#Wim Wenders: King of the Road Movie

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• Meg Shields
• August 14, 2020

We’re always down to hit the post-war road with Wim.

The “road movie” is one of the most enduring genres in cinema. And with good reason. Film is a medium of motion. And road movies are all about movement: a journey from Point A to Point B, whether it’s a purposeful trek towards some final destination or something hazier and meandering and searching.

Wim Wenders‘ informal Road Trilogy, comprised of Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976), sees West Germans journeying not to some ideal endpoint but through their own post-war, post-Nazi, present Cold War-era home. They aren’t trying to outrun their past so much as come to terms with it. To chart the shape of a landscape that they no longer recognize and that has become alien, distant, and uncanny in the aftermath of atrocity.

What distinguishes Wenders’ road movies is that they are, in the end, not in the business of personal enlightenment. They are about displacement: an unsettled sense of home and more intimately, of a sense of self. They are a search for redemption in the rubble.

Watch “Wim Wenders and the Possibilities of the Road“:

Who made this?

This video essay was produced for Fandor, the San Francisco-based subscription service / social video sharing platform that operated from 2011 to 2019. Philip Brubaker, the creator of the essay, is a nonfiction filmmaker and video essayist based in Gainesville, Florida. You can browse Brubaker’s video content on his Vimeo page.

More Videos Like This

• In 2015, Criterion curated a retrospective titled “Portraits Along the Road” and its trailer serves as a visual drive-by of Wenders’ attraction towards road movies
• Here’s an old interview with the late Harry Dean Stanton on Paris, Texas: “Wim told me he’d never shot a love scene…symbolically I think it showed the distance between people.”
• From MoMA: Wim Wenders on Walker Evans, road movies, and his love of shooting corrugated iron in black-and-white
• Wim Wenders in the Criterion Closet (“don’t get jealous of me if you watch this…everybody would love to be in here.”)
• French auteur Claire Denis worked as Wenders’ assistant director on both Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire. Here she is speaking on their creative partnership.
• Here’s Wenders being super on brand, musing about the elusive joy of polaroids