Apocolypse Road Movies...

According to director Wim Wender's Web site, Until The End of the World is, "an odyssey for the modern age. As with Homer's Odyssey, the purpose of the journey is to restore sight - a spiritual reconciliation between an obsessed father and a deserted son. Dr. Farber, in trying to find a cure for his wife's blindness, has created a device that allows the user to send images directly to the brain, enabling the blind to see."

Wender, the son of a surgeon, was born in Germany in 1945. In the 60s he turned from following in his father's footsteps in studying medicine, to a pursuit of painting and moved to Paris. There he discovered the Cinemathèque Francaise, where he immersed himself in a study of film. His rise to fame includes working with Francis Ford Coppola and Sam Shepherd - in the 80's cult film hit, Paris, Texas.

Like Ridley Scott's battle over the first release of Bladerunner, Wender was forced to accept a forshortened version of Until the End of the World and like Scott he continued to edit his own director's cut - a 5-hour epic (which I hope to find.)

His latest films include The End of Violence, the award-winning music documentary Buena Vista Social Club and The Million Dollar Hotel which won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2000. He collaborated on Ten Minutes Older together with fellow directors Jim Jarmush, Spike Lee, Chen Kaige, Werner Herzog, Aki Kaurismaki and Victor Erice.

I must thank my Borg friend Kevin Lim, (another "social cyborg" who tweets his interest in the works of Wim Wenders) for pointing out the film and an essay on Until the End of the World by Toni Perrine that suggests we are suffering from a Disease of Images - a love-hate relationship with technology - where story-telling becomes the salvation.

"The 'disease of images' experienced by Claire and Sam (principal characters in the film) suggests the power and potential danger of mediated visual communication in western culture," he explains. "It seems inevitable that Claire be afflicted by the disease of images since it is her vision that structures much of the narrative. She is frequently shown recording her surroundings with a hand-sized video camera, in effect, experiencing the physical world second-hand through electronic mediation."

Timothy Leary was fascinated with the transformational changes brought about in human consciousness by the capacity to record and repeat sound and images... segments of time. He and David Byrne engaged in a dialogue in which Leary explains, "quantum mechanics, quantum physics: it's all movie; it's cast is changing, it's re-forming, it comes in clusters, it's not linear. And you don't study anything - you set up a situation and you record it." David Byrne, "And you follow the pattern."

David Byrne: "It seems that post-WW2 with television and movies and records being disseminated all over the globe, you have instant access to anything anywhere almost. But you have it out of context, free-floating. And , people in other parts of the world - India, South America, Russia - they have access to whatever we're doing. And they can take what they need and leave the rest. They can play around with it, they can misinterpret it or re- interpret it. And we're free to do the same thing. It seems to be a part of the age we live in, that that's a unique thing about this period, that there is that kind of communication, even though it's not always direct communication with people in different places - it can lead to direct communication if you follow through."

Wim Wenders currently lives in Los Angeles and Berlin. Read his complete biography...
Kevin Lim is currently pursuing his doctoral degree in Communication at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) and blogs at theory.isthereason.com.