P J Harvey @ The Troxy

You can read my review of the gig here.

An Interview with Wim Wenders

1. Until Alice in the Cities female characters in your films were few and far between. Why did you prefer to have a little girl rather than a woman interrupting Philip Winter’s plans?

WW: The idea for the film was based on a song by Chuck Berry. If you check out the lyrics for “Memphis, Tennessee”, you’ll realize that what sounds like a man’s urgent long distance call to a woman is really an effort to call his daughter. Anyway, I made a film before centered around a female character, after Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter”. Hester Prynne was the heroine of the story, and played by Senta Berger. I regarded the film as a failure, especially as I felt I had no insight (and therefore no right) to tell a woman’s story competently. Also, the film was a period piece, which I dreaded. Altogether, I only liked one little scene, and that was between Hester Prynne’s little daughter, Pearl, played by Yella Rottländer, then 6 years old, and a sailor, played by Rüdiger Vogler. I decided, already during the difficult shoot of “Scarlet Letter”, to make my next movies with these two people, Rüdiger and littler Yella, no matter what. And then the Chuck Berry song gave me an idea, together with the memory of my first visit to America, where I had been looking for locations to shoot “Scarlet Letter” in its proper location, in Salem, Massachusetts. (I ended up having to shoot it in Spain, in a village where they shot mainly Spaghetti Westerns….)

In later films you deal with the relationships between men and women. Is Alice in the Cities a stepping stone for this subject matter?

WW: I wouldn’t call it that. Alice was a kid. I continues working with kids. There’s a little boy playing an important part at the end of “Kings of the Road”. Another little girl is the hero of “In the family of crocodiles” which I did for TV. Little boys play important parts in “American Friend” and certainly also in “Paris, Texas”, where little Hunter helps Travis find his wife. This wife, though, Jane, played by Nastassja Kinski, SHE was my “stepping stone”, as you put it. That was the first female part I was happy with.

2. In your poem 'the American dream' you say:

A boy in the neighbourhood
was given a cowboy suit by relatives in America.
Real leather!
And the following year
an Indian suit.
Real feathers!
Dressing up for carnival
you only had that choice anyway:
cowboy or Indian.
My mother suggested
there were other possibilities,
clown or Chinese, for instance.
A laughable proposition.

Other than binary opposites (a cowboy or an Indian) there is no other option. A clown or a Chinese person has nothing to do with national identity. Your thinking here seems to be reduced to binary terms. It is interesting that the mother sees more options than the child does. Do you see this kind of polar/binary view as a masculine thing?

WW: I see it more as the result of an education and a childhood in postwar Germany. The world was governed by a dualism. There were only Americans (or “us”, the Western world) and Communists. Every little boy knew that. And in movies, too, the only real conflict was between Cowboys and Indians, i.e. between good and evil. Religion also confirmed that dualism. My mother was just trying to come up with something where she could produce a more fancy outfit. She just LOVED making dresses, and for a while she also made stuff for me which I utterly hated. I wanted to have “Lederhosen” and stuff like any boy, not self-made fancy suits by my mom.

3. It's well documented that there was an ambivalent attitude to American movie and cultural influence in Germany in the protest movements of the late 60s. What are your own memories of this time? Also what are your memories of the 1970s/1980s cold war?

WW: I was in prison twice for having taken part in Vietnam protest marches that turned violent. (Mainly because of the Police’s violent intervention.) I was a left-wing film student then, and bashed the war in Vietnam, much to my father’s chagrin who was rather conservative. It was a great satisfaction to me, and people of my generation, that the truth about the war in Vietnam finally came out and became common knowledge. The American people had been lied to by four legislations and had been dragged into an unnecessary an impossible misadventure.
The cold war was a given thing. I was one of the few who had traveled to the Soviet Union, to Poland, to East Germany. I lived in West Berlin, then, a city encircled in an “antifascist wall”, as they called it. I knew that communism was basically the reign of an ultra-bourgeois and mediocre class that stuck to an ideology long outdated. I knew that they had to suppress the working class they really pretended to represent.

4. You say of Hanna Schygulla, 'she was always very lively in Fassbinder's films, and visibly less so in mine. I was rather upset by that'. The style of your early road films, long panning shots, episodic narrative etc makes it more difficult to fully develop characters. For some reason this impacts more on female characters in your films.
Would you say that there is something about road movies that excludes women?

WW: Not necessarily. The character of Lana in my recent LAND OF PLENTY proves that women can just as well be characters in toad movies. But consider the Western as the predecessor to the genre of the road movie, and then you see how dominated by men this is. Actually, CINEMA itself was dominated by male characters, and still is today. You should really see my latest film DON’T COME KNOCKING, that has a Western movie star as his hero, who slowly disintegrates and is taken apart, while the women in the story take over. That film has a weak male character and THREE very strong women in it, and throws a very ironic look at the male domination of the Western genre.

