Abstract
Written in the West is the title of the German film director Wim Wenders’s catalog of photographs exhibited at the Parisian Centre Pompidou in 1986. The catalog contains striking images of cities and landscapes taken throughout California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. It closes with an image of “The Devil’s Graveyard,” taken in Big Bend, Texas, which is the location of the opening sequences in Wenders’s remarkable film Paris, Texas (1984). In the accompanying catalog interview with the French critic Alain Bergala, Wenders speaks eloquently about the meaningful relationship between photography, exploration, and travel: “Photography makes it possible to comprehend a place right away…. Both the familiar and the unfamiliar are, for me, excluded by photography: it’s an instrument of exploration, it belongs essentially to travel, practically like a car or a plane. The photo camera makes arrival in a place possible.”1 The histories of photography and the “discovery” of the American West through the lenses of explorers, photographers, and cinematog-raphers are closely connected. As in Wenders’s Written in the West, another catalog titled Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan discusses O’Sullivan’s nineteenth-century images of the American West as a “foundation of our understanding of the landscapes of the West”; photographs that create the “immediate impression of a landscape in turmoil.”2 These images depict a landscape that had suffered cataclysmic events. Importantly, rather than striving toward representations of the sublime, a not uncommon trope in early representations of the West, O’Sullivan was “interested in emptiness, in apparently negative landscapes, in the barest, least hospitable ground….
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Notes
Wim Wenders, Written in the West. Photographien aus dem amerikanischen Westen (Munich: Schirmer / Mosel, 1987, repr. 1996), 8. All translations are our own.
Toby Jurovics and Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan (Washington, DC: Library of Congress / Yale University Press, 2010), 19.
From Michel Ciment, “Entretien avec Wim Wenders,” Positif 236 (1980); cited in Michael Töteberg, “Back to the US of A. Das Bild Amerikas in den neuen Filmen von Wim Wenders,” in Man of Plenty—Wim Wenders, ed. Volker Behrens (Marburg: Schüren, 2005), 23–38.
Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemünden, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 206.
Roger Bromley, From Alice to Buena Vista. The Films of Wim Wenders (London, UK: Praeger, 2001), 49.
Wim Wenders, Emotion Pictures. Reflection on the Cinema (London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1989), 94.
Wim Wenders, quoted in Robert P. Kolker and Peter U. Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 36.
Wim Wenders, “Like Flying Blind without Instruments. On the Turning Point in Paris, Texas,” in Wenders, The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations, trans. Michael Hofmann (London, UK: Faber, 1991), 66.
Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager, “Introduction,” in The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Fisher and Prager (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 13.
Ibid., 74 and 76 (emphasis in the original). On the interrelationship between these films, see Volker Wehdeking, Mentalitätswandel in der deutschen Literatur zur Einheit, 1990–2000 (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 2000), 229.
Wim Wenders and Daniel Bickermann, A Sense of Place: Texte und Interviews (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 2005), 39.
Andreas Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry 24, no.1 (1997): 57–81.
Stephan Schindler and Lutz Koepnick, “Introduction. Against the Wall? The Global Imaginary of German Cinema,” in The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present, ed. Stephan Schindler and Lutz Koepnick (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 2.
Volker Behrens, “Der Geschichte einen gewaltigen Raum schaffen: Ein Interview mit Wim Wenders,” in Man of Plenty: Wim Wenders, ed. Behrens (Marburg: Schüren, 2005), 133–138, 135. On Wenders’ role in the New German Cinema, see
Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema (London, UK: British Film Institute, 1989).
See Hartmut Häußermann and Claire Colomb, “The New Berlin: Marketing the City of Dreams,” in Lily M. Hoffman, Susan S. Fainstein, and Dennis R. Judd, eds., Cities and Visitors: Regulating People, Markets, and City Space (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2003), 200–218;
Janet Ward, Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity (New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and
Claire Colomb, Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989 (New York: Routledge, 2012).
Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake, “Introduction,” in Berlin: Divided City, 1945–1989, ed. Broadbent and Hake (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 3.
Hans Stimmann, Michael Goj, and Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk, et al., eds., Babylon, Berlin etc: Das Vokabular der europäischen Stadt (Basel, Berlin, and Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 1995). As Claire Colomb has recently written: “Urban policy-makers (and other actors) seek to ‘shape’ urban images not only through transformations of the built environment, but also through the production of particular textual and visual representations disseminated via various media.” Colomb, Staging the New Berlin, 18.
Tony Rayns, “Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire),” Monthly Film Bulletin 55, no. 654 (1988): 203–205, 204.
Wim Wenders quoted in Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 8.
Wim Wenders, “Traveling,” in Reisefilme. Ästhetik und Geschichte, ed. Annette Deeken (Remscheid: Gardez! Verlag, 2004), 11.
Wim Wenders, “From Dream to Nightmare. The Terrifying Western Once Upon a Time in the West,” in Emotion Pictures, ed. Wenders (London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1989), 24–25, 24.
“Seehofer und Merkel befeuern Leitkultur-Debatte,” Spiegel Online (October 15, 2010), http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,723466,00.html (accessed December 15, 2012). This critique of multicultural politics was reinforced in Germany Abolishes Itself published by SPD politician and former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin in the same year. Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010).
See Friederike Kern and Margret Selting, Ethnic Styles of Speaking in European Metropolitan Areas (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011); and
Heike Wiese, Kiezdeutsch: Ein Neuer Dialekt Entsteht (Munich: Beck, 2012).
Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi, Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries (Barcelona: Actar-D, 2007).
Horst Fleig, Wim Wenders. Hermetische Filmsprache und Fortschreiben antiker Mythologie (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2005), 43–47.
Michael J. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (New York: Routledge, 2004), 142.
Michael J. Shapiro, Deforming American Political Thought: Ethnicity, Facticity, and Genre (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), xi.
Ibid., xii. Shapiro quotes from Jacques Rancière, La fable cinématographique (Paris: Le Seuil, 2001), 22.
Ibid., Shapiro quotes from Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 24.
Barbara J. Eckstein and James A. Throgmorton, Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History As Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, 2nd ed. 1992). At this time, Wenders’s The Act of Seeing: Texte und Gespräche (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren) was published.
Eric Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time: Reflections on the Twenty Years since Oberhausen (Bedford Hills, NY: Redgrave, 1984), 112.
Alon Confino, Germany As a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 77.
Kolker and Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders, 161 and 164. See also Inga Scharf, Nation and Identity in the New German Cinema: Homeless at Home (New York: Routledge, 2008).
Jan Dawson and Wim Wenders, Wim Wenders (New York: Zoetrope, 1976), 17.
Roger Bromley, From Alice to Buena Vista: The Films of Wim Wenders (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 70. Emphasis original.
Wim Wenders, “The Truth of Images,” in Wenders, The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations, trans. Michael Hofmann (London, UK: Faber, 1997), 44–68, 45–46.
Daniela Berghahn, “‘Seeing Everything with Different Eyes’: The Diasporic Optic of Fatih Akin’s Head-On (2004),” in New Directions in German Cinema, ed. Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood (London, UK: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 235–252, 240.
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 4 and 61.
Alexander Graf, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway (London, UK: Wallflower Press, 2002), 94.
Paul Coates, The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 255.
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© 2014 Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Janet Ward
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Huber, N., Stern, R. (2014). From the American West to West Berlin: Wim Wenders, Border Crossings, and the Transnational Imaginary. In: Diefendorf, J.M., Ward, J. (eds) Transnationalism and the German City. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137390172_12
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