Wim Wenders

This collection, which emanated from a 2017 conference on Wenders, goes a long way toward updating the director's reputation in light of his recent work and of new methodologies consequential to film studies ... [Wim Wenders] does a solid job of showing that his later work has more than just curiosity value. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE * Wim Wenders: Making Films that Matter is an important and timely contribution to the scholarly literature on Wim Wenders and to film studies in general. Its collected essays constitute a long-overdue reassessment of Wenders as an important German auteur at a time in which Wenders's work has received little scholarly attention. The book's essays do invaluable work both by putting Wenders's films into the context of his work as a whole and by implicitly or explicitly addressing the politically motivated critiques that Wenders's films seem to offer only superficial engagement with their subjects. Taken together, the book's essays explicate the ways in which Wenders's filmic process and preoccupations with the technologies of seeing and their concomitant failings (the recuperative power of 'mere' sight, the interference of the camera/window/eye as medium that interposes between subject and object, and Wenders increasing concern with the ethics of his aesthetics as he works toward a collaborative 'language of peace') constitute at the same time the content of his work. This book is a long overdue reassessment of Wenders and his work. * Jay M. Layne, German Instructor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Virginia Tech, USA *