Buena Vista Social Club
Director Wim Wenders
"When you see them, you realize that you cannot even make any separation between their lives and music," German director Wim Wenders says of the Cuban musicians in his documentary, Buena Vista Social Club (1999), "it's just all one and the same. For them it's not art, it's just their way of living."
"I would almost say the same for myself," he continues via telephone as he edits his new film, The Million Dollar Hotel. "Filmmaking for me also is not an art, it's my way of living, and everything I do is related to it. For them, too, music is in their blood and they would continue playing after each recording. There was just no stopping them. For them it's just like breathing."
Like many fans of the 1997 album Buena Vista Music Club — which features the lilting sounds of Cuban son performed by veteran musicians including Compay Segundo, Rubén González, Ibrahim Ferrer, Eliades Ochoa, Omara Portuondo, and Orlando 'Cachaíto' López — Wenders was immediately entranced.
"From the first moment," he enthuses, "I heard that music, I loved it. I do listen to a lot of Latin American music, especially tango. I must say, the Buena Vista Social Club album is really very, very special. It is like no other Latin music I know. So if I heard it without being connected to it, I would fall in love with it just as well."
But in fact, Wenders did have a connection to this musical collective,
through the album's producer, Ry Cooder. The filmmaker and musician have
been friends for twenty years — "it's a brotherly corporation" is
how Wenders describes the relationship — but had only collaborated
on two films before teaming up to make Buena Vista Music Club.
Cooder supplied the haunting score to Wenders' elegaic Paris,
Texas (1984), but they didn't work together again until The
End of Violence (1997).
"Because that was such a good experience for both of us," Wenders says
their first film, "we stayed very good friends but refrained from working
with each other for a while. It was such a perfect experience that one can only
be afraid to ever do that again."
But their third collaboration is equally charmed. What Cooder did for Wenders in Paris, Texas (perfectly complementing his lyrical imagery with music), Wenders does for Cooder in Buena Vista Social Club. The film documents Ry's return to Cuba with his son, percussionist Joachim Cooder, to record Ibrahim Ferrer's solo album, and Wenders immersed himself in the musical landscape.
In fact, music has always been an integral part of Wim Wenders's films (Wings of Desire, The American Friend, Until the End of the World, The State of Things), and Million Dollar Hotel [released in 2000], finds him immersed in another collaboration with a musician: U2's Bono, who conceived the film's storyline and is contributing new music to the soundtrack.
Wenders views a film's score as an integral "part of the entire filmmaking process, and the most fun one." He usually has "a ballpark idea" of the music while shooting, "but I don't really actively start thinking about it until I have my first cut, and then I'm very involved. That's my favorite part of it, the moment when you can actually sit down and work with the composer or the songwriters of the groups. The greatest moment of all is when you actually get that music for the first time and you see it together with your images. For me, that's the greatest part of the process."
Because the music for Buena Vista Social Club already existed and was, in fact, the raison d'etre for the film, Wim Wenders worked very differently. "In that case," he says, "music is much more like your tour guide or your screenplay. Buena Vista Social Club was the first time that I was actually shooting concert footage or the recording studio. I'd never done that before. It was a great pleasure to film music and not have the music added afterwards. It was wonderful."
Using a very small crew (a cinematographer and sound engineer), he shot on high resolution video, whose equipment offered flexibility and the option to be spontaneous. To capture a particular moment, Wenders often picked up a second camera himself. "One of the tasks of the film," he explains, "was to have the film language try to get the flow of the music, and we tried with the Steadicam to catch the spirit of the music already in the camera movement."
This feeling of motion continued into the editing (where images flow effortlessly from a Cuban studio or street to an Amsterdam or New York stage). Wim Wenders was only in Cuba for three weeks, with brief sojourns abroad for the concert dates, but he returned home with 80 hours of footage. Nine months later, he had the final cut of the 106 minute documentary. (The trip was also documented in Buena Vista Music Club: A Companion Book to the Film, a collaboration between Wim and his wife, photographer Donata Wenders.)
Even though making Buena Vista Social Club offered new experiences, this was not Wenders's first non-fiction film. He's explored two prominent figures in Japanese culture: the late filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu (whose meditative style greatly influenced Wenders) in Tokyo-Ga (1985); and fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, a longtime friend, in Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989).
"I myself do not call them documentaries," explains Wenders, "I call them diaries, because they're very subjective, more like taking notes and very personal experiences. These films are very different because you sort of have to make up the subject, you have to invent it."
"In the course of Buena Vista Social Club," he continues, "the music was guiding me to make the film, so there was much more at hand already. In both of the two other films, you hear my voice narrating and in one of them, I even appear myself. I really wanted to refrain from that [here] so that the music would just speak for itself."
With Buena Vista Social Club, Wim Wenders wanted to straightforwardly depict contemporary Cuban life without the usual discussions of politics or sanctions. "It's become sort of a forgotten place," he says, "as if it didn't exist. I hope the film will contribute a little bit to creating awareness of it again. That is one of the reasons why we really tried to refrain from making a political film as such. I thought just showing Cuba as it is was a political statement in itself."
In one telling sequence, the camera glides up the magnificent staircase of a former casino and finds 80-year-old Rubén Gonzalez playing an upright piano in a corner of an exquisite column-filled room. Slowly, it's revealed that this once lavish space has been put to utilitarian use, as a practice area for young gymnasts.
"They're awfully isolated since they lost all their former trading partners [like the USSR and East Germany]," explains Wenders,"and yes, there was a feeling of abandonment. On the other hand, in the whole time I was there, there was never a feeling of anything like a reproachfulness. People were amazingly, genuinely, optimistic and in good spirits in spite of everything. They have every reason in the world to be discontent or hopeless, but they never were."
The success of the Buena Vista Social Club musicians (the title refers to a long-gone musical haven in Havana) abroad has helped spark a renewed interest in Cuban culture, and has made them heroic figures back home. "They've got a nickname in Cuba now," Wim Wenders says, "they're called the 'super-grandfathers,' and it's a very tender name. 'Grandfather' is already a respectful name, and 'the super-grandfathers,' they are like Superman."
© 1999, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.