A professional goalkeeper, for no apparent reason, allows the opposing team to score an easy goal. A few days later he committs an equally motiveless murder. The film follows the goalkeeper’s retreat to a small village on the Austrian border where he spends his time following television accounts of the police search for the murderer. Wim Wenders’ early film is a claustrophobic study of a man alienated from a sterile society to the point where he can only express his loneliness and fear through acts of random irrationality. An early film of the German New Wave of the seventies, “The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty” uses the thriller genre to explore contemporary questions of social disintegration.
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Collection
In ACMI's collection
Credits
Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
304222
Language
German
Audience classification
PG
Subject categories
Advertising, Film, Journalism, Mass Media & TV → Foreign language films
Sound/audio
Sound
Colour
Colour
Holdings
VHS; Access Print (Section 1)