On Wim Wenders' "Until the End of the World"

A Rosetta Stone for Surviving the 21st Century

First up, some Vita Contemplativa news—

I’ve got a new piece out today over at UnHerd, on the 100th anniversary of Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece Die Nibelungen. If you’ve never seen it, you really ought to, it’s still jaw-dropping. (Also, if you like my film writing and you’re into the whole Letterboxd thing, you can follow me here.)

I’m also stoked to announce that I’m now serving as the associate editor for The Hinternet, as it expands into its new peculiar phase. If you’re not already familiar with that site, it’s the wildly successful Substack of the writer/philosopher/genius Justin Smith-Ruiu, which is now expanding into something like an online magazine for people as weird and contentistically beleaguered as we are. JSR gave me my first break on Substack and has been a good guide and friend, so I’m more than excited to be part of his next venture. I’ll be contributing and editing as one of “The Sams,” as I believe I’m referred to, in a statement from our new managing witch/editor, Hélène Le Goff. You can read her most recent intro here.

I should also say, for all of my subscribers and Substack connections in the UK, I am officially moving to London next week! I’m going to be attending King’s College for the next year, working towards my second Masters. I would certainly love to meet and connect with any other writers in London. Please reach out however you’d like.

Now, since I’ve written some pieces on music and some on literature, including this piece which was (ironically) my most successful yet, I figured I ought to balance that out by writing about a few favorite films, not least since I believe cinema is still the great living medium, no matter what Hollywood decline seems to spell. So this is the first of two pieces on a pair of films, released in 1991—Until the End of the World and La Double Vie de Veronique (which I’ve often called my favorite film ever made). They are, in my estimation, the least-seen and least-understood masterpieces of late 20th century cinema. Each reflects depthlessly on the century that produced it, while looking forward, curiously, to what might change in the new millennium, at the closing of a long and bloody epoch of human history.

The late, great Solveig Dommartin

I don’t know where to start, except with superlatives.

Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World is vast. Even in its nearly 5-hour official version, it feels like it’s bursting over with wild ideas, overtones, deep insight into the modern world. It’s so many things: prescient, clunky, warm, chilling, goofy, sleek, kitschy. Impossibly disturbing, yet joyously optimistic about human beings. It’s often billed as “The Ultimate Road Movie” since Wenders’ immense and ambitious production spanned 9 countries and 4 continents, filming with local crews in Venice, Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, San Francisco, Sydney, and—throughout the film’s second half—on Aboriginal land, deep in middle of the Australian Outback.

In fact the project was a bit too ambitious. Rather than being shown in Wenders’ preferred vision, it was cut to under three hours and half-heartedly distributed, to critics and audiences who were mostly indifferent. By his account, the “true” version might never have seen the light of day if Wenders hadn’t absconded with a copy of the negative. Like many a poor passion project in the too-cruel history of film, it would have to wait for better times to be seen in its proper format. Now we thankfully have the approved full version, shown a few times in galleries and festivals over the decades, recently collected on an excellent Criterion Collection release. It’s always been this way with forgotten, mangled masterpieces. Consider Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, another butchered beauty which might be the best American film of the 21st century so far, though almost no one’s heard of it. Lonergan had to fight his studio for years to even release it (with Martin Scorsese apparently stepping in at one point to try to edit it to something the studio would put up with)—when they finally did, in 2011, it was a wholly compromised version. His own Extended Cut, which changed whole edits, score, and sound design, is still hard to find. But it’s a work of genius. Such is the way of the movie world.

Until the End of the World suffered a little less than that, if only because of its legendary soundtrack (featuring no less than Talking Heads, U2, R.E.M., Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Peter Gabriel, Patti Smith, Neneh Cherry, CAN, Depeche Mode, Julee Cruise, and a choir of Pygmy children). And in recent years, even those who find the film unwieldy have had to admire its many eerie predictions: onboard GPS systems that talk to their drivers, real-time video conference calls, search engines tracking people’s credit cards. Most disturbingly, Wenders imagined portable devices which come to display the captured images of dreams, leading the main characters into a hell of hopeless addiction to their handheld screens. Whereas these other predictions might’ve been extrapolated based on then-current trends (the film was shot in 1990, but set at the end of 1999), it’s this last bit which has become the really cutting foresight, as if Wenders knew exactly where all our technological reliance was headed.

