Just like the camera in Wim Wenders’ films, his writing demands the “freedom to move”: “I need to be able to ‘circle’ an idea”. For this reason he chooses to write in free verse – or what he modestly refers to as “my odd verse” – for many of the essays in this illuminating collection. In his hands it becomes a playful and wonderfully malleable literary form that allows him to create a flow of images and ideas, a kind of rhythmic thinking: “visible blocks of thought”. Each line becomes a separate tracking shot as the writer-director moves restlessly around his subject, words crystallising into ideas in the same way as a narrative emerges during the editing of a film.
Many of the essays explore the German director’s filmic influences. Wenders confesses that “I bawled my eyes out” after watching Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. He describes Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni as “one of the great modern classics”, and in a moving piece recalls the director’s death on the same day as Bergman’s. Douglas Sirk is “the Dante of soap operas” and Samuel Fuller “the greatest storyteller I ever met”. A heartfelt essay celebrates the westerns of Anthony Mann, such as Man of the West, which convinced Wenders to give up art and turn to film-making in the 1960s: “They opened up a new world for me.”
Mann’s motto was keep it “simple and pictorial”, and despite the naivety of his films, today Wenders still finds “a kind of reality and raw truth” in them. Indeed, this defence of realism, which is also about a quest for artistic authenticity, is one of the underlying themes here. An accomplished photographer, Wenders writes with real passion about the work of photographers such as Barbara Klemm. In our current era of “infotainment” and “digital hyperbole”, he finds something heroic in Klemm’s 50-year career as a black-and-white press photographer dedicated to “truth and reality”. For, he argues: “The greatest art / doesn’t refer to itself – / but to the world, to reality.”
Wenders admits to being what in German is called an Augenmensch, a visual person who relies on seeing and has “sharpened this sense more than any other”. Whether their subject is the US artist Andrew Wyeth, a painting by Paul Cézanne, or Pina Bausch’s dance theatre, which allows the viewer to “become weightless simply from watching”, these eloquent and insightful essays – expertly translated by Jen Calleja – celebrate the transformational power of seeing and aspire to reclaim that “lost paradise” where “watching was being”.
• PD Smith’s City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age is published by Bloomsbury. The Pixels of Paul Cézanne: And Reflections on Other Artists by Wim Wenders, translated by Jen Calleja (Faber, £14.99). To order a copy for £12.74, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
