Produced and directed by Wim Wenders.
Starring Solveig Dommartin, William Hurt, Sam Neil, Rudiger Volger, Ernie Dingo, Adele Lutz, Chick Ortega, Eddy Mitchell, Allen Garfield, David Byrne, Tom Farrell, Kuniko Miyake, Chishu Ryu, Max Von Sydow, and Jeanne Moreau.
Story by Solveig Dommartin & Wim Wenders.
Screenplay by Peter Carey and Wim Wenders, with an early, uncredited draft by Michael Almereyda.
Cinematography by Robby Müller.
Edited by Peter Przygodda.
Music by Graeme Revell.
Produced by Anatole Bauman and Jonathan Taplin.
An Argos Films production.
A Warner Bros. release.
Restoration and release of the Director’s Cut by The Criterion Collection, Janus Films, and Wim Wenders Stiftung.
UTEOTW was confoundingly Rated-R upon it’s initial release considering there is nothing in the way of gratuitous sex, or violence, excessive profanity, or any of the other fun things that usually earn a picture its R-rating.
When it was originally released theatrically in 1991, in its excessively-abbreviated form, cut down to a more theatre-friendly 128 mins from Wenders’ 247-min Director’s Cut (finally made available in North America in recent years by The Criterion Collection), and the (allegedly) 20-hour first assembly, Wenders’ strange, quirky, romantic, sci-fi road movie epic was mostly met with earth shattering silence. It is an exhibiting artist’s worst fear: widespread indifference.
The release of the restored and expanded Director’s Cut has significantly improved UTEOTW’s reputation, and gives cause for a major re-appraisal.
Selections from the original story treatment, published in Wim Wenders On Film, by Faber & Faber:
“It’s surely no exaggeration to say that in the whole history of the cinema, no subject has been handled as much as love.
Wim Wenders, On Film
A story in which love is possible, love works , is right and proper, and with an ending to match. At any price. All received wisdom to the contrary. (And where did that ever get us?) With a courage born of despair. With fortunefavouring the brave. In spite of everything and, if need be, TO THE END OF THE WORLD.
Wim Wenders, On Film
The story itself is very simple. Maybe it will become more complicated. We’ll see. At any rate I’d like to make this film in the same way that I made Alice in The Cities, Kings of the Road, The State of Things, and not least, the second half of Paris, Texas.
Wim Wenders, On Film.
Use an almost empty ‘narrative structure’ and gradually have it filled in by the actors and by pooling all of our experience. Discover the story, in other words.
Wim Wenders, On Film.
It’s the only way I can do it now. And there’s no better way of making an adventure film.
Wim Wenders, On Film.
Wenders’ resulting “adventure film” tells the story of Claire Tourneur, a listless young Parisian woman trying to find herself in Venice, Italy, but mostly losing herself in “a lot of parties, designer drugs, and one-night stands.”
As an off-course Indian satellite circles the earth, threatening to destroy it, Claire wakes up from a falling nightmare, in bed with one of her disposable lovers (in a black wig, looking like Anna Karina in Alphaville), though we assume she hasn’t rested long, since we learn that Claire doesn’t really sleep.
She wanders, drifts, really, through the stragglers, die hards, and miscellaneous detritus left over from last night’s revelry (or however long ago this Bunuelian-party-that-never-ends began).
Claire seems at once to belong to and remain apart from the people and environment she wanders past and through.
She is clearly very far from home. This place is not a final destination for her, just a quick stop along the way to who-knows-where?
And like the shark that will surely die if it stops swimming, Claire must move on from here. But where will she go?
She is on the run, even though no one is chasing her. Yet. Calire is simply trying to escape the very relatable pain of a recent breakup.
But, of course, heartbreak is something you carry with you, and so, everywhere that Claire goes, and she goes just about everywhere over the course of the film, there it is: heartbreak.
