11 - From Death to Life: Wim Wenders, Autobiography, and the Natural History of Cinema

Summary

In 1986 wim wenders published Emotion Pictures, his first collection of writings. Playing with the word “motion,” Emotion Pictures collects film reviews and short essays written between the years 1968 and 1971 while Wenders attended the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film in Munich. In the introduction for the 1989 English translation he comments that his revisitation of these early writings “really create[d] strange, mixed feelings.” Looking back twenty years, Wenders reflected on his evolution from student to New Wave filmmaker and European auteur. He admits that he “didn’t learn much in film school,” but did ascertain a great deal from watching and writing about film. He describes this learning process in detail:

I was watching movies, but as much as I was looking at the screen, I was also aware of myself as observer. Writing was as much selfobservation 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. (Emotion Pictures, vii)

Writing about the cinema afforded Wenders an opportunity for a form of self-analysis, through observation of his experiences and responses as a film spectator. Films, for Wenders, were “about life” and brought him to an understanding of his lived self and a life lived through film, the one inextricably linked to the other. The passage not only recalls cinema’s capacity to document what Vertov called “life caught unawares,” but it also seems to point toward something much more elusive: the spirit of change, constant transformation, never staying still, and by coextension, the élan vital that characterized Wenders’s own life.

As a student, the young filmmaker studied Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film, whose passages concerning the “flow of life” appear to resonate with his own line of thinking. According to Kracauer, film has the capacity to redeem physical reality because its materiality is intimately connected, “as if by an umbilical cord,” to reality’s material continuum. He describes a “stream of material situations and happenings,” a stream of ongoing flux, inherently indeterminate and open. “I gave them life, too,” Wenders continues in his introduction, speaking of his films, “I passed them on” (Emotion Pictures, vii).