State of Things

Wim Wenders’ State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge, 1982) is a film about film. The article suggests five possible readings of this simple remark: the shooting of a movie creates a film within the film in the sense of a work within a work; it is a film about the fatefulness of film stock; an autobiographical picture about Wenders’ traumatic experience with the Hollywood studio system; a pedagogical essay about the dimensions of film as an audio-visual art; and a Deleuzian confrontation with the crystal-image as a quintessential form of the time-image. The series of situations with which the film crew is confronted when the shooting is interrupted demonstrates almost every possible option that a film director can choose from the history of film forms.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!