Dream Junky from Paracelso Zeppelin on Vimeo.
Still marinating weeks after seeing--finally--the five-hour version of Until the End of the World.* I remembered the beginning and the end and not much in between, it turns out, but I have lived inside the soundtrack and it inside me for more than a quarter century. For now, these links and clips will have to act as a placeholder for more choate feelings about how soundtracks tether us to their fleeting films like half-remembered dreams. So beautiful--the cinematic soul singing to itself after the end in the way that Decasia looks like cinema dreaming itself into being before the beginning.
Conceived as the ultimate road movie, this story poised at the brink of a nuclear apocalypse and set at the turn of the millennium wends its way from Venice, Paris, Lisbon, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, and San Francisco, to the cataclysmic meeting of mystery and dreams in the Australian outback. Claire (Dommartin), a femme fatale for a new age, abandons a doting lover (Sam Neill) to chase an inscrutable man on a mission (Hurt). Haunting echoes of film noir shade a globetrotting sci-fi fantasy for Wenders’s wild poetic vision of escape through technology. In English, French, Italian, Japanese, and German with English subtitles. New 4K DCP digital restoration. There will be a 10-minute intermission.
Note that at the end of the original trailer, it heralds "the music of 1999."
Wenders gets a good deal right about the technology of the future.
(Sidebar: Only today I learned that a 15-year-old Neneh Cherry toured with the Slits.)
It's strange, though. The Peter Gabriel song (featured in the extended trailer above) was not on the soundtrack CD, and (so) it came across as jarring and lyrically too on the nose to me.
The endless roundelay of the Kinks was just perfect, though. It had me wondering whether Wes Anderson had this film in mind during The Darjeeling Limited.
UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD - Director's Cut (Wim Wenders, 1991) from wimeo on Vimeo.
I also got distracted wondering where all the cigarettes came from out there in the post-nuclear-blast outback.
And by how much I loved Chico.
And Solveig's clothing.
And
and
*I took a solo road trip for more than 2,000 miles last week, listening to dire news bleating from my satellite radio.
and
