Wim Wenders and Peter Handke: Collaboration, Adaptation, Recomposition

309 Pages·2011·5.72 MB·English

by  Martin Brady

Wim Wenders and Peter Handke
Collaboration, Adaptation,
Recomposition
147 Internationale Forschungen zur
Allgemeinen und
Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
Begründet von Alberto Martino und in Verbindung mit
Francis Claudon (Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne) – Rüdiger Görner
(Queen Mary, University of London) – Achim Hölter (Universität Wien) –
Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) – John A. McCarthy
(Vanderbilt University) – Alfred Noe (Universität Wien) – Manfred Pfister
(Freie Universität Berlin) – Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)
herausgegeben von
Norbert Bachleitner
(Universität Wien)
Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer
Anschrift der Redaktion:
Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Sensengasse 3A , A-1090 Wien
Wim Wenders and Peter Handke
Collaboration, Adaptation,
Recomposition

Martin Brady and Joanne Leal
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011
Cover image: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vampyr, 1932 (courtesy of Eureka
Entertainment Ltd.)
Cover design: Pier Post
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Literaturwissenschaft” wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi,
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From 2005 onward, the series “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen
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ISBN: 978-90-420-3247-7
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© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 7

Authors‟ Note 9

Introduction 11

1. Politics, Poetics, Film: The Beginnings of a Collaboration 35

2. Parallel Texts: Language into Image in The Goalkeeper’s Fear 113
of the Penalty

3. Accompanied by Text: From Short Letter, Long Farewell 163
to Alice in the Cities

4. Mute Stories and Blind Alleys: Text, Image, and Allusion in 195
Wrong Move

5. Leafing through Wings of Desire 243

Conclusion 281

Filmographies 289

Bibliography 293

Index 309
Acknowledgements
Joanne Leal would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council
which awarded her a grant for this project under the Research Leave Scheme.
She would also like to thank Birkbeck College for providing her with the
Faculty Research Grant which made study leave possible. Her thanks go too
to the friends, family, and colleagues who offered support, help, and
guidance over several years, and particularly to Richard Johnson who
remained convinced that this project could be finished.
Authors‟ Note
This book aims to make material on the collaborative films of Wim Wenders
and Peter Handke available to as wide a readership as possible. For this
reason all quotations from German texts have been translated into English. In
the case of the principal prose texts by Handke and Wenders‟s essays, we
have used published translations where available. Elsewhere, all translations
are by the authors. For the sake of simplicity, and in line with current
scholarship, we have chosen to refer to the longer prose texts of Handke as
novels rather than „stories‟ or „novellas‟. In the case of the films, we have
used the published script for Wings of Desire, but otherwise we have
produced our own protocols.
Introduction

film is film, literature is literature1

The feature film can step over every
border2

1. Cinema as a mixed medium
Cinema is a mixed or, in the terminology of André Bazin, an „impure‟
medium. In the case of German cinema, literature has remained the dominant
ingredient in the mix. In 1962 the Autorenfilmer (auteurs or writer-directors)
of the „Young German Cinema‟ in the Federal Republic programmatically
announced their intentions in print, in the form of the famous Oberhausen
Manifesto. According to Alexander Kluge the „new film language‟ called for
in this manifesto comprised an amalgamation of different media. In an article
co-authored with Edgar Reitz and Wilfried Reinke in 1965 he was forthright
in his assessment of the benefits of this mix:

Because it already includes language anyway, film would actually have the capacity to
articulate meanings that elude the grasp of verbal expression. [...] Thus we would have an
accumulation of subjective and objective, of literary, auditory, and visual moments which
would preserve a certain tension in relation to each another. [...] The combination of verbal,
auditory, and visual forms and their integration through montage enable film to strive for a
greater degree of complexity than any of these forms in isolation. [...] We could imagine,
however, an experimental film (albeit one of extreme artistic intensity) which forcefully
utilizes the oscillation between literary, visual, and auditory elements as well as the gaps
between these elements [...].3

Rather than simply reiterating the well-worn mantra that cinema is overly
dependent on literary models, although it does say this as well, the essay
asserts that it is only in the „epic ranges of film‟ that language itself could
„fully unfold‟, to such an extent, indeed, that ultimately „cinema could
surpass even the tradition of literature‟.4 The use of the term „epic‟ is of
course significant here: in their discussion of film form, Kluge and his co-

1 Robin Wood quoted in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. by Ginette
Vincendeau (London: BFI, 2001), p.xi.
2 Alexander Kluge, „Theses about the New Media‟, in West German Filmmakers on Film:
Visions and Voices, ed. by Eric Rentschler (New York-London: Holmes and Meier, 1988),
pp.30-32 (p.32).
3 Alexander Kluge, Wilfried Reinke, and Edgar Reitz, „Word and Film‟, in Film and
Literature: An Introduction and Reader, ed. by Timothy Corrigan (Upper Saddle River,
New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999), pp.229-45 (p.232, p.233, p.234, and p.238).
4 Ibid., p.231 and p.234.
12 Wenders and Handke: Collaboration, Adaptation, Recomposition

authors clearly have Bertolt Brecht in mind, and indeed at one point in their
discussion they go so far as to use the term Verfremdungseffekt (distancing
effect); montage, they assert, can generate „ambiguity, polyphony, and
variation‟.5
The „Word and Film‟ essay is, alongside the Oberhausen Manifesto, one
of the most important documents of the nascent „Young German Cinema‟ of
the 1960s. Written under the influence of Kluge‟s mentor and friend Theodor
W. Adorno, the essay demonstrates a degree of sophistication in its
argumentation and rhetoric which belies the suggestion that German
filmmakers were intellectually out of step with European New Wave film
theory until the „New German Cinema‟ of the 1970s. On the other hand, the
fact that it was published in a journal of linguistics might suggest that the
institutional framework for discourse on film was still wanting.

2. Literariness
The Brechtian tenor of the „Word and Film‟ essay was of course to become
both more strident and more explicitly political in the years immediately
following its publication, not least in the writings of Kluge himself. It could
be argued, indeed, that this seminal essay established the tone which was to
dominate auteurist discourse in Germany right through to the 1980s.
Interestingly it does not address the question of literary adaptation itself in
any great detail – over and above the customary dismissal of a cinema which
„makes every film conform to the model of the novella‟6 – although a telling,
if brief commentary on Alain Resnais‟s Hiroshima mon amour (1959), based
on the screenplay of Marguerite Duras, does applaud the film‟s „immersion
of language in image, the emergence of language from image, the mutual
pursuit of verbal and visual texts, figures of parallelism and collision,
polyphony‟.7 Again the terminology applied to this early classic of the French
New Wave is that of critical theory and dialectics. Kluge himself has
strenuously avoided literary adaptation across his 50-year career as a
filmmaker, and his disparaging remarks on the practice – most famously that
„literary adaptations are always weaker than literature‟ – have become
canonical.8 This does not mean, of course, that he has restricted his activities

5 Ibid., p.232.
6 Ibid., p.230.
7 Ibid., p.240.
8 Alexander Kluge, BESTANDSAUFNAHME: Utopie Film: Zwanzig Jahre neuer deutscher
Film / Mitte 1983 (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1983), p.436. Original sources
have been translated into English throughout this book. Where published translations are
available, these have been used. Otherwise all translations are by the authors. (See Authors‟