Protestant Ambivalence Toward Allegory in Wim Wenders’s The Scarlet Letter

Abstract

Abstract This chapter picks up on the idea that European auteurs experiment with cinematic styles in reaction against Hollywood’s mainstream films and shows how Wim Wenders, who shares with Luther and other reformers a Protestant skepticism toward allegory, tends to use a plain style of camera work in his film adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, Der Scharlachrote Buchstabe (1973). Wenders’s adaptation counters the dominant allegorical mode found in earlier Scarlet Letter movies such as the critically well-regarded 1926 American silent film. As the chapter points out, however, Wenders is at the same time drawn toward the allegorical mode, as he intends to shift his movie from a mere literal meaning to a transliteral dimension of meaning.