Abstract
In line with the critical movement that in the last two decades has led to an âaesthetic turnâ in the International Relations (IR) field, this article introduces the notion of geopoetics as a useful conceptual category for the analysis of peace, security, and politics. Conceiving geopoetics as an operative concept that helps to understand the political and social experience of geographical space through the most varied forms of artistic expression, this article investigates the work of the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, seeking to show how his filmography, when examined as a whole, constitutes a kind of geopoetic discourse of peace that offers an aesthetic critique, immanent to the very formal possibilities of cinematic technique that challenges dominant geopolitical and geostrategic approaches that continue to naturalise war and violence as necessary instruments of international politics. Relying on the concept of geopoetics and on the political relevance of cinema within the aesthetic turn observed in the IR field, the article argues that geopoetics contributes to expand the epistemological and methodological boundaries of the IR field and to developing a broader conception of peace in the discipline.
Introduction
In line with the critical movement that in the last two decades has led to an âaesthetic turnâ in the International Relations (IR) field (Bleiker, 2001), this article introduces the notion of geopoetics as a useful conceptual category for the analysis of peace, security, and politics. Conceiving geopoetics as an operative concept that helps understand the political and social experience of geographical space through the most varied forms of artistic expression, this article investigates the work of the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, seeking to show how his movies have since the mid-1970s emblematically reflected an effort to map cartographies of violence and invent a visual language of peace in a world saturated by banalised images of war, injustice, and suffering. 1
Be it by crossing the borders of divided Germany during the Cold War, travelling around Europe, Asia, and Oceania, going from Portugal to the United States, experiencing the depths of Greenlandâs seas and the turbulent coastal communities of Somalia, or witnessing the harsh conditions of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the characters from Wendersâ films are constantly moving between various geographical spaces, experiencing a world where the more they look, the less they see. For Wenders, the thinking and practice of peace inevitably involve engaging with the issue of invisibility, which raises the idea that âone of the conditions of peace is to seeâ (Wenders, 2013, p. 51). Thus, recovering the ability to see the world in a more meaningful and sensible way is at the core of the notion of peace that emerges in Wendersâ fictional and documentary work.
Cinemaâs big challenge, from this perspective, is to reinvent the visual language in a way that makes people recover the ability to see what is hidden behind the ordinary details of everyday life. A large part of Wendersâ films deals with images in this way, seeking to shape a certain consciousness, stimulate new perceptions, and introduce sensitivity into the range of possibilities for interpreting the relationships of people, the space where they live, and the world. Wenders treats the geographical landscape with respect, attempting to maintain its thematic integrity, giving viewers the time needed to focus on details, on what escapes the eyes accustomed to the fast paces of modern life. Rather than a decorative, meaningless background, the landscape is endowed with an identity, a force that creates an atmosphere, a sense of time, and a certain emotion and sensitivity that influence the human characters (Wenders, 1994). This way of creating images regards the geographical landscape as a space for building connections between people, thus suggesting the possibility of reorganising social relations in a more affective and supportive way.
This almost reverent way of treating the image, the landscape, and the relationship between people and space, according to the argument advanced in this paper, constitutes a kind of geopoetics of peace that contrasts with the obsession with power, militarism, and imperialism, and the alleged objectivity and neutrality that define the way dominant âgeo-approachesâ â that is, traditional geopolitical and geostrategic narratives â articulate the geographical space with politics to think about war and peace. Thus, reading reality through geopoetic lenses indicates new epistemological and methodological possibilities to represent, interpret, and understand peopleâs relationships with the world.
Coined in late 1970s by the Franco-Scottish poet Keneth White in his manifesto for literature oriented towards land and ecology, the term geopoetics has been generally used in the field of literary studies (Italiano, 2008, p. 2). From this articleâs point of view, however, this is a category that can be perfectly extended to the analysis of the various forms of artistic expression, including cinema, and to the most varied areas of knowledge, including IR. This allows geopoetics to be explored as an operative category within the IR critical research agendas that have resorted to aesthetic representations to reorient the discipline towards epistemological and methodological perspectives that encourage more productive interactions between sensibility, emotions, imagination, and reason (Bleiker, 2001).
In this article, I undertake a conceptual outline of geopoetics and its potential contribution to the IR aesthetic agenda (section one) and a brief exploration of the relevance of cinema within the IR aesthetic turn (section two). Drawing on this initial discussion, I then conduct an analysis of Wendersâ films, seeking to show how his work constructs a geopoetics of peace that mobilises the aesthetic resources immanent to the cinematographic technique to denaturalise violence, war, and human suffering (section three). Because the limited length of this article restricts the possibility of a comprehensive examination of Wendersâ work, I will be selective in the choice of the films analysed. Furthermore, to organise the discussion within specific thematic axes, I will not treat the films in chronological order of Wendersâ cinematographic production. In this way, the analysis will start with the examination of recent documentary films where the issues of peace and conflict are more explicit. Next, I will look at Wendersâ early films, which can be classified as road movies, where the maladjustment of people with their environment is the central focus. Finally, I examine the film Wings of Desire, where Wenders reflects on the Cold War world. A concluding section summarises the discussion.
