Wim Wenders

Interview and portraits by Flo Kohl

Wim Wenders is one of the greatest storytellers in cinematic history. His films, which are rich in the personalities of its deeply complex characters, shed a tender red light on humanity’s open wounds and attempts to suture them with deep poeticism, wisdom and profundity. His more iconic films, like Paris, Texas, which stars Harry Dean Stanton as a lovelorn desert wanderer and Nastassja Kinski as his long lost wife working at a peep show, contain within each frame magnitudes of heart shattering existential angst and longing. Or Wings Of Desire, a metaphysical tale which portrays the secret and sometimes sad hidden lives of two guardian angels living high up among the gargoyles of Berlin that offer heavenly relief and solace to the city’s denizens below.  But upon observing real human experiences, like love and anguish, one decides to shed his wings to experience true love with a trapeze artist in a circus played by the late French actress Solveig Dommartin. The son of a surgeon, Wenders is just as exacting and precise in his attempt to frame the human condition with a blend of Germanic fantasy riding on the high wire of realism that is typical of the German New Wave. In his newest film, a documentary entitled Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, Wenders is offers unprecedented access to a pontiff attempting to revolutionize the Catholic Church in the new millennia. We caught up with Wenders at his exhibition of early photographs and Polaroids at Blain|Southern gallery in London.

FLO KOHL: In so many of your films - Wings of Desire, Paris, Texas, Tokyo-ga, Lisbon Story - place is practically a main character. Your photographs evoke this same sense, almost as operatic sets for human dramas.

WIM WENDERS: The “sense of place” is underestimated in our human capacities. Once, it was essential for our survival, now it is deteriorating. For me, both as a filmmaker and photographer, it is still crucial. If I don’t have a strong feeling for a place – be it a landscape, a city, a building – I don’t know how to place my camera, or even what story I could tell there. My films (almost all of them) start with a place that attracts me and that I want to know better. And then I try to find the story that can only “take place” there. I hate it, and I get dysfunctional, when I feel that a scene could be shot just as well somewhere else. For me, a movie needs to happen necessarily in a certain place, it can’t possibly happen anywhere else. When that is the case, I feel that my story is rooted, my characters are, and I am myself.  

In photography, it’s similar, but it works differently. Yes, place is first again, but I’m not trying to find the story for it, I try to listen to the story it is offering me. My camera needs to become like an instrument to decipher or record a place’s story. And every place has both story and history; if you’re willing to listen, and look!  

KOHL: Do you have these places in mind, and create narratives or bodies of images around them?

WENDERS: I do “store” places in the back of my head, and sometimes wait for the story that belongs there. You see, it’s rather the crossroads between a place and a fiction that are at the beginning of my films. It’s me who brings them together. In photography, I wait for the story to be revealed by the place. That’s a much quieter process.

KOHL: Do you travel with the intent of shooting a particular visual, or allow the place to reveal itself spontaneously?

WENDERS: When I start a journey, it is mostly either with a film in mind, or with the intention to take photographs. I’m on a very different mode for each. They actually seem to exclude each other more and more. When I’m traveling to do photographs, I need to be much more open, almost empty, I can’t bring my own “intentions” with me. I believe that places want to be found, you cannot force that process. I’m not one of these photographers who “invent” their pictures. I find them, or better: I let them find me. 

KOHL: When you shoot stills, are they telling a narrative, or does that develop later as you edit them into a book or exhibition?

WENDERS: Each place comes with its narrative. That can demand a series of pictures, or it can be just one single frame. But as soon as you “produce” a series, for a show, or a book, you yourself become the storyteller, if you want it or not. The place tells you all in one shot. When you assemble several images, you introduce your own narrative, you take over as storyteller. Which is allowed, of course, and sometimes even necessary to do justice to a place. I’ve done series like that in my book “Once,” for instance. Because that is a story-driven book. In “Pictures of the Surface of the Earth,” every picture tells the story, as the saying goes.

KOHL: I find photography to be a more spontaneous visual medium than film, and though both allow for improvisation, I'm a fan of being able to shoot without a big crew.

WENDERS: In a fictional film, I necessarily have a crew, sometimes 50 people or more around me, and even in a documentary there’s a handful. But you’re not alone, that’s the point. In photography, in the process that represents my own photographic approach, I need to be alone. As soon as there is one other person with me, he or she takes attention away from the place, interferes between me and the story that the place can only tell me if my attention is undivided.

KOHL: How spontaneous is your shooting style?

WENDERS: Totally. I photograph from the guts. It’s between my eyes and my hands, it doesn’t need to go through a mental process. Sometimes I feel that the place I am expecting, or hoping, to find, is very close, and I turn around the corner and there it is. This can be like a sixth sense. And sometimes I have to spend time at a place, and wait. Sometimes the place is “timid,” and I have to come back the next day. Some places need a lot of patience, before they reveal their secret. As I only shoot with fixed lenses, every picture involves some walking, getting closer, sometimes inch by inch, or finding more distance. And that back and forth, that “dance” in front of a place that I like, that, too, can only happen when I’m alone.

KOHL: Is photography liberating, or limiting?

