Cafe Umberto

I first read Joseph Conrad’s story 'Il Conde' (The Count) when I was around fourteen, in a volume called Four Tales (which I can see in my mind as a maroon cloth-bound book, with cancelled library stamps), in turn the four stories in this book came from a slightly larger collection A Set Of Six; the stand out story of Four Tales is clearly 'The Duel'. Given most other things I was drawing then, I would have thought that I should have been more attracted to the Napoleonic protagonists of 'The Duel', but for some reason 'Il Conde' was the one that prompted me to make a drawing inspired by it (I also missed the homosexual subtext in the central encounter of the narrative). I recall making a large pencil drawing of what I imagined the Cafe Umberto from the story might have been like. This was probably inspired by some memories of Czechoslovakia, my most recent experience of the continent but also, I think, Gatwick Airport, where I had made drawings in the early hours of the morning while waiting for our plane. I finally got to Naples in 2004, but don’t remember even thinking about 'Il Conde' - or the drawing - when I was there. I realise that my drawing was based on the brief description in the text:

“The monumental arch of the Galleria Umberto faced him at the top of a noble flight of stairs. He climbed these without loss of time, and directed his steps towards the Cafe Umberto. All the tables outside were occupied by a lot of people who were drinking. But as he wanted something to eat, he went inside into the cafe, which is divided into aisles by square pillars set all round with long looking-glasses. The Count sat down on a red plush bench against one of these pillars, waiting for his risotto. And his mind reverted to his abominable adventure.”

Joseph Conrad, Il Conde

This was supplemented with my ideas, gathered from television and film, of what such a space might look like in the early 20th century ('Il Conde' was first published in 1908, although as much as I can remember what my drawing of Cafe Umberto looked like, it had more of a feel of the 1920s or 30s). The drawing did have the pillars with mirrors, crowded by the chairs and tables, all done with a box of pencils I had recently been given, ranging from 4H to 9B. I used this range for carefully shading in the drawing, a method quite given up on later, the idea that one might need more than one weight of pencil in a rendering. The original drawing is long lost, probably destroyed like similar juvenilia of the time, and if found would only be a disappointment. A drawing from the Cafe Apropos in Copenhagen will have to stand in for the Umberto.

Resistances

"The camera is a weapon against the tragedy of things, against their disappearing."

'Why do you make films?', Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images

Some things are surprisingly resistant to change. Despite the myriad pressures involved, the built environment remains stubbornly so. Patrick Keiller's The City of The Future drew on footage from the first decade of cinema (1895-1905), with the curious insight that many British cities are very recognisable from how they appeared around the turn of the twentieth century. Visionary architects of the modernist avant garde always presented the city of the future as erupting, fully formed, from a tabula rasa. However, many of the fleeting figures from the film footage that Keiller curated would easily recognise those same streets in London, Liverpool, and the other cities one hundred years on: much of the late Victorian and Edwardian infrastructure continues to shape life in the cities today.

Keiller also touched on similar themes in the rarely-seen The Dilapidated Dwelling, a film commissioned, but not shown by Channel 4, due, Keiller believes, to its pessimistic tone around the inability of the domestic house to become innovative through the vested interests of capital. Keiller's central premise is that technological advances in design, manufacturing and automation, have been painfully slow at affecting house building - especially in Britain - when these have transformed so many other spheres of life in the material world. Patrick Keiller uses a statistic that, at the current rate of replacement, buildings in Britain will have to last an average of five thousand years.

Forty years is a trivial length of time in comparison, yet in terms of the felt experiences of material existence in the developed world, it is: the texture of everyday life from the 1970s was very different. Researching the trip to Wuppertal, I looked for the locations using various maps online - and also Google StreetView. This appeared to show a cafe that displayed such strongly consistent architectural features that it must be the one used in Alice in the Cities. This seemed remarkable in a way that the continuing function of the Schwebebahn does not, for example, or the continuing needs that the road network serves. On the opposite side of the road there is a neon sign "Seit 1907" which also remains.

