Schwarz und Weiß

The third film in AFS's Wim Wenders retrospective I've attended was also the third and final installment of his road movie trilogy.

But sadly I still have only a vague idea of what that label means to me, or specifically how the road movie genre is defined exactly. Apart from these three Wenders movies the only other examples I can think of are Easy Rider (1969, Dennis Hopper), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971, Monte Hellman) Scarecrow (1973, Jerry Schatzberg), Badlands (1973, Terrence Malick) Wild at Heart (1990, David Lynch), My Own Private Idaho (1991, Gus Van Sant), Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas (1998, Terry Gilliam), The Brown Bunny (2003, Vincent Gallo) and Prince Avalanche (2012, David Gordon Green).

Although I do love the variety of life experiences the genre's loose structure allows, the beautiful nature, rural and urban scenes photographed, and for the most part lack of a burdensome sense of plot getting in the way of the feeling of freestyle filmmaking. And the cool music.

Im Lauf der Zeit (1976, Wim Wenders) opens with intertitles telling us, in German, that the film was shot in black and white, at 1.66:1, and uses production sound. Last night I again, after last Friday's Falsche Bewegung (1975, Wenders) found myself spending Friday night watching a slow paced, Robby Müller shot, Wenders Road Movie and lost myself in another world. Except this time the movie was 3 hours, but no seriously it flew by.

Like Alice in den Städten (1974, Wenders) and Falsche Bewegung, the film stars Rüdiger Vogler. Vogler as the main character for the third time really has sealed my love of his work as an actor in these. This time he drives a bus that houses his mobile film mechanic shop, stopping in German towns to repair projectors in theaters. Vogler plays a character called BRUNO WINTER and encounters ROBERT LANDER (Hanns Zischler) at the beginning of the film in a sequence that builds up parallel editing of shots of Bruno parked in his bus out in the countryside getting ready to shave with shots of Robert speeding recklessly through city streets in his VW bug. Their first meeting is a wonderful collision both visually and figuratively.

Robby Müller's cinematography is again the highlight of the show. Shot on Orwo black and white 35mm, wide panning epic vistas of beautiful countryside, wonderful textures of paint chipped structures, and elegant gradients of shadows and light playing on the subjects are everywhere. And plenty of driving shots. The night exterior tracking the motorcycle through the country roads as we see a lightning bolt striking beyond in the horizon had me smiling.

Of all the trilogy Im Lauf der Zeit is the one that had me laughing out loud. Mostly it was shock laughter, as there are a few gags that arise out of graphic depictions of some bodily functions I'm definitely not used to seeing in a movie. Or when Bruno at the bumper cars ticket gate and a woman played by Lisa Kreuzer (Alice's mom in Alice in den Städten) shows up and asks for a light for her Hitler head candle completely deadpan.

Im Lauf der Zeit is really relaxing. It just feels like as long as you're in for the ride who cares about the usual priorities like plot, and an over arching theme. It's all character development and like being on vacation.

Among the later stops the duo make, the abandoned GI post recalls the candle light shack scene in The Grapes of Wrath (1940, John Ford) that Gregg Toland shot. In Alice in den Städten there was a scene in the motel the Vogler character stops in where he watches a scene from Young Mr. Lincoln (1939, Ford) along with a scene towards the end where the same character clips an obituary column of Ford titled "Lost World." And Im Lauf der Zeit has another scene where Bruno is on his truck and clips a photo from a film journal showing Ford on the set of Mogambo (1953, Ford) it looks like. So what's to be made of all this? What's the link, the reason for these references? People of the earth? Slower paced, tales set in the countryside with vast horizons and big skies? The black and white film?

Paper Moon was made by Peter Bogdanovich and released in 1973, the year before Alice in den Städten and has a shot where Ryan and Tatum O'Neil play characters eating in a diner where outside through the window a marquee can be seen that advertises Steamboat Round the Bend (1935, Ford) as its featured attraction. And Paper Moon is also shot in black and white and mostly rural. I don't know what point I'm trying to make with this, but it's impossible not to think of ADDIE when you see ALICE. I mean I'm not trying to imply anything negative about this link, if you can even call it that. Just speculating. Maybe I'm just trying to show off my memory or observation skills?

