Kuhbeere Kinepiffle: Wenders, Ozu...

Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, 1974)

In the both widely and deeply loved 1974 film Alice in the Cities, a modestly-scaled black and white transnational classic with big heart, star Rüdiger Vogler plays author, journalist, and grifter-sleuth Philip Winter for the first but not the last time in a film by Wim Wenders, Vogler’s collaborator and buddy. The film commences with the stumblebum German factotum lost on some vague and probably vaporized assignment in the United States, playing around with his then-brand-new, highly-novel—and most of all affordable—commercial grade Polaroid camera, but mostly really just slouching and registering checked-out, nary a sense of the direction in which to point his toes. About ten minutes into Alice in the Cities, Philip Winter falls asleep in an anonymous hotel bed, appearing almost as though to drift peacefully and passively in and out of consciousness as the sounds of the hotel cathode-ray television tube transmit scenes from John Ford’s 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln, including one in which Henry Fonda, starring as young Illinois lawyer Abe Lincoln, plays a more than serviceable mouth harp. The scene does a sublime job of capturing the nebulous zone you enter when you fall asleep while watching a movie or playing a record. We might also pause to consider this nocturnal television event later, two years later, when Vogler, playing Bruno Winter in Kings of the Road, declares: “The Yanks have colonized our Unconscious.” Insofar as concerns the scene in the hotel room and the benevolent appropriation of the John Ford material, one might assume that material was selected in advance so as to be a basic precondition of the scene and its requirements. Wenders is a big outspoken fan of Ford and of Young Mr. Lincoln in particular. Writer Peter Handke, another regular Wenders collaborator and brother in jukeboxes / movie houses, wrote a novel called Short Letter, Long Farewell, published two years before Alice in the Cities came out, in which John Ford and Young Mr. Lincoln both figure prominently. Well, not so fast, hold your horses. On the commentary track for Alice in Cities contained on the Criterion Blu-ray, Wenders says the scene was shot in New Jersey and that he looked in the TV Guide earlier that day to see what was playing later, because there were always lots of movies running on American TV, and Young Mr. Lincoln merely presented itself as the most appropriate of the available options.

To underscore what a major film Young Mr. Lincoln was for that firebrand generation of militant cinephiles who formed the French Nouvelle Vague and its bustling rats-with-plastic-forks Arrière-garde, allow me to treat you to a scrumptious historical footnote, remembered at this point no doubt by none save perhaps academics with a specialization in the vicinity and yours truly, in ill health and in worse: 1972, two years before Alice in the Cities and the same year as Handke’s Short Letter, Long Farewell, the illustrious Cahiers du Cinéma, shortly to turn over to Serge Deny and actively swinging Maoist and Lacanian simultaneous-like, did an entire issue of the magazine on Ford’s 1939 legal beagle oater and its lanky lead, with every last faintly glimmering semiotic detail covered by at least three autonomous voices.

Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders, 1991)

Ohayô (Yasujirō Ozu, 1959)

I loved going to film history lectures in university because my mind would be blown thirty times before I was so much as properly seated and de-scarved. I mean it with total earnestness and extremely good recollection when I assert that one of the film history stories I first heard as an undergraduate that completely blew my mind is that of the great Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu who started making silent movies and worked constantly into the early 1960s and who additionally claimed that after he saw Victor Fleming’s 1939 Hollywood übersmash Gone with the Wind while stationed with the military in Singapore it became clear to him that the Americans were going to defeat the Japanese in the war due to the sheer superiority of their production capabilities. What a thing to sit with! The impact of Ozu’s work on the sensibility and taste of Wim Wenders is no mystery, and of course Wenders' intimate 1985 archive-artifact Tokyo-ga is explicitly about how the departed giant Ozu becomes threaded through Classical Japan and Speculative-Futurist Japan too. Had it not been for the fact that Ozu was championed by Wenders, I would not have bought a copy of the VHS tape of 1959’s Ohayô at the A&B Sound downtown when I was in high school. It’s a famously adorable comedy, on the light end of things for the director who conceals no part of life's variegated seasons, containing an awful lot of flatulence and essentially telling the story of two boys who attempt to pressure and cajole their father into providing them with a television set. If Michelangelo Antonioni pushed to the limits what he was capable of doing and capable of withstanding in forcing the colour systems of complete landscapes to bow to his regime in just one film, 1964’s Red Desert, judicious elder Yasujirō Ozu produces a sleeve-full of superior colour conjurings in each one of his final colour pictures (with special distinction due Ohayô and ’62’s An Autumn Afternoon), the whole while taking an occasional break here and there to dash off and star in a whisky advertisement on a yacht. Clearly the most fun part of building half a city block on a big empty lot is painting it all up. When people tell me that their favourite Ozu is one of the earlier black and white movies I’m almost a little confounded somehow, as though my personal value were in dispute, even should their choice happen to be ’49’s mercurial Late Spring, which is a note-perfect motion picture on every single level.