Graffiti in The American Friend

Before the the opening credits of The American Friend are complete, the scene shifts from New York to Hamburg. “Ein film von Wim Wenders” appears on screen, superimposed on a shot of a building that is later revealed to be Jonathan Zimmerman’s apartment. This is surrounded by waste ground, with remnants of snow, and, too small to be clearly read in this scene, there is graffiti on the wall of an adjacent building. This graffiti is revealed in a shot much later in the film when Jonathan returns from committing a murder in Paris. It reads: “BRD=Polizeistaat!”.

In 'Impossible Stories' (1982), Wim Wenders describes his work of the 1970s into the early 80s as consisting of 'A-films' and 'B-films':

"In the first group (A) all the films are in black and white [...] In the other group (B) all the films are in colour, and they are based on published novels. The films in group A, on the other hand, are based without exception on ideas of mine - the word 'idea' is used very loosely to refer to dreams, daydreams and experiences of all kinds."

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

Wenders states that, during this period, each film was a reaction against the previous film he had made: The American Friend is one such B-film, made after Im Lauf Den Zeit (a literal translation is "In the Course of Time"; it was released under the English title, Kings of the Road), the last film in the 'road movies trilogy' which began with Alice In The Cities, itself a reaction against Wenders' unhappy experiences with The Scarlet Letter. The American Friend was in fact based on an unpublished novel, Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game: Wenders had wanted to use source material from Highsmith, but the rights of all her published work had been already sold at the time. In adapting the material, Wenders shifted much the important action from France to Hamburg in Germany.

The locations in Hamburg around Jonathan's home and framing workshop show a city of empty spaces and isolated apartment blocks facing the Elbe and the docks opposite. A reasonable assumption to make is that this townscape is the result of bombing in the Second World War, not yet rebuilt, thirty years after the destruction. In another scene, as the Zimmermans drive away from the apartment building in their orange Volkswagen, we can see another slogan, on a building behind the first: “Mord an Holger Meins/Nieder mit der Klassenjustiz/Rote Hilfe”. A rough translation would be: “Holger Meins was murdered/Down with [bourgeois] class justice!/Red Aid”. Filmed at the end of 1976, The American Friend is contemporary with the long Stammheim trial of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrik Meinhof and Jan Carl Raspe, original members of the Rote Armee Fraktion, otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang; Holger Meins had died on hunger strike two years earlier. The 'Rote Hilfe' referred to is a left-wing support group that worked for the RAF prisoners, inspired by a Communist organisation of the same name from Weimar-era Germany. The presence of the graffiti adds to the film’s sense of moral decay as Jonathan acquiesces to the manipulations of Raoul and, unknowingly, Ripley. That Jonathan is seen walking past the first slogan “BRD=Polizeistaat!” (which translates as “BRD" - the Bundesrepublik or West Germany "=Police state”) when he returns from the murder in Paris feels like commentary: state murder and individual murder are equated in a sense of the cheapness of life, heightened by Jonathan's existential crisis. Raoul attempts to assuage Jonathan's conscience by calling the people to be murdered 'bad' men in simplistic terms. Such simplicity does bring to mind an abitrariness: Raoul and his associates have designated them 'bad men', and for that they need to die.

These slogans on the walls of Hamburg are presumably genuine: I have already written about Wenders' fidelity to his locations; but they are also deliberately included. Perhaps they are shown to be indicative of the area in which Jonathan and his family live, in the St Pauli district, just a short distance from the infamous Reeperbahn (in one early exchange, one of the first things that Jonathan says to Ripley, in English, is, "The Reeperbahn is not what it used to be", and one can hear the quotation marks as Jonathan says this). Hamburg in the film, despite being shown as a working port, appears in material terms to be depressed economically. Capital flows through the docks, barely adhering to the town itself. The post-war West German economic miracle has left it alone, or incomplete; meanwhile, this economic miracle appears to have been bought, in part, with a willing amnesia by large sections of German society in order to build a new state. This was one motivating factor for the Baader-Meinhof Gang's violent puncturing of this complacent West German prosperity, a prosperity that had to deal with the oil shocks of the 1970s by the time of The American Friend. Growing unease with the state's closeness to America at the time of the Vietnam war, and the presence of US army bases in Germany helped create the conditions for extreme left-wing reaction. Wim Wenders would not have been unaware of this:

"As part of the '68 generation, Wenders was drawn into politics at this time, at one time being arrested and charged for resisting arrest at a demonstration. However, although he was active in protesting against the Vietnam War, he was not able to shake his ambivalence towards America. He continued to attend screenings of his beloved Westerns every evening and thus never quite fitted into the anti-imperialistic milieu of his student sharehouse."

David Tacon, Great Directors: Wim Wenders

In many of his films, America and American culture feature far more prominently than those films of his contemporaries (notably Herzog and Fassbinder). This American culture fills a void left by the necessary idea, if not the actuality, of starting a new state from scratch after the war. It also fills a role similar to the absent fathers that recur in Wim Wenders' films. In Kings Of The Road, this is famously summed up as, "The Americans have colonised our subconscious". Wenders has always felt this as both a pull and a push, ambivalence and criticality side by side with a love for the surfaces of such a culture. In The American Friend this relationship is symbolically mirrored in the friendship - cautious, amoral, yet genuine and galvanising - that develops between the two men.

