30 years ago it premiered in Spain Until the end of the world, Wim Wenders’s most excessive film. With a footage that was close to three hours long, the film took us to the immediate future, a time in which we now live immersed and whose reality is presented to us with all its dystopian charge.
To achieve this, Wim Wenders established correspondences that went beyond the mere relationships between characters, managing to show in a hidden way the unhealthy link between human beings and technology. The visible world hid another world where the artificial dominated. In this way, the character played by Jeanne Moreau is that of a blind woman who tries to combat her evil with a machine that captures conscious and subconscious visions of other people’s brains in order to be transferred to hers. The story sounded fantastic; not so much today.
As if that weren’t enough, Wenders’ film is a whole display of gadgets that seemed like science fiction, but today have become an everyday thing. Without going any further, the cell phones with screens that appear in the film are a premonition of what the new millennium was going to bring us. It can be said that with these details, Wenders’s film is a sad film, since happiness, to be complete, requires that the future be uncertain, and what Wenders achieved with his film was to correctly predict what awaited us .
But long before Wenders presented us with the future in such a clear way, in 1926, Nikola Tesla gave an interview to the weekly Collier’s, where he accurately described the dominance of technology in the future, hitting on everything. You only have to look back to realize that in these last 30 years, the world has changed more than in the previous 30 years.
In 1992, when Wenders’ film was released, it seemed unattainable that a blind person could recover his sight, but today we are very close to it thanks to bionic eyes, an advance of nanotechnology by which it is possible to perceive reality with all its colors. I don’t know where Fellini left off saying that the only realist there is is the visionary, but the filmmaker was not without reason if we take Wenders and his film as an example Until the end of the world; a film that was presented to us as science fiction and that, over the years, would become the opposite, that is, a realistic film.
Time would have to pass before we realized that Wenders, like Tesla, was anticipating the reality of our time, full of contradictions and chiaroscuro. Because it is paradoxical that, while we dedicate ourselves to the conquest of a brave new world where technology allows us to make possible what until recently seemed impossible, on the other hand we need to maintain territorial conflicts and wars in order to access the energy sources that fuel this conquest.
To question it in the manner of Saramago: “What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the murder of a human being?”
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