Geopoetics and World Politics
This article borrows the notion of geopoetics from the field of literary studies, where this term first appeared in the work of the poet Kenneth White. As White himself clarified, he âbegan talking about geopoeticsâ around âthe end of 1978â, although still not quite sure what this should be (White, 1992, p. 172). According to him, a great insight came from reading a brief note about Arthur Rimbaud in an old issue of Victor Segalenâs Journal des Iles, dated 10th January 1905. The note questioned how Rimbaud was able to reconcile his poetâs sensibility with the nature of the explorer in him. As White argues, that banal episode was a key moment in his apprehension of what geopoetics should be: Poetry, geography â and a higher unity: geopoetics ... As is well enough known by this time, Arthur Rimbaudâs last published text were geographic reports sent to the SociĂ©tĂ© de GĂ©ographie. Hereâs part of a report he wrote on the Somali coast, about 1883: âAccording to Sottaro, the central region of the country, Ogaden, whose average level is 2700 feet, is a vast stretch of steppe land: after the light rains prevalent in this area, it is a sea of tall grass interspersed, here and there, with stony fields ...â One can well understand Rimbaud preferring a text such as this to so much âpoetry.â And this meeting in his movement of the poet and the geographer is certainly a sign of things to come. (White, 1992, p. 174)
For White, what seemed fundamental in this short extract from one of Rimbaudâs reports was the emergence of a poetic cartography that moved the geographical landscape âaway from the âslavery of the factâ to the âfreedom of the real,ââ which meant âa disengaging of the mind from rationalism, realism and materialism, and an openness to direct apprehensionâ (White, 1992, p. 175). Geopoetics, as envisioned by White from that moment, became a concept and at the same time a manifesto for inventive literature, in the sense of the poetic creation of the world, instead of the mere mimetic reproduction that, according to him, predominated in a large part of literary practices: In its specifically poetic aspect, geopoetics breaks out of the platonist-aristotelian theory of poiesis as mimesis, which still lies at the basis of literary practice in general (reproduction, representation, reflection: mirror-writing) and moves over into presence-in-the-world, experience of field and territory, openness of style, in a relationship of configurational complicity with the cosmological âpoeticsâ of the universe (White, online).
Geopoetics emerged, therefore, as a form of aesthetic experience (poetics) of the earth (geo). Rather than emphasising the verb graphein (to write, to describe), as the word geography suggests, geopoetics put the emphasis on the experience of poiein (to create, to make). From this view, geopoetics claims a post-mimetic approach to the world, calling for more sensible and creative ways to explore the relationship between people and the earth (White, 2018, p. 22). This indicates, as Federico Italiano (2008, p. 4) argued, a humanistic perspective that âperceives geography as an âimaginationâ of the worldâ, a geography that manifests itself less as scientific knowledge of nature and more as thought, as a discourse of the poetic ability to build the world and produce original and creative ways of presenting, through art, the relationship between humans and the landscape.
Thus, by advocating a literature that reflects the aesthetic experience of space, White developed not only a theoretical work on geopoetics (White, 2018), but also a poetic work in which he exercises the writing of the poem as place, and the configuration of the page as landscape 2 (White, 2003). One can obviously find traces of what White calls geopoetics throughout the history of literature, and he recognises these traces in the work of various writers and poets (White, 1992, p. 176; 2018, p. 10). But the new point he brings, besides invented the term geopoetics, is the effort to elevate this notion and its rules to the level of a programme, a movement (White, 2018, pp. 5â6). There is in Whiteâs undertaking a certain militancy, an activism that is expressed not only in his poetic and theoretical work, but also in his efforts to institutionalise geopoetics as a cross-cultural, trans-disciplinary field of study â which can be noted in his direct involvement in the creation of Institut International de GĂ©opoĂ©tique and the journal dedicated to the dissemination of its theoretical and literary production, entitled Cahiers de GĂ©opoĂ©tique. 3
Within this programmatic effort to make geopoetics a comprehensive field, White acknowledges and emphasises the political dimension of this concept. When considering this political dimension, however, one should not associate the term âgeopoeticsâ with the term âgeopoliticsâ as if the latter were the standard from which the former should be drawn: Unless it is very clearly articulated, the word âgeopoeticsâ will often be confused with the word âgeopolitics,â at present much more widely known and extensively practised. This phonetic juxtaposition provides another occasion for definition. Geopolitics is concerned with the power-relationships between State and State on a global scale, conceiving of space exclusively in terms of exploitable resources. Geopoetics is a deeper, more radical enterprise. Its concern is not territorial power-mongering among States, but the state of the human being in the universe, the relationship between human being and the planet Earth, presence in the world (White, online).
Indeed, White understands geopoetics as an antidote to geopolitics (White, online). Even acknowledging that the relationship between politics and geography is present in virtually all his books, this is not to be confused with the classical conception of geopolitics centred on âthe relationship between States on the checkerboard of the world in terms of resources, markets and securityâ (White, 2014). For White, everyday experiences â âa conversation in a restaurant, or at the roadside, an unexpected meeting, a chance remarkâ â may be more revealing of a state of things than pages of statistics or official geopolitical discourses (White, 2014). The political dimension of geopoetics, therefore, is revealed aesthetically in ordinary peopleâs experiences with space, not in grand geopolitical narratives.
