Wim Wenders turns routine into a piece of art through his films

Wim Wenders, a pioneer of New German Cinema, discusses his love for music and filmmaking in an interview with The Hindu.

Music, just like travel, is hard to separate from Wim Wenders films, for they are intrinsic to his process and his film’s narratives. In Alice in the Cities (1973), the first of his road movie trilogies, a character attends a Chuck Berry concert, while his Cannes winning classic Paris, Texas (1984) would have been incomplete without Ry Cooder’s slide guitar. In Wings of Desire (1987), an angel walks into a Nick Cave concert and Perfect Days (2023) had a perfect rock mixtape as its soundtrack.

So, when the 80-year old German filmmaker, one of the major figures in contemporary world cinema, sat down for an interview with The Hindu in Thiruvananthapuram, the first question inevitably had to be about music. 

“Music was the starting point for me personally when I grew up. All these musicians, be it Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones or Beatles were all of my age and part of this huge rock n’ roll, youth movement. I realised that if they were able to rock the world, maybe I could do that too. There was no film culture in my country in the 1960s Germany. I had the courage and the cockiness to make films because of the music made by the people from my own generation,” says Mr. Wenders. The filmmaker is here as part of ‘King of the Road’, his first India tour and retrospective, organised by the Film Heritage Foundation with the Goethe-Institut.

Mr. Wenders grew up in a Germany that was just recovering from the destruction of Second World War and also the shame of Nazism. His creative pursuits began as a 6 year old, using the “little plastic camera” that his father gifted. This fascination with photography is evident in the wide, static frames in his road movies and in his many protagonists who photograph compulsively. His interests would traverse through painting before settling in films.

“I grew up in a country that did not exist any more, a culture that was ruined and I felt it was up to my generation to completely start from scratch. Starting from scratch is something very healthy and more liberating than if you grew into a tradition. I didn’t like the German culture I was confronted with. I felt it was phony. I liked what I received from American culture, a substitute culture which I was infatuated with for a long time. But then this American dream faded and became almost its opposite. Travel has been an integral part of my life ever since I was a little boy. I couldn’t travel back then, but I wanted to. I realised that the world was much more beautiful than my own town, where everything was in ruins,” says Mr. Wenders.

As one of the pioneers of the New German Cinema, his style leaned more towards documenting than manipulating time. Elements of cinema seeped into his documentaries and vice versa. But, he says, he never had a set filmmaking process.

“The biggest mistake after my first few films was thinking that now I was a filmmaker because I knew how to do it. If you work out of routine or experience, you are not a filmmaker. It is lazy and uncreative. You are only a filmmaker if you know how to react to something and know how to do it as if you haven’t done it before. Every film has to invent how it wants to be made,” he says.