The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations

Description

This slim, but fascinating book, is not entirely only accessible to fans of the cinema of Wim Wenders. It certainly fills that requirement with a number of essays detailing the making of a number of his films, his inspirations and the industrial and creative difficulties befalling an artist in the 1970's and 1980's, the most fascinating of which is the trials and tribulations endured with the troubled production and distribution of "Paris, Texas." But the book is at its strongest when Wenders commits his philosophy of cinema to the page. This is a philosophy in which image is all important and in which narrative and the story-telling process is seen to hijack the purity and truthfulness of said images - an attitude he shares with his colleague Werner Herzog. What comes across strongest is Wenders love affair with cinema, often reflected in his films overriding pre-occupation with imported Hollywood forms and images. Importantly though Wenders regularly subverts and challenges such images/attitude, as in films such as "Kings of the Road" and "The American Friend." Rather than write with the pretension one would expect of an `auteur' Wenders in fact writes in a very simplistic, understandable and down to earth prose style, which takes "The Logic of Images" away from the stuffy, incomprehensible world of academic film theory. Overall there is a feeling of lamentation and nostalgia both in Wenders writing and his cinema, which permanently gives the sense that something great and good has been irretrievably lost.