Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders talks with Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto about the creative process and ponders the relationship between cities, identity and the cinema in the digital age.Read More »

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3 AMERICAN LP’S was the first film I did with Peter Handke. It was a film about American music, about three pieces of three LP’s. There was a song by Van Morrison, another by Harvey Mandel, and one of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

It was mainly the music and some shots out of a car, landscapes out of the car window. And it had a little bit of commentary – dialogue between Peter and me about American music and about how American rock music was about emotion and images instead of sounds. That is to say, about a kind of phenomenon, that it was in a way a kind of film music, but without a moving picture.Read More »

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“I was very impressed by the views from the different apartments in which I lived as a student in Munich. And I had a postcard collection. And in the attic of the film school I found a collection of old 78 Shellac records and numbered them consecutively with the same title: MOOD MUSIC. A recording mix did not happen. With the 16mm projector of the film school, I recorded them directly onto the audio track by rule of thumb.” – Wim WendersRead More »

Wenders explained that the experience of directing this, his second film, was the usual one which occurs with a new director. It is much more difficult and much less successful. One of the biggest problems is that the interior shots were finished first (Normally exteriors are shot first). These were shot at a studio in Cologne. If you notice in the interior shots, the landscape outside the windows does not appear. The windows were covered with a variant of the rice paper you see in traditional Japanese homes. This was done because they did not know what the outside would look like. Care also had to be taken with not showing the environment outside the doors of interior shots. Read More »

About the film
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In “The Soul of A Man,” director Wim Wenders looks at the dramatic tension in the blues between the sacred and the profane by exploring the music and lives of three of his favorite blues artists: Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson and J. B. Lenoir. Part history, part personal pilgrimage, the film tells the story of these lives in music through an extended fictional film sequence (recreations of ’20s and ’30s events – shot in silent-film, hand-crank style), rare archival footage, present-day documentary scenes and covers of their songs by contemporary musicians such as Shemekia Copeland, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Garland Jeffreys, Chris Thomas King, Cassandra Wilson, Nick Cave, Los Lobos, Eagle Eye Cherry, Vernon Reid, James “Blood” Ulmer, Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt, Marc Ribot, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Lucinda Williams and T-Bone Burnett.Read More »

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„SCHAUPLÄTZE was my first short film. But it got lost somehow. However, two leftover shots remained and became the first two shots of SAME PLAYER SHOOTS AGAIN. They form some kind of prelude. The rest of the film, after the title consists of a three minute shot repeated five times, like the five balls in a pinball machine. It was shot in black and white and then repeated five times, dyed in a different color each time. It did not really turn out a color film. Just a bit of blue, red, yellow and green along the road.” – Wim WendersRead More »

The life and work of photographer Sebastião Salgado, who has spent forty years documenting deprived societies in hidden corners of the world.Read More »

Quote from Wenders:
” It’s a film about the Munich police and their new tactics for dealing with the student situation in 1968. It showed their efforts to work in a more sophisticated and psychological way . It is a very funny movie, I think ….a little bit my Laurel and Hardy film.”Read More »

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“REVERSE ANGLE was my first diary film. It is about “new wave music” (among others Jim Jarmusch’s Del Byzanteens), about straying in New York, about the editing process of HAMMETT in the presence of Francis Ford Coppola, about a novel by Emanuel Bove and about Edward Hopper. And somehow, the whole thing was a reflection about filmmaking in Europe and America.” — Wim WendersRead More »