On Sunday morning, I visited the Eis-Cafe Gardasee. Alighting at Sonnborner Strasse, I was pleased to find it open on an otherwise quiet street. I was the only customer. The interior decor has changed, hardly a surprise, and the jukebox has gone (one would imagine that the jukebox was originally part of the cafe's furniture, not set dressing for the film). I ordered a glass of tea (the unceasing rain meant an ice cream seemed less apt), and sat in the window, at a table in the same position as Alice and Philip do in the film. Although the proprietor did not speak much English, my German was sufficient to ask if she knew Alice in the Cities. She smiled at this and said that she did. When she brought the tea to my table, she saw the stills that I had taken from the DVD for reference. This opened up more conversation. She was fascinated to see the image of the cafe from the outside, and the presence of the roadworks caused used some comment, although I could not entirely follow what she said. She did not look too much older than me, and I did not get a sense of whether she had been around when the film was made, but she cannot have been any older than Alice, if that. She said something about Wim Wenders returning to Wuppertal after thirty years to make Pina. As the conversation seemed to be faltering, or entering a natural break at that point, I asked the woman her name. Smiling, she said it was "Pina", before pausing to say, "Josepina".

She left me to my tea, but I could hear her talking to the chef in the kitchen - I was referred to by the kind if not entirely accurate epithet "young man" - and the chef came out to meet me. He wanted to see the stills, and was quite talkative; I only caught the general gist of what he said, and he had less English than Pina, but he did point out the photograph on the wall behind me- of the Schwebebahn above Sonnborner Strasse in the 1970s.

Wim Wenders has explained his motivations as a film maker in a number of writings and interviews which contain sentiments along broadly similar themes as the quote that begins this post (another is: "Things are disappearing; if you want to see them you have to be quick"). This is undoubtedly true for many aspects of everyday life, but the past can be tenaciously persistent in its ability to exist in a continuity with the present.

Alice's Gaze

"And then the camera, filming from what has been Alice's point of view, cuts to a shot of a young boy, riding a bicycle along the sidewalk, moving from right to left as he pedals to the centre of the frame, slips back to the right, and begins to pedal steadily to keep up with the car. He looks about seven years old. He has blond hair, and is wearing black shorts. When we first see him he is riding in front of an expanse of brick wall between two doors. [...] The boy is looking at someone inside the car, but we don't know for certain if it is Alice or Philip, for the reverse shot that would confirm the object of his gaze doesn't appear. And then it strikes me that the only person he could be looking at is me, us, the viewers. He is looking too directly, too steadily into the camera to be part of the fiction any longer. We have been seen. The shock of being recognized by the film connects us to this boy. The car is still moving through this city, but someone living here has arrested our attention and has also noticed us."

Brenda Austin-Smith, 'The Uses of Disorientation'

The description of this scene from Alice In The Cities, like the "pure contemplation" of the bird coming into the shot from the telescope earlier in the film, is a perfect example of the use of the contingent image in Wim Wenders' open, loosely-structured, road movies. It is also an example of how Wenders makes the viewer see with Alice's gaze: by use of editing and reverse angles we 'understand' Alice is looking at the boy on the bike, through the simple language of film, sufficiently assimilated as to rarely require explanation. Earlier, in Wuppertal, we see Alice looking at children leaving school, remarking that school must be out, and then in a cafe, where a boy is sat by a jukebox, singing. These scenes in the film where Alice's gaze is shown to be directed at other children demonstrate a form of double revelation: firstly, each instance appears to underline how Alice's current peripatetic life, the life of the road movie, is divorced from the certainties of place (the boy on the bike, or the boy in the cafe) or routine (the children leaving school) and is held in suspension; secondly, these scenes, one could argue by extension (and inference), show Alice to be developing a sense of empathy and understanding in that, being divorced from these certainties that she sees other children being secure in, Alice is perhaps better able to see others as they might see her, and is beginning to escape the solipsism of a child's view on the world.

As Alice eats her ice cream in the cafe, she watches the boy sat by the jukebox absently half-singing, half-humming along to Canned Heat's 'On the Road Again' while he licks an ice cream cone (the mirroring of the ice cream links the two, otherwise separated, children). This scene has a typical use of diegetic music in the film: it is cut to take exactly as long as the song on the jukebox, including revelations that Alice's grandmother did not live in Wuppertal as first supposed (Alice says, "Grandmother never lived in Wuppertal", and this is followed by the repeated line in the song, "And my dear mother left me when I was quite young"). Here Philip leaves to go to the bathroom, and Alice is then left to watch the boy. When Philip returns, after a bad tempered exchange, ("All you ever do is scribble in your notebook"), he announces that he is taking Alice to the police. Alice leaves the rest of her ice cream uneaten. As the song on the jukebox fades out, we hear its coda over the cut to the interior of the police station.

