Perfect Days
Next time is next time, now is now.
1. Late Style
Is there a late style in movies? That is, do films made by great directors near the end of their lives evince a significant change in sensibility and thematic substance than movies produced earlier in life? This question is relevant to our interpretation of Wim Wenders’ feature film, Perfect Days, a picture made when the director was 76 years old.
Some critics have articulated the notion of “late style,” that is, works made late in a great artist’s life claimed to possess a quality different from earlier creations. In a recent book on this subject, The Late Style and its Discontents, the editors in their introduction define “lateness,” “late work”, or “late style” as “a profound difference in style, tone and content which tends to look back to the artist’s earlier years and forward, beyond his death, to future developments in the field...” Such works are thought to “transcend (their) immediate context” and “mark a moment both within and without time and place.” (McMullen and Smiles ed., 2016).)
Examples of “late works” are Titian’s final paintings, Goya’s murals in “The House of the Deaf Man” as he called his dwelling at the end of his life, Monet’s waterlilies and, perhaps, Philip Guston’s cartoonish, but painterly images of shoes, dying men, and Ku Klux Klansmen made in the final decades of his life (after a career mostly as an Abstract Expressionist). These works are characterized by monumentality, simplified design and form, and other-worldly subject matter. In music, Schubert’s eerie and ineffable Winterreise is thought of as a “late work”, although the composer, dying of tertiary syphilis was only thirty years old. Beethoven’s final symphony and last string quartets are thought to embody “late style” characterized by a serene disregard for the ordinary constraints of musical form – that is, strangely proportioned fugues and sonatas, colossal sets of variations on themes, and unprecedented distortions of existing musical structures (for instance, a symphony that ends with an enormous choral fugue.) Rossini’s Peches de villiesse (Sins of Old Age), a collection of 150 short chamber pieces, songs, and piano compositions, first published after the composer’s death, is a work overtly announcing its “lateness.”
In theater, the idea of a late style dates back 2300 hundred years to Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonnus. Ibsen’s final works are claimed to represent a “late style” – for instance, The Masterbuilder and, of course, his radically simplified and symbolic When We Dead Awaken. It seems pretty evident that the movies made by Clint Eastwood in the last decade have the characteristics of “late works.” Eastwood seems to be reflecting on his earlier movies, disavowing, as it were, the concepts of machismo, redemptive violence and heroism that characterized his earlier films. Further, Eastwood late movies are short and involve simplified plots and characters that are drawn in broad stroke to exemplify certain stereotypes common in genre movies.
Notwithstanding these examples, many critics have concluded that the notion of a “late style” is an example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. That is, the death of an artist is claimed to cast a shadow over that artist’s last works. But, of course, most artists don’t know precisely when or how they are going to die. If Schubert had survived to live another forty years, we probably wouldn’t regard his Winterreise as so profound and uncanny as it is generally considered to be. (Schubert is a bad example because he undoubtedly knew that his syphilis doomed him to an early death.) The point is that it’s easy to conclude that a late work is eerie, or possesses an aspect of the ‘peace that passeth all understanding” based upon the artist’s death shortly after creating the piece – but this is often the use of a subsequent unrelated event to explain something that preceded it. In fact, in their anthology of essays, McMullen and Smiles suggest that the notion of a “late style” is really just a form of “critical wish fulfillment” – we wish that a great artist would depart from this mortal coil on a high-note of artistic creativity, but often we are merely imagining in the artwork something that we wish to find there.
Notwithstanding these cavils, it’s worth considering Perfect Days in light of the idea of the “late work.” Certainly, the movie is radically simplified, eschews any sort of conventional narrative, and presents a detached, almost indifferent perspective on a man’s life. Further, the film is self-indulgent in this respect: Wenders use of music and imagery represents an anthology of other artworks that have sustained this filmmaker for most of his life. He returns, as it were, to his old favorites. And, further, Wenders’ reprises themes from his earlier movies – there is the concern with skies and light falling from above, imagery central to Wender’s famous films such as Wings of Desire with its looming, forbidding heavens populated by strangely disconsolate and weary angels; the photographs that the hero makes in Perfect Days will remind Wenders’ fans of the Polaroids take by Ripley in the filmmaker’s version of the Highsmith novel, Ripley’s Game – the Wenders’ film is called The American Friend. And, indeed, there are many other echoes of filmmaker’s earlier works, all refracted through the lens of a quiescent and serene tranquilty, a mood that we might imagine to be the product of old age.
