By Larry Schwartz
WIM WENDERS is leaning over a glass case full of boxes of fat cigars in the cool of an inner-city hotel smoking room. He scrutinises the ornate cigar wrappings. His latest film features a visit to a Havana cigar factory. Cigars of all sizes are prominent in Buena Vista Social Club. He does not think these cigars are Cuban.
The scene is reminiscent of one in his film, a documentary about a group of veteran Cuban musicians, in which a few of the musos stop to gaze at figurines in a storefront window while in New York to play at Carnegie Hall. The window is packed with icons of American culture and politics, but the Cubans are stretched to place most of them. That one was a trumpeter, notes one of the men as he points at Louis Armstrong. Marilyn Monroe seems vaguely familiar. “Was she famous?,” one of them asks.
In a lineup of American Presidents, only John F Kennedy – the man at the helm during the Cuban missile crisis of 1961 – rings a bell, but even his name escapes them. The sequence offers a powerful snapshot of the isolation that has been Cuba’s lot since America imposed its cultural and economic embargo on the island in the 1960s as punishment for the Fidel Castro-led socialist revolution. “They didn’t go through the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s like we have,” Wenders says. “In Havana, you still have to go to the house and knock on the door. You can’t count on the phone.”
The scene also stands in stark contrast to Wenders’ own relationship with American culture. He grew up in a GI-occupied Germany saturated with American imagery. Who among his peers might wonder at the identity of the likes of Satchmo, Monroe or JFK? In his 1976 film Kings of The Road, Wenders had one of his characters give voice to the ambivalence he felt about this relationship: “TheYanks have colonised our subconscious.” Clearly, it’s a theme that still preoccupies him.
Wenders is a slender 54-year-old, wearing black-rimmed spectacles, a muted blue shirt beneath slate blue summer suit, and a pair of Reebok sneakers. He is personable but his conversation is punctuated with silences in which he gives careful consideration to questions before responding. He speaks so softly it’s a wonder any of his words are picked up by the cassette recorder.
“I grew up in a country that was strangely storyless or historyless,” he says.
“It was a country that eagerly absorbed others’ stories, and many American stories, as a surrogate for their own stories in which they had lost faith …”
By contrast, tattered Havana, despite its big old American cars, was a world set apart. Wenders visited Cuba for the first time last year at the suggestion of his long-time friend, Ry Cooder, who played his languid slide guitar on the soundtrack for Paris Texas, Wenders’ 1984 film (which has been hailed as “one of the fondest and most ambivalent films about America that a European has ever made”).
Wenders’ passion for music has been evident throughout his career. Summer in The City (1970) has been described as a “three-hour love letter to the Kinks”. The soundtrack for 1991’s Until The End of the World features Lou Reed, U2, Patti Smith, T-Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave and R.E.M. Wenders’ futuristic thriller The End of Violence (1997) has music from Tom Waits, Sinead O’Connor, Michael Stipe and others. While working on the soundtrack for that film, Cooder enthused about his 1996 trip to Cuba, in which he had helped make three recordings with once-famous musicians who were now living in obscurity and poverty.
Cooder suggested to Wenders that he accompany him to Havana to film the recording of an album by the great bolero singer Ibrahim Ferrer, rediscovered aged in his 70s.
Wenders liked the idea and agreed to film for three weeks while Cooder recorded the Ferrer album. He later took his camera crew to New York and Amsterdam to record concert performances by the reassembled musicians, now labelled the Buena Vista Social Club after a defunct venue in Havana.
Wenders says the musicians were like nervous teenagers who’d never played together before. “The real energy about the film was not the fact that it was a documentary about fantastic music but that we happened to be there at the right moment in the life of these people and something miraculous happened,” he says.
“Cinematically it is much more edited and structured like it was a character piece, and that’s what it was in the end. Only I didn’t know until I almost finished shooting it.”
Wenders marvels at the way Cooder has helped focus attention on neglected musicians such as the 92 year-old guitarist Compay Segundo – who laughingly reveals plans in the film to sire a sixth child – and 80-year-old pianist Ruben Gonzales.
Cooder is sometimes mistakenly described as a musicologist. But he’s more than that. In a lengthy career, he has helped shine a light on players as diverse Tex-Mex accordionist Flaco Jimenez, virtuoso Bahamian guitarist Joseph Spence, and Ali Farka Toure from Timbuktu.
Wenders compares Cooder’s role in this regard to that of the pioneering American folk music anthologist Harry Smith, whose landmark collection was rereleased to acclaim on CD a few years ago. “It was difficult to get Ry in front of the camera in the first place. He’s very shy. One of the reasons of him not having a (higher profile) career in rock ‘n’ roll was that he didn’t want to be in the limelight. “Even in the concerts, he was hiding behind everybody. He was happy to play in the last row.”
Wenders would appear to have a similar disposition, happier to be behind the camera than in its glare. He says he declined an invitation to take a small role in City Of Angels, last year’s remake of his 1988 film Wings of Desire, because he feared his presence might put undue pressure on the young director, Brad Silberling.
He had sold the rights to the film, one of his best loved, to Warner Bros in the late 1980s. To this day it seems miraculous to him. “When they came and approached me, I was amazed because I found the story so much a public domain story. An angel becoming a human being and falling in love. I felt that was not my story. I had no right to that story. So when they wanted to buy the rights, I thought I better give it to them because they are going to make it anyway.”
Still, Wenders retained the right of veto over the script, and for years nothing happened. The project passed from studio to studio, until finally Wenders found a script (by Dana Stevens) to which he could give his stamp of approval.
At a test screening of the finished film, though, Wenders was ready to be disappointed. “I sat in the last row. I sank down in my seat ready for the worst because you never know … In the end I just sat down like everyone else in the audience and enjoyed it and I felt they did a good job. For a big studio production, it wasn’t a bad film.”
Meanwhile, the rediscovered and still touring players of the Buena Vista Social Club continue to feel their lives have been touched by an angel. “I saw them several weeks ago in Los Angeles,” says Wenders. “I met Ibrahim in the hotel lobby and he shook his head and said he can’t believe it. And Ruben says, `Where are we? Where are we? What city is this? You say Los Angeles? `Is that in America?’ He really doesn’t know.”
Wenders once said: “Film is the art of seeing. I want to help people to see again.” But it seems music is almost as important to him. Asked to explain his concept of the relationship between sight and sound, he again focuses his attention upon the cigar case before him.
He came to film, he explains, after studying medicine, philosophy and etching. He has been an avid reader since childhood. He could read books by the time he began primary school; later he learnt the importance of what lies between the lines.
“Movies are what’s between the images,” says Wenders after one more of the long thoughtful pauses. “I really long to have these open spaces. And to me, that’s where the music comes in.”
The Sunday Age, 26-Dec-1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 