Film and Interstitial Landscape. Wim Wenders' Fascination with the Terrain Vague

Hace cerca de un año preparé este breve documento; a la manera de un resumen de ideas, la siguiente cuartilla se esbozó con el ánimo de abundar en las relaciones entre el paisaje intersticial y la cinematografía, tópico ya abordado en la tesis de maestría de su servidor. Aunque no se han concretado los planes de extender estas líneas, confío en que pronto habrá oportunidad de retomar este trabajo que, en lo personal, me apasiona. Agradezco el incondicional y valioso apoyo de mis amigos Jaime Brambila y Felipe Orensanz en las revisiones que hicieron del texto que a continuación comparto:

It is becoming increasingly clear that urban space is constituted as an authentic testing laboratory and as an inspiration trigger for several generations of artists; artistic production itself is also one of the basic expressions that help us -as urbanitas- to characterize our territory. We see, for example, how some proposals in contemporary art show a kind of fascination towards interstices, perceiving these urban areas as sites where waste is either raw material, an inspiration or an art medium. This artistic production reconsiders the landscape visualizing it as a work of art in which to destroy or to undo is privileged over the convention to build. The French anthropologist Marc Augé has exposed that artists have a need for ruins, saying that the uncertainty that they reveal is capable of stimulating the imagination and arouse a sense of waiting. The conceptual and land art work of Robert Smithson, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Matta-Clark or Almarcegui, has emerged as a controversial response to the terrain vague, showing its potential beauty.

Moreover, cinema and urbanism have experienced various confluences: numerous images transmitted by films have influenced our perception of the city. There is no small amount of films that have taken the urban void as scenario, be it to evince a political upheaval or to manifest the physical status of citizenship in a process of erosion (De Sica, Tourneur, Buñuel). However, one can highlight the work of Wim Wenders as a filmmaker with a more unique approach. Beyond his interest for the city, he accepts the fascination for such “urban injuries” registered over time, ensuring that “those ‘black holes' carry more history than any book or document”. From his early films like Alice in den Städten to the more recent Don't Come Knocking, including momentous productions in his career as Der Himmel über Berlin, one can observe an interest in seeking interstices, empty plots and construction sites. But his is not just a search for aesthetic affinity, his reflections -recorded on film and in literature- lead us to believe that there exists a fascination of Wenders with the terrain vague. Is there a subtle provocation against urban planning reclaiming these landscapes, preventing them from any intervention? Is it an invitation for the city to preserve the condition of these “urban pauses”?






Today, at a time where both, contemporary ruins are becoming progressively more common and inevitable in our visual memory and transdisciplinarity is sought-after with an ever increasing recurrence, it is most relevant for architecture and urbanism to draw from lessons that the work of Wenders could reveal either between the lines in his texts or coded in film sequences every time a character appears wandering inside a “vacuum”. That beauty in the ruins that art has been offered as evidence that something went wrong in modernity he manages to portray it stressing that the interstitial embodies a spirit of regeneration, not material in nature, but human, not through architecture, but by encouraging a different manner of seeing and inhabiting the interstitial.