In a world in which geopolitical discourses are not an outdated product, it is worth noting that the classic works of Halford Mackinder, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Nicholas J. Spykman and others continue to be discussed. This persistent debate is fuelled not only by scholars aiming to understand and critically assess these worksâ imperial resonances in the early 20th century and their revival during the Cold War in the USA, Europe, and Latin America, but also by analysts seeking to draw geostrategic lessons that can be applied to understand and explain world politics today (Dalby, 2016; Sidaway et al., 2016).
Although the geopolitical tradition and its legitimising intellectual apparatuses have been increasingly deconstructed since Simon Dalby (1990) and GearĂłid Ă Tuathail (1996) paved the way for the emergence of the so-called âcritical geopoliticsâ, the core of geopolitical thought and practice â the dispute for resources and territories and the search for strategic advantages by states â seems more popular than ever and continues to determine the way dominant IR theories approach the relationship between geography and politics (Sidaway et al., 2016, p. 165). Despite critical geopolitics interventions, which have broadened the debate to investigate how visual and popular culture, arts, texts, affects, and emotions are fundamental to constructing and legitimising geopolitical orders (Hughes, 2016; MĂŒller, 2016), this critical discussion continues to be defined in terms of past geopolitical practices and narratives, without subverting the geopolitics lexicon. As Ă Tuathail himself admits, âgeopoliticsâ and âcritical geopoliticsâ are part of the same conversation: By 1996 my conceptualization at least (others were working similarly) was that critical geopolitics is not something radically new in the world. It is an intervention into the pre-existing world of geopolitical practices, is parasitic on those practices and is inevitably a form of geopolitics itself. (Ă Tuathail, 2016, p. 20)
Within this geopolitical conversation, peace is noteworthy for its absence. With its focus on masculinised, armed, militarised bodily violations (Megoran, 2016, p. 190) as a legitimate approach to fight over territories and resources and consolidating Stateâs strategic zones of influence, geopolitics and its great ally in IR theory, realism, tend to regard the discussion and theorisation of peace as a secondary, if not unnecessary, endeavour. At best, these approaches arrive at a fragile conception of peace as balance of power, which traps the concept of peace within the same masculinised and militarised logic of force highlighted earlier. Critical geopolitics, in turn, also fails to help overcome this absence: despite its contribution to critically discussing violence, geopoliticsâ critical agendas have done little or almost nothing to explore peace and nonviolence as core subjects (Megoran, 2016, p. 196).
These are crucial points to consider when attempting to introduce the notion of geopoetics into the IR field. While geopolitical and geostrategic visions continue to be dominant in the way IR orthodoxy theorises and analyses the relationship between politics and geography â with their obsession with military power, domination and imperialism, and the belief in war as a necessary ingredient of world politics â a geopoetic vision of the world goes in another direction. It is no longer a question of critically interpreting geopolitics, but of constructing a new vocabulary, a new perspective that offers, as Kenneth White claims, âan antidoteâ against geopolitics. Geopoetics suggests a new, poetic form of approaching the politics of space outside the geopolitical conversation.
From its emphasis on the experience of poiein (creating the world poetically), geopoetics discloses a politics of the everyday, a politics of seeing, a politics that creates a sense of place, a presence in the world. In an approach such as this, much is due to IR feminist scholarship and the claim that everyday experiences are integral parts of the engagement with the international. From feminist perspectives, IR shape and are shaped by personal relationships, voiceless persons, and unseen spaces and scales (Agathangelou & Ling, 2004; Dingli, 2015; Harman, 2019). This attention to those who are invisible and inaudible, and on spaces ignored by the macro-scale focus of mainstream IR theories, suggests an aesthetic of the everyday politics that converges to the way geopoetics tries to understand the relationship between people and the world.
The Aesthetic Turn in IR and the Relevance of Cinema
In the early 2000s, Roland Bleiker (2001) defended an aesthetic turn in the IR field, by claiming the need to break the theoretical and methodological boundaries of the discipline for the entry of approaches open to emotions, the sensible and artistic expressions as alternatives taken seriously, to broaden the ways of making sense of global politics. Since then, IR scholars have increasingly focused on arts and popular culture as sources of knowledge, and these alternative efforts have been embraced by important publications in the IR field. 4
In the context of this aesthetic turn, cinema has received special attention. Michael Shapiro, from Cinematic Political Thought (1999) to Cinematic Geopolitics (2009), regularly used films and images to criticise the dominant modes of representation of the world in the IR field and to map what he calls âviolent cartographiesâ â that is, social constructions of geographic imaginaries that, when articulated with issues of identity-difference, create political frames within which antagonisms and enmities give rise to security policies (2009, p. 18). Likewise, in Cinema and Popular Geo-politics, edited by Power and Crampton (2007), different cinematic narratives were explored to show how films had been used to address âthreatsâ and âdangersâ that shape the geopolitical construction of the contemporary world. Rens Van Munster and Casper Sylvestâs book Documenting World Politics: A Critical Companion to IR and Non-Fiction Film (2015) also recognises the epistemological relevance of cinema by drawing attention specifically to documentary films as important visual resources in mediating understandings of world politics. In 2006, Millennium: Journal of International Studies established a regular section entitled Film Readings, where influential IR scholars have published articles exploring cinema as a source of knowledge about international politics. 5 It is also worth noting the growing trend of using films as teaching resources in classrooms, workshops, and conferences in the IR field (Holden, 2006, p. 804; Shapiro, 2009; Weber, 2001, p. 155).
