Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders: Making Films That Matter is the first book in 15 years to take a comprehensive look at Wim Wenders’s extensive filmography. In addition to offering new insights into his cult masterpieces, the 10 essays in this volume highlight the thematic and aesthetic continuities between his early films and his latest productions. Wenders’s films have much to contribute to current conversations on intermediality, whether it be through his adaptations of important literary works or his filmic reinventions of famous paintings by Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth. Wenders has also positioned himself as a decidedly transnational and translingual filmmaker taking on the challenge of representing peripheral spaces without falling into the trap of a neo-colonial gaze. Making Films That Matter argues that Wenders remains a true innovator in both his experiments in 3D filmmaking and his attempts to define a visual poetics of peace.

This collection, which emanated from a 2017 conference on Wenders, goes a long way toward updating the director’s reputation in light of his recent work and of new methodologies consequential to film studies … [Wim Wenders] does a solid job of showing that his later work has more than just curiosity value. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty., Wim Wenders: Making Films that Matter is an important and timely contribution to the scholarly literature on Wim Wenders and to film studies in general. Its collected essays constitute a long-overdue reassessment of Wenders as an important German auteur at a time in which Wenders's work has received little scholarly attention. The book's essays do invaluable work both by putting Wenders's films into the context of his work as a whole and by implicitly or explicitly addressing the politically motivated critiques that Wenders's films seem to offer only superficial engagement with their subjects. Taken together, the book's essays explicate the ways in which Wenders's filmic process and preoccupations with the technologies of seeing and their concomitant failings (the recuperative power of ‘mere’ sight, the interference of the camera/window/eye as medium that interposes between subject and object, and Wenders increasing concern with the ethics of his aesthetics as he works toward a collaborative ‘language of peace’) constitute at the same time the content of his work. This book is a long overdue reassessment of Wenders and his work.

Olivier Delers is Associate Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Richmond, USA. He is the author of The Other Rise of the Novel in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction (2015). Martin Sulzer-Reichel is Director of Arabic at the University of Richmond, USA. He is the author of A Change in Perception: The Arab Reception of Emperor Frederick II and Other Protagonists of the Crusades from the 13th Century Until Today (2015).