Wim Wenders Wirkl.Name: Wenders, Ernst Wilhelm

Intern: Satznummer: 1462063 aus: imd_185
Titel
Biographisches zu: Wim Wenders
Kurz/Spitzname:
Wim
aka:
Vend˜su, Vimu
Wim
Wirkl.Name: Wenders, Ernst Wilhelm
Biograph.Hintergrund: Wim Wenders is an Oscar-nominated German filmmaker who was
born Ernst Wilhelm Wenders on August 14, 1945 in Düsseldorf, which then was located
in the British Occupation Zone of what became the Bundesrepublik Deutschland
(Federal Republic of Germany, known colloquially as West Germany until
reunification). At university, Wenders originally studied to become a physician
before switching to philosophy before terminating his studies in 1965. Moving to
Paris, he intended to become a painter.
He fell in love with the cinema but failed to gain admission to the French national
film school. He supported himself as an engraver while attending movie houses. Upon
his return to West Germany in 1967, he was employed by United Artists at its
Düsseldorf office before he was accepted by the University of Television and Film
Munich school for its autumn 1967 semester, where he remained until 1970. While
attending film school, he worked as a newspaper film critic. In addition to shorts,
he made a feature film as part of his studies, _Summer in the City (1970)_ (qv).
Wenders gained recognition as part of the German New Wave of the 1970s. Other
directors that were part of the New German Cinema were 'Rainer Werner Fassbinder'
(qv) and 'Werner Herzog (I)' (qv). His second feature, a film made from 'Peter
Handke' (qv)'s novel _Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1972)_ (qv), brought
him acclaim, as did _Alice in den Städten (1974)_ (qv) and _Im Lauf der Zeit
(1976)_ (qv). It was his 1977 feature _Der amerikanische Freund (1977)_ (qv) ("The
American Friend"), starring 'Dennis Hopper' (qv) as 'Patricia Highsmith' (qv)'s
anti-hero Tom Ripley, that represented his international breakthrough. He was
nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival for "The American
Friend", which was cited as Best Foreign Film by the National Board of Review in
the United States.
'Francis Ford Coppola' (qv), as producer, gave Wenders the chance to direct in
America, but _Hammett (1982)_ (qv) (1982) was a critical and commercial failure.
However, his American-made _Paris, Texas (1984)_ (qv) (1984) received critical
hosannas, wining three awards at Cannes, including the Palme d'Or, and Wenders won
a BAFTA for best director. "Paris, Texas" was a prelude to his greatest success,
1987's _Der Himmel über Berlin (1987)_ (qv) ("Wings of Desire"), which he made back
in Germany. The film brought him the best director award at Cannes and was a solid
hit, even spawning an egregious Hollywood remake.
Wenders followed it up with a critical and commercial flop in 1991, _Bis ans Ende
der Welt (1991)_ (qv) ("Until the End of the World"), though _In weiter Ferne, so
nah! (1993)_ (qv) won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes. Still, is reputation
as a feature film director never quite recovered in the United States after the
bomb that was "Until the End of the World." Since the mid-1990s, Wenders has
distinguished himself as a non-fiction filmmaker, directing several highly
acclaimed documentaries, most notably _Buena Vista Social Club (1999)_ (qv) and
_Pina (2011)_ (qv), both of which brought him Oscar nominations.
Hintergrund von: Jon C. Hopwood
Geburtsdaten: 14 August 1945, Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Körpergröße: 6' 3"
Familie/Ehepartner:
'Ronee Blakley' (qv) (1979 - 1981)
'Edda Köchl' (qv) (1968 - 1974)
'Donata Wenders' (qv) (1993 - present)
'Isabelle Weingarten' (qv) (1981 - 1982)
'Lisa Kreuzer' (qv) (1974 - 1978)
Gastauftritte:
Book: "Emotions Pictures., Reflections on the Cinema" by Wim Wenders. Published by
Faber and Faber on May 1, 1991. ISBN# 0-571-15272-4
Book: "The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations" by Wim Wenders. Published by
Faber and Faber on April 2, 1992. ISBN# 0-571-16517-6
Book: "The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations" by Wim Wenders. Published by
Faber and Faber in August 1997. ISBN# 0-571-17843-X
Book: "Einmal: Bilder und Geschichten" ("One Time: Pictures and Stories") A book of
photographs by Wim Wenders. Published by Verlag Der Autoren in May 1994. ISBN# 388661-151-5
Directed music video for the 'EELS' "Souljacker, partI", set in Berlin.
Commercial for Parisiennes cigarettes
(book) Die Zeit mit Antonioni: Chronik eines Films. Farbphotos von Wim Wenders,
Schwarzweissphotos von Donata Wenders. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1995.