Equally eerie is the film’s clear prediction of the era of Y2K anxiety. As the film begins, narrated by Gene (Sam Neill), the one-time lover of our main character, Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin), an Indian nuclear satellite has gone offline and threatens to crash to the Earth. The American government has threatened to shoot it down, and the rest of the world is preparing for the possibilities of a chain explosion, or a planet-wide EMP. We meet Claire in the midst of a dead-eyed, vaguely aristocratic party in Venice. On the road back to Paris, her car is nearly wrecked by a pair of French bank robbers, who enlist her help in transporting their money. Along the way she runs into a mysterious American, Sam Farber (William Hurt), whom she later finds out is on the run from both the U.S. Government and vengeful Australian opal miners.

Sam and Claire trekking into the Outback

Soon she’s employing the services of a melancholy German detective, Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler, star of Wenders’ early road movies), and a cross-continental chase ensues. By the time they catch up to Farber in Tokyo, the man has nearly gone blind using a machine he stole from the U.S. government. It turns out his own father (Max von Sydow) made the device, intending to use it on his blind wife (Jeanne Moreau). The two are waiting in a secret bunker lab in the Australian Outback until Sam can bring them the images he’s been collecting. The device—which looks like nothing so much as an Oculus Rift—records brainwaves during the act of seeing, which are later fed into a computer and overlaid with the brainwaves of the act of seeing the image a second time. With the help of their adopted Mbantua friends and siblings, the family plans to use it to beam these digitized images straight into the blind woman’s cortex. And it’s this tech which the elderly Doctor Farber will later use to reverse-engineer computerized renderings of people’s dreams, an action that prompts a disgusted exit of the Mbantua scientists who assist him, in a sequence typical of the film’s careful depiction of White-Aboriginal relations.

But this plot summary is hardly preparation for the actual feeling, or the deeper interests, of the movie. As I said above, the film leaps through genres and tones. Many sequences are giddy and slapstick, others hypnotic, patient. Claire and Sam end up in rural Japan, where Sam recovers his sight, and for a while the film is shot as a loving homage to the great Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. Most every sequence feels just as unhurried—it’s the kind of film which takes time, even within its global scope, for goofy French criminals and detectives who aren’t very good at their jobs. In the midst of the Outback, when the satellite has gone down and the Farbers are working hard at their breakthrough, the film repeatedly steps away from the action for a series of amateur jam sessions involving a harmonica, a didgeridoo, an old piano, and whatever else the characters can find in the Aborigine’s cultural center. It’s silly and endearing; I imagine most people’s qualms with the film have something to do with this shagginess. Few things are dearer to cineastes than the ideal that the big, important masterpieces of cinema are supposed to be rigorous, clear, and perfectly-composed (and never too funny).

Wenders, however, is an unfailingly honest, spiritual filmmaker, and a passionate Romantic. He’d proved himself the great outsider authority on Americana—see his 1984 classic Paris, Texas. And he’d become one of contemporary cinema’s few temperamentally religious filmmakers—see his other masterpiece, 1987’s Wings of Desire, one of the most genuinely holy films I’ve encountered. But these very qualities—his warmth, sincerity, and grace—are, I think, some of the reason he’s not often mentioned on lists of Greatest Living Directors. Yet he is one.

Wim’s too-hopeful vision of a futuristic Beijing

But I’m still not much closer to communicating the unique experience of watching the film. That’s certainly true of all great cinema, yet I don’t think Until the End of the World is quite like any other great films. And certainly much of my intense feeling about it must come from how personal it is—how much Wenders’ concerns mean to me, intimately. But this is also true of all great art: it is finally personal or it is nothing. I return to this film again and again, as I return to all great films, for a feeling, for a mood. Glorious, complex images are part of this, as are beautiful people and evocative spaces. Narrative and event and gesture—all part of it. But in the end I think what differentiates the creative response to a film from the art-critical response (and I believe firmly that the creative has eternal primacy over the critical in all art) is that it is fundamentally concerned with an experience, not merely an art-object. If I might even go so far as to say—there seem to me to be as many ways of relating to moving images as there are names for the experience.

