Wim Wenders, Emotion Pictures. Reflections on the Cinema. Trans. Sean Whiteside in association with Michael Hofmann. London, Boston: faber and faber, 1989. Hardcover, 146 pp. 24 x 16 cm.
An interesting collection of 33 essays by probably the most famous director of New German Cinema. Most of the essays and reviews in the book are from a period between 1968 and 1971 when Wenders was still at film school. A few other pieces go back to 1977. All texts document Wenders' cultural obsessions that were to lead to Paris, Texas the film that won him the Palme d'Or in Cannes.
The sometimes fragmentary nature of these essays, mixing reflection on film genres with more extended citations of song lyrics, clearly shows Wenders' thought process, simultaneously documenting all the aspects of American culture that made Wenders into an avid explorer of planet America, and an acute deconstructor of the American dream: “The American dream is quintessentially an export of Europeans who fled a war-driven, divided continent and painted their utopian version of a better humanity onto this new, promised land.” (Vice)
Subjects include: experimental film, American Westerns, Asses in Westerns, Godard's One + One (Sympathy for the Devil), Once Upon a Time in the West, Easy Rider, Rote Sonne, The Kinks, François Truffaut (La Sirène du Mississipi), Bad Day at Black Rock, Hitchcock, John Ford, Van Morisson, L'Enfant Sauvage, Monterey Pop, a rock music film festival, Eddie Constantine, etc. See table of contents.
A fine, clean and tight copy in a fine, unclipped dj, protected by a Mylar cover. Pages slightly browned. Essential for lovers of European cinema.