Midway through his 1988 film, Wings of Desire, director Wim Wenders abruptly switches from black-and-white film stock to color, marking a character's transformation from angel to mortal. All the scenes showing various angels roaming the divided and decidedly shopworn-looking city are shot in black-and-white, while the mortals whose thoughts they overhear are shown in color. This reverses the visual conceit of The Wizard of Oz, whose fantasy realm is in color and whose "real world" is black-and-white.
But the crucial metaphor is spatial. Wenders stages the critical discussion between Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) in the "no-man's land" on the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall. Damiel tells Cassiel that he has made up his mind: He has determined to become mortal. As Damiel rhapsodizes about feeling and tasting, Cassiel looks behind them and notices one set of footprints in the well-patrolled and dangerous gravel. Next, we see Damiel holding his friend's limp form, and then Cassiel is shown lying on the other side of the graffittoed Wall.
Not surprisingly for a man who long ago decided to call his production company "Road Movies," place is at the heart of Wenders' films. It seems apt that his long road as an artist, filmmaker and photographer brings him to our peculiar but quintessentially American place, to be honored Saturday with a 2005 Vanguard Director Award at the CineVegas film festival. Just as Berlin is central to Wings of Desire and its sequel, 1993's Faraway, So Close, the United States and particularly its West, has informed much of Wenders' work.
"I just love the American West. It's my favorite place," Wenders wrote in an e-mail interview last week. "Probably because I grew up with the films of John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann or any other of the great directors who produced these films that I saw over and over and over again. Not for the action, just to gasp at these unbelievable places. I grew up in a country in ruins. But I had caught a glimpse of paradise, and that definitely was in the West and you could reach it only by stagecoach."
That mythic landscape bookends Paris, Texas (1988), the iconic "independent film" and perhaps the one for which he is best known in the U.S. It also marked his first collaboration with Sam Shepard, who wrote the screenplay. The two would reunite for this year's Don't Come Knocking, in which the Western landscape reprises a supporting role. Unlike Paris, Texas, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, Don't Come Knocking received a mixed response at the springtime festival. (Time's Mary Corliss, in her online "Cannes Diary," called it "ludicrously bad.")
Wenders says the West, and Shepard, figure in his future: "Sam Shepard and I have a secret plan to write a western together. Well, now it's not secret anymore." This is intriguing, in that Shepard's character in Don't Come Knocking is a western movie star who walks away from the set to find his lost family.
Meanwhile, though, the film accompanying Wenders to CineVegas, 2004's Land of Plenty, had yet to find a distributor in the States. The film screens after the award presentation and a talk with Wenders at 4 p.m. Saturday. "I very much hope that CineVegas might kick off something," Wenders writes. "I have shown the film to about a dozen audiences in the United States. I traveled with it a bit this spring. All the people who saw it were highly impressed and the general consensus was: 'Americans need to see this film!' Only distributors don't seem to think so. And I'll gladly reveal the problem to you. They seem to think that a film with both a 'liberal' and a 'Christian' message cannot be marketed in America. They consider that 'incompatible,' amazingly enough."
Land of Plenty is Wenders' rumination on the post-9/11 U.S. A paranoiac Vietnam veteran (John Diehl) scouts Los Angeles for Islamic terrorists, while his missionary niece (Michelle Williams) ministers to the homeless. Deutsche Welle, the German radio service, reports that Wenders told the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper last year: "The idea for Land of Plenty originated with the fundamentalist Christianity of the Bush era. From the anger that Christianity has been so perverted and used in so a perfidious manner for political interests."
Wenders' attitudes about the United States have been ambivalent. Peter Falk appears as himself in Wings of Desire, a benevolent presence (and former angel) through whom Wenders processes another viewpoint of Berlin and its history. But where that ethereal film ends with Damiel finding love in the divided city, Faraway, So Close offers Cassiel a more sinister fate in the unified Berlin, which Wenders clearly sees compromised by American commercialism.
But when Cassiel is homeless and hopeless, Lou Reed comes along to help him with money and encouragement—testimony to a corner of American experience that continues to inspire Wenders: music. Ry Cooder's music haunts Paris, Texas. A Nick Cave performance is the background of a crucial moment in Wings of Desire.
"What can I say? I LOVE music," Wenders writes. "That's my greatest pleasure, right together with breathing. Luckily, filmmaking is a very privileged profession, and you can do all these things at the same time. Writing, photography, music, painting ... I couldn't do it better than with that (modified) quote from the Velvet Underground: 'Rock'n roll has saved my life!' "
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.