Ry Cooder

A dry, bare, parched sound. A fiery trail of slide guitar accompanying the uncertain steps of a man wandering the desert like a ghost, in jacket, tie and red cap, holding a gas can from which he sucks the last drops of water. The shot opens onto the boundless landscapes of the Frontier. And that stubborn sound, which keeps carving ravines into the sun-bleached, sandy earth, but also into the traveler's soul, lost in the vast emptiness of his solitude. If a great film can be recognized from its very incipit, then "Paris, Texas" is certainly no exception. Opening with that formidable sequence, the 1984 masterpiece by Wim Wenders is also one of the most dazzling demonstrations of how music and images can not only coexist perfectly, but integrate and enrich one another.

It's well known that for the Düsseldorf-born director, action is often a consequence of the space in which it unfolds; "it is not the places, then, that transform according to the choices of the characters who inhabit them (as in classic cinema), but the characters who must shape their choices around the landscape that surrounds and looms over them" (cf. Eugenio Radin, "Paris, Texas"). But it's equally true that in Wenders' cinema, the music has never merely provided a simple sonic backdrop, always taking on a central role (from Nick Cave's incursions in "Wings of Desire" to the enchanting Madredeus in "Lisbon Story" all the way to the choral rock fresco of "Until The End Of The World").

The desert, then – both the real one and the protagonist's metaphorical one – is the true dominus of "Paris, Texas", but the soundtrack is an integral part of it, helping to shape and animate it: a low, skimming flight of slender guitars, slithering like snakes among the cacti of the desolate Texan lands, amplifying the immense silence of this drift into nothingness. An inexorable country-folk litany, with the sinuous quivers of the bow (courtesy of David Lindley) and the faint piano chimes of Jim Dickinson, accompanying the guitar. And certainly not just any guitar: that of Ry Cooder.

A pioneer of ethnomusicological research and a wizard of the slide, the Californian Ryland Peter Cooder, Ry to his friends, is one of America's greatest guitarists (No. 31 on Rolling Stone's special Top 100 list), boasting an extraordinarily refined style built around various open tunings and a distinctive use of the "bottleneck". Starting from the wellsprings of roots music, Cooder gradually broadened his path, touching on wildly different cultures, from Indian raga to South American rhythms to African music. Among other things, he would go on to be the chief architect, in 1996, of the celebrated Buena Vista Social Club project. But his name will forever be tied to these ten blazing desert compositions, which mark the stages of Travis's pilgrimage, played by a then still-emerging Harry Dean Stanton ("It was important that he be unknown," Wenders would explain. "And Harry, even though he'd already made more than 100 films, was practically unknown. He'd only had supporting roles, and he was superb.").

The end of his love affair with the beautiful, very young Jane (Nastassja Kinski), along with the necessary abandonment of his son Hunter, will cast Travis into the mouth of the desert, hollowing out the world around him and stripping his life of any purpose beyond finding the place of which he keeps a worn photograph: Paris, Texas, where years earlier he had bought a plot of land, his native soil.

Cooder crafts a stark yet pulsating portrait of this existential collapse. Starting with the simple, unforgettable chords of the title track, inspired by Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was The Night (Cold Was The Ground)", a piece of blues history that the Californian guitarist describes as "the most soulful, the most transcendent in American music". Those lacerating sinuosities, those dizzying slide runs left to hang trembling in the air, seem to penetrate the very soul of the protagonist, in a transcendent dimension that would find a worthy heir ten years later in Neil Young's aching guitar textures for "Dead Man", Jim Jarmusch's metaphysical western.

If "Brothers" is the natural reprise of the main theme, in an even more draining, parched version, "Nothing Out Here" – in just over a minute and a half – opens up a chasm of anguish, laying bare once and for all the protagonist's utter desolation. The silence is then broken by Stanton's own voice, an unlikely (but highly effective) Hispanic minstrel wrestling with the romantic torments of the Mexican "Cancion Mixteca". It's one of the few vocal moments on a largely instrumental record, one in which Cooder's slide immediately takes center stage again, in the experimental drapery of the trembling "No Safety Zone" and the anemic "Houston In Two Seconds" (almost post-rock, a decade ahead of its time). Desert-born atmospheres grow even more urgent on the album's longest instrumental, "Leaving The Bank", with the bow's insistent punctuation smudging the slithering guitar phrases.

After another brief reprise of the main theme ("On The Couch"), it's the protagonists' turn to take center stage, in one of the film's most moving exchanges: Travis and Jane facing each other, separated by a transparent glass wall that lets the man watch without being seen, as in the convention of the peep show ("I Knew These People", with Cooder's guitar arriving in medias res, sealing the intensity of the conversation). "Disappeared" is the last word spoken by Stanton. And beneath his feet – firmly planted on the ground, as evidenced by his fear of flying and his obsessive fixation on shoes – the final abyss opens up: "Dark Was The Night" is the final stage of a pilgrimage doomed from the outset by the inescapability of a destiny of exile and solitude. Cooder lets his fingers slip slowly across the strings of his slide, the guitar's threads growing ever thinner and more rarefied, with one last dragging, desperate chord sealing the end of the journey.

Born of the creativity of three brilliant minds (Wenders, Cooder and co-writer Sam Shepard), "Paris, Texas" would win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, perhaps distilling the finest fusion of Neuer Deutscher Film and classic American cinema. But that wouldn't be the only achievement of its soundtrack: with this unforgettable collection of guitar twang, slide brushstrokes and atmospheric vistas, Ry Cooder laid the groundwork for the future desert rock of the likes of Thin White Rope, Calexico, Giant Sand, Howe Gelb & co., bequeathing to music as a whole a new way of sculpting images through sound.

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14/04/2019