But okay, since I've already started down this road, there's also a moment in Im Lauf der Zeit when Bruno and Robert are talking about passing through the towns of Powerless and Peaceless. They mention that in between both towns is a mountain called Dead Man. Robby Müller went on to shoot Dead Man (1995, Jim Jarmusch). And Dead Man feels like a road movie for sure; also there's a shot in Im Lauf der Zeit of a symmetric 1 point perspective down a town's thoroughfare with a large tall building weighing the center in the background, just like the shot in Dead Man of the city of Machine with the smokestack; also there's a CU of the van's wheel spinning in Im Lauf der Zeit that looks and feel like the CUs of the train's wheels in Dead Man.

Apologies if anyone was expecting anything in-depth but this time here I just felt like writing a journal entry of a movie I really loved.

--Dregs

What Did I Just Watch?

Continuing the Wim Wenders series, the second entry in his road movie trilogy.

Shot on color 35mm by the amazing Robby Müller and restored at 4K in 2015 on DCP,  (1975, Wim Wenders) is droll and unpredictable throughout. It's odd.

Falsche Bewegung opens with some helicopter shots of a German town that progresses into the window of one of the houses where the film's star Rüdiger Vogler, who I'm really beginning to appreciate since Alice in den Städten (1974, Wenders), obsessively keeps playing a Troggs record then punches through windows with each of his fists. He lives with his mother and wants to be a writer, so he ventures out into the country on a train in search of inspiration.

None of this movie made any sense to me whatsoever. Yet watching it Friday night I would not have rather watched anything else. I'm still only beginning to really become familiar with the road movie as a genre. But Falsche Bewegung seems to be the best example I've seen of leaving your usual surroundings and encountering different people, who don't necessarily teach you anything although that in itself causes you to live.

Didactic film practices always rely on cause and effect. What's great about Falsche Bewegung is that it's never important where these characters came from or where they're going. So the first character the writer encounters is a girl called MIGNON played by 13 year old Nastassja Kinski (in her first movie and she's credited here as Nastassja Nakszynski). Mignon is really pretty, never speaks a word and is a magician acrobat performer who street hustles with her companion, an old man with a shady WWII Nazi past who plays a harmonica.

On a train across from them an actress played by Hannah Schygulla is drawn into the group. The final member of the group will be a poet played by Peter Kern. I'll always remember Kern as FATTY in Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975, Rainer Werner Fassbinder). Schygulla is easily one of cinemas greatest actresses who had a symbiotic chemistry with a director, in her case Fassbinder, that lasted through several films: Von Sternberg/Dietrich, Fellini/Masina, Cassavetes/Rowlands, Waters/Divine. Okay so I know I don't have a strong point to make here, but having watched dozens of Fassbinder movies and loving them so so so much I was absorbed by the nuanced creativity of Falsche Bewegung just because it used some of the same actors from Fassbinder's films, was made around the same places during the same years and is so far from resembling most mainstream more well known movies or all of the garbage on Netflix and cable TV.

Falsche Bewegung is mostly a couple of characters talking at any given time, but it's not dialogue driven. It's all about the people, but it's not character driven. I boil film down to a formula, I've always believed if a movie can nail just one aspect out of plot, dialogue, character, setting, or genre then it can fail at the other four and still work. Falsche Bewegung is a formidable example of the road movie genre and an unforgettable escape.

And again Robby Müller's cinematography painted gorgeous locations on canvasses both rural and urban, highlighted by green fluorescent sources in the nightwork, autumn foliage, sweeping valleys, giant snowy mountains in the day work.

Watching Falsche Bewegung in the theater last night was one of the rare instances I lost complete sense of time at some point during the movie. I can't wait to see where Wenders goes next.

--Dregs

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Oh, the problem of labels in film viewing. There have been certain directors that I've found where I have tried to find and watch as many of their movies as I could. Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a case of one of those directors. And it was worth it. And when I heard that he was around and working with contemporaries of his time in Germany who are called the New German Cinema, that didn't do much for me. I didn't respond to any of the other filmmakers sharing that label like I did to Fassbinder. But this is because I had not made sufficiently diligent efforts to explore the films themselves.

I've never been a big Herzog guy, but it's to my embarrassment. Especially because his name is thrown around so often. Movies either click with me or they don't, that is the mystery of the public's taste. I'd held even less of a regard for Wenders' reputation as I had Herzog's, but I've also spent less time viewing his films.

The Austin Film Society has programmed a Wim Wenders retrospective and I chose to check out some of his movies. Of particular interest for me were the early ones, which I'd never seen before.

