Alone in the Crowd: the figure of the flâneur in the work of Wim Wenders
A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of 'MA Media Studies: Film Studies' from the University of Amsterdam in the 2015-2016 academic year, submitted on June 24th
2016.
Student number: 10216359 Thesis of student: Sam Duijf
24 juni 2016, Amsterdam Thesis supervisor: dr. M.A.M.B. Lous Baronian Second reader: dr. A.M. Geil
Word count: 18664 Figure 1: The turbulent streets of Tokyo in Tokyo-Ga (1985) TC 01:00:29
Abstract
The films of contemporary German filmmaker Wim Wenders are continuously posing questions about the ontology and materiality of film. This thesis will show how Wenders’ ongoing interest and fascination for ‘new’ digital cinematic devices (while simultaneously keeping attached to what was ‘old’) is aligned with the notion of the flâneur – once elaborated by the French writer and art critic Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Just as the observer of modern urban life, Wenders seems to carefully scrutinize the rapidly changing iconoclastic city. However, as it will be argued, the postmodern metropolis complicates Wenders’ quest to find his ‘cinematic identity’ which results in a ‘nostalgia for the future’.
Keywords: Wim Wenders, analogue and digital filmmaking, flâneur,
postmodernism, Tokyo-Ga (1985), Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989), nostalgia
Acknowledgement
This thesis could not be realized without the help of my MA supervisor Marie-Aude
Baronian. Her academic support and kindness were of great help for me. Also the academic and stylistic critiques forced me to creatively and challengingly revise my work. Furthermore, I want to thank Mashya Boon for her very encouraging words, thoughts and corrections. My girlfriend, family and friends also deserve special thanks. They supported me in many ways that caused for new forms of inspiration and a strong discipline to continue writing. Also I want to give a special thanks to Adrian Belew, Robert Fripp, Tony Levin and Bill Bruford: better known in their formation as the progressive rock band King Crimson. Their 1987 album “Discipline” gave me, coincidentally, also a lot of discipline because without the mystifying and soul elevating sounds of this highly skilled, original and – most of all – sincere band, I was not able to empty my mind, which is an absolute necessity when writing
long texts. Although it is not my strongest point to convince others of my own personal interests, having said that King Crimson helped me through this academic project is hopefully enough. Lastly, I want to pay my respect to the man who made me spellbound since the first film I have ever watched by him: Wim Wenders. However, my love for Wenders’ work will not echo through this thesis. Instead, I will try to be critical, thus academic. Wenders’ films, documentaries, interviews and written work is inspiring in so many ways that I immediately knew that he was going to be my topic of discussion. His personal relationship with
modernism and with “the new” is directly discussed in his work, which made it a perfect combination: “Wenders” and “modernity”.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 6-8
1. WENDERS’ WORK AND THE REVERBERATIONS OF HIS GERMAN
POSTWAR MILIEU 9-25
1.1 Wenders’ motives 9-13
1.2 Wenders’ context 14-17
1.3 A New German voyage 17-19
1.4 The Wenderian journey 19-23
2. BAUDELAIRE’S FLÂNEUR AND THE STREETS OF PARIS 26-42
2.1 The ‘beauty’ful times of Baudelaire’s nineteenth century Paris 28-31
2.2 Being in and out of fashion 31-33
2.2.1 The (un)predictable nature of fashion 33-35 2.3 Moving towards an understanding of the flâneur 35-37
2.4 The skillful flâneur 37-38
2.4.1 Levels of flânerie 38-40
2.5 Where are we supposed to stroll? 40-41
2.6 Stretching the concept of the flâneur 41-42
3. EXPERIENCING THE ICONOCLASTIC CITY 43-58
3.1 Muting the postmodern metropolis 46-51
3.2 Wenders’ electronic tool 52-56
3.3 Representing the immersive metropolitan experience 56-58
5. SOURCES 65-69
5.1 Bibliography 65-68
5.2 Media 68-69
Introduction
In what follows, I will have a detailed look at the work of German filmmaker Wim Wenders. Wenders offers a rich and diverse oeuvre which consists of films, documentaries, essays, installations and various other art projects. By constantly refashioning his artistic realms, critics and scholars have crowned Wenders as a captivating object of study.1 Especially two
1 See for example The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire(1993) by Phillip Kolker and Peter Beicken and The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition (1997) by Roger Cook and Gerd Germünden.
of his documentaries, Tokyo-Ga (1985) and Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989)2 will be
analyzed to a great extent, while making at the same time references to the rest of his oeuvre for contextual and argumentative reasons. Both documentaries mainly display Wenders’ itineraries through the media-saturated city of Tokyo. In Tokyo-Ga Wenders’ endeavor to trace the legacy of the famous Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) ends up being a despondent trip through a city that has changed in so many ways for Wenders. Not only does Wenders encounters difficulties to trace back the same feeling that he experienced from watching Ozu’s films, also the image-based city seems to force Wenders to reflect upon his own use of (electronic) images. The experimentation of using ‘two systems at the time’, thus both photochemical images and electronic images, are profoundly discussed and literally displayed in Notebook on Cities and Clothes by the use of image-into-image structures. Why does Wenders use the iconoclastic city as a mirror to reflect upon his own cinematic
profession?
Taking Wenders’ whole oeuvre as a general starting point allows me to understand his idiosyncratic style of filmmaking which is especially pivotal in his documentaries. His active ‘appearances’ in the above-mentioned documentaries resemble in a way a classical notion that was once elaborated by the French writer and art critic Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) . To be more precise, Wenders’ idle act of ‘looking at urbanity’ on the one hand and Wenders’ self-reflexiveness about his use of modern, digital techniques within the realm of analogue filmmaking on the other hand, seem to epitomize the notion of the flâneur, as I will suggest. Wenders’ documentaries contain a dualistic function: his observations of the rapidly
changing modern media-saturated city force him to reflect upon his own ways of making film. Namely by initiating an open debate about how ‘new’ (digital) and ‘old’ (analogue) techniques are converted into Wenders’ continuous quest for his ‘cinematic identity’.
2 The original title of Notebook on Cities and Clothes is Aufzeichnungen zu Kleidern und Städten. Because this is a recurring title in my thesis, I prefer using the English title for the sake of clarity and convenience.
Indeed, the two documentaries are today, anno 2016, dated to a certain extent. However, with regard to Wenders’ recent 3D projects, his experimentations that will be discussed in this thesis, provide a fruitful encounter with his adaptive ways of dealing with new cinematic techniques. Wenders is openly enthusiastic about the possibilities of 3D cinema which blossom into a new way of cinematic experience since recent years. His If
Buildings Could Talk (2010), Pina (2011) and Everything Will Be Fine (2015) can be seen as
the most striking 3D examples. In fact, 3D cinema is according to Wenders a whole new cinematic domain in which he tries to find “pictures in reality and reality in pictures”,
according to scholar Blandine Joret (207). 3D is not only used as an aesthetic impetus to find 3D resemblances of the real world. It also allows Wenders to structure his shots and editing
according to the mechanisms of 3D, as Wenders states: “in 3-D, I come up with different
shots, I edit differently, I look at my actors differently. We are involved differently, myself as well as my audience, so don’t you think an intimate drama could also come out differently?” (qtd. in Joret, ibid). 3D film becomes another fashion for Wenders to enlarge the/his
cinematic powers.