The graffiti in The American Friend is doubly echoed in Chris Petit’s Radio On (1979). The slogan “Free Astrid Proll” is prominently seen on a wall in London which the camera from inside the moving car tracks as it passes, while David Bowie's 'Always Crashing In The Same Car' plays as the protagonist drives out of London. Astrid Proll had been a RAF member hiding out in London at the time, discovered and arrested pending extradition. Undoubtably a knowing nod from Chris Petit, funding from Wim Wenders' production company, black and white cinematography from Martin Schäfer (Kings of the Road, The State of Things), and the presence of Lisa Kreuzer as a woman searching for her missing daughter - Alice - all conspire to make this the most German of British road movies. As in The American Friend, the use of graffiti here functions in very similar terms of presenting a background of moral decay, emphasised in the dead brother's involvement in smuggling pornography. In references throughout Radio On, Britain's post-war relationship with Germany is seen as an exchange in both directions: the former occupiers (the UK still had thousands of troops in Germany at the time) do not remain untouched by the experience. This is highlighted by the soundtrack: Kraftwerk (and Lene Lovich) sit with Berlin-era Bowie, opening with the English-German hybrid version of "Heroes"/"Helden".

As Bowie, so the Beatles: both recorded German versions of their songs for the continental market. In a seemingly throwaway line, Ripley says he's "bringing the Beatles back to Hamburg" - still technically possible at the time of the film. Referring to the group having cut their teeth playing there little more than a decade before, this boast sums up Ripley's charismatic arrogance and sense of possibility; "The Reeperbahn is not what it was", suggests a wry rueful acknowledgment of the diminution of the liberties tourists, often American and English (and male), used to enjoy. The area around St Pauli, the docks and the Fischmarkt today displays much more graffiti than in the film, while the landscape has been filled in with many new buildings and apartment blocks, yet today's graffiti is essentially individualistic, apolitical in the main, and in its spraycan style, it represents another aspect of culture imported from America.

Improvisations

In discussing his approaches to what he has termed his A- and B-films in 'Impossible Stories', Wim Wenders has written that the 'A-films' were largely improvised, in comparison to the 'B-films', which were tightly scripted. This sequence of alternating A and B-films essentially ended with The State of Things in 1982. It began with Alice In The Cities. The first section of the film, in America, followed a script, but once Alice and Philip return to Europe, scenes in the film as the characters search for Alice's grandmother's house were increasingly improvised and determined in part by the contingency of the locations which the production found. Alice In The Cities was followed by The Wrong Move, scripted by Peter Handke, and based on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. In reaction to The Wrong Move, the third of the 'road movies trilogy', Kings Of The Road, returned to an improvisational method. Wenders has written that this was partly inspired by visiting old cinemas in towns close to the border between East and West Germany. As the small crew moved from one location to another, Wenders would write up a scenario for the actors to improvise around the next day inspired by where they found themselves.

This spirit of improvisation suits travelling by road. On the railways, with tickets purchased in advance for reasons of economy, and hotels to be met, this is rather more difficult. I had given myself a day in Wuppertal, and had a late afternoon ICE train to Hamburg. The stay at the hotel in Wuppertal included free use of the VRR integrated local transport system - including the Schwebebahn, the reason I had come to Wuppertal. Having visited the Gardasee Eiscafe in the morning, I contemplated going to Gelsenkirchen to look for the house that used to be Alice's grandmothers' (used to be in a double sense: in the film, Alice's grandmother has moved, "A Italian woman lives there now", thus negating a closed resolution to the film). Gelsenkirchen is within the VRR area, but an hour away from Wuppertal. I looked at the possibility of travelling there from Vohwinkel (the last stop on the Schwebebahn, where the scene I described in 'The Phantom Ride' is shot); Vohwinkel S-Bahn station is a short walk away.

There was not enough time to get to Gelsenkirchen, find the house, and return to Wuppertal to collect my luggage, and catch my train to Hamburg. However, I knew that Gelsenkirchen was in the general direction of travel. Picking up my rucksack from the hotel, I went to the Reisezentrum at Wuppertal Hauptbahnhof, located in a temporary building due to the vast rebuilding work at Doppersburg. It was possible: my hotel ticket would get me to Gelsenkirchen for no extra charge, and I could have an hour and a half there before I would need to take a connecting train from Gelsenkirchen to Münster, where I could join the Hamburg train that I was booked on; the ticket to Münster was a mere €11.60.

Unfortunately, improvisation only gets one so far. Although I had printed a map showing a section of Gelsenkirchen from the station to the road where the house was (at least in the film; but again, Wenders has a particular fidelity to his locations, so there is no reason to believe this one is any different). In the film, they ask a passing driver, and he gives a name that appears in the subtitles as "Erdbrückenstrasse": with no such address in Gelsenkirchen, Erdbrüggenstrasse seemed a near-enough homophone. This I was unable to research any further online: Gelsenkirchen is untouched by Google StreetView. My map didn't have a scale on it, but I thought that the distance might be walked in half an hour. As in Wuppertal that morning, it was raining. I soon realised that the scale was deceptive and it would take me longer than anticipated. On one of the main roads, I took a look at a bus stop. There was a bus listed with the direction of Erdbrüggenstrasse. However, being a Sunday, there were only two buses an hour, and I had missed one by ten minutes, meaning the next was due in twenty minutes, at ten past four. My train to Münster was at 16:53. At this point I did realise that I would be unable to bring this improvised journey to its goal. I walked another few streets in the direction of Erdbrüggenstrasse; when I had emerged from Gelsenkirchen station, the town centre seemed completely unlike the semi-rural setting that Alice's grandmother's house appears to be surrounded by in the film. By the time I had walked for just over half an hour, the character of the streets had changed. I reached Bulmker Park, where the roads around it had modest villas behind hedges and screens of trees. At the far side was a footpath leading North, alongside a plot of typical German summer houses. Here I stopped, pausing in the park, with bare dripping trees and two young men smoking in a shelter overlooking the small lake. I turned around, and walked back to Gelsenkirchen station.

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