Her writer boyfriend, now ex, the film’s ever-patient narrator, Gene, played by Sam Neil (Żulowski’s Possession; Jurassic Park I & III), has just cheated on Claire with her best friend, Makiko. And though her friendship with Makiko seems to have survived, maybe a little bruised, but mostly unscathed, what Claire had with Gene has forever been lost.
Claire is on the fast track to nowhere-in-particular when a (miraculously non-fatal) automotive crack up irrevocably changes the course of her life forever.
Claire rolls her car, swerving to avoid collision with a vehicle driven by two French bank robbers, played here by Chick Ortega (Wings of Desire; Jeunet & Caro’s Delicatessen) and Eddy Mitchell (Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon and Round Midnight) as a friendlier, goofier version of the two hoods who harassed Charles Aznavour in Francois Truffaut’s Shoot The Piano Player.
A surprising exchange follows. Rather than a road rage incident erupting at gunpoint (as one might expect when colliding with a pair of desperate, armed, fleeing bank robbers) out in the middle of Italy’s version of nowhere, these apparrently harmless bandits have a surprisingly attractive, albeit highly dangerous, and clearly illegal, proposition for Claire.
If she will transport the money they have stolen in a headline-making heist at the Nice airport (they are too hot, and one of them too injured, to do it themselves), they will cut Claire in on thirty-percent of the loot.
Suddenly, Claire’s wayward wanderings are given purpose and direction. She has a mission. And she sets out to accomplish that mission with great enthusiasm. With her 30 percent, she can buy herself an apartment back in Paris, perhaps overlooking the Seine.
At the very least, she will not have to return to Gene, whom she still loves, but can no longer trust.
Her mission is initially derailed, then defined by, a chance encounter at a (video!) pay-phone with a man claiming to be an Australian called Trevor McPhee, but who is really an American named Sam Farber.
You have very sad eyes.
-Claire to Sam.
I’m not a sad man though.
-Sam to Claire.
Played by a never-so-dashing William Hurt (Altered States, Body Heat). Sam is handsome, charming, and mysterious, with a little boy lost quality to him. Claire naturally falls in love at first sight. The first thing she notices? His eyes.
Sam is being followed by a mysterious man with an Australian accent (Ernie Dingo), who may or may not be a hitman. Claire covers for Sam, and when he is desperate for her help in evading his pursuer, she reluctantly agrees.
Where have you been?
Sam to Claire.
Everywhere… and back.
Claire to Sam.
Claire whisks Trevor away in her badly damaged (and foam-covered) automobile, and unknowingly embarks on the beginning of what will be the adventure of her lifetime, one that will take her across the globe and possibly heal her heartache.
When they are stopped by some futuristic police vehicles for a roadside check, Sam learns that he isn’t the only one on the run. Claire is afraid of the police and it has something to do with the heavy bag she’s carrying.
Sam offers to drive, and surprising herself, in his presence, Claire is able to finally fall (and stay) asleep.
While she’s lost in dreams, curious about the contents of Claire’s luggage, Sam exploits the opportunity to search her bag and help himself to some of the cash.
How long did I sleep?
Claire to Sam.
About 500 kilometres.
Sam to Claire.
It’s telling that in a road movie like this, time is measured not in seconds, minutes, and hours, but in distance travelled.
Claire returns to Paris to deliver the stolen money and collect her cut. She drops Sam off, only to discover once he’s gone that so is some of her money. In its place is an I.O.U. and Sam’s prized recording of a group of Pygmy children singing.
Taking brief refuge at Gene’s apartment to count the money and figure out how much is hers, Claire decides she has to go after Sam, telling herself that it’s only to retrieve the money stolen from her, but knowing, as we do, that the money is only an excuse.
And so Claire departs to track down Sam and the stolen money, a journey that will take her from Paris to Berlin, to Moscow, to Tokyo, and beyond, ultimately to the Australian outback, where Sam hopes to reunite with his parents before the Indian satellite brings about the last of days.
The trail leads to some encounters with the other interested parties who are hunting Sam for their own reasons, apparently having to do with some rare opals that Sam has stolen along with a mysterious, top-secret video-camera headset that his father has invented.
