Wenders on "the loud and the lurid"

Thanks so much to GreenCine Daily for posting this link to Naked Punch:

Wim Wenders:

The loud and lurid are terribly overrated, and just because everybody seems to have accepted that they rule, some of us grudgingly – we shouldn’t exclude the transcendental, the silent or the good as being part of our contemporary existence. Wings of Desire was making that point, and not, I think, by dwelling on the “art” aspects. And the way people all over the world embraced that alternative way of “purification” sort of proved my point, didn’t it? That doesn’t mean I can’t dig the vulgar. Fassbinder’s films as well as, let’s say, Almodóvar’s today have marvelously explored that territory, without glorifying it like for instance Lynch or Tarantino. With these guys I sometimes feel they try to prove their point so much that it becomes redundant. Not that I don’t count them as two of the most brilliant stylists and innovators of our times. (I just dread their imitators…) But to come back to your question…

And here’s my favorite part…

There are films MADE to exist as box office results first, or as reviews first, or as expression of the author first. My films are meant to come to life in people’s heads. They are incomplete before, actually they are meant to be incomplete. I see them like open systems that need to be pulled together by somebody. That somebody is each and every spectator. In a way I think of films the same way I looked at stories in books, when I was little. I realized very early on that the story was not in the written words, but in the space between the lines. That’s where the real reading took place: In my imagination, and that happened in all the white between the letters and the lines. And when I started to see films, I approached them the same way. In fact those films ALLOWED me to perceive them like that, they were asking me to dream myself into them. The classic American cinema has that same specific quality, and this is also the great tradition of European Cinema. I did not invent that “method”. It is an endangered process, though, these days. More and more films come as “wall to wall” entertainment. What you see (and hear!) is what you get. No more space between the frames, so to speak. No chance to sneak in with your imagination, to dream on and to project your innermost hopes or fears or desires into what you see and thereby pushing it further. You come out of the theatre and feel strangely empty. For two hours you were prevented from participating. You were obliged to “witness” instead. And that is the opposite to what you called my “method” which is in the true sense of the word “interactive”.