Sunday, December 30, 2018
558 - Kings of the Road, Germany, 1976. Dir. Wim Wenders.
Bruno - Has the movie started?
Pauline - Ten minutes ago, but you haven't missed anything.
"The camera is a weapon against the tragedy of things, against their disappearing." - Wim Wenders, 1987.
In 1976 movie theaters are disappearing. All along the border. The border between East and West Germany. And it is a tragedy.
Bruno Winter is a projector repairman. He makes house calls. Or rather, theater calls. He drives a large truck from town to town to visit their movie theaters and repair their projectors. The truck is large enough to have a bunk bed in the cab and a full-size jukebox in the back. Along with all the tools, the signs, and the equipment.
He is doing his part to fight against the disappearing of things. The disappearing of small-town movie theaters.
The film begins in the projection room of one of those theaters, where Bruno talks to an old man. A man who has been running the theater for many years. A man who remembers the way things used to be, you know? The man ends each sentence with the phrase "you know?" And each sentence describes the way things used to be.
The film ends in the projection room of another one of those theaters, where Bruno talks to a woman. A woman who has been running the theater for years, and whose father ran it for many years before her. She has halted the showing of films. Her father said, "Film is the art of seeing." She agrees. But the films they are sending her are exploitative. She does not define what that means--what it is that exploits--but it hurts her. It makes her sad. She is not presented as prudish or censorial but as another one of those old knights fighting against the passage of time. Pictures of Brigitte Bardot and Fritz Lang line the walls of her theater as a kind of memory of how things used to be.
Fritz Lang, the director with one eye. The cycloptic, cyclopedic, half-blind seer. Predecessor to Nicholas Ray, the other director with one eye. Another godfather to Wim Wenders.
Her theater is named the Weisse Wand. The White Wall. It has a neon sign on the left side of the marquis which shows its initials. WW. The letters on the sign on the front are mostly dark. Only the final e of Weisse and the final nd of Wand are lit up. We see it already in the reflection of Bruno's windshield, with his Faulkner novel The Wild Palms visible behind him. (My copy has the new title, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Bruno's older version is itself a remembering, a preserving, of older things.) (In Alice in the Cities it was F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night.) We tilt up to the Michelin Man that hangs above the driver outside the truck, and we continue tilting and panning over to settle on the marquis. The lit WW stands for Wim Wenders. The lit e nd spells End. The End of the movie. The End of the road trilogy. The End of Bruno's career as a projector repairman. The End of cinema as these people knew it. As Wenders once knew it.
In between these two theaters that bookend our three-hour tour, Bruno Winter, the King of the Road, rides with his temporary companion, Robert Lander, the Kamikaze. Lander meets Winter at the beginning of the film, and leaves him at the crossroads, the intersection, in the end--with Lander's riding the train on the tracks, and Bruno's driving the truck across the tracks.
They meet when Bruno is stopped by a lake to rest, where he has recently awakened and steps out to put on his clothes. Robert is driving his VW Beetle at high speeds, throwing up white exhaust in the midst of the billowing wheat. (Wenders the photographer is always photographing landscapes. The film is a picture-book of sites along the German border, beautifully composed, beautifully filmed.) Lander drives his car into the lake. As it begins to sink he climbs out through the sunroof, with his jacket and his suitcase. He swims ashore. Walks out. Stands facing Bruno who laughs to see him. Lander laughs. If he wanted to commit suicide, he made a pitiful effort to do it. Apparently, he did not want to badly enough.
But in this easy-come, easy-go world of the Road Trilogy, Lander leaves his car behind in the lake and rides along with Bruno. The two form a quiet friendship as they go from town to town, Bruno fixing projectors and speakers, Robert tagging along.
Kamikaze takes a detour to visit his father. His father prints newspapers. And as they talk through the night, Robert sets type on his father's printing press, so that in the morning when he leaves he hands his father a front page describing his feelings and offering advice printed below the masthead--the headline informing his father that the story below is how Robert believes his father should treat his mother.
Bruno works with large mechanical equipment. Movie projectors. Robert works with large mechanical equipment. A printing press. Robert says he is a pediatrician, but his real job involves linguistic research, studying childhood growth and development as it pertains to language. He documents the moments when imagination dies and words become functional, an unfortunate aspect of growing up. Loss of creativity. Loss of freedom.
Early in their journey Kamikaze goes with King of the Road to a school, where Bruno replaces the speaker for the movie being shown on the last day before break. The children sit restlessly in their seats as Bruno stands on a ladder behind the screen in the dark installing the new speaker. Suddenly, Robert turns on a light. "Striking!" Robert does not warn Bruno, and at first Bruno is blinded by it. He asks him to turn it off. But Robert, realizing that the children can see the men's silhouettes through the screen, begins a game of pantomime which makes the children laugh. Bruno joins him, and the two men delight the audience with their shadow show.
