Alice in the Cities

Sometimes when people ask me what my favorite film is I say Alice in the Cities, which is a film that Wim Wenders made in 1973, shooting footage all over the US and then also, notoriously, at least to me, in the city of Wuppertal, Germany, which is sometimes described as being located in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region. That’s important to me because the greater Ruhr valley is the part of Germany that often reminds me of the Rust Belt regions of the US, including the area of southern Michigan and, importantly, at least to me, of Detroit, which happens to be the city in which I currently live and have lived for the last ten years. The idea that some of the oblivion of post-industrial America is related, in a felt, emotional and visual sense of the term, to regions of northernish Europe and especially Belgium, northern Germany, everywhere around there, this is an idea, or let’s say an ongoing experience for me and my own travels and encounterings of the world, this idea is one that keeps nagging at me or, I don’t know how to say it exactly, but I suppose “haunting” feels like the best word. This connection haunts me.

It should also be mentioned that in the city of Wuppertal can be found a thing called the Schwebebahn. It is hard to say Schwebebahn at first but once you get used to it, and, by the way, to say it properly you have to start out with a hard ‘shhh’ sound the way Germans do it and the ‘w’ pronounced as an English ‘v’, but once you get used to it, it’s quite a fun word to say and you’ll probably go around saying Schwebebahn a lot from now on. The Schwebebahnfeatures nicely in a few of the scenes of Alice in the Cities and you’ll never forget it once you’ve seen it. Of course, I haven’t even said what a Schwebebahn is. It’s a train, basically. But not just a train. It is a suspended train, meaning that the track is above the train cars and the trains cars hang suspended from the track that is above them. It looks amazing, somehow, though it is hard to describe just why it is so amazing. Maybe the Schwebebahn, there, I said it again, but maybe the Schwebebahn is so fascinating because it seems like something from the vision of a future that never actually happened.

Another great thing about the word Schwebebahn is that it is a compound sort of word, German being a language that especially loves compounding words, and the best part of this compound word is the verb schweben, which means something like hover or float or even levitate. So the Schwebebahn is a floating train or a hovering train or a levitating train.

Actually the whole movie, the entirety of Alice in the Cities could be described as a sustained act of hovering. In the very first scene of the movie the German journalist Philip Winter, played extremely excellently by Rüdiger Vogler, is sitting under a boardwalk, and yes, he sings the song a bit as he does so, and looking out at the sea. The scene is set in Surf City, North Carolina though was actually shot I think in Coney Island or along one of those boardwalks in southern Brooklyn if I remember correctly, and Philip is sitting there looking out rather listlessly at the scene in front of him and then he takes out a Polaroid camera and snaps a shot of the scene he’s just been looking at and glances at the Polaroid, once it has developed, and back out at the scene again. What is he looking for with such a mix of longing and ennui? We don’t know. But also we do know.

The funny thing of course is that while Philip Winters is looking at the world around him in its hazy diffuseness and trying to grasp on to something, anything, that will click for him, if we can put it that way, we, the viewers, are caught between all the forms of representation going on here. What I mean is that we, the viewers, have got the problem even worse than Philip has got it because we are watching him watching and we are gazing at the projection of an image that has been captured on 16mm film of a person, who is in fact an actor and pretending to be a person that he is actually not, and he is being presented to us as looking out at the sea and also looking at the Polaroid, the instant visual capturing of this very same moment that we are now viewing through various levels of mediation and you might even say obfuscation. How is any reality going to come of this?

Which makes me think of another thing I think about more than infrequently and that is the writings of Friedrich Schlegel, whose name has that very same ‘Sch’ thing going on as you find in Schwebebahn, by the way. Schlegel liked to write fragments, that was a thing he was known for doing and in one of these fragments he wrote, thinking about poetry in specific but I think this point could be made of many forms of art and also of a certain kind of cinema although Schlegel himself would have disagreed, but I think Schlegel’s thoughts apply to the kind of cinema that Wim Wenders practiced in the 1970s and still practices today, with varying levels of success, and this kind of artmaking is described by Friedrich Schlegel thusly: “Und doch kann auch sie am meisten zwischen dem Dargestellten und dem Darstellenden, frey von allem realen und idealen Interesse auf den Flügeln der poetischen Reflexion in der Mitte schweben…” which I am going to render somewhat loosely as “And yet it can, more than any other form, hover between what is represented and the act of representing, free from all real and ideal interest, on the wings of poetic reflection, suspended in the middle…” Schweben.

And what Schlegel would probably also say is that this hovering and this betweenness is not less connected to reality, whatever exactly that is, but more so, and that, in short, reality is like that, has the quality of this hovering as its very character and so when Philip is under the boardwalk in his state of extreme hovering he is not actually detached and forlorn but is deeply connected to real life and to his own life and the only real problem, if there was ever one at all, is that he doesn’t realize this until he is forced to spend some time with a little girl who allows him to see and experience what was already there to see and experience all along, this hovering, this tantalizing presence, this zwischen und schweben that is our earthly sojourn and daily Schwebebahn.

Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review and is a contributor at The New Yorker. He won the Whiting Award for non-fiction in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. A book of Morgan’s selected essays can be found here. His books from Slant are The Drunken Silenus. The Fate of The Animals, and The Grand Valley He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com.