Wenders formerly served as the president of the European Film Academy from 1996–2020. He also earned an Honorary Golden Bear in 2015. He is an active photographer, emphasizing images of desolate landscapes.[4][5] He is considered an auteur director.[6]
Early life and education
Wenders was born in Düsseldorf into a traditionally Catholic family. His father, Heinrich Wenders, was a surgeon. The Dutch name "Wim" is a shortened version of the baptismal name "Wilhelm". As a boy, Wenders took unaccompanied trips to Amsterdam to visit the Rijksmuseum. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine at the University of Freiburg (1963–64) and philosophy at the University of Dusseldorf (1964–65), but dropped out and moved to Paris in October 1966 in order to become a painter.[7] He failed his entry test at France's national film school, IDHEC (now La Fémis), and instead became an engraver at Johnny Friedlaender's studio in Montparnasse.[7] During this time he became fascinated with cinema, and saw up to five movies a day at the local movie theater.
Set on making his obsession his life's work, he returned to Germany in 1967 to work in the Düsseldorf office of United Artists. That fall, he entered the University of Television and Film Munich (HFF).[7] Between 1967 and 1970, while at the HFF, he also worked as a film critic for FilmKritik, the Munich daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Twen magazine, and Der Spiegel.[7]
Wenders completed several short films before graduating from the Hochschule with a 16mm black-and-white film, Summer in the City (1970), his feature directorial debut.
Career
1970–1976: Film debut and early work
Wenders's career began in the late 1960s, the New German Cinema era.[8] Much of the distinctive cinematography in his movies is the result of a long-term collaboration with Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller.[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] Wenders made his directorial film debut with Summer in the City (1970), his graduation project at the University of Television and Film Munich, which he attended from 1967 to 1970. Shot in 16 mm black-and-white by Müller, the movie exhibited many of Wenders's later trademark themes of aimless searching, running from invisible demons, and persistent wandering toward an indeterminate goal. Protagonist Hans (Zischler) is released from prison, and after searching through seedy West German streets and bars, he visits an old friend in Berlin.
Wenders also directed a documentary-style film on the Skladanowsky brothers, known in English as A Trick of the Light.[23] The Skladanowsky brothers were inventing "moving pictures" when several others like the Lumière brothers and William Friese-Greene were doing the same. In 2011, Wenders was selected to stage the 2013 cycle of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival.[24][25] The project fell through when he insisted on filming in 3-D, which the Wagner family found too costly and disruptive.[26] In 2012, while promoting his 3-D dance film Pina, Wenders told the Documentary channel blog that he had begun work on a new 3-D documentary about architecture.[27] He also said he would only work in 3-D from then on.[28] Wenders had admired the dance choreographer Pina Bausch since 1985, but only with the advent of digital 3-D cinema did he decide that he could sufficiently capture her work on screen.[29]
In 2015, Wenders collaborated with artist/journalist and longtime friend Melinda Camber Porter on a documentary feature about his body of work, Wim Wenders – Visions on Film. Porter died before it was finished, and the film remains incomplete.[30][31] Wenders is a member of the advisory board of World Cinema Foundation. The project was founded by Martin Scorsese and aims to find and reconstruct world cinema films that have been neglected. As of 2015 he served as a Jury Member for the digital studio Filmaka, a platform for undiscovered filmmakers to show their work to industry professionals.[32]
In June 2017, Wenders stage-directed Georges Bizet's opera Les Pêcheurs de perles, starring Olga Peretyatko and Francesco Demuro and conducted by Daniel Barenboim at the Berlin State Opera(Staatsoper). In a 2018 interview, he said his favorite movie of all time was his film about Pope Francis, and that his entire career had been building up to it. His admiration for Francis is profound; he said he felt Francis is doing his best in a world full of calamities. He also said that, though raised Catholic, he had converted to Protestantism years earlier.[33]
In 2019 Wenders acted as executive producer for his former assistant director Luca Lucchesi's documentary A Black Jesus, which has similar themes to Pope Francis: A Man of His Word. The film explores the role of religion in communal identity and how this can create or dissolve differences in a small Sicilian town during the height of the refugee crisis.[34] Lucchesi noted that Wenders pushed the film to be more symbolic and philosophical, saying that Wenders wanted the film to have a "universal fairy-tale aspect" and to represent "Europe in a nutshell".[35]
Photography
Wenders has worked with photographic images of desolate landscapes and themes of memory, time, loss, nostalgia and movement.[4][5] He began his long-running project "Pictures from the Surface of the Earth" in the early 1980s and pursued it for 20 years. The initial photographic series was titled "Written in the West" and was produced while Wenders criss-crossed the American West in preparation for his film Paris, Texas (1984).[7] It became the starting point for a nomadic journey across the globe, including Germany, Australia, Cuba, Israel and Japan, to take photographs capturing the essence of a moment, place or space.[36]
Personal life
Wenders lives and works in Berlin with his wife, Donata.[7] He has lived in Berlin since the mid-1970s.[37] He is an ecumenical Christian; as a teenager he wished to become a Catholic priest.[38] He supports German football club Borussia Dortmund.[39]
In 2009, Wenders signed a petition in support of director Roman Polanski, who had been detained while traveling to a film festival in relation to his 1977 sexual abuse charges, which the petition argued would undermine the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely" and argued that arresting filmmakers traveling to neutral countries could open the door to "actions of which no-one can know the effects."[40][41]
From 1979 to 1981, Wenders was married to the American actress and singer-songwriter Ronee Blakley.
Wenders has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989, the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) in 1995, and the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, in 2005. The Wim Wenders Foundation was established in Düsseldorf in 2012. It provides a framework to bring together his cinematic, photographic, artistic and literary works in his native country and make them permanently accessible to the public.[95] In 2016, he received the Großer Kulturpreis of the Sparkassen Culture-Foundation Rhineland.[96]
Exhibitions
1986–1992
Written in the West, in conjunction with the publication, Written in the West, Munich: Schirmer/Mosel (1987)[97]
1993–1995
Wim Wenders Photo Exhibition, in conjunction with the publication, Once, Munich: Schirmer/ Mosel (2001)[97]
2004
Pictures from the Surface of the Earth, Australia and Japan, James Cohan Gallery, New York[98]
Wim Wenders: America, Villa e collezione la Panza, Varese, IT[109]
"In broad daylight even the sounds shine. Wim Wenders scouting in Portugal", curated by Anna Duque y González and Laura Schmidt Reservatório da Mãe d'Água das Amoreiras, Lisbon[110]
2016
"The Space Between the Characters Can Carry the Load", Collection Ivo Wessel, Weserburg Museum for modern Art, Bremen, DE
2017/2018
"Instant Stories/Wim Wenders' Polaroids", The Photographers' Gallery, London, from 20 October 2017 to 11 February 2018.[111]
Wenders, Wim (1997), The Act of Seeing:Essays and Conversations, London: Faber and Faber, ISBN978-0-571178-43-8
Wenders, Wim; Hofmann, Michael (2000), My time with Antonioni: the diary of an extraordinary experience, London: Faber and Faber, ISBN978-0-571-20076-4