I’ve always been curious about The State Of Things (1982; Der Stand der Dinge), a black-and-white movie Wim Wenders directed after his German road movie trilogy. I didn’t realise it was actually something he made while he was on a break having a tough time filming the detective movie Hammett (based on Dashiell Hammett) in Los Angeles for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios who was rewriting the script and eventually asked Wenders to reshoot the film. Using crew and performers who were making a movie by Raul Ruiz, The State Of Thing is an improvised drama that seems to be a receptacle for Wenders’ frustrations and experiences making movies. Unsurprisingly, it’s about a film crew shooting a science-fiction movie in Portugal and they run out of film stock to the disappointment of the director Freidrich (Patrick Bauchau). His cameraman Joe (played by the cigar-chomping filmmaker Samuel Fuller) awaits word about his dying wife back home. For the rest of the crew including the actors, they are staying in a hotel by the seaside in a small town, and the majority of the movie is just watching these characters kill time in arty black-and-white images, which seem to reference Ingmar Bergman and plenty of other classic art-house directors. At the same time, from the novel of The Searchers that the director loans to an actor Anna (Isabelle Weingarten) to the cowboy hat the director occasionally wears, there is a fascination with American and western mythology. It’s quite plotless and there’s a lot of interest in creating and representation with people drawing, taking photos or singing to themselves. The black and white cinematography feels like a collection of atmospheric, iconic magazine images. Things pick up when Freidrich decides to fly to Los Angeles and chase up their absent producer Gordon (Allen Garfield from The Conversation), which invokes Apocalypse Now and the quest for Kurtz while becoming a riff on film noir tropes as the director drives around the roads and parking lots in an open top convertible, shaking off the crooked associates also out for the missing producer. I think I preferred Wenders’ Kings Of The Road, and The State Of Things I might have admired more on reflection than in the watching; I watched this late on a Saturday night after a long day of driving around, so I kept falling asleep and rewinding scenes to catch up with what I missed. The second half was much more engaging (from the Roger Corman cameo to the way the city is shot prefiguring Paris, Texas) and the concluding sequence of a camper van tooling around the sunset strip being great stuff. I dug Bauchau’s elegant charisma and persona as well as him hanging out with Samuel Fuller bringing that old school Hollywood swagger. In the end, the film feels like the missing link between Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless and Jim Jarmusch’s future career in its deadpan black-and-white ‘hipster’ vibe. Recommended.
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