It is in an incredible risk to create a film about the struggle of making a film. A movie partly devoted to the study of sound, not only the production of music by trained vocalists and musicians, but the accumulation of everyday noises by a man with a boom mic seems equally ambitious. For anyone else, the results might be forced and superficial, but Wim Wenders' products are at once astounding and spontaneous. Both in Lisbon Story and Buena Vista Social Club, Wenders seamlessly integrates the passionate, fatal and trivial aspects of cinema and musical performance. Whether staged or improvised his narratives never veer into the dreadful realm of predictability. It is through his profound sensitivity to place, reflected in the local musical and chromatic vibrancy of Cuba in Buena Vista, and the hybrid medieval-industrialized Lisbon basking in Mediterranean light, that the questions of art, music and cinema are raised. He grounds the two films so authentically in their locales that we eagerly embrace the topics of music and movie-making.
Wenders is not interested in strictly replicating the structure, lighting, energy and mood of the two respective cities, though he masterfully captures the form and atmosphere of each urban place. He goes beyond simply conveying the essence of a city as an entity: he suggests the emotional sentiments a city might elicit and characterizes the bond between his characters and their environments. The crosscut is used particularly effectively in Buena Vista to create a coherent portrait of an intimate cast of characters who retain their mannerisms, humor, technical skill, wit and dignity whether at home or on the stage, whether in Cuba, Amsterdam, or New York. A specific building, street, figure or piece of debris might trigger the memory of another place or time, but Wenders plays visually with nostalgia in such a way that he avoids overt sentimentalism.
Guitarist Ochoa Bustamante (left) and vocalist/guitarist Compay Segundo. Creative Commons, by Hiabba (2008). http://search.creativecommons.org/
Most of the emotional responses and dynamics between character and place are sufficiently subtle to require full attention and multiple viewings. In Buena Vista, a group of elderly Cuban male musicians and one female vocalist come together to record and perform the nation's provincial and popular music. They are musicians who have been forgotten or fazed out -- some had abandoned their instruments for a decade or more -- but performers endowed with a striking vitality, humanity and appreciation for their Caribbean culture. Working with Ry Cooder, Wenders captures the centrality of music to their lives: in the studio, on the streets, in ornate pre-Revolution gambling houses and in abandoned bars. Rhythm is inescapable, permeating all aspects of life. Wenders recognizes that the discovery of a culture and locale so inherently bound to music constitutes something refreshing and unique. Particularly from the European or American perspective, he acknowledged in the commentary, we tend to think of music as a separate entity, something we listen to for a duration and then set aside. We occasionally go to concerts, listen to the radio or improvise, but these are less integral elements in the fabric of life than they are exceptional circumstances. In contrast, Cubans constantly discover, produce and collaborate in formal and informal musical exchanges.
Extreme Right: Trumpet player Manuel Mirabal Vázquez. Creative Commons, by Moyo Taxiguerrilla (2006).
One of the film's most revealing sequences occurs when singer Omara Portuondo, clad in a bold print dress, strolls down the street of her old neighborhood amid residents standing on the curbs and in front of dilapidated buildings. As she wanders through the street, Portuondo sings, partly to herself and partly offering an impromptu performance to the audience that has gathered for her. One woman of African descent joins her in song, invoking their common career experience and suggesting Cuba's ethnoracial heterogeneity. During the commentary, Wenders emphasized that the neighborhood promenade scene unfolded spontaneously, a fact that is at first difficult to believe. The individuals who gather to hear Portuondo balance reverence with anonymity. They convey interest and desire to hear her voice, yet maintain relative nonchalance and refrain from pressuring or bombarding their locale celebrity. Their expressions also appear unaffected by the presence of the camera. The audience embodies civility and appreciation, without the self-consciousness or egotism that often accompanies the presence of a camera. Indeed, as Wenders asserted, there is nothing "fake" about the people of Cuba.
