New Delhi, At a time when governments everywhere are trying to reform history to further their agendas, cinema can be an important weapon for a civilised future, German auteur Wim Wenders said here on Friday in a masterclass where he spoke about his “troubled” next project, growing up in post-war Germany wanting to become a painter only to be seduced by moving images.
Known for movies such as “Wings of Desire”, “Alice in the Cities”, “Kings of the Road”, “Paris, Texas”, “Pina” and most recently “Perfect Days”, the filmmaker made a stop to the national capital as part of his ‘King of the Road – India Tour’.
“We are now living in times where people, governments all over the world, are trying to rewrite and reform the history of their countries in order to fulfill their own agendas. They are doing it everywhere, in all parts of the world. Governments right now have a tendency to tell you their version of history so that they can stay in power longer. So, cinema is an important weapon for a civilised future,” Wenders said during a masterclass in jam-packed theatre here.
According to Wenders, who wants to make a fiction film on the topic of peace next, movies contain a sense of history in them and are a “great catalogue for the future”.
“If we are able to take a sense of history from movies and take that to the future, we would make much less mistakes,” he said, adding that he has been restoring his old movies to prepare them for a digital future.
“Young people learn through reading and writing but do not learn much about the language that they are mostly exposed to, which is the language of images. And this is the language in which more lies are happening,” he added.
The 79-year-old filmmaker, who keeps switching between forms and genres in his cinema, said after his next project, a 3D feature documentary about Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, he is trying to develop a fictional story on the topic of peace but the project has hit roadblocks.
“It’s a troubled project because the world keeps changing rapidly and I always have to adjust my story to what is happening and I was so sick and tired of having to adjust it,” he said, adding that when he started there was a war between Russia and Ukraine and then another in Gaza.
“I realised that it was better to set it up in future because then nobody could surprise me with their follies… Nobody is going to fight for peace anymore so I am going to make a film in the future that will make everybody excited about peace,” he said, deriding US President Donald Trump for some of his recent statements on world politics.
Wenders, who hails from the city of Dusseldorf , said he was born on August 14, 1945, in the week when two atom bombs were dropped on Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“My own town didn’t look much different because Dusseldorf was largely destroyed. It’s a beautiful city by the river Rhine. All the bridges were lying in the water. Most houses were just chimneys. The streetcars drove through little passageways because the roads were full of rubble,” he said.
As a young child, he said he loved playing in the ruins. It was a little later when he saw, through photos and maps, a city that looked different than the one he was living in.
That’s when he discovered paintings and fell in love with museums.
Wenders said he was probably the only child around who dragged his parents to museums as they were “so full of beauty”.
The filmmaker has often spoken about how he fell in love with movies when he discovered world cinema at the Cinematheque in Paris where he had moved to become a painter.
In his two-hour-long masterclass, Wenders recalled a much earlier memory that may have influenced his future career as a filmmaker. It was the discovery of his father’s projector.
“He said, ‘I didn’t know it had survived the war.’ And it was a woodbox and he put it on the table and lifted the cover. It was a tiny little projector. I didn’t know what a projector was, but my father told me, this is a projector and it can project movies.
“He was very excited because he had been given this thing in the late 20s when he was a kid. It was a 9.5 mm projector. And along with the projector, there was a box with five, six, seven, or eight, I don’t know, tiny little reels of film,” Wenders recalled.
The filmmaker said it was for the first time that he saw movies, which were tiny reels from the movies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.
“My father gave me the authority over the machine, I would put the reels in, I’ll go back, forward and backward. Backward was more funny. And I became the most popular kid when I went to school, at the age of six, because I was the only one who had a projector. And I was invited to every birthday in order to show my movies,” Wenders said.
While in Paris, he realised that his career as a painter was not going to take off.
Wenders said he saw an application for the University of Television and Film Munich and applied. The film institute didn’t even have a camera and Wenders sold off his saxophone to buy a camera from a pawnshop.
And that’s how his extraordinary career in movies began.
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