ESSAYS

Wim Wenders — or film postmodernity »Im Lauf der Zeit«

In his book The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origin of Cultural Change (1990), David Harvey gave crucial answers to the question of postmodernity in film by analysing »time and space in postmodern cinema «. He focuses his analysis on two films: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, Wim Wenders, 1987). A type of interpretation which makes the consciousness about reception and about viewers expectations' manipulation and genre patterns' variation a basis for experiencing individual films is the type of interpretation suitable for Wenders's work. Polemical citations, pronounced eclecticism, selfreference, and reference to the whole history of film are postmodernist elements that can be captured in Wenders's films. When »a European quality« is emphasized as a theoretical postmodernism specificity of »Lyotard origin «, the fact that a high number of European film authors were impressed by the American genre film and its narrative patterns can not be forgotten. On the other hand, the populist character of the American pop-art is the most adequate pool of consumer culture, with which postmodernism is most commonly identified. The author of this text analyzes Wenders's films as prototypical Po-Mo films which are a specific combination of the American pop-culture and rock-iconography and the legacy of the German Filmverlag der Autoren. Blade Runner and Der Himmel über Berlin are examined separately as two poles, the negative and the positive, of the postmodernist image of the American utopia.

Marijan Krivak