2. Toilets
The 2020 Summer Olympics were scheduled for games in Tokyo in August of that year. COVID-19 intervened and the Olympic competition was re-scheduled for August of 2021. At that time, Tokyo was under a state of emergency and the competitions were largely held in venues without spectators; it was said to be a ‘closed door’ Olympics. Although the City was braced for multitudes, except for athletes, no one traveled to the games and Tokyo was largely deserted during the competition.
Shibuya Ward is the center of Tokyo’s financial and corporate enterprises. It is also home to 250,000 people and the two busiest subway and train stations in world, Shibuya and Shinjuku stations. Prosperous, upscale, and very liberal, Shibuya Ward expected hordes of tourists traversing its train and subway stations and enjoying the neighborhood’s parks. (Shibuya is the home of one of the nationally-maintained Imperial gardens in Tokyo and has several other large and impressive greenspaces.) A non-profit corporation called the Tokyo Toilet was formed with the mandate to erect a number of architecturally advanced and high-tech public toilets in the Ward. These facilities were planned for locations near parks and greenspaces to render those amenities more inviting to the public and tourists visiting the City for the Olympics. Beginning in early 2020, the first of the toilets was opened and, in the following years, another 16 restrooms were constructed. (The work was delayed because of COVID and low demand during the period in which the pandemic was virulent.)
Each of the toilets is designed by a world-renowned architect, most of them Japanese. Three Pritzker prize-winning architects were enlisted in the project, the great Tadao Ando (known in this country for the Pulitzer Foundation Museum in St. Louis and the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth), Shigeru Ban, and Kengo Kuma. (The Pritzker Prize is the most prestigious award for excellence in architecture.) Shigeru Ban is known for this innovative work with cardboard, particularly cardboard tubes that he deployed to make emergency housing for the victims of disasters in Rwanda, Nepal, and Turkey among other places. Kengo Kuma was awarded the commission for the design of the Olympic Stadium for the 2020 games.
Proud of their project, the Tokyo Toilet invited Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and several other directors (including Wim Wenders) to come to Shibuya and make films focusing on the public restrooms. (Fast Retail, a marketing firm with respect to the generic Uniqio brand, provided some incentive financing for the project.) Wenders, who had made several movies in Japan, accepted the invitation. At first, it was thought that he would produce a documentary about the amenities. Takuma Takasaki, a well-known Japanese screenwriter, was the liaison for the project. Wenders decided to make a full-length (124 minute) feature film using the toilets as the film’s main setting. Takasaki assisted in the preparation of the screenplay. Nine of the 17 public restrooms are featured in the movie.
In the film,the protagonist, Hirayama, lives in the much grittier Koto City. The address of his apartment is 3 Chome 37 Kamaida, Koto City. Koto City, where about 500,000 people live, is east of the Sumida River. We see Hirayama driving along the river and crossing the bridge into the adjacent, much tonier, Shibuya Ward each morning.
3. Wenders
Wenders had worked in Japan in the late eighties, directing two documentaries there – Tokyo-Ga (1985) about Wenders’ hero the filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu and A Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989). In some respects, Perfect Days is a homage to Ozu; two of Ozu’s everyman heroes are named Hirayama. Perfect Days, a film that won every possible award, is widely regarded as a return to form for Wenders, an autumnal masterpiece from a director who has been written off as a failure several times in his life.
It’s hard for me to write objectively about Wenders because his movies are entangled with my youth. I associate Wenders’ pictures with my aspirations as to becoming a writer, my early and continuing love for the cinema, and, more prosaically, with women that I knew when I was in college and a young man. It’s hard for me to reflect on his career without becoming sentimental and misty-eyed.