Chief amongst Sam’s pursuers is the rumpled, German private-eye, Winter, played by Rüdiger Volger (Wenders’ Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road, and Lisbon Story), who proves alternately annoying and useful to Claire.
Winter has resources that Claire does not, and with his high tech tracking gear, he quickly picks up Sam’s scent. Reluctantly, Claire agrees to partner up with Winter. Perhaps together they will have a greater chance of finding Sam.
Sam’s father, Dr. Farber, is played by the great icon of Ingmar Bergman’s cinema, Max Von Sydow (The Seventh Seal; Spielberg’s Minority Report).
Like so many brilliant but myopic men of his generation, and every generation before him and since, Dr. Farber has been figuratively blinded by his career ambitions to the harm that his life’s work is causing the people who love him most, mainly his son, Sam. Slowly, Sam is being literally blinded while trying to complete his father’s research through over-exposure to the visionary camera that Dr. Farber has invented, the American government has stolen, and Sam has “repossessed.” What makes the camera so special? Among other things, it can record our dreams.
Blindness, literal or otherwise, is one of (if not the) main themes of the picture, which is highly ironic given that UTEOTW is a film with such an abundance of visual splendour.
It should be counted among the finest examples of the late Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller’s very best work, a long list of excellent pictures that includes:
Perhaps it is precisely because UTEOTW is so beautiful to look at that the prospect of losing our ability to see, as Wenders’ story presents, becomes so terrifying, and thus, such an effective dramatic engine for what may initially appear to be a rambling, globetrotting journey without destination. That all changes once we learn the true nature of Sam’s mission. But first, back to blindness:
Sam’s mother (played by Jeanne Moreau, another legendary icon of international cinema), is already clinically, legally blind, which is why Dr. Farber invented the camera in the first place.
Sam’s true mission, we eventually learn, is to travel the world collecting images of family, friends, and various landscapes for his mother to finally “see.” Dr. Farber’s camera does have the capacity to record our dreams, but it was originally designed for the sole purpose of allowing blind people to see.
Reeling from the fresh heartbreak of Gene and Makiko’s betrayal, Claire is now “love blind” over Sam. As she says, she is like some teenage girl with a bad crush, refusing to see the many red flags warning her off pursuing the troubled Sam, who robs her, abandons her, sleeps with her, ties her up, robs and abandons her again.
Sam really does not want to be followed, even by someone as intriguing, beautiful, and selflessly invested in helping him (for no discernible, logical reason), as Claire.
When he skips out on her for a second time, leaving her stranded, broke, and handcuffed to Winter in a Tokyo hotel room, Claire calls Sam a bastard. But she isn’t going to give up on him. When Claire loves someone, she is prepared to go to the ends of the world for them. And thats’s exactly what she will have to do for Sam.
For his part, our hapless narrator, Gene, is blind to how badly he has hurt Claire, and how she could have so easily and speedily fallen out of love with him, only to immediately fall in love with a criminal like Sam, who treats her so much worse (in Gene’s estimation) than he did through his one-off transgression with Makiko.
Gene will have to traverse the globe chasing after Claire, then chasing Sam with her, footing the bill along the way, before he is ready to see that he has lost her forever as a partner, but never as a friend. And anyone who knows Claire will attest that, to be her friend, is certainly worth crossing the globe for, even if only to finally let her go.
Winter, the lovable, but lonely private eye, by the very definition of his occupation, is always looking for what cannot be found, and therefore cannot be seen.
Like his Bounty Bear program, Winter is perpetually searching, searching, searching.
But by the time he reaches the Australian outback in the film’s more philosophical and decidedly slower-paced second-half, his eyes are now open to something more profound than the endless pursuit of chasing people for money.
He is, after all, as Gene tells us in his narration, a “bleeding heart,” who previously made finding lost children his life’s mission.
