wim wenders

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter

PERFECT DAYS

interview

by OLIVIER ZAHM and ALEPH MOLINARI

portraits

by CHIKASHI SUZUKI

 

Wim Wenders’s fascination with Japan is beautifully captured in his work. Already in 1985, his documentary Tokyo-Ga paid tribute to the legendary Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, while Notebook on Cities and Clothes captured in 1989 the philosophy and work of designer Yohji Yamamoto. His latest film, Perfect Days, features the iconic actor Kōji Yakusho as an elderly man cleaning toilets in Tokyo — a masterpiece of layered emotions, gradually seeping into a seemingly simple narrative, portraying Tokyo as a psychological  landscape of intense inner turmoil.

 

PURPLE — In your first movies, the United States was the cinematic destination. Has Japan replaced America as your cinematic landscape — a cinematic alterity, an interior adventure?

WIM WENDERS — [Laughs] That’s a big question in my life, so I need a bit of time to cover that huge territory. Yes, the first decade of my filmmaking was very much engrossed with America. It was a focal point, a constant subtext. But your question aims past that, so I’ll try to make that arc. It’s been more than 50 years since I arrived in New York for the first time. It was February 1972, and the Museum of Modern Art had programmed my first feature film, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, in their very first “New Directors, New Films” program, which has been going on for 50 years now. I was 26 and the first of any of my family or friends to arrive in America. I sent hundreds of postcards. I felt like a discoverer. I was exploring, for myself and my friends, the promised land. That’s what the US represented to a young boy raised in postwar Germany. It loomed big in my imagination, and New York especially was a huge promise, the ultimate city. I was only there for a week, but it felt like I never went to sleep. I just couldn’t get enough of it. I roamed the streets day and night, and even in my hotel room I spent nights in front of the TV screen to take in more of “America.” I came back countless times, first only to New York, then I ventured more into the country and crossed the continent to the West Coast. I shot the beginning of Alice in the Cities there and, a few years later, parts of The American Friend. Then I made Hammett in Hollywood and Lightning Over Water in its entirety in New York, just like the short essay film Reverse Angle. The State of Things again took place partially in Hollywood, and finally I was able to produce and direct Paris, Texas. In many ways, that was the turning point of my life, and the film also allowed me to leave my American fascination behind. Until then, I felt I had not really grasped America, but with that film I had, which meant I could go home again. I had fulfilled my “American mission,” so to speak, and after living in the US for almost eight years by then, I moved back to my home country, and to Berlin. Parallel to that exorcism of the “American Dream,” another fascination started — again in New York, but a few years later, in 1976 or so. In a small theater near Lincoln Center, I discovered the cinema of Yasujirō Ozu. I had never heard of this director, even if I had seen a large amount of Japanese films at the Paris cinémathèque, where I received my initial crash course in the history of cinema. I had seen lots of films by Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, and others, but not a single film by this Yasujirō Ozu. It turned out, as I understood later, that the Japanese had never exported his films because they felt he was “too Japanese” and people in the West wouldn’t get it. Anyway, seeing Tokyo Story for the first time at that New York cinema was a life-changing event for me. It not only blew my mind as a film but also showed me a whole different idea of cinema. I had admired classic American movies — Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Michael Mann, up to John Cassavetes — and had even become friends with two of my heroes: Samuel Fuller, with whom I made four films, and Nicholas Ray, with whom I codirected Lightning Over Water. I had absorbed a huge dose of European cinema and loved all of François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, and others. But what I saw that day in Tokyo Story surpassed the horizon I had known. I stayed in the theater for the following two (or was it three?) screenings that day and walked out late at night with a sense of a new beginning. There once had existed a “paradise of cinema,” of which I had just caught a glance, apart from the impact that the history of American and European movies had on me. It was a more meditative, “ontological” cinema, so to speak, less story-driven but more existential, halfway between fiction and sheer reality. The other two Ozu movies the distributor had acquired, and which
I was allowed to see in an editing suite in the following days, confirmed the revelation I had experienced with Tokyo Story. Even though, at this point, I had already made five or six films myself, I realized I had finally encountered my “master.” I needed to see more of his work. From Donald Richie’s book on Ozu, I learned there were about 50 films to discover, even if quite a huge amount of them were probably lost.

PURPLE — When and how did you discover Japan?