Interestingly, the concept of cinematic authenticity is a motif that recurs in Lisbon Story. Towards the conclusion of the film, the mysterious German filmmaker Frederick challenges the very act of movie-making. In his diatribe with his sound recorder he equates "Pointing a camera" with "pointing a weapon" and reflects, "...Every time I pointed at something, I had the feeling of depriving things of their life." The very presence of the camera changes the subject, and the very eye of the cinematographer distorts it even further. That is Frederick's unhappy conclusion, anyway. The only way to escape these limitations is to capture figures without their knowledge or consent and without the corrupting influence of the filmmaker's own eye. Frederick fashions plastic shopping bags, small backpacks and garbage cans into vessels for hidden cameras. The flimsy blue plastic shopping bag seems appropriated directly from Buena Vista, where it also functioned as a vehicle, but one holding sacred visual elements from the past, rather than illicitly capturing unknown moments in the present. Cuban pianist Rubén González's uses a blue plastic bag to transport photographs of himself and other musicians at the height of their careers. Against his characteristic orange zigzag button down, Rubén's insubstantial bag of treasured images intimates the pervasiveness of Cuban poverty, but also visually encapsulates Cuban values of relationships, authenticity and meaning in images and lyrics. Armed only with a minimal plastic shopping bag, Rubén manages to protect the photographs from any blemish, indentation or tear.
Bassist Orland Lopez "Cachaito." Creative Commons, by Volume12 (2008).
Visual parallels between the two films run far more deeply than mere recurrent props. In fact, Wenders captures environmental structures and geographies with suggestive doubles in Havana and Lisbon. Train tracks function as one structural motif and symbol of transport, change, interconnectedness and, paradoxically, divisiveness. In Buena Vista Social Club, Ochoa Bustamante sings and plays his guitar with a provincial folksiness as he walks towards the steady cam, following the tracks. In Lisbon, the pace of life around the tracks is slightly more frantic and mechanized. Trolley tracks in Lisbon Story help propel the protagonist Winter towards the mysterious child employed by Frederick. Other analogues to the Lisbon trolleys are the putrid green and pink buses imported from the Soviet Union, seeming anachronisms that are actually critical to Havana's contemporary transport infrastructure.
Wenders grapples with the environmental opposition between old and new in both films, and plays extensively with boundaries. Boundaries may be physical thresholds, such as the coastal waters crashing against Havana's highways, or may exist in space and time, as with the cross cuts between the group's performance in Amsterdam and their work in the Cuban recording studio weeks earlier. Diegetic sound bridges across these cuts (Silencio, sung by Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo) lend a sense of continuity to an editing technique that might otherwise create temporal confusion.
In both films, cinematography works to suggest navigation and exploration. It evokes another breed of tension, this time between familiarity and newness. The mobile camera ventures through the streets of Havana and Lisbon in a series of long takes that capture not only the neighborhood architecture and lighting, but the residents' attitudes and body language. Wenders relied fully on the mobile cam and two heavier cameras with tripods (no tracking or dolleying), and the subtle irregularities in camera stability humanize the framing. We are somewhat conscious of the street venturer recording the sights. He is not a blatant tourist, but rather a selective observer, an outsider who also experiences a sense of connection with the new city. In Lisbon Story, Winter embodies that "outsider." En route to Lisbon, he listens to a Portuguese language cassette and struggles to replicate comical phrases. Yet, although certain cultural and linguistic aspects of life in Lisbon are quite foreign, other elements -- like the exotic voice of Madredeus (Teresa Salgueiro) -- exist independent of national bounds and deeply resound with Winter. A similar tension arises in Buena Vista Social Club, when the members of the band arrive in New York City for the first time. In souvenir shops, the musicians recognize certain bobble-heads (Charlie Chaplin, for instance), but struggle and fail to name others (Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy). By including such sequences detailing cultural connections and deviations, the director reveals something about himself. Wenders has thoroughly established himself as an international figure in cinema. Yet, he too must experience the strange, exciting imbalance that comes from traveling: the alien and unsettling juxtaposed with the familiar and universal. And this opposition is what makes his local environments so vivid, so authentic and so approachable, regardless of a viewer's experiences or background.
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