Wim Wenders creates films that make a virtue of cinema`s encounter with reality, insisting that cinema`s referential quality imbues it with a unique relationship to our encounter with the world over and against other art forms. This idea frequently serves as a point of departure for his narratives. His characters—often photographers, writers, or filmmakers—share a common desire to experience the world and to represent it in their own media. Nevertheless, their mediation is not without difficulty; these characters misunderstand the relationships between media, time, art, the world, and themselves. In this dissertation, I show that their seemingly innocuous activities belie an overarching theme of melancholy in Wenders` films. Through this thematic and formal engagement with melancholy—understood as a combination of social isolation and self-estrangement that cyclically perpetuates itself—Wenders enters into a discussion about photographic mediation that spans the twentieth century. While Bela Balazs, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Rudolf Arnheim contribute to this discourse, I root my understanding of melancholy primarily in the film theory with which Wenders is most familiar, in particular, Siegfried Kracauer`s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality and his subsequent work, which expands on film`s relationship to time, History: The Last Things Before the Last. This theoretical perspective that I call the -redemptive realist tradition‖ emphasizes film`s documentary capability to mediate an encounter with phenomena that would otherwise elude perception, thereby -redeeming‖ them in Kracauer`s vocabulary through what I call his -photo-historical approach.‖ I find that this approach and the process of resolving melancholy parallel one another, thereby offering Wender`s characters the chance to redeem the phenomena of their perception while overcoming their estrangement and isolation.
In order to investigate the development of melancholy in Wenders` work, I show how two trilogies that represent beginning and middle point of his career culminate in a more recent film. His early work, represented by The Road Trilogy (Alice in the Cities, 1974; Wrong Move, 1975; and Kings of the Road, 1976), shows the inception of melancholy as it arises for his protagonists in a combination of self-estrangement and social isolation. Though self-estrangement would normally offer them an objective viewpoint on the world, a boon to their attempts to represent their encounter with the world through their photographs and writing, the protagonists cling to their sense of self and become self-absorbed. Although the protagonists acknowledge their melancholy state by the end of their respective films, they do not find a means of addressing it. They gain little but a vague sense that they must change the way that they perceive the world and interact with other people. This sustained irresolution characterizes the films of The Road Trilogy.
The next stage of melancholy in Wenders` filmmaking comes in what I designate The Diary Trilogy (Reverse Angle, 1982; Tokyo Ga, 1985; and Notebook on Cities and Clothes, 1989), films from the middle of his career which follow the protagonist -Wim,‖ a fictional projection of Wim Wenders, as he grapples with the changing landscape of visual media in an effort to preserve the virtue of cinema`s encounter with reality. Although Wim falls into melancholy at the thought of cinema`s obsolescence in the face of video and digital media, he overcomes his self-absorption and resolves his melancholy by embracing these new modes of representation.
Wenders` work with melancholy culminates in the film Palermo Shooting (2008), a film that follows its professional photographer protagonist, Finn Gilbert, as he travels the entire course of melancholy`s resolution. The recent passing of his mother has instilled in him a fear of death which isolates him from his home life and estranges him from his work. Like the characters of The Road Trilogy, he responds to self-estrangement by groping vainly for a sense of self. His self-absorbed celebrity lifestyle belies an effort to make up for lost time by constantly remaining in motion, but his fast-paced lifestyle causes him to miss out on life more than he captures it. He is only able to overcome his self-absorption and resolve his melancholy by confronting his fear of death. Wenders expresses this confrontation and melancholy`s resolution by drawing on the imagery of the redemptive realist tradition. Like Kracauer and Barthes, he demonstrates how Finn confronts death by redeeming the image of his mother.