A very Wim evening — German auteur regales Mumbai
Wim Wenders, who won the European Film Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award last year, is on his first trip to India
Early Thursday evening, a line of people began to form outside Regal cinema, one of Mumbai’s last surviving single screen theatres. A few hours later, as they filed in, conversations flew fast and loose. Some compared German auteur Wim Wenders’s films from the 1970s to his most recent, Perfect Days (2023), some others carefully broke down the merits of German New Wave cinema of which Wenders is considered an exemplar alongside Werner Hertzog and Raner Werner Fassbinder.
Wenders, who won the European Film Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award last year — even actor Juliet Binoche who introduced him at the ceremony couldn’t hold back her tears when she described his filmography — is in Mumbai for a retrospective of his films.
And on Thursday evening, at Regal, packed to the rafters with scores of 20-somethings, the 79-year-old filmmaker held a masterclass .
“Movies can’t change lives if you make them as “product” or “content”. Products and content don’t change anybody’s lives,” he told the cheering audience.
Wenders is on his first trip to India.
Over the course of the month, Wenders will travel to five other cities including Bangalore, Kolkata, Thiruvananthapuram, and New Delhi, before ending in Dungarpur in Rajasthan, to showcase a selection of his films. All screenings will be free of cost, Shivendra Dungarpur, founder-director of Film Heritage Foundation, said. The foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to preserving and restoring India’s film heritage, has organised this retrospective of Wenders’s films in collaboration with the German film maker’s own eponymous foundation that has undertaken the work to restore all the director’s films made in celluloid, as well as the Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan India.
Over the course of the next 25 days, he will meet audiences across the country and talk to them about the 18 films that he has chosen to show them.
Wenders has been making movies for well over six decades, and if there’s one word that can be used for him, it is masterful. The German director’s films — feature-length films, documentaries, including more recently, 3D ones — are considered cinematic masterpieces and highlight his primary preoccupation -- with time, space and truth-telling.
His work, which, he admits with no hint of grandiosity, has been about making a difference in people’s lives through the medium of cinema.
Before becoming a filmmaker, Wenders lived in Paris in the 1960s trying to make it as a painter. During that time, he visited Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque Française, a foundation that sought to preserve films and film history, and where Wenders could, for a very tiny entry fee, sit in the warmth and watch films from around the world that were screened.
They changed his life; and he has since tried to pass it on.
“There is a huge responsibility we have as a filmmaker. I knew this from the films I had seen. Some of them changed my life. So I knew that my films could do that too. And for that to happen, you need to invest everything you have in the film. The utmost you have is your idea of what life is all about, and what you’re living for. It’s only if you ask yourself that question each time you make a film, and seriously pursue that question that some people might get something out of it,” he said.
“I always wanted to make a film on Wim Wenders and with Wim Wenders. I wanted to make the film with him first before I embarked on the film on Czech filmmaker, CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel. I’ve always looked at the filmmaking aspect of filmmakers who’ve inspired me and Wim, too, has followed a similar trajectory and made films with (directors) Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller (who have acted in his films, ‘Lightning over Water’, also known as ‘Nick’s Film’ and ‘The American Friend’, respectively)...,” said Dungarpur.
“I was fascinated by the idea of the image, and not many others can use the image in the way that Wim has been able to do it [over all these years],” he added.
With Wenders in India, does that mean that there is a film in the offing?
“That was my wish, but maybe something else will emerge from this,” Dungarpur said.
“Never expect anything because it doesn’t happen when we expect it. It only happens if you keep it open. So, whatever could come out of my journey through India will happen if I keep it open, and treat it like a gift,” Wenders said.
On Wednesday — Wenders’ first day in India — his 1987 film, ‘Wings of Desire’, was screened.
One of the 23 films he made in celluloid and restored by the Wim Wenders Foundation, the film posed some specific challenges because it is a largely black and white film with bursts of colour in some scenes.
“It’s not that easy to restore a film. We did 10 films before we dared to do ‘Wings of Desire’, which was the most difficult and demanding of all, as it was shot on black and white negative as well as on colour negative and then mixed in a very complex way based on the technology available at the time. So the film that emerged, and what people have seen for 30 years, was seven generations removed from the original film that went into the camera. The restored film however is identical with the negative that ran through the camera, both black and white, and colour,” Wenders explained.
Changing technology is certainly a boon to filmmakers, Wenders said during a one-on-one conversation with select journalists before his first film was screened at the retrospective.
“Between the late 60s to today, the tools of cinema have changed completely. And I was able to take each of these new technologies and see how it improved my relation to story-telling, to truth, to time, and to place. We are in a very privileged place today as filmmakers, as we can represent our times today in ways that we couldn’t even dream of before. And, we have access to space which was always elusive and in movies, space was always pretense — we simulated it — but now it is there (in 3D, for example),” he said.
Yet, there is also a deeper concern over the way we think about movies today and how it differs from his worldview, where plot and script are not as significant as the urgency to be truthful to the time and the place about which the film is being made.
On Friday, Wenders is slated to meet filmmakers Payal Kapadia (whose ‘All We Imagine as Light’ won the Cannes Grand Prix award last year), Shaunak Sen (whose ‘All That Breathes’, also won at the Cannes in 2022 and was nominated for best documentary category at the Academy Awards in 2023), Vishal Bhardwaj, Nandita Das, and Kiran Rao among others.
“I like the progress we witness but I also see that we have entered the digital age where the relationship with film and truth has changed dramatically. Manipulation is almost the rule today. And young filmmakers are almost forced to think of movies as manipulators. That’s exactly the opposite of what movies are,” he said.
