6 - Dissolving the fear of the feminine: Wim Wenders

Summary

Perhaps the best point at which to begin a consideration of Wenders's itinerary, of the road that led him to Wings of Desire, is in medias res – with The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge), the most self-referential of all his fiction films. The State of Things was made during an interval in the tortuous shooting of Hammett and showed a film crew stranded on the location of their science fiction film when the money ran out and the director was compelled to visit Hollywood to seek supplementary finance from his American backers (who turned out to be a Mafia group none-too-pleased to have bought into a barely saleable black-and-white European art picture). It was a smoldering meditation on Wenders's own experiences with Hammett, the entrée into the American market sought by so many European directors – particularly those who cherish a childhood association of Hollywood with cinema and believe that only if one makes it in America can one be said truly to have arrived. As Wenders watched editors impose a more conventional narrative shape on the abstracted rhythms of his work, his illusions peeled away one by one: They fall languidly like slow-motion apple peel in his short Reverse Angle. Wenders perhaps had more illusions to lose than most European directors: In his earlier films the man in a cowboy hat on Hamburg's streets had represented the American colonization of the unconscious of young Germans growing up in the ghost town of their own culture.