With Alice no longer in his care, Philip goes to a Chuck Berry concert. A brief scene follows with Philip seated on the ground as part of an audience, and a reverse angle shot (on different film stock, borrowed from D. A. Pennebaker) of Chuck Berry playing 'Memphis Tennessee'. Although aptly chosen, only a short section of the song appears, and, significantly, it leaves out the revelation in the last verse of the song, which entirely changes the reading of the verses preceding it. In the song, the narrator is trying to get in touch with "my Marie", revealed not, as one might expect from a rock and roll song, a lover, but the narrator's estranged daughter. Unlike the cafe scene, as Wenders does not let the entire song play out, only those familiar with the song's lyrics will understand its use as commentary, and not merely as an example of a product of an American culture that Philip Winter (and Wenders) appears fascinated by, but unable to assimilate (Philip is shown drinking Coca-Cola in this scene; while he has been unable to finish his assignment in America, America has followed him back to Europe). Back outside the hotel in Wuppertal, Alice reappears, having run away from the police.

Towards the end of the film, on the ferry across the Rhine, we see Alice looking at a woman singing to herself, accompanied by a boy of similar age to Alice - a scene of which she takes a photograph with Philip's Polaroid camera. Parallel to my reading of Alice's gaze in these scenes, Philip has also been affected by his encounter with Alice and their journey. Alexander Graf describes Philip's difficulties with his assignment as a writer as stemming from his "inability to see his life and his experiences as a cohesive whole that can be told as a story", and that Alice's possible role is to help "him to see and comprehend things more clearly."

At the end of the film, on the train Alice asks Philip: "What are you going do in Munich?"
"I'll finish this story."
"Your scribbling?"
(Philip nods)
"And what'll you do?"

In Stefan Zweig's novella, The Burning Secret‚ a twelve year old boy, Edgar, runs away while on holiday after he is befriended by a baron who uses him as a means to seduce his mother (entirely ignorant of sex, in a contemporary story Edgar would surely be younger). In a parallel to Alice In The Cities, Edgar's destination for his escape from his immediate situation is a train journey to his grandmother's house, entirely reliant on his own devices- and a gold coin kept, fetish like, for emergencies, or for occasions Edgar does not seem to have yet foreseen. During this journey, in a sublime passage, Edgar has a revelation of, for want of a more felicitous phrase, the adult world and it is worth quoting at length:

"But would the ten dollars be enough? He had travelled by train many a time without thinking that one had to pay, and still less how much one paid, whether ten or a hundred dollars. For the first time he got an inkling that there were facts in life upon which he had never reflected, and that all the many things that surrounded him and he had held in his hands and toyed with somehow contained a value of their own, a special importance. An hour before he had thought he knew everything. Now he realized he had passed by a thousand mysteries and problems without noticing them, and was ashamed that his poor little wisdom had stumbled over the first step it took into life. He grew more and more discouraged, and his footsteps lagged as he drew near the station.

[...]

It was not until Edgar took his seat in the train that he noticed he had secured only a third-class passage. Having always travelled first class, he was again struck with a sense of difference. He saw there were distinctions that had escaped him. His fellow-passengers were unlike those of his first-class trips, a few Italian laborers, with tough hands and uncouth voices, carrying pickaxes and shovels. They sat directly opposite, dull and disconsolate-eyed, staring into space. They must have been working very hard on the road, for some of them slept in the rattling coach, open-mouthed, leaning against the hard, soiled wood. "They have been working to earn money," came into Edgar's mind, and he set to guessing how much they earned, but could not decide. And so another disturbing fact impressed itself upon him, that money was something one did not always have on hand, but had to be made somehow or other. And for the first time he became conscious of having taken the ease in which he had been lapped as a matter of course and that to the right and the left of him abysms yawned which his eyes had never beheld. It came to him now with the shock of suddenness that there were trades and professions, that his life was hedged about by innumerable secrets, close at hand and tangible, though he had never noticed them. Edgar was learning a good deal in that single hour of aloneness and saw many things as he looked out of his narrow compartment into the great wide world. And for all his dark dread, something began to unfold itself gently within him, not exactly happiness as yet, rather a marvelling at the diversity of life. He had fled, he felt, out of fear and cowardice, yet it was his first independent act, and he had experienced something of the reality that he had passed by, until then, without heeding it. Perhaps he himself was now as much of a mystery to his mother and his father as the world had been to him. It was with different eyes that he looked out of the window. He was now viewing actualities, it seemed to him. A veil had been lifted from all things, and they were showing him the core of their purpose, the secret spring of their actions. Houses flew by as though torn away by the wind, and he pictured to himself the people living in them. Were they rich or poor, happy or unhappy? Were they filled with the same longing as he to know everything? And were there children in those houses like himself who had merely been playing with things? The flagmen who waved the train no longer seemed like scattered dolls, inanimate objects, toys stationed there by indifferent chance. Edgar now understood that the giving of the signal was their fate, their struggle with life."

Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret

London to Brussels

A year and a half ago, the first stage of the railway journey to St Petersburg entailed taking the Eurostar to Brussels. The current trip begins in the same fashion, although this time the train from London is rather more busy, thanks to this being the first Saturday of the Easter holiday.

At Brussels there was a similar amount of time for changing trains, a generous hour, although many of the trains are running a few minutes late, which might have been due to poor visibility in the fog. Ouside the station, leaving by the exit from Brussels Midi with the double-height wall-sized panel from Tintin in America (it shows Tintin bravely clinging on to the front of a steam locomotive, complete with motion lines, although rail travel in Belgium is less exciting than this), I went to see the site of the etching I had made from the source material gathered last time I was here. The building which was the focus of the print has now been demolished, leaving a plot of fine, flattened rubble

What still remains is the long low stump of a wall that cuts across the foreground of the etching from which protrudes a linear mass of twisted, rusting steel reinforcing rods, which was very enjoyable to draw, as a device to divide up the space in the picture. After rephotographing the scene, a few steps further along the short street are a pair of temporary concrete barriers, such that one finds around building works. I had photographed one of these eighteen months ago, with a slogan against Mohamed Morsi, who had been deposed two months earlier. The graffiti was still there.

Provisional Cities/The Phantom Ride

In 2013 I had an exhibition of paintings called 'Provisional Cities'. Most of the work consisted of paintings in the format of 6x4 inch postcards. This had evolved from work made specifically for the annual RCA Secret postcard sale: I had liked the idea of working within the prescribed format. As a series of paintings, to begin with the subject matter was not so prescribed, but became more so as the work continued. Like the postcard itself, many of these paintings were of ‘views’, although not necessarily those souvenirs or aide-mémoires that might typically feature as postcards. In my work there was the germ of an idea for a topographic project in which I was able to make comparisons and draw parallels between different aspects of the built environment, in different areas, different cities, different countries. Although not clearly thought through as a programme of work, which evolved as I made the paintings, certain features began to bear repetition: light to medium industrial uses of suburban areas, port facilities, the architecture of underground railways or rapid transit systems.

As I made the paintings from my own photographs, I realised that other images could fit within the types that I was using. With some of the compositions being inspired, if loosely, by stills from films, I found a handful of stills which would not be anomalous within the set of work. The exhibition Provisional Cities was promoted on posters and online with one such painting, 'Cafe Restaurant with Roadworks’. This was based on a still from Wim Wenders’ film, Alice In The Cities.

The Phantom Ride

It is 45 minutes into Alice in the Cities before Alice and Philip return to Europe without Alice’s mother. A shot of a plane, their plane, silhouetted against the sun, logically rising as they are going east, suggests a break in middle of the film, separating its American and European halves. This brief shot fades to black. The next shot is a fade in, to a plane landing in Amsterdam (Wenders uses lots of fades to black in the film generally; with the episodic structure of the film, these fades create a sense of elision, that time in the film passes between episodes, as opposed to cuts, although how much time is missing is often unclear).

Wim Wenders describes Alice In The Cities as:

"about a man who's supposed to be writing a feature about America. He can't do it, and the film begins with his decision to return to Europe. He happens to meet a little girl, Alice, and her mother, and promises to take her back to her grandmother in Europe. Only he doesn't know where she lives; all he has is a photograph of the house. The remainder of the film is taken up by the search for the house."

'Impossible Stories', Wim Wenders, in The Logic of Images

There are few scenes at a hotel near the airport while Alice and Philip wait for the arrival of Alice’s mother. The screens over the hotel room’s window show a picture of a landscape of windmills, a replacement of the ’anywhere' of the hotel (anonymous, international modernism with no sense of the vernacular) with permanently spring or summer 'any time’: sliding the screen over the window reminds the room’s occupants that they are in the low countries. Returning to the airport in vain, with Alice, upset, locked inside a toilet cubicle, Philip reads through a list of German town names from a book. At the end of the alphabet, the name ‘Wuppertal’ provokes Alice's memory of her grandmother's house.

