I once wrote a book about Wim Wenders. It covered the first 20 years of his career, his breakout years in Germany, where he became one of the luminaries of the New German Cinema, which sought to separate itself from the mostly mediocre studio films of Germany’s postwar economic-miracle era, and his foray into American filmmaking, a rocky period which, nevertheless, culminated in the highly successful collaboration with Sam Shepherd on Paris, Texas (1984). In a recent interview with NPR, Wenders noted that critics characterized these years by three A’s: angst, alienation, and America, and that’s not a bad summation. The angst was always male; women, if they appeared in the films at all, inspired the intensest angst. Relationships never worked out (on or off screen). Wenders collaborated with Peter Handke, a more disciplined, but even more alienated artist, on many of the German films. They were slow and contemplative and asked more questions than they answered. Composed of inner journeys and outer landscapes more than real stories, they anticipated Wenders’ eventual turn to documentary, as many of them were already quasi-documentaries. Kings of the Road (1976) documented the last of Germany’s rural movie theaters; Lightning Over Water (1980), supposed to be a collaboration with Nicolas Ray on a last movie, ended up documenting Ray’s last days, while The State of Things (1982), though fiction, chronicled the all-too-real dilemma of a film crew stuck with an unworkable project.
Although preceded by two short films for French television, the delightful, Chris-Marker-like Tokyo-ga (1985), represents Wenders’ first notable foray into documentary. The film explores idiosyncratic aspects of Japanese culture on the way to finding out more about Wenders’ hero (and mine), Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. Another decade of both fictional and documentary films followed, culminating in three Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary: The Buena Vista Social Club (1999), Pina (2011), and, this past season, Salt of the Earth (2014).
With Salt of the Earth Wenders has achieved his most compelling work to date. A chronicle of the life and work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, the film takes us through Salgado’s short-lived beginnings as a revolutionary, which effectively exiled him from Brazil for a decade, his decision to give up a comfortable life as an economist to become a photographer, and the many photo projects he embarked on, projects that increasingly centered on the world’s marginalized. The title “Salt of the Earth” is also the title of the 1954 Herbert Biberman fiction film about a strike by mine workers in New Mexico. In early interviews Wenders sometimes named the Biberman film as one of his favorites, though his inward-looking early films gave little indication of own interest in such subject matter.
As chronicled by Wenders, Salgado’s photo career reaches a literal dead end when he photographs the Rwandan genocide and its less publicized aftermath, the death by starvation or disease of hundreds of thousands of Hutus, expelled from Rwanda when the Tutsis regained power. Emotionally and artistically exhausted, Salgado returns to his father’s farm, where he grew up. It too has been devastated—by drought and poor farming methods—but, together with his wife and life partner Lélia, Salgado successfully replants a rainforest, tiny tree by tiny tree, and the couple establishes the Instituto Terra (earth institute) on the farm, which has since become a national park, to teach others how to restore devastated land. The reclamation project restores Salgado’s faith in living, and he goes on to become a nature photographer, giving to these images the same breath-taking depth, beauty, and grittiness that had characterized his earlier work, continuing to travel the world and risk his life—as the film documents when the crew has to crawl on its collective belly to elude a polar bear while Salgado photographs walruses in the Arctic.
In creating the film, Wenders collaborated with Salgado’s son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, who accompanied his father on the later expeditions recorded in the film, both to get footage for his own film and to get to know his so often absent father better. The collaboration with Wenders, the young with the old, was, according to both men, difficult, and editing alone took about 18 months. However, struggling through hours of footage and differing visions of how to shape the film eventually brought the depth, breadth, intensity, and plenitude that characterize the end product.
The film is structured around ever-widening circles of family (something a young Wenders found difficult to believe in). First, there are the three generations of the Salgado family, central to which is the life-long love affair and partnership between Sebastião and Lélia that endures constant separation, yet survives and flourishes; next the human family that Sebastião photographs in all its variety, pathos, and savagery; and finally the family of all living things, at the same time fragile and resilient. No more angst, alienation, or America. Wenders confidently embraces the world in this rich, mature, affirmative work of art.
Wim Wenders, 1980's