NP Until the End of the World

Sat Dec 7 22:13:23 UTC 2019

Alright, y'all have convinced me to re-watch it for the first time since I
rented the VHS from Toronto's legendary (and much missed) Suspect Video and
Culture shop, probably within weeks of its first becoming available to
rent.

At the time, in my early 20's, with my taste spreading, wet ink-like, from
a thick black line connecting the dots (Kubrick, Scorsese, Coppola, and
Herzog on the high side, Carpenter, Romero, Argento, and Verhoeven on the
low, with Cronenberg and Lynch straddling the two) leaking over to
Jodorowsky, Fellini, Bergman, etc, etc, etc, Wim Wenders (always paired
with Jim Jarmusch in my mind) seemed like the kind of fellow whose films I
should be checking out. And based on the back of the box, Until The End...
seemed like the kind of movie I would like.

Turns out I didn't. At least, not much. I remember being bored in a way
that I hadn't quite been bored by a film before.

Then again, I used to think that about the films of Tarkovsky (and, much to
my shame, 2001). I've grown into my appreciation of slower paced movies
just like I had to grow into my appreciation of the music of Neil Young
(and I still believe if you say you "love" Neil Young in your early 20's...
you're probably lying at least a little bit).

So! I'll download, watch, and probably do a mini-review of Until the End...
(and if we're still chatting about it here by the time that's through, I'll
link to said review as soon as it's uploaded).

Thanks, guys!
yer old pal Jerky

On Sat, Dec 7, 2019 at 4:44 PM RZ <robert.zutphen at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> >
> --
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>