An hour into the film there is a hard cut from a brief shot of a bus, presumably from the airport, to a dark interior. The camera moves backwards, away from this initially hard-to-read space, out into what appears to be open air, an exterior shot moving above a river. The logic of this disembodied, uncertain view only becomes clear with a cut to Philip and Alice seen inside a compartment of a train. This train is Wuppertal’s Schwebebahn, a suspended monorail system, which later appears overhead in many of the exterior shots during Philip and Alice’s searches in the city. Wenders’ initial placing of the camera in the rear-facing window of the Schwebebahn is a reverse example of the phantom ride:

“…the term phantom ride does not seem to have existed prior to its use to describe a certain kind of film, though it has since diffused into the language of horror fiction. One might understand phantom  merely as a modifier, meaning illusory, in which case railway panoramas can be and sometimes are described as phantom rides, but the term is more specific to a view in a direction close to that of the line of travel. In its strictest sense, a phantom ride is a film that looks forward from the front of a moving railway engine - a view then seldom encountered in ordinary experience, even by an engine driver”

Patrick Keiller, The View From The Train

Keiller’s discussion of the phantom ride is in relation to early non-narrative cinema and its role in fracturing the familiar spaces that existed before the imaging (and other) technologies of modernity and their abilities to collapse time and space: “For Henri Lefebvre, ‘around 1910 a certain space was shattered’ so that early cinema, arguably, offers a glimpse of this space just before (or possibly during) the period in which its ‘shattering’ occurred.” Had Wenders’ filmed from the front of the Schwebebahn, this brief sequence would have had a very different effect: although it only lasts for a few seconds, the viewpoint is disorientating, decentring and unexpected. The phantom ride had to be reversed to achieve this, which has the added effect of starting from darkness - like cinema itself - then establishing where the viewer is situated with the camera retreating inside the carriage.

There is a sense of time passing in the lighting outside (it is getting dark) from the brief few shots that comprise this sequence, but with very few clues as to how long they have been on the monorail. Further to his use of fades to black, employing cuts within a particular mis-en-scene, Wim Wenders often leaves the viewer with an impression that time may have elapsed between camera angles, an effect that works especially well in Alice in The Cities, suggestive of the elasticities of time when travelling: jet lag and changing time zones, sleeping and waking at odd hours, the soporific rhythms of mechanised transport. Philip and Alice alight at a station in twilight. Among the notices and advertisements which railway stations feature as their wallpaper, the end of a name can just be read: “-NBORN”. Although not exactly matching any current station name, it is clearly Sonnborner Strasse, as the exterior shots show the same location as the station itself, and I imagine Wenders owes his location this amount of fidelity. The Schwebebahn features directly outside the window of Alice and Philip’s hotel room, on the same street, as Philip invents a bedtime story.

Wenders returned to Wuppertal and the Schwebebahn for the elegiac Pina, thirty years after Alice In The Cities, which was his first foray into the most recent periodic re-emergence of stereo (or 3D) cinema. For Pina it feels apt; the history - and novelty - of imaging technologies is a recurring theme in Wim Wenders' films, of which the concept of the phantom ride is but one example. Within Alice In The Cities itself, there is Philip's (then) new Polaroid camera, a photobooth, hotel and airport televisions, and a pay telescope, as well as Alice's photographs of her mother and her grandmother's house. The images from the telescope, although unrelated to the narrative, become a sequence of "pure contemplation" according to Alexander Graf:

"From the composition of the sequence, it is clear that the bird flies into the frame quite by chance: the camera had previously been tracking along a different line but, once the bird enters the frame, the camera follows its path. This signals a desire in Wenders for the camera to enjoy the same openness of vision and attention that Alice - the first of a number of children who, in Wenders' films, are blessed with clear vision - shows for the incidental. Objects on the edge of the diegesis - here, the bird - are often allowed to drift into the frame, even though they may have little or no relevance for the development of the plot, as is the case here."

Alexander Graf, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway

Children, from Alice, through those that feature in Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire and Lisbon Story, extend into the space of the cinema of "pure contemplation": although acting, with lesser or greater degrees of awareness and self-consciousness, one gets the sense that, like the bird coming into the shot of the telescope, like the early 'pure cinema' of the phantom ride, for Wenders, the children are in some sense, more being truly themselves, existing in front of the camera.

Twenty years after Alice In The Cities, Rudiger Vogler would appear again as Philip Winter, in Wenders' Lisbon Story. In the final sequences of the film, Philip convinces Friedrich Munro to complete his abandoned portrait of the city. The viewer has already seen some of Friedrich's film-within-a-film, through Philip's viewing of the silent footage prior to Philip's forays into the city to capture the sound to accompany the images. Reunited with Friedrich, who has been an absent, disillusioned character for most of Lisbon Story, the two are seen, slapstick-fashion, filming with Friedrich's old hand-cranked silent movie camera, notably around, and then on a tram - creating a new phantom ride.