Anchor Bay has repackaged 3 Wenders dvds together at a reduced price, and I'm thinking of buying: Lightning Over Water, American Friend, and some fashion documentary, Notes On Cities I think it's called.
I've never seen any of those, but the first two sound amazing. Basically the idea of this box is that you can buy these on their own for $24 each, or you can buy the box for $45. However, I didn't really dig Wings Of Desire all that much, so I dunno if I'm gonna be a huge Wenders fan.
So, any opinions on those 3 flicks? If I end up liking two, the blind buy is worth it...
I've seen a handful of his films, but none of the ones in the boxed set. I really like what I've seen, including the angels films, so I'd probably get it.
You should buy the box set just for the prestige of having it, so that when people come over they can be even more impressed at your worldly collection. Then, when people spy the Wenders films and ask you what you think of them, you can shake your head and mutter something pretentious about how you hate them but keep them out of some sort of twisted, self loathing sense of germanic pride. Or something like that.
I love you.
You should get "Paris, Texas" even if it's Region 2.
Yes, I wanna see that, but it's hard to find 'round here.
***
So I got this box set. Watched the one flick I wasn't sure about last night: Notebook On Cities And Clothes. Very thought provoking. The premise was loosely just to learn about this Japanese fashion designer, but it turned into a meditation on the image, with a comparison of video and film.
Anyway, as I watched it, I started to become aware of this guy's business -- fashion -- and began to think about it in relation to film. If he picks a more expensive material, or a greater amount of work/workers have to go into making the clothes, the price reflects that. This is sorta the same with food, cars, etc etc. But in movies (and cds, and I suppose books as well), there are basically fixed prices, regardless of the product. Except for the differences between matinee and night prices, or 1 disc & 2 disc prices on dvds, everything is fixed. The audience basically pays the same whether for a crap movie or for an amazing movie. $200 million budget, or $2 million budget, if I go to the theatre at noon, they're both the same ticket price. Does this make it the great democratic art form, audience-wise? Maybe "democratic" is the wrong word...
i also have this box set, notebook on cities and clothes was one i was kinda sketchy about when i bought it. but like you i figured two good films is worth one bad egg. the first i watched was american friend, because my parents recommended it to me. the visual aspect of it is so beautiful, but i was kinda half asleep when i was watching it, so i didnt get into the story, but i found the hitman art dealer thing really interesting. thanks for your thoughts on the fashion film, i think ill watch it this weekend.
Fathers who flee focus of Wenders' Cannes entry
A morally bankrupt Hollywood star who deserts the set of his latest Western after a drug-fueled orgy with groupies is the subject of Wim Wenders' well-received Cannes entry Thursday.
"Don't Come Knocking" concerns the emptiness of a troubled playboy Western hero who discovers he fathered two children who are now adults. It took the German director and screenwriter Sam Shepard 5 years of collaboration to make.
Both Wenders, who won the 1984 "Golden Palm" for "Paris, Texas," and Shepard, who not only wrote the screenplay but is superb as a worn-out Cowboy looking for his life, basked in the applause at its world premiere and news conference.
"It's certainly one of the best things I've done in my life," said Wenders, 59, a Cannes fixture, of his seventh film at the world's most important festival. Wenders had endured withering attacks for some recent critical and commercial flops.
"I'm very proud of this film," he added, clearly moved by unusually loud cheers from a usually skeptical collection of critics and journalists. "Already while we were shooting it I had the feeling we were doing something right."
A film that amusingly portrays men as losers without any bearings but women as the stronger and wiser gender, "Don't Come Knocking" also tackles the hot new topic of "paternity," a central theme in several competition films this year.
FATHERS MISS OUT ON FAMILIES
"The family and the love you miss out on because you run away from it is a very important general topic these days," said Wenders, whose 2000 film "The Million Dollar Hotel" was disparaged by Mel Gibson as "boring as a dog's ass."
"I know so many people who suffer because they realized they missed the most important things of their lives," Wenders added. "I think the disintegration of the family is one of the main subjects people all over the world are concerned about."
The loser Western hero played by Shepard, Howard Spence, literally jumps on a horse and flees the location of an expensive film production in the Utah desert. He escapes to his mother, whom he hasn't seen or talked to in 30 years.