Wenders is constantly shifting his cinematic interests; his search for ‘cinematic identity’ is dispersed throughout his entire oeuvre. By an ongoing recuperating stance towards what cinema ontologically is, Wenders’ way of looking at the ‘new’, while keeping attached to what was ‘old’ is aligned with the work of the flâneur as will argue. This thesis can therefore be seen as a hypothesis in which I suggest that Wenders shows distinct signs of this urban dweller, albeit in a different urban surrounding. Whereas the original flâneur strolls through the streets of the modern city, I believe that this notion can be loosely be adapted into a cinematic concept which allows this German filmic flâneur to walk through the postmodern metropolis in order look for signs of ‘(post)modernité’, as I will explicate.
informative elaboration about Wenders’ (early) work. By having a close insight in his work, I shall state that his overall lamenting characters already show signs of a continuous urban stroll that never seems to end. The second section will inhabit an assemblage of theories about the urban dweller – the flâneur. By rooting this notion back in the work of Charles Baudelaire, but also that of the German modern theorist Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), I believe that Wenders acts as a flâneur. And moreover, his (unintentional) articulation of the
flâneur provides the basis for what chapter three and my conclusion will state: Wenders’ flâneuristic tendencies provide a critical – and maybe even philosophical – reevaluation of
1. WENDERS’ WORK AND THE REVERBERATIONS OF HIS GERMAN POSTWAR MILIEU
Starting with a biographical introduction about the profound relationship between Wim Wenders and cinema in general, I will continue by briefly elaborating on his oeuvre. By appointing the historical context in which Wenders learned his filmmaking and distilling his main themes and topics, I provide a coherent overview of Wim Wenders as a self-reflexive film- and documentary maker. Without trying to speak for Wenders, I shall allow Wenders to speak for himself by referring to his essays and interviews. In this way there is an apparent distinction between the author’s intentions and my own interpretations.
1.1 Wenders’ motives
Already at the age of six, Wenders’ love for silent films by Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin and Keaton molded him into a young cinephile. He became susceptible to the mysterious beauty that cinema contained and his father understood that little Wenders needed only one thing: a camera. At the age of eight, Wenders received an 8mm camera and immediately started to record “things”, practically everything. In The Logic of Images (1991), a materialization of several essays by Wenders (including interviews and his transcribed documentary voice-overs), Wenders recalled a conversation with his dad when he was young:
Father: “Was machst du den da mit deiner Kamera?”
What are you doing there with your camera?
Wenders: “Ich filme die Strasse, das siehst du doch?”
I’m filming the street, can’t you see?
Father: “Und Wozu?”
And what for?
Wenders did not have a clear answer to this last question.3 The inability to answer this
question is, indeed, an important impetus for Wenders to make films. Even today, Wenders leaves this question unanswered, as will become clear. When he was making his first 16mm film he could not stop filming until the film reel was entirely finished. Wenders stated that “it didn't occur to me to pull away or stop shooting any earlier. With hindsight, I suppose it would have seemed like sacrilege to me” (ibid). Albeit less extreme, his fervent respect for the technicality of film will be visible throughout his oeuvre. Especially in his documentaries, the need for self-reflection is a clear focal point as I will elucidate in what follows. These films vary in style, narration and the use of (digital) images. Wenders is also often visible as an active subject in his own documentaries. Alongside his documentaries, Wenders’ (early) fiction films tend to follow a more classical narrative-based trajectory.4 Although, Wenders
himself acknowledges a dichotomy between “group A-films” and “group B-films”:
In the first group (A) all the films are in black and white. […] In the other group (B) all the films are in colour, and they are all based on published novels. The films in group A, on the other hand, are based without exception on ideas of mine - the word 'idea' is used loosely to refer to dreams, daydreams and
3 From The Logic of Images. p,1.
4 When I recall one of his “films” I shall, for the sake of clarity, consequently mention if it relates to a “fiction” or a “non-fiction” film.
experiences of all kinds. All the A-films were more or less unscripted, whereas the others followed scripts very closely. The A-films are loosely structured, whereas the B-films are all tightly structured
(ibid, 55-66).
Wenders’ idiosyncratic way of filmmaking results in a varied palette of films that are not per se linked to each other in form as we will see. Wenders tends to expand his style, his forms, and more importantly: his way of filmmaking; his use of different filmic apparatuses. In other words, together with his passion for filmmaking in general, his raison d’être as a filmmaker is rooted within a profound respect for the technicality and materiality of the cinematic medium. It is not necessarily a nostalgic respect, in the sense ‘that analogue film is better than digital film’. This tension is for example explicitly visible in his fictional ‘mise-en-abîme’ Der Stand der Dinge (1982). In this film-within-a-film, a film crew is working in Portugal to shoot their low budget sci-fi movie called The Survivors. Once the director of The
Survivors finds out that all the analogue film reel is used, he wonders why he is not informed
earlier that they were soon out of film stock. “If you knew that, you wouldn’t have produced anything”, his cinematographer wisely answers. By juxtaposing the analogue on the one hand, with the video and digital apparatuses which the crew uses (mostly out of boredom) on the other hand, Wenders not only introduces these two terms within one filmic representation, but he also sharpens the relationship between the analogue and the digital. For Philip Kolker, the auteur of The Films of Wim Wenders (1993), the digital computer within Der Stand der
Dinge “represents for Wenders the mechanization and displacement of form, imagination and
subjectivity” (Kolker, 104). At first sight, the digital computer is seen as the most dominantly threatening device which is capable of digitalizing images which are moving further away from a pure reality as we will see further on in this thesis. In Der Stand der Dinge, the digital is seen as a blemishing stain on the (originally analogue) medium of film. The present fear for free-floating digital images which are detached from their authentic and traceable
photochemical carriers, distinctively conflict with pure analogue images.
In Der Stand der Dinge, such ontological anxieties yield for a refusal of “new technologies” and thus provide an occupation of the cinematic dominant, the traditional analogue film. However, Wenders does not per se reject new technologies throughout his career. Without giving a value judgment, Wenders, instead, carefully and professionally observes technical changes within the cinematic realm in depth throughout his whole filmic oeuvre. Technical alterations in the materiality of film as such force Wenders to reflect upon ontological modifications of film via his own films. Primarily, but not exclusively, these reflections are quite pivotal in his documentaries.
As mentioned before, his documentaries aim to be non-structured and epitomize a personal intervention by Wenders. His documentaries can therefore be seen as “essay films”. I borrow this term from film scholar Laura Rascaroli which she discusses in her article “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments” (2008). According to Rascaroli, the essay film is mainly a mode of address. Within this mode, the essayist possesses an idiosyncratic gaze, an active experimentation with the medium and reflections upon that medium (39). Film scholar Timothy Corrigan adds that within this subjective vision a structural motif of questioning activity” is enunciated. The personal mode of “self-questioning activity” is a major hallmark of the essay film, and within this mode, a potential power is encompassed (79). In the case of Wenders, his “self-questioning activity” leads to an intimate portrait in which a credible and direct way of visualization leads to personal bond with the filmmaker. Wenders obliges a shared viewing experience; we observe with him.