A more ambitious step within this cinematic approach has sought to challenge the IR positivist bias by proposing a methodological shift towards the direct involvement of researchers in filmmaking. Drawing on one of the central defining characteristics of IR feminist approaches â the idea that the personal is international â Cynthia Weber and Sophie Harman, for example, engaged not only in reading and interpreting films (Weber, 2001, 2006), but more importantly in the very process of filmmaking as a visual method of research and knowledge production. Weberâs book I am an American: Filming the Fear of Difference (2011) and Harmanâs book Seeing Politics: Film, Visual Method, and International Relations (2019) document their respective work as filmmakers, discussing not only the complexities involved in the filmmaking process, but also its potential to give visibility to ordinary personal narratives as an alternative visual method for IR feminist research. From a post-structuralist standpoint, James Der Derian is another IR scholar who has devoted himself not only to reading films (2010a, 2021), but also to filmmaking as a visual method to document and critically investigate the security domain. Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic (2010b) and Project Z: The Final Global Event (2015) are examples of Der Derianâs involvement with documentary films. While the first movie examines a program conceived by the US military to promote collaboration between American academics and the armed services with the aim of strengthening the cultural aspects of its counterinsurgency strategy, the second documentary work investigates the emergence of a military-industrial-media-entertainment network that uses language games, war games, video, predictive computer models, financial systems, and networked technology to anticipate and prevent crises that this network itself creates and amplifies.
It can be noted, therefore, that a cinematic approach to international politics emerged in the first decade of this century as a specific niche within the IR aesthetic turn highlighted here. This cinematic approach, however, does not seek to establish great theories or a common point of view to approach the relationship between cinema and international politics, which would be incompatible with the several critical perspectives that have shaped this debate â postmodernism/post-structuralism, feminism, post-colonialism, critical theory. Thus, if there is a common thread to be identified in this whole debate, perhaps it is the dissatisfaction with the mimetic approach that dominates IR orthodoxies â realism and liberalism â and the useless pretension of these dominant approaches to depict the essence of international politics and systematise it as an objective and universal IR theory (Bleiker, 2001). From an alternative aesthetic view, the possibilities that cinema offers to post-mimetic approaches to politics â that is, to new perspectives that recognise âthat the inevitable difference between the represented and its representation is the very location of politicsâ (Bleiker, 2001, p. 510) and open avenues to âprovoke thinking outside of any narrative determinationâ (Shapiro, 2009, p. 11) â indicate promising paths to be explored in the critical reflection on international politics.
Before proceeding with my discussion, a methodological note is important. In this study, cinema is not seen as a mere auxiliary instrument, from which issues of international politics, security, and peace can be illustrated. This has been the most common methodology among authors who seek to connect cinema and the IR debate. In this predominant approach, the political relevance of cinema has less to do with the cinematographic language itself and more to do with the intentions of analysts, who seek to identify in movies references that serve to contextualise and illustrate their didactic explanations. This is what happens, for example, when classic James Bond films are used to portray the dynamics of the Cold War or science fiction films are evoked to illustrate the dynamics of imperialism.
Although one should not deny the relevance of such an approach as a useful IR teaching tool, the methodological orientation adopted here goes far beyond this. From my point of view, cinema is political not necessarily because certain films provide illustrations about some political institutions or dynamics of world politics, but because the way some filmmakers build their films, compose their images, and work with rhythm and time challenges ordinary modes of perception and common sense of reality (Shapiro, 2015, p. 84). In other words, the political force of cinema emerges from its own form â that is, from the composition of images, words, and sounds â and from its ability to break, through aesthetics and shock, the usual ways of seeing, feeling, and perceiving the world.
By understanding the relationship between cinema and politics from this perspective, a brief look at Walter Benjaminâs philosophy, especially some insights found in his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (2008), provide a good starting point. In that work, Benjamin considers cinema to be the modern artistic medium par excellence due to its potential to re-educate peopleâs perceptions and sensibilities (2008, p. 28). For Benjamin, the unstable and fragmented structure of a film requires the necessary attention capable of re-educating the modern look. âThe function of film,â argues Benjamin, âis to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost dailyâ (2008, p. 26, 37). As Michael Jennings observes, there is an emphasis on âtrainingâ in Benjaminâs aesthetic works, which has its roots in his texts from the 1920s, when he often referred to an approach to pedagogy called Anschauungsunterricht â whose translation into English is âinstruction in perception and intuitionâ (Jennings, 2008, p. 13).
Jacques RanciĂšreâs politics of perception, outlined in The Distribution of the Sensible (2004), also helps to clarify the relationship between cinema and politics. Simply put, RanciĂšreâs fundamental insight for this articleâs purpose is the understanding of politics as a form of aesthetic experience â that is, as a form to determine who has a voice and who is silenced, who is seen and who remains invisible, who occupies the space and who is placed beyond the borders of the political community. Understood in this way, aesthetics goes beyond the realm of the arts and encroaches into the âmodes of visibility operative in the political domainâ (RanciĂšre, 2004, p. 82). In other words, aesthetics defines a configuration of perceptual forms that determine what is visible and audible within a particular regime of practices (RanciĂšre, 2004, p. 13). The relationship between politics and aesthetics, from this view, lies in the condition that they a priori have in common: the distribution of the sensible â that is, âbodily positions and movements, function of speech, the parcelling of the visible and the invisibleâ (RanciĂšre, 2004, p. 19). When considering cinema from RanciĂšreâs view, its relationship with politics is not necessarily found in the so-called politicised movie or in the filmmakerâs engagement with a specific political cause or his political militancy (RanciĂšre, 2004, pp. 60â63), but from the way the aesthetic resources are articulated in the film to disrupt âthe relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicleâ (RanciĂšre, 2004, p. 63).
