Nagib DeathaCinema 2020

Amsterdam University Press
Chapter Title: The Death of (a) Cinema The State of Things
Book Title: Realist Cinema as World Cinema

Book Subtitle: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema
Book Author(s): Lúcia Nagib
Published by: Amsterdam University Press. (2020)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1b0fvq4.6
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Part I
Non-cinema
1 The Death of (a) Cinema
The State of Things
Abstract
Chapter 1 focuses on Wim Wenders’s 1982 The State of Things, a watershed
film that distils, in programmatic fashion, the idea of cinema’s inherent
but unachievable mission to become material reality. The film is located
at a significant historical juncture, which marks, on the one hand, the
end of the European new waves and new cinemas, and, on the other,
Hollywood’s move into a self-styled postmodern era, dominated by self-
reflexive remakes. More pointedly, it attempts to theorise, in form and
content, this cinematic end of history by means of a mise-en-abyme
construction evolving across multiple layers of self-referentiality and
self-negation, that exposes it to the contingencies of the local environment
and improvisations of the characters/actors.
Keywords: Wim Wenders; The State of Things; Postmodernism; Remakes;

Allusionism; German Cinema
The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge, Wim Wenders, 1982) constitutes the
ideal object with which to initiate this part of the book because it distils, in
programmatic fashion, the idea of non-cinema, that is, cinema’s inherent but
unachievable mission to become material reality.1 The film is located at a
significant historical juncture, which marks, on the one hand, the end of the
European new waves and new cinemas, and, on the other, Hollywood’s move
into a self-styled postmodern era, dominated by self-reflexive remakes. More
pointedly, The State of Things attempts to theorise, in form and content, this
cinematic end of history by means of a mise-en-abyme construction evolving
across multiple layers of self-referentiality and self-negation. The film starts
as a post-catastrophe sci-fi entitled The Survivors, which is interrupted after
1 I have previously elaborated on the idea of ‘non-cinema’ in Nagib (2016).
Nagib, L., Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020
doi 10.5117/9789462987517_ch01
42 REALIST CINEMA AS WORLD CINEMA
a few minutes to reveal itself as a film in the making brought to a halt due
to the disappearance of its Hollywood producer and the exhaustion of film
stock. It then proceeds as a faux documentary of the crew and cast of The
Survivors, idly waiting for the shoot to resume on the real locations, a ruined
hotel semi-sunken into the sea and its rocky surroundings in the vicinity
of Sintra, Portugal. The characters, now donning the mask of actors and
technicians, spend their time in the exercise of individual hobbies, such
as drawing, painting, playing music, photography, reading, writing and
computing, all portrayed as frustrated attempts at capturing and making
sense of the real world around them. In the meantime, dialogue lines and
voiceovers weave together the film’s main declaration of purpose, namely
the insufficiency of film, together with all its constitutive artistic and medial
forms, to accurately reproduce reality.
With its extensive theorising on the end of the world, the end of cinema
and its own failure to deliver a f ictional narrative, The State of Things
prefigures Fredric Jameson’s (2001 [1984]: 188) groundbreaking definition
of the postmodern, published just a couple of years later in the article
‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’:
The last few years have been marked by an inverted millennarianism,

in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive have
been replaced by senses of the end of this or that […]: taken together, all
of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism.
Jameson (188) locates at the origin of this tendency a historical break or

