The retrospective of films by Wim Wenders currently running at IFC Center offers a chance to observe an unusual cinematic phenomenon. Wenders’s career is marked by a break that occurred between 1975 and 1977, between the films “Kings of the Road” and “The American Friend.” Both are road movies (the German title of the earlier film, “Im Lauf der Zeit,” means “in the course of time”), but the earlier film inhabits its moment and its place fully, while the later one is petrified in cinematic nostalgia and deploys its picturesque landscapes and cityscapes as mere signifiers of travel. In that shift, Wenders went from being one of the most intrepid and original directors of the time to being himself an art-house signifier.
In the mid-seventies, Wenders moved from audacity to audacity with the trilogy “Alice in the Cities,” “The Wrong Move,” and “Kings of the Road.” He captured a particular mood of self-distance, that of a West German coming of age with American rock music and American movies. “Alice in the Cities” starts with its protagonist in the United States, doing a report on the real America of the road, but, with his insistence on making images rather than writing, he gets fired. Marooned in New York while awaiting a flight to Germany, he meets a woman and her young daughter. The woman goes off on a road trip of her own, leaving the man to bring the girl back to Germany—a West Germany that’s infused with the artifacts and moods of American pop culture. “The Wrong Move” is also a sort of road movie. It’s a loose adaptation of Goethe’s 1795 novel “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,” about a young man who leaves his mother’s house and travels through Germany with an improvised group of wanderers, passing from the rural to the urban, from the horrors of recent history to the gleaming comforts of the new reconstruction, and from radical gestures to political reaction. “Kings of the Road,” a cinema-centric adventure, follows a movie-projector repairman on his route through rural Germany, as he gains a fellow-traveller as a companion and sounding board.
It was a moment of radical cinema, and “Kings of the Road,” especially, was one of the prime films of the moment. Movies were psychosexually radical, and Wenders’s film shows its protagonist naked early on and, soon thereafter, openly and explicitly defecating in a deserted field. There isn’t much in the way of a story, but the movie is filled with stories and, at one point, addresses, in a line of dialogue, the very notion of a personal story: Bruno tells Robert that, after a leg of their trip, “For the first time I have the feeling that I’ve passed through a certain time and that this time is my story.” The subject of the film is the experience of time and the times, and in this regard it echoes another of the most radical films of that era, Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman.” But “Kings of the Road” has a mood and a tone of its own. Wenders devised a sentimental alienation, a warm-hearted isolation, that evokes with bluesy ambivalence the good feelings of bad feelings, the solidarity of solitude.
It was also a moment of vast cinematic historicism. Film schools were proliferating; movies had taken off from the streets and were landing in universities and museums. The cinephilic passion that had been artistically canonized by the French New Wave and that was now motivating Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and other young filmmakers of the next generation was quickly becoming an institution. (For instance, at the time, Jean-Luc Godard conceived of his vast project of video essays, “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” as a commercial series of videotapes that could be profitably sold to American universities for use in cinema-studies courses.)
Wenders’s own films, especially “Kings of the Road,” were expressly cinephilic. But with “The American Friend,” he tried something different: rather than making a film about movies, he made a movie that recalled the American movies he loved. He made a film noir that he adapted from a novel by Patricia Highsmith, featuring Dennis Hopper as the criminal mastermind Ripley and the German actor Bruno Ganz as the picture framer Jonathan Zimmermann, whom Ripley persuades to commit a contract murder. The action swings between New York, Hamburg, and Paris, and in addition to the American actor in a lead role it also features two of Wenders’s artistic heroes in prominent parts—the directors Nicholas Ray (as an art forger) and Samuel Fuller (as a gangster).
“The American Friend” captures an authentic sense of homelessness at home, as if Wenders, a new international celebrity for “Kings of the Road,” wanted to film the feeling of hitting the road under the malevolent guidance of sharks with money, spending too much time in trains and planes and hotels, consorting with shadowy figures who could make or break his fortunes. The film’s symbolic dimension, regarding a director (someone, after all, who frames images) who is propelled out of his usual orbit and into danger, held an irony. Wender, the director, strolls, seemingly blindly, into another danger: that of walking backward into a history of cinema that had already been superseded by recent creations.
Wenders doesn’t explode the film-noir framework of the movie, nor does he explore its historical origins or its implications, whether aesthetic or political. He embraces the genre uninhibitedly, as if asserting an artistic restoration in the name of heroes, Ray and Fuller, whom the industry at large had marginalized a decade earlier. Its nostalgia has the air of a righteous crusade on behalf of classical modes of filmmaking that had inspired the following generations’ extreme works and extreme experiences. In effect, Wenders, turning his back on his own freest inspirations, instantly turned himself into an institution, into a walking museum of cinematic devotion. At the very moment that Wenders was filming Ray, Ray himself was struggling to complete a movie that would only be completed after his death, “We Can’t Go Home Again.” Its very title rejects the return that Wenders was attempting, and the film itself is among the most original and most daring films of the time, one of the era’s signal cinematic inventions.
Meanwhile, at almost the same time, the writer Peter Handke, who wrote the script for “The Wrong Move” as well as for Wenders’s first feature, “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick,” out-Wenders Wenders with the 1978 film “The Left-Handed Woman.” Handke directed his own adaptation of his novella, which appeared in translation in The New Yorker in 1977; it’s tactile as Wenders’s earlier films were; it confronts the loss of cultural foundations as well as the political and personal implications (positive as well as negative) of that epochal shift; and it does so with precisely the emotional, familial, and artistic intimacy that Wenders was leaving behind.
The crossing of borders, the disorientation of travel, the melding of cultures, the attention-shifting of modern communication that puts the focus of minds on places far from the bodies at hand—these have been Wenders’s themes for the past forty years, and he has reworked them in films that bear, at the same time, a narrowly conservative and Hollywood-nostalgic aesthetic. (Even the nearly five-hour-long “Until the End of the World,” for all its apocalyptic foreboding, globetrotting production, and clever science-fiction gizmos, is just a very long road-movie film noir.) He has pursued that aesthetic through a series of works that pay further fealty to his chosen set of living artistic ancestors, living or dead, whether Dashiell Hammett or Peter Falk, Yasujiro Ozu or Michelangelo Antonioni, Pina Bausch or Sebastião Salgado or the entire iconic small-town American landscape.
With “The American Friend,” Wenders picked up on something else that was in the air—the yearning for a mythic America that no longer existed. It no longer existed for good reasons, including the fortunate demise of the narrow self-definitions and exclusions on which it ran. But Wenders never wondered about the connection between aesthetic conservatism and reactionary politics, between the severed connection to classical ages of culture and the hierarchies that they embodied and advanced. Despite the superficial progressivism and internationalism of his concerns, Wenders became the exemplary art-house filmmaker of the age of Reagan, and his aesthetic, with its pious deference to ancestral authority, remains stuck in that mode of stirringly reactionary sentimentalism.