And though poor Winter suffers much through the film, always the one most put out by the double crosses and desperate attempts to evade him, the experience of venturing to the end of the world with Claire, et al, has seemingly delivered him to a moment approximating some form of enlightenment. By the film’s end, Winter is at peace, his heart still bleeding, but intact.
Ultimately, the most urgent concern of Wenders’ film is with the blindness that we all share — the inability to truly see into each other’s hearts, minds, and dreams.
We have modern, ultra-sophisticated microscopes that can show us our cellular makeup…
Tiny, fibre-optic video cameras that can be inserted under our skin to allow us to see inside our bodies and study our internal organs…
We have X-ray machines that sometimes look and make us feel like we’re strapped in for one of those nasty procedures in John Frankenheimer’s prototypical 1966 body-horror, Seconds, that show us our bones, but none of this technology can show us what we feel or think.
We can look at our brains with an MRI machine, but we cannot see our thoughts. Dr. Farber’s revolutionary dream camera rectifies that.
To see each other’s dreams would be to reveal an open window directly into the deepest, hidden, unexpressed reservoirs of our innermost thoughts and feelings.
And Farber’s device records not only what we are looking at, but also how we feel about what we are looking at. It records our emotions. It can “see” a child’s love for its mother, for example.
My favourite quote ever about movies comes from Roger Ebert, the one about how they are “empathy machines,” but a camera that can show us our own and other people’s dreams? With all due respect, admiration, and apologies to Sir. Roger, Dr. Farber’s camera would easily have the movies beat.
Incidently, Ebert gave UTEOTW a very lacklustre two stars in his contemporaneous review, and wrote somewhat dismissively: “The movie itself, unfortunately, is not as compelling as the tempest that went into its making.”
But in all fairness to him, Ebert only saw the truncated version, not the Director’s Cut. In effect, he only saw half the picture, so awarding the original version half of the stars that the Director’s Cut rightly deserves actually seems apropos.
Should such a device as the one Dr. Farber invents in the film ever come into existence, I fear that, at least for the cinema, it truly would be the end of the world.
But with the exception of a small bit of comic relief around one minor character (Tom Farrell) whose apocalyptic Cassandra Complex turns him from anxious dive-bar lonely heart into an anti-nuclear-activist-cum-terrorist, that sort of the sky is falling (or in this case, Indian satellite), doomsday rhetoric is mostly avoided by Wenders’ hopeful, romantic, ode to travel, technology, love, and dreams, and so, I’ll avoid it here.
Like Paul Schrader’s 2002 sex-and-videotape drama, Auto Focus, would do a little over a decade later, UTEOTW also holds a special significance for those of us with an interest in the history and development of digital video photography.
At the time of UTEOTW’s production, although analog tape had been around since 1951, the digital medium was very much in its infancy. If it were a baby, it would have taken its first breath, but not yet opened its eyes.
Dr. Farber’s camera remains the stuff of science-fiction fantasy, but since the audience would have to view so much of the footage that the Farber’s device was supposedly capturing, there was a real need for Wenders to find a credible way of presenting digital images that would still be recognizable as videotape to an audience in 1991, when the film was to be released, but also show how the technology might significantly advance by the year 1999, when the story takes place.
This required Wenders, his creative and technical teams, and the Japanese engineers in R&D over at SONY, who would have to actually develop or invent the working hardware and software required by the task at hand, to imagine the potential future of video ten years down the road.
They set about accomplishing this in three ways. First, they would have to create the blurry, pixelated, desaturated digital images captured by Claire with her consumer-grade mini-handicam.
Then there would be the higher resolution, but still slightly impressionistic (since they are imbued with the beholder’s feelings about what they are seeing), much crispier, high-end digital images captured by Sam while out in the field. We see them as double images as we would with modern 3-D cameras, which, like our own brains, rely on two overlayed visual inputs to create the illusion of depth, as we perceive it with our eyes.
With the on-screen computational overlays, Sam’s footage is a little like Schwarzenegger’s POV shots from James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, released the same year as Wenders’ film, though obviously to much greater box office.