Last night I went to a screening of a gorgeous DCP restored  Alice in den Städten (1974, Wim Wenders) not expecting a lot and found immediately that it had far exceeded any expectations for it I could have imagined. I don't know what the formal criteria are for minimalism, or if there's even a strict way of defining it as a aesthetic movement, but all I kept thinking about during Alice In the Cities is that compared to most other films it doesn't seem to be trying to do a lot, but does. And I can't think of a better way to describe that as minimalist.

Alice in den Städten starts with a young German Bohemian type with longish messy hair on a beach taking Polaroids of the landscape, as he sings "Under the Boardwalk" to himself. Then he drives, takes more pictures, checks into motels, watches TV, eats, sleeps, and listens to the radio. And the style of Alice in den Städten that's established early on will remain evident throughout its runtime: Robbie Müller's 16mm black and white cinematography, the locations, the stillness and silence.

Robby Müller is a cult hero of mine because of his diverse array of collaborators and work, which includes:

• Saint Jack (1979, Peter Bogdanovich)
• They All Laughed (1981, Bogdanovich)
• Repo Man (1984, Alex Cox)
• Paris, Texas (1984, Wenders)
• Down by Law (1986, Jim Jarmusch)
• Dead Man (1995, Jarmusch)
• Breaking the Waves (1996, Lars von Trier)
• Dancer In the Dark (2000, von Trier)

And these are only a few.Alice in den Städten is composed of so many subjective shots from driving in cars, flying on airplanes, trains, and even a ferry. And there are obviously those with the opinion of what does and doesn't belong in a movie who do not value empty shots of landscapes, but in this case it's done with such an eye for interesting images that it becomes one of the best parts of Alice in den Städten. Müller also exposes the negative in just the right light to where there's always a lot of detail and deep focus. After what I'm guessing are Florida beaches, the loner drives to NYC and in several instances the Empire State Building is in the background, like a postcard. There's also an in-camera technique used often where the lens closes as opposed to an optical fade out.

Then there're the shots that don't function solely to enhance the plot, like when Alice is on the roof of a building looking through binoculars, and a POV starts on the World Trade Center then tilts down and across other buildings and finds a seagull then tracks it. That stuff isn't planned. That stuff is creative filmmaking.

Turns out the loner is a journalist whose deadline has approached for completion of an article written about the American landscape, to be published by his bosses based out of Germany. But, the loner has only taken pictures and not written a single word. Just one quote culled from his esoteric ramblings is "when you drive through America something happens to you, the images you see change you." And that's profound for me without going into anything deeper.

Okay so if any of this sounds boring, maybe it would be, except ALICE is some little kid whose mom abandons her in the care of the loner whom she trusts to take her daughter back to Germany and meet up with in a day or two.

The kid who plays Alice delivers an amazing performance. She's precocious, critical of the loner, bright, eccentric, and always eating. The chemistry between the loner and the kid turns into this humble, honest, simple just plain old tender bond that occurs as the trip progresses. Lots of the scenes find that rare slightly off European prosaic dry humour that's what gives Alice in den Städten its quality and will pop up later in the best work of Aki Kaurismäki and Jim Jarmusch.

For being so young, it's hilarious how over everything Alice is. So the story is a little sentimental, but I'm tired of associating that word with a negative connotation. For me one of the best moments is in a photo booth, when Alice and the loner are looking into the booth's lens and Alice starts to smile, but the loner doesn't. She looks at him and sees this, then changes her facial expression to deadpan to match his. She wants to be like him. And yeah even though the movie never says who her real dad is I feel like she needs this guy, even if it's only for a few days.

Alice in den Städten is also so impressive because it doesn't portray high stakes drama, it's just a few days this dude and this kid cross paths and it's not about them teaching each other anything groundbreaking about life or anything. It's just a couple of people who don't hate each other and form a little attachment and the realization that that's pretty important in a way.

There are so many little moments that find relevance beyond logic. Like the kid slouched next to the jukebox in the German diner who hums and mumbles along to Canned Heat's "On the Road Again," for the duration of the song it seems, as the conversation between Alice and the loner continually returns to him lost in his sesh. There's a Chuck Berry concert for, I don't know, just because. But the score is so sparse, it's just a few strums of an electric guitar and can convey so much, slightly spooky, a little empty, maybe just as casual and unassuming in its charm as the rest of the movie.

--Dregs