Oh, joy.

"Hail and Hosanna, it's happened, good news too good to be true." Well. That announcement may have been buried way, way down in Glenn Erickson's "Savant Newsletter," but it certainly caught my attention. Turns out, the songs of joy are well-warranted: "Anchor Bay has announced that they're releasing the LONG, 4.75 hour Until the End of the World to DVD in Spring of 2004."

The moment they start accepting preorders, I'm there.

Back up to last October. Mark Wickum was writing "text supplements," the DVD equivalent of liner notes, for Anchor Bay's "Wim Wenders Collection" and posed 19 questions via email which Wenders answered generously yet succinctly. The resulting interview, in fact, is probably about the best quick intro to the man and his work around. Now, of the original New German Cinema triumphirate - Herzog, Fassbinder, Wenders, the three who, right or wrong, achieved the most international fame and acclaim - Wenders is the most often disparaged.

There are a couple of reasons for that. Of the three, Wenders is the most accessible and least idiosyncratic. The same might be said of his work, but that's not such a clean argument. Secondly, he has an unabashed affinity for contemporary pop culture. And, while all three have made at least one dud, Wenders's triumph-to-dud ratio is the least pretty.

But here's where one of my own affinities comes in. I like directors with spotty track records. I get a little suspicious and uneasy with straight-A directors ("What, every Bergman is a masterpiece?"). I'm trying to avoid the phrase "takes risks," but I'm glad that, say, after the Godfathers, Coppola didn't say to himself, "Ok, there's my modus operandi." I'm glad he made One From the Heart, and I'm glad to have seen it. It may not "work," but it's a fascinating document in its own way; the question, "What were they thinking?," so often posed derisively, can actually be a fairly helpful way in to a better understanding of the films that do "work."

Actually, Coppola and Wenders, who managed to fail together with Hammett, are an interesting pair in the light of next spring's release. It must have been at around the same time, two decades or so ago, that each dreamed up his Really, Really Big Film. For Coppola, it was Megalopolis; for Wenders, Until the End of the World, or as some like to call it, UTEOTW.

The major difference between them, of course, is that UTEOTW actually got made. But that certainly was not the end of that. Back to that interview with Wickum. Wenders:

The Reader's Digest version I was forced to release at the time would have broken my heart if I had left it at that. I knew that. And I felt I owed it to my actors, to my crew and to the musicians who had worked on that fabulous score, to finish the real work we had done. It had epic proportions, that was for sure. Together with my editor, Peter Przygodda, we added another full year after the delivery of the commercial version at the time, at our own expense, and finished what I considered "the real film." Of five hours. Which exists since then and which hopefully will see not only the light of day in the form of DVD releases, but also a few theatrical screenings here or there. I have shown it four or five times already, and EVERYBODY who saw it had the same reaction. "Wow! Now we get it. That's a whole different ballgame!" At the time we had to condense the film so much that all the fun had gone out of it. The "message" had become very heavy, if not to say heavy-handed. The very narrator had become more or less a side character, for instance.

Blessed, or just really, really lucky, are those who have seen that full-length version. Glenn Erickson is one, and he has his theories about what Wenders was after, too. German critics are especially unkind to Wenders, but when he showed the 5-hour UTEOTW in Munich, the Süddeutsche Zeitung absolutely raved. And take it from me, the SZ is not a paper given to raving.

I have yet to be blessed or get really, really lucky. But I am so looking forward to next spring. And so glad the DVD format has launched this ongoing wave of restoration and reclamation of cinematic history.

Posted by dwhudson at September 5, 2003 8:30 AM