5. The relationship between Ripley and Jonathan in The American Friend deepens as Jonathan becomes increasingly estranged from his family.
Do you see this as a reflection of the seductive yet corrupting relationship between America (capitalist/go-getting, travel, excitement, Ripley having a violent and dramatic death) and Germany (European culture, family – orientated, Jonathan dying slowly and steadily)?

WW: Already “The American Friend” was an ironic title. In “Kings of the Road” one of the characters says: “The Yankess have colonized our subconscious...” “The American Friend” can be seen as an illustration of that theory. But that is strictly a subtext of the film, not its main drift.

6. How do you account for the portrayal of men in your films?
How do you account for male friendships in your career?

WW: Male friendship was certainly an important subject in my earlier work. But already “paris, Texas” left that territory behind. And my last two films are taking place on a very different terrain, as far as men are concerned. In LAND OF PLENTY, the hero is a deranged, slightly paranoid and very lonely Vietnam soldier, and his counterpart, MY heroine, is a liberal young American woman, his niece. SHE really carries my point of view.
Same as in DON’T COME KNOCKING. The two men, father and son, are really rather helpless and unable to live out a conflict. It’s the women in the story who set things straight.
So altogether, my focus has shifted over the years, and I do not want to be reduced any more to narrative positions from twenty years ago.

I hope this is helpful, Suzy
All my best,
Wim

Getting On

Another year and we're all getting on, as it were.

I don't do new year resolutions because I never stick to them, but instead I vow to continue doing what I enjoyed in the year just gone, and for me that's writing.

I really enjoyed this year - everything seemed to pan out just nicely - and this is fortunate because 2009 was full of tragedy for my family. Excuse my trepidation as a new year begins then. I don't always know what it is we're supposed to be celebrating. A new year can go as badly as it can go well, but hopefully 2011 will be fine.

Anyway, as the dying days of 2010 draw to a sluggish end, I can't resist an excuse to write a quick (and somewhat hungover) summary of the highs of the tv year and so, here we go:

Getting On

I'll start with the best. I've been a bit disappointed that this hasn't been watched by more people. Tucked away on BBC4 this sitcom has been treated with trepidation. Not surprisingly, as it's daring tv but even so I hope it'll be snapped up by BBC2 next year. It's bleak, contains Jo Brand (which strangely puts people off but she's brilliant in it) and Vicki Pepperdine. Pepperdine is genius as the priggish consultant.

There are plentiful parodies of glitzier American shows like Mad Men and House, but it's done in such a British, understated way I just want to punch the air with pride. Stars Peter Capaldi but really it's the women - including The Thick of It's Terry, that makes this show the best comedy of the year - and how often do you hear that?

The Trip

A close second (a very close second) is Winterbottom's The Trip. I'm sure you've all seen it so I won't blather at length, but it was great to see Coogan back on TV again. I wonder if him and Brydon are still friends after that? The only off episode is the one where they entertain a couple of women. Possibly to show America they can include women too? Anyway, it didn't really work.

Grandma's House

Readers of this blog and my Twitter maunderings will know what a huge Amstell fan I am. A Buddhist beaver, as a recent appearance on Breakfast TV reveals, but bloody hell, he's as bright as a button. I always loved him on Never Mind the Buzzcocks and he was the only reason I watched that. If most comedians had an inch of his talent, tv would be a much better place.

The Apprentice

I bloody love The Apprentice and look forward to it all year. Sugar's not doing another hire an apprentice series, instead he's going to give the winner of the next show £250,000 to start their own business. Will this make for less desperate, weird people entering the show? I hope not, but we shall see. In any case, the Junior Apprentice was just as watchable, if not more so.


And a Happy New Year to you all. What can we look forward to next year on the box?

But You Must Try...

I'm a carnival sceptic. I go to the Notting Hill carnival only about every ten years. The avoidance is not only because of the prohibitive crowds and transport headaches, but for another reason.

What irks me about carnivals and urban festivals in general, is the fact they're forced upon you. There's a feeling that if you don't already live there (God help you if you're a Notting HIll resident who works shifts, and no, they're not all rich - there's a huge glut of social housing around there too), you're nonetheless expected to attend if you're a London resident. I'm not comfortable with an assumption that I *should* celebrate diversity. I do this in small private ways every day anyway, as I'm sure we all do.

On a more emotional level, I don't have much connection with Notting Hill, other than having gone to some unforgettable record industry type parties in my early twenties. I'm not a resident and nor am I Caribbean, or have this heritage. Why would I go to carnival then? What meaning could I apportion to going to carnival?

