I Was Haunted by ‘The American Friend’
The cinema is a medium of ghosts — more so than photography, whose images, although they likewise transcend the death of their subjects, will forever remain locked without animation, bereft of vitality and movement. The cinema is a reawakening of the no-longer-there; they are traces of life without body. This can be said of nearly any film — digital or celluloid; deliberately paced or charged with action; camera immobilised or camera freed. It is often those films whose creators, both behind the camera and in front of it, have passed that to us feel the most haunted. We can say the same of silent cinema; its lack of audio becomes more than simply an indication of its time in cinematic history — its images become voiceless souls, ghosts screaming without noise. The sea of faces in the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin — of a mother watching her son being trampled to death, or a frightened old woman shot by Cossacks — speak of an inescapable suffering; their now-exagerrated performances, a symptom of an age without sound, only add to the spectral fervour depicted on-screen. While reality can move on, these characters are doomed to repeat and relive their own deaths and tragedies.
Sound cinema has done away with the theatrics — at least, comparatively. Its initial forays are perhaps even more haunting than its soundless predecessors — like Sunset Boulevard’s Gloria Swanson, its actors have yet to move on from the histrionics of performances past and into the realities of a cinematic future with a voice. The early attempts at audio are themselves crackly and at times indecipherable — like listening to old blues melodies on a wax cylinder, time has once more made ghosts of these fading voices. Would Fritz Lang’s M still possess that viscerally nocturnal miasma with cleaner sound? Even as we approach the 1970s, with major advances in sound technology being made, films like Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now still possess a hauntingly archaic quality to its audio track that feels inseparable from the terrifying nature of the spectacle.
Wim Wenders’ The American Friend is not a supernatural film, but as time has passed, it has begun to feel like a movie populated by ghosts. This is partly since many of its creators have passed away — the most recent among them being Bruno Ganz. It’s eerily appropriate that the first film featuring Ganz that I should watch following his passing is The American Friend. There is an autobiographical quality to his character Jonathan Zimmerman: a humble Swiss man in Germany, suffering inside from an incurable disease which both would finally succumb too. While I doubt that the days before Ganz’s passing were saturated with murder plots and underground criminality, we can view Zimmerman’s death in parallel to Ganz’s reality and suddenly The American Friend feels like an appropriate poetic farewell; a tribute to the many characters and absorbing narratives that Ganz helped realise. Among the many others involved that have passed include Dennis Hopper, Gerard Blain, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Jean Eustache, David Blue, cinematographer Robby Muller, and editor Peter Przygodda. As a list, it reads like a tribute to a cultural legacy — the film’s credits become an obituary for an insular zeitgeist; a creative time-and-place. Yet there is more going on here. Why the film felt haunted to me is more than simply an attachment to the memories of those associated with it. You can read it in the air; the pacing; the places and the images; the characters and their stories.
Robby Muller’s camera has always been fascinated by decay, stagnation, and existential uncertainty. His early films (Summer in the City, The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and Kings of the Road — all of which saw Wim Wenders at the directorial helm) are first glimmers of this legacy — their characters lack a true destination, attempting to escape the past, yet still trapped within their own mortality. Future films like Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law open with a shot of a hearse — immediately, Muller marks the film with death: his flowing shots of desolate housing and ravaged streets, of American urban decay, end up becoming part of his trademark. In The American Friend, Muller’s camera dwells on the Hamburg docks, where Zimmerman lives with his wife and children. Docks in the cinema of the early-to-mid-20th century are often plagued places — they become fringes, a place of duality for the global and the local. They are the distant mechanical behemoths silhouetted against the foggy skylines of Marcel Carne’s Les Quai des Brumes; they are the fishing quays of Sète in Agnes Varda’s underappreciated La Pointe Courte, a hive of local pride in constant fear that their way of life will be forgotten and destroyed. For The American Friend, the crumbled stumps where buildings once stood, with people existing in and around them, speak of a country still tormented by the marks of the recent past. The desolate dockside buildings conjure up the national memories of Allied bombings — of a global war disrupting local lives. Graffiti reading “BRD=Polizeistaat!” — or “BRD = Police State!” — channels unresolved background tensions: an environmental assertion of discontent fuelled once more by the follies of recent history. Hamburg is painted as a haunted place; signs of life emerging atop the ruins of the world which came before. Even the modern settings — the cavernous subway stations of Paris and the geometric abstraction of Hamburg’s escalators — already feel tired and worn-out, stagnant and on the verge of decay.