Wenders was born in the ruins of Dusseldorf in 1945. He was raised in an upper class, conventionally Catholic household in that city; his father was a surgeon. His early career follows a traditional trajectory: first, to please his father, he studied to become a doctor. This wasn’t to his liking and, so, he rebelled by changing his college major to philosophy. This also turned-out to be an unsuccessful pursuit – Wenders dropped out of school and went to Paris to live as a starving artist. He failed at this endeavor as well when he was not accepted as a student at one of the art schools in Paris. For a few months, he supported himself by working as an apprentice engraver; he is said to have gone to the movies obsessively, seeing as many as five pictures a day – which begs the question as to how hard he was working as a graphic artist. Wenders returned to Germany, went to film school, and began writing idiosyncratic film reviews for a number of publications, including Der Spiegel, Germany’s premiere weekly news magazine. (I’ve read some of Wenders’ reviews and they imitate writing by Godard and Truffaut during their Lehrjahre in Cahiers du Cinema; Wenders has always been a fan of pop music and some of his reviews are more about records to which he was listening at the time than the films under consideration; he was an admirer of Buffalo Springfield (Stephen Stills and Neil Young among others) and other bands of that sort including Sonny and Cher.)
Wenders made some short films while attending college and directed his first feature Summer in the City in 1970. (Wenders sometimes does commentary tracks on films by other directors, notably pictures by the fearsome Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Wenders ruefully noted on one of these commentaries that while he was studying film in school, “Rainer Werner was out making ten movies.”) Wenders formed an alliance with an avant-garde writer, Peter Handke. (Handke, who is little known in this country, was a darling of the German art-scene, beginning his career as the author theater works, the most of famous of which is Publikumsbeschimfung – that is, “Bitching at the Audience”, a work in which he denounced people attending the show as unregenerate Nazis. Handke wrote a number of novels, some of which were bestsellers in Germany, including the memoir about his mother, Wunschlose Unglueck, published in English to some acclaim as A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. Handke, who is still alive was “canceled,” as it were, when he supported the Serbs in the Bosnian War and wrote several huge books to express that political position.) With Handke as scriptwriter, Wenders made his break-through movie, an avant-garde picture called The Goalkeepers Fear at the Penalty (1972). Later, Handke collaborated with Wenders on the script for his most famous and renowned movie, Himmel Ueber Berlin (released in 1987 in English as Wings of Desire), a picture that also won many awards and was regarded as a masterpiece when it was released.
Wenders is a highly uneven filmmaker. He is not always reliably good or, even, coherent in some of his pictures. After his internationally successful first picture with Handke, The Goalkeeper’s Fear at the Penalty, he made a catastrophic adaptation of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. This was followed by a trilogy of movies, called Wender’s “road pictures” – in each of these films, the protagonists travel by car from place to place. These films are highly poetic, evocative, and unresolved: the trilogy movies are Alice in the Cities (a newly divorced father takes his young daughter on a trip across Germany), Wrong Moves, an modern adaptation of some scenes from Goethe’s Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprentice Years (by this point, Wenders was working with established stars – Natassia Kinski appears in this film), and Im Lauf der Zeit (released in English as Kings of the Road), another fully accomplished picture that I regard as a masterpiece – the movie is about a man who repairs film projectors in decaying rural movie theaters on the bleak border with East Germany; the picture looks like it was filmed in North Dakota, runs for about three hours, and is both very challenging and rewarding – it’s a buddy movie that imitates Howard Hawks’ Red River, a kind of Deutsch companion piece to Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.) The road movies were made between 1974 and 1976. Wender’s production company is named after these films, Road Movies GmbH.
In 1977, Wenders’ released the brilliant film noir The American Friend with Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper, a spectacularly photographed technicolor crime film. This picture is probably Wenders’ most famous work and it is splendid in all respects. (The film is an eccentric adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel Ripley’s Game, shot in Paris, Hamburg, and New York City.) While working with the Danish cameraman Robbie Mueller in New York, Wenders met the dying Nick Ray and made a very moving documentary about the American filmmaker called Lightning over Water; Ray is credited as co-director on the film – he died before it was released. On the strength of The American Friend, Francis Coppola recruited Wenders to make a big-budget Hollwood crime film; Wenders couldn’t work successfully in Hollywood and the project was vexed by cost overruns and delays. When the picture Hammett (about the crime writer Dashiell Hammet) was released, the critics savaged the movie and it is, indeed, unwatchable – bad in the unique way that Europan directors go wrong when seduced by Hollywood budgets, cocaine, and sex (Wenders’ souvenir of his time in LA was a disastrous marriage to the country-western singer and actress, Ronee Blakelee.) Licking his wounds, Wenders returned to Germany where he made one of the very best movies ever produced about film-making, The State of Things, an eerie picture set on a stalled-out film location in Portugal where a half-crazed director and his actors are making a low-budget sci-fi film – the movie features Roger Corman in a fantastic appearance as a producer who has borrowed money from the mob to make the movie and is on the lam in a big Winnebago parked in fast food lot. Wenders returned to America to make Paris, Texas with Harry Dean Stanton and Natassi Kinski, another highly regarded picture based on a screenplay by Sam Shepard. Back in Germany and, then, living in Berlin, Wenders directed his magnum opus Wings of Desire, another movie that won all possible awards and was a big box-office success.
