In Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion, she describes Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire in its English release) as ‘topophilic.’ She notes that Wenders, who was trained originally in painting and engraving, was by his own admission “interested only in space: landscape and cities… ‘landscape’ portraits.” For Bruno, Wings of Desire acts as a “work of mourning”; an “architectural document of a city that no longer exists.” Filmed in Berlin just prior to the fall of the wall in 1989 – after which point came a new era of constructing and restructuring – Wenders’ filmic record of a cityscape hollowed out by conflict presents a view of place and situation in which emptiness takes on key importance. “In this particular city,” Bruno writes, “both for the inhabitant and the visitor, history was written onto the blank of the empty space, in the void that was a palimpsest of erasures.” The empty square, the wide-open wasteland: whilst these spaces are in essence nothing more than rubble and weeds, they also hold within their emptiness an endless sense of reference to what was before. “Behind the city of today,” Wenders writes, in affirmation of this sentiment, “in its interstices or above it, as though frozen in time, are the ruins, the mounds of rubble, the burned chimneystacks and facades of the devastated city, only dimly visible sometimes, but always there in the background.” Emptiness, visual and spatial, allows us to access the pieces of the past which we can see through the gaps.

The decimated postwar-European landscape which Wenders evokes came into being during the prime years of Paul Julian’s animation career. By the end of the 1940s, Julian had perfected his emptied paintings, and in a concentrated spate of Sylvester and Tweety cartoons which would become a large part of his legacy at Warner Brothers, he demonstrated his uncanny use of light, shadow, and colour as applied to dense cityscapes.

1950. Paul thinks for a second before carefully placing his last stroke of orange: a highlight on the inside of a doorframe. He puts his brushes down – several of them held between each of his knuckles – and stands up from the desk, his back aching. He looks down at the image and scrutinises it, fixated on his own rendering of the window to the left of the page; yellow glass, with an unintelligible interior behind it. He’d tried to sneak a little painting in, but the space was too small for details, really, and it was cased up behind the yellow glass so he couldn’t make it too clear. Nobody sits in the comfortable looking armchair because there isn't anybody anywhere. He’s reminded of a book Millard had shown him, in his last year at Chouinard: a catalogue from Edward Hopper’s 1933 show in New York. Millard had gone to see it on Nellie Chouinard’s buck, with the stern instruction to ‘bring something useful back to show for it.’* Paul had heard about Hopper before of course – well, only really from Millard, who tended to know about these things – but the catalogue was the first time he’d actually seen any of the work itself. The reproductions were black and white, but the way the light fell, even without color, was powerful enough. Each image was just so empty, even when it was packed with detail, and whenever there were buildings it was like you were looking at a photograph of an abandoned city, carefully preserved but left behind by everyone who’d ever lived there. Paul remembers poring over the catalogue, transfixed. He looks back down at his own painting.

Sometimes my town feels lonely, especially when the guy goes out to smoke and there’s nobody’s paint against mine. Do you think a painting feels lonely because it takes a long time? I do. The guy that painted Nighthawks, it took him a long time and he always says he’s not lonely but I’m not sure if he just don’t know it yet or not. Soon he will. Late ‘50s. “I probably am a lonely one” he’ll say. His wife is lonelier than he is, maybe. Or maybe less, ‘cause she likes to write letters. Letters can get you out of loneliness. The guy that did Nighthawks, he’s trying to get out of it through the painting like his wife does through her letters. “What’s more, the technical strategies he uses –– the strange perspectives, the sites of blockage and exposure –– further combat the insularity of loneliness by forcing the viewer to enter imaginatively into an experience that is otherwise notable for its profound impenetrability, its multiple barriers, its walls like windows, its windows like walls.” That’ll be from another book, about seventy years from now. Somebody called Olivia writes it. Nice name.