Dear Wim Wenders,
The Ecumenical Jury at the Locarno film festival 2005 presents you with a special award, honouring your extraordinary contribution to the art of film. This special award is presented on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the international church film organisation INTERFILM. INTERFILM, in cooperation with the Catholic world organisation for communication SIGNIS, sends the ecumenical juries to Locarno and other festivals. Being the president of the jury, it is my honour to deliver the eulogy and to present you with your award in the form of a certificate and a plaque afterwards.

In the thirties, Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher and critic, who till his death carried with him a picture of an angel – the “Angelus Novus” by Paul Klee – denied films the ability to bring forward the aura of people and things. He even said that the cinema destroys this aura. But contrarily to his assertion, he thus sharpened the senses for the fact that film is able to produce its own, a physically not tangible quality of perception. In the images of old art, it was sometimes shown as a nimbus, a halo, or as wings. Film, being the art of light and time, is no less of an immaterial nature, even if it may be bound to technical equipment, to industry and economy. The hybris of creation and skills has darkened this immaterial core of the art of film over and over again. Your work, dear Wim Wenders, has been tracing this aura of film since its beginnings: first in the examination of images and narrations of the classical, and especially the American film, in connection with music and literature, later more independently and more freely. Thus, angels as they appear in “Wings of Desire” and other films, are no strangers to you. You yourself talked about a special sense for the essence of places that a film-maker needs, a sense that is an equivalent for a relationship to things, to history, to itself and to others, all at the same time. That is why the speciality of your work can be characterised as a spherical art, an art of the perception of spheres – which is nothing else but another attempt to translate  the word “aura”.

This art is not easily had, certainly not in the film industry. It belongs to the process of modernity, the losses of which your films show a precise feeling for: the loss of relationships and trust, of love and of the self. Your film’s characters are again and again shaped by a deep loneliness that often leads to a narcissist loss of the world. Still, your films tell about a search for new, other experiences that can recreate the link to the world and heal the losses – should there be a success even in learning to love again.

The images of your films that prefer the found and the given to the wanted and created, often hold the lead over the stories and the characters. They always know that they represent a seeing that includes the seer him/herself. The images of your films oppose a production of images without subject, this also means: without responsibility. Hardly any other director has thought so profoundly about the responsibilities of image-making, about what images can do to and with us. Your films that often deal with film-making, cinema, seeing and the image machinery – like “The State of Things” – , draw the conclusions from these reflections. They are evidence for an aesthetic as well as a moral sensibility – an artistic sensibility and responsibility that make one think, fill with consternation, confuse, make happy and give comfort. This is where the work of the church film organisations and yours are essentially linked. I am very happy to present you with the Special Award of the Ecumenical Jury. May God’s blessing be with you.

For the Ecumenical Jury at the Locarno Film Festival 2005, called by SIGNIS and INTERFILM,
Karsten Visarius, President of the Jury
Locarno, 6th August 2005

Wim Wenders (l.) and Karsten Visarius at the Award Ceremony