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1913issue6online

80 and then from the mirrored ceiling; the poster advertising an upcoming visit from the Dalai Lama as a moped zooms by on a nearby street; the woman who can›t keep her eyes off of the young, interracial couple on the Paris metro. But too, there is his young, white wife, smiling to her mother while she holds the brown baby on her hip as they wait for the train to Rome. I›ve seen so much of my childhood through the veneer of muted tones, heaviest in dust- yellow and cyan. I know just how to replicate this balance of color in Photoshop, and often find myself on the computer, fixing the pictures I take to match the faded quality of my father›s videos. Once he overlaid a track of horribly cheesy R&B onto footage of patrons at the Picasso museum in Paris. Men and women wearing shoulder pads and permedhairweaveamongsteachotherorstandincontemplation of the self portraits and cubist bulls while a deep voiced singer sings and the electronic imitation of a bubble bursting plays over the ambient sound. My father›s home videos make the past into an easily re-entered moment. Because there isn›t much plot, the scenes are like landscapes that can be walked into and inhabited. You can join the woman at the cafe bar, sit in front of a wall-sized Picasso or stay on the train watching the couple, because this is where they live. Wim Wenders captures that quality of time. His orientation toward quiet, subtle moments create a space for the viewer to enter into the scene more than is often the case for most feature films. In an interview for DoubleTake Magazine he says, «My first films were basically landscape paintings, except that they were shot with a movie camera. I never moved the frame.» His first long film was about a man who gets out of prison: «nothing much happens except that he listens to a lot of music and drives around the city, so content to be at liberty again.» So it is that we come to feel so much for his characters. We›ve sat with them for so long as they exist before the camera that we forget that time, location or a screen separates us from one another. Or, we become them. In the film Paris, Texas, Wenders shows the story of a man who comes out of the desert with a plastic gallon jug of water in his hand. He has been missing for four years, and when his brother finds him, he drives him home to Los Angeles. The man who stumbled out of the desert hardly remembers his past. He sits in the living room of his brother’s home as his tow-headed

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