WENDERS: Incredibly liberating. It frees me from any preconceptions, you could even say: from myself. In the act of photographing, I can almost be beside myself. I need to become as empty as possible. Which, again, is the opposite from filmmaking, when  you’re always too full, of your story, its implications, its characters, its plot, its budget restrictions, its organizational consequences.

KOHL: Leaving aside picture quality for a moment, if all cameras,—from an Arri or Leica to a camcorder or disposable—are "tools" for capturing visual art, do they all have equal artistic merit?

WENDERS: Each tool brings along its own set of rules. You take different photos with different cameras, in photography at least. But in film just as well, just not so obviously: your tools and your “weapons of choice” determine how you move the camera, for instance, if you shoot a scene hand-held, or on tracks. Sometimes you realize you have brought the wrong tools for a scene. The choice of lenses is so important, too. And most of all: the format that often come with your tolls. In modern digital equipment, you can switch the format. My old Plaubel only has one format: the relation of 6 by 7. Your frame is just a little bit wider than it is high. With that camera I take totally different pictures than with my panoramic Fuji camera 6x17. In order to take a photograph with those relations of 6 to 17, when your width is almost 3 times as big as your height, you have a whole different approach to “place”. You have so much more horizon, for instance 

KOHL: Instant gratification has always been part of the appeal of Polaroid. Do we still have this with iPhones?

WENDERS: Sure. Only in an extremely different way. You see the picture on your screen before you take it, for instance, you don’t look through a viewfinder. You can “share” a picture, but not physically. With a Polaroid, you give the thing itself away. And you hold the thing itself in your hands. A world of difference. Not to talk about the fact that the iPhone has 2 cameras, one in the front and one in the back. If you would have told me that at the time when I was taking lots of Polaroids, all through the Seventies, I would have said: “You’re nuts! A camera with a lens towards its back? What is that good for!?”

KOHL: You've said that photos taken on phones aren't really photographs, and will eventually be lost to the digital ether. Playing devil's advocate for a second, I could say the same of any digital media, or even film stocks which can no longer be developed (like unprocessed rolls of Kodachrome). 

WENDERS: Unprocessed negative is a bad example, I’d say. Developing is part of the photochemical process, otherwise the whole chain is broken and you did not take that picture. And of course you can also lose the film, or you can accidentally open the back of the camera and expose it to light, or you can damage your film by going too often through those damn x-ray machines in airports. Film can be destroyed, obviously. So can digital media. But a developed negative last for ages. I can today make prints of the pictures I took as a little boy. Kids who photograph today on their smartphones will not have those pictures anymore, when they’re older. Digital media is utterly unstable. My early CDs from the Eighties all have dropouts. And the films that the Wim Wenders Foundation restored in digital 4K, at the highest possible standard, they have to be “migrated” and re-transferred every 7 years or so, in order to remain usable. We archive the entire humanity on digital storages today – think of the billions of pictures that are added every week – but that is a very untrustworthy memory. (laughs) Luckily, I’d say, for most of it.

KOHL: When you take photos on your phone, are they akin to notes, a visual journal, mementos?

WENDERS: They are exactly what the good old word called them: “snapshots.” And yes, like quickly scribbled notes. Every now and then, when people want to show you something they think they photographed a while ago, they swipe through hundreds and hundreds of pictures (that you know they’ll never actually look at) to search the one they’re looking for, and you stand there and watch that avalanche of pictures going by on their iPhone. I’m not excluding myself. I have that same mess of pictures on my mobile phone.

KOHL: What gives a photograph or video tangibility?

WENDERS: Several criteria. First I’d say the amount of care, or love, that went into them. Then the amount of truthfulness they represent. Then, but only then, the degree of, let’s say for lack of a better word, “artistic input” or intention that formed them.

KOHL: If old forms of technology begin to fail—Celluloid, for example—and are preserved digitally, do they lose authenticity?

WENDERS: No. When we restored “Wings of Desire”, for instance, we went back to the original camera negative that actually ran through our camera at the time. No print was ever made from that negative! It was used to make an interpositive, of which another internegative was made, of which another internegative was made… and so on. Actually every print ever made of that film was 6 generations removed from the camera negative! That was the only method at the time to combine b/w negative, colour and all the special effects. So when we restored the film, we went back to the real thing, the camera negative, and when we scanned it, in 4K, we saw each and every grain that was exposed at the time. We had goose-pimples when we watched that on the screen for the first time. That was so much closer to the “authentic” event (as you used that word) than celluloid had been able to ever show us.

KOHL: You've said before that you see Polaroids as objects. Do you have a collector's mentality? 

WENDERS: Yes. Unfortunately. I can’t throw away books. And LPs. And CDs. And DVDs. And a few other things…

KOHL: Photographers and filmmakers are notorious for collecting cameras. Any favourite "children" (and don't worry, cameras can't read interviews, yet!)?

WENDERS: There you go, another thing I can’t throw away. Unfortunately, a lot of my old cameras were stolen once. But I still have a few, and my favourite is my first Plaubel Makina 6x7. That camera made me a photographer. I can’t use it any more, as the bellows have cracked a bit. But it’ll always stand in the shelf and look at me. “Always” is of course very relative, for people even more so than for cameras and photographs.