ISBN 3886611620
directed TV commercials starring 'Peter Ustinov' (qv) and 'Verona Pooth' (qv) for
the EXPO 2000 in Hannover (Germany) (2000).
Book: "Nick's Film/Lightning Over Water," w/Chris Sievernich. 1981.
2003: Commercial for Audi's new A3, entitled "The other Side of the Road"
Book "My Time with Antonioni" (London, Faber & Faber, 2000)
(2012) Print advertising for Loewe 3D Home Cinema Systems - Promotor
(1970) Co-founder with 14 other filmmakers of Filmverlag Der Aotoren to produce and
distribute their films.
Monographie über:
Robert Phillip Kolker and Peter Beicken (contributor). _The Films of Wim Wenders:
Cinema As Vision and Desire._ Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0521380642
Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemunden. _The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and
the Postmodern Condition._ Detriot: Wayne State University Press, 1997. ISBN
0814325785
Aussprüche:
Sex and violence was never really my cup of tea., I was always more into sax and
violins.
Hollywood filmmaking has become more and more about power and control. It's really
not about telling stories. That's just a pretense. But ironically, the fundamental
difference between making films in Europe versus America is in how the screenplay
is dealt with. From my experiences in Germany and France, the script is something
that is constantly scrutinized by the film made from it. Americans are far more
practical. For them, the screenplay is a blueprint and it must be adhered to
rigidly in fear of the whole house falling down. In a sense, all of the creative
energy goes into the screenplay so one could say that the film already exists
before the film even begins shooting. You lose spontaneity. But in Germany and
France, I think that filmmaking is regarded as an adventure in itself.
Originality now is rare in the cinema and it isn't worth striving for because most
work that does this is egocentric and pretentious. What is most enjoyable about the
cinema is simply working with a language that is classical in the sense that the
image is understood by everyone. I'm not at all interested in innovating film
language, making it more aesthetic. I love film history, and you're better off
learning from those who proceeded you.
I will always produce my own films and avoid finding myself at the distributor's
mercy. You must become a producer if you want any control over the fate of your
work. Otherwise, it becomes another person's film and he does with it what he
pleases. I only had one experience like that and I will never repeat it.
I've turned from an imagemaker into a storyteller. Only a story can give meaning
and a moral to an image.
In the beginning I just wanted to make movies, but with the passage of time the
journey itself was no longer the goal, but what you find at the end. Now, I make
films to discover something I didn't know, very much like a detective.
It is very hard to stay inside the boundaries of a genre film., I admire people
that are able to do that. I just don't have the discipline. What I like about
genres is that you can play with expectations and that there are certain rules that
you can either obey or work against. But genres are a funny thing. They're heaven
and they're hell. They help you to channel your ideas and they are helpful to guide
the audience, but they don't help you in what you want to transport other than the
genre itself. Genres get angry if you want to tell other stories -- because they
are sort of self-sufficient. They like to be the foreground.
[on whether he will continue to film in 3-D] I will not do anything else. I'm
completely hooked. I think 3-D is a still unexplored cinematographic story. In my
books, it's the ideal medium for the documentary of the future. It's not invented
to show us different planets. It's invented to show us our own planet.
[on employing 3-D to film the choreography of Pina Bausch] The body is such an
important thing in [her] work, and it is fiction on the regular screen. In 3-D, the
body has volume. The body is an instrument to discover and conquer space. Everybody
thinks that depth is the great thing about 3-D. But in my book, volume is the great
thing.
[on the subject of his Oscar-nominated documentary] Pina was a perfectionist in a
different way. She wanted each dancer to be completely himself or herself. She
didn't want them to play any parts. That was an amazing process to see. To see them
do it, not fake it.
I believe very much in overseeable budgets. I really believe in films where the
money allows freer expression but the budget isn't that big that people are
breathing down your neck all the time and looking at what you're doing. The movies
that I really enjoy throughout the whole history of Hollywood were never the big
pictures., they were the underbelly.
In a nutshell, _Hammett (1982)_ (qv) was shot twice. The first film was shot
entirely on location in San Francisco only. Not a single second in the studio,
everything on location in real places in San Francisco. The studio didn't like it.
