Recommended Reading: Wim Wenders’ The Act of Seeing
The MAG 12/22
REVIEW by Cristina Morozzi
Wim Wenders encourages us to rediscover curiosity, fueled by childlike amazement, and suggests looking without making judgments.
Wim Wenders’ The Act of Seeing, published in Italian by Meltemi (Milan) in 2022, is many stories all together: on the one hand, it is a biography and a history of his activity as a filmmaker, with the moving and nostalgic memory of Berlin immediately after the fall of the wall; and on the other, a theoretical essay on seeing, an activity that is learned and perfected, nourished by curiosity for knowledge in its many facets and by knowing how to dwell on images without the frenzy of accumulation. The Act of Seeing is a manual and guide with a philosophical bent, written by a filmmaker who has built his business on “seeing” and who invites us to learn how to tell stories about people, cities, desert landscapes and objects.
Wim Wenders encourages us to rediscover curiosity, fueled by childlike amazement, and suggests looking without making judgments, “because an image, unlike a thought, imposes no opinions about things (...)”. Because he argues that in an image, a potential truth remains latent, while behind stories there are lies.
These are 270 pages that deserve to be read with care, because they could even be defined as therapeutic. Learning to see means making sense of life, even monotonous life. Looking inspires our thinking and feeds our memory, soliciting emotions and sharing.