Yesterday I did go. Before the drinking started in The Porchester, I wandered around by myself with my camera in semi-earnest, wanting to
document the Caribbean element of the festival (see above picture). What interests me, artistically, is the meaning people bring to celebrations. A carnival is a great unifier, isn't it? Except it isn't. It's a random collation of disparate individuals approaching the situation with different motives.

These motives range from a desire to get drunk, blow whistles and take drugs, to an extreme spectrum of elevating gang warfare. Some want to celebrate achievements in music, dance and food, or some want to show their friends and themselves how cool they are - being in the centre of a cultural whirlwind etc. In short, a sense of unity and belonging is the gloss, but it's never achieved.

Nonetheless, I got into it and I left after dark feeling a bit silly - although not ashamed, for not allowing myself to enjoy something as exciting on my relative doorstep more often.

If you realise everyone feels as fraudulent as you or at least as confused about their role in carnival as you, then you can enjoy yourself - and we certainly did that.

Does Rigsby Have One...?

Technically - strictly speaking - I have a hallway in my palatial domicile.

It's large enough for a coat rack, a shoe rack and even a bookcase, but my lady's chambers does not boast a hallway. I don't keep our telephone sat pertly on a table there, and we don't have what I can only consider purchasing if we did have an entrance displaying a bannister-supported stairway, and that's an umbrella stand.

If I've bought umbrellas in the past, they've been the short, forearm length variety - normally black, and blown-to-buggery in the slightest bluster, and abandoned in a litter bin somewhere. An umbrella stand though would require the golfing-sized model to justify its existence, and let's face it this Gothic Summertime is giving me plenty of time to consider making such a purchase.

The prize umbrella stand is of course the elephant's foot one, but where could one buy one? A cursory glance on the net reveals the main types of affordable stand are the Portland variety (wooden slats) or a wide-topped bamboo one. Perhaps even a modern, silver, cylindrical examole. There are also varieties that are over-the-top in their ornateness. There's too many of them to mention.

While I think of it, there's a parlour game called 'I went to the shop and I bought an elephant's foot umbrella stand' (the idea being - if you don't know - the next person to you has to add another random shopping item to make a list; then the next person contributes something and so on - making sure that each person in the ring remembers all the items on the list). I vaguely remember playing this in school.

Snooker Tournaments.

Snooker without cigarette advertising: well, it's not the same is it?

Do you remember Alex Higgins chain smoking his way from the sidelines in the early 80s - the golden era of snooker? I was hooked on snooker back in the day. I had an older brother who used to host tournaments for the local boys in our garage.


Even for sport-neutral me, it was an exciting time. Ghoulish Ray Reardon - the Welsh hope, Terry Griffiths, Steve 'boring' Davies, and little, squeaky Alex Higgins. My brother and his pals took their tournaments seriously - they used to club together to buy a trophy from the engravers in town. All properly executed, I remember Jason Thomas winning one year. Jason - the year he won, wore a waistcoat and dicky bow for posterity. One polaroid picture shows his chest puffed out, waving the trophy proudly.



The next year a tall boy won. I can't remember his name now, but I recall he died in his teens in a car accident in Ireland.

Ah, of course, these tournaments didn't last forever, and neither did the golden age of snooker. The enthusiasm ripping through the grey, pebble-dashed ex-council houses was directly linked to the fanfare around the players of the time, and when they gradually faded away, then then so did the tournaments - and it was back to the wickets and bats...

It's Steak Dear...

How often do you stay in a hotel and there's only one option on the menu? I have to say, in my adult life, I don't think I've come across this. But then, I haven't eaten out in rural Ireland before.

Yup, that's what happened to Mr Norman and I in a country house by Connemara lake recently. On arrival we were asked if we had any dietary needs, but basically, it was salmon, followed by steak, followed by choccy pud. I'm not complaining, but I wouldn't dare serve that up. It's not very imaginative is it? I know that's hypocritical, because I'll happily eat it.

It was a spectacular house - a mansion with dark oak panels and tiger skins adorning the walls of the main staircase. There was a tremendously handsome and friendly 'laird' (for want of a better term!) called Henry who greeted us with the clear blue eyes and black hair of some Irish lush like, I dunno, Cillian Murphy. There were also two very old ladies who stooped over double serving us our dinner. We were a little bit in time-gone-by heaven.

But what if you don't like steak, salmon or chocolate? In England, we pander too much to people now, perhaps?

We ate it all anyway, and then had a benedictine in the lounge. And that's another thing, we love ordering that. The barman always raises a confused eyebrow and gets a step ladder to reach a bottle down, while dusting it off...