"One might think that, as someone who has made ten movies, I would see my calling as telling stories with images. But that never quite convinced me. Maybe because basically pictures have always mean more to me than stories, yes, and sometimes the stories were merely a hook for hanging pictures.
But you can't always rely on pictures; they're not always there when you want them.
On the contrary , they sometimes seem to avoid me, for weeks on end, even months. In all that time, I won't see a thing that strikes me, that seems worth 'preserving'. I completely lose any inclination to make pictures myself, and if I try my hand at it anyway, the results are completely random, images without form: because the eye that might have given form isn't there. And then you can end up with the worst view there is: that of the tourist. The uncommitted view, the Evil Eye.
Right now too, without the brace of a story, images are starting to look interchangeable and purposeless to me, and things, searching for their lost form, look up through the camera lens at me and say: why are you bothering us? Leave us in peace!' For me that spells the beginning of a new age hostile to images (and an age of hostile images too), and I run around with my camera in circles of despair. There's no help from the cinema; on the contrary American films are looking more and more like trailers for themselves. So much in America tends to self-advertisement, and that leads to an invasion of and inflation of meaningless images. And the television as ever at the forefront. Optical toxin.
After days of this blindness, it's two books that once more open my eyes to pictures and put in the mood for peaceful looking..."
Wim Wenders in Reverse angle: New York City, March 1982
