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Wim and vigour: A retrospective interview with director Wim Wenders

On The Road: The Films of Wim Wenders at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West), from Thursday (January 28) to March 6. tiff.net/wenders. Rating: NNNN


Talking to Wim Wenders last year at TIFF, where he premiered Every Thing Will Be Fine, I make a point of asking the director for an update on the restorations of his earlier films – a project he’d been working on for a while with the help of the cineastes at the Criterion Collection. At the mention of Criterion, he lights right up.

“I was the first guy who had a laserdisc collection and who was aware of the fact that Criterion brought out movies better than anybody else,” he tells me. “So I was so proud when they finally caught up with me and released Paris, Texas and Wings Of Desire, and helped us restore those two films.” 

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The experience led Wenders to establish his own foundation, the Wim Wenders Stiftung, to restore another 10 films, with Criterion and Janus Films paying for the North American rights. Those restorations are the core of a new retrospective at TIFF, which starts Thursday (January 28) at 6:30 pm with his first feature, The Goalie’s Anxiety At The Penalty Kick

A jet-black study of a footballer (Arthur Brauss) whose bottled rage explodes into violence, the film looks better than I’ve ever seen it. It’s not pristine – it was never pristine – but it’s cleaner and brighter, rescued from decades of scratchy prints and degraded optical soundtracks. 

Wenders tells me these restorations were some-thing of a personal crusade, ensuring people could see these films in their best possible state.

“For a long time I felt so shitty,” he laughs, speaking of the early home video releases of his films – for decades, the only way anyone could catch up to masterworks like the shaggy road picture Kings Of The Road (Tuesday, February 2, 6:30 pm), his devilish 1977 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, The American Friend (February 5, 6:15 pm), and his 1982 moviemaking allegory The State Of Things (March 1, 9:15 pm). 

“I felt so ashamed that people actually bought movies in VHS. I was ready to personally refund everybody who ever bought a VHS of mine, because I felt they shouldn’t have had to pay for this sort of lousy quality.”

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The longer cut of UntilThe End Of The World is a must-see.

Watching them theatrically, of course, is the ideal presentation – and in one key case the restoration goes well beyond the surface. Wenders’s globe-trotting epic Until The End Of The World (February 21, 5:30 pm) – an insanely ambitious sci-fi venture that placed his muse, Solveig Dommartin, alongside William Hurt, Sam Neill, Max von Sydow and Jeanne Moreau – was dismissed on its initial release in 1991 as an intriguing misfire, its intentions and message garbled by clumsy visual effects and a story that kept shifting in and out of focus. 

I first saw Until The End Of The World at a Toronto preview screening, followed by an on-stage conversation between Wenders and Atom Egoyan in which Wenders seemed to be apologizing for an unfinished movie, or one that was at least lacking some key elements he’d wanted to include all along. 

Having seen the longer cut, I get it. Now running over two hours longer than the original theatrical version – nearly five hours, with an intermission – the restored Until The End Of The World is a remarkable accomplishment. The rich, personal drama Wenders had nested inside his sprawling all-star epic finally comes through, and the time passes a lot more quickly than it does in the shorter version. The movie finally makes sense both narratively and emotionally it’s a road movie about the unlikely families we form, just as all of Wenders’s best films are.

And, yes, Criterion’s going to put it out on Blu-ray eventually, along with the rest of these restorations – but why wait? See it in a theatre. Wenders would want it that way.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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