Lightning over Water (1980), a ‘fictional documentary’5, exemplifies such “power”. This
portrait of the well-known Hollywood director Nicholas Ray is an assemblage of several (staged and non-staged) images. Some of them were taken by Wenders himself, some of them
5 Lightning over Water is in fact partially fictional, partially non-fictional, thus neither part of solely group A or group B.
by Wenders’ crew and others by Nicholas Ray. Nicholas Ray is diagnosed with lung cancer and we see within this film that Ray is moving closer and closer to his death. What is so essayistic about this film is that Wenders tipped over the initial edit of the film. Due to ethical standpoints regarding the visualization of Ray’s death, Wenders decided to upend his first edit. While shifting away from a third person narration and moving to a first person narration, Wenders is actively engaged with the viewing process. With his descriptive narration about all the events that are screened, he watches the film almost simultaneously with his viewers, as if he is located next to you on the couch. He is personally talking to you about the images he made. Despite the fact that the viewer cannot talk back, the viewer is personally addressed by Wenders in an intimate, descriptive and guiding way. Wenders’ personal narration let us believe that he is next to the viewer, with the viewer, and that his words are thus personally directed at the viewer. While talking openly about his feelings and struggles to film a friend who is dying, Lightning over Water creates a profound closeness between viewer and maker. Together with this closeness, his personal efforts to overthrow the initial edit and remake this film so that it still worshipped Ray, are distinct essayistic powers of a filmmaker (or:
“essayist”) that expresses a clear idiosyncratic, self-questioning gaze about the style and form of this film.
Wenders’ take on cinema is fluctuating and results in various forms and styles, which will be more addressed below. His ever-changing outlook on cinema as a medium is a major point of focus for this thesis. As Kolker already describes: “his [Wenders’] subjectivity tends to reveal itself in a continual quest for cinematic identity” (5). Wenders’ interest in the identity, the ontology of the medium itself is at stake here. His reflexive and questioning stance towards cinema is displayed in various films, which will be the focus of this thesis. His oeuvre is a rich compilation of self-reflexive questions about the medium specificity. Even today, as I already mentioned in the introduction, 3D filmmaking steps into Wenders’
cinematic realm, indicating that his search for “cinematic identity” is still ongoing. Already at a young age, Wenders tries to understand what the camera could do and how it can/must be used. His preoccupation with ontological questions about the materiality and the physicality of the cinematic medium are dispersed throughout much of his work.
1.2 Wenders’ context
Firstly, a few biographical and contextual elements on Wenders and his historical context are needed to provide a clear view on him as a figure in film history. It is worth mentioning that Wenders was born in Düsseldorf during the end of the WOII. The aftermath of the war and the complex status of German society ran parallel with Wenders’ growing up. It is therefore no coincidence that Wenders after his study Film and Television in Munich made multiple films which includes, or even better: visually excludes this “theme”. What remains are the dazzling characters moving from one (trans)national space to another. They leave their diegetic world and their viewers with a feeling of loss and homelessness. I will exemplify this by stretching out some of Wenders’ early fiction films.
The embodiment of this transitory, ‘not-knowing-where-to-go’ feel is already apparent in the main character of first feature film Summer in the City (1970).Almost as a European copy of Vivian Leigh’s performance in Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), protagonist Hans is on the run for a crime that he committed. His roaming around in Munich, Berlin and eventually Amsterdam captures a dislocated feeling of ‘not-knowing-where-you-belong’. In fact, all of Wenders’ following films contained in some way or another comparable
wandering, goal-seeking structures which his characters disseminate. By showing the goalie in a long shot, centered out of the soccer team, the goalie in Die Angst des Tormanns beim
Elfmeter (1972) gets immediately detached from the team’s body during the openings
between East and West Germany in Im Lauf der Zeit (1976). In Falsche Bewegung (1975), the antisocial protagonist Wilhelm [Rüdiger Vogler] wants to become a writer. Yet, he has to communicate with people who he decries in order to achieve his ambitions. What follows in an open-ended itinerary which is associative with an ever-searching destiny of this lamenting wannabe writer. A similar journey is found in Alice in den Städten (1974). In this film Philip Winter [Rüdiger Vogler] travels across America to finish his article. While getting close to a German lady and her daughter in New York, the wife leaves the two for unknown reasons and Winter is saddled with young Alice [Yella Rottländer] to search Alice’s mother.
This is merely a handful of examples in which we are able to see Wenders’
conspicuous focus on his dwelling and searching characters who seem to be deriving from the aftermath of their German pasts. As it is the case with Hans, the protagonist in Summer in the
City, Kolker remarks that the attempts of Hans who “extricates himself from a suffocating
past, echo the larger issue of Germans dealing with their history that insinuates itself through Wenders’ films (26). Even though it would be inaccurate to consider these examples as therapeutic ways of processing trauma. Yet, Wenders does not ignore the German past in his films; Wenders’ invisible historical scar that nourished him for years by postwar culture becomes then visible in the material form of his characters. In other words, the highly
sensitive and painful stigma of the postwar age remains underneath the surface. An important and often cited philosopher who attempted to denote the German postwar condition/feeling was Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).6 The searching characters of Wenders seem to be in line
with Heidegger’s endeavor to localize the notion of home during the German postwar condition:
6 Being aware of his dubiously compassion for the Nazi-party which he was accused of, I believe that this quote has nothing to do with that discussion. It does in fact capture a feeling that is precisely expressed by Heidegger and compatible with the feeling that Wenders portrays via his characters. For more information about these accusations and his relationship with the Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt, see for instance Stranger From
Many Germans have lost their homeland, have had to leave their villages and towns, have been driven from their native soil. Countless others whose homeland was saved, have yet wandered off. They have been caught up in the turmoil of the big cities, and have resettled in the wasteland of industrial districts. They are strangers now to their former homeland. And those who have stayed on in their homeland? Often they are still more homeless than those who have been drive from their homeland. Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world. […] All that with which modern techniques of communication stimulate, assail, and drive man- all that is already much closer to man today than his field around his farmstead, closer that the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer than the conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition of his native world.
We grow more thoughtful and ask: What is happening here – with those driven from their homeland no less than with those who have remained? Answer: the rootedness, the autochthony, of man is threatened today at its core! […] The loss of rootedness springs from the spirit of the age into which all of us were born (48-49).
