, 57 (n.69); The Highsmith, Patricia, 185; Ripley’s Game,
Long Way Round, 227 (n.91), 248, 249, 41, 139 (n.58); The Tremor of Forgery,
250, 253, 265; The Loss of Images, 266, 139
283; A Moment of True Feeling, 32, 33 Hildesheimer, Wolfgang, 244, 245
(n.49), 99 (n.201), 178 (n.27), 226-34, Hitchcock, Alfred, 57, 94 (n.178), 142
235, 236, 238, 243, 255, 257, 258; My (n.65)
Foot My Tutor, 77, 108; My Year in the Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, 58,
No-Man’s Bay, 33 (n.49), 99 (n.201); 284
Offending the Audience, 35; The Peddler, Homer, 244, 256, 259; The Odyssey, 40
55; Phantasies of Repetition, 248; Prose Hopper, Dennis, Easy Rider, 83, 95
Poems Plays Radio Play Essays, 56, 74; Hopper, Edward, 250, 255
Repetition, 16 (n.15), 33 (n.49), 243, 248, Horkheimer, Max, 232
249, 259, 265; Self-Accusation, 35, 41, 54; Huillet, Danièle and Jean-Marie Straub,
Short Letter, Long Farewell, 20, 30, 31f., 13, 14f., 16, 26-28, 69 (n.97), 91-93, 94,
64, 72, 97, 118f. (n.14), 125 (n.30), 138 213, 214, 216, 217, 282, 284f.; Antigone,
(n.55), 163-94, 195, 196, 219 (n.66), 228, 93f. (n.178), 284f.; The Bridegroom, the
230 (n.98), 233, 234, 235, 254; Slow Comedienne and the Pimp, 68f., 284;
Homecoming (tetralogy), 20, 32, 227, 248, Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, 17f.,
250, 250 (n.13), 253-55, 264; (novel), 99 26, 91-93, 205, 211, 214, 217; History
(n.201), 227, 248, 250, 253, 254, 255; A Lessons, 218 (n.61); Machorka-Muff, 26,
Sorrow Beyond Dreams, 165, 167, 168f., 213, 213f. (n.50), 214; Not Reconciled,
168 (n.9), 195f., 228, 251; Voyage to the 158 (n.95); Sicilia!, 27, 28; Itinéraire de
Sonorous Land, or The Art of Asking, 79 Jean Bricard, 27; Von heute auf morgen,
(n.123); The Weight of the World, 32, 248, 24, 26f.
Mann, Thomas, Tonio Kröger, 209, 215,

Isasi-Isasmendi, Antonio, They Came to 220; The Magic Mountain, 220 (n.70)
Rob Las Vegas, 96 Markopoulos, Gregory, The Illiac Passion,
91
Jagger, Mick, 95 Martin, Dean, 99
Jandl, Ernst, 61 Marx, Karl, 92 (n.171)
Janouch, Gustav, 49 (n.42) McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding
Media, 23
Kafka, Franz, 49; The Metamorphosis, 230 Melville, Jean-Pierre, An Honourable
(n.99); The Trial, 151 (n.88), Young Man, 95f.
Keller, Gottfried, Green Henry, 185 Milošević, Slobodan, 79 (n.123)
Kleist, Heinrich von, 122 (n.19); The Mitchum, Robert, 99
Earthquake in Chile, 207f. Mon, Franz, 61
Klossowski, Pierre, 243 Mörike, Eduard Friedrich, 209
Kluge, Alexander, 11-14, 16, 22, 84 Moritz, Karl Philipp, Anton Reise, 185
(n.142), 93, 113 (n.1), 274, 243 (n.1); The Müller, Robby, 227 (n.90), 249
Artistes at the Top of the Big Top: Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm, Nosferatu,
Disorientated, 90f. (n.166), 218 (n.62) 25, 246; Tabu, 111 (n.226)
Knieper, Jürgen, 143, 145, 152, 159, 207
(n.31) Nancy, Jean-Luc, 243
Kracauer, Siegfried, 92, 97, 271 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 265 (n.61)
Kristeva, Julia, 243
Kristl, Vlado, 61 (n.82), 240 Oberhausen Manifesto 11, 12
Kundera, Milan, 244 (n.4) Ono, Yoko, 48
Ossorio, Amando de, Return of the Blind
Laing, Ronald David, The Politics of Dead, 217
Experience, 82 Ozu, Yasujirō, 149f. (n.86), 225, 239, 254,
Längsfeld, Wolfgang, 79 282
Léaud, Jean-Pierre, 90 (n.163)
Lemke, Klaus, 48 Hours to Acapulco, 91 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 16
Leone, Sergio, Once Upon a Time in the Peckinpah, Sam, Ride the High Country,
West, 98 87
Leonhardt, Gustav, 17f., 92f. Penn, Arthur, Bonnie and Clyde, 57, 60
Lettau, Reinhard, 183 (n.35) Peymann, Claus, 35
Lilienthal, Peter, 13; La Victoria, 217f. Przygodda, Peter, 227 (n.90), 249
Lumière, Auguste and Louis, Arrival of a
Train at a Station, 47 Quicksilver Messenger Service, 64, 71
Mandel, Harvey, 64, 66, 67, 96 Ray, Nicholas, 97