WIM WENDERS — I traveled to Tokyo for the first time in the summer of 1977 to see more. I went to the Japanese film institute and asked them if I could see more of Ozu. Yes, they had quite a few, they said, a bit embarrassed, but none of them were subtitled. At the time, there were no videotapes of movies — all you could watch was a print. They had no capacity to put a translator beside me, but I’d be free to sit at an editing table and watch all the films they had available as prints, as long as I operated the machine myself. I was glad to do that, and so I sat in that dark room watching Ozu films on a small viewing screen for several days, with a huge stack of film reels to go through. Nobody translated a word, and it was all in Japanese, but it was like a process of osmosis — I felt I understood. At least, I knew all the Japanese words for family relations. In the end, I knew that otousan meant “father,” okaasan was “mother.” I also understood “grandfather” and “grandmother,” “uncle” and “aunt,” and so on. The Japanese family was the universe of Yasujirō Ozu, and he filmed that family in such a way that it became the universal core of humanity. I saw my own father and mother, my own family, on screen like never before in cinema. This man had been able to transcend the appearance of the people and places in front of his camera and make them become the family, the city, the trees or trains or streets or houses. He made “life itself” appear on the screen. I have no other way to say it. This was also the first time I had experienced Tokyo. It was a city in full transformation. As much as there were plenty of old buildings and living quarters left, it was on its way to becoming a science-fiction city. The multilevel freeways reminded me of Metropolis; the subway was a maze through which I could still find my way, intuitively. The civilized way in which everything in Tokyo seemed to happen astounded me. At night, there were huge construction sites everywhere, with hundreds of people working there, but they always disappeared in the morning, almost miraculously. Enormous towers were built all over, and the way that business areas, shopping centers, living quarters, and almost rural vicinities were coexisting right next to each other was strictly unbelievable.

PURPLE — When did you first shoot a film there?

WIM WENDERS — I came back to Tokyo several times and finally shot a film, Tokyo-Ga, there in the spring of 1983. I actually shot it before Paris, Texas. As we had trouble closing the financing of that film and had to postpone it for a few months, I found myself in limbo, with nothing to do. But I knew this was exactly 20 years after Ozu’s death. He passed away in 1963, on his 60th birthday. I asked the cameraman Ed Lachman, who lived in New York and was a good friend, if he was free to travel with me and shoot in Tokyo with his Aaton camera, while I would do the sound on my Walkman Professional. We arrived there as a two-man crew with no budget, who spoke no Japanese. We just explored the city on our own, shot what we saw, and slowly dug deeper and deeper. My idea was to just look around, in Ozu’s footsteps, so to speak, and discover as much as possible about what had changed since he had stopped being a witness to the city’s constant development. That was another thing about Ozu: apart from following the huge changes in Japanese family life from the ’20s to the ’60s, all through World War II and the postwar era under the influence of the American occupation,  he also recorded the changes in Japanese society and city life, almost like a seismograph. Tokyo was his stage, and if you could see his films in chronological order, you would see exactly how it slowly became a modern city — and beyond! It was moving into the future, and I had the idea I could witness that, in some sort of continuation of Ozu’s quest. I was lucky in finding help from my lovely Japanese distributors, Hayao Shibata and his wife Kazuko, who was from the famous Kawakita family, which had been a powerhouse in bringing European art house films to Japan. Kazuko finally located Ozu’s longtime cameraman, Yūharu Atsuta, so we could do a long interview with the man who had shot the last 20 or so films with my master. In the end, we were even able to talk to and film Ozu’s lifelong acting companion, Chishū Ryū, who had been in all his films except one. For a while, it even looked like Setsuko Hara might be willing to grant us an interview. She had appeared in some of Ozu’s most important films, and also in Tokyo Story, and she had been the love of his life, even if the two of them were (famously) never a couple. She was the biggest star in postwar Japanese cinema but had withdrawn from the public eye after Ozu’s death. In the end, she decided not to break that silence. So, Tokyo-Ga was an homage to Ozu, but I was only able to edit the film after Paris, Texas — which was somehow poignant. And yes, my life took a different direction afterward. America had lost its spell, in many ways — but that’s another story — and my home country of Germany moved back into the center of my attention, always with Japan on the horizon.

PURPLE — You made a film with the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, you’ve modeled for him, and he’s a close friend. How would you describe his fashion? What do you like about it?

WIM WENDERS — I made another film in Tokyo (and Paris) in 1989, on Yohji Yamamoto, Notebook on Cities and Clothes. This time,
I largely shot it as a one-man crew, as Yohji agreed to be observed at work but wanted it to happen with minimal invasiveness. He became a close friend, my “Japanese brother,” and through him, his work, and his life’s story, I understood more about my fascination with and love for Japan. I realized how similarly both countries had gone through the history of the 20th century, both with an attraction to fascism, both ashamed of their own history afterward, both the big “losers” of World War II. There is a beautiful scene in an Ozu film, when Chishū Ryū — playing a captain on a Japanese warship during World War II — meets one of the former soldiers serving on that ship, and the two of them have a drink in a bar. The barkeeper plays old war marches on his record player for them, and they both get quite loaded. But when the soldier ponders, dreamingly: “What if we had won the war? Imagine! We’d be sitting in a bar on Fifth Avenue!” Chishū Ryū’s character stops his reverie and answers, suddenly quite sober: “Luckily, it didn’t turn out that way!” I realized how similar our stories were as postwar children of Japan and Germany. Both our countries had gone through a period of frantic reconstruction and industrialization. We had both lived through the similarly massive impact of American culture in our youth, growing up in countries that looked forward rather than backward, and we both experienced that we had to reestablish our identities from scratch. The film very much touches on that notion of identity, and how his work with clothes centers around that subject, just like my work with images. In many ways, we found out, we had both followed the same impetus and path. I understood so much more about Japan through my friendship with Yohji and by immersing myself more and more in Japanese culture.