His mother's questions about the affairs, drugs and alcohol problems she's read about in tabloids don't bother Spence. But he is shaken to learn that a woman he at first can't remember called her almost 30 years ago to say he fathered her baby.
Slowly recalling the woman, he heads off to find her and the son he never knew. A daughter from another woman he never knew about either is also searching for him -- as is a nasty private investigator hired by the film company. They all wind up in Butte, Montana, for a gathering that doesn't go well.
"With Sam as the writer, you can sleep well at night as a director," Wenders said.
I should say that "Land of Plenty" is fantastic!
you SHOULD say that. but you wont.
My roommate just got the boxset and fuck. I want to say that in the way Melville did the urban samurai in Le Samourai, Wenders here does the urban Melville. There was this train sequence that felt classic and contemporary and there were shots during chaises and get aways that were on par with De Palma. There was a red sky scene that fucking just made my day, and there's Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray as actors and there's fucking terrific performances from Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper. I don't think I've every enjoyed Hopper so much in fact. After the red sky scene there's a Hopper scene where he's talking about being confused and then he walks on this ledge and we cut to a wind tube from a window and we pull in and see Fuller and that's just one great sequence out of many.
I watched this movie twice in two days and I think I'm going to go for another.
The American Friend, I forgot to say that. The movie I was talking about was The American Friend.
there's an advance screening of this this thursday in manhattan, sponsored by the museum of the moving image. my prof didn't say where, exactly, but he's gonna send an e-mail with details. it's probably somewhere on their site or you might be able to call.
anyway, i think it's $20 admission or $12 for members/students. Wim Wenders and Jessica Lange will be there.
Quote from: Xidentity Crixax on March 06, 2006, 09:40:34 PM
there's an advance screening of this this thursday in manhattan, sponsored by the museum of the moving image. my prof didn't say where, exactly, but he's gonna send an e-mail with details. it's probably somewhere on their site or you might be able to call.
anyway, i think it's $20 admission or $12 for members/students. Wim Wenders and Jessica Lange will be there.
http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=7947.0
Wim Wenders Talks About the Future of Cinema, Praises Malick.
Source: Jeffrey M. Anderson; Cinematical
In 1982, Wim Wenders made a documentary called Chambre 666, in which he asked a handful of top world film directors to comment upon the future of cinema. Last week, Mr. Wenders was in San Francisco to talk about his latest film, Don't Come Knocking (now playing), and I asked him the same thing. Here's what he had to say:
"I think there's a lot of hope. Consider where we were in the 90s, it looked like the future of movies was blockbusters and nothing but. And then today, there are documentaries again in a big way. A lot of people, that's the favorite thing for them to see. And that for me is very promising. The comeback of documentaries is strictly linked to the arrival of digital technology. We only see the tip of the iceberg. The whole the notion of distribution will be changed in the next decade."
Have any recent movies or filmmakers captured Wenders' attention? "I saw one of the greatest films of my life not so long ago, and I've now seen it four times. For me it's one of those movies above everything in the Oscars, and there were some great movies, but it was in a class by itself, way above all of it, and that was The New World, Terrence Malick's movie. That was one monster movie, and it was so good that nobody could even grasp it. It got nominated just for Best Cinematography and it should have won that by a landslide. I don't know why it completely disappeared. In ten years it will be a classic and everybody will say, 'That was the movie that mattered in 2005. ...'"
Quote from: MacGuffin on March 30, 2006, 01:03:43 AM
Have any recent movies or filmmakers captured Wenders' attention? "I saw one of the greatest films of my life not so long ago, and I've now seen it four times. For me it's one of those movies above everything in the Oscars, and there were some great movies, but it was in a class by itself, way above all of it, and that was The New World, Terrence Malick's movie. That was one monster movie, and it was so good that nobody could even grasp it. It got nominated just for Best Cinematography and it should have won that by a landslide. I don't know why it completely disappeared. In ten years it will be a classic and everybody will say, 'That was the movie that mattered in 2005. ...'"
man i love when classy directors talk about other classy directors. usually they don't because of pride or because at this point in their careers they think they can't appear to be influenced by their "contemporaries", or worse, younger directors. so they stick to only saying "yeah that kid is alrite", or "that old dude, he meant a lot to me". here wenders is basically saying Mallick made a better movie, a more significant film, than he or anyone else has. that's a big call, and the best part is he means it. i like that.
