Wim Wenders and Peter Handke Collaboration, Adaptation, Recomposition 147 Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft Begründet von Alberto Martino und in Verbindung mit Francis Claudon (Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne) – Rüdiger Görner (Queen Mary, University of London) – Achim Hölter (Universität Wien) – Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) – John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University) – Alfred Noe (Universität Wien) – Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin) – Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien) herausgegeben von Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien) Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Sensengasse 3A , A-1090 Wien Wim Wenders and Peter Handke Collaboration, Adaptation, Recomposition Martin Brady and Joanne Leal Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011 Cover image: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vampyr, 1932 (courtesy of Eureka Entertainment Ltd.) Cover design: Pier Post Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-3247-7 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3248-4 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011 Printed in The Netherlands Table of Contents Acknowledgements 7 Authors‟ Note 9 Introduction 11 1. Politics, Poetics, Film: The Beginnings of a Collaboration 35 2. Parallel Texts: Language into Image in The Goalkeeper’s Fear 113 of the Penalty 3. Accompanied by Text: From Short Letter, Long Farewell 163 to Alice in the Cities 4. Mute Stories and Blind Alleys: Text, Image, and Allusion in 195 Wrong Move 5. Leafing through Wings of Desire 243 Conclusion 281 Filmographies 289 Bibliography 293 Index 309 Acknowledgements Joanne Leal would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council which awarded her a grant for this project under the Research Leave Scheme. She would also like to thank Birkbeck College for providing her with the Faculty Research Grant which made study leave possible. Her thanks go too to the friends, family, and colleagues who offered support, help, and guidance over several years, and particularly to Richard Johnson who remained convinced that this project could be finished. Authors‟ Note This book aims to make material on the collaborative films of Wim Wenders and Peter Handke available to as wide a readership as possible. For this reason all quotations from German texts have been translated into English. In the case of the principal prose texts by Handke and Wenders‟s essays, we have used published translations where available. Elsewhere, all translations are by the authors. For the sake of simplicity, and in line with current scholarship, we have chosen to refer to the longer prose texts of Handke as novels rather than „stories‟ or „novellas‟. In the case of the films, we have used the published script for Wings of Desire, but otherwise we have produced our own protocols. Introduction film is film, literature is literature1 The feature film can step over every border2 1. Cinema as a mixed medium Cinema is a mixed or, in the terminology of André Bazin, an „impure‟ medium. In the case of German cinema, literature has remained the dominant ingredient in the mix. In 1962 the Autorenfilmer (auteurs or writer-directors) of the „Young German Cinema‟ in the Federal Republic programmatically announced their intentions in print, in the form of the famous Oberhausen Manifesto. According to Alexander Kluge the „new film language‟ called for in this manifesto comprised an amalgamation of different media. In an article co-authored with Edgar Reitz and Wilfried Reinke in 1965 he was forthright in his assessment of the benefits of this mix: Because it already includes language anyway, film would actually have the capacity to articulate meanings that elude the grasp of verbal expression. [...] Thus we would have an accumulation of subjective and objective, of literary, auditory, and visual moments which would preserve a certain tension in relation to each another. [...] The combination of verbal, auditory, and visual forms and their integration through montage enable film to strive for a greater degree of complexity than any of these forms in isolation. [...] We could imagine, however, an experimental film (albeit one of extreme artistic intensity) which forcefully utilizes the oscillation between literary, visual, and auditory elements as well as the gaps between these elements [...].3 Rather than simply reiterating the well-worn mantra that cinema is overly dependent on literary models, although it does say this as well, the essay asserts that it is only in the „epic ranges of film‟ that language itself could „fully unfold‟, to such an extent, indeed, that ultimately „cinema could surpass even the tradition of literature‟.4 The use of the term „epic‟ is of course significant here: in their discussion of film form, Kluge and his co- 1 Robin Wood quoted in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. by Ginette Vincendeau (London: BFI, 2001), p.xi. 2 Alexander Kluge, „Theses about the New Media‟, in West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices, ed. by Eric Rentschler (New York-London: Holmes and Meier, 1988), pp.30-32 (p.32). 3 Alexander Kluge, Wilfried Reinke, and Edgar Reitz, „Word and Film‟, in Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, ed. by Timothy Corrigan (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999), pp.229-45 (p.232, p.233, p.234, and p.238). 4 Ibid., p.231 and p.234. 12 Wenders and Handke: Collaboration, Adaptation, Recomposition authors clearly have Bertolt Brecht in mind, and indeed at one point in their discussion they go so far as to use the term Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect); montage, they assert, can generate „ambiguity, polyphony, and variation‟.5 The „Word and Film‟ essay is, alongside the Oberhausen Manifesto, one of the most important documents of the nascent „Young German Cinema‟ of the 1960s. Written under the influence of Kluge‟s mentor and friend Theodor W. Adorno, the essay demonstrates a degree of sophistication in its argumentation and rhetoric which belies the suggestion that German filmmakers were intellectually out of step with European New Wave film theory until the „New German Cinema‟ of the 1970s. On the other hand, the fact that it was published in a journal of linguistics might suggest that the institutional framework for discourse on film was still wanting. 2. Literariness The Brechtian tenor of the „Word and Film‟ essay was of course to become both more strident and more explicitly political in the years immediately following its publication, not least in the writings of Kluge himself. It could be argued, indeed, that this seminal essay established the tone which was to dominate auteurist discourse in Germany right through to the 1980s. Interestingly it does not address the question of literary adaptation itself in any great detail – over and above the customary dismissal of a cinema which „makes every film conform to the model of the novella‟6 – although a telling, if brief commentary on Alain Resnais‟s Hiroshima mon amour (1959), based on the screenplay of Marguerite Duras, does applaud the film‟s „immersion of language in image, the emergence of language from image, the mutual pursuit of verbal and visual texts, figures of parallelism and collision, polyphony‟.7 Again the terminology applied to this early classic of the French New Wave is that of critical theory and dialectics. Kluge himself has strenuously avoided literary adaptation across his 50-year career as a filmmaker, and his disparaging remarks on the practice – most famously that „literary adaptations are always weaker than literature‟ – have become canonical.8 This does not mean, of course, that he has restricted his activities 5 Ibid., p.232. 6 Ibid., p.230. 7 Ibid., p.240. 8 Alexander Kluge, BESTANDSAUFNAHME: Utopie Film: Zwanzig Jahre neuer deutscher Film / Mitte 1983 (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1983), p.436. Original sources have been translated into English throughout this book. Where published translations are available, these have been used. Otherwise all translations are by the authors. (See Authors‟