A collection of essays in free verse by the maker of Paris,Texas and Wings of Desire explores his influences in film, portray and photographyJust like the camera in Wim Wenders’ films, and his writing demands the “freedom to dart”: “I need to be able to ‘circle’ an idea. For this reason he chooses to write in free verse – or what he modestly refers to as “my odd verse” – for many of the essays in this illuminating collection. In his hands it becomes a playful and wonderfully malleable literary form that allows him to create a flow of images and ideas,a kind of rhythmic thinking: “visible blocks of thought”. Each line becomes a separate tracking shot as the writer-director moves restlessly around his subject, words crystallising into ideas in the same way as a story emerges during the editing of a film.
Many of the essays explore the German director’s filmic influences. Wenders confesses that “I bawled my eyes out” after watching Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. He describes Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni as “one of the great contemporary classics”, or in a moving piece recalls the director’s death on the same day as Bergman’s. Douglas Sirk is “the Dante of soap operas” and Samuel Fuller “the greatest storyteller I ever met”. A heartfelt essay celebrates the westerns of Anthony Mann,such as Man of the West, which convinced Wenders to give up art and turn to film-making in the 1960s: “They opened up a new world for me.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk