Der amerikanische Freund (1977)Director: Wim Wenders
Starring: Dennis Hopper, Bruno Ganz, Lisa Kreuzer
So I said in yesterday's blog that this week in Screens, Images, Ideas we were looking at Wim Wenders. The actual film we were looking at was The American Friend, an interesting choice given that it is neither one of his most famous films nor his most celebrated films. It wouldn't get put in the same bracket as Wings of Desire, Paris, Texas or those films in his road movie trilogy.
Jonathan Zimmerman (Ganz) is a picture framer from Hamburg who has recently been diagnosed with leukemia. At an art auction he crosses paths with an American art dealer named Tom Ripley (Hopper). Ripley has a scam going where he sells expertly painted forgeries. While others don't know this, Jonathan has his suspicions and therefore takes a disliking to him. What he doesn't know is that Ripley is involved in far shadier things than just dealing forged artworks. Hearing about Jonathan's medical condition, Ripley comes to him with a unique proposal, offering him a large sum of money to assassinate an underworld figure. Knowing that he doesn't have long to live, the prospect of ensuring his family's financial security leads Jonathan to take up the job and starts a decent into a dark side of the world he had never seen before.
The American Friend is an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game. Wenders has said that he likes Highsmith's work and had long wanted to make an adaptation of one of her books because he likes the way that the narrative grows out of the characters, rather than the characters appearing to serve the narrative. Wenders is very much of the opinion that narrative need not be king all the time, as it tends to be in Hollywood cinema. He is very much in favour of using narratives that grow out of characters or locations (Wenders' films have an incredible sense of place) rather than just coming up with a story and then working out where to put it and who to put in it.
In 2002 a more Hollywood adaptation of the novel was made, released under the original title Ripley's Game, to cash in on the success of 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman. In the 2002 version of the film the role of Tom Ripley is played by John Malkovich. Needless to say Malkovich plays the part in a very different way to Dennis Hopper. Malkovich's Ripley has a softly-spoken intensity. He has very level emotions and feels very sinister. Hopper plays Ripley exactly the way that you would expect Dennis Hopper to. He is slightly more twitchy and skittish, not as eerily calm as Malkovich's portrayal and lacks that sinister quality (which if you've seen Blue Velvet you'd know Hopper is more than capable of achieving). But for mine, the big difference between the two is that in the 2002 version there is no doubt that Ripley is the main character. Wenders' film is organised in such a way that Ganz's Jonathan is much more central. There is even a point in which Hopper disappears from the film for about half an hour only to show up in a very short scene before another extended absence. Wenders' film is not about Ripley the way it would have been if it were being made by in Hollywood.
This film poses some really interesting questions about morality and what our morality is based upon. In the film Jonathan is confronted by a question, does the fact that he is not far from death alter his moral compass? It is something he wrestles with. He is not a violent man, and the notion of serving as a hit man would ordinarily have been abhorrent to him, but the fact that he is going to die causes him to think about things in a different way, to reset some priorities. It is an interesting moral conundrum that Wenders explores.
Wenders was a part of the New German Cinema, one of the many New Waves which have swept through the European cinema in that back half of the last century. Behind the French New Wave, the New German Cinema, which flourished from the late 1960s through to the early 1980s, was probably the most influential. It brought attention to some great filmmakers like Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wenders. Of all the New German directors, Wenders is probably the most commercially accessible and, he would admit, the most American. Wenders had always been very influenced by American popular culture and while we are quite used to hearing about Hollywood filmmakers who have a European sensibility, in Wenders we find a European who seems to have an American sensibility. His interest in the American cinema can be seen in The American Friend in the fact that as well as giving the title role to Dennis Hopper, he gives smaller cameo roles to American film legends Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray. It was working with Wenders on The American Friend which led Hopper to tell Francis Coppola that he felt Wenders was the best equipped of all the exciting young filmmakers working in Germany to make the transition to Hollywood. Coppola, through his Zoetrope Studios, would thus give Wenders his first American directorial job, Hammett (which ended up being a massive cock up, but that is another story).
The American Friend is a strange film. It feels like a thriller, Wenders does a good job of creating that atmosphere of tension, and the general plot dealing with the planning of murders and shady dealings tells us that it's a thriller, but at the same time there just seems to be elements missing from the narrative which undermine its thriller status. In a good thriller, while certain pieces of information will always be intentionally withheld from you as part of the mystery, generally it is important that the viewer knows what is happening and to a certain extent why it is happening. To immerse yourself in a thriller you need to have a rough idea of how the different events you are watching relate to each other, so as to build that tension. This is what Wenders doesn't give you in The American Friend. You can follow what's going on, but you do feel like you are missing something. It is a thriller more in terms of its atmosphere than its narrative.
In 2002 a more Hollywood adaptation of the novel was made, released under the original title Ripley's Game, to cash in on the success of 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman. In the 2002 version of the film the role of Tom Ripley is played by John Malkovich. Needless to say Malkovich plays the part in a very different way to Dennis Hopper. Malkovich's Ripley has a softly-spoken intensity. He has very level emotions and feels very sinister. Hopper plays Ripley exactly the way that you would expect Dennis Hopper to. He is slightly more twitchy and skittish, not as eerily calm as Malkovich's portrayal and lacks that sinister quality (which if you've seen Blue Velvet you'd know Hopper is more than capable of achieving). But for mine, the big difference between the two is that in the 2002 version there is no doubt that Ripley is the main character. Wenders' film is organised in such a way that Ganz's Jonathan is much more central. There is even a point in which Hopper disappears from the film for about half an hour only to show up in a very short scene before another extended absence. Wenders' film is not about Ripley the way it would have been if it were being made by in Hollywood.
This film poses some really interesting questions about morality and what our morality is based upon. In the film Jonathan is confronted by a question, does the fact that he is not far from death alter his moral compass? It is something he wrestles with. He is not a violent man, and the notion of serving as a hit man would ordinarily have been abhorrent to him, but the fact that he is going to die causes him to think about things in a different way, to reset some priorities. It is an interesting moral conundrum that Wenders explores.
Wenders was a part of the New German Cinema, one of the many New Waves which have swept through the European cinema in that back half of the last century. Behind the French New Wave, the New German Cinema, which flourished from the late 1960s through to the early 1980s, was probably the most influential. It brought attention to some great filmmakers like Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wenders. Of all the New German directors, Wenders is probably the most commercially accessible and, he would admit, the most American. Wenders had always been very influenced by American popular culture and while we are quite used to hearing about Hollywood filmmakers who have a European sensibility, in Wenders we find a European who seems to have an American sensibility. His interest in the American cinema can be seen in The American Friend in the fact that as well as giving the title role to Dennis Hopper, he gives smaller cameo roles to American film legends Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray. It was working with Wenders on The American Friend which led Hopper to tell Francis Coppola that he felt Wenders was the best equipped of all the exciting young filmmakers working in Germany to make the transition to Hollywood. Coppola, through his Zoetrope Studios, would thus give Wenders his first American directorial job, Hammett (which ended up being a massive cock up, but that is another story).
The American Friend is a strange film. It feels like a thriller, Wenders does a good job of creating that atmosphere of tension, and the general plot dealing with the planning of murders and shady dealings tells us that it's a thriller, but at the same time there just seems to be elements missing from the narrative which undermine its thriller status. In a good thriller, while certain pieces of information will always be intentionally withheld from you as part of the mystery, generally it is important that the viewer knows what is happening and to a certain extent why it is happening. To immerse yourself in a thriller you need to have a rough idea of how the different events you are watching relate to each other, so as to build that tension. This is what Wenders doesn't give you in The American Friend. You can follow what's going on, but you do feel like you are missing something. It is a thriller more in terms of its atmosphere than its narrative.
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