SCMS, Seattle, 19.03.2014. Panel: Word – Image: Ekphrasis, Dialogue, Criticism. The Film in Words: Ekphrasis and Script in Peter Handke and Wim Wenders Although Ekphrasis is constantly present in the debates about the relationship between visual arts and literature, the reflections it awakens are only occasionally part of cinema research (SAGER 2008). In conceptual terms, it is typical to summarize Ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (HEFFERNAN 1993: 03). In other words, it begins with an image that it later reconstructs with verbal descriptions. In this presebtation Ekphrasis will be used to explore the intermedia relationships between theater, literature, and cinema as found in Wings of Desire and its script, a product of the partnership between Wim Wenders and Peter Handke. I will highlight four different moments and aspects. The first one is the concept of Enaergeia, that is intimately related with Ekphrasis and Greek-Roman rhetoric skills. The second is a possible approach between Script-writing and Ekphrasis phenomenon and concept. The third moment is the search of Ekphrasis in Handke's literature. Finally I will try to find out some Ekphrasis evidence in the first draft of Wings of Desire's script and compare it with its film, which was screened in 1986. I. Enargeia Ekphrases lead us to a dynamic and complex play between presence and absence. There is concrete materiality that accesses the imagination of the audience, the readers, and the spectators through media. They are transitions between replacing a now absent material presence, and its fictional trans-creation. Greco-Roman rhetoric clearly shows the unique manner in which the orators used Ekphrasis to convince their listeners. In a detailed study, Ruth Webber shows that Ekphrasis was a required skill for the art of persuasion and for establishing a good relationship between the orators and their audience. Traditionally, descriptions were used for historical scenarios, wars, detailing a murder case before a court of law, or for presenting landscape to diplomatic guests (WEBB 2009). Ekphrasis was emphasized as a skill that enabled the audience to visualize scenes, places, occasions, and historical events. It was a strategy for constructing speeches that would suggest, establish, and awaken images “before the very eyes” of the audience. Enargeia, the quality that makes an ekphrasis an ekphrasis and distinguishes it from a plain report of the facts, is thus a paradoxical phenomenon. It is able to arouse emotions through immaterial semblances of scenes that are not present to the listener and may never taken place (...). For what lies behind vivid speech is the gallery of mental images impressed by sensations in the speaker’s mind. (WEBB 2009:107-114). II. Script and Ekphrasis. In his media genealogy, Friedrich Kitler intentionally emphasized the essential role of the typewriter. Along with the gramophone and film, the typewriter preceded a new approach to writing habits that influenced society as a whole. Scriptwriting would become one of the pinnacles of the three media configurations that Kitler addressed. Especially after 1928 and the advent of sound in cinema, scripts became one of the possible material, institutional, and stylistic syntheses that defined the media era. A script is something hybrid: one half is still a text of a drama to be staged, and as such, a descendant of Sophocles, the other half is already programming apparatus and, as such, ancestor of programs calculated automatically by artificial intelligence. ( ... ) . The challenge for the writer is to keep the balance between writing that is iconoclastic , and writing designed for images. However, the scriptwriter is a traitor , it succumbs to the magic of the image. (...) Therefore, the scripts are a double mistake : they pretend to be texts, when in fact they are imaging programs " ( FLUSSER 2011 : 206-210 ) . The intention here is to show how the script incorporates the Ekphrasis debate in Flusser’s reading. The script is not merely attached to paper. It situates its aesthetic fabulations between the page and the screen. There is more than one materiality shift in the transition from paper to screen. On one hand, Ekphrasis reveals the aspect of transition from word to image and sounds on the screen. On the other hand, the script is the archive and the dramatic-visual mirror of a cinematography event. Therefore, to think of Ekphrasis by means of the script allows an understanding of historical and dramaturgical concepts in terms of reaching the enjoyment standards of the spectator. III. Ekphrasis in Handke's literature and theater. In Peter Handke and Wim Wenders, the issues of locations and borders are not only linked to displacements in space but also to friction between distinct languages and poetic traditions. These barriers are always transposed by poetic gestures laden with Ekphrasis. It is the radio play entitled Hörspiel Nr.2 that calls the most attention for my argument. The dramaturgy takes place in the streets of Berlin, where taxi drivers form a group of actors meandering through the city. Using the perspectives of the taxi drivers and the sounds they encountered, Hörspiel Nr.2 suggests images that take the listeners to Berlin’s urban reality of the 1960s and therefore, transforms the listener into a spectator, as if in an Enargeia. The images are fast, of metropolitan flanerie between the car, the driver, the passengers, the street, and the passersby, capturing the movement of people, moments, and feelings that reverberate between the metropolis and its inhabitants. As I will highlight at the last session, the harmony of voices in this radio piece might be very similar to the voices of Wings of desire. In oder words, the Enargeia of Hörspeil N.2 may be present in a cinematographic Enargeia. In 1972 Peter Handke published Die kurze Brief zum langen Abschied (Short Letter, Long Farewell), which narrates the story of a character travelling through the United States. At the time, Handke was influenced by the pictorial atmosphere of Edward Hooper (ESLAESSER 1986) that depicted isolated individuals in the midst of lights and aesthetic experiences in American cities. Handke created a coming-of-age