The director of “Wings of Desire”, Palme d’Or for “Paris, Texas”, received the 2023 Lumière prize on Friday evening, awarded at the end of the Lyon Festival which rewards a leading director or actor each year.
Wim Wenders received the 2023 Lumière prize on Friday October 20 in Lyon for all of his work. The 78-year-old German filmmaker gave an exceptional interview to a team from France 3 Rhône-Alpes. The opportunity to pay tribute to the creators of cinema, to discuss its filmography and to envisage a bright future for the cinema of tomorrow.
A very symbolic price
Receiving this prize, in the birthplace of the Cinématographe Lumière, is a great mark of pride for Wim Wenders. “Light is the very essence of cinema. I always liked the Lumière brothers, although they were documentary filmmakers, they, unintentionally, also made fiction films. So it’s a very symbolic price.”he rejoices.
Traveling filmmaker, polymorphous and visionary virtuoso, accomplished photographer, Wim Wenders has never stopped looking for keys in the cinematographic process of the inventors of cinema. “J“I was even able to make a short film with their wooden cinematograph, I was nervous because I only had a piece of film”, he confides.
Inventing your own form of cinema
Through his work and his 25 films made since the 1970s, Wim Wenders examines the wanderings of his characters, solitude, travels and dreams. “Being able to be alone taught me how to also be with people. It’s a huge thing in my cinema to represent the idea of solitude with a positive connotation”, he reveals.
Long confidential, his cinema exploded at the end of the 1970s with The American friend (1977). In the 1980s, it was the consecration with Paris-Texas (Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984) and Wings of Desire (1987). “These films changed my life as a filmmaker in a funny way. It was also a bit of a burden to be successful. There are a lot of people who expect us to continue doing what they’re told. showed. And that is the enemy of cinema. It is a recipe for failure. Cinema is not a form that applies to everyone. We must find this form. We must invent and cinema has this great capacity to reinvent itself with each film”, explains Wim Wenders.
Over the years, he has dedicated numerous documentary films to other artists: the photographer Sebastiao Salgado, the dancer Pina Bauch, and the Cuban musicians of the Buena Vista Social Club. Today, he dedicates his new film, Anselm-the Sound of Timeto the German visual artist Anselm Kiefer. “There are artists, I don’t know how they do it, I don’t know what their secret is. I find it a great adventure to discover their language”, he said.
Cinema will live
Born in 1945 in Düsseldorf, Wim Wenders discovered the seventh art at the Cinémathèque française via the films presented by Henri Langlois, one of the founders of the institution. So it’s “goodbye to painting”, for which he was first destined, and “long live cinema!” A surge of youth and optimism that he still retains today despite the upheavals that cinema is undergoing.“Like all of humanity, cinema is going through a great crisis, but I am sure that it will once again be a source of consolation. We will always need to tell stories, cinema will survive,” he assures.
Proof of his incredible desire to imagine a radiant future for cinema, Wim Wenders presents two new works this year, Anselm-the Sound of Time And Perfect Days.