Where whim wanders
German director Wim Wenders tells Stephanie Bunbury why his new western, Don't Come Knocking, is his final American movie.
Source: The Age
Thirty years ago, there was no name in cinema cooler than that of Wim Wenders. From the thoroughly German The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty Kick (1971) to the poignantly American Paris, Texas (1984), his meandering, melancholy, allusive films picked up on a sense that there was something out there below the surface of modern life, something existentially significant but too vague to be pinned down by words, that only cinema could catch.
For Wenders fans, the flicker of the screen was like the wall of Plato's cave. Perhaps we could never see the whole truth of things but, thanks to grim Wim, we could see its shadow up there on the screen.
But who wants to gaze at the cave wall any more? Call it the Tarantino effect, but it's all cod gangsters spouting Biblical fury and martial arts high-kickers these days; the gaming generation wants blood. At least, that seemed to be the consensus in Cannes when Wenders' latest film Don't Come Knocking - written, like Paris, Texas, with celebrated American playwright Sam Shepard - was shown. To a generation of bang-bang fans, it was agreed, nothing could be more tedious than old Wimmy sending yet another miserable, washed-up old dude trailing across a wide red landscape in search of ... well, what, exactly?
Wim Wenders is, rather incredibly, 60 years old. He has been in Cannes 14 times, eight of them in competition and once as jury president; he must, he muses gently, be getting old. We don't much like glimmers of the past now, either. One of the most virulent criticisms of Don't Come Knocking is that it is no more than an attempt by both Wenders and Shepard to pick over the entrails of Paris, Texas. Worse, to pick over them unsuccessfully.
Like the earlier film - and, indeed, like practically everything Shepard has ever written - Don't Come Knocking deals with a man at the end of his tether, with lost parents, lonely children and regret. As always, his chosen landscape is the American West, which is both as a real place and as a vast field of dreams. Americans, says Shepard, ingest the western from childhood. "It is part of our imagination, certainly part of the cinematic imagination of how we imagine ourselves to be. It is part of our deep past, if we have a deep past." The West is the home ground for nostalgia - or, equally, disillusionment.
Shepard himself plays Howard Spence, a has-been western hero who compensates for his decline with a whole load of drinking, taking young folks' drugs and making out with any girl who will have him. As Don't Come Knocking begins, he is on set making yet another second-rung film when, on a whim, he simply rides off into the backdrop. He changes the horse for a train, then hires a car and goes to Nevada to see his mother, played by Eva Marie Saint, for the first time in 30 years.
She tells him that, unbeknown to him, he has a grown-up son to a waitress he met way back when he was a pin-up, making another of those interminable westerns in the Montana town of Butte. So Spence, apparently acting on a vague, Wenders-ish urge to piece his life together, hits the road again, pursued by a rather ludicrous private detective (Tim Roth) sent to bring him back to the film set he has deserted.
As in Paris, Texas, where Harry Dean Stanton tracks down his lost love to the strip joint where she has found a kind of refuge, Howard searches for that lost waitress (Jessica Lange, his real-life wife) and the newly discovered son (Gabriel Mann) who wants nothing to do with him. Two young women (Sarah Polley and Fairuza Balk) are there too, fluttering about Howard's helpless unhappiness rather like the earthbound angels in Wings of Desire (1987), the last indisputably great fictional film in the Wenders canon.
The only other character - perhaps, given Wenders' painterly eye, the most important one of all - is the town of Butte itself, once the biggest smoke west of the Mississippi but now dwindled to scarcely more than a ghost of itself. "Butte looked like Edward Hopper had lived there all his life and never painted anywhere else," says Wenders. "You just had to put your camera there and look through it and you didn't have to do much. Well, we just had to make the streets emptier than they were already. They were already empty of people, but we took a lot of stuff away as well, to make them simpler."
Wenders says that he and Shepard wanted to work together again the minute they finished Paris, Texas. "But we knew it would be a big mistake," he says. "We liked that first collaboration so much; it was so good that it was like paradise. We realised that it would be better if we didn't touch it right away."
