Hito Steyerl and Wim Wenders

After many sessions I’d finally finished watching all 287 minutes of Wim Wender’s Until The End Of The World and as the credits washed over me, there it was:

2nd Unit Video Kamera … Hito Steyerl.

I was so surprised by this unexpected (to me) combination of people that I wanted to share this coincidence with somebody. The number of people that I know who know both is almost certainly in the low single digits. Even for those who are familiar with both this appearance of Hito in the credits amounts to little more than trivia.

Of course there is a place for intersections of niche topics: the internet. This will be a guiding principle for this blog: a place to discuss niche topics and niche intersections.

Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders is a German filmmaker who is best known for Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987). Wings of Desire was so successful, both critically and commercially, that it:

• Spawned a sequel (Faraway, So Close! (1993))
• Was remade (loosely) in English as City of Angels (1998), starring Nic Cage and Meg Ryan.
• Helped Wenders secure funding for his ambitious and decades-in-the-making project Until The End Of The World (1991)

Until The End Of The World

Until The End Of The World is an epic road movie, shot across 11 countries in 4 continents¹, set in a pre-apocalyptic 1999. While it is generally described as science-fiction the sci-fi elements are few² and existed in order to “take a few liberties”. The result is a sprawling and visually gorgeous movie where not that much happens but you get to hang out in the world for a few hours. And it also gets quite weird in the last hour, for those who make it that far.

The original rough cut was twenty hours long! Wenders was contractually obligated to release a finished worked that did not exceed 150 minutes. As a result the theatrical release of the movie was 158 minutes in the USA and 179 minutes in Europe. These were staggering run times for the early 90s. The world was not yet accustomed to fifteen act Marvel movies.

The theatrical release was poorly received by critics and did about as well at the box office as you would expect a three hour slow and slightly weird not-quite-sci-fi road movie to do. The US box office gross was $830k and the total budget was $22M.

Wenders retained the original negatives and a copy of the theatrical release and eventually produced the impressively long (287 minutes!) Director’s Cut, which was received very well by critics.

The Director’s Cut can now be streamed on The Criterion Channel. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone who is intrigued by the above or the much better description supplied by Criterion:

Conceived as the ultimate road movie, this decades-in-the-making science-fiction epic from Wim Wenders follows the restless Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin) across continents as she pursues a mysterious stranger (William Hurt) in possession of a device that can make the blind see and bring dream images to waking life. With an eclectic soundtrack that gathers a host of the director’s favorite musicians, along with gorgeous cinematography by Robby Müller, this breathless adventure in the shadow of Armageddon takes its heroes to the ends of the earth and into the oneiric depths of their own souls. Presented here in its triumphant 287-minute director’s cut, UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD assumes its rightful place as Wenders’ magnum opus, a cosmic ode to the pleasures and perils of the image and a prescient meditation on cinema’s digital future.

We should be grateful to those who approved such a grand budget for something so beautiful and so unlikely to be a financial success.

Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl is a video artist and essayist. My two primary touchstones are her essay In Defense Of The Poor Image and her video artwork How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File.

In Defense Of The Poor Image

The introduction to the essay gives a better indication of what it is about that I could achieve through paraphrasing it poorly:

The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.

The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright

While I always remember the essay in terms of memes and the deterioration over multiple generations and iterations it is quite clear that Steyerl grounds her ideas in cinema, specifically contrasting high quality commercial cinema with experimental and independent cinema.

Steyerl says:

Like the economy of poor images, imperfect cinema diminishes the distinctions between author and audience and merges life and art. Most of all, its visuality is resolutely compromised: blurred, amateurish, and full of artifacts.

It is interesting to reflect on this in 2022 (the essay was written in 2009) where the distinctions and relationships between author and audience have changed wildly thanks to YouTube and TikTok and where (comparatively) very high quality is achievable by most video-makers.

How Not to be Seen (2013)

via e-flux:

Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File examines the politics of visibility and the means for opting out of being represented in the digital age. Structured as a “how-to” video, Steyerl’s work presents a variety of practical techniques to avoid being captured by the camera’s lens. While playful in tone, the video’s message is gravely serious; the digital networks that visualize the world today serve to exploit the masses in the name of control, power, and profit

Steyerl’s concerns about visibility were prescient. The implications of always being recorded, detected and categorised by our cameras (and the many algorithms that consumed these images) were not as widely considered in 2013 as they are now in 2022.