Again Hollywood summoned Wenders and he went to work on a hugely ambitious science fiction film, improbably made in Australia’s outback, Until the End of the World. The movie spiraled out of control and the financiers took the picture away from Wenders. The picture was released in a disastrously truncated version in 1991 and was an incoherent mess. Wenders was written-off as not bankable and a has-been. (Criterion released the movie in Wender’s cut a few years ago and the movie is actually very good – but long and meandering.) Wenders made a reboot of Wings of Desire using original cast members (and Mikhail Gorbachev), Faraway so Close – the ‘87 Wings of Desire was shot in Berlin divided between East and West; Faraway so Close revisits the city after German reunification (courtesy of Gorbachev) – the movie lacks urgency and, although interesting, is unsuccessful.
With the critical failure of Faraway so Close, Wenders entered the wilderness. His next nine feature films, made between 1994 and 2017 are all regarded as failures of one sort or another, some of them, indeed, said to be embarrassingly bad. (I have seen only two of these pictures: 1994's Lisbon Story which is a bleak picture heavily influenced by Michelangelo Antonio who was, then, making his last film in Portugal but recognizable as a Wenders’ project and 2005's Don’t Come Knocking, a country-western picture featuring Sam Shepard that I didn’t think half-bad, although, of course, I’m not really objective on this subject.) During this period, Wenders’ however wasn’t forgotten nor was he universally derided – this is because he had reinvented himself as a director of prestige documentaries. The first of these films was the very successful Buena Vista Social Club (1991) about Cuban singers and featuring the picturesquely decomposing city of Havana. (The Grammy award-winning album of songs from the movie was a best-seller among the Barnes and Noble/Borders Books crowd.) He worked for PBS on The Soul of a Man, a Scorsese-produced documentary about traditional southern Blues. In 2011, Wenders’ released a documentary in three dimensional format (the Germans love technology; Herzog made a 3D movie as well – to the horror of Roger Ebert who spent several columns denouncing the process) – this was Pina about the German modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch. Wenders followed this documentary with a film about the photographer Sebastian Salgado (Salt of the Earth) and a excellent movie about the artist Anselm Kiefer, Anselm (2023) – these documentaries are beautifully shot and display the works of the artist under consideration in loving detail; there are no interviews nor any talking heads to explain what we are seeing. So, at the time that Wenders had been characterized as a complete failure with respect to fiction feature films, he had become highly acclaimed as a director of documentary features.
Wenders lives in Berlin. He has been married frequently and unhappily. Around 1987, he announced that he had returned to Christianity and had become a “believer” once more. (For a time, he was an editor of a magazine about religious subjects to which my mother subscribed.) He recently directed a documentary about Pope Francis (Pope Francis, a Man of his Word) that is also highly regarded by those who have seen it.
Wenders has been left for dead, mostly after forays into Hollywood, at least three times – he was thought defunct after Hammett in 1982, again declared dead a decade later after Until the End of the World and, then, directed nine feature-film flops in a row before winning the whole sweepstakes in 2023 with Perfect Days.
4. Komorebi
Komorebi is a Japanese word that has no precise equivalent in English. A title at the end of Wenders’ Perfect Days explains the word: the term means the effect of light shining through leaves, that is, the experience of dappled sunlight and shadow on a forest path. Light and shadow are central images in Perfect Days and, in a sense, the movie is an exercise in komorebi. This is literally true in that film projects light onto a screen producing a dappled moving image that we interpret as a picture of reality although, of course, it is merely an optical illusion. Recall that Wenders studied philosophy in college and that the Platonic notion that what we see as reality is, in fact, the projection of shadows on the wall of a cave in which we are confined. Wenders imagines our cave to be a kind of movie theater with images thrown ahead of us on a screen that both illumines and obstructs. As Perfect Days shows, our relationships with others are often a form of “shadow tag” – we touch the person’s shadow cast on the ground, but not the person him- or herself. Thus, the photographs that Hirayami takes of sun penetrating a canopy of leaves are a trope for the cinema itself. Wenders films frequently pause to show simulacra for cinema. The American Friend contains an inventory of pre-cinematic devices that simulate motion through our eyes’ persistence of vision – the same optical effect that causes us to see still photographic frames as moving pictures. (In the film, the protagonist plays with variants on the phenikistiscope, zoetrope devices, the mutoscope and other examples of stroboscopic animation of images including flip cards. Im Lauf der Zeit (“Kings of the Road”), the film that is central to an understanding of Wenders’ work, is about a man who repairs movie projectors and features scenes of distressed film burning, melting, so, drawing attention to the material aspects of light and celluloid from which motion pictures are constructed. For Wenders, accordingly, komorebi is an analog to film and movie-making.
