Wings and a prayer

Wim Wenders is renowned as the creator of some of the most beautiful films of the 1980s, as the upcoming Irish Film Institute Wenders season will attest, but he's also responsible for some truly rotten cinema, writes Donald Clarke.

A LITTLE OVER a year ago, Wim Wenders, director of such perennial favourites as Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas, flew into Dublin to promote an odd little drama called Land of Plenty.

Shot in 16 days on a shoestring budget, the film uses a shrill and hectoring voice; just consider that galumphing title alone to denounce certain undeniable idiocies in the response of the United States to 9/11. Land of Plenty, which follows a Vietnam veteran and his missionary niece as they bounce about poorer parts of southern California, was filmed as long ago as 2003, but, when we met, had still to receive a release in cinemas or on DVD.

"We made it before the 2004 election and thought it might change things," the German director said morosely. "At that time nobody was making films like that. People were still all driving around with American flags and nobody was questioning if that was a good thing."

In the years since the film's completion, the US response to 9/11 has become a key topic of the age. Barely a month goes by without some director - this week, Brian De Palma's Redacted bumbles into cinemas - delivering a meditation on the conflict in Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet Land of Plenty remains unreleased. Indeed, it doesn't even feature in the Irish Film Institute's upcoming Wenders season.

It seems as if Wenders may have drifted out of fashion. Don't Come Knocking, the meandering, formless film he made after Land of Plenty, received savage reviews from the critics and none of his releases this decade has found a substantial audience. To be fair, the director, now a hairy 62, seems good humoured about negative responses to his work.

"At some point, after my first films got to America, I realised that every review said they were about angst, alienation and America. I called them my triple-A reviews. The original title of Land of Plenty was Angst, Alienation and America."

It feels like a long time since Wenders's triple-A films hung around the cutting edge, but, for a period of around 15 years, the director was, indeed, one of the most fascinating film-makers on the planet. In between 1972's The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty and 1987's Wings of Desire, Wenders delivered a series of pictures that, though linked by a uniquely Teutonic class of post-war insecurity, offered greater variety than those sarky American reviews suggested.

The American Friend was an endlessly inventive Patricia Highsmith adaptation. Alice in the Cities bridged the Atlantic. Kings of the Road found new things to do with the road movie. Even before the international success that came with Paris, Texas, Wenders had achieved his place in the pantheon.

Wim Wenders was one of a golden coterie of brilliant German directors to emerge in the late 1960s. They may have been fewer in number than the French film-makers who had redefined cinema a few years earlier, but the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (prolific), Volker Schlöndorff (austere), Werner Herzog (crazy) and Wenders (trans-cultural) has a sour weightiness that resonates as strongly today as it did in the era of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Analyses of this creative explosion have often come to the conclusion that Wenders and his pals were reacting against the bourgeois complacency that had crept into German society following the post-war economic miracle.

Well, that notion of a movement was really created by the reactions to the films rather than by the films themselves, Wenders told me. "But we were of the generation that responded to 1968, the year of revolution. We were young and knew movies would have to change. Maybe we in Germany were best-placed to react quickly to that and find a new foundation to build on."

Born only a few months after the end of the second World War, Wim Wenders was of an age to absorb the great wave of US pop culture that swept across the world in the 1950s. His early films were energised (and his later ones impaired) by efforts to filter Eisenhower-era iconography - diners, cowboys, Route 66 - through a middle-European, post-war sensibility.

After an unhappy venture into costume drama, he once said that he would never again make a film where no car, service station, television or jukebox appeared. What's a jukebox, granddad? Raised in Düsseldorf, the town that also brought us the mighty Kraftwerk, Wenders studied in Paris and Munich before taking a temporary job in the German offices of United Artists. That experience, happening while protests against the Vietnam War were all about, helped stoke Wenders's ambivalence towards the US.

After a few well-received, low-budget productions, Wenders collaborated with writer Peter Handke on the eccentric The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty. Following a goalie as, after letting in an easy shot, he wanders about Germany and drifts towards murder, the film was sufficiently impressive to convince German producers that he might be the man to handle an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

That film turned out to be something of a catastrophe, but, after its unsatisfactory completion, Wenders launched himself into a project that showcased his odd talent at its most characteristic. Alice in the Cities, in which a German journalist returning from New York assumes responsibility for a young stranger, is infected with both the director's enthusiasm for the new world and his suspicion that its culture might have a poisonous effect. Alice seems equally unsure about the strange beast that was West Germany.

While directing The American Friend, a film that triumphs despite conspicuously altering the tone of Patricia Highsmith's source novel, Wenders became involved in a savage punch-up with Dennis Hopper that ended with them bonding like Victor McLaglen and John Wayne in The Quiet Man. The film also managed to attract the attention of Francis Ford Coppola. Hammett, made for the American director's Zoetrope studio, was an unhappy experience.

"There was enough conflict and ugliness for two movies," Wenders said. "Francis and I encapsulate two totally different approaches to movie direction."

Never mind. Hammett, a better picture than Wenders's recollections suggest, offered one further step towards the international success that was Paris, Texas. Written by Sam Shepard, the picture, winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, sent Dean Stockwell and Harry Dean Stanton round a version of the US that nodded towards the Wild West which Wenders remembered from the comics of teenage years. Ry Cooder's guitar twanged. Shadows of the dustbowl were everywhere.

In retrospect, Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire now appear to form the punctuation that closes Wenders's best years. Wings of Desire, in which pony-tailed angels murmured their way around Berlin, is a classic example of a work of art that succeeds despite the fact that certain worrying tendencies - tendencies that will later totally overpower the artist - make their first conspicuous appearance. (Think of the creeping portentousness of Martin Amis's London Fields, the underlying cheesiness of David Bowie's Let's Dance or the disorder in Coppola's Apocalypse Now.)

Wings of Desire is a tremendously beautiful film, but the crazy grandiosity that later skewered Faraway So Close, Until the End of the World and, most disastrously, the jaw-droppingly stupid The Million Dollar Hotel is already lurking among the monochrome streets.

That last film, from a story by (mein Gott!) Bono, also managed to confirm how dated Wenders's obsession with American imagery of a certain era had become. All those Edward Hopper windows. All those noir hotel rooms. The images have been recycled so often, their original potency is as diluted as that of the Bayeux Tapestry.

And then there is Don't Come Knocking. The movie asks us to believe that a key character might be a star of contemporary cowboy movies. Cowboy movies? Why not make him a crusader or a medieval jester?

The sad fact is that the relationship the young Wenders had with US culture will mean little to any western European born after 1970. In the 1950s and 1960s, American pop ephemera were simultaneously pervasive and elusive. Almost nobody took a holiday in the US, comics got through irregularly, films took ages to cross the Atlantic and one's parents still tended to resist the Yankee advance and be wary of its long-term effects. Younger middle-class Europeans, now no less likely to own the latest sleek appliance than the average New Yorker, find America considerably less exotic than their parents did.

The good news for fans of Wenders's great German films is that he seems to be getting the message.

"I have twice lived in America and twice left," he told me. "The first time I left was in the 1980s, when I became sick of Reaganomics. Now I live in Berlin again. I hoped Americans would realise they had been lied to and vote against Bush. But it seems at least half of them didn't get it. So I moved back again."

Is he back on track? His next film, The Palermo Shooting, stars the lead singer of German band Die Toten Hosen as a photographer adrift in southern Italy. Hmm? Sounds like it could go either way.

Wim Wenders: In the Course of Time, a two-part season of the director's films, begins at the Irish Film Institute on April 1st. The event continues in May. See www.ifi.ie for details