Wenders on Antonioni
By Wim Wenders
In Memoriam: Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)
Michelangelo Antonioni died in Rome on July 30 2007, at the age of 94. The body of work he left behind is unquestionably one of the great glories of international cinema since the Second World War. By the 1990s Antonioni's directing career was widely believed to have been more or less finally curtailed by the effects of a stroke that left him barely able to speak. But in 1994 Wim Wenders, a passionate admirer of Antonioni's work, agreed to assist and 'back-stop' the production of Beyond the Clouds, a portmanteau film that Antonioni had adapted from several of his short stories and sketches. In due course Wenders would write a diary of his extraordinary experience on the film, published in English (and translated by the poet Michael Hofmann) as My Time with Antonioni (Faber and Faber, 2000.) In this extract from the book's opening, Wenders recalls the powerful effect of his first encounter with the maestro, then on the cusp on his seventieth birthday.
I first met Michelangelo Antonioni in 1982 in Cannes, where he was showing his film Identificazione di una donna. I had brought Hammett to the film festival, and was impressed with Antonioni's new film as I had been by Blow-up or Zabriskie Point or, before that, by L'Avventura, La Notte or L'Eclisse.
As part of a documentary I was making on the development of film language, I had invited all the directors present at Cannes to speak to camera on the future of the cinema as they saw it. Many of them had taken up my invitation, among them Werner Herzog, Rainer Fassbinder, Steven Spielberg, Jean-Luc Godard and–Antonioni. Each director was left by himself in a room with a Nagra tape-recorder, a 16 mm camera and some brief instructions. Each was free to 'direct' his reply to the question I put to them all; they could be brief, or if they liked they could use up the whole reel of film, roughly ten minutes. The finished film was called Chambre 666, after the room in the Hotel Martinez where it had all taken place. It was the last available hotel room in the whole of Cannes.
For me, the most impressive statement on the future of the cinema was that of Michelangelo Antonioni, which is why it went into the film completely unedited, including the moment when Michelangelo had finished speaking, and walked over to the camera to switch it off.
What he said was this:
"It's true, film is in grave danger. But we shouldn't overlook other aspects of the problem. The effect of TV on people's viewing habits and expectations–especially children's–is clear. On the other hand, we can't deny that part of the reason that the situation seems so grave to us is because we belong to an older generation. What we should do is try to adapt to the different visual technologies that are coming into being.
"New forms of reproduction such as magnetic tape will probably come to replace traditional film stock, which no longer meets our needs. Scorsese has already pointed out that some older colour films have begun to fade. The problem of entertaining ever-larger numbers of people may be solved by electronics, by lasers, or by other technologies still to be discovered–who can say? Of course, I'm just as worried as anyone else about the future of the cinema as we know it. We're attached to it because it gave us so many ways of saying what we felt and thought we had to say. But as the spectrum of new technical possibilities gets wider, that feeling will eventually disappear. There probably always was that discrepancy between the present and the unimaginable future. Who knows what houses are going to look like in future–the structures we see when we look out of the window probably won't even exist tomorrow. We shouldn't think of the immediate future either, but of the distant future; we must concern ourselves with the kind of world that a future race of humans will inhabit.
"I'm not such a pessimist. I've always been someone who tried to adapt to whatever forms of expression coped best with the contemporary world. I've used video on one of my films; I've experimented with colour, and I've painted reality. The technique was crude, but it represented some kind of advance. I want to go experimenting, because I believe that the possibilities of video will give us a different sense of ourselves.
"It's not an easy thing, to talk about the future of cinema. High-definition video cassettes will soon bring it into our houses; cinemas probably won't be needed any more. All our contemporary structures will disappear. It won't be quick or straightforward, but it will happen, and we can't do anything to prevent it. All we can do is try to adjust to it.
"Already in Deserto rosso, I was looking at the question of adapting–adapting to new technologies, to the polluted air we'll probably have to breathe. Even our physical bodies will probably evolve–who can say in what ways. The future will probably present itself with a ruthlessness we can't yet imagine. I'm only going to repeat myself now; I'm not a philosopher or a speech-maker. I'd rather work and try things out than talk about it. My sense is: it won't be all that hard to turn us into new people, better used to dealing with the new technologies."
It wasn't just the statement that impressed me, it was Antonioni himself–his confident yet unassuming way of talking, his movements, the way he walked up and down in front of the camera, and stood by the window. The man was as cool and stylish as his work, and his outlook was every bit as radical and modern as the films he made.
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