Komorebi is a relatively common word in Japanese. The is a pop group bearing this name and several hit songs that express the concept. Japanese poetry is replete with references to komorebi. The word is spelled in joyo kanji (standard Japanese characters) as ko (tree), more (to leak out or filter through) and bi (day or sun). There is another spelling of the word using archaic kanji that are more beautiful in terms of their calligraphy, but which means the same thing. The archaic form often appears in Haiku.
5. The Dalai Lama
What did the Dalai Lama say was the essence of enlightenment? Routine.
6. The Essence of Wenders
A German critic described the essence of Wenders’ films with these words: “Children are strange. Women are strange. Let’s put another song on the jukebox.”
7. Koji Yakusho
Koji Yakusho, the actor who plays Hirayama, appears in just about every shot in Perfect Days. His charisma and performance carries the movie. Of course, the film expresses a paradox: Yakusho is a famous Japanese movie star, renowned for his handsome features – sometimes, he looks a bit like Clark Gable in Wenders’ picture – and, so, it is unusual to see him in the humble role of a toilet janitor to whom nothing really happens. Yakusho won the Best Actor award in Cannes for his performance in Perfect Days. (The film also won the Ecumenical Award for the film that best expresses spiritual or religious meanings.)
Yakusho was born in Nagasaki prefecture in 1956. His career in Japanese cinema has spanned 48 years and he has made more than a hundred movies – he tends to appear in about three pictures per year. Yakusho has also done extensive voice-over work for animated features and appears frequently on TV, most notably in 2022's The Days, a Netflix series about the Fukushima tsunami and nuclear power plant crisis. Yakusho’s work includes two noteworthy films with the great director, Shohei Imamura (The Eel and Warm water under a Red Bridge, both erotic films -- the latter is about female ejaculation). He has made a number of well-received horror pictures with Kiyoshi Kurosawa and starred in Kon Ichikawa’s 74th feature film, Dora-Heita. Yakusho’s international “break-out” picture was Shall we Dance? a romantic musical comedy that initiated a ballroom dancing craze in Japan when it was released in 1996.
Yakusho is a “method” actor and has said that he found Wenders’ directing style problematic. Wenders steadfastly refused to give Yakusho any backstory as to the character of Hirayama. After many discussions on the subject, Wenders relented and gave Hirayama some cues as to how the character had come to work a a toilet cleaner. Yakusho spent two days working for The Tokyo Toilet himself, actually cleaning restrooms. He says that a representative of the janitorial staff employed by The Tokyo Toilet was on-set throughout the production of the movie to provide technical assistance, Perhaps disingenuously, Japan’s leading matinee idol indicated that he wouldn’t mind working as a janitor in the Shibuya Ward toilets. He observes it is useful work: if public toilets are kept as clean as possible, those using them would be inspired to also keep them neat and tidy. Yakusho says that he rehearsed for the final scene in which we watch his features alternate between happiness and sorrow by locking himself in one of the toilets and watching himself in the mirror. Yakusho says that he gave his best performance alone in the restroom and that what we see on screen is not as convincing as the rehearsed iteration of the scene.
8. A Plot convention
Many films show us a character locked into a routine, isolated, and an alienated loner to whom nothing ever happens – one day is like another: “next is next, now is now.” Sometimes, the hero is a cowboy, used to riding the range alone, or a professional assassin whose lethal routines are disrupted by romance or some other sort of adventure. A washed-up, alcoholic country-singer who has resigned himself to loneliness will encounter a kind woman (Robert Duval in Tender Mercies) or a professional thief will violate his own roles forbidding engagement with others with disastrous effects (James Caan in Thief.) This plot contemplates that its hero is trapped in day-to-day routine that is estranged from others and solitary. But, then, something happens to change things and the plot shows us the consequence of this change.