Even 20 years on, their greatest fear was that they would repeat themselves, as the critics have accused them of trying to do; eventually, says Shepard, they decided the character was so different they "got over the trauma of it". But there is a distinction to be made here, he cautions, between actual repetition and the development of a particular idiom.
"If you're a piano player, nobody wants you to come onstage and play the trumpet," says Wenders. "But with filmmakers, people are amazed if they play the same instrument twice. Sam's instrument is the American West - or the American family, if you like. It is a huge instrument and you can play many songs on it."
Songs, however, slide in and out of fashion. The conventional critical wisdom about Wenders in his glory days - the run of masterpieces that ended with Wings of Desire - was that his work was a unique marriage of European sensibility with an American appreciation of cinematic imagery. Unleashed from Europe's confines, Wenders' eye stretched to the horizon as John Ford's had before him; he felt America's grandeur.
Looking back, however, it is clear that his films were nothing like the Ford westerns or the gangster movies he so regularly referenced; they were always as German as Goethe or Rilke, with the same sense of tortured romanticism. What was true was that much of their fire sprang from his ambivalent relationship with America. On the one hand was his fascination with its modern folklore, on the other a virulent hatred for the country that authored the Cold War. It was a common enough dualism among the Vietnam generation, obviously, but it was felt particularly keenly in divided Germany.
Wenders was imprisoned three times, he says, in the course of protesting against the Vietnam War; his stance led to a rift with his own, politically conservative father that lasted three years. Critics have noted that his tailspin as a filmmaker coincided almost exactly with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps that was the end of his era, the moment at which his nameless, charged anxiety stopped making sense.
Well before he made Paris, Texas, however, he had gone to live in the lions' den. Americans then, he says, were much more liberal than their politicians - much more liberal, indeed, than they are now. For more than a year now he has had everything in storage, preparing to leave the country for good.
"This hostile takeover by the religious right has created an unpleasant climate," he says. "It makes you feel like you want to scratch yourself all the time." His last five films were made in America, something he says he never intended; the next will be made in Germany, probably in collaboration with another of the pillars of the '70s New Wave, Peter Handke. Perhaps Don't Come Knocking represents the end of another era in Wenders' career.
Wenders did, undoubtedly, go into a bizarre decline that began with Until the End of the World (1991), in which William Hurt staggered across several countries and as many hours in a baffling quest overlaid with irritating sci-fi nonsense. He has been so regularly dismissed since then, however, that anyone who had not seen them might assume that all his subsequent films - apart from the fantastically successful Buena Vista Social Club (1999), which as a documentary does not seem to have been touched by the same curse - were indistinguishable from each other in their awfulness.
All right, Million Dollar Hotel (2000), described by its star Mel Gibson as "as boring as a dog's arse", was unbearable in its pretentiousness, while Land of Plenty (2004) was a terrible, clumsy, mawkish mulling over Wenders' own investigation of religious faith. The End of Violence (1997), however, in which Bill Pullman's high-flying movie producer takes the opportunity of a kidnap attempt to drop out of his life altogether, becoming a gardener in the houses where he once did deals, still resonates in a way that more resolved films of the time, films with a quicker pace and clearer intent, do not.
Don't Come Knocking has come in for a similar pasting as that film did: it is "a complete misfire", according to one critic, with "silly" characters, "clunking" dialogue and "a lousy sense of direction", to pick a few other comments almost at random. But I suspect that, years down the line when those criticisms have coalesced into no more than a jumbled memory of negativity, Don't Come Knocking will still sing. It may be far from the perfect song - it may even be rather out of tune - but the music is real enough. The vagaries of fashion, as the director of Buena Vista Social Club knows as well as anyone, can't change that.
Javier Bardem Reveals The Invisibles
A portmanteau pic with Wim Wenders
Source: Variety
Portmanteau films have a bit of a hit-and-miss history. For every New York Stories, there's a Four Rooms.
But the risk clearly isn't putting off Javier Bardem, Wim Wenders, Fernando Leon, Isabel Coixet, Mariano Barroso and Javier Corcuera, who are putting together just such a movie - albeit a much more serious effort - with the working title Invisibles.