Lastly, they would need to create the vibrant, impressionistic, colour-saturated (occasionally black-and-white or monochromatic) images, distorted to the point of abstraction, of the various characters’ dreams (and sometimes, nightmares).
The first challenge for the team of artists and technicians assembled by Wenders’ would be the inevitable, unfavourable comparisons of the aesthetic qualities of the digital footage to the well established look of traditional film.
By juxtaposing digital video images with those shot on celluloid, as Wenders intended to do, the fear was that, by contrast to the pristine look of contemporary film stocks, which, unlike digital video, had advanced considerably by the early 90s (film admittedly had more than half-a-century’s head start on its baby-sister medium), that video footage would just look bad. Grainy. Ugly. Unusable.
Pixels were simply no match for film grain in 1991. Was it even possible to make video look beautiful back then? Wenders and his collaborators were undaunted in their many trials and errors along the way in that most honourable of pursuits: artistic and technological innovation.
The real-world images that Sam and Claire would record with their respective cameras in their across-the-world adventures would be challenge enough, but how could Wenders and team even hope to approximate the look and feel of our dreams?
Beyond those technical difficulties associated with the use of digital media in its early form, there was an even more daunting artistic obstacle: the generally accepted notion that dream sequences in cinema (and television) have traditionally, more often than not, simply been inadequate in their attempts to articulate the intangible, amorphous look and feel of our dreams, which do not adhere to any of the visual logic that film grammar is dependent upon. Of course, there are exceptions:
The Salvador Dali sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) is one prime example.
The world’s most famous surrealist painter and its most famous director of suspense pictures, respectively, Dali’s and Hitchcock’s worlds collided in Spellbound with stunning results.
Topping his work in Spellbound, the Saul Bass psych-out sequences in Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, Vertigo, remain the very best of their kind.
Fellini’s opening to 8 & 1/2 (1963) is another example of dreams done right, probably the finest articulation of dream imagery in international cinema to date.
Woody Allen’s opening to Stardust Memories (1980), riffing on Fellini’s opening to 8 & 1/2, also comes to mind.
There are even those few, extra rare examples of films which successfully create and sustain a dreamlike quality for the entirety of their runtime.
The most obvious example would be the cinema of (recently departed genius) David Lynch, especially Lost Highway (1997), and Mullholland Drive (2001).
Outside of the movies, the most successful dream sequences in narrative television are likely to be found in select episodes of HBO’s landmark mafia & psychoanalysis drama, The Sopranos (1999-2007).
The most notable example would have to be Season 5’s 11th episode, The Test Dream – the one where Tony rides a horse through his living room.
What sets UTEOTW apart from those other stories in this regard, is that it never attempts to recreate the distorted narrative logic of our dreams. It’s not bothered with their elusive plots (trying to remember the stories in our dreams only ever proves to be an exercise in frustration), but is instead preoccupied with the meaning of the images and with the emotions they elicit in the dreamer.
There are no gravity-defying Inception-like dream-within-a-dream (within a dream!) heist sequences to be found here. Instead, Wenders and team explore the new and emerging aesthetic possibilities inherent in imagining how our brains would interpret and process images without the benefit of our eyes to actually see them.
It’s a fascinating visual problem, and as such, a distinctly cinematic one. And because it is so interested in how we see, how we feel about what we see, and how we reproduce and share what we see, UTEOTW is a story that can really only be properly told through the uniquely visual medium that is the magic of moving pictures.
Cinema remains the art form that most closely approximates our dreams, despite its over-reliance on pesky little elements like visual and narrative logic.
The great joys of the film’s first half are to be found in exploring the visual pleasures of our external realities: of so many diverse, breathtaking landscapes (from the Blade Runner-esque metropolis of near-future Tokyo, to the vast, tranquil emptiness of the Australian outback) in such rapid-fire succession; of so many beautiful and captivating movie-star faces; of such a rich and varied, and when called for, impressionistic colour palette (remember when movies weren’t just orange and green?!); of the great sounds and songs that play throughout Claire’s big adventure on the film’s soundtrack (more on that later).
