Wim Wenders for the 80s: From the soot of the Ruhr area to pictures that give us wings

The Great Bruno Ganz (1941–2019) helped his spectacle to immortality. Wim Wenders, who turns 80 tomorrow, has dressed the Swiss in his film “The Heaven over Berlin” (1987) but also in his lifetime in pictures of unearthly and temporal poetry: All of them played in the film Engel Damiel, who wants to give up his immortality for love.

In his latest directorial work “Perfect Days” (nominated for the Oscar abroad in 2024), the jubilee found the spell again in everyday life: He decided in this feature film for a toilet cleaner in Tokyo-touching because of all people who could have told Wenders, because infinitely satisfied in a world of music, nature and work.

These two of the more than 30 feature films, which Wenders presented in almost 50 years, fuel the envy of everyone who still has it: the first immersion in the work of the native of Düsseldorf. Wenders has thus created a cinematic heritage that will survive the fashions of the cinema: it does not use bombast, crashing effects, not on and stakkato, Wenders films sneak up to hug – with pictures such as paintings, with clarity how to have balanced texts and compositions. The passions of the artist always hall: photography, painting (especially US chronicler Edward Hopper), music (Lou Reed, Nick Cave), literature. In this way, Wenders adapted “The Fear of the goalkeeper at the penalty” (1972) of his “contemporary” and later co-scratch author Peter Handke (82) for the canvas.

For his documentaries about the photographer Sebastiao Salgado (“Das Salt der Earth”, 2014), “Pina” about dancer Pina Bausch (2011) and the “Buena Vista Social Club” (1999), Wenders was Oscar-nominated-a triple that shows his sensor as an explorer of people and diversity.

Smog, smoke and soot

Long before he translated his artists into light and shadow, he recorded the smoking chimney of the industry in Oberhausen, which he saw from the children’s room in the early 1960s. The camera (eight millimeter film) was a gift from the father. “A cheap plastic”, but a nice, forward -looking gift. The family had moved to the Ruhr area because the father had got a better position there as a chief physician.

Before that, they had to build an existence in the rubble of Düsseldorf. This disgrace of the early birth – shortly after the atomic bombs over Japan, where “Perfect Days” was supposed to play ” – probably took the root for the down -to -earthness of the artist. From the stroke with the German guilt, the generation of fathers, the constant urge to go into the world, “always somewhere else to be someone else”, can be derived, as Roadmovie specialist Wenders once said.

He had accused his father that he survived as a soldier but had done nothing against Hitler and that he always suppressed the mother. He reconciled with father and homeland. This friction left further traces in the work of the graduate of the University of Film and Television in Munich (1967): questioning masculinity. In “Paris, Texas” (1984) Wenders, who has more than ten godchildren, radical and yet sensitively released the fallability of fathers in the lost travis (Harry Dean Stanton). It is a melancholic meditation about gender that the cinema has only been looking for again since #metoo.

Film tips for Wim Wenders

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