But this will not be your typical family drama fare, considering Wenders will be shooting the film in 3-D. An odd choice, you’d assume, but if this works at all in way that Pina did, it could truly be something groundbreaking and incredible. Rather than conventional 3-D, which I usually tend to avoid, the figures in Pina do not pop out or invade your space—rather, you invade theirs. It’s as if you’re transported onto the stage with them and surround their world, getting a immersive look into the world that he’s created in a way that truly enhaces everything about what you’re seeing. Using Steadicams rigs, Wenders dissolves the distance between character and spectator, and if he can manage to do that with a structured narrative such as this, well, just hand me the box of Kleenex now.
Wim Wenders Begins Production on His Next Film ‘Every Thing Will Be Fine’ Starring James Franco
Wim Wenders
Cinematic Obsessions: The Great American West, Existential Romantic Longing, The Barriers of Human Connection, Transient Spaces, Child/Parent Dynamics, The Psychological Effects of Neon, Spirituality and a Nostalgic Longing for an Absent Something, Emotional Isolation
Best Director Nominations: None
Best Films:Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, Alice in the Cities, Pina
Terrence Malick
Cinematic obsessions: Wheatfields Gently Blowing in the Wind at Magic Hour, Sweeping Philosophical Voiceovers, The Confounding Nature of Existence, The Evils of Man, The Divine Presence in Everyday Life, Examining Humility and Grace Through Love, Man’s Existence with Nature Through Time, Redemption and Forgiveness
Best Director Nominations: The Tree of Life, The Thin Red Line
Best Films: Days of Heaven, Badlands, The Tree of Life
Cinema’s Best Directors to Never Win the Best Director Academy Award
I’m getting a little bored by the juxtaposition of American and other cinema. I no longer think this division is as true as it might have been in the 1980s, or the early part of the 90s.
What makes Paris, Texas and all of Wim’s work so special is that it is filled with so much yearning and so much restlessness; people aching so badly to find what it is they’re looking for. They’re all so hungry for love and connection and something to make them feel alive. Some of them find it in others and then some of them realize even if they did—would it even make them feel better? Or are they destined to eternally feel that hole inside? Travis leaves Jane and Hunter in the end because he knows putting together the pieces of the past won’t put him back together. He’s ripped apart we’ll never know why. None of us do. Wenders’ also expressed that, “hotels room have a real magic because you feel yourself, who you are in a different way and in an anonymous hotel room than you would ever be able to at home.” His films all live in transient places like motels where everyone’s face changes from moment to moment—and in a way that’s more comforting than feeling sorrow in the comfort of stability.
Cinematic Panic: Longing Endlessly with Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas
Actually, I was going to make a far more complex film, because I’d originally intended to drive all over America. I had it in mind to go to Alaska and then the Midwest and across to California and then down to Texas. I’d planned a real zigzag route all over America. But my scriptwriter, Sam Shepard, persuaded me not to. He said: “Don’t bother with all that zigzagging. You can find the whole of America in the one state of Texas.” At the time, I didn’t know Texas all that well, but I trusted Sam. I traveled around Texas for a couple of months, and I had to agree with him. Everything I wanted to have in my film was there in Texas—America in miniature.
A lot of my films start off with road maps instead of scripts. Sometimes it feels like flying blind without instruments. You fly all night, and in the morning you arrive somewhere. That is: you have to try to make a landing somewhere so the film can end.
(Source: criterion.com)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the greatest person I have ever shared a conversation with.
I saw America in pictures and movies, and it was sort of a utopian place compared to where I lived. All I ever wanted was getting there. American music was the opposite of everything I heard in my own country, and there was rhythm and fun—the notion of fun was completely strange to me. Everything I really liked was from this mythical place called America.
Aida Vainieri and Dominique Mercy in Pina Bausch’s “Cafe Muller” - photo by Maarten vanden Abelle
The way Pina gets to the core of what love and loss means in her piece, Cafe Muller, I just don’t know a single film that has been able to come remotely close to that. In forty minutes Pina showed me more about men and women than the history of cinema without a single word.
(Source: whos-afraid-of-virginia)
