Wim Wenders-Stand der Dinge, Der (1982)

This is not a movie that's easy to understand, yet it easily makes you think. It smells of nostalgia and of things past and fading. The film that the film crew is shooting about survivors to a nuclear holocaust is a parallel to the director's own journey to collect money from his LA producer in order to continue the film. The movie is visually beautiful, full of the magic of black and white photography. It's also a movie that constantly speaks about itself, about the hardships of shooting black and white, and about the need for "a story" which the film itself seems to lack. It tries not to be a film, but to film life. Yet, in the ordinary and particular of everyday life it conveys the eternal and universal.

The cinematographer,real or fake,who would have been free to explore life and death, through narratives and images of his own conception, becomes an object of exploitation from the medium and it's economic concomitants.So he fools himself by abandoning his art to the conventions of economic necessity.Friedrich, and by implication Wenders,is afraid of the void that precedes the stories and the void that comes after.They both desire to integrate and at the same time they fear the outcome of this integration.The project of discriminating between false and authentic representation, between autonomy and manipulation or seduction is omnipresent in DER STAND DER DINGE.Against the threat of manipulation, Wenders romantically upholds the image as something pure and autonomous, an image that derive it's meaning through a network of signification but is meaningful in itself.Wenders task is "Wahrnehmen", that is to authenticate and to perceive at the same time by ascribing truth and beauty.Hence Wenders attempts to preserve something that is bound to disappear.His agenda is the recovery of vision.In Paul Cezanne's view,Wenders expresses a desire to hold the ephemeral: "Things are looking bad.You have to hurry if you want to see anything.Everything is disappearing".His films pay homage to his models who taught him the art of seeing:paintings of Edward Hopper and the par excellence Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, the photography of Walker Evans and August Sander.Yet his films increasingly become aware of the difficulty and even impossibility of combating the power of images through cinema.This is characterized by a paradoxical situation in which Wenders has to create images in order to battle them.Clearly this invocation of an older generation is an attempt to rid himself of a cultural legacy that he repudiates yet dares not fully confront.


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