coupure, which
is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-

year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation).
Thus, abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the
final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs,
or the modernist school of poetry […]: all these are now seen as the final,
extraordinary flowering of a high modernist impulse which is spent and
exhausted with them.
The State of Things fits this description to perfection, with its apocalyptical
discourse on the end of times which Russell (1990: 15) has referred to as
‘apolitical romanticism’. As is well known, the film was born out of director
Wenders’s frustrated experience with the making of a neo-noir in Hollywood,
where he had been summoned to work by New-Hollywood grandee, Francis
The Death of (a) Cinema 43
Ford Coppola, thanks to his auteurist style, but where his exercise of it was
thwarted by the producer’s own commercial concerns. Thus, the hero in The
State of Things, played by the discretely blasé Belgian actor Patrick Bauchau,
is Wenders’s alter-ego Friedrich (Fritz) Munro, a pun on the names of Fritz
Lang and Friedrich Murnau, two legendary German directors who migrated
to Hollywood at the turn of 1920s and 30s. Embodying the sacrificial auteur
in the ruthless industrial capital of cinema, Fritz ends up murdered together
with his Hollywood producer, Gordon (Allen Goorwitz), who stands for
the now defunct American cinema which had been so inspirational to the
European new waves. Among New German Cinema directors, Wenders was
perhaps the most outspoken American cinema devotee, paying constant
homages in his films to the same classical Hollywood directors and B-movie
icons enshrined in the auteur pantheon by erstwhile Cahiers du Cinéma
writers and Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, under the leadership of François
Truffaut. In The State of Things Wenders testifies to this affiliation by means
of explicit references to the Nouvelle Vague’s foremost self-reflexive director,
Jean-Luc Godard, and Contempt (Le Mépris, 1963), Godard’s reckoning with
and self-affirmation against Hollywood. Indeed, Contempt contains some key
elements of The State of Things: the film about a film, here the interrupted
screen adaptation of the Odyssey; the presence of Fritz Lang, not just as a
citation, but in person, speaking the three languages Wenders claims to be
his own comfort zone, German, English and French; a representative from
Hollywood, in the person of legendary actor Jack Palance, who embodies the
most sordid side of the film industry, including its despicable treatment of
women; among other things. Not accidentally, Jameson (2001: 189) lists, under
the postmodern category, ‘Godard, post-Godard and experimental cinema
and video, but also a whole new type of commercial film’, as represented, in
The State of Things, both by the victimised auteur and the New-Hollywood
catastrophe film, The Survivors. From that perspective, Wenders’s film,
albeit against its own grain, is a salutary swansong of the chain of male
geniuses who until very recently constituted the staple of western cinema,
including the producers at the head of the Hollywood system; the American
directors revered by their French and German new-wave counterparts;
and the European auteurs themselves. It was indeed time for them all to
retreat to the background and make room for the enormous diversity of
films produced around the world with plenty of stories to tell.
Rather than in the film’s profuse and often dubious philosophising on the
end of times, this chapter is interested in the overflowing of the objective
reality beyond the various devices and frames employed to capture it. I
shall argue that the emphasis on the ‘postmodern’ character of The State of
Things obscures the most positive aspect of its proclaimed death of cinema,
namely its realism. The film is first and foremost its real locations in Los
Angeles, Lisbon and, in particular, the cliffs around Sintra complete with
a monumental modernist seaside hotel half-destroyed by the waves. After
stumbling upon this extravagant semi-ruin in Sintra, Wenders is said to
have immediately decided to shoot his next film there (Boujout 1986: 99).
More than the characters’ postmodern reiterations of the end of history and
of storytelling, it is the disintegration of this hotel which provides material
evidence of the end of the modernist project. The idea of a Europe and its
imperial power being irretrievably eroded from the edges, as the sea invades
its westernmost extremity, comes across compellingly by means of the
camera’s careful scrutiny of these locations more than from the lofty verbal
quotations to this effect that abound in the film. Depicted as the victory
of the objective over the subjective world, the film’s realism is entirely in
tune with Bazin (2005: 37-38), who defines, about a neorealist film such
as Paisan (Paisà, Roberto Rossellini, 1946), what he calls the ‘image fact’:
[T]he nature of ‘image facts’ is not only to maintain with the other image
facts the relationships invented by the mind […] Each image being on its
own just a fragment of reality existing before any meanings [my emphasis],
the entire surface of the scene should manifest an equally concrete density
[…] Man himself is just one fact among others, to whom no pride of place
should be given a priori.
In tune with more recent non-anthropocentric approaches to film and

art, such as critical realism and speculative realism (further elaborated
upon in the next chapter), Bazin offers with the concept of ‘image facts’ a
suitable explanation to the chosen imagery in The State of Things, in which
realism is directly connected to style, or, in Bazin’s (2005: 37) words, to the
‘deliberately intended quality in the photography’. In the hands of an aesthete
such as French DoP Henri Alekan, and combined with Wenders’s own
exceptional photographic talent, film itself becomes material presence, not
only as landscape, but as apparatus, as its innards are exposed as reflectors,
cables, cameras, false background screens, hanging film strips, photographs,
drawings, paintings, books, typewriters with blank pages of the stagnant
script, computer data and sound recordings. Through the camera’s exacting
fidelity to its objects, all these are revealed as the pre-existing reality of a
(non-)film.
Thanks to this ‘pregivenness of the universe to the human’ – as Philip
Rosen (2003: 57) has defined the Bazinian realist principle – non-cinema,
as much as the ‘postmodern’, lends itself, in The State of Things, to a positive

reading. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre (2003: 40) explains his negative
dialects as follows:
[B]eing is prior to nothingness and establishes the ground for it. By

this we must understand not only that being has a logical precedence
over nothingness but also that it is from being that nothingness derives
concretely its efficacy[…] [N]othingness, which is not, can have only a
borrowed existence, and it gets its being from being. Its nothingness
of being is encountered only within the limits of being, and the total
disappearance of being would not be the advent of the reign of non-being,
but on the contrary the concomitant disappearance of nothingness.
Non-being exists only on the surface of being.
Sartre’s atheistic existentialism is however strongly anthropocentric, as

