La esquina de Spring con Broadway (NY) en el cine de Wim Wendersmetáfora fílmica de la experiencia límite

Abstract

At the corner of Spring Street with Broadway (NY)in Wim Wender’s Cinema: Filmic Metaphor of theLimit-Experience.Starting with the postmodern notion of space as “practiced place” and “crossroad of elements” in motion, thispaper focuses on the relevance of the “anthropologicalspace”, coined by Merleau Ponty (1945) as “existential” space, in The American Friend (1977) and Lightning Over Water (1979). Both films by Wim Wendersare set in the same scenario and, even though they present different characters, both share the premonitoryscene of a tragic ending, where a certain place standsas a metaphor for illness, and as the starting point ofthe staging of the mental and the corporeal regardingsuch metaphor. In order to develop this existentialistperspective of space, this paper puts special emphasison the body’s possession of the world and vice versa; illness as the space of social and personal organism;the current voyeuristic process in relation to death asspectacle. The development of these premises is aimedto defend my hypothesis, which tries to demonstratehow a limit-experience works as an active artefact thatgenerates knowledge relating to the search for identity and the subject’s self-reaffirmation. At this respect,this paper remarks the persistence of the figure of theantihero, which appears in Wender’s reflexive cinematography as a character capable of providing the spectator with a shifting and existential knowledge of theself and the world.