Mann, Anthony, 57, 97, 100 Reinke, Wilfried, 11, 113 (n.1), 243 (n.1)
Index 313
Reitinger, Richard, 32 Summers, Jeremy, Five Golden Dragons,

Reitz, Edgar, 11, 13, 113 (n.1), 243 (n.1); 57
The Night of the Filmmakers, 254 (n.25) Syberberg, Hans Jürgen, 13
Resnais, Alain, 89; Hiroshima mon amour,
12 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 254, 279, 282
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 15, 19, 62, 244, 264, Tokens, The, 126, 126 (n.32), 152
266, 267, 277, 287 Troggs, The, 211, 212
Rolling Stones, The, 44, 45, 46, 82f., 95 Truffaut, François, 91, 254, 261 (n.48);
Rottländer, Yella, 177 (n.27) The Bride Wore Black, 91
Ruttmann, Walter, Berlin: Symphony of a
Great City, 71 Van Morrison, 64, 65, 66, 69f., 70 (n.99),
92, 96, 98-100, 140 (n.59)
Sander, August, 39; People of the 20th Vertov, Dziga, Man with a Movie Camera,
Century, 40, 266, 273, 274 71
Sanders-Brahms, Helma, 13 Vienna Group, 61
Savoldelli, Reto Andrea, Lydia, 98 Vittorini, Elio, 28
Scharoun, Hans, 244 Vivaldi, Antonio, 211
Schlöndorff, Volker, 13 Vlady, Marina, 69
Schneider, Peter, Lenz, 196 Vogler, Rüdiger, 33 (n.49), 39, 105, 165f.,
Schneider, Romy, 57 222, 226, 227, 227 (n.90), 249
Schoenberg, Arnold, 26f. Von Eschenbach, Wolfram, Parzival, 212
Schrader, Paul, 205 (n.49)
Schwarz, Libgart, 35, 249
Schygulla, Hannah, 94, 216 Wallace, Edgar, 57
Shakespeare, William, 212; Hamlet, 212 Walsh, Raoul, 94 (n.178), 97; The Tall
(n.49) Men, 98
Siegal, Don, Madigan, 139 Wenders, Wim, passim; 3 American LPs,
Skladanowsky, Max and Emil, 218 (n.62) 15, 19, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36 (n.8), 37, 38,
Snow, Michael, Wavelength, 91 40, 54, 63 (n.89), 63-73, 79, 95, 96, 98f.,
Sontag, Susan, On Photography, 30, 42 99 (n.199), 104, 107, 125, 134, 138, 148,
(n.24), 45, 46, 47, 48 (n.35, n.38), 49, 51f., 170, 217 (n.59), 247f., 251, 253, 265
52 (n.53), 59, 67, 67 (n.93) (n.61), 280; Alabama: 2000 Light Years,
Sophocles, Antigone, 284 36 (n.8), 45, 46f., 55, 63, 67, 71f., 94, 204
Spinoza, Baruch, 243 (n.24); Alice in the Cities, 20, 30, 31f., 39,
Stifter, Adalbert, 259, 260 (n.42) 40, 47 (n.33), 53 (n.57), 63, 64, 68 (n.96),
Straub, Jean-Marie. See Huillet, Danièle. 70, 72, 81 (n.134), 97, 117f. (n.10), 125
Struck, Karen, Class Love, 165, 166f., 168 (n.31), 128 (n.38), 131 (n.44), 134, 138,
(n.9), 196 158 (n.96), 165-194, 195, 196, 202 (n.20),
206, 207, 208 (n.36), 209, 210 (n.43), 212,
227, 234, 238 (n.118), 241, 251, 251 Same Player Shoots Again, 36 (n.8), 45,
(n.14), 257, 258, 270 (n.73), 279, 281, 46, 50, 71, 205 (n.29); The Scarlet Letter,
282; The American Friend, 139 (n.58), 163, 177 (n.27), 196; Silver City Revisited,
215 (n.53), 225, 248; Buena Vista Social 30, 36 (n.8), 37, 38, 42-53, 55, 56, 58, 59,
Club, 226 (n.86); Chambre 666, 248; 62, 63, 67, 71f., 83, 104, 110, 138, 148,
Don’t Come Knocking, 177 (n.25); 209, 273f., 282; The State of Things, 217
Emotion Pictures, 85, 100f.; The (n.58), 241 (n.129), 248; Summer in the
Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, 18, 20, City, 35 (n.2), 39, 113, 114, 124 (n.26),
29, 31, 33f., 35 (n.2), 36, 38, 39, 55, 72, 90 125, 196, 281; A Trick of the Light, 218
(n.164), 107, 113-161, 163, 164, 173, 191 (n.62); Wings of Desire, 16 (n.15), 19, 20,
(n.60), 195, 196, 202, 205, 205 (n.27), 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 39f., 55, 91, 159, 168,
207, 207 (n.31), 209, 224, 225, 228, 230 178, 201, 209, 218 (n.62), 223, 224, 226,
(n.98), 248, 255, 266, 280, 287 (n.16); 227, 235, 243-280, 281, 282, 283, 285,
Hammett, 109 (n.224), 208 (n.37), 248, 287, 288; Wrong Move, 19, 20, 29, 32, 40,
251, 252, 255; Kings of the Road, 63f., 51 (n.47), 53, 69, 84, 93, 113f., 122 (n.19),
125 (n.31), 128 (n.38), 138, 202 (n.20), 149, 158 (n.96), 160, 161, 167 (n.8), 193f.,
208 (n.36), 212 (n.48), 227, 241, 248; 195-242, 243, 248, 251, 256, 264, 266,
Lisbon Story, 39; Locations, 36 (n.8); 268f. (n.70), 269, 279f., 282f., 285, 286,
Lightning Over Water, 208, 248; Once, 40, 287 (n.16); Wings of Desire (film book,
53; On Film, 38; Paris, Texas, 20, 64, 177 see Handke, Peter)
(n.27), 248, 249, 253, 262, 266, 281; Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 54, 55, 91 (n.166),
Police Film, 36 (n.8), 40 (n.18), 52, 63, 67, 127f. (n.37), 150
69, 70, 71, 80, 104, 201, 223; Reverse Wollen, Peter, 27
Angle, 248, 249-51, 252, 253, 254f., 274; Wondratschek, Wolf, 167

