Desert Romance Renowned Filmmaker Wim Wenders Explores Australian Wilds With Photos by Gary Tischler Wim Wenders is in a league of giants when it comes to his status as an international film director. Revolutionary, whimsical and cutting-edge, the German filmmaker has been showered with establishment honors. He loves rock íní roll and has said more than once that it saved his life and may well have prevented him from becoming a lawyer. Wendersís movies always seem to come out of left field and, beyond that, out of a murky and then clear blue sky. Films such as ìWings of Desire,î ìThe American Friend,î his dark take on ìHammettî and the ebullient musical documentary ìBuena Vista Social Clubî have given him the distance of an outsider, the surprising mantle of popular acceptance and the restlessness of a renaissance spirit. And then thereís Wim Wenders the photographer. Wenders said that he considers himself a photographer, and his movies often flex with still images. The filmmakerís photographs of wide open and seemingly endless spaces can be seen this month at the Goethe-Institut in the exhibition ìWim Wenders: Photosîóa panoramic road movie of sorts. If you go unprepared, these cinemascope, thin, unbounded photos look remarkably familiar: They could be of Arizona, the mountains of New Mexico, the deserts of Nevada or the hopeless decay of the flat, sage-brush part of Eastern Texas. The photographs, as it turns out, are not of the American WestóWenders has done that beforeóbut of the Australian Outback, a vast stretch of desert, flat land and mountain area that makes the American version seem downright overpopulated and civilized. Wenders visited the areaóAustraliaís ìred centerîóin 1977 and 1988 and was enthralled and almost overpowered. Wenders clearly has the Central European mindset of being surrounded by land, urban-ness, cities, forests, city blocks, villages and the milling human race. It appears that, faced with the forbidden and unforgiving spaces of the Outback, the filmmaker felt a dreaded longing for home and a kind of hypnotic love with it. ìIn these pictures,î he wrote, ìI am this landscape reaching as far as the eye can see. The homesickness that takes hold of me when I am looking at these pictures today is that which is felt by Ö all those who do not live surrounded by the elements.î There is a certain rough, romantic feeling in those wordsóand a sense of things out of reach or swept away in his pictures. What is in the photographs, when anything is in them at all, appear negligible, threadbare, beaten down, already fading and waiting to be buried. Wendersís hunger for experiencing what heís photographed is evident in the images and horizontal exposures. He looks with a remarkable intensity for what little is there and succeeds in almost making it holy. Wenders chose the panoramic format because to have used a normal format ìwould have been an insult to this vast, ancient and untouched continent. Even where singular remnants of civilization could be foundósuch as a fence of corrugated iron, car dump, an abandoned drive-in theaterótheir decay and desolate struggle to be noticed could not be ignored in the face of boundless and ageless nature.î Against these endless horizons, the thin trees and sharp brush, clouds and buttes, the imposing and unnerving rock formation called ìthe bungle bunglesî and the few signs of human activity look more like last stands than new beginnings. The blank white screen of a drive-in theater, for instance, looks like the bones of a settler, while the rust of a junkyard car looks more like dried blood than a once viable automobile. Wenders has thrown in, almost casually, a portrait of Sidney at night, with its lights and Los Angeles feel. It looks like an image for a thirsty traveler, a survivor who escaped the hypnotic effect of the Outbackís distance, dirt, flat earth and dry sun to make it back to civilization. ìWim Wenders: Photosî runs through May 14 at the Goethe-Institut, 812 7th St., NW. For more information, please call (202) 289-1200 or visit www.goethe.de/uk/was/enindex.htm. Gary Tischler is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.