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Touching Wenders
By
Derek Malcolm
3 Jan 2008
"The Yanks have colonised our subconscious," someone says in Kings of the Road, the last and best of Wim Wenders's Seventies road movie trilogy.
It is a theme that the director who grew up in post-war Germany has returned to again and again, as he has watched his country grow increasingly enamoured of all things American.
This reissue of the first of the three, made in 1974, has the stoic Rudiger Vogler as a photo-journalist touring America and finding a nine-year-old girl attaching herself to him as he returns home, first to Amsterdam and then to Germany.
Touching but never sentimental, it is as much concerned with the encroachment of American culture and the love-hate feelings Wenders had for it, as with the relationship between the man and girl. Alice in the Cities is, of course, also about alienation, as is most of his work.
But what distinguishes this from some of Wenders's recent efforts is the sureness of his control and the feeling that he knew what he wanted to say and how to say it with quiet, unmelodramatic effect.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