he emphatically declares in Existentialism and Human Emotions (2000: 15):
Atheistic existentialism, which I represent […] states that, if God does not
exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a
being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that this
being is man or, as Heidegger puts it, human reality.
Having drawn upon Sartre’s phenomenological ontology for his own realist
project, Bazin went on to turn it on its head with regard to cinema, by stating,
in his Impure Cinema essay, that ‘we must say of the cinema that its exist-
ence precedes its essence’ (1967: 71). In order to test the application of this
thought to our case study, I propose to consider non-cinema as intrinsically
dependent, not on the cinema The State of Things has declared dead, but on
what preceded it, that is, objective reality.
The State of Things and ‘Allusionism’
The fact that, 30 years on, film in its most various forms and platforms, is
still alive and well suggests that the postmodern announcement of the death
of cinema, in The State of Things, should not be taken at face value. Suffice
it to remember that, rather than providing a closure to Wim Wenders’s
career, the film is only the twelfth of his prolific production, spanning 39
feature-length titles at the time of writing. Within this long career, peppered
with masterpieces and milestones such as Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der
Zeit, 1976), Paris, Texas (1984), Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin,
1987) and Pina (2011), The State of Things stands out as a kind of symbolic
capsule. It marks the peak as much as the decline of the New German
Cinema, signalling the retreat into obscurity of some of its most illustrious
representatives (such as Hans-Jürgen Syberberg), while others, such as
Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff and Wim Wenders himself, move on,
in the wake of their international success, to greener pastures abroad, i.e.
Hollywood in Wenders’s case. The film functions as a landmark of this
process, offering cinematic expression to a debate first initiated by André
Bazin and Gilles Deleuze, which had hitherto been circumscribed to film
theory and could be summarised as follows:
Hollywood vs Europe
↓
Classical vs modern cinema
↓
Realist vs illusionist cinema
↓
Movement vs time
↓
Pure vs impure cinema
In previous writings (Nagib 2006; 2011; 2012) I have addressed with suspicion
these binary oppositions as well as the resulting evolutionist understanding
of history and film history that perpetuates the centrality of Hollywood and
Europe within world cinema history. Hence the usefulness of the concept
of non-cinema, which allows us to transfer the theoretical debate from the
outside to the inside of the medium, configuring it as film’s constitutive
dilemma. Be it covertly, as in conventional narrative cinema, or overtly as in
The State of Things, self-negation lies at the heart of the film medium given
its time-based properties that allow it to self-present as reality. Non-cinema
specimens, such as the films analysed in Part I of this book, recognise and
expose this dilemma by striving for an identity with the phenomenological
Real, an aim whose impossibility results in a bottomless mise-en-abyme.
In the film in focus here, a self-conscious exercise in non-cinema, the film
medium is first dismembered into its various constitutive art and medial
forms before its final demise, forever inching towards, but never really
crossing, its ultimate self-destructive border with real life.
Jean-François Lyotard (1986: 3), the first to theorise on what he calls
‘the postmodern condition’, dates it back to ‘the end of the 1950s, which
for Europe marks the completion of reconstruction’. Jameson (2001: 189)
agrees with the timeframe of ‘the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s’, though
questioning whether the artistic movements taking place in that period
‘imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style- and
fashion-changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of
stylistic innovation’. Whatever the case, the mere use of the prefix ‘post’
implies a teleological and evolutionist understanding of history. By contrast,
the idea of non-cinema refers to a non-teleological tendency to self-negate
inherent in the medium, which unveils itself as such at cyclical turning
points in film history triggered by the ‘imperative of stylistic innovation’
mentioned by Jameson, which is likely the case of The State of Things. From
the late 1970s, Hollywood had become awash with remakes and sequels
that recycled both home-made and foreign classics. The period is variously
defined as ‘New Hollywood’, ‘postmodern’ and ‘postclassical’, all to signify
an increasing dearth of fictional subjects and modes of storytelling. In 1982,
the same year The State of Things was released, Noël Carroll (1998 [1982]:
241) published an insightful explanation for the phenomenon, which he
referred to as ‘allusionism’:
Allusion […] is an umbrella term covering a mixed lot of practices includ-

ing quotations, the memorialization of past genres, the reworking of
past genres, homages, and the recreation of ‘classic’ scenes, shots, plot
motifs, lines of dialogue, themes, gestures, and so forth from film history,
especially as that history was crystallized and codified in the sixties and
early seventies.
Rather than to a postmodern exhaustion of fictional storytelling, Carroll

(241) ascribes allusionism to ‘an aggressive polemic of film criticism, often
called auteurism’, developed in Europe on the basis of the Hollywood clas-
sical canon. As a result, according to Carroll, American filmmakers felt
motivated to revisit their own film history with renewed attention and
to profusely cite from it as well as from those European works that paid
homage to them, chiefly from the French Nouvelle Vague, but also from
other world new waves.
As one of the most gifted among his New German Cinema peers, Wenders
was handpicked in 1978 by Francis Ford Coppola, a central figure within
New Hollywood, to conceive and direct a film for his newly-founded film
production company, Zoetrope Studios, whose aim was to foster new local
and international f ilm talents. The venture should not have meant for
Wenders a radical departure from his habitual self-reflexive, meditative
f ilmmaking style, on the contrary, to all appearances, Hollywood was
opening up precisely to that kind of approach. Wenders was even convinced,