There wasn't too much action, too much time was dedicated to Hammett the writer and
not enough to Hammett the detective. He became a writer out of necessity because he
became sick and couldn't work as a detective anymore. He decided to write about his
experiences and in that idea "Hammett" was based. So my first shoot was strictly
set in San Francisco and really based on the actual character of Hammett. The
studio didn't like it, they thought it was too slow and they wanted more of the
fantasy and the detective. In the final product ten shots survived from my original
shoot: only exteriors. Because there wasn't much money left, and I was too stubborn
to drop it and or say, "Well then let somebody else do it." 'Francis Ford Coppola'
(qv) was too stubborn to fire me so we stuck it out and we respected each other in
spite of all the conflicts. So I ended up shooting the second version as well. That
was entirely in one sound stage. The whole [first] shoot never saw the light of
day, except for a couple of shots from the first, maybe 5% of the film from the
first version. (...) [The first version] was destroyed. It doesn't exist now. They
only kept a cut negative, everything else is junked. Which I found out really late
and I don't know who was to blame. I don't know. Anyway, I was very disappointed.
At one point I suggested to Zoetrope that I could finish [that version] and
wouldn't it be an interesting case study to present the two films? They said, "Oh
yeah, that's interesting, let's find out," and then eventually the guy who was
responsible for this did the whole inventory and said, "I'm sorry we couldn't find
your film."[2015]
I think the artistic process is one of the great adventures left in our modern
times. There are very few adventures left to be done by traveling anywhere because
everyone has already been everywhere, but creation is still a great adventure.
Films can heal! Not the world, of course, but our vision of it, and that's already
enough.
[on what did he learn from Sebastião Salgado] There's no one concrete thing that I
learned from him, but still there were a number of enormous lessons. To be so
radical, and once you've made a realization, draw your conclusions and then change
your life, that was something amazing. This man had a great career as an economist
ahead of him, and then realized he had a gift for photography and completely
changed his life and started from scratch. I don't think many people do that today.
And then 30 years later, he gave up that photo
Typisches:
Glasses with thick, dark rims.
On-the-road location filming
Triviales:
President of the European Film Academy
Donated his $5,000 Cannes prize for "Wings of Desire" (_Der Himmel über Berlin
(1987)_ (qv)) to Canadian filmmaker 'Atom Egoyan' (qv).
President of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989
He worked with all of his wives on at least one movie: With 'Edda Köchl' (qv):
_Alice in den Städten (1974)_ (qv), _Summer in the City (1970)_ (qv) and _Die Angst
des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1972)_ (qv)., with 'Lisa Kreuzer' (qv): _Alice in den
Städten (1974)_ (qv), _Der amerikanische Freund (1977)_ (qv), _Falsche Bewegung
(1975)_ (qv) and _Im Lauf der Zeit (1976)_ (qv)., with 'Isabelle Weingarten' (qv):
_Der Stand der Dinge (1982)_ (qv)., with 'Ronee Blakley' (qv): _I played It for You
(1984)_ (qv), _I played It for You (1984)_ (qv) and _Lightning Over Water (1980)_
(qv) and with 'Donata Wenders' (qv): _Al di là delle nuvole (1995)_ (qv), _Arisha,
der Bär und der steinerne Ring (1992)_ (qv), _Buena Vista Social Club (1999)_ (qv),
_The End of Violence (1997)_ (qv), _Lisbon Story (1994)_ (qv), _Land of Plenty
(2004)_ (qv) and _The Million Dollar Hotel (2000)_ (qv).
After studying medicine and philosophy in Munich, Freiburg and Düsseldorf, he
joined the Munich Academy for Television and Film in 1968.
Considers 'Yasujirô Ozu' (qv) his all time grandmaster.
Many of his films are indebted to 'Nicholas Ray (I)' (qv), which is proved by the
expressionistic use of color in _Der amerikanische Freund (1977)_ (qv) or the title
of _Bis ans Ende der Welt (1991)_ (qv) (Until The End of The World), the last
spoken words in Ray's _King of Kings (1961)_ (qv). _Im Lauf der Zeit (1976)_ (qv)
also lovingly lifts a scene from Ray's _The Lusty Men (1952)_ (qv). His movie
_Lightning Over Water (1980)_ (qv) is a documentary about 'Nicholas Ray (I)' (qv)'s
last days.
He is infertile since an illness in childhood
He closed Belgrade Film Festival - FEST 2006.
President of the Jury at the Venice Film Festival in 2008. He openly argued with
the festival's artistic director over the rules for the final verdict and disliked
the experience so much, he vowed never to be part of a film festival jury again.
Uncle of 'Hella Wenders' (qv).
Attended Munich's Academy of Film and Television from 1967 to 1970.
Wender's Gray City, Inc. Manhattan office overlooks 11 East 14th Street, the site
of D. W. Griffith's American Biograph studio, whose brownstone has been replaced by
a white condominium.
An avid backgammon player.
Hinweise: (qv)=quod vide=siehe dort. Ist die Biographie abrupt, s. den 2.Teil im
Index 2 als [_biographie teil 2].
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