ALICE IN THE CITIES / WRONG MOVE / KINGS OF THE ROAD

ABOUT THE FILMS: 

ALICE IN THE CITIES, 1974, Dir. Wim Wenders, 110 MIN, Janus Films, West Germany 

In German and English with English subtitles. 

Technically, ALICE IN THE CITIES is Wim Wenders’s fourth film, but he often refers to it as his first, because it was during this film that he discovered the genre of the road movie. It was also his first film to be shot partly in the U.S. and the first to feature his alter ego, Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler). The German journalist Winter wants to write a story about America but is unable to accomplish anything but a series of Polaroids before disappointedly beginning his journey back home. In New York, he reluctantly agrees to take little Alice (Yella Rottländer) with him, because her mother (Lisa Kreuzer)—whom he meets on the day before his departure—has urgent business to take care of there. In Amsterdam, the mother then fails to appear as they agreed, so Winter and Alice set out to try to find Alice’s grandmother in the Ruhr region. During their search, their initial mutual dislike gradually transforms into a heartfelt affection.

FORMAT: DCP

WRONG MOVE, 1975, Dir. Wim Wenders, 103 MIN, Janus Films, West Germany 

In German with English subtitles. 

Glückstadt, in Northern Germany; Bonn; a palace along the Rhine; a housing project on the outskirts of Frankfurt; and finally the Zugspitze—these are the stations of the journey that the young Wilhelm Meister (Rüdiger Vogler) hopes will save him from the gloomy irritability and despondency that plague him in his hometown. In unfamiliar places, he thinks that he will be able to do what he has always had an uncontrollable drive to do—to write. He wants to become an author. With the journey, which his mother (Marianne Hoppe) gives him permission to make, he hopes to broaden his horizons and, above all, to find himself.

FORMAT: DCP

KINGS OF THE ROAD, 1976, Dir. Wim Wenders, 176 MIN, Janus Films, West Germany 

In German with English subtitles. 

KINGS OF THE ROAD is about a friendship between two men: Bruno (Rüdiger Vogler) who repairs film projectors and travels along the inner German border in his truck, and the psychologist Robert (Hanns Zischler) who is fleeing from his own past. When Robert drives his old Volkswagen straight into the Elbe River, he is fished out by Bruno. This is the beginning of their shared journey through a German no-man’s-land, a journey that leads them from the Lüneburg Heath to the Bavarian Forest. Wenders began the film without a script. Instead, there was a route that he had scouted out beforehand: through all of the little towns along the Wall that still contained a movie theater in this era of cinematic mass extinction. The old moving van with the film projectors in the back becomes a metaphor for the history of film—it is no coincidence that the film is dedicated to Fritz Lang. This “men’s story” also treats the themes of the absence of women, of loneliness, and of postwar Germany.

FORMAT: DCP