These selective insights into Benjaminâs pedagogy of the sensible and RanciĂšreâs distribution of the sensible do not suggest there is a convergent perspective between both authors on the political potential of cinema. On the contrary, when considering this question in the broader context of their writings, there may be more disagreements than agreements. 6 Despite the nuances of both approaches, however, a common point can be drawn from the insights highlighted above: cinema is political through the way filmmakers use aesthetic resources to show what often is hidden to eyes accustomed to dominant ways of seeing. The political relevance of cinema, from this point of view, has to do with the ability to put thoughts in films through the composition of images, sounds, words, rhythms, pauses, or perspectives. These are important insights for the analysis of the geopoetics of Wendersâ films proposed in this article.
Wendersâ Geopoetics of Peace
Wendersâ films constitute a cinema of borders, which are crossed by the protagonists in a permanent journey through communities, cities, countries, and deserts. Whether in fiction films or documentaries, the dualities between urban and rural landscapes, cities and villages, skyscrapers and small houses, modern buildings and ruins, the inflation of images of the megalopolis, and the emptiness of the desert shape the large geographic spaces that serve as settings for the narratives of permanent mobility and displacement that define most of Wendersâ movies. There is a certain maladjustment between his filmsâ characters and the places where they are, which results from their inability to connect deeply to those spaces and find the peace that results from the perception of a sense of place. Their greatest anguish results, therefore, from the difficulty of feeling at home. That is why the road movie is a constant in Wendersâ filmography.
Using the continuities/discontinuities of these spaces and travels as metaphors about the crossing of boundaries â geographic borders, emotional borders, identity borders â Wenders engenders a geopoetics of peace that challenges the dominant geopolitical images of the world. In Wendersâ films, this geopoetic perspective is shown not only in the moviesâ plots and stories, but mainly through the aesthetic resources the filmmaker uses to trace cartographies of peace. A geopoetics of peace is revealed mainly in the form of films, in the way the director uses rhythm and constructs his cinematic narratives, in the way he shows on screen the relationship between his characters and the landscapes they inhabit and within which they move, giving the viewer the time necessary to reflect on the portion of thought embedded in each fragment of image and sound. Peace, from this perspective, has more to do with educating perceptions, to creating âconditions for peace by thinking together with technologyâ (Wenders, 2013, p. 133), than with epic narratives about war and peace.
From this perspective, Wenders offers an aesthetic critique, immanent to the very formal possibilities of cinematic technique, that challenges the film industryâs dominant approaches, which continue to explore cinema as a mere market and entertainment consumption product. Conceived as art, cinema is, for Wenders, a privileged medium to build, with the help of technological apparatuses, images full of thoughts. Most importantly, Wenders explores these technological apparatuses to construct a visual language of peace. In this sense, his films dialogue with territories, borders, spaces, landscapes, and people of the world in a supportive and affectionate way, seeking to break isolation and division, promote aggregation, and re-establish the link between individuals and their spatial, social, political, and affective communities. This section highlights some Wendersâ movies to illustrate the characteristics mentioned here.
Conflict and Peace: Wendersâ Documentary Films
I begin the examination of Wendersâ filmography from the most recent phase of his work. What is striking about his movies from the 1990s to the present, in my view, is the reflections they evoke on the question of violence and the need to consider love, affection, social justice, and solidarity as fundamental ingredients of peace. It may be in Wendersâ documentary films where he has been most successful in his purpose of inventing a visual language of peace. It is as if, released from the commitment to narrate a fictional drama, documentaries are more conducive to aesthetic and formal experiments capable of creating sensations and unexpected angles that stimulate spectators to perceive the detail, the invisible, what is subtly shown between the lines.
Indeed, since Buena Vista Social Club, realised by Wenders in 1999 â removing from invisibility and silence the extraordinary sound, as well as the life and history, of Cuban musicians who were no longer being heard â documentaries have been how Wenders has best been able to use creative visual and sound resources to experiment and bring about new forms of perception. The 2011 documentary on the work of the German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch, shot with 3D technology, goes in the same direction, offering unusual angles and bringing to the screen movements that would not be possible to perceive and experience through conventional filming techniques. With the 2014 documentary O Sal da Terra (The Salt of the Earth), about the Brazilian photographer SebastiĂŁo Salgado, Wenders claims a more ambitious notion of peace, which is connected to the everyday lives of a large part of the worldâs population. Wenders relies on Salgadoâs photographic work to give visibility to those who suffer from hunger, misery, poverty, slave labour, greed, and environmental degradation. The faces of people who suffer around the world and the sadness of landscapes degraded by greed are the great protagonists of the images that Salgado captures, instigating perceptions and challenging the inattentive eyes that condemn human misery and environmental degradation to invisibility.
