Wim Wenders. Ultimate test to 3D language. 2015

source: European Graduate School     2016年4月16日
http://egs.edu/ Wim Wenders, Professor of Film at The European Graduate School / EGS. On his approach to 3D and film-making. Fragment of a lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School EGS, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. 2015.

Wim Wenders (b. 1945) is a film director, writer, and photographer. He is a professor of film at The European Graduate School / EGS and Professor für Narrativen Film at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. Wenders is considered one of the most important figures to have emerged from the “New German Cinema” in the 1970s and was a founding member of the German film distribution company “Filmverlag der Autoren”. In 1977, he established his own production company in Berlin, “Road Movies,” which has produced many of his films, as well as numerous films by Ken Loach. Wenders received the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or in 1984 for his movie Paris, Texas, the Golden Lion at the 1982 Venice Film Festival for The State of Things, and won best director at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival for Wings of Desire. He has also been nominated three times for the Academy Awards for his films Buena Vista Social Club (2000), Pina (2012), and, most recently, The Salt of the Earth (2015).

Born in Düsseldorf, Wenders grew up in Düsseldorf, Koblenz and the surrounding areas. His early studies followed in the footsteps of his father with Wenders spending a year studying medicine in Freiburg (1963-1964), followed by a year studying philosophy (1964-1965). However, in 1966, he dropped out of university and moved to Paris to become a painter. In Paris, he worked as an engraver and has often described this period as the loneliest time of his life. As a result, he started to spend more and more time at Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque and became enchanted by film, watching more than five films per day. After this experience, he returned to Germany and attended the University of Television and Film in Munich from 1967 to 1970, where he also began working as a film critic for Süddeutsche Zeitung and Filmkritik.

Wenders’s directorial debut was also his thesis film, Summer in the City, produced in 1970. This film also marks the start of a long and fruitful collaboration with his frequent cinematographer Robby Müller. His second film, The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (1972), marked the beginning of another important collaboration––that with the Austrian writer Peter Handke. The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty was Wender’s adaptation of Handke’s critically acclaimed novel. Handke also wrote the script for Wenders’s movie The Wrong Move (1975) and co-wrote with Wenders the script for Wings of Desire (1987). Wenders sees the primary theme of this period in his career as “the Americanization of Germany.”

Currently, Wim Wenders’s work explores 3D as a new language of filmmaking. The films If Buildings Could Talk (2010), Pina (2011), and Every Thing Will Be Fine (2015) approach this question from different perspectives. If Buildings Could Talk, Wenders’s short film about The Berlin Philharmonic, within the six-part omnibus Cathedrals of Culture (2014), uses 3D technology to offer a unique experience of architectural space, while Pina (2011), about dance choreographer Pina Bausch and her company, attempts to present movement, dance, and physicality in a new and visceral way. According to Wenders, 3D technology possesses hidden revolutionary potential that still remains unexplored. He insists that the language of 3D makes everything more visible, more emphatic––including the acting––as in Every Thing Will Be Fine (2015), the slightest show of emotion is perceived as “overacting,” and as such, this technique demands a new approach from the actor. According to Wenders, the 3D camera fundamentally questions and alters the profession of an actor, and therefore creates a completely new mindset both for the making and perception of films.

Presently, Wim Wenders and his wife, photographer Donata Wenders, live in Berlin. In the fall of 2012, they established the Wim Wenders Foundation situated in Düsseldorf. By acquiring the rights to all of his films, including those currently held by third parties, its primary aim is to make Wim Wenders’s oeuvre permanently accessible to the public at large. As well, the foundation provides a stipend, the Wim Wenders Bursary, for young filmmakers and artists “whose vision is to tell stories with new aesthetic and technical means and to enrich and renew our visual language.”