Regardless of whether or not this is the case, in the end, all the manifestly feigned experimentalism is just dull. Not even some well-composed shots of the bygone Twin Towers can elicit genuine emotional responses.
Then comes the penultimate scene of Ray, near death, lecturing Wenders, who inexplicably is lying in bed in a fake hospital scene. This scene is just painful to watch, for Ray’s out of his mind and merely rambling. Wenders shows this for seven minutes and the result is borderline pornography, full exploitation, and plain old sadistic, because nothing is gained. I felt a minor anger and contempt for Wenders during this, but it passed, as all else in this empty vessel does.
Yet, did Wenders really think that this sequence would illumine death — Ray’s or any others? Apparently so, which only demands that the flaw of pretension be added to this film’s artistic sins, which include treacly sermonizing, such as when Wenders asks, in all apparent seriousness, such banal queries as whether or not telling the truth is dull or exciting.
All in all, Lightning Over Water is a bad film. It is an inconsequential and failed extension of the documentary form, a weak statement on art and/or death, and not even a good record of the late 1970s fashion nor culture. It is basically a pointless vanity project that never coheres, for it has no narrative nor emotional cement to hold its flimsy structure together. This fact provokes only two real questions — who was more vain, Ray or Wenders? And did the right filmmaker die?
Article comments
1 - Brian
Rebel Without a Cause is nowhere near greatness?! Fool.
Those who can, do; those who can't, blog.
2 - Dan Schneider
And those who quote cliches comment on posts they cannot understand.
3 - Peter L. Winkler
Although I disagree with the evaluation of Rebel, your review is otherwise excellent. Gavin Lambert took John Houseman, a friend of Ray's, to a screening of Lightning Over Water. Lambert asked Houseman what he thought. Houseman simply said, "Repulsive."
4 - Rodney Welch
Well, first of all...geez, we are just so completely, totally far apart on this whole Das Neue Kino thing. Herzog is a wonderful director, yes, and I haven't seen a lot of his work beyond Kaspar Hauser, Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, but those films are not leagues beyond Wenders (whose In the Course of Time, Alice in the Cities and The State of Things are absolutely stellar works of the period) or Fassbinder, who dominated German cinema in the 1970s and early 1980s with Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, Ali: fear Eats the Soul, Death of a Holy Whore, The Merchant of Four Seasons, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, the BRD Trilogy and Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Lightning Over Water is an excellent anti-documentary about a great American film director as told by his German compadre. It's grim, it oversteps it's bounds, and it's made with love. It is, yes, often painful to watch, but what I loved about it was the way Wenders was calling attention to the documentary form, and how fake it is, how it manufactures reality, and how you have to go behind the scene and beyond the form to get at the truth of a man's life.
I take it you're not into Ray. "After Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without A Cause, the James Dean teenaged sudser, are there any real films of note that Ray directed?"
To which I can only scream: "Have you ever heard of In a Lonely Place, which is one of the key works of film noir?"
How about On Dangerous Ground? Saw that recently on TCM and I suddenly understood why Ray appealed to Wenders: he's less interested in plot than he is ambience and character. He's great at establishing mood and place, which is what made those clips in Wenders' film so fascinating eventhough I hadn't actually seen the films.
5 - Dan Schneider
Rodney:
Glad that you love the film, but it's a bad film objectively. At least Tokyo Ga had some pointlessly interesting sidebars in a film supposedly about Ozu. This film is all about Wenders. And he's pretty much a cipher as a person.
'the way Wenders was calling attention to the documentary form, and how fake it is, how it manufactures reality, and how you have to go behind the scene and beyond the form to get at the truth of a man's life'
If we can only get a translation into French this will read like some of the Cahiers du Cinema nonsense.
6 - Rodney Welch
It's perfectly clear. May it just needs to be close-captioned for the intelligence-impaired.
7 - Dan Schneider
Psychobabble is clear in any lingo- it's just silly.
But, feel the love.