at the time, that European cinema, including his own, would be filling in the
gap created by the end of the Hollywood B-movie strand, a cheaper and more
personal kind of commercial cinema, including the likes of Edgar Ulmer,
Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges, who had been inspirational to him
(Schütte 2001: 200). He had just come from shooting The American Friend
(Der amerikanischer Freund, 1977), a neo-noir adapted from the novel Ripley’s
Game by American writer Patricia Highsmith, featuring Dennis Hopper,
the star and director of the 1969 iconic road movie Easy Rider; and he was
about to embark on the shoot of Nick’s Film – Lightning over Water (1980),
a documentary on the agony and death of director Nicholas Ray, another
of his B-movie idols. He was thus ideally placed for the Coppola enterprise.
The plan was again a neo-noir, though not a remake, but a reflexive reas-
sessment of the crime genre as such via the adaptation of Joe Gore’s fictional
biography of Dashiell Hammett, the private eye turned detective writer that
bequeathed to genre cinema one of its most iconic characters, Sam Spade,
the protagonist of The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941). Wenders shot a
first version of the film in his usual realist style, on location in San Francisco,
though not in black and white as he had originally intended. Unfortunately,
however, this version seems to have been lost or destroyed. What remains is
a disastrous second version, entirely re-shot with a different cast in Coppola’s
Zoetrope studios, that could perhaps be described as an involuntary film-noir
caricature that prefigures the kind of postmodern cinema Tarantino would
inaugurate ten years later, but devoid of the latter’s irony and humour. This
notwithstanding, Wenders’s Zoetrope misadventure, stretching over four
years, was not entirely wasted, as he managed to produce two independent
films in the meantime, in an attempt to set the record straight about his
ambiguous relationship with Coppola and Hollywood: the today unavailable
Reverse Angle (1982) and the internationally acclaimed The State of Things.
As for the latter, the story goes that in 1981, on one of his trips between
Europe and the US, where Hammett had stalled, Wenders stopped over in
Sintra, Portugal, to visit his then girlfriend, Isabelle Weingart, an actress
in the film The Territory being shot there by Raúl Ruiz. Deceased in 2011,
Ruiz (studied in Chapter 6) was a Chilean exile living in France since the
mid-1970s, who has to his credit over 100 films and an equal number of
theatre plays. Though famous for his uncompromising personal style, Ruiz
was also courted by Hollywood in the wake of the ‘allusionist’ trend, in
his case, by Roger Corman, a mentor of some New-Hollywood directors
such as Coppola. Corman joined French Nouvelle Vague producer Pierre
Cottrell and Portuguese producer Paulo Branco in support of The Territory,
a Buñuelian allegory of humanity’s inherent cruelty, focusing on a group of

American tourists who get stranded in a French forest and finally engage in
cannibalism. Corman had reportedly advised Ruiz to produce a ‘very, very
disgusting’ film so as to make a ‘break into a large United States market’
(Kahn 1981: 103). Though certainly extremely violent, the work in progress
did not promise any of the graphic gore Corman was probably expecting,
so he left the production, and the shoot of The Territory was brought to a
halt due to the lack of film stock.
Along came Wim Wenders and, according to some versions,2 offered Ruiz
his own leftover film stock, but on condition that he could use the whole cast,
crew and Portuguese locations of The Territory in a film of his own, which
he started to write on the spot and became The State of Things. Accounts
diverge here, with Kahn (1981) reporting that, rather than offering succour
to Ruiz’s endangered production, this was actually completely disrupted
with Wenders’s arrival on set, forcing Ruiz to return to Paris, reorganise his
finances and then resume the shoot of The Territory once Wenders was gone.
Ruiz himself never confirmed this version of the events (Martin 1993) and
The Territory was eventually completed, though today it is classed under
Ruiz’s ‘rarities’ and only remembered for its connection with The State of
Things. Indeed, it supplied the latter not only with crew, cast and locations,
but also with its central theme, the shoot of a film brought to a halt for lack
of film stock and the disappearance of its Hollywood producer. Corman
himself makes a brief appearance as the lawyer of Hollywood producer
Gordon, the latter, an allusion to Beckett’s elusive Godot as well as a parody
of Francis Ford Coppola.
In addition, Wenders cast, for the protagonist Fritz, Patrick Bauchau,
whom he had found ‘wonderful in Eric Rohmer’s La Collectioneuse’ (Schütte
2001: 199). The choice has further cinephilic (and postmodern) resonances.
As Boujut (1986: 99) notes, Brazil’s foremost filmmaker and Cinema Novo
leader, Glauber Rocha, was in Sintra when Wenders stationed there to shoot
The State of Things, and Bauchau, a Rocha fan, took the opportunity to
conduct a video-interview with him, in which the latter solemnly declared
that ‘Sintra is a beautiful place to die’, the title-phrase of Bauchau’s video
interview. Rocha’s untimely death would come just a few months thereafter,
giving further fodder to the apocalyptic premonitions of the end of cinema
in The State of Things. Another Wenders’s addition was B-movie icon Samuel
Fuller, cast in the role of cinematographer Joe Corby, who appears, with
2 It is entertaining to see producer Paulo Branco (2015) publicly diverging from Wim Wenders
on this point during a post-screening Q&A.
his unfailing cigar, in another three Wenders films, The American Friend,
Hammet and The End of Violence (1997).
Allusionism therefore pervades the film across all its self-reflexive layers.
Rather than detracting from its substance, the pre-existence of other film
stories, casts, crews and locations responds to those ‘image facts’ which
for Bazin precede the birth of a realist film. Talking a propos of The State
of Things, Wenders mentions three types of images: ‘grammatical images’,
which are necessary for the purpose of storytelling; ‘profound images’, or
those that the filmmaker stores in the back of his mind; and ‘found images’,
which are those found in the process of shooting (Russell 1990: 19). The
State of Things could be read as a ‘found film’, in the sense that its point of
departure is a collection of pregiven phenomena in the objective world in
which humans are condemned to play a secondary role.
In Search of the Real
The opening scenes in The State of Things, a fragment of the disaster sci-fi
in the making, The Survivors, are a citation of the beginning of two Hol-
lywood B-movies, Roger Corman’s The Day the World Ended (1959) and
Alan Dwan’s The Most Dangerous Man Alive (1961), placing the film from
the outset within the allusionist trend described above. Following some
kind of nuclear disaster, a group of four adults and two children, covered in
protective suits and masks, is shown crossing a devastated expanse of land
covered in scrap iron, abandoned vehicles, rubble and skeletons. A young
girl, wrapped in gauze around her hands and face, moans continuously
and is finally choked to death by her own father because she has ‘started
to melt’. The group proceeds towards the sea, following in the footsteps of
previous fugitives, until they arrive at an abandoned hotel half-sunk into
the sea, strewn with parts of a crashed airplane.
At this point, the camera angle opens up to unveil the film within the
film, by capturing the group of survivors in a real landscape on the left-hand
side of the frame, while the right-hand side is occupied by a large canvas
containing a landscape painting like those that serve as false background
in Hollywood studio sets (Figure 1.1). This pedagogical shot, unveiling the
false background that is not being utilised in The Survivors, can only be
there to tell us the kind of commercial film Wenders refuses to make, even
when shooting on commission from Hollywood. The process of unveiling
reality to the spectator proceeds with the sepia tone, hitherto utilised via a
day-for-night filter, changing into black and white within a single shot. The
Figure 1.1 The film within the film in The State of Things: a real landscape is on the left-hand side of
the frame, while the right-hand side is occupied by a large canvas containing a landscape painting
like those that serve as false background in Hollywood studio sets.
‘realism’ of black and white – defined as such in the film by cinematographer

