Paris, Texas, Australia, And So Forth

A photo exhibit by Wim Wenders, a German film director who, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, was one of the principal members of the New German Cinema of the 1970s, held within the framework of the 31st Molodist [Youth] Film Festival, was quite modest and may have been missed by many in the heat of reviews. Three dozen color photos on a single stand mounted at the press center and a brief annotation was all. Yet it was one of those cases when one had to abstract one’s mind from the conventional to try to understand at least something. There is, however, another method: “First, you spend a couple of nights out in the desert, sleeping on the hard ground and staring up into the star-strewn sky until your eyes close; only then you can start taking pictures again.” Whether the author of Der Himmel — ueber Berlin (Heaven over Berlin; English title, Wings of Desire) did is best known to himself, but the desert seems to have firmly implanted itself in his heart and mind. The aborigines’ holy mountain on the horizon, rusty car frame, an abandoned movie theater under the open sky, an idle excavator cutting into a whitish slag heap, tenacious reddish trees clinging to rocky soil, a hardly discernible footpath amid dusty emptiness — such are the hallmarks of a world that has always existed and which is here and now, without human presence, inimitable and ever undisturbed. The photos’ format imposes on the viewer a panning concept; one seems to stand at an elevated point, slowly taking in the environs. Few things that seem familiar around, actually none whatsoever, yet the sense of deja vu is there. A dream is something you cannot train your camera on, but you don’t have to, you can take a picture that will create a dream; all it takes is the photographer’s sharp inner eye.

Traveling in the depths of Australia with a photo camera, an area which is one big desert, Wenders, of course, had a purpose in mind, building his story, like the one in his “desert” film Paris, Texas. Yet it would be erroneous to regard this series of captivating photo images as a kind of sketch following his most successful Hollywood production; rather (no mater how paradoxically), this photo series is another Wenders film, possibly one of the best he has ever made. I think it is about the end of the world that will never come, except in someone’s nightmare.