Their various entries will tackle the world's overlooked conflicts and the human suffering they cause. The subjects include sleeping sickness in Africa, Uganda's young soldiers, a documentary about displaced Columbians and Wenders' film about violence against women in the Congo.
The plan is to release the pic next year, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Spain's Medicos Sin Fronteras, the country's contribution to Doctors Without Frontiers.
Wenders readies Sicilian "Palermo Story"
German director Wim Wenders said Monday he is beginning work on "Palermo Story," a drama based on a Sicilian love affair between a middle-aged German man and a younger local girl.
Wenders, the 61-year-old Oscar nominee for his 2000 documentary "Buena Vista Social Club," announced the plans for the film in Palermo, his first visit to the city in nearly 40 years. Although the story is only partially written and the cast not yet selected, he plans to start shooting in September or October.
Funded partially with cash from the Sicilian Regional Film Commission and the regional government and tourist boards, Wenders said that the story would strongly reflect its location.
"I want this city (Palermo) to tell me its story," Wenders said, adding that the cast would be made of a mix of local talent and foreign actors.
Wenders will be spending a lot of time in Italy toward the end of this year. In addition to the shooting of "Palermo Story" in Sicily, the director will be honored with a special retrospective at the Turin Film festival in November.
Mezzogiorno joins Wenders' 'Palermo'
Pic starts shooting in Sicily
Source: Variety
ROME — Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno has joined the cast of Wim Wenders' "The Palermo Shooting," which has just started shooting in the Sicilian city.
Mezzogiorno — recently a lead in Mike Newell's "Love in the Time of Cholera" — is playing an angelic art restorer in "Palermo," which Wenders has described as a "romantic thriller."
"Palermo" is the first European fiction pic the helmer has tackled in more than 10 years.
Cameras started rolling Monday in the exotic Sicilian capital, known for Baroque and Arabic architecture, which Wenders said he will pay tribute to, in a somewhat similar fashion as his depiction of the Portuguese capital in "Lisbon Story."
"Palermo," which will contain cameos by Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed and Patti Smith, is centered around a hotshot German photographer, played by German rock star Campino, who travels to Sicily in the throes of an existential crisis and falls in love.
Wenders' relatively low-budget latest is produced by his own Wenders Images shingle in collaboration with Teutonic web ZDF and Arte, with backing from several German regional entities, including the North-Rhine Westphalian fund Filmstiftung, and the Province of Palermo.
Q&A: Wim Wenders
Source: Hollywood Reporter
Returning to Cannes Competition for the ninth time you'd think there'd be no surprises left from German auteur Wim Wenders. But his latest, the thriller "Palermo Shooting," is generating more excitement than anything Wenders has made in a decade. The story of a photographer who flees his hometown in Dusseldorf, Germany and rediscovers life in Palermo, Italy the film stars German punk star Campino. Wenders sat down with The Hollywood Reporter's German bureau chief Scott Roxborough in Cannes to talk about childhood, photography and the art of genre bending.
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: You were really down to the wire getting this movie ready for Cannes. Is it finished?
WIM WENDERS: I finished the end credits Monday night and had the final version delivered Wednesday. It's been a little nerve wracking. We knew that we were going to be late and that's one of the reasons we are at the very end of the festival. When we watched the opening of the festival on television we were in the medium stage of mixing. It was close.
THR: "Palermo Shooting" is the first film you've shot in Germany since "Faraway, So Close!" 15 years ago and the first you've ever shot in your hometown of Dusseldorf. What brought you back?
WENDERS Yes, I've never shot a film in my hometown, except for shooting some Super 8 as a kid. Partly it was my choice of lead actor. Campio is from Dusseldorf and he is a true Dusseldorfer and a local hero because his band, Die Toten Hosen, are the biggest rock band in Germany and they are from Dusseldorf. I wrote the story for Campino. Having in mind that he is not a professional actor at least not before the film, although now he is.
All we'd ever done together was shoot a music video -- a three-day shoot. But I knew he had a very enigmatic presence. Nobody knows him as an actor but he is exactly the kind of character I had in mind to play this photographer. I wanted the actor to be from Dusseldorf because Dusseldorf is the home of all the great contemporary photographers in Germany. The Dusseldorf school is the great German post-war photography school. My hero, being a photographer, had to be from Dusseldorf.
