Somehow it comes back to this. Appropriate at the end of one year and the start of another. The State Of Things, the strange missive Wenders eked in the delay, delay, delays of Hammett, indulging in all sorts of anachronism and present-tension. Black-and-white, you motherfucker, indeed. How much did Garfield improvise in his Coppola stylings in that rackety Winnebago Silverfish? Like some of the rat-a-tat-tat of John Garfield exsanguinating Abraham Polonsky’s corpuscular vernacular in Force Of Evil. Garfield’s may be more impressive a feat of off-the-cuff character legerdemain than Brando telling us he swallowed a bug in Hearts of Darkness. “You can’t build a movie without a story. Have you ever tried building a house without walls? It’s the same. You can’t build a house without walls. A movie’s got to have walls, Friedrich. It’s gotta have walls. Y’know?”

“Why walls?” mutters Friedrich. “The space between the characters can carry the load.”

“You’re talking about reality, Friedrich. Fuck reality, Friedrich, when are you going to wake up? Cinema… is not about life going by, people don’t wanna see that.”