Wim Wenders

Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders (; born 14 August 1945) is a German filmmaker, playwright, author, and photographer. He is a major figure in New German Cinema. Among many honors, he has received three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature: for "Buena Vista Social Club" (1999), about Cuban music culture; "Pina" (2011), about the contemporary dance choreographer Pina Bausch; and "The Salt of the Earth" (2014), about Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado.
One of Wenders's earliest honors was a win for the BAFTA Award for Best Direction for his narrative drama "Paris, Texas" (1984), which also won the Palme d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. Many of his subsequent films have also been recognized at Cannes, including "Wings of Desire" (1987), for which he won the Best Director Award at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival.
Wenders has been the president of the European Film Academy in Berlin since 1996. Alongside filmmaking, he is an active photographer, emphasizing images of desolate landscapes. He is considered an auteur director.
Early life.
Wenders was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, into a traditionally Catholic family. His father, Heinrich Wenders, was a surgeon. The Dutch name "Wim" is a shortened version of the baptismal name "Wilhelm". As a boy, Wenders took unaccompanied trips to Amsterdam to visit the Rijksmuseum. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine at the University of Freiburg (1963–64) and philosophy at the University of Dusseldorf (1964–65), but dropped out and moved to Paris in October 1966 in order to become a painter. Wenders failed his entry test at France's national film school, IDHEC (now La Fémis), and instead became an engraver at Johnny Friedlaender's studio in Montparnasse. During this time Wenders became fascinated with cinema, and saw up to five movies a day at the local movie theater.
Set on making his obsession his life's work, he returned to Germany in 1967 to work in the Düsseldorf office of United Artists. That fall, he entered the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München (University of Television and Film Munich). Between 1967 and 1970, while at the "HFF", he also worked as a film critic for "FilmKritik", the Munich daily newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung", "Twen" magazine, and "Der Spiegel".
Wenders completed several short films before graduating from the Hochschule with a 16mm black-and-white film, "Summer in the City" (1970), his feature directorial debut.
Career.
Wenders's career began in the late 1960s, the New German Cinema era. Much of the distinctive cinematography in his movies is the result of a long-term collaboration with Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller. "Paris, Texas" and "Wings of Desire" were the result of collaborations with "avant-garde" authors Peter Handke and Sam Shepard. Handke's novel "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" was adapted for Wenders's second feature film, "The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty". Handke co-wrote the script for "Wings of Desire" and "Until the end of the World".
Wenders has directed several highly acclaimed documentaries, most notably "Buena Vista Social Club" (1999), about Cuban musicians, and "The Soul of a Man" (2003), on American blues. He also directed a documentary-style film on the Skladanowsky brothers, known in English as "A Trick of the Light". The Skladanowsky brothers were inventing "moving pictures" when several others like the Lumière brothers and William Friese-Greene were doing the same. "Buena Vista Social Club" and his documentaries on Pina Bausch, "Pina", and Sebastiao Salgado, "The Salt of the Earth", received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Wenders has also directed many music videos for groups such as U2 and Talking Heads, including "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)" and "Sax and Violins". His television commercials include a UK advertisement for Carling Premier Canadian beer.
Wenders's book "Emotion Pictures", a collection of diary essays written as a film student, was adapted and broadcast as a series of plays on BBC Radio 3, featuring Peter Capaldi as Wenders, with Gina McKee, Saskia Reeves, Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton and Ricky Tomlinson, dramatised by Neil Cargill.
In 2015, Wenders collaborated with artist/journalist and longtime friend Melinda Camber Porter on a documentary feature about his body of work, "Wim Wenders – Visions on Film", when Porter died. The film remains incomplete.
Wenders is a member of the advisory board of World Cinema Foundation. The project was founded by Martin Scorsese and aims to find and reconstruct world cinema films that have been neglected. As of 2015 he served as a Jury Member for the digital studio Filmaka, a platform for undiscovered filmmakers to show their work to industry professionals.
In 2011, Wenders was selected to stage the 2013 cycle of Richard Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen" at the Bayreuth Festival. The project fell through when he insisted on filming in 3-D, which the Wagner family found too costly and disruptive.
In 2012, while promoting his 3-D dance film "Pina", Wenders told the Blog that he had begun work on a new 3-D documentary about architecture. He also said he would only work in 3-D from then on. Wenders had admired the dance choreographer Pina Bausch since 1985, but only with the advent of digital 3-D cinema did he decide that he could sufficiently capture her work on screen.
In June 2017, Wenders stage-directed Georges Bizet's opera "Les Pêcheurs de perles", starring Olga Peretyatko and Francesco Demuro and conducted by Daniel Barenboim at the Berlin State Opera (Staatsoper).
In a 2018 interview, Wenders said his favorite movie of all time was his film about Pope Francis, and that his entire career had been building up to it. His admiration for Francis is profound; he said he felt Francis is doing his best in a world full of calamities. He also said that, though raised Catholic, he had converted to Protestantism years earlier.
In 2019 Wenders acted as executive producer for his former assistant director Luca Lucchesi's documentary "A Black Jesus", which has similar themes to "Pope Francis: A Man of His Word." The film explores the role of religion in communal identity and how this can create or dissolve differences in a small Sicilian town during the height of the refugee crisis. Lucchesi noted that Wenders pushed the film to be more symbolic and philosophical, saying that Wenders wanted the film to have a "universal fairy-tale aspect" and to represent "Europe in a nutshell."
Photography.
Wenders has worked with photographic images of desolate landscapes and themes of memory, time, loss, nostalgia and movement. He began his long-running project "Pictures from the Surface of the Earth" in the early 1980s and pursued it for 20 years. The initial photographic series was titled "Written in the West" and was produced while Wenders criss-crossed the American West in preparation for his film "Paris, Texas" (1984). It became the starting point for a nomadic journey across the globe, including Germany, Australia, Cuba, Israel and Japan, to take photographs capturing the essence of a moment, place or space.
2016.
"The Space Between the Characters Can Carry the Load", Collection Ivo Wessel, Weserburg Museum for modern Art, Bremen, DE
Legacy and honors.
Wenders has received many awards, including the Golden Lion for "The State of Things" at the Venice Film Festival (1982); the Palme d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival for his movie "Paris, Texas"; and Best Direction for "Wings of Desire" in the 1987 Bavarian Film Awards and the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. He won the Bavarian Film Awards for Best Director for "Faraway, So Close!" in 1993. In 2004, he received the Master of Cinema Award of the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg. He was awarded the Leopard of Honour at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2005. In 2012, his dance film "Pina" was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature of the 84th Academy Awards. Wenders also received a nomination for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Screenplay for the film.
He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989, the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) in 1995 and the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium in 2005.
The Wim Wenders Foundation was established in Düsseldorf in 2012. The foundation provides a framework to bring together his cinematic, photographic, artistic and literary works in his native country and to make it permanently accessible to the public.
Wenders was awarded the Honorary Golden Bear at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2015. In 2016, Wenders received the Großer Kulturpreis of the Sparkassen Culture-Foundation Rhineland, one of the highest-endowed cultural honorings in Germany, with previous winners such as photographer legend Hilla Becher, sculptor Tony Cragg, musician Wolfgang Niedecken and director Sönke Wortmann. In 2017, Wenders received the Douglas Sirk Award at the Hamburg Film Festival.
Personal life.
Wenders lives and works in Berlin with his wife, Donata. He has lived in Berlin since the mid-1970s. He is an ecumenical Christian; as a teenager he wished to become a Catholic priest.