Irreconcilable Differences

Yet another take on the auteur theory:

Without debating whether films are made by an individual or collectively (thus negating any claims of sole credit), I stubbornly cling to my lifelong collector's compulsion to enjoy memorizing all of a director's works and the year they came out. Am I the only one who gets a kick out of the publicity still of Alfred Hitchcock next to a tower of the screenplays to his films, with the titles printed on the spines, in order?

I thank my lucky stars that theaters have shown retrospectives of individual directors since the 1970s as far as I know. Getting to see a director develop while their skills improve is a joy, whether they seem to make the same thing over and over again or constantly reinvent themselves.

Furthermore, theatrical exhibition provides several advantages. Often a film will only be shown once, so you can't afford to let your attention wander. And sometimes you may never get to see it projected in a theater again, so all you will keep is your own memory of it, like the sweet Celine and Julie find in their mouths after leaving the ghost house and coming back to reality.

But the obvious benefit is the size of the image. Showing certain movies intended for theatrical release on a TV is assault.

The sixth film I've seen shown from the theatrical retrospective of Wim Wenders put on by AFS.

The screen is all black.

Atonal metallic percussion sounds ominously, gently mourn from some place beyond like Native American spirits attached to their homelands. Vibrant red saturated text appears on-screen displaying the brief opening credits. Red will play a strong role in the rest of the film.

A helicopter shot of the closest Texas has come to looking like Monument Valley floats through a desolate canyon with no signs of life, until the next shot links this POV to a hawk in the sky.

A steel guitar strums wobbly, as if drunk or about to pass out from dehydration, just like TRAVIS HENDERSON (Harry Dean Stanton).

Travis walks. His pinstriped suit dusty, ragged. His beard, shabby. He wears a red ball cap and carries a plastic one-gallon jug of water that's just run out. His eyes are haunted. He's barely staying afloat in the wake of a devastating trauma in his past.

Travis slinks in between the wires of a barbwire fence and twists the knob on a spicket. Nothing. Dry. He enters a bar, then collapses on the floor.

WALT (Dean Stockwell), Travis's brother, flies in from LA to help him.

This past weekend I had the fortune of attending both screenings of Paris, Texas (1984, Wim Wenders) from a 4K DCP restored by the Wim Wenders Stiftung in 2014 and projected in its OAR of 1.66:1.

Paris, Texas is the reason I came to this series. It's the one I'd been looking forward to. Many consider it Wenders' best known work. It also won the Palme d'Or at the 1984 Cannes film festival. And some trivia: Claire Denis is first assistant director on Paris, Texas. She is now known for many a great movies in her own directing career beginning with Chocolat (1988, Denis). And Agnès Godard is first assistant camera on Paris, Texas. She will go on to serve as Denis' director of photography on nearly all of her films.

Robby Müller is the cinematographer of Paris, Texas and shows his skilled craftsmanship with every camera set-up in the film. After Walt lands in TX he fills up his rental car at a gas station, with uncorrected fluorescent lights overhead casting green light on him while in the background the sunset is such a deep red one wonders how such a shot was even possible. How was the sky that red?

Terry Malick tells his camera department not to photograph blue skies. Thats' one way. It's understandable that he prefers his movies to feature overcast skies so they don't look, say, too much like a postcard. Paris, Texas opens with blue, often cloudless skies, and commit to that choice anytime there's a daytime exterior (with the exception of a rainstorm shot). Paris, Texas is a cinematography movie, despite my guess that its makers would probably say that their intention was not to distