Wim Wenders

by

Olivier Delers

• LAST MODIFIED: 23 September 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0382

Introduction

Wim Wenders is one of the most renowned German filmmakers of his generation. Born in Düsseldorf in 1945, he attended the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film in Munich between 1967 and 1970. His career is marked by a spirit of collaboration. His first feature, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick [Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter] (1972), was an adaptation of a novel by Peter Handke and his cinematographer, Robby Müller, is credited with influencing the aesthetics of his early films. The Road Trilogy (Alice in the Cities [Alice in den Städten, 1974]; Wrong Move [Falsche Bewegung, 1975]; and Kings of the Road [Im Lauf der Zeit, 1976]) made Wenders a leading figure of New German Cinema. All three films express feelings of alienation and question German identity in the postwar era. Even though one of his characters famously declares that “the Yankees have colonized our subconscious,” references to American culture and cinema abound in Wenders’s work. After releasing The American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund, 1977), based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, Wenders moved to the United States to work on Hammett (1982), a film produced by Francis Ford Coppola. The experience left him disillusioned with Hollywood and inspired The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge, 1982), a film that reflects on the financial pressures facing auteur filmmakers. The 1980s were a period of high acclaim for Wenders. Paris, Texas (1984), written with Sam Shepard, received the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987), another collaboration with Handke, is often considered his masterpiece. These critical successes are framed by two films essays that were difficult to access at the time but that scholars consider as essential reflections on the acts of seeing and image-making: Tokyo-Ga (shot in 1983, released in 1985) and Notebooks on Cities and Clothes (1989). The 1990s marked the beginning of a period of relative critical draught with films that are harder to classify but show the continuity of Wenders’ cinematic vision. The five-hour long Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt, 1991) proved to be too ambitious, Faraway, So Close! (In weiter Ferne, so nah!, 1993) too didactic, and the essayistic love tale Lisbon Story (1994) too discombobulated for critics and audiences alike. The quadralogy centered around the city of Los Angeles, composed of The End of Violence (1997), Million Dollar Hotel (2000), Land of Plenty (2004), and Don’t Come Knocking (2005) revisits themes already present in earlier films: characters lost in the vastness of amorphous spaces, the mise en abyme of the Hollywood Western tradition, and the omnipresence of screens in the age of television. Wenders returned to the foreground with Oscar-nominated documentaries Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and The Salt of the Earth (2014). In the 2010s, he turned his attention to 3D filmmaking and explored its potential to convey the emotions of dance (Pina, 2011), psychological drama (Every Thing Will Be Fine, 2015), and theater (The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez, 2016), an adaptation of a play by Handke. In recent years, Wenders’s output has continued to be eclectic with new feature films (Submergence, 2017; Perfect Days, 2023) and documentaries on Pope Francis and Anselm Kiefer. He is also a noted photographer with regular exhibitions all around the world.

Books and Edited Volumes

The scholarship on Wenders and his films follows the ebb and flow of his career and aligns with dominant critical paradigms in film studies and literary criticism. Early on, scholars focused on his New German Cinema films and defined his place in the movement as one of its most important contributors alongside Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. They emphasized the originality of Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road and praise the films’ uncanny blend of realistic storytelling and new forms of visual poetry. Buchka 1983 aptly summarizes the first ten years or so of Wenders’s career. The mise en abyme of filmmaking in The State of Things, the impossibility for the self to find fulfilment in a materialistic world in Paris, Texas, and the deep intertextuality of Wings of Desire made films released in the 1980s perfect candidates for postmodern readings. Cook and Gemünden 1997 probes the postmodern aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings of Wenders’s work. Both Geist 1988 and Kolker and Beicken 1993 offer readings that show that his films do not always fit squarely in that category. There is a visible drop in scholarly interest in Wenders starting in the late 1990s. Graf 2002 offers a survey of his work that includes understudied films such as Faraway, So Close, Lisbon Story, and The End of Violence. Coury 2004, Malaguti 2008, and Brady and Leal 2011 form an intriguing group of monographs solely devoted to the collaboration between Wenders and Handke over a twenty-year period. Handke won the Novel Prize in Literature in 2019 but remains a controversial figure for his support of the Serbian regime in the 1990s. The monographs point to the continued relevance of films on which Wenders and Handke worked together and to the intermedial nature of Wenders’s imagination. Delers and Sulzer-Reichel 2020 takes stock of these contributions, assesses criticisms leveled at Wenders for representing peripheral spaces with a neo-colonial gaze, and argues that he should be seen as a leader of transnational, translingual, and transmedial cinema.

• Brady, Martin, and Joanne Leal. Wim Wenders and Peter Handke: Collaboration, Adaptation, Recomposition. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2011.

  DOI: 10.1163/9789042032484

  Offers in-depth analyses of films on which Wenders and Handke worked together: The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move, and Wings of Desire. The authors highlight different modes of collaboration and adaptational strategies. They reflect on what structures the relationship between two of the most important creative minds of their generation. The book puts forward the idea that adaptation can be a non-hierarchical form of collaboration.

• Buchka, Peter. Augen kann man nicht kaufen: Wim Wenders und seine Filme. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1983.

  Engages with the themes and styles of Wenders’s films up to The State of Things. Identifies visual motifs that appear in several films and juxtaposes stills from the films and famous artworks to show how Wenders reimagines and reinterprets them. Reflects the concerns of film studies at the time of publication but is still useful today to see how the scholarship on Wenders has evolved.

• Cook, Roger, and Gerd Gemünden, eds. The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition. Detroit: Wayne State University, 1997.

  Important edited volume with a co-authored introduction that considers Wenders’s contribution to German, European, and American cinema. Focuses on the self-referential dimension of his films and contends that its purpose is to create a sense of collective experience rather than make sophisticated artistic statements. Contains excellent articles (some of which are reviewed individually elsewhere in this bibliography) as well as interviews and essays by Wenders translated into English.

• Coury, David. The Return of Storytelling in Contemporary German Literature and Film: Peter Handke and Wim Wenders. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004.

  Coury anchors his study of the creative relationship between Wenders and Handke in the tradition of anti-narrative cinema that was particularly strong in the 1970s. While Wenders’s early films were image-driven, he came to realize the importance of stories both for his craft as a filmmaker and for their capacity to bring about social change.

• Delers, Olivier, and Martin Sulzer-Reichel, eds. Wim Wenders: Making Films That Matter. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020.

  The most recent collection of essays to date devoted to Wenders. The current generation of scholars still finds the Road Trilogy relevant to think about the postwar era and the influence of the Romantic period in Germany. Wenders is a visual artist whose photography practice informs his filmmaking and a theorist of his own work interested in the language of 3D cinema and in defining a visual aesthetics of peace.

• Geist, Kathe. The Cinema of Wim Wenders: From Paris, France to Paris, Texas. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1988.

  Surveys Wenders’s career from his early short films in the late 1960s to Paris, Texas. His vision of cinema is less political than that of his German peers: Geist’s monograph gives a unique window into Wenders’s creative process: it is informed by a series of interviews with him and with people who were directly involved in the creation of his films.

• Graf, Alexander. The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway. London: Wallflower Press, 2002.

  Deals with the tension that lies at the center of Wenders’s work between the inherent truth of filmic images and the fact that the medium of cinema is driven by storytelling. The latter fundamentally corrupts the former and Wenders seeks to make sense of this conflict in his body of work. Graf is one of the rare scholars to insist on the importance of sound in Wenders’s films.

• Kolker, Robert Philip, and Peter Beicken. The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

  A study of the first twenty-years of Wenders’s career focused on the oedipal structures discernible in his films. As he rejects the artistic legacy of his father’s generation, Wenders finds new father figures in John Ford, Nicholas Ray, and Samuel Fuller. The authors comment on the evolution of his style of storytelling, from the elliptical nature of his early films to the postmodern musings of Wings of Desire.

• Malaguti, Simone. Wim Wenders’ Filme und ihre intermediale Beziehung zur Literatur Peter Handkes. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008.

  Makes use of developments in the field of intermedial studies to think about the relation between literature and cinema in Wenders’s work. Emphasis is on the different collaborations between Wenders and Handke and on a transformation process that seeks to create distance between the original text and the adaptation.