Wim Wenders: The Art of Seeing, Remembering and Forgetting

When I think of the German filmmaker and photographer Wim Wenders, my mind often wanders to the Schwebebahn: a suspension railway built in Wuppertal in 1901 that I’ve come to regard as a kind of mythical object. I first learned about the railway perhaps a decade ago while watching Wenders’s Alice in the Cities (1974), in which the young protagonist rides back and forth on the Schwebebahn in search of her grandmother. Living not so far away, I have wanted to visit ever since. There is just something so endearingly German about the elevated line with its hanging carriages – a slightly goofy punt for the future in a country forever grappling with its own past. Wenders was born in 1945 in the rubble of Düsseldorf, 15 kilometres west of Wuppertal, and I’ve often found myself wondering what effect it must have had on the young artist’s mind.

The closest I’ve come to seeing the Schwebebahn was last week on a train ride to Bonn, where a new exhibition, dedicated to the movie director’s life and work, opened at the Bundeskunsthalle this month. ‘W.I.M. The Art of Seeing’ – which is detailed enough to please an acolyte and punchy enough for the uninitiated to not get bored – is a collaboration between the museum, the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (DDF) in Frankfurt and Wenders himself. Across its panoply of screens and mementos, the show tastefully arranges the filmmaker’s eclectic obsessions – German postwar self-reflection; Edward Hopper-era Americana; mid-century Japanese cinema; and his many collaborations with luminaries of music, fashion and dance (though a little less on the late Robbie Müller than I’d have hoped) – into easily accessible blocks.

Among the highlights is a five-channel immersive room of ceiling-high projections designed by Wenders, where visitors can enjoy the sensation of being engulfed by Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas (1984). Large-format photographs punctuate the space, including one of Bruno Ganz, perched precariously atop Berlin’s Siegessäule (Victory Column) in Faraway, So Close! (1993), gazing towards what was then still East Berlin. On another screen, a Stetson-clad Dennis Hopper, in The American Friend (1977), broods at the wheel of a Ford Thunderbird. That film is also notable for featuring a performance by Nicolas Ray, whose dying days Wenders would later document in Lightning Over Water (1980). Though still criticized by some cinephiles for its attempts at narrativizing the painful process of death, this collaborative work between Wenders and the terminally ill Ray – created partly in homage to the latter, who had a strong influence on Wenders’s wider work – is treated with notable significance in this show.

Indeed, few filmmakers are as openly reverent as Wenders, who turns 80 this month and has lost little of his gimlet-eyed sincerity. It’s a quality that the exhibition highlights through a selection of quotations as well as in Wenders’s embrace of new technologies, artists and artforms – including several of his own paintings, striking early photomontages and his remarkably convincing experiments with 3D. There is also, of course, his collaboration with Pina Bausch, the trailblazing dancer who resided in Wuppertal from 1973 until her untimely death in 2009, just two days before filming for the documentary of her life and work was set to begin. For that project, Wenders returned to the Schwebebahn. Nearly 40 years had passed since Alice in the Cities, yet seen again through the director’s eyes, its depiction appears no less miraculous.

I’ve seen all but a few of the director’s films – many of which I love, some of which I revere. He’s probably one of the reasons I moved to Germany 13 years ago in the heady days of the Angela Merkel years, when life was cheap and anything seemed possible. A lot has changed since then, yet revisiting these images still moved me deeply. The show welcomes you in with an ecstatic aerial shot of Berlin from Wings of Desire (1987), filmed on 35mm from a military plane at a time when few others were allowed to fly. The wall text in part conjures the image of a World War II bomber, but the hunger and excitement in the camera’s movements left me with a sense of elation. Wenders’s work reminds you of how poetic it was to be a young German in the second half of the 21st century – the clear-eyed sense of purpose and humility that many artists of Wender’s generation seemed to forge from the ashes.

And yet, it’s hard not to sense that something is still missing here. Walking back to my hotel through the city’s town square, I came across a woman in her early fifties standing outside the Bonner Münster cathedral, wearing a keffiyeh and waving a Palestinian flag. She was soon accosted for choosing to make her stand outside a church – a dispiriting ‘out of sight, out of mind’ tactic that persists among centrists, even in light of recent events. Disconnected from that dizzying political present, Wenders’s work, which in one way or another has always projected his politics and worldview, resonates a little differently – a quietly heart-breaking reminder of a more hopeful and collective time.

With ‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’ – the artist’s epic survey – taking over large chunks of both Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie and Gropius Bau this summer, Wenders certainly isn’t the only big name to be garlanded by one of the country’s leading institutions. What such a show can add to a filmmaker and their work, however, is trickier to assess. The best exhibition of this kind I’ve seen was for Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr in 2017 at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. What set it apart was that the curmudgeonly Tarr, who retired after The Turin Horse (2011), included an original installation: a nightmarish room of gigantic fans and barbed wire that brought visitors face to face with the bleakness and brutality of a border crossing. The previous summer of 2016, Victor Orbán’s state-hired thugs had started violently cracking down on Syrian refugees entering Tarr’s country from the Serbian border. To see the director engage with something so contemporary and close to the bone brought the images that followed barrelling into the present day – not least the depictions of displacement that come up so often in his work. Without a similar statement, the Wenders show remains trapped in amber – a dream of the future that might have already passed us by.

‘W.I.M. The Art of Seeing’ is on view at Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn until 1 November 

_{Main image: Wim Wenders, Alice in the City, 1974, film still. Courtesy: © WDR, PIFDA MCMLXXIV}