Joe – is thus offered to us didactically, by degrees, so as to demonstrate its
superiority over the usual Hollywood colour tricks. By the same token, the
soundscape, hitherto dominated by the atmospheric music by Wenders’s
faithful composer Jürgen Knieper, makes room for the sound of the sea
waves which had been muted up to this point.
This is when Hollywood veteran Joe, in a condescending tone to fledgling
Fritz, breaks the bad news: stock has run out and the shoot has to stop. This
gives Wenders the opportunity to move from the postmodern citational
mode back to the modern, or ‘Bazinian’, search for presentational realism,
via a careful survey of the environs and a systematic dismantling of cinema’s
various constitutive artistic and medial components, in order to test and
dismiss, one by one, their mimetic properties. Drawing on some of the casts’
real skills, as they retreat to their individual hotel rooms, the camera lingers
on their solitary artistic and recording exercises. Actress Joan (Rebecca
Pauly) undertakes a scales exercise on her violin with the scores on a stand
by the window facing the sea, but she soon stops to retune the strings and
start her metronome, in apparent despair at adequately responding to the
magnificent seascape. Another, Anna (Isabelle Weingart), takes notes on
her diary, but also suddenly stops to cover her dressing-table mirror with a
cloth, a scene Russell (1990: 25) reads as an attempt at blocking the cliché of
an actor’s narcissism in order to give free rein to ‘the anti-“story” aesthetic
of contingent realism’. The superiority of the Real is confirmed by Fritz’s
Figure 1.2 Kate, in The State of Things, weeps for being unable to reproduce the dramatic
landscape before her eyes in her watercolour painting.
partner and scriptgirl Kate (Viva Auder) in a dialogue line, as she weeps for
being unable to reproduce the dramatic landscape before her eyes in her
watercolour painting (Figure 1.2). There is even a point when the Polaroid
photos, taken by Fritz’s daughter Julia and Kate’s daughter Jane, displayed
on Fritz’s bedroom wall, are attacked by nature itself, when a hefty piece
of driftwood breaks through the window and a gust of wind blows them
away. Still photographs, including the negative film strips hanging on a
line in Joe’s bedroom, are there to remind us of the material stillness at
the base of cinema.
As all these amateur artists fail to communicate their vision of the real,
their inconclusive medial activities presage not only the end of the love
story between Europe and America, but the end of love tout court. Anna
confesses to Mark (Jeffrey Kime), after their first sexual encounter, that she
has a sense of déjà vu, while Kate places a drawing of her lover Fritz on his
body as he sleeps, and we are offered the two images for comparison: the
real-life man and its small, sketchy reproduction complete with the caption:
‘I feel like sleeping alone tonight. Kate’. Given the impossibility of relating
to an overwhelming reality, love is reduced to onanistic exercises, such as
that of Mark in his bathtub and Fritz in his drunken sleep, both of whom
have their hands suggestively placed on their lower parts.
Finally, the mechanical and industrial side of cinema comes under
scrutiny through the multiplication of gadgets, such as the tape recorder
used by Kate as a diary, Joe’s voice clock announcing the passing of time
minute by minute, multiple photographic and super-8 cameras, and an
early Apple computer complete with a small printer kept by scriptwriter