Wim Wenders and Peter Handke - Collaboration, Adaptation, Recomposition (PDFDrive)

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Wim Wenders and Peter Handke - Collaboration, Adaptation, Recomposition (PDFDrive)

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Begründet von Alberto Martino und in Verbindung mit

Francis Claudon (Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne) – Rüdiger Görner

Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer

Anschrift der Redaktion:

Martin Brady and Joanne Leal

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Cover design: Pier Post

Die Reihe “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden

From 2005 onward, the series “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen

1. Politics, Poetics, Film: The Beginnings of a Collaboration 35

2. Parallel Texts: Language into Image in The Goalkeeper’s Fear 113

3. Accompanied by Text: From Short Letter, Long Farewell 163

5. Leafing through Wings of Desire 243

The feature film can step over every

1. Cinema as a mixed medium

to the medium of cinema or renounced literature. He has remained a prolific

3. Adaptational events in the intersecting mode

4. Recycling, remaking, repetition

(Effi Briest) and Jean Genet (Querelle) – make no attempt to (re)construct a

5. Affirmation and renunciation

However, as well as representing different approaches to the question of

6. Adaptation and beyond

Theoretical discourse allows us to differentiate between four models of adaptational strategy

She argues that The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty is imitative in

intermedial (and in the case of film citations „intramedial‟) exchange her

post-ideological connotations, is not the appropriate term for this process. In

8. Adaptation as translation and transcription

term „adaptation‟ be substituted by „translation‟ in discussions of what he

One hundred years previously the German-Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni

Stam concludes his introduction to Literature and Film: A Guide to the

that cinema inherits the different art forms of which it is comprised

graphic frontispiece illustration and a theatrical shadow play, it ekphrastically

Handke himself put it to Wenders, in a discussion following the premiere of

10. The dispositif of cinema

11. Displacements: the field of study

analogization, popularization, and reculturalization‟. 44 In analyzing individual

and intellectual development of their authors: specifically we explore the

Politics, Poetics, Film: The Beginnings of a Collaboration

performed modern play in the German-speaking countries, cementing his

In fact Handke became something of a literary phenomenon in the 1960s and

juxtaposing Handke‟s early essays (particularly those on film) with

2. In the beginning was the image: Silver City Revisited

this age, which favours the picture over

2.1 The capricious photographer: Wim Wenders and still images12

It was an extension of painting for me, of landscape painting.

2.2 In the beginning was the word19

filmmaker. Aside from a perceived sense of continuity between his activities in

Sequence 1 [shots 1 & 2] 00.00

3 shots of waves on water from above.

foreground. Daylight, light traffic (colour).

The film is without original sound but accompanied sporadically by a scratchy

2.4 The important thing is not to blink35

The eye-blink – subject of two contemporaneous experimental Fluxus films of

2.5 Absence and melancholy

focus of photographic interest in Silver City Revisited is shifted from

2.6 Romanticism and the middle-class flâneur

As well as being programmatically Romantic in its choice of vantage point –

2.7 The birth of fiction out of photography53

In a talk given in 1982 at a colloquium on narrative technique, Wenders

3. „“I ...” (end quote)‟: The early works of Peter Handke59

3.1 Language games

Handke gives straightforward expression to his primary concern with language