Among Wendersâ documentaries, two short films should also be highlighted: Invisible Crimes and War in Peace, both made in 2006â2007 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the support of the NGO Doctors without Borders. Filmed in an almost clandestine way, due to constant patrolling by the local military authorities and militias, the objective, according to Wenders (2013, p. 185), was to make a film about a situation that has become frequent in many areas of armed conflict all over the world: sexual violence against women.
The result of one of these films, entitled Invisible Crimes, is a series of reports of women who have been raped in the Congolese conflict. Wenders uses a simple, and at the same time masterful, aesthetic artifice to indicate the invisibility of these women and the indifference with which these crimes have been handled. Each scene usually starts with only the voices of women who narrate their experiences. As their speeches advance, describing the atrocities of the violations, their images gradually gain form on the screen, before disappearing again. Throughout the film, Wenders employs this aesthetic artifice, contrasting moments of visibility and concealment, of speech and silence. In some scenes, women appear on the screen doing everyday heavy household chores, with their images faded against the landscape, almost imperceptible, while groups of men and boys are shown leaning against the walls, talking casually, oblivious to the women who pass by, carrying heavy cans of water or bales of firewood balanced on their heads, practically unnoticed.
The second short film, War in Peace, filmed on the same occasion, was the result of chance, according to Wenders (2013, p. 192). Noting that in the community where they were recording womenâs interviews for Invisible Crimes there were hardly any men at dusk, Wenders was surprised to find where they spent most of their time: in an improvised cinema in a ruined house, with a TV and DVD player installed by an Indian dealer, where five to six films were shown between late afternoon and evening. The audience was composed only of males (children, youths, adults, and old people), and the predominant films were violent action or war films. War in Peace is a short documentary made inside this improvised movie theatre, using an infrared micro-camera, which made it possible to record in complete darkness. During the screening of Ridley Scottâs film Black Hawk Down, about the well-known episode of the shooting down of two American helicopters by Somali militias in the city of Mogadishu in the 1990s, Wendersâ crew filmed the faces of the children in the audience, highlighting their terrified and tense looks fixed on the violent scenes of war that unfolded on the TV screen.
Although short and lesser known, these two small documentaries masterfully achieve the great purpose that has characterised Wendersâ recent filmography: a critique of the banalised images of violence, war, misery, and suffering around the world and the fidelity to the idea that peace requires an affectionate and supportive look, capable of removing from invisibility and silence all those who suffer. Within this purpose, the political relevance of cinema lies precisely in its ability to mobilise technical resources to produce, creatively and originally, reflexive images that are full of thought and that contribute to inventing a visual language of peace.
Landscapes: Wendersâ Road Movies
In this section, I turn my attention to the first phase of Wendersâ filmography, a period marked by works which could be categorised as road movies. The protagonists of these films show a similar set of characteristics: constant movement, anguish, lack of a sense of place, the difficulty of establishing relationships, strangeness in relation to the landscape, the inability to feel at home, a feeling of being a foreigner everywhere. Characterised mainly by black and white films, these movies explore the poverty of experiences in the form of a deep estrangement of the characters concerning the world they inhabit. The difficulty of the characters to experience the reality by themselves is remarkable in the three main films of this period â Alice in the Cities (Alice in den StĂ€dten) from 1974, In the Course of Time (Im Lauf der Zeit) from 1976, and The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge) from 1982. The protagonists look, but do not see; they cannot prove the existence of things with their own eyes, but only through some intermediate filter â cameras, camcorders, or film projectors â or some borrowed look, usually from a child, to mediate their relationship with the world. In all these films, the charactersâ relationship with the landscape is what enables them to reflect on their identities and the challenges of being in the world.
In Alice in the Cities, these features are especially present. In this movie, the Polaroid camera of the protagonist, Philip Winter, functions as a mediating object between his eyes and the countless landscapes of cities he experiences in his travels between America and Europe. Through an incessant search for instant âevidenceâ about the world, Philip uses Polaroid photos to supply his need to capture the details, reconstruct the landscape and trace the stories he experiences. The opening scenes are revealing about the difficulties of the relationship Philip has with the landscape. The film begins with a general shot of the sky traversed by a supersonic aircraft, where the noise of the engine stands out. Then a top-down panoramic shot shows a sign that reads B-67 Street, continuing down to the waterfront. After a panoramic view of the sea, the camera reveals a bridge, a city on the horizon, and finally Philip sitting under the bridge with a Polaroid camera in his hands. Before getting up to leave, Philip photographs the landscape, which is then shown in detail on the instant photo in his hand.
This type of sequence, which takes place slowly and without dialogue, is repeated other times in the first part of the movie, first showing the landscape in a large panoramic view, following the moment in which Philip photographs it, ending with a detail of the photo in his hands. Two aspects are fundamental in the way Wenders shows these initial sequences of the film. The first is the role of the Polaroid camera as a mediating element between Philip and the world â it is as if he was incapable of establishing a direct relationship with the landscape. The second is Philipâs frustration at not being able to satisfactorily capture the landscape in his photographs â the images never correspond to the landscape shown in the filmâs panoramas. This difficulty in establishing meaningful links with the world is also revealed in interpersonal relationships. Philip is always alone and silent, which suggests his difficulty in communicating.
