Melinda in Conversation with Wim Wenders

Listen to audio from Melinda's interview with Wim Wenders from the set of Paris, Texas. In this clip Wenders discusses what men except of women.
 

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MelindaCamberPorter.com

New Edition of Badlands Now Available

Badlands is now available in a fully illustrated, collectible hardcover edition from Blake Press. 

Badlands is a love story set in the awe-inspiring landscape of the Wounded Knee Reservation in South Dakota. The narrator, a young Englishwoman, discovers her own history of abuse, as she plunges into the poignant destinies of the Lakota people. She forms a passionate bond with an adolescent Sioux girl and her charismatic father, Blackfoot. An intoxicating love emerges between them that transcends politics and destiny.

Praise for Badlands

"A  deeply affecting story of revelation and its repercussions." - Donna Seaman, Booklist
"Badlands is a very strong, very intelligent and very intriguing novel." - Joyce Carol Oates

"Badlands is an extraordinary book. Its imagery makes one think of William Blake. Better than a novel, it reads like a fierce poem." - Louis Malle

"In Badlands, Melinda Camber Porter has focused her English intelligence on America and rendered it as an uneasy dream of sex and death and abandonment, a mirage with the power of possession." - Joan Didion

"Badlands is an achievement." - Peter Matthiessen

"A narrative with a weighty sensuality that carries the reader forward in a kind of drunken, dreamlike state." - The New York Times

Melinda in Conversation with Joan Didion

Joan Didion (1934 - ) is an American novelist and literary journalist.

“I'm not even sure of the importance of books, or of my books to people. However, I'd like to do something practical. I'd like people to pay more attention, and I don't mean have more readers or sell more copies. It seems to me that I'm always bringing something horrible to the attention of my readers and nobody does anything about it. So I sometimes think, well, perhaps I should stop expecting people to do something and get up and do it myself.”

Didion's sense of her own lack of importance springs from a sense of humility which is apparent in her self-questioning stance. It is perhaps what makes her unflinching criticism of American society so convincing and ultimately sympathetic. Though she appears to underplay her own success as a writer, she is true to herself and her themes in seeing alienation even in the relationship between herself and her readers.

MelindaCamberPorter.com

Melinda interviews Louis Malle for the Paris Post, 1975

Having completed his 13th and most puzzling film, Black Moon, Louis Malle is still a very young 40 year old. It is no coincidence, he says, that his recent films have all had adolescent heroes or heroines. It seems evident to anyone who has followed his development that he will never give up his restless searching, his self-questioning and his earnestness. Many of his “Nouvelle Vague' friends, with whom he made a startling entry into the cinema, have found a formula and have lived by it, Louis Malle regards each film as a new beginning and challenge.

“The more one goes on in life, the more the past becomes a burden. In my life and films I have always tried to cut off from the past and start again. But each time, it requires greater effort. It is only by breaking with habit that one can get rid of all that is anecdotal. If not, you let a mask come between you and the reality of your situation. It is a protection, like clothes. But it is wonderful to be naked from time to time, and it's also a good idea to change one's clothes of context.”

Read the full article here.

MelindaCamberPorter.com

MCP Archive Director to speak at Wim Wenders Conference

AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON WIM WENDERS, University of Richmond, VA, February 24th-25th 2017

Change is Possible and Necessary:

New Perspectives on Wim Wenders as Filmmaker and Visual Critic

Selected for Conference Presentation:

“Melinda Camber Porter In Conversation With Wim Wenders

(on the film set of Paris, Texas 1983)

[Newly published book, Blake Press 2016]”

Presentation Abstract: The conversation between Wim Wenders and Melinda Camber Porter (1953-2008) took place on location in December 1983, while Mr. Wenders was shooting his first American Feature Film, Paris, Texas. America was a place of European immigrants, German immigrants, and a vast land stretching to California. Men and women were becoming disillusioned and seeking ‘that something’ just out of reach. Melinda Camber Porter asked Wim Wenders: “When you say men have certain expectations of women, what exactly do you mean? Wim Wenders explains, “We still have to find out what we mean by that, because ‘the character’ hasn’t really understood that yet [in shooting his film, Paris, Texas]. The character is getting ready to confront the issue. I do not work so a film is laid out and people can spell it out. I work much more on intuition … Sometimes film making is very much based on very subconscious choices or intuitions.” Paris, Texas directed by Wim Wenders and written by Sam Shepard with adaptation by L.M. Kit Carson, and starring Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski, and Hunter Carson among others. 

The conference will take place on Friday, February 24 and Saturday, February 25, on the campus of the University of Richmond, in Richmond, Virginia. It is organized by Drs. Olivier Delers and Martin Sulzer-Reichel and hosted by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Funding for the conference comes from the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Richmond and the Tucker-Boatwright Festival for the Arts. For more information, click here.