Wim Wenders

Born in Dusseldorf, Germany, on August 14, 1945, Wim Wenders is one of the heirs of his country’s Young Cinema. An avant-garde and cosmopolitan author, who has received influences from American popular culture and filmmakers as diverse as Michelangelo Antonioni , Nicholas Ray and Yasujiro Ozu , or the German writer Peter Handke. After studying Medicine and Philosophy, he had to learn film art at the French Cinematheque when he was not admitted to the famous IDHEC in Paris. Later enrolled in the newly created Munich Higher School of Film and Television, he graduated as a Director and made six shorts, while also working as a film critic (Filmkritik, Die Suddeutsche Zeitung) and rock music critic. Of Catholic formation, he is a doctor of Theology.

His first feature film,Summer in the City (1970) is an original walk through the urban environment with references to contemporary America, which would announce its later theme and which had its aesthetic-narrative culmination in Wenders’ most famous road movie:Paris, Texas , with which he won the Palme d’Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. However, in the previous decade he had made a trilogy following the principles of New German Cinema:Alice in the Cities (1974),Wrong Move (1975) andIn the course of time (1976), all films played by the actor Rüdiger Vogler , and in which he showed his philosophical concerns. With these films he begins a unique moral and existential itinerary, in the form of an internal and physical journey, with characters in transit and in search of their identity, which he himself would express with these words: “Movement is the narrative formula that best suits cinema. ”.

Concerned about the marginalization and progressive disappearance of individuality, as seen inThe goalkeeper’s fear before the penalty (1971), Wim Wenders continued his reflection on the creative personality and the crisis of auteur cinema withThe state of things , a film made in Portugal and with which he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival in 1982.

Although he owned the Road Movies firm, which he produced for his usual screenwriter Peter HandkeThe left-handed woman , and he directed the stage work “Through the cities”, Wenders was somewhat uprooted from the cinema of his country. That’s why he shot his most famous thriller,The American Friend (1977), based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith , starring Bruno Ganz , Samuel Fuller , Dennis Hopper , and Nicholas Ray. He would later settle in the United States to make new tributes: the film dedicated to RayLightning over Water (Nick’s Movie, 1980), which captured the agony of this great filmmaker, and “black” cinema and Dashiell Hammett , withThe man from Chinatown (1982). In New York he creates another production firm, Gray City. Later, he went to Japan to honor the master Ozu in Tokyo-Ga (1984).

In 1987 he would return to Germany to carry out his magisterialThe sky over Berlin , which has a second part,So far, so close! , 1993. But, in the meantime, he still directed another ambitious fable: his philosophical-futuristic thrillerHasta el fin del mundo (1991), where he consolidates his peculiar creative style, tremendously minority and difficult to understand, essentially concerned with the field of images.

Wim Wenders’ cinema is poetic and symbolic, rational and speculative, raw and violent, brilliant and surprising, experimental and innovative, obtuse and sometimes even pretentious. A tormented and somewhat enigmatic author, his confusing proposals are awaited by an audience made up of intellectuals who debate his films even if they don’t quite understand them. He has also done various works for television and presents lonely, uprooted characters with communication problems, under a cold and lyrical prism. On occasions, his films contain dreamlike-surreal touches that are not exempt from a certain baroque style and decadent eroticism.

A great film buff and music lover –remember his masterfulLisboa Story (1994), a true tribute to the Seventh Art, and the Cuban documentaryBuena Vista Social Club (1999)–, in the first decade of the 21st century, this prolific director has already shown that he is a master of cinema, with proposals as powerful asLand of Abundance (2004), about the repercussions of the historic attack of September 11, 2001, or the fictionalized documentaryPineapple (2011).