story where images, photographs, billboards, and radio news surround the main feelings captured by the travelling main character. In line with my argument, it is worth pointing out the passage in the novel where the narrator goes to a cinema to watch Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939). The narrative takes the reader into the movie and beyond it: “Sitting in her covered wagon, their mother had witnissed the fight, but she refused to say which of her sons was the murderer. Some drunks tried to lynch the brothers, but Lincoln stopped them by softly reminding that them of themselves, of what they were, what they could be, and what they had forgotten. This scene – Lincoln on the wooden steps of the jail-house, with his hand on the mob's battering ram – embodied every possibility of human behavior. In the end not only drunks, but also the actors playing the drunks, were listening intently to Lincoln, and when he had finished they dispersed, changed forever. All around me in the theater I felt the audience breathing differently and coming to life again. (HANDKE, 1974, translated by Ralph Manheim, p. 115)”. This passage is clearly a fleeting transitory instant of Ekphrasis in its most classic and traditional sense, where what is being described is not a painting, but a cinematographic scene as if it were a painting. In describing this key instant in Ford’s film, Handke tries to go beyond the scene to the very moment the scene was lived. He describes not only the experience, but also the very feelings of the actors and the relationship between the characters experiencing the scene. It is as if the scene, framed by the cinema itself, or the tableux-vivant of that instant, were frozen by the literary motion of Ekphrasis. Although founded on the classic verbal description of an image, this Ekphrasis highlights a point of view and form of experiencing that is important to the author, the narrator, and the character. In summary, Peter Handke’s dramaturgical and literary works uniquely share inquisitiveness and specific traditions that directly or indirectly deal with the Ekphrasis phenomenon. IV. Wings of desire and the modulations of Ekphrasis. The first treatment of the script for Wings of desire was written without speech, almost without voices or dialogues, as if it were a silent film. It is about building a blick that is not a montage, but a way of seeing that is continuous and establishes a flow of consciousness. Centered mainly on developing stimmung, this first version of Wenders’ script creates exemplary visual, acoustic, and sensorial environments and implements imagetic dramaturgy. The absence of words is revealing as to how the collaboration between Wim Wenders and Peter Handke took place in this film. When we contrast Wenders’ initial script to the final cut we see how it fell to Handke to create speech that suggested images, speech that transmitted internal impressions of the spectators sensorial flow. This speech mosaic served to guide the filming and montage. Handke’s presence is felt in the words of the angels, which make space for the counterpoints of the images composed by Wenders. This affirmation shows not so much a partnership centered around counter-positioning images (by Wenders) and words (by Handke), but more on writing that combines programmatic Ekphrasis that is closer to an Enargeia awakened by oral communication. The combination of these Ekphrasis traditions established constant modulations between speech, archives, and location (such as the city and its sceneries), precisely interwoven by montage. In this sense Der Himmel über Berlin is primarily a film where words dissolve into images, or images that create a sensitive counterpoint using words. The partnership between these two artists subtly joins a tacit Ekphrasis that is well expressed in the angel that writes about his metamorphosis, of before and after becoming human, of before and after becoming an image. The writing gesture is like vestiges of transformation that connect the footprints of the angel when he begins to feel and seek touch. In the film, we see a synthesis of Homer emerge, interpreted by the actor Curt Bois. The character is almost completely mute, yet when he does speak, it is preponderantly voiced over. The lines Handke wrote for the film transform the listener into spectator and the spectator into listener. In other words, this section plays an essential role in modulating Ekphrasis and emphasizes the imagetic power of oral communication. Homer leaves the library to walk down a deserted street along a wall. His steps take him to what is left of Potsdamer Platz after the Russian and American bombardment and occupation. Homer walks through the empty main plaza of what had been Berlin’s downtown since the time of the Weimar Republic, remembering details of the street cars, the horse-drawn carriages, the Wertheim café, the hot chocolate he had there. His narrative brings the historical ruins into the present. It bridges the gap between his lived past and memories, and the current moment. Although updating these memories clearly seeks to revive Enargeia, what Homer does in bringing them before his own eyes and before the eyes of the spectators, is exercise the very essence of Ekphrasis. It is as if the accumulated ruins keep the bygone images alive. It is an attempt to bring back absences, or what was lost in past reality, in a melancholic gesture of pursuit, reunion, and refuge. Handke and Wenders succeeded in fashioning a personal and artistic dialogue permeated by silence and imagetic transcendence; by distance and closeness permeated by language. Therefore, it is not per chance that the story is about two angels, and that the film was neither written nor narrated by one hand alone. Wings of desire elucidates the complexity of the film events it interweaves, where word and image combine to forge writing that does not deny image, and an image that does not shortchange writing. Whether between angels and children, or between the city, Handke, and Wenders, the Ekphrasis found in Wings of Desire is more than the content of a description or of and event. It is a way, a route, and a trajectory – a script written by various hands for the eyes.