The injured autochthony of many Germans is noticeable on a subcutaneous level which has several sociological outcomes: an alienated home, a massive desertion to the big cities and a submergence in “modern techniques of communication”. These are three important axes where Wenders’ work is deeply connected with as I will come back to. The above-quote in a way resembles the pitiful faith of German postwar society. Regarding the home and the homeland, a German postwar paradox emerges: the home cannot simply be redeemed by leaving the place which you want to find back. An encircling quest seems to be the faith for Wenders and his characters. For Wenders, this results in an ontological search for the profound meaning of film on the one hand: as a filmmaker, he can personally be understood as a dwelling and searching character as we will see. On the other hand, his characters show similar entrapments in vicious circles as we already sensed from the previous plot
Freund (1977). Protagonist Jonathan [Bruno Ganz] is a picture framer who is diagnosed with
an unknown blood disease that would eventually be fatal. While Jonathan presumes that his condition is getting more and more serious, his declining work ethos and his obtuse
relationship with his wife are turning him into an impulsive and unpredictable character who seems to be stuck with himself (see fig. 2).
Figure 2: An open-ended visualization of Jonathan Zimmerman in Der amerikanische Freund whose frame stays unclosed (TC: 00:16:41).
1.3 A New German voyage
Already from this glimpse of Wenders’ early career, we can distill certain important topics which are inextricably linked with his style of filmmaking. His wandering, dry and seemingly lamenting characters can be understood more precisely if we also zoom out and look at what was happening with the German cinema where Wenders was becoming part of.
During the late 60s, a German cinematic revolt was welling up. Ironically, the manifestation of this revolt took place in the United States.7 As German Studies scholar Eric
Rentschler remarks, the Junger Deutschen Film was “a product of the 1960s ferment, the revolt of a generation disenchanted with its elders' abuse of the cinematic medium, became transformed into an arthouse commodity, a hot item circulating in the 1970s under the rubric "New German Cinema" (7). The Junger Deutschen Film was a collaborative of young directors, writers and cinematographers. In the 1970s, numerous filmmakers joined, albeit not a contractual joining, the New German Cinema amongst Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Jean-Marie Straub and Wim Wenders.
The New German Cinema was the embodied collaboration of filmmakers who were highly inspired by the Oberhausen Manifesto which was held a few years earlier, in 1962. The lamenting manifesto was signed by twenty-six filmmakers and assaulted the artistic and economic devaluation of the German cinema. The Oberhausen Manifesto in itself did not contained straightforward and programmatic ideas about how these filmmakers wanted to realize their “detailed, spiritual, structural, and economic ideas about the production of new German cinema”.8 It did, eventually, inspire the New German Cinema. Taken various other
movements as example (Italian Neo Realism in the 40’s and the Nouvelle Vague in the 60’s
7The New York Museum of Modern Art showcased 12 West German feature films and 17 short films. The suggestion “that the new German cinema may be the most exciting new cinema outside of that of the American avant garde" by filmmaker Jonas Mekas already opened doors for (trans)national interest (qtd. in Eric
Rentschaler, 8).
for instance), the New German Cinema wanted to (re)possess territorial domains in Germany, while not being dependent on the state which ‘polluted’ the whole cinematic system in the first place. The idealistic wish of the latter did not entirely work out. The call for
independency and to create an own set of rules was still subordinate to state funded subsidies and television co-productions. Still, as Rentschler states, this system “has provided working conditions that have allowed directors to fashion a body of work with stylistic continuity and distinct visual flair” (34). This style that welled up as result of this “need to make films”9 was
artistically challenging. According to Roger F. Cook, to the co-editor of the book The
Cinema of Wim Wenders, especially the younger filmmakers (including Wenders, Herzog and
Fassbinder) were “pursuing a ‘new realism’ that meant to educate the spectator and to demonstrate the viability of a certain thesis, with the films often being little more than a selection of incidents and events in the life of a character” (15). Yet, there are no clear overriding techniques and manners. If we look at Wenders, it resulted in artistic freedom, freedom to work with a decent budget, to work with acclaimed writers (Peter Handke), cinematographers (Robby Müller) and a set of actors which some of them became well-known national and international stars (Rüdiger Vogler, Hannah Schygulla and Bruno Ganz for instance).
To sum up, this new collaborative and new fresh wind through German filmmaking culture, provided Wenders (and others) access to articulate personal styles and ideas. As we have seen, this ‘new realism’ entered into the lives of Wenders’ characters, resulting in dazzling searchers whose home(land) is out of sight; gone as it were. One can say that the political aftermath of postwar Germany is captured in a Wenderian journey of despair and loss. A rather sad and never-ending search echoes through most of his early work as I have stated above.
9 Wenders considers the New German Cinema not per se as a “distinct category”, but more as a distinctive need to make films. In The Logic of Images, p. 34.
1.4 The Wenderian journey
This Wenderian feeling is notably rooted in the realm of a (transnational) journey. A journey which causes mobilization for the main character, forcing him/her to go from point A to B (to C, to D and so on and so forth). In order to understand the emergence of the journey, I suggest to turn to French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), because this journey seems to be in line with his concept of the “urban voyage”, which he describes in his book
Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983). The urban voyage is defined by Deleuze as “the
stroll, the voyage and the continual return journey” (208). Opposed to the “urban” (or
“modern”) voyage, classical (Hollywood) cinema was always focused on what Deleuze calls the “sensory motor action scheme”(210). In short, within this scheme, filmic temporality was consistently subordinate to the action of narrative, and the action of causality. Movements and characters follow a linear trajectory which are determined by these actions (208). This often resulted in the well-known polished and smoothened cinema of Hollywood. According to Deleuze however, Italian Neo Realism in particular can be seen as the assignable catalyzer which announced a new kind of cinema. After the end of WOII, Italian Neo Realists changed towards new aesthetics and new narrative-based structures. Italian neorealist directors like Vittorio de Sica (1901-1974) and Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) deliberately inhabited long shots, lack of coherent narratives and moved away from classical Hollywood tempo. This new European cinema that emerged shares many similarities with the later New German Cinema10 which Wenders was part of. An important setting for this new cinema was the
“any-space-whatever – marshalling yard, disused warehouse, the undifferentiated fabric of the city” (208). Derelict ruins, deserted buildings, empty streets and the impersonal city are denominators of such postwar milieus. These spaces heavily (and deliberately) conflicted
10 Scholar Richard W. McCormick remarks that within the early works of Wenders “reticence about montage” and “love for pro-filmic reality” is present which resembles Italian Neo-Realism. In The Cinema of Wim
with the fluidity and stability of classical cinema.
While being aware of the resemblances between Wenders and a movement like the Italian Neo Realists, Wenders’ settings and surroundings move beyond those of that of de Sica and Visconti for example. Looking at the “any-place-whatever” between Wenders on the one hand and the Italian neorealists on the other hand, the interrelation is indeed clearly visible. In Wenders’ films, the characters also embody these ‘empty’ spaces, like Travis [Harry Dean Stanton] does in the openings sequences of Paris, Texas (1984). We know nothing about Travis, at this point we even do not know his name. What is he doing in the far-reaching desert all by himself? What are his goals and where is his home? The vast landscape in Paris, Texas (see fig. 3) exemplifies this “nothingness”. A second example could be found in Der Stand der Dinge. The stranded film crew emanate their feeling of bewail at the deserted beach (see fig. 4). Wenders’ characters are subjected to a personal
psychological crisis while being rooted in such “any-space-whatever”.