In contrast, the great pleasures of the second half are to be found in the film’s scientific and philosophical musings, its ideas about ways of seeing, and in its intellectual curiosity about humankind’s shared compulsion to steal glimpses into the mysterious abyss of our unexplored interior lives through our dreams. Wenders’ characters do this armed with the full knowledge, as Nietzsche warned us, that the abyss always stares back.
Sam’s fading eye-sight is but one of the dangers (physical, psychological, moral, and otherwise) inherent in the use of Dr. Farber’s dream machine.
The good doctor’s intention of restoring sight to the blind is, of course, a noble one, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with.
You don’t have to be a paranoid genius on the level of Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; We Can Remember It For You Wholesale) to imagine the real world implications and potential for harm that abuse of Farber’s device would cause if placed in the proverbial wrong hands.
We have been well warned by Dick in his novels and the films adapted from them.
The concept that technology might be used in the future to harm us is one that we are all very familiar with in the post-Edward Snowden reality in which we find ourselves currently living, as we’ve seen in Laura Poitras’s documentary Citizen Four (2014), and Oliver Stone’s Snowden (2016).
But the surveillance state hasn’t just been forced upon us by Big Brother, like we saw in Michael Radford’s 1984 adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
We happily adopted it ourselves, volunteering our locations, memories, and thoughts in an endless stream of Facebook updates, Instagram posts, and Twitter/X tweets (Xs?), as we saw in David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010).
That using the futuristic tech his father invented will put Sam’s life in danger is more than a distinct possibility considering the rogues gallery of bounty hunters, private dicks, and even hitmen, that the US government has dispatched to solve their Sam problem. All of that makes for great high stakes drama and suspense as Sam circumnavigates the planet in his efforts to evade them.
The personal risks that Sam takes in his righteous quest to collect images for his mother almost excuse his bad behaviour towards Claire before they inevitably (as people must do in the movies), finally, properly fall in love.
It’s not that Sam is a bad person, it’s just that he has a mission, too, and he cannot afford to get distracted or waylaid by anyone or anything, not even true love. Time is running out for Sam before, like his mother, he can no longer see.
By the time Claire and Winter finally track Sam down to that Tokyo hotel, he is now effectively, totally, blind.
Since an image collector needs only two things: a camera, and the use of their eyes, at about the halfway point in UTEOTW, Sam is unable to complete his mission, and here, the film does something very odd. Already more than two hours in (more than the entire length of most movies) Wenders stop the story cold, pausing the frenetic pace of the global chase narrative, to allow Sam as much time as he needs for his eyes to heal, and for he and Claire to really get to know each other, and genuinely fall in love. From here on out, Claire will no longer have to chase after Sam.
The chemical process we experience as romantic love may occur in an instant, hence, “love at first sight,” but that is only the intense, but shallow, quick-fading flame of lust and infatuation, not the everlasting, till-death-do-us-part, raging fire of selfless, heart-bursting, life-lasting true love, the stuff Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas wrote about, the kind of love that can make you forget the world is soon coming to an end.
Once Sam stops running, and lying, and finally tells Claire all of his secrets and fears, when he is truly vulnerable with her for really the first time, Claire isn’t angry that he has been keeping so much from him.
She says only, “You could have told me this before.” It’s not the admonishment that it sounds like. Claire just wants Sam to know that everything she learns about him only makes her love him more. It has taken them such a long time, over so many miles, to finally reach this place of trust, affection, and connection with each other, and it could well prove to be that very rare and special kind of love after all.
Despite its never-ending fountain of ideas, optimism, and hope for the coming (now past) future of 1999, it is Wenders‘ romantic, humanist tendencies that have had me revisiting a film which perplexed me greatly 34 years ago, when both the movie and I were so much younger.
