WIM WENDERS, ROADS TO EVERYWHERE

Few directors espouse a sense of universality as much as Wim Wenders (1945–), his work traversing the boundaries between high art and popular culture, Europe and America, the political and the personal. Over his varied and lengthy career Wenders has directed feature films, documentaries, shorts and music videos, all challenging the spectator with beautiful, open imagery while being equally aware of the fundamental need for some kind of narrative propulsion. Wenders began alongside other luminaries such as Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge and Rainer Werner Fassbinder as part of the New German Cinema in the late 1960s. Setting his work apart from his compatriots, he draws inspiration most frequently from genre films, looking back to Weimar-era cinema and outwards to the Hollywood iconography of John Ford, Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray. An equal devotion to the work of Michelangelo Antonioni and Yasujiro Ozu provides a sense of sublime ambiguity to Wenders’ cinema. His more narratively conventional films of the 1980s onwards, such as Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987), attracted both awards and celebrity, resulting in collaborations with an array of cutting-edge artists across numerous disciplines. Despite his predominant use of unadorned and stark locations, Wenders has also kept abreast of digital innovations, including groundbreaking 3D explorations (such as his extraordinary tribute to Pina Bausch). Embracing a filmmaker who is intellectually restless, emotionally involved and utterly devoted to the medium, this season surveys a number of Wenders’ key works of the 1970s and 1980s. It includes his breakthrough feature, The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (1972), his fascinating B-movie homage, The State of Things (1982), and his masterpieces, Kings of the Road (1976) and Wings of Desire.

Wednesday 18 March

7:00pm KINGS OF THE ROAD

Wim Wenders (1976) 175 mins – R 18+

Wenders’ now-classic buddy movie is an elliptical road odyssey of two estranged men (Rüdiger Vogler and Hanns Zischler) traversing the nether regions of the East/West German border while servicing broken-down movie theatres. Powered by an idiosyncratic mix of 1960s pop music (heard and quoted by the characters) and Axel Lindstädt’s evocative score, Wenders’ existential narrative poetically charts the Americanisation of the German mindscape, the impoverishment and beauty of the stark modern landscape, and the inevitable death of the cinema. The final part of the director’s “road trilogy” following the previous year’s Wrong Move<. With Lisa Kreuzer.

4K DCP.

10:15pm CHAMBRE 666

Wim Wenders (1982) 48 mins – M

An intriguing time capsule in which Wenders asks various filmmakers to enter a hotel room, turn on the camera and answer the “simple” question: “Is the cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” Filmed at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, it features candid and playful responses from Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Steven Spielberg, Monte Hellman, Mike De Leon, Susan Seidelman, Yilmaz Güney, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and others. Preceded by Reverse Angle: Ein Brief aus New York Wim Wenders (1982) 17 mins – Unclassified 15+. Wenders’ essay film about New Wave music, New York, his artistic practice and the difficulties of working with Francis Ford Coppola on Hammett.

Wednesday 25 March

7:00pm WRONG MOVE

Wim Wenders (1975) 103 mins – R 18+

The Bildungsroman originated in the late 18th century, commonly following a young protagonist who goes out into the world seeking personal development and education. Although Goethe’s 1795 Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was the basis for Peter Handke’s screenplay, Wenders’ Wilhelm (Rüdiger Vogler) traverses contemporary Germany with a resigned, post-1960s pessimism, encountering the potent spectres of Germany’s past. This is contrasted with the rich images of the land itself, from the glistening Elbe River in northern Germany to the snowy Zugspitze mountain in the south. Co-starring Hanna Schygulla and featuring Nastassja Kinski in her debut film role.

4K DCP.

8:55pm THE GOALKEEPER’S FEAR OF THE PENALTY

Wim Wenders (1972) 101 mins – Unclassified 15+

Adapting Peter Handke’s short novel, Wenders delivers a drifter’s-eye view of paranoia and dissociation, shaped by his fascination with the way people move through the world when their inner compass has slipped. Following its titular, murderous protagonist (Arthur Brauss) with dispassionate curiosity, letting behaviour reveal more than psychology, the film’s uncanny calm owes as much to Robby Müller’s sun-bleached, quietly dislocated images as to Handke’s dry, clipped dialogue – a combination that keeps everything slightly off balance, as if it were the world itself that was misfiring.

4K DCP.

Wednesday 1 April

7:00pm WINGS OF DESIRE

Wim Wenders (1987) 128 mins – PG

An angel (Bruno Ganz) soulfully watching over the stranded citizens of West Berlin is tempted by the pleasures of the flesh when he falls in love with a trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin). Wenders’ profoundly moving and often magical modern fairytale is an extraordinary essay on the weight of history and memory. Shifting between black-and-white and colour, it evokes both Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death. Now itself a significant artefact of a soon-to-be united Berlin, it features Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Crime & the City Solution, Curt Bois and Peter Falk. Co-written by Peter Handke and shot by Henri Alekan.

9:20pm THE STATE OF THINGS

Wim Wenders (1982) 121 mins – M

Described by Wenders as a dark investigation into his profession, this low budget, noirish art-imitates-life work came about when he discovered a film production (Raúl Ruiz’s severely troubled The Territory) stalled for lack of funds. Offering to help fix things if he could use the crew to make a film – immediately – Wenders created this brilliant film-within-a-film about a remake of a Roger Corman (cameo alert!) apocalyptic science-fiction B-movie that has, unsurprisingly, stalled due to a lack of funds and film stock. Featuring Samuel Fuller, Allen Garfield and Viva.

4K DCP.

CTEQ ANNOTATION
The State of Things
by Lee Hill