6 ÎOM GUNNING Shooting into Outer Space Reframing Modern Vision I N WLv WENDERS's DOCUMENTARY tribute to Ozu Yasujiro, Tokyo-Ga (1985), the flmmaker searches through modern Tokyo in an attempt to discover some remnant of the flm world Ozu had created. At one point on the top of the Tokyo Tower (the world's tallest self-supporting steel tower at 333 meters, 13 meters taller than the Eiffel Tower) he encounters another German tourist flmmaker in search of fesh images, Werner Herzog. Wenders's flm recurringly excoriates the modern world of debased images in contrast to the ordered images fund in Ozu's films. Television especially, Wenders claims, has inundated the world with false images. High above Tokyo Herzog too mourns the Joss of vital images. He is searching, he indicates, for "pure, clear, transparent images," which he feels have vanished fom an overdeveloped earth (that crowded Tokyo cown into which they peer). He daims he would consider any risk or effort to attain these images: climb huge mountains or travel into outer space on rockets to Mars or Saturn, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Skylab or the space shuttle. Wenders, however, indicates his own view that such images must be fund on earth, there in the chaos of Tokyo. 97