Graf’s primary interest is to describe and elaborate the basic premises of Wenders’ film aesthetic. Although he admits that Wenders’ meditations on the cinema “can sometimes leave an impression of puerile idealism,” Graf generally refrains from staging a full-scale critical interrogation and refutation of Wenders’ premises. No doubt Wenders’ film aesthetic is more of personal moral stance than a substantial theoretical position on the nature of cinema. Wenders’ weighty statements about unmediated visual perception and the redemption of the real can strike the reader as naive, essentialist, and ahistorical, especially at a time when current theory emphasizes the inaccessibility of the real, and the constitutive process and mediating structures of representation. Wenders’ belief that cinematography bears an unimpeachable witness to “things as they are,” and provides an ontological bond between representation and what it represents, invokes a metaphysics of presence that leads to the misrecognition that images can exist somehow in an unmediated, nonmedialized, nonedited form. For Wenders, only film can redeem the real. The temporal and spatial separation of images from the realities they depict— making them reproductions, mere illusions of reality, and spectacle—seems to have little bearing on Wenders’ desire for an unmediated representation of reality. Unlike Farber’s special high tech camera in Until the End of the World (which records not optical images, but the neurological event of seeing), moving film images (even “true ones”) do not automatically imprint on our brains—they are negotiated, mediated by our point of view, our experiences, our memories. Even if we grant that film images have a latent truth-telling potential and can preserve the real world, they are also, as Graf points out, highly fragile and open to abuse. Just like stories, they can be used to manipulate, distort, and tell lies.

7. The author’s primary purpose in the passage is to

A. explain the reasoning behind Graf’s dismissal of Wenders’ film aesthetic
B. suggest that Wenders’ films are childish and manipulative
C. analyze Wenders’ beliefs about the nature of film
D. emphasize the importance of capturing reality in film
E. affirm Wenders’ reputation as a flawed yet groundbreaking modern filmmaker





8. In which of the following does the author discuss the implications of an idea put forward by Graf?

A. The statement that Graf “refrains” from criticizing Wenders’ premises.
B. The description of Wenders’ statements about perception as “weighty.”
C. The assertion that, for Wenders, “only film can redeem the real.”
D. The description of film images as “negotiated” and “mediated.”
E. The assertion that, like stories, images can “manipulate” and “distort.”






9. It can be inferred from the passage that the author would agree with which of the following statements about Wenders’ beliefs about film?

A. For Wenders, the images of film serve to convey reality.
B. Although Wenders believes film shows us what is real, he warns that it is also important for us to interpret its images.
C. Wenders hopes that his films will be heralded as genuine representations of the world around us.