This is the narrative structure that Wenders’ implies in Perfect Days. We are shown Hirayama’s daily (and weekly) routine in lavish detail. So we expect some event or person to intervene in the hero’s solitude and trigger an adventure. (Wenders has used this structure earlier in his career in The American Friend, a film in which we see an ordinary man – played by Bruno Ganz – who is happy with his wife and child and his daily rituals as a picture-framer, but, then, becomes entangled with a gang of professional criminals and pornographers who force his participation in their schemes.) Perfect Days audaciously defeats our plot expectations. Although Hirayama has several small adventures, none of them are decisive. He is not changed, nor is his life altered at the end of the picture. The hero is condemned (or better put: resigned) to his work and his routine. Perhaps, this explains his moments of sorrow in the final scene as well as the expression of happiness that suffuses his face. Hirayama’s job is as earth-bound as it is possible to imagine – unlike the angels in Wings of Desire and its sequel, Hirayama can’t fly. He has his nose to the ground. But like those winged beings, he greets each day with an ecstatic glance into the heavens over Tokyo.
9. Public urination
People venturing into the New York City subway system will often complain that the tunnels smell of urine. They blame homeless people and junkies for pissing on the walls in the subway. But this is perverse and misguided. If you don’t like the smell of urine impregnating walls and floors, you should provide people with reasonably clean and safe public toilets. The reason that people urinate on the walls and floors is not because they are depraved or poor or drug-addicted; rather, it’s because the City has failed them by not providing decent restrooms at regular intervals in the subway system. Human beings are animals that have to piss and shit. Therefore, it’s inhumane to construct elaborate transportation systems without equipping them with proper toilets. Roman cities were famous for their clean and convivial public latrines near the gates entering into the urban space. It seems that our level of civilization has declined. Our cities have worse toilets than Ephesus or Rome two-thousand years ago.
10.
Virginia Larson and Kim Lockhart
For a couple years, my friend Kim Lockhart was employed as a adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota. At that time, he co-taught a course in film and had access to 16 millimeter prints of critically renowned movies. Lockhart admired Wenders’ movies and, one Summer night, he drove down to Austin with a projector and seven or eight reels of celluloid, round cans of film labeled Im Lauf der Zeit, that is, Wenders’ ultimate road movie about the projector repairman working remote and desolate towns on the eastern borders of the Federal Republic of Germany. (The movie’s story begins, after some introductory scenes establishing the hero’s work in empty, decaying picture-show houses, with something out of the ordinary, a plot point that triggers an adventure: another solitary man attempts suicide by driving his Volkswagen Beetle into a big, slow-moving river. VW Beetles were famously air-tight and the car doesn’t sink, but just floats down the Elbe. The hero fishes the suicidal man out of the river and, together, they embark on a pilgrimage from movie theater to movie theater. At the border with East Germany, they hear a sentry listening to American rock-and-roll on the radio: “The Yanks,” the hero says, “have colonized our subconscious.” Of course, the two men meet some women but they are strange and there’s always an opportunity to “put another song on the jukebox.”) Kim was a little disoriented by cocaine that he had inhaled and, after the first reel, as a homage to the film we were projecting on a sheet at my house, he scrambled the reels and showed half of the rest of the picture out-of-order. The drugs had diminished Kim’s attention span and the Wenders’ film is very slow-moving and discursive and, so, I don’t think that he was capable of sitting through the long and rather challenging picture. There were probably about 15 people in attendance at this screening and, of course, when Kim changed the order of the reels by random selection, whatever interest that anyone had in this film (and it was pretty limited) evaporated – there isn’t much of a plot in Im Lauf der Zeit but it was disorienting to see the movie without any continuity at all. People began drinking heavily and pretty soon, there was no one watching the images flickering on the sheet but me – and I was only paying a little attention.
Virginia Larson, who taught German at the College, had come to the screening. She was there primarily on the basis of her knowledge of the German language. She was amused by some of the complicated sentences spoken by characters in the film. She noted that one of speeches in the film ended with a string of three verbs, including one of them in the subjunctive tense. Prof. Larson remarked that this sort of sentence structure was quite remarkable.
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