Dennis (Paul Getty III) in a derelict Moorish palace on the Sintra outskirts,
one of Gordon’s neglected properties reminiscent of his former financial
glory, where the scriptwriter succumbs to smoking and drinking himself
to numbness. The documenting of these mechanical gadgets in connection
with the process of filmmaking highlights their impassive materiality which
remains untransferable to the film itself.
Unable to reach Gordon by phone, Fritz decides to fly to Los Angeles
where he finds him running away from his creditors in a mobile home. His
attempt at renewing their friendship ends up with both being shot dead
after affectionately hugging and kissing each other. Both cinema and love
have indeed become impossible, but Fritz’s super-8 camera continues to roll
autonomously for a few seconds after his death, finally capturing reality
mechanically as it is, free from any subjective will: an incomprehensible blur.
Modern Non-cinema
Rather than a new phenomenon, the championing of presentational over

representational aesthetics in The State of Things responds to a long modern-
ist tradition in political art whose agenda draws on its own rejection as art.
Alain Badiou provides us with a useful summary of this tradition, which he
addresses in terms of ‘inaesthetics’. This refers to the saturation of the three
schemata which, in his view, have attempted to define a philosophy of art:
didacticism, romanticism and classicism, corresponding respectively to
Marxism, Heideggerian hermeneutics and psychoanalysis. For Badiou (2005:
8), modernity is moved by both the didactic and the romantic impulses in
its thrust to debunk classicism:
The avant-gardes were didactic in their desire to put an end to art, in their
condemnation of its alienated and inauthentic character. But they were
also romantic in their conviction that art must be reborn immediately
as absolute – as the undivided awareness of its operations or as its own
immediately legible truth.
The State of Things follows the same romantic impetus to salvage modern
art from its own mistrust in representation. As far as cinema is concerned,
Badiou’s (82) privileged case study is no other than a Wenders film, The
Wrong Movement (Falsche Bewegung, 1975), an adaptation of Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre), in which
‘[t]he allusive quotation of the other arts, which is constitutive of cinema,

wrests these arts away from themselves’. In The State of Things, Kate’s failed
attempts at reproducing the Real in her drawings and paintings resonate
with Badiou’s formulation on the avant-gardes’ didacticism, in that they
draw the viewer’s attention to the artwork’s representational operations
in order to disqualify the copy to the benefit of the thing itself. But they
are also romantic in their aspiration for an art that is not distinguishable
from its object. Non-cinema may be seen as an offspring of this at once
modernist and romantic tradition of self-negation, at the core of which lies
the political and ethical aspiration for a legible truth.
Badiou (2005: 10) further observes that ‘[a] truth is an infinite multiplicity’,
whereas a ‘work of art is essentially finite’. In The State of Things, human
presence (as represented by artists attempting to capture objective reality)
and truth seem to be mutually exclusive. Martin Lefebvre (2011: 70), cit-
ing Simon Schama, states that ‘nature may exist without us […] it doesn’t
need us, whereas landscape requires some degree of human presence and
affect’. Kant (1914) also famously distinguished between the ‘beautiful’
and the ‘sublime’, noting that the former refers to the object’s form and is
limited, whereas the latter derives from a formless, unlimited object, and
for this reason human sensibility and imagination are insufficient to fully
comprehend phenomena happening in the realm of the sublime. In The
State of Things, nature is equally defined as a formless, uncontainable mass,
akin to the ineffability of the sublime. This is repeatedly signified through
the representation of the act of photographing by imprinting the camera
viewfinder on the objects framed so as to demonstrate the photographer’s
inability to apprehend an object in its overflowing totality (Figure 1.3). Even
the monumental, deserted hotel, half-sunk into the sea, where cast and crew
are staying, both in the film and in actuality, is posited as a kind of ‘frame’
destroyed by the force of the nature it attempts to contain (Figure 1.4). The
place is in reality the Hotel Arribas, which has now been entirely restored
and brought back to its original glory. At the time of the shoot, however,
its courtyard, including a magnificent 100m swimming pool made of a
section of the sea, was half-submerged in the Atlantic, with its walls partially
demolished by the force of the waves.
Nonetheless, if film, together with all the arts and media at its base, is
unable to open up a passage to the Real, the realisation of this fact reveals
the unquestionable reality of all these expressive mediums, as well as the
actual artistic skills of the agents at their helm. Most notably, it is through
photography, i.e. by eliciting a sense of stasis and failure and recognising
film’s inability to capture nature as a whole, that The State of Things gains
Figure 1.3 The State of Things: the camera viewfinder imprinted on the objects framed demon-
strates the photographer’s inability to apprehend an object in its overflowing totality.
Figure 1.4 The State of Things: the swimming pool in the monumental hotel, half-sunk into the sea,
is another kind of ‘frame’ destroyed by the force of the nature it attempts to contain.
in artistry. It is also in this kind of anti-cinematic stasis that Adorno (1991)