PURPLE — Are you still a big fan of the Plaubel Makina 67?

WIM WENDERS — [Laughs] Oh, yeah. On my last day in the spring of 1983, when Ed and I had finished shooting Tokyo-Ga, I fulfilled a very old desire. During our shoot, I had discovered a fabulous used-camera store in the Ginza area with my dream camera in the window. It was that Plaubel Makina 67, with an amazing 2.8 Nikon lens. It was a legendary camera, and I knew several photographers who had used it all their lives. I myself had always photographed on 35mm cameras, like my father’s Leica and others — never on a mid-size camera and on roll film. As I was going to go on a long and lonesome journey through the American West on my return to the US, I decided it was time to take this step up to a huge-format negative. So, I bought that Plaubel Makina. It was in great shape, and I made each and every picture in my book — and later exhibition — Written in the West on color negatives and with that very camera I had bought in Ginza. It was the most reliable instrument, and I used it for years and years. Except that on a later visit to Tokyo, in the late ’80s, I went back to that shop and acquired my second dream camera, a Fuji 6×17 Panorama. Since then, I’ve always traveled with both cameras everywhere. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly difficult to bypass the X-ray machines in airport security. At the time, you could pack all your large negative rolls into one bag, both the unexposed and the exposed ones, and they were shielded against any damaging rays. Security people would examine the bag and its contents by hand, without putting it through the X-ray exposure. Now, they don’t even know any more what these film rolls represent and insist on sending them through the machine, saying that they can’t be damaged and that these machines only have an effect on films of more than 1600 ASA. That is simply not true. I’ve come home too often only to find — once my precious films are developed — that they are fogged or show all sorts of damaging effects from the X-rays that make them unusable. So, now I only use my Plaubel and my Fuji when I do not have to travel and go through any security. Otherwise, I’ve made the switch to digital equipment, like everybody else.

PURPLE — In your film Perfect Days, you tell the story of a man who seems to be a normal person doing the lowliest job in the city with devotion, yet with an extremely emotional inner world. Is this a metaphor for art, considering that art and cinema are all about a real internal experience, even a sort of ecstatic experience?

WIM WENDERS — You could read the film this way, sure. And Hirayama [played by Kōji Yakusho] does live a very fulfilled life, even if he probably once lived a more privileged lifestyle. Now he has reduced his possessions to a real minimum. He still works with an old automatic snapshot camera and buys one film per week, not more. And he reads his favorite literature on used books that cost a dollar each. No, he doesn’t buy two or three books, just one, and only when he finishes it does he buy the next one. His music is still the old cassette tapes from when he was young. I guess he realized this was his favorite music anyway, and listening to his old mono tape deck was still a pleasure that couldn’t be topped, even if he has moved on to hi-fi stereo. He only uses his old mobile phone to receive calls — it is not a smartphone, it doesn’t have an Internet connection, and it doesn’t take pictures. Hirayama has simplified his life to his bare needs. Not having more, no TV and no Internet, doesn’t bother him. He enjoys entertainment that is free of charge and for everybody’s enjoyment, although nobody else seems to see it, except for our man. It’s the fabulous and unique spectacle of the light and shadows produced by the sun when it shines through leaves that are swaying in the wind. I’ve just tried to explain that as briefly as possible in English, but the Japanese have a single word for the phenomenon, komorebi. Hirayama loves them, and his best friends are trees, anyway. Yes, komorebi is a metaphor for cinema and how fugitive or ephemeral everything might be that appears in front of our cameras. And yes, we’re so busy seeing and consuming “stuff” all the time that most of us have unlearned any “ecstatic experience.” But Hirayama is still capable of it, even when he just leaves his house in the morning and lifts his eyes up to the sky with a smile, almost like a little ceremony. Now that I’ve answered all these questions, I feel an acute pain in my heart. It’s homesickness. I feel homesick for Tokyo and for Japan. Japanese culture has deeply impregnated my sense of living and certainly has helped me regain an appreciation for the common good. I can’t say, even after all these visits, that I feel like an “expert” on Japan or on Japanese society. On the contrary: every time I arrive there, I feel astonished from scratch. But I also feel strangely at home, right away.

END