What is worth noting in these initial sequences is that Wenders manages to make a complex psychological characterisation of Philip and his relationships with the world using only images, creatively exploring the aesthetic resources provided by cinematographic technique, without any additional narrative being added to clarify the situation. The story unfolds slowly, determined by the landscapes, almost as long as the actions take place in real life. And these landscapes are disconcertingly simple: they appear without ornaments, almost empty; the long travelling shots move slowly, as if wanting to give the viewer time to discover the richness of detail that exists in each image.
In all the road movies of this phase of Wendersâ work, a foreign look predominates, a stateless feeling of characters who perceive the landscape with strangeness. This foreign look is manifested not only in the geographical spaces, among characters who travel between different cities and countries, but also in their own interpersonal relationships and in the identity crises that are revealed, in a subtle way, through the difficulty of communication and the impossibility to integrate with the communities and cities where the action takes place. Childrenâs naive look is a resource Wenders often uses to stimulate different perceptions of the world and to seek unusual details in landscapes. Especially in Alice in the Cities, the child Alice is the key figure who teaches the adult protagonist, Philip, to understand what a meaningful life is.
A recent study by RenĂ© Arcilla (2020) highlights this pedagogical dimension by identifying in Wendersâ road movies elements that suggest a philosophical theory of education that emphasises the experience of being led out. For Arcilla, Alice in the Cities is the pedagogical model from which all of Wendersâ other road films derive: a protagonist who is âlost in how his experiences lack substance, coherence and directionâ, in search of his own identity and unable to relate meaningfully to other people and reality; another protagonist â in the case of this film, the child Alice â who leads the lost protagonist out, but âwho is not in any strict sense a teacherâ and has no deliberate intention of leading him out (Arcilla, 2020, p. 38). What happens is a spontaneous pedagogical relationship, which is born in everyday experiences through the deepening of the human ties between these characters and the world where they live.
When considering these road movies, one should say that the optic machines or the childâs look function as a metaphor for what Walter Benjamin (2005, p. 732) calls ânew barbarismâ â an original condition of modernity not determined by any form of tradition â providing an alternative perspective through which the world, impoverished in terms of communicable experiences, could be viewed from an innocent, original, unconditional look, arising from scratch. Cinema for Benjamin (2008), as previously commented in this article, has an important pedagogical function in this respect, by educating perceptions to re-establish peopleâs ability to communicate experiences in this new condition. The commitment to this kind of pedagogy of the sensible is what made Wenders start building a filmography that questioned the perceptual atrophy generated by the trivialisation of images in the contemporary world in general and in cinema-as-commodity in particular, while trying to re-educate his own look and that of the spectators through the search for new forms of aesthetic reconfiguration of the space-image.
Wings of Desire: Geopoetics of Peace in the Cold War Era
Wings of Desire (Der Himmel ĂŒber Berlin), whose original title in German translates literally as The Sky over Berlin, was directed by Wenders in 1987. This movie perhaps is the best illustration of Wendersâ search for an alternative geopoetics of peace that can overcome the geopolitical cartography of violence represented by the walls created by 20th-century great powers. This movie, in my view one of the most poetic of the 1980s, mixes black and white (to represent the look of angels) and coloured scenes (to represent the look of human beings). It is a fable about angels who observe, without being noticed by human beings (except for children), a Germany still divided by the Berlin Wall.
The film begins with a beautiful image of Damiel, one of the angels, who observes the city of Berlin from the top of the Gedachtniskirche (a church bombed during World War II and kept in ruins as a symbol of the tragedy). Eventually, Damiel meets Cassiel, another angel, on long and slow walks in the guarded space between the two rows of the Berlin Wall, to talk about existential themes or issues specific to humanity, such as the emergence of the first conflict between men and initial history of wars. Wenders produces a great aesthetic impact when filming these walks of the angels with a fixed camera, positioned on one of the greatest symbols of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, which appears as a constant backdrop, almost as if it were a character in the movie.
Wings of Desire is a film about peace. It is a metaphor for how to experience peace in a divided world through an original perception, not vitiated by dominant ways of looking and seeing. Adopting the external point of view of the angels, purposely in black and white to make âthe essential stand outâ (Wenders, cited in Ciment, 1988, p. 317), Wings of Desire seeks to cast our eyes on the city of Berlin, which was so marked by the scars of war and the effects of the division imposed by the dominant geopolitical conception of peace that marked the Cold War era. More than in the films mentioned earlier, this fable about angels outlines one of the points that took a central position in Wendersâ filmography: What constitutes a language of peace in its most positive sense? How should one think about peace on its own merits, beyond its definition as a by-product of war? How can one translate this positive language of peace in aesthetic terms?
For Wenders, the biggest challenge in making Wings of Desire was to find the most appropriate way to translate the language of peace in the film. The path found, according to the filmmakerâs own words, was to find a way to express a âloving lookâ through the camera: When I started to conceive of Wings of Desire, with those guardian angels as the filmâs main heroes, it opened up all sorts of questions. âHow do angels look?â was the most obvious one. [âŠ] This was an important issue. In a way, those angel characters were metaphors, anyway (at least initially), an excuse to have a different view of Berlin and of the people living there, so their point of view was crucial. How were they seeing us? critically? Full of pity? Mercilessly? Indifferently? No, angels would look at us lovingly, of course⊠This realisation quickly translated into the following problem: âHow can the camera produce a loving look?â [âŠ] Can a camera look at the world with affection? (The answer was found along with the film crew): Cameras only do what the eye(s) behind them do (or tell them to do). But they do reflect a very exact mirror image of the emotion you empower them with. The camera translates the attitude of the beholder, his (or her) stance, and approach. That was a big lesson for me from Wings of Desire (Wenders, 2013, p. 72â75).
