Watched Wim Wender’s 1984 film Paris, Texas last night. It left heavy trace metals in my brain that sifted through my dreams and now lies like a thin layer of white silt all over my skin. The images, the music, the language, all of it so cohesive in creating a total experience of loss and sacrifice, of truths hard won and cherished in the calloused hand like a freshly unearthed gem. The opening shots of the bare Texas landscape, and the Mohave desert in California retreating to the edge of the camera’s frame, the deeply worn, dirt-caked face of the anonymous man who wanders around the parched landscape looking for water. Travis (played by Harry Dean Stanton) has been lost for four years, and we meet him as he wanders around the desert and finally collapses in a gas-station from dehydration. His brother is notified. We learn that Travis once had a wife and a son. The son is now living with the brother and his wife, and it is to this home that Travis is taken to. He does not speak for the first half-hour of the movie. When he finally does he is like a man rediscovering language, like someone who has forgotten the purpose of the tongue. Where has been all these years, what has he done? These are the mysteries the film gradually unwinds in an unhurried pace.
What separates a great film from merely a good one is the self-conviction in the power of its own images. When Travis in the beginning is looking for water, stops at a tap outside a lonely gas-station, discovers that it is broken, then walks across a brown expanse towards the door of the building, the camera lingers on the rambling form of the man – it does not cut immediately to an interior shot. We are subjected to the walk, the actual time it takes to get from the tap to the door. We are immersed in the dust, the heat and harsh light – we are forced into contemplation. This is possible because what we are looking at has an intrinsic power – the mysteries are real, they are not filmic fabrications meant to manipulate. The camera watches, it does not dictate.
The dialogue as written by Sam Shepard is spare, precise, and has no emotional window-decoration. I know Shepard’s work mainly as a playwright – my friend played a part in a recent production of Cowboy Mouth, which also dealt with the mythos of Western Americana and its eventual disillusionment. In Paris, Texas he employs the same spare style, like some sort of cross between Hemingway and Faulkner, where suddenly the poetry of an unexpected turn of phrase hits you sideways and takes you unawares. The characters are simple people leading complex lives, and the knowledge they have gained through their mistakes and regrets is a tough knowledge, a knowledge that comes from looking at things truly and knowing that nothing lasts, everything is mutable, stability is a lie, and sometimes you have to lose in order to grow.
(A person who means a lot to me I now realize is blind to the power of images. This blindness gives that person a kind of power – she is able to remain unaffected by almost any type of gaze. A shot of a burning expanse of arid land means nothing to her, while to me it is a visceral experience. I am lost in the landscape, but returned to myself in its barest form. My breath catches a bit. But there is nothing for her – it only remains as it is, an image of a desert. It is not transformed into a reflection of spirit. This immunity to images is something I have noticed many people around me share. Is it because we are so inundated by the image (our culture is, after all, a culture of images) that we are like water-logged ships sinking in a chaotic ocean, unable anymore to tell the difference between one water and the other? Or perhaps we have come to distrust images because of what we see around us all the time, fabrications meant to entice, to coerce, to manipulate. So when we come across an image that is merely itself and should move us with its honesty, we dismiss its naked depiction as the Emperor’s new clothes.)
Anyways, here’s a scene from late in the movie. Don’t watch it if you plan on actually watching the film, but for those who need a little more encouragement to check out this gem, go ahead.
Wenders is part of the ‘New German Cinema’, as it is called. It rose in the 1960’s and flourished right up to the mid-eighties, and included directors like Herzog and Fassbinder. It was started with The Oberhausen Manifesto published by 26 German filmmakers in 1962. The text is as follows:
“The collapse of the conventional German film finally removes the economic basis for a mode of film-making whose attitude and practice we reject. With it the new film has a chance to come to life.
German short films by young authors, directors, and producers have in recent years received a large number of prizes at international festivals and gained the recognition of international critics. These works and these successes show that the future of the German film lies in the hands of those who have proven that they speak a new film language.
Just as in other countries, the short film has become in Germany a school and experimental basis for the feature film.
We declare our intention to create the new German feature film.
This new film needs new freedoms. Freedom from the conventions of the established industry. Freedom from the outside influence of commercial partners. Freedom from the control of special interest groups.
We have concrete intellectual, formal, and economic conceptions about the production of the new German film. We are as a collective prepared to take economic risks.
The old film is dead. We believe in the new one.”
I wonder how something like this would fly in the current film climate in Canada. The only people I know who are actively part of the scene tend to refer to it as the Film Industry with absolutely no irony. Is it possible anymore to take financial risks like those that produced the films we call ‘great’?
Just some random musings from a film geek.
Now its off to the Fringe for voulunteering duties. I’ll try to post up some reviews of the plays as I see them.
