In 1981, Raoul Ruiz made a little film called Territory - a group of people lost in a landscape, where without the signifiers of story or a map to guide them, we saw how they fell apart in all sorts of hierarchies and explanatory dogmas. The allegory was about us and the stories we make up. A central image was a map as a series of heads within heads, minds within minds - where the world starts. I've written a comment on IMDb.
At that time Wenders was waiting for money to come together for the Hammett film he was going to do for Coppola, floundering. Somehow he arranged to borrow Ruiz' cast & crew from that film to make this one in Portugal about the frustration. I had in fact marked this to see soon after Territory but other things intervened, I never took much to Wenders, so it was kind of forgotten.
As I return to it I find many of the same pros and cons of the man.
First the spin on Ruiz, playful, referential. The same people lost in a landscape but as they find their way to an abandoned seaside resort we realize they're actors in a film. They ran out of film to shoot with and have to wait as phonecalls are being made and the American producer is sought out. This lets Wenders capture the Hammett frustration - he shows a languishing with nothing to do.
More important though, without thesignifiers of story and images to mark time, real life opens for these people who now have to be themselves and not in a film. The German director in a speech says that 'stories are only found inside stories, real life is where there are no more stories', a banal aphorism like the French were doing years before - the obvious side of Wenders.
With nothing to do, we see how they're all embroiled in stories of their choosing, how they keep trying to imprint meaning, it's what we all do, foisting concept on things to explain existence. A log smashes through a window and the director has to quote from a book how it's a sign of evil, it cannot be just a log brought by the wind. Another one is awed that the ocean indicated on a globe is in fact what's right out his window - the real thing has been there all this time. A woman says that she's glad they're not filming, says it to the camera as she has her picture taken.
Ruiz would soon have all this in a magical timeflow, images of mind from inside of it, Wenders is looking for the ground beneath images that gives rise to them - the most difficult thing. So we have a second shift to now a Wenders film purely about the search, and what better place to unfold than Hollywood? We fly to the place that gives rise to images and drive around looking for the producer in ultimate control of them.
This was a great choice - now we can have just the city, the coming and going of things through the eyes. So what real life does he find beneath the stories?
A wandering around town looking for someone, the wandering as life. Some expertly photographed atmospheres of streets, but it numbs. Still the same lack of satisfaction so long as we depend on something out there to happen, outside of us.
So an emptiness but emptiness for Wenders is modern monotony instead of vital in the Buddhist understanding, lucid, receptive to things. It's what he missed again in his Ozu film after this. This isn't Zen as people sometimes say, Zen would be to see mundane life as the open ground of possibility, this merely records confines of unfulfillment: aimless driving around to cheat death.
Someone could say this all perfectly captures a malaise we know too well. But it does so as a coffee-table book about it, with cinematic time unspooled as only a style to hang around in. There's talk about Bogart films, a theater plays the Searchers - it fits nicely with that cinematic culture built by the French around reference, but it seems small stuff. And even so, what can be the use of saying life is aimless?
The finale with trying to spot unseen gunshots with a camera is difficult to watch, filming, trying to see, where death swoops from and the last breath as image. This because it could have been powerful - I think of the end of The Passenger. But how sophomoric it looks, how film school- ish in its reach of a great matter. Still it's better to confront this and decide than never to contemplate the thing.