THR: Place and architecture always play a major role in your films. What was it like to shoot your hometown?
WENDERS: The strange thing in filmmaking is that places you know best are the hardest to shoot and I usually go to places that I did not know like San Francisco or Lisbon or Tokyo or now Palermo. As a foreigner, a stranger you see places better than you would if you lived there. At least that's my theory. It is very difficult to see something that is so close to your heart. If you spend your childhood at the river Rhine and you come back 50 years later, it is hard to think of the river Rhine without seeing your own childhood and without thinking about your own childhood. And I didn't want to make a film about my hometown. I wanted to make a film about photography and about all the questions that contemporary photographers are exposed to and the one that they are most exposed to is the question of truth. There's no other profession that is facing the question of truth as photographers.
THR: "Palermo Shooting" is a thriller. You've often played with genre elements in your films, something that is becoming de rigeur among many art house directors.
WENDERS: I've always played with genres, especially with the thriller -- with "American Friend" or "The End of Violence." I've never been able to make a film inside that genre, though and "The Palermo Shooting" is not a film that stays inside the boundaries. It is very hard to stay inside the boundaries of a genre film; I admire people that are able to do that. I just don't have the discipline.
What I like about genres is that you can play with expectations and that there are certain rules that you can either obey or work against. But genres are a funny thing. They're heaven and they're hell. They help you to channel your ideas and they are helpful to guide the audience but they don't help you in what you want to transport other than the genre itself. Genres get angry if you want to tell other stories -- because they are sort of self-sufficient. They like to be the foreground. Then it becomes difficult, because in my case I want to tell all sorts of stories.
But my next film will be a genre movie. Full on. It will be a horror film. It is going to be very exciting. Horror is one genre that is used much less than others to transport other things. Lots of people have used great thrillers to transport political messages but the horror film is rarely used to transport anything but fear. And that I think makes it very interesting to try. It's called Miso Soup and is based on a famous Japanese novel. Willem Dafoe is attached to star. We will shoot in Tokyo next spring. But I'm not telling you anything else.
Wim Wenders stops Pina Bausch movie
BERLIN (Hollywood Reporter) - German director Wim Wenders has stopped production on the planned 3D dance film "Pina" following the death of the film's subject -- the legendary choreographer Pina Bausch.
Bausch, who is often credited with having revolutionized modern dance, died on Tuesday after being diagnosed with cancer only days earlier. She was 68 years' old. She had been preparing the film project with Wenders, which was to be the first dance film shot in 3-D.
Wenders' production company Neue Road Movies said it had stopped all pre-production work on the film. After a mourning period, the company will discuss with Bausch's dance company in Wuppertal whether and how to proceed.
I've been a huge fan of 'paris texas' for a long time. Strange and delicate that film is. Man, I sound like yoda. The performances in that film really stood out in that delicate film. But I am not here to talk about how much I adore that film. I am here to talk about only my second Wenders experience: 'Wings of Desire'.
Its pure cinema in its loudest, most distinct. Something you can't take your eyes off of when viewing. Something that demands to be watched. To eviscerate your thoughts of what can be done with the medium to what is constantly produced. It expands your mind and doesn't condescend towards it. In the wrong hands this film could have been desperately pretentious. In fact it could come off that way to most. That's one of the reasons why I am hesitant to show it to anyone else. That and because I got such a visceral experience from it myself. I felt like it was a very inspiring and existential film. I might be rambling but I really don't care. This film really affected me. Why haven't more people talked about it here?
i would suspect it's because wenders is somewhat irrelevant, as he hasn't made a good film in a long, long time, and not for lack of trying. the most notable and worthy thing he's done in the past ten years is rave about the new world. that said, he's got a few masterpieces under his belt, and wings of desire may be his crowning achievement, even more so than paris, texas, which i think of more as sam sheperd's movie as taxi driver is considered paul schrader's by scorsese. it's the consummate european art film and one of the most overwhelmingly beautiful and poetic--and not just because there's constant recitation of poetry throughout--films ever made. if ever i were on the verge of suicide, i'd need only to watch the scene in which peter falk is explaining to bruno ganz the loveliness of being human--the feeling of rubbing your hands together on a cold day, the blissful combination of coffee and cigarettes. glad you enjoyed it, it's one of my favorites.