These characters, at times, feel more like ghosts than anything tangible and living— they interact with each other but seem to float through their worlds, detached and undeterred by the forces of reality. Even Zimmerman’s shop, a picture framing workshop, feels like a faded void — tucked away on an old cobblestone street as if forgotten; outdated; like the world has passed on by. During Zimmerman’s first assassination, in the Parisian subway network, he stalks his target and eventually catches him on a set of escalators — after shooting him, he runs away with almost nobody there to witness him. The security cameras catch him running, but no one is there to observe. The subway is suddenly devoid of potential spectators; the actions he has committed, one that would normally speak louder than words, has gone by without a trace. In a sense, Zimmerman is already a spectre — his actions are self-justified by his own encroaching sense of the end, exacerbated as it were by the underworld he has chosen to bargain with. He is both barely alive and not-quite-dead — a state of in-between. It’s as if his restless spirit still walks the Earth, if only to make sure those who are still left to remember him and those who still rely on him are safe and secure once he has drifted away forever. Dennis Hopper’s Tom Ripley (perhaps Patricia Highsmith’s most beloved character) is as ghostly a character as one will find. He appears, as if from thin air, on the train to assist Zimmerman during his second assassination. His occupation and mysterious sources of wealth make him a character of cryptic intrigue. He often retires to a secluded white mansion that overlooks the city, like Dracula in a castle — or some solitary Gothic lord in a Stetson and denim jacket. His relationship with Zimmerman is one of both mutual respect and reservation — Zimmerman’s initial introduction of “I have heard of you” echoes this sentiment; one of sincere but passive-aggressive acknowledgement. Their bond throughout the film appears remarkably natural — indeed, we must acknowledge a degree of homoerotic subtext at play here (a familiar reading in many of the works that include Tom Ripley), yet the bond they share feels at times like an unspoken acknowledgement of their own shared place in the world: as ghosts. Both are men who exist as shadows — men of two very different backgrounds, unified by their spectral existence.
Though we may label it as a ‘thriller’, I feel as though it would be more appropriate to refer to it as a partial adorcism of film noir. Though many of elements of past film noirs resurface, their place among contemporary settings feels disjointed and subversive — like two realities awkwardly converging. It retains distinct qualities of noir — those mysterious characters, hard-boiled crime narratives, and a thematic contemplation on death — but set against the backdrop of a post-war West Germany, a country segmented and still in anguish, it feels like an unwelcome quantity. The American Friend, in this sense, becomes more than just a reference to Tom Ripley — it manifests itself as a darkly-comic ironic statement about a (American) past coming to haunt the (German) present. While the characters are content with getting on with their life, hoping to grow on from the errors and terrors of recent history, like Zimmerman hoping to live his life without further stress, those elements which make the film so noir-ish are what disturb this attempt to recover, paralleling the arrival of the criminal underworld in Zimmerman’s life. As such, the film noir genre’s inclusion is symbolic of an Americanised consumerist culture’s taxing presence in West Germany. A country exploited because of, and thus haunted by, past troubles.
Though time will naturally make ghosts of all films and the characters they display, Wim Wenders’ The American Friend is one so acutely pitched in many aspects to themes of near-death and hauntological presences — of a world balancing on the fringes of life — that perhaps we can view the film as ‘supernatural’ after all. The film is not an oppressive tale of death, as it does not overwhelm us with explicitly fatalist arcs or get bogged down with hopelessly nihilistic issues. Neither is its camerawork a barrage of pessimistic Expressionist splashes. It is, however, mournful — a semi-realist take on the idea of ghosts and hauntings, if such a thing is possible; of a present disrupted by the forces of an unresolved past.
