Part of Dialogues & Film Retrospectives

Der Himmel ber Berlin, 1987, aka Wings of Desire. Directed by Wim Wenders. Shown: Bruno Ganz (as Damiel). Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures/Photofest.

Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman dubbed Wim Wenders “the most garlanded European director of his generation.” Wenders is responsible for masterpieces Kings of the Road and Wings of Desire, each tackling his home country, Germany, at different volatile moments in its history. Though Wenders has produced films of wide variety, he continues to return to his style of the road movie genre, including Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975), and Paris,Texas (1984). Wenders joins Hoberman for a career retrospective. Recorded in 1991.

• Wings of Desire
• The American Friend
• The State of Things
• Until the End of the World

“All of my films have as their underlying current the Americanization of Germany,” Wim Wenders once said. The most garlanded European director of his generation, Wenders also has been the most ambivalently American—drawn to Texas and Hollywood, half in love with private eyes and rock ‘n’ roll. This Euro-Americanism is only one of his paradoxes. His films draw equally on classic literature and mass culture. He has filmed adaptations of Goethe and Hawthorne, collaborated with Peter Handke and Sam Shepard. But his characters quote old Bob Dylan lyrics, his first movie was dedicated to the Kinks, and the original title for Kings of the Road was As Time Goes By.

Hacks glide from blockbuster to blockbuster, but the shorts, documentaries, or rock videos that directors such as Martin Scorsese or Jonathan Demme produce between major features evince a love for filmmaking that transcends careerism. So it is with Wenders, who has made documentary-portraits, personal travelogues, diary films, and various unclassifiable filmic investigations, many of which mourn the death of cinema (even as they prolong its life). Whatever the mode, the Wenders worldview is instantly recognizable—a free-floating homesickness and complementary wanderlust, an appreciation for the poetry of banal landscapes (at once empty and imprisoning), and a taste for roadside attractions. Most of his films are road movies, but it is a road that leads through the indistinguishable airports of the great far-flung international metropolis—whether it be Hamburg, New York, Los Angeles or Tokyo.

Wenders is the most cosmopolitan of directors, but his two masterpieces are his most German movies. Melancholy but not humorless, Kings of the Road is the tenderest and most horrific depiction I know of German postwar anomie, while Wings of Desire captures better than any film I have ever seen the particular ambience of Cold War Berlin—its sadness and self-absorption, its somnolent brutality, deep sense of loneliness, and desertion. Both are now period films; it remains to be seen how the reunification of Germany, now the dividing point of Wenders’ career, will determine his work in the 1990s and beyond.

─J. Hoberman

Hoberman is the senior film critic for the Village Voice. His books include Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds, The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism and Midnight Movies (written with Jonathan Rosenbaum), as well as monographs on the films 42nd Street and Flaming Creatures.