Mere photography is to be differentiated from motion pictures, for instance. I get a wonderful old-fashioned mist in my eye whenever I hear Scorsese speak of seeing a “terrific picture.” It’s classic old-Hollywood speak. I imagine John Ford saying “I’m John Ford, and I make pictures.” I imagine generations of dirt-weathered faces, off to “the pictures” for an afternoon. The term carries a rustic evocation of a bright and new form of diversion, entertainment, and yearning.

This yearning then spills over into the larger idea of the Cinema. The Cinema is the temple itself—the totality of the experience, the great Gesamtkunstwerk operating on the entranced and waking-dreaming mind, raptured in the dark. I am myself, by temperament, a devotee of the Cinema. It’s why I have only limited tolerance for those who speak of “Film” itself and seem to approach the whole thing as primarily a medium with medium-specific interest, loftiest spots reserved for the purest of the avant-gardists. That’s not for me. Brakhage is nice, but it’s not Cinema. Kenneth Anger? Getting closer. Maya Deren? Just about there. Certainly brilliant; at the boundary. But Murnau? Vertov? Griffith? Now we’ve crossed over the vague line.

Then, of course, there are Movies. Movies are what most people go to see. Movies are a pastime. Like Baseball, or Cribbage. I go to see Villeneuve’s Dune flicks and I think, “Gee, those are sure cool movies.” Maybe I’ve even had something of a powerful aesthetic experience that I could liken to an experience of Cinema. Those particular Movies are at least closer to Cinema than most Movies these days. Jaws and The Empire Strikes Back are probably the ultimate Movies which elevate themselves to Cinema—on the other hand, something like Transformers is a Movie, and only a Movie. It’s for passing the time, like Television is (and here come the objections about Prestige TV—yet most of that is only pastime, and its few instances of exquisite art like Deadwood and Mad Men are essentially long serial films which somebody snuck onto the TV). Many Movies aren’t even “Film” exactly, because few of them are too concerned with the medium itself. Maybe Hitchcock fits in there. But, again, these days I’m Pauline Kael in her own famous conversation with Brakhage—if I want to see autonomous shapes and pure color, I’ll go to a gallery. But in a movie theater give me vistas, give me bodies, give me stories and beautiful people to tell them.

Now I’ve kept this digression in here because I think it’s really relevant to Wenders and his film. It’s on my mind whenever I go back to Until the End of the World. Because it’s a grand and healing experience—if you watch it in the full 5-hour sprint, it’s a bit like hypnosis, or meditation. Though it’s hardly Slow Cinema; it’s even defiantly Pop, with a bit of Euro Art Pretension mixed in for fun. Personally I find it cleansing, focusing. While watching it, the unimportant parts of life fade away and the best remain. Much of the film is composed of long, sustained sequences of waiting—it accustoms us to waiting with its characters. In trains, in hotel lounges, in the rock shelter in the Outback, so much of the film is spent without action. Only travel, rest, waiting, more travel. As I mentioned before, Wenders builds this into his structure, so that even the characters with nothing to do must themselves find a way to occupy their time. This ends up summoning a rather beautiful glimpse of how actual human culture and society begin: the group, left to sit around its fires at the end of the day, figures out a way to keep itself occupied, and this eventually turns to a celebratory ritual. Later in the film, this exploration of community is contrasted neatly with the subterranean obsessions of Doctor Farber and his son, bent solely towards self-aggrandizing discovery.

