The Portrait of the City in Wim Wender's "Lisbon Story"

Abstract

The paper addresses the depiction of the city in Wim Wenders’s film Lisbon Story (1994). The film meditates on the “death of the cinema” resulting from the commercialization of the image and globalization of culture, accompanied by the destruction of space. Wenders protests against the postmodernist consumption and homogeneity of space by presenting Lisbon as a city arrested in time, beyond the impact of corporate culture. Expressing his distrust of images, he creates a heterogeneous portrait of the city, superimposing soundscape over the landscape, whereby sounds, particularly music, encode the emotional attitude to the city, experienced in a kinesthetic manner.