We will only learn later that this was a moment of fear, anxiety, and anger for the two men.
When Robert leaves to meet his father, Bruno meets Pauline. He stops in a town, and during his free time he goes to an amusement park whose rides have not yet opened for the day. He stands next to the bumper cars. Pauline comes to him and thinks he works there. She wants to ride the bumper cars. She pays him. He has no change. Keep it. She does not mind. She gives him enough money that she could "ride forever." She gets in a bumper car and rides it by herself as the other attendees stand in line waiting for the ride to open. She moves forward and backward, bumping into the edge but otherwise has the entire floor to herself. The real worker sees her and stops her. He commandeers the car and pushes it over beside the others. She gets out and walks past everyone, presumably embarrassed, and approaches Bruno as he stands eating his hot dog and smiling. He hands her her money back and asks to see her. She looks him over. He can tell she is unimpressed with his work overalls. He offers to clean up. Maybe tonight even. She says she will be at the movies. He says he will be there too. Of course.
That night she pulls the switch on him. When he arrives he finds that she works at the theater. He pays for two tickets and she does not have change. Keep it. He does not mind. He can get a snack. Will you join me? She sends him in. He sits alone. The screen is out of focus. There is a dark spot in the middle. It is framed poorly. He walks to the wall and opens the secret window, where he can look in on her in her booth. She looks at him. How does he know about that? He tells her the problems and asks her to call up to the projectionist in the projection booth. She picks up the phone but does not know what to say. He will tell her. No one answers anyway. He goes upstairs to fix the problem himself. When he arrives, he finds the film spooling off the sprocket and onto the floor. A pile. Wanton locks of film. The projectionist is lying on the floor facing the other way. He has a small mirror dangling in front of the projector bouncing the movie onto the back wall, where he is watching it. And doing things.
The man does not know what he is doing. He is filling in. The job does not pay anyway. So Bruno comes to the rescue. Fixes the problem. Sets up the next reel on the next projector. Watching Bruno in the projection booth reminds us of our beloved Italian film Cinema Paradiso.
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2018/03/440-cinema-paradiso-italyfrance-1988.html
What is more romantic than the projection room of a movie theater?
After everyone is gone, Bruno starts a film for him and Pauline to watch alone together. They have a nice evening. Reality sets in when she informs him that she does not want a man in her life. She lives alone with her daughter and intends to keep it that way. It is too bad. We were pulling for Bruno to find love.
He discusses it later with Robert when they are in a bunker, at the end of the road, in the Black Forest, on the border where they can go no further. Each has his story. Each has taken his time, over the course of the movie, to tell it. The challenge of communicating. The difficulty of relationships.
They sit inside the walls covered in graffiti, the signatures and home towns of American soldiers that were stationed here in the War.
If Robert is with his wife he wants to kill her. If he leaves her, she will kill herself. Bruno calls him on it. You are making excuses. You are a coward. Robert gives it back to Bruno. You hide in your truck and avoid society. As if you are invisible. As if you do not exist.
Man is alone.
They part ways, as people do in Wenders' road movies. They meet. They travel. They share something. They learn something. They separate. They continue their journey off screen. Alone yet filled with possibility.
Robert meets a boy at the train station. The boy is sitting and writing in a notebook. Robert asks him what he is writing, and the boy says he is describing what he sees. A train station. Train tracks. He looks at Robert, who makes gestures for the boy to respond to. A man. Sunglasses. A suitcase. An empty suitcase. Smiling. A fist. Robert asks if it is that easy. The boy says, Yes. It is that easy. The boy functions as an answer to Wilhelm in yesterday's film Wrong Move (1975). Wilhelm made writing difficult. He said that observation was preferable to inspiration, yet he seemed to have neither. He was the picture of the wannabe writer. Putting on airs. Pretentious. Tormented. But not actually writing. This boy has cracked the code. It is not difficult. It is simple. He is doing it. And he is still a boy. When Robert offers to give the boy his suitcase and sunglasses in exchange for the boy's notebook, the boy immediately says yes and hands it to him. Just as easily as he wrote it. Easy come, easy go. It is not precious. It is not his baby. It is what he wrote today. He can write more tomorrow. Robert takes the notebook like a found treasure. The secret that ever eludes him. But the boy puts on the sunglasses with ease and joy. He looks up at the sky. He looks at his new suitcase. "This is a good deal," he says. He got the better of it.
The film ends on an optimistic note, showcasing solitude without despair. A poetic resignation to the condition of the soul. And the idea that life goes on. That it is mysterious. That it is good.
When asked how he does it, Bruno says he gets by.
And he does.
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