In other words, this means that the loving look and the emotions shown on the screen do not depend only on the representation of the actors, but instead above all on the look of those behind the camera. For Wenders, therefore, perceptions and emotions in cinema cannot be disconnected from the crewâs ability to use technical resources â and this begins in capturing the images, in the way rhythms and pauses are developed in the filmâs editing and the articulation between images and sounds. In Wings of Desire, the aesthetic result of all this is indeed masterful when projected on the screen. The filmâs images are full of poetry, and Wendersâ camera seems to teach us all the time how to look and see in a loving and supportive way at loneliness, poverty, and human suffering. Wendersâ camera teaches us to see and understand what is contained in each fragment of the image. The slow rhythm of the movie allows viewers to perceive the details and, in this way, see with thoughts instead of merely waiting passively for the next block of action (as prevails in most commercial films today). This preoccupation with perception is an aspect that distinguishes Wendersâ cinema, and this has to do with the way the director himself rejects contemporary cinemaâs obsession with violence, action, and speed: What we find today is that people no longer have the patience for detail or stillness, to really look. As American author Susan Sontag has written, the âshockâ of images of war or other atrocities may become familiarised to the point that people no longer âlook,â or as she says, people may still look, but they do not have the skillful means to see and understand. Maybe we need to reconsider, then, how we look at the world, and how we let the world speak to us? (Wenders, 2013, p. 137)
For Wenders, even films that intend to criticise war sometimes fail in this attempt by merely reproducing the language and rhythm of violence, without giving the viewer the time necessary to reflect on what is happening on the screen. According to Wenders, a visual language of peace cannot be determined by the language of war, but by our ability to look beyond the indifference, cruelty, and injustice that occur time and again before us. It is for this reason that Wenders considers that âone of the conditions for peace is to seeâ (2013, p. 50â51).
The crucial point of Wings of Desire, in short, is Wendersâ effort to construct images of peace that cannot be reduced to the mere absence of war. Peace requires invention, and its broader meaning, the âgreat peaceâ, must be sought in everyday life by bringing back, in peopleâs ordinary experiences and relationships, the ability to live in solidarity, love, kindness, and community. The contribution of cinema to this, according to Wenders, cannot be found in epics about war and peace, but in the way some directors cultivate respectful treatment of everything that is shown in front of the camera (Wenders, 2013, p. 88). From this perspective, the search for a language of peace in cinema involves a âcreative revoltâ to change the habits of perception instead of merely reproducing âhistorical trauma and griefâ (Wenders, 2013, p. 107). That means that inventing a visual language of peace requires the transformation of images of violence without trying to reproduce them. The way suggested by Wenders is to use the lens to reproduce the creative and imaginative look of children â or angels. In this way, the technique must work not to produce spectacular and sensational effects, but to transform our perceptions to teach us to see what has been hidden by the dominant forms of production and reproduction of images.
Conclusion
This article has presented geopoetics as a conceptual category that contributes to rethinking the way the IR field approaches the relationship between politics and space. Instead of reproducing the cartographies of violence and war that mark the dominant geopolitical narratives, geopoetics claims new forms of the distribution of the sensible that reconfigure the boundaries of the IR discipline to give visibility to actors and spaces that have been generally erased by dominant approaches. For this purpose, a geopoetic approach to world politics involves the search for places of shared memories and sensible experiences of affection, solidarity, and compassion that make it possible to cross the physical and emotional boundaries that divide humanity. Geopoetics does not look at space and landscape from a naturalised viewpoint, but refers to alternative aesthetic forms of knowledge about the land, spatiality, the world, and the people living in those places. Geopoetics requires recovering the ability to perceive the place as a space of construction, association, and affection, rather than destruction, division, and indifference. Within this framework, peace can emerge as a core concept.
Overcoming the tragedy of war and the terrible suffering caused by its direct physical and psychological violence is, of course, an important defining element of peace. But there are countless forms of indirect violence (Galtung, 1969, 1990), produced by unjust structures of society or by symbolic aggressions of language, religion, customs, and social habits that affect millions of people, even in contexts not subject to formal and declared conditions, conventionally called wars, which also need to be overcome to build a more peaceful world. It is this broader conception of peace that Wenders explores in his films, trying to build a geopoetics of peace that trains our eyes to recover the ability to see people and spaces that have been rendered invisible by the dominant regime of practices of the distribution of the sensible.
The important conclusion to be drawn from this discussion is that to face the magnitude of the challenges involved in the construction of peace â a positive, great, and ambitious conception of peace â overcoming social injustices and cultures of violence, from the individual to international level, is necessary. A key step towards this goal, without which it is not possible to advance, is to recognise what is increasingly limiting our disposition for social and political engagement: the ability to see what is hidden behind invisibility and silence. Images and sounds are everywhere, but this aesthetic hyper-exposure has reduced the human ability to perceive details, to experience the world reflexively. To make this experience live again, as Wendersâ cinema shows, a geopoetic approach to the world can help train our senses to new perceptions and to develop the inventive and unconditioned look that only children â or angels â generally have.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