saw a way out for cinema, thereby taking issue with Sigfried Kracauer
(1997: 33-34), who distinguishes cinema from photography on the basis of
movement: the camera movement, the movement of the objects in front of
the camera and the movement introduced by montage. Adorno (1991: 180)
contends that the centrality of movement in cinema is ‘both provocatively
denied and yet preserved, in negative form, in the static character of films
like Antonioni’s La Notte’. He says: ‘Whatever “uncinematic” in this film

gives it the power to express, as if with hollow eyes, the emptiness of time’.
Adorno’s defence of uncinematic stasis is based on its power to neutralise
the unavoidable ideological residues of the culture industry, as symbolised
by the quarrel between technology and artistic technique, or, in this case,
between Hollywood commerce and auteurist creativity. As Miriam Hansen
(2012: 218) reminds us, Adorno attributed to cinema a leading role in modern
art, but only insofar as it rebelled against its own status as art through
self-awareness of its technological origin.
A cinema that gains in artistry by losing its cinematic properties could
also be seen as the purpose of Bazin’s realist proposal, although here politics
decidedly takes a back seat with relation to aesthetics. Bazin’s rejection of
montage and defence of the long take and the long shot favour the presence
in the final film of residues of unexpected phenomena that tend to obstruct
narrative progression and are usually removed in the editing process, some-
thing that Lyotard (1986b: 349) would later formulate in terms of ‘acinema’.
Bazin is also keen, like Adorno, on ‘uncinematic’ empty moments, as can
be seen in his famous analysis of the coffee-grinding scene in Humberto D
(Vittorio de Sica, 1952), in which, according to him, ‘nothing happens’ (2005:
81-82). In particular, Bazin’s concept of ‘impure cinema’ (1967) dismisses
cinema’s pretence to medium specificity, highlighting instead its inherent
dependence on the other arts.
With its focus on stagnation, endless waiting, lovelessness and incon-
sequential artistic and medial exercises, The State of Thing constitutes, to
an extent, an early candidate for the label of ‘slow cinema’, popularised in
the 2000s in reference to a large ‘socio-cultural movement whose aim is to
rescue extended temporal structures from the accelerated tempo of late
capitalism’ (de Luca and Jorge 2016: 3). Indeed, in The State of Things, the
sense that ‘nothing happens’, as formulated by Bazin, prevails thanks to the
slow editing pace and prodigal use of long takes and long shots. However,
things – trivial though they might be – happen all the time in the film,
which relies on a montage of suture that weaves together plot and subplot
in a seamless chronological progression, climaxing rather conventionally
with the protagonist’s death. Waiting, as the characters do in this auteurist
piece, is also a classical recourse for the construction of suspense, and indeed
suspense builds up in particular in the latter part of the film, set in Los
Angeles, by means of persecution, spying and even a car chase. Granted, all
these elements are metacommentaries on their use in American movies, in
which they are aimed at eliciting spectatorial immersion and commercial
success. An example is the car chase scene, which contains no speed, crashes
or dashboard-mounted subjective cameras to enhance the sense of peril.

