To Everything Turn, Turn’: The Uneasy Togetherness of Michelangelo Antonioni and Wim Wenders, and Other Fraught Collaborative Ventures | Adrian Martin

Summary: Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Adrian Martin “I do not regret my time with Antonioni.” These are the closing words of German filmmaker Wim Wenders’ book-length memoir about his contribution to a remarkable feature film, Beyond the Clouds (1995), credited to famed Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni – who, after a massive stroke, had limited motor capacities and almost no ability to speak. Wenders was, technically, the ‘back-up’ director contractually required for the project; on other projects (most of them, alas, unmade) Antonioni had Atom Egoyan and Martin Scorsese lined up to play the same role. In the event, Wenders was put in charge of making elaborate framing and linking episodes for the film (which is based on short, mostly erotic stories written long before by Antonioni), and keeping an eye over the shoot as whole: which meant, as for everyone on the crew, trying to intuit and execute what Antonioni wanted, but could scarcely convey, except in a few enigmatic sounds and gestures. Wenders’ expression of ‘no regret’ belies the fact that his book is, despite the evident respect for his Master, one long howl of frustration, exasperation and bitterness: the chronicle of a collaboration that was – at l east in the subjective terms of Wenders’ experience, if not in the objective terms of the finished work – fraught, even a failure. This presentation will reflect upon the difficulty of collaboration in both artistic and literary spheres. It draws upon the range of my own collaborative critical writings (with Paul Taylor, Nicole Brenez, Philip Brophy), as well as the acidic memoir What’s Welsh For Zen? by the modern composer John Cale, and the light cast upon the composition of Anti-Oedipus by the recent publication of Félix Guattari’s drafts for that radical philosophical book which he wrote with Gilles Deleuze. Adrian Martin is Associate Professor, Co-Director of the Research Unit in Film Culture and Theory and Head of Film and Television Studies at Monash University (Australia). He has written five books. His work has appeared in many magazines, journals and newspapers around the world, and has been translated into over twenty languages and has regular columns in the Dutch De Filmkrant and in Cahiers du cinéma España.