Wenders also contrasts their heedless pursuit of image and technology with the spirit of the Mbantua people. Sam explains to Claire when they arrive, on seeing an old Mbantua man “Singing the Country,” that he is telling the story of the rocks and plants, passing down the sense of a grand narrative in the world, that sense which is the particular genius of the Australian Aborigines. Wenders has nothing but respect for indigenous tradition—he keeps a distance from the Mbantua people, allows them to express ambivalence about the presence of the Whites, and spends most of his time instead on the Mbantua scientists who have more thoroughly integrated themselves with the Europeans, some to the point of being skin-family. These people are portrayed as complicated, thoughtful, and fundamentally kind. They do not all agree on what Farber is doing. But when Farber’s experiments lead to an exhaustion that ultimately kills his wife, and then turns to his dream-rendering, planning to hook up the tribe’s old shaman to his machine, his assistants see the line that has been crossed, declare that he is going to “steal their dreaming,” and leave immediately. Our main characters are left to descend alone into their reckless technological mongering and, soon enough, into paralyzing addiction to the images produced there.

Farber’s computer attempting to render Claire’s emotions

This sets up the horrifying final sequence, in which the characters we’ve suffered with for nearly four hours are reduced to catatonic screen-huggers, unable to tear themselves away from the computerized images of their own dreams. These scenes are beyond disturbing—the entire thrust of the film, the whole result of its careening plot, and of all these images, has been to lead them into the dead-end of technological myopia. But Wenders has been preparing a subtle commentary in parallel, and the dream-stories of the Aborigines have only been one alternative to measure against the tyranny of the image.

The narrator, Claire’s ex-lover Gene, had followed them to the Outback, along with their other friends. In the aftermath of the EMP which kills the laptop he was using to write his novel, he finds an old Royal typewriter and begins chronicling the story again, as he is witnessing it. We realize that the narration heard throughout the film has not in fact been his novel—we realize he really is telling the story to us, including the story of how he came to write Claire’s tale in the Outback. When he finally takes Claire away from the compound, she is practically nonverbal, and Gene has a stunning bit of narration that I still can’t get out of my head—“I had always admired the beginning of the Gospel According to John: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ Now I worried that the Apocalypse would read: ‘In the end there was nothing but images.’

Claire and her dream-machine

In order to cure Claire of what he calls “the disease of images,” he drives her out to an abandoned town where she goes through an arduous withdrawal. As she screams in the background, the Outback birds circle and caw, and Gene works through the night to finish his novel. He leaves the manuscript next to her and as she reads it, returning to the memories of her adventure, she is slowly restored to herself. They finally depart from Australia and return to the world. Gene writes a happy ending for his book, where Claire and Sam eventually reunite, but then scraps it. In reality they never see each other again.

It’s all very Romantic. But it’s also beautiful, and the allegory remains potent. Wenders couldn’t be any less clear. A world without stories—as the genius of Indigenous people teaches us, as the great writers and storytellers all teach us—would be a numb void. We are in danger of interfering with our own dreams, replacing a world of place and personhood with a shadow-world of disembodied images. It can only end in one place, and that is something worse than death. I find it absolutely remarkable that thirty years ago Wenders was able to articulate this existential dilemma in such an earnest way. But his own film is his best argument against the mere disease of images: it is pure Cinema, an experience of beauty and character and humanity, which uses its beautiful images to show us the serious importance of story.

This is why I find the film so healing. As an allegory for the deprogramming of our fried synapses, and a meditative relief from digital addiction, it’s one of the only works of Cinema I know which is actually trying to get us through the horror. It throws out solutions everywhere: story, art, love, community, connection, adventure, and above all place. Perhaps the first guard against the disease of images is the world itself—the landscape, the grandeur of cities, the power of natural images, the immensity of the ground we move on. We have to show these things the requisite attention: we have to treat the land we walk with nothing less than a religious sense.

This is why the Australian Aborigines (who, we must remember, possess what may be the oldest unbroken culture in the world) are the most beautiful models—to see the world itself as a narrative, to see our dreaming as entering into the story of things, is not an affectation. It is very probably the most natural way of being human. Wenders seems to suggest that if we can get over ourselves for a little while, if we can turn our attention to what’s really around us, to the world as it really is, then perhaps we might be able to recover some of that genuine human nature. At the very least, whenever I revisit Until the End of the World, I find that my hope is somewhat restored, and I see a little bit better in that direction. The 21st century has been, and will continue to be, a strange and stupid one. But the Cinema can still speak to it. It can still show us how to dream. We just have to look a little harder to find it.