For the 40th anniversary of his Palme d’Or, I would like to come back to Paris, Texasa film little known to the general public but which remains one of the most influential on the artists of its generation.
Seminal work for Sam Mendes, Gus Van Sant and Wes Anderson, Inspiration of the album The Joshua Tree de U2, head of the names of the Texas and Travis groups (that of the character of Harry Dean Stanton), Paris, Texas was also the favorite film as many Elliott Smith as of Kurt Cobain.
Victor Morek
Wedding of old and new continent
He was scripted by Sam Shepard, whose acting career often eclipses the fact that he was the companion of Patti Smith, and created with her the post-punk movement, very imprint of nihilism.
Shepard contacted a young man emerging whose work he admired, the German Wim Wenders, a graduate of philosophy, and whose work is between fiction, philosophical tale and documentary (which he will brilliantly marry in Perfect Dayshis latest film).
Thus was born Paris, Texasa Franco-Ouest-German co-production that everyone imagines American as it is emblematic.
A hundred and the first role of Harry Dean Stanton, the film almost was fatal for one of the most important directors of contemporary cinema. Indeed, Claire Denis (Great work, High Lifeetc.), then assistant director, wanted to prove that it would be magnificent if Stanton crossed the Rio Grande to swimming. She tried the experience herself, dressed, and had to fight for more than an hour to come back to the bank, failing to lose her life. On his return, Wenders simply said to him, “You see, Claire, I don’t think it’s a good idea to do it with Harry.”
Victor Morek
The American dream
Wenders envisaged this film as “a story about America”, depicting a world arriving at the end of the road drawn to the west: all the territories have been conquered, everything was done, composed, written. While America is right in its reaganian boom of consumerism of the 80s, Wenders underlines that this excess of needs only exists to fill an existential vacuum, which illustrates the hero’s brother, builder of advertising panels.
Stanton goes in search of Nastassja Kinski, the mother of his son, who left years ago and whose quest symbolizes that of America, from the history of a country that goes, like the hero, desert expanses to Urban civilization.
Wim Wenders describes the loss of the American dream, which was built on the fantasy of these immense and promising spaces which are ultimately only emptiness. The principle is precisely that there is nothing in Paris, Texas, barely a memory of the protagonist, the fact that it may have been designed by his parents. He bought a piece of land there and retained a faded photograph, an idea of being the owner of something intangible, the land of his origins, but which no longer makes sense: where he wanted to live happy with His family, a dream that will never happen.
This image is as misleading as the name of Paris, which evokes the greatness of the old continent and the absolute fantasy of love, transposed here to the nothingness to which we simply gave the name.
Once Nastassja Kinski is found, rather than trying to understand who she is and what pushed her to change and leave, Stanton sends her constantly to what she was before, living in a past that does not exist more.
The film thus works on fantasies, both that of a lost America as that of the feminine. The woman who, behind the window of peep-showachieves the fantasies of customers: love as a good consumption.
This fantasy is, however, the result of non-commissioning, and the film will relearn its characters to communicate all along. Starting from Stanton’s silence to reach this famous discussion on the phone through the window of peep-show Where, for the first time, without really being, he manages to put himself in his place, literally in the plan, by this superposition of the faces, and understand it, accepting that time has passed and that the world has changed.
Victor Norek, creator of the YouTube channel The cinematographer, specializes in the shell of consumer films. He writes for Rockyrama magazine and is a speaker, among others, for the Cinémathèque québécoise.
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