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BOOK REVIEW:
THE CINEMA OF WIM WENDERS: THE CELLULOID HIGHWAY
by Alexander Graf
Reviewed by SHANNON SMITH
In The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway (192 pp., $20 paperback), a recent installment in Wallflower Press' quickly-growing Director's Cut Series, Alexander Graf sets out to prove that Wenders's preference for pure images over story renders the filmmaker both incredibly idiosyncratic and one of Sigfried Kracauer's most dedicated followers. By placing Wenders's writing in contrast to the work of other theoreticians (primarily Kracauer, Balázs, and Pasolini) and his own detailed analysis, Graf's text creates an excellent introductory summary of Wenders's oeuvre. Unfortunately, since Graf chooses to deal with only the destructive - or what he terms the "vampire" nature of story - his arguments seldom move beyond this basic introductory and even superficial level. For someone who hypothesizes that Wenders has revolutionized narrative, the author barely skims the surface of Wenders's critical potential, instead presenting the reader with little more information than one would glean from combining Wenders's essays with a few viewings of his films. On the other hand, if for some reason a reader wanted to avoid sitting through Wenders's longer films, or was unable to find his early shorts (of which Graf's descriptions are superb), or couldn't bear the thought of watching a film with music by Bono from a director who once worshiped Bob Dylan and garage rock, then Graf's workable prose provides more than enough plot-summary based analysis to appease this hypothetically undedicated, but curious, fan. Furthermore, for someone whose text concentrates on the subject, Graf fails to spend enough time defining "story" and "image." One must assume that by "story" he means any plot-driven narrative, which seems a fair assessment and applicable to Wenders (at least to his early work), but Graf never adheres to a specific definition nor does he address the issue of Wenders's images, which (no matter how unrelated) once linked together do tend to form coherent narratives that could easily be termed "story." Graf's repeated use of the word "image" seems even more vague. If all film is composed of images, and, as he argues, Wenders strives to portray reality in its most basic, honest, forms, how does one handle such otherworldly figures as angels and the partially mechanical Mel Gibson in the director's later work? Although the second portion of the book contains detailed narrative analysis of a commendable cross-section of Wenders' work (Alice in the Cities, Paris, Texas, Tokyo-Ga, Wings of Desire, The Million Dollar Hotel and Lisbon Story), Graf ignores Wenders's shifting notions of reality and the proper tone in which to depict the filmic worlds the director found once he left Germany. To his credit, however, through exploring a critique of the American Dream, Graf manages to sustain several compelling arguments, most specifically and coherently, Wenders's questioning of the destructive natures of television and advertising.
In contrast to this scene-by-scene analysis, the first portion of the book contains surface discussions of almost every thematic issue-except, of course, those concerned with character states (because that would probably be "story")-that has ever appeared in a Wenders film. Graf, of course, substantiates his theories with material from the films, but in his hurry to address a wide range of issues, his points occasionally appear haphazardly organized or overreferential. Even a simple discussion of the possible reasons that Wenders supposedly lives in morbid fear of allowing story to dominate his films would have been beneficial. Instead, the only real illumination of such personal points Graf offers is that the director feels the need to establish himself in a conflicted European rather than Hollywood tradition (as evidenced in The State of Things and some of Wenders's comments). Essentially, Graf's book provides an extensive introductory analysis to the cinema of Wim Wenders, but overall his theories seem a bit shallow; unless, of course, one wants to argue that the films themselves lack the depth that a more complicated treatment than this would hopefully yield - one that concentrates on the "whys" instead of the more obvious "therefores," or perhaps focuses on a connection to the world rather than a purely filmic realm, since Wenders is supposedly redeeming reality. - SHANNON SMITH
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