Instead, an extremely high, distant camera captures in a single long shot/
long take combination a car weaving slowly through and around carparks,
until it manages to confound and lose its follower, to the delight of the
driver. The whole is overlaid with the minimalist score by Jürgen Knieper,
whose jazzy beat is here just slightly accelerated, imparting the reassuring
sense of a minor event.
The highly accomplished quality of such scenes, and the dazzling images
and sounds of the film as a whole, certainly contributed to it being awarded
the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1982, among a host of other
festival prizes. Rather than confirming its own predictions of doom and
the end of cinema, it boosted Wim Wenders’s career, not just in Europe but
also in the United States, where he went on to shoot the highly-acclaimed
and Cannes Palme D’Or winning Paris, Texas (1984). These developments
expose the limits of categories of modernity and postmodernity, as history
went on both in cinema and in general without any traumatic break. Thus
the idea of non-cinema, as a periodical wake-up call to film’s constitutive
dilemma between representation and presentation of reality, may offer a
more productive way of situating The State of Things.
Non-cinema as Ruin
What can and should be taken more seriously than the modern-postmodern
divide is the way The State of Things sums up the cinematic challenges
and opportunities of its time, and in so doing prefigures not only the ‘slow
cinema’ but also the ‘essay film’ genre of today, or what Bazin (2005: 97) had
called the ‘film à thèse’. As Mitchell (1983: 50) states, ‘The State of Things is
like a fictional film essay of self-assessment’. From the outset, the derelict
Hotel Arribas introduces a ‘thesis’ that cuts across the entire f ilm: the
oxymoronic nature of capitalist progress, including its entertainment and
tourist industry, whose staleness is constitutive of the novelty it advertises – a
fact alarmingly confirmed by the now archaic electronic gadgets littering the
film, including a pioneering Apple computer, which is just a little more than
a word processer, but displayed in the film as next-generation technology.
Invariably and inevitably, the products of these gadgets turn out to be
disappointing simulacra. The static and descriptive framings used to produce
such an effect constantly bring to the fore cinema’s photographic stillness
and reinforce the sense of death through stasis, which is corroborated by
numerous shots of cinemas in ruins on the streets of Sintra and Lisbon
and, towards the end, Los Angeles, where a cinema advertising John Ford’s
The Searchers (1956) is clearly surviving out of past glories. On a similarly
metaphorical level, the hotel increasingly engulfed by the sea is recurrently
likened to a sinking ship. The character of Robert (Geoffrey Carey) points
to a plastic Earth globe and comments: ‘Lisbon is really right at the edge,
the far-western corner of Europe, indeed there’s water right in front of my
window’. The metaphor of a sinking ship recurs in the characters’ lines, for
example, when Fritz reads aloud, to himself, from Alan Le May’s book The
Searchers (at the origin of Ford’s film), about ‘the terrible sense of inevitable
doom that overpowered him every time he encountered this ship’.
Even more in the spirit of a thesis is the post-catastrophe footage of The
Survivors, which could be read as the synthesis of Bazin and Deleuze’s vision
of modern cinema. Cityscapes in ruins, as epitomised by Berlin in the neore-
alist film Germany Year Zero (Germania anno zero, Roberto Rossellini, 1947),
were hailed by Bazin (2005b: 98; 2011: 58-60) as the non-anthropocentric
symbol of cinematic modernity. Deleuze (2005: 124), like Bazin, dates modern
cinema from the end of the Second World War, describing typical postwar
film locations as ‘any-space-whatevers’, made of ‘demolished towns […]
vast unused places, docks, warehouses, hips of girders and scrap iron’, all
of which can be found in the fragment of The Survivors at the beginning of
The State of Things. The magnitude of the Second World War, for Deleuze,
caused the time-image, typical of modernity, to interfere with and disrupt
the action-image he attributes to classical Hollywood and montage cinema
in general, creating characters who are observers or ‘seers’ rather than
agents, in a world that overwhelms their comprehension.
Given the recurrence of war in human history, however, there is scope
to investigate the combination of ruins and cinema before the Second
World War. Indeed, Johannes von Moltke identifies ruins at the very birth
of cinema, for example, in the Lumière brothers’ The Demolition of a Wall
(Démolition d’un mur, 1895), which shows the destruction of a wall and its
immediate reconstruction achieved with the simple trick of running the
film backwards. For von Moltke (2010: 396), ‘this little episode from 1895
might serve as a cinematic epigraph for the broader aesthetic, ontological,
and epistemological imbrications of cinema and ruin in modernity’.
In any case, Deleuze’s def inition of a ‘time out of joint’ and ‘in pure
state’ is entirely applicable to the representation of Portugal in The State of
Things, as it makes use of the country’s location at the westernmost end of
Europe, that is, at the periphery of Europe’s self-attributed modernity, so
as to configure it as a kind of space-time hiatus, or a ‘time in pure state’,
that offers a distanced viewpoint to worldly phenomena. Seen in this light,
the modern and postmodern categories become irrelevant, as they fail to

provide reliable indicators of progressive politics. As Jacques Rancière (2009:
51) has pointed out:
If there is a political question in contemporary art, it will not be grasped

in terms of a modern/postmodern opposition. It will be grasped through
an analysis of the metamorphoses of the political ‘third’, the politics
founded on the play of exchanges and displacements between the art
world and that of non-art.
Caught in this dilemma, The State of Things resolves it via non-cinema,

that is, by surrendering to film’s irresistible drive towards material reality.
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Amsterdam University Press

Chapter Title: The Death of (a) Cinema The State of Things

Book Title: Realist Cinema as World Cinema

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

Keywords: Wim Wenders; The State of Things; Postmodernism; Remakes;

1 I have previously elaborated on the idea of ‘non-cinema’ in Nagib (2016).

The last few years have been marked by an inverted millennarianism,

Jameson (188) locates at the origin of this tendency a historical break or

is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-

In tune with more recent non-anthropocentric approaches to film and

as much as the ‘postmodern’, lends itself, in The State of Things, to a positive

[B]eing is prior to nothingness and establishes the ground for it. By

Sartre’s atheistic existentialism is however strongly anthropocentric, as

The State of Things and ‘Allusionism’

Allusion […] is an umbrella term covering a mixed lot of practices includ-

Rather than to a postmodern exhaustion of fictional storytelling, Carroll

opening up precisely to that kind of approach. Wenders was even convinced,

a Buñuelian allegory of humanity’s inherent cruelty, focusing on a group of

In Search of the Real

‘realism’ of black and white – defined as such in the film by cinematographer

early Apple computer complete with a small printer kept by scriptwriter

Rather than a new phenomenon, the championing of presentational over

‘[t]he allusive quotation of the other arts, which is constitutive of cinema,

in artistry. It is also in this kind of anti-cinematic stasis that Adorno (1991)

like Antonioni’s La Notte’. He says: ‘Whatever “uncinematic” in this film

or dashboard-mounted subjective cameras to enhance the sense of peril.

the modern and postmodern categories become irrelevant, as they fail to

If there is a political question in contemporary art, it will not be grasped

Caught in this dilemma, The State of Things resolves it via non-cinema,

Adorno, Theodor W. (1991), ‘Transparencies on Film’, in: The Culture Industry,

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