NP Until the End of the World

[RZ]

This is the only Wenders film I recall having seen (though I think I *may*
have seen “Wings of Desire” at some point? Is that the one with “Colombo”?)
so I am powerless to place it in among his other work.

I would say my excitement over this film’s re-release is in several parts.
In no particular order:…

1 / The circumstance of my first viewing—

I saw it in a theater in Edinburgh during the summer of 1992, when I was
living in Scotland during a “semester abroad.” I was visiting an old, oh
shall we say, “friend”? with whom I had a long, complicated history. The
visit was already fraught and electric. She and I came out of the theater
well after midnight. It had rained but now the sky was painfully clear, and
shards of the Moon flickered in every stark puddle. But even so: the real
world was a dream and only the movie was real.

For the next few hours, beneath backlit castles, black towers, and a
solstice sky that never quite got dark, we walked the city streets that
bustled even in the middle of the crepuscular night, lost in our heated
discussions and divagations. It possessed us both for days afterwards.

(And I instantly regretted not going back to see it again as soon as
possible. By the time I returned to the States, it was no longer playing in
the theaters, and I had to wait what felt like a very long time for it to
appear in the video stores.)

2 / The difficulty of finding it to rent, and its eventual, almost
complete, vanishing act—

Back in the States, I rented it on VHS many times over the next few years
but it rapidly grew more and more rare. And I never managed to buy a copy.
So, soon, it became even more dreamlike than it already was.

3 / The soundtrack.

4 / The story itself—

I instantly loved the rambling mystery of it, and how the story turned
suddenly several times until I couldn’t quite classify it anymore. I was in
the middle of my first, crashing Pynchon infatuation (I must admit to
having fallen away from Our Humble Author for a very long time soon after
that, before falling for him a-new barely 13 years ago) and I found this
sort of slightly surreal, polyphonic, even “slipstream,” storytelling
extremely compelling. I still do, of course — but back then, I’d certainly
never seen a movie that was such a direct hit to so many of my
preoccupations.

5 / The fact of not having seen it for a quarter century—

I freely admit that the brute fact of its scarcity has caused its emotional
value to skyrocket. Now that I’ve shelled out for the DVD, I have already
been cautiously entertaining the grim possibility that the Suck Fairy will
have visited its malign magic up on it, and after feverishly ripping open
the case, I’ll find myself watching a rambling, messy piece of shit with
mounting annoyance, irritation, betrayal, rage, nausea…

But sometimes, I still think I can play whole scenes in my head as if I had
just watched it yesterday, and I really want to see how much of it is Wim’s
dream and how much of it is mine.

Anyway, I’ll let you know after it arrives…

On Sat, Dec 7, 2019 at 3:35 PM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for letting us know about these.
> Wow! How cool is this list,  still.
>
> On Sat, Dec 7, 2019 at 10:51 AM RZ <robert.zutphen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Some of my fellow Pynchonistas may be interested to learn that for the
> > first time since 1992, Wim Wenders' film "Until the End of the World" is
> > once again available in the US.
> >
> > Criterion has released the 287-minute Director's Cut, which debuted in
> 2014
> > in an extremely limited release:
> > https://www.criterion.com/films/28767-until-the-end-of-the-world
> >
> > (YMMV of course, but personally, when I heard the news, it was only
> through
> > supreme force of will that I managed to keep from peeing my pants and
> > weeping helplessly like a 14-year-old girl at a Beatles concert...)
> >
> > ~rz
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>