Not really understanding the deeper implications of the story as an 11 or 12 year-old, and despite the aesthetic limitations of first seeing it on VHS tape, the movie’s sumptuous visuals and its ultra-cool soundtrack intrigued me sufficiently to return to it again and again every few years. Now that we’ve both matured (hopefully, in my case) with the passage of time, UTEOTW has finally, totally enchanted me.
I’m not ashamed to tell anyone who will listen that I absolutely adore this film. To echo Nick Cave’s words on my favourite (among many standouts) track from the album, which I’ve happily had stuck in my head since re-watching UTEOTW for this post, (I will love it) till the end of the world!
There is a funny music joke in the film, too. When Claire reminisces with Gene about the time they saw The Rolling Stones’ last concert, Gene corrects her. “But it wasn’t their last concert, was it?” Claire smiles, knowingly, and we smile, too. That’s another of many predictions that Wim got right.
The Stones (who did not contribute any songs to the soundtrack) did not have their last concert in 1999 nor, as of this writing in early 2025, in any year since. In fact, according to our friends at Google (by which I mean myself, using their search engine), The Rolling Stones are currently planning a 2025 European tour. Wherever they are in the world right now, I’m sure they are either performing live, or rehearsing to do so imminently.
Wenders’ former screen muse and life companion, the luminous Solveig Dommartin, died tragically young on January 11th, 2007 in Paris, France, after a heart attack. She was only 48 years young.
I hope she is with Damiel and Cassiel now, and all the other angels of heaven, joyfully spreading her own wings of desire, while keeping a friendly watch over the great many of us who return again and again to the enduring gifts she left behind in her all-too-few screen appearances.
In Wenders’ Wings of Desire she gave one of world cinema’s finest performances, one that must not be forgotten.
But it is her portrayal of Claire in UTEOTW that remains my personal favourite. I think I fell a little bit in love with Dommartin myself when I was 13 or 14 and first saw her lighting up the screen in that circus tent, or going alone to a dingy underground club to see Nick Cave perform live in Desire. And that’s the other bit of magic to be found at the movies. It doesn’t matter where I am in my life, whenever I see this picture, or Wings of Desire, or any of the films I fell in love with in my formative movie-watching years, I am instantly 13 again, and happily love blind.
But I’m not 13 anymore, of course. I’m 45 now. It is January 27th, 2025 as I write this. Nearly 35 years have passed since the film was made, and more than a quarter-of-a-century since 1999, when it take place. We are living in the future of the future that UTEOTW envisioned.
Probably the closest thing we have today to a device that even remotely resembles Dr. Farber’s dream machine is Apple’s Vision Pro headset.
The Vision-Pro looks a little like Dr. Farber’s device, and though the headsets may not be able to record our dreams (yet!), they do just about everything else, including immerse us fully in an alternate, 360-degree-spanning, dream-like reality.
Not to mention video calling, as predicted in the film (along with the internet, GPS, and Winter’s iPad-like computer tablet).
Apple’s Vision Pro offers the wearer of its headset the ability to record, as Sam does, their memories, not as they might do through the cumbersome apparatus of a video camera in their hands, but hands-free, just by looking.
Our greatest hope for realizing Farber’s vision of seeing our dreams through some kind of digital medium continues to rest on tbe efforts of doctors, scientists, and technicians (and dreamers!) working to find new and improved technologies for mapping and reading our brains. According to the BBC article above (its slightly misleading headline aside), we’re getting a lot closer to achieving the reality that UTEOTW envisages. Soon, it will be science-fiction no more.
Whatever technology we do ultimately adopt to enhance it (Sleeper’s Orgasmitron, anyone?), human beings will always seek most to connect to each other, to fall in love, to share our memories, our fears, our hopes, and, perhaps more than anything else, our dreams.
And so, this post is dedicated with much respect and admiration to the memory, and in honour of, the great, multi-talented, human being and artist, Solveig Dommartin. May she forever rest in peace and power.
So, what happens now?
Claire to Gene
That’s for you to invent.
Gene to Claire.
