Wim Wenders, Roads to Everywhere

Few directors espouse a sense of universality as much as Wim Wenders (1945–), his work traversing the boundaries between high art and popular culture, Europe and America, the political and the personal. Over his varied and lengthy career Wenders has directed feature films, documentaries, shorts and music videos, all challenging the spectator with beautiful, open imagery while being equally aware of the fundamental need for some kind of narrative propulsion.

Wenders began alongside other luminaries such as Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge and Rainer Werner Fassbinder as part of the New German Cinema in the late 1960s. Setting his work apart from his compatriots, he draws inspiration most frequently from genre films, looking back to Weimar-era cinema and outwards to the Hollywood iconography of John Ford, Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray. An equal devotion to the work of Michelangelo Antonioni and Yasujiro Ozu provides a sense of sublime ambiguity to Wenders’ cinema.

His more narratively conventional films of the 1980s onwards, such as Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987), attracted both awards and celebrity, resulting in collaborations with an array of cutting-edge artists across numerous disciplines. Despite his predominant use of unadorned and stark locations, Wenders has also kept abreast of digital innovations, including groundbreaking 3D explorations (such as his extraordinary tribute to Pina Bausch).

Embracing a filmmaker who is intellectually restless, emotionally involved and utterly devoted to the medium, this season surveys a number of Wenders’ key works of the 1970s and 1980s. It includes his breakthrough feature, The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (1972), his fascinating B-movie homage, The State of Things (1982), and his masterpieces, Kings of the Road (1976) and Wings of Desire.