Figure 4: The stranded film crew besetted by the enormous desertion of the sea (TC 00:10:24).
However, Wenders’ “any-space-whatever” is often subjected to a transnational paradigm. His transitory characters are moving from one side to another, and moving from one country to another. A recurring structure within his films, is the friction between transnational spaces. On the one hand Wenders’ characters tend to break borders between different countries and different continents, and make them seemingly one united whole in which it is not the case that you move from nation to nation; but from land to land. The transnational quest by Wenders converts these lands into homogenous spaces which are all alike. A useful example in this respect would be Alice in den Städten, in which it does not matter where the characters are in the world (New York, Amsterdam, Wuppertal): it is all the same. However, simultaneously, the confrontation between one distinct transnational space opposed to the other, gives Wenders the opportunity to evoke a scrutinizing (and often elegiac) friction between these two spaces. Especially between North-Europe and America. This recurrence in Alice in den Städten for instance, is according to film scholar Silvestra Marienello described as an “Ameuropian” quest. Ameuropian is the conjunction of America on the one hand and Europe on the other. “Ameuropian” refers to the encounter between “the
American landscape (human, sonar and musical geographic, etc.) and a European gaze replete with memory […] constituted by a German’s perspective on the States” (165-166). This respective is frequently displayed as a negative and critical one. In the famous scene at a New York hotel room in Alice in den Städten where Philip is writing some thoughts in his notebook, he states that:
The inhuman thing about American TV is not so much that they hack everything up with commercials, though that’s bad enough, but in the end all programs become commercials. Commercial for the status quo. Every image radiates the same disgusting and nauseated message. A kind of boastful contempt. Not one image leaves you in peace, they all want something from you.
Falling into the American abyss of audiovisual images, according to Marienello “one sees images and not reality” (168). By this time Wenders has an ambiguous fascination for America. Indeed, American film is the source of production for his most famous films by directors like John Ford and Nicholas Ray. Especially their black-and-white films contains what reality is for Wenders: “it is the way you describe essence, rather than surfaces” (Wenders, 35). On the other hand, America is nowadays all about surfaces. Images do not speak for themselves and often relate “to something [else] that already exists, into a kind of a
déja-vu” (Wenders, 101). Images create their meaning only in existence with other (older)
images. The essence and the beauty of an image is thus liable to its power for a segregated existence while not being related to other images. Thus, these itinerary’s which his characters undergo are turning lands, cities and districts homogeneously into a unified whole. While at the same time, he uses the lack of borders to move to a particular space in order to lament and offer a critical standpoint through the use of those same characters.
“I want my films to be about the time in which they are filmed, and to reflect the cities,
landscapes, objects and people involved in them, myself included” (Wenders, 18).
As opposed to his feature films, Wenders’ documentaries express Wenders’ own voice more concretely. Topics as “cities, objects and people” are mainly discussed in these self-reflexive depictions. As I already stated, for Wenders, finding the ‘essence’ in film is constitutive of the work of a filmmaker. By anchoring himself in a world of images, he tries to understand what these images mean for him. This results in an open debate where he uses these same images (which are the topic of discussion) as a platform for discussion. The three most important documentaries which include this ontological quest for film are Chambre 666 (1982), Tokyo-Ga and Notebook on Cities and Clothes. These are the most salient examples of this discussion and they were made in – approximately – the same period of time; a period where the ‘classical’ image was being ‘assaulted’ by the emergence of electronic images.
Chambre 666 is in fact a collage of different meanings and perspectives on cinema by various
filmmakers (eg. Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni and Steven Spielberg) who Wenders interviewed during the Cannes Film Festival in 1982. The camera is located in a fixed position within one room and the interviewee has eleven minutes (approximately one 16mm film reel) to answer Wenders’ questions about the meaning and future of
film(making). Nevertheless, I want to concentrate specifically on Tokyo-Ga and Notebook on
Cities and Clothes because these explicitly show, both visually and orally, Wenders’ feeble
state as a filmmaker who is located in the midst of an altering, media-saturated city.
Tokyo-Ga explores the blurred urban landscape of the beloved Tokyo that the Japanese filmmaker
Yasujiro Ozu often depicted in his films. This was the reason for Wenders to track down the legacy of the famous Japanese director in a city that has changed so much after Ozu died. In
Paris. His conversations with the Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto are presented as a hybrid collection of images and forms; interviews, narration, video images (within images), non-diegetic music are disorderly collided with each other. This film is, according to Nora M. Alter, the highlighter of Wenders’ “reluctant concession to the twenty-first century” because it was shot both in 35mm and in video images (156). We can already see that
Wenders’ stance is shifting, or at least becomes more ‘flexible’ regarding the ontological meaning of film, as I shall argue below.
While providing an apparent contextual framework of Wenders as a filmmaker and by elucidating some aspects of his oeuvre, I hinted that Wenders’ modes of wandering – by himself and his characters – are visible in his diverse and hybrid career. Precisely in the above-mentioned documentaries – instead of his “newer” ones like Pina (2011) and The Salt
of The Earth (2014) – indicate his explicit focus with ontological issues and reflections about
“landscapes, cities and himself” (Wenders, 18). His visual assessments inhabit analogous practices with those of “flânerie”. In the next chapter I will trace down the wandering notion of flânerie by rooting it in the classical works of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin to eventually localize the flâneur within Wenders’ filmic activities.
2. BAUDELAIRE’S FLÂNEUR AND THE STREETS OF PARIS
For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.
When we recall Wenders’ conversation with his dad, when the young filmmaker “stood by a window and filmed the street below, the cars and pedestrians” only for the sake of “filming”, Wenders was located in the pile of people who epitomizes urban street life (Wenders, 1). Yet, as his documentaries will express, he is at the same time detached from these people via his intermediated use of his (digital) camera and/or video camera. He is, indeed, part of the urban crowd, yet, he nevertheless locates himself at a safe distance in order to properly observe the crowd of which he is himself part of as we shall see. Through his documentaries, his interest in “streets, cars and pedestrians” is synchronized with Wenders’ self-reflexive observations about his own use of ‘modern life’ within the realm of filmmaking. Think in this respect of the new techniques and digital tools he is working with. In the next chapter I will delve into his documentaries more profoundly, but an example of such ‘synchronized survey’ is already apparent in Tokyo-Ga. While using the pompously image-based city of Tokyo as a backdrop, his one-week during stay in Tokyo is being recorded with his mobilized digital camera. In this manner, as scholar Nora M. Alter already emphasizes, Wenders initial goal to “recapture the city that was the topic of Ozu’s films” paves the way for a retrospective gaze on Wenders own use of the digital camera which documented everything in his quest (139). Wenders namely admits that if he would have gone to Tokyo without a digital camera, he would remember more.11 Thus, while using the digital camera already, these documentaries devoid a
clear persuasive utilization of the ‘new’ medium without thinking it over first. For Wenders, the act of ‘looking at urban life’ almost simultaneously means a ‘looking at himself’ as chapter three will mainly discuss. How resonates modern urban life a platform in which Wenders can observe himself as a filmmaker in a ‘modern’, ‘digitalized’ age? How can an observance to urban life provide a feasible mirror to look at Wenders’ own ‘modern’ ways of dealing with digital film for example? Before we move to these questions more precisely, we
have to turn first to the French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire’s way of ‘looking at modern urban life’ is particularly elaborated in The Painter of Modern Life – Le
Peintre de la vie modern – (1863), a collection of short essays on art and modern life. The Painter of Moden Life inhabits an in depth look at how the observer – the flâneur as becomes
clear – is aware of his ever-changing urban surroundings and how the flâneur conducts himself regarding modernity. Indeed, we will see that Wenders seems to echo the Baudelairian act of flânerie. Via his documentaries, Wenders could be compared to the
flâneur; to the urban dweller who tries to determine what modernity ontologically is.
Wenders does not only seem to embody the most important thoughts of Charles Baudelaire to a certain extent, simultaneously, Wenders’ films and characters (including Wenders himself), also contribute to an exacerbated understanding of Baudelaire’s enigmatic concept of the
flâneur. His use of digital processes force him to reflectively think about new modes, which
is akin to Baudelaire’s stance about ‘modernity’ as I will show.
Digital processes which are other than photochemical filmmaking, are exposed and questioned by Wenders himself while using them already (!), for instance in Notebook on
Cities and Clothes and Tokyo-Ga. The lack of a distinct source, a photochemical carrier,
forces Wenders “to find the essence in the process of fabricating [images]” as he states in
Notebook on Cities and Clothes. Finding essence in film as an art form can prompt
similarities to what Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) calls an “aura” 12 in his canonic essay “The
Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility” from 1936. Albeit that “aura” is a highly debated term, works of art according to Benjamin can lose their authenticity by being mechanically reproduced; aura is described as “the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be” (1937, 105). An aesthetic experience which spiritually elapse our normal ways of engaging with life. For Benjamin, authentic art is covered with a translucent and
12 Although Benjamin already invokes this term in his 1931 article “Little History on Photography”, the elucidation of this term is more riveted in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility”.
authentic veil that is not visible at first sight. Finding essence – finding the aura in art – and trying to maintain this aura (even in digital reproducible times) is Wenders’ task that he takes upon himself throughout his career which will become clear. To enlighten this task, we have thus to turn to Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life and eventually his elaborated figure of the city dweller – the flâneur.
2.1 The ‘beauty’ful times of Baudelaire’s nineteenth century Paris.
In order to have an in depth look at Wenders’ articulation between media and his urban surroundings, I will suggest that the concept of the flâneur by the French poet resonates in multiple ways Wenders’ filmic activities. By tracing this concept back to its origin by the use of the original text by Baudelaire as well as multiple secondary texts, I will expose where we could localize Wenders in the theory of Baudelaire, and I will pose an exacerbated
understanding of the ‘connoisseur of the city’ which also leaves its traces in a cinematic realm. Before I expound this concept more profoundly, let us take a concise look at the socio-cultural conditions under which Baudelaire’s perception was subjected to.
Nineteenth century Paris, merely several years after the Revolution of 1789, was still in a process of constructing its own urban identity. Paris’ rearranging political and economic systems made the city blossom into a modern center of growth, wealth and a new urban energy. According to Priscilla Ferguson, the author of the book Paris as Revolution: Writing
the Nineteenth-century City (1994), Paris became the spatialized breeding ground for a new
urban language since “Paris could represent the Revolution because the Revolution, in its turn, remade Paris in its image” (Ferguson, 11-13). Especially in its topographical signifiers, Paris demolished all explicit monarchist references and became susceptible to a complete urban make-over. Aside from economical advancements, Paris became a major center for social convergence. In light of the flâneur’s beloved environment to stroll around, it is not
needless to say that Paris became one of Western Europe’s hotspots with its sparkly café life and the focus on (mass) entertainment. Paris of the nineteenth century was known for its leading role for initiating new modes of fashion, which were centered in large shopping malls (arcades) as we will see.
Baudelaire’s early writings derive from his regular visits to the salons. The salon was the perfect meeting place for the intellects. Here, one could leave the fast urban street life and recuperate energy and write and/or talk about art and politics and practically everything in life. Baudelaire’s early literary observations about modern life would form the basis of what he later would elaborate in The Painter of Modern Life. Baudelaire’s critical stance against the various (mythical) paintings on the wall that hung in these salons already point to Baudelaire’s demand for contemporary creative artists who shall not reach back for the past but, instead, “celebrate the advent of the new”:
This Salon, on the whole, is like all previous Salons. […] Let us record that everyone is painting better and better – which seems to us a lamentable thing; but of invention, ideas or temperament there is no more than before. No one is cocking his ear to tomorrow’s wind; and yet the heroism of modern life surrounds and presses upon us. We are quite sufficiently chocked by our true feelings for us to be able to recognize them. There is no lack of subjects, nor of colors, to make epic. The painter, the true painter for whom we are looking, will be he who can snatch its epic quality from the life of today and can make us see and understand, with brush or with pencil, how great and poetic we are in our cravats and our patent-leather boots. Next year let us hope that the true seekers may grant us the extraordinary delight of celebrating the advent of the new (Salon of 1845, 31-32).
Baudelaire’s discontent about the paucity of interest in “tomorrow’s wind”, modernité as we will see, is a general presupposition which finds its most elaborated articulations in his 1863 essay The Painter of Modern Life which I want to address more closely.
concept of ‘beauty’. Although beauty seems to be an overarching universal term that is relevant for almost everything in life, beauty consists for him of both a general and a particular component (3). General beauty is the veiled ‘sublime’ which is extremely hard to touch upon and which is only expressed by the true, classical artists. The particular element, “tomorrow’s wind”, on the other hand, entails the element of ‘being temporal’. This
“circumstantial beauty”, how Baudelaire puts it, is characterized by a vivid emergence, yet bearing simultaneously the essentials that ‘circumstantial beauty’ must eventually face its inevitable decline; and makes places for another temporal beauty (1, 3). These transcendent “winds” appear and disappear and Baudelaire calls them “the sketch of manners” (ibid). According to him, each age is characterized by their own manners, their own temporal qualities; emotions; morals; even its own facial expressions (14). “The sketch of manners” already implies its multifaceted nature which contains different essentials. The key figure to pinpoint this “sketch of manners” is epitomized by the flâneur as we will see. The flâneur searches for signs “circumstantial beauty” while the urban street life functions as a backdrop. Comparable is Wenders’ attempt to trace back the legacy of filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu in his documentary Tokyo-Ga. During this inspecting voyage through Tokyo, Wenders experienced other temporal manners than he would experience of Tokyo via the films of Ozu. Ozu’s films were often devoted to the striated beauty of Tokyo’s mythical and ordered urban qualities. Wenders narrates that he had a preconceived image of Tokyo because he thought that he knew the people of Tokyo so well through Ozu’s films: “no other city and its people have ever been so near and so familiar to me. I was trying to find this nearness myself, and it was that intimacy that my scenes from Tokyo were looking for” (Wenders, 61). Despite his valiant quest, Wenders already states that he was “perhaps looking for something that no longer existed” because his beloved image of Tokyo has changed into a Tokyo that “appeared as a wanton, loveless, menacing, even inhuman proliferation of images” (Wenders, 61-62).
The city of Tokyo had capriciously changed and had adapted different particular elements than the ones Wenders was familiar with.13
In sum, ‘beauty’ abides both general as well as particular elements which coexist with each other, rather than being separate entities. Notwithstanding the sublime essentials of eternal beauty, we need temporal circumstantial qualities to reveal the eternal. However, seizing these temporal qualities is a crucial point, because the ‘sketch of manners’ is not given in a palpable preformed index. For Baudelaire, in order to understand modern life we must look at sartorial fashion. According to him, this is a necessity to understand the notion and the inducements of the flâneur. And for this essay, the focus on “fashion” in this chapter is also requisite for my later analyses of Notebook of Cities and Clothes.
2.2 Being in and out of fashion
Baudelaire explicitly emphasizes the role that sartorial fashion bears, namely that of indexical value for appointing the capriciously modern features of a certain time. In the earlier quote deriving from Baudelaire’s Salon of 1845 we already had a glimpse of his interest in fashion –in its most direct meaning regarding clothes and bodily extensive manners. In the above quote he speaks about the fact that the wind of modern life is already discernible in “our cravats and our patent-leather boots”. It is modern life – modernité – that includes its
“ephemeral, fugitive and contingent” features which is the half of art other to the ‘eternal’ as stated above (13). Modernité comes and goes and this transitive form of beauty blows over society like a wind which is extremely ephemeral and therefore difficult to capture.
Baudelaire also describes modernité as being “the depiction of bourgeois life and the pageant of fashion” (4). Scholar Ulrich Lehmann stresses the etymological relation between fashion (in French: mode) and modernity (modernité): “In mode, the two meanings of manner or type – as in ‘mode of living’ or ‘style’ – and modern, that is contemporary and progressively
changing, come together (2010, 314). These terms are interconnected and the quarrel between the ancient and the modern leads to a call-and-response between the two components.
Fashion implies a certain ‘newness’ that possibly could take over that which is ‘taken over’. Lehmann describes that the dialectical nature of fashion does not elapse and does not take over the ancient; instead modernité inhales the sublimity of the older styles and echoes these onwards via its ephemeral artistic enunciations (Lehmann 2000, 39). ‘Ancient’ and ‘new‘ undertake a co-operative friction in which each of them does not surpass the other.
Fashion is for Baudelaire the most salient characterization of modern life and fashion was considered as “the key to modernity” (Steel, 90). Yet, as Lehmann also addressed, fashion does not only abbreviates its meaning and value regarding clothes and textiles. Fashion in clothes cannot be isolated without its “cultural meaning”, and it can thus not be seen without a constant retrospection to other “fashionable expressions in modern culture” (Lehmann 2010, 314). In this respect, fashion – and its expression throughout modern culture – have to be understood, to use Baudelaire’s words, as the collision of every element that a certain age encapsulates; “everything, I say, combines to form a completely viable whole” (13). By this, Baudelaire does not only mean the set of clothes, dresses, textile materials and so on, but also the most personal elements have to be taken into account – like a smile, a glimpse and the unique time-related expressions of certain age. Baudelaire amplifies the concept of fashion further than solely the material and objectified connotations which fashion seems to address at first sight. Fashion is for him also the opaque layer of circumstantial manners that each age includes. Hence, fashion is ambiguous because it is restricted to be a part of modernité, but fashion is at the same time equal to modernité. Thus, ‘fashion’ is the generic term which inhabits all manners of modernity, including the sartorial elements.
Fashion can be considered as a set of oscillating qualities which come and go; fashion simply appears and disappears without any predictable structures. “Tomorrows wind” implies this transcendent feature which is also akin to Benjamin’s observation that fashion functions as the weather. The recurrent qualities of coming back and moving away “stand in the cycle of the eternally selfsame” (1936, 390). Both being unpredictable and being part of a larger whole, means that fashion has its own rhythms and its own structure.
However, according to German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918) fashion does not move so enigmatically like an unpredictable squall as Baudelaire and Benjamin suggest. Already in his first sentence of his 1904 article “Fashion”, Simmel points out that “fashion is a form of imitation and so of social equalization” (541). For Simmel, fashion leads inevitably to processes of copying (by a lower class) and separating (by a higher class). Indissolubly to this idea is that fashion has to occur in a society that is based on a classified structure; a stratified society that has to be divided into the inferiors (the “lower class”) and the superiors (the “upper class”). In this envisioning, the lower class is always looking up to the upper class and not the other way around. This biased relation is due to the fact that the latest fashion – which is marked by “social forms, apparel, aesthetic judgment, the whole style of human expression”– does only affect the upper class (545). Lower classes, in their turn, want to catch up with the fashion that is standardized by the superiors; a principle that works the same as ‘envy’, according to Simmel. Envy for wanting to have the same what the other one possesses: “this quiet personal usurpation of the envied property contains a kind of antidote, which occasionally counter-acts the evil effects of this feeling of envy" (548). Imitating that what is envied leads to a form of contempt. The upper class, as a reaction to this adaptation of the lower class want to regain their social demarcation by searching for a new fashion, resulting in a never-ending cycle of reshaping fashions. Regarding nineteenth century Paris, Benjamin’s citation of Friedrich Vischer (German art philosopher, 1807-1887) indicates that
fashion was the “barrier” of these different social strata’s. Vischer asserts that “fashion, as we understand it today, has no individual motives but only a social motive” (qtd. in Arcades
Project 1936, 74). This relates to the Simmelian process of the endeavor by one (relatively)
small group who takes a fashionably advantage and thus inhabiting the latest fashions, while the other group tries to imitate and copy their superiors.
Sartorial fashion as part of modernité, can thus also finds its impetus through stratified structures in society that produce processes of imitation and equalization; and thus of
differentiation. Fashion is the marker for the dichotomy between different classes; fashion is the process which unites one class, being simultaneously demarcated from another. In sum, the rise and fall’ of modernité is not per se axiomatic as a mere wind which dwells up and departs; the prevailing powers of society can at the same time force fashion into a certain direction. According to Baudelaire, one needs a hawk eye in order to see these fluctuations in fashion. It is the flâneur’s task to get hold on the ephemerality of modernité, in which fashion (mode) is one of its most valuable components. Fashion, as we have seen, rises up and eventually falls into the abyss of obsolescence; facing its own inevitable decline. The
temporal and unpredictable14 elements of fashion call for a skilled metropolitan who indulges
oneself into the fluctuating playground of fashion: the modern city.
2.3 Moving towards an understanding of the flâneur
Honoré de Balzac and Alexandre Dumas, as scholar Rob Shields has argued, gave the first articulations to the concept of the flâneur, but it was Baudelaire who dragged the flâneur out of his “urban mythical” nature and extensively rephrased its characteristics (62). The flâneur is the embodied subject which propels as a transcendent spirit through the city and through the crowd; he epitomizes the emergence of a new urban figure. The flâneur is the strolling
14 Albeit that Simmel gives reason to believe that the structures of fashion are partly forced by a classified society.
and wandering observer who enjoys being among the hordes of people since “his passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd” (Baudelaire 1863, 9). The flâneur
“delights in universal life” and Baudelaire continues by saying that his worthy task is to find
the mysterious beauty of present day fashion: “if a fashion or the cut of a garment has been slightly modified, if bows and curls have been supplanted by cockades, if bavolets have been enlarged […] be very sure that his eagle eye will already have spotted it from however great distance (11). Again, Baudelaire is directly pointing towards sartorial fashion (often qualified by its objectified and materialized forms: dresses, coiffures, textile use etcetera) which is the most plain hallmark of modernité. These are the characteristics of modernité. Next to this ‘quantitative’ marker of modernité, the flâneur seeks for a more phenomenological experience of ‘qualitative’ elements of glances, emotions and manners. By submerging himself into the crowd, as Mike Featherstone argues, the flâneur “seeks an immersion in the sensations of the city, […] to become lost in feelings, to succumb to the pull of random desires” (1998, 913). By being ‘one’ with the masses, the flâneur’s immersion enables him to not only see; but also feel the modern city. Hence, his immersive usurpation of both
‘quantitative’ as well as ‘qualitative’ manners makes an interpretation and evaluation of modernity possible.
Then, after detecting the sketch of manners, it is the flâneur’s ability to, as Lehmann said before, maintain an ongoing conversation between what is past and what is present, between what was beautiful then and what is modern now. Baudelaire famously states that it is the flâneur’s business to “distil the eternal from the transitory” (12). The flâneur needs to carefully extract the ‘eternal’ historical poetry from modernity’s circumstantial elements. According to Lehmann, modernity is, as mentioned before, merely a reflection of the ancient through its “most ephemeral expressions” (2000, 39). Modern and ancient do not subvert each other, but the ancient past’s envelope rather echoes in the present day beauty that is
decorated with its own temporal manners. The task of the flâneur is to observe, and above all, to express the modern conversion of the ancient.
Not everyone is gifted with the capacity of documenting and expressing his findings of street life as the flâneur does: “few are gifted with the capacity of seeing; there are fewer still who possess the power of expression” (Baudelaire, 12). So, his responsibilities are twofold: firstly, the flâneur must see and observe. Secondly, he must rapport his findings. Scholar David Frisby mentions Benjamin’s claim that the flâneur must “produce texts” about his reports regarding urban street life:
The flâneur, and the activity of flânerie, is also associated in Benjamin’s work not merely with observation and reading but also with production – the production of distinctive kinds of texts. The
flâneur may therefore not merely be an observer or even a decipherer, the flâneur can also be a
producer, a producer of literary texts (including lyrical and prose poetry as in the case of Baudelaire), a producer of illustrative texts (including painting), a producer of narratives and reports, a producer of journalistic texts, a producer of sociological texts (83).
In this sense, we might consider Wenders’ camera recordings also as a form of “producing text”, one of the flâneur’s tasks. Wenders journalistic essays of urban life are mostly
observed and documented via the use of a (digital) camera, instead of merely binoculars and a white sheet of paper to express his findings (see fig. 5). I shall, however, come back to this point more closely after a more dense pronunciation of the skills that a flâneur imbeds and
where the flâneur emerged as a figure of observance.
Figure 5: The nineteenth century flâneur who carefully observes the streets.15
2.4 The skillful flâneur
The Painter of Modern Life is a hymn for the artistic draftsman Constantin Guys (1802-1892)
who Baudelaire uses as a motif throughout his essay. This “man of the world”, which goes by under the denomination of “Monsieur G.” is interested in the whole world; not so much in politics, but in an “understanding and appreciation of everything that is happening on the surface of our globe” (7). The exclusivity of his being leads to an incongruence which
separates the man of the world from a highly skilled painter even if the latter can impressively handle the most complex painting techniques with great finesse. Being a man of the world is not so much a matter of acquaintance, but of understanding. Finesse is subordinated to the mental grasp. The man of the world is characterized by a strong curiosity in life and a child-like convalescence: which is ”child-like a return towards childhood: “the convalescent, child-like the child, is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly interesting himself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial” (7). Only few are worthy of deserving this entitlement by Baudelaire; only the true artist who embraces the ‘new’ and is willing to keep up with modernity’s pace. His function is thus mostly devoted to this distilling process in order to express modernité. Flânerie is so to say an individual practice devoted to a social practice, a practice that reflects the whole urban thought: by expressing modernité one can get hold on the understanding and appropriation of urban life. Only he keeps who keeps on transforming himself synchronically with modernity and eloquently expresses modernité by ‘producing texts’ – only he can become a man of the world.
2.4.1 Levels of flânerie
Though, the man of the world is blessed with “an aim more than a mere flâneur”, a gaze which is more faithful to the purification of the eternal from the transitory; keeping one foot
in the past and one in the present, instead of the general tendency that artists have to steal beauty from the past and reuse this in a present day setting (Baudelaire, 12). The – slightly denigrating – use of the word “mere” hints that the act of flânerie is divided into sublevels. A “mere” flâneur connotes a decrease in exclusivity, yet it requires still a whole set of skills. Keith Tester, editor of the book The Flâneur (1994), sheds light on the distinction between the man of the crowd and the man in the crowd (3) in which the former is related to Monsieur G. The man of the crowd delves himself, admittedly, into the homogeneous collusion of bourgeois street life, yet he knows that he is physically akin to the rest, but is mentally
capable of acknowledging his own ambivalent position in the crowd. This flâneur knows that he is mentally not part of the crowd, because of his invisible mask which makes him only temporally part of average bourgeois life. Truth is, “if he could be seen he would be unable to observe” (3-4). Ambiguously, he belongs partially to the crowd and partially not. His
invisible (mental) distance towards the crowd does not make him superior to the rest; he only has the aesthetic appearance of being one of them.
Its counter-part, the “mere flâneur”, is better to be understood with the help
Benjamin’s profound interpretations of Baudelaire’s work which is gathered in his Arcades
Project (1936). Benjamin acknowledges the lower status of the flâneur by describing his
detective-like adventures as idle acts. In contrast to Baudelaire’s painter of modern life who was “everywhere at home” and was enjoying his masquerade, for the average flâneur, street life is a hiding place where he does not feel at home (417). Still, the city contains a
mysterious attractive force, which ambiguously makes the urban space both a friend and an enemy for the flâneur. I would like to argue that Wenders’ filmic characters include these anxious tensions of idleness. In the very act of going towards nowhere, of impetuous handling; there is an almost subterranean pressure that forces Wenders’ characters to keep walking and to continue their own personal stroll. Der amerikanische Freund is already