Wim Wenders taps into 3D for documentary on Pina Bausch (From The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/feb/13/wim-wenders-pina-bausch-documentary))
First 3D arthouse film may inspire further experiments from the world of performing arts
Until now, the 3D revolution has embraced large-scale action films such as Avatar, and children's animations, such as Up and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.
But, as Wim Wenders premieres his tribute to the great avant-garde choreographer Pina Bausch, arthouse audiences may find themselves donning those flattering 3D specs as well.
Pina, the highly anticipated cinematic homage to the director of the famous Tanztheater Wuppertal in Germany, may be the first 3D arthouse documentary, but this year will bring further 3D experiments from the world of the performing arts.
The Royal Opera House is planning a theatrical release of a 3D film of Bizet's Carmen this summer, and has also been experimenting with shooting ballet in 3D. Meanwhile, Michael Flatley's enduringly popular Irish dance troupe has been shot in 3D, for a film set for release on St Patrick's day (17 March).
Speaking at the Berlin film festival Sundayabout the future possibilities for 3D, Wenders said: "It will still be blockbusters and animations, but I think the other future for 3D is documentary. It can make us discover our planet and its people in an immediate and gripping way." He added: "3D is almost tailor-made for dance."
The German director of Wings of Desire and Buena Vista Social Club had known Bausch for 20 years, and the idea of making a film together about her work had been on the cards for almost as long.
However, said Wenders: "I never knew, with all my knowledge of the craft of film-making, how to do justice to her work. It was only when 3D was added to the language of film that I could enter dance's realm and language."
3D, with its illusion of depth, could, it was felt, open out the flatness of the cinema screen and give dance the depth and sculptural quality it needed to work cinematically.
Wenders and Bausch – who, with her pioneering art, brought to bear an incalculable influence on the worlds of both dance and theatre – developed an idea for a film, centring round a handful of her most famous works including the classic pieces of the 1970s, Le Sacre du Printemps, Kontakthof, and Café Müller.
However, two days before the shoot was due to start, in June 2009, Bausch died suddenly, five days after being diagnosed with cancer. When what Wenders called this "unimaginable" event occurred, the film was cancelled. "The film we had prepared had Pina Bausch as the central figure," Wenders said. "She was to have been next to me when we shot it. We would have followed her in rehearsals, watched her give notes to the dancers. And we would have gone on tour with her to Asia and South America, so it would have been a road movie."
Eventually, encouraged by Bausch's family, company, and dancers, it was decided to go ahead after all – not least so as to film a document of the choreographer's work "while her eye upon it was still fresh". But, Wenders said, "the main difficulty was that the film we had planned for could not be made any more." A new concept had to be developed for the film.
Footage of her dance works performed on stage was still to be a central element, and "then we slowly developed the idea that her orchestra, the dancers, could be her voice. And her own method of constantly asking her dancers questions should be the method of the film."
The documentary – which is due for release in Britain on 22 April – interleaves excerpts from the stage works with interviews with the dancers, who express themselves briefly in words, and perhaps more eloquently in danced solos.
Speaking about Bausch's influence on him as an artist, Wenders said: "As a film director – and I have made a number of films – one has the impression that one has the mastery of a craft. And a movie means movement, is about movement. But it was only when I saw Pina Bausch's work for the first time that I realised I might know about movies and movement, but I could never decipher or create movement in the way that she could. In fact compared to her, we are all bloody beginners in the art of seeing.
"Pina had trained her eyes to what the soul can teach us through the body."
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found out that Wim Wenders is adapting this book, which excites me because i'd been thinking about reading this book. it was well reviewed, and i most liked hearing it called "postmodern literary airport fiction. Offering myriad pleasures in its prose..." i like the sound of this and i'll probably see the movie first, which sounds ok to me since we're chatting Wenders.
the name J. M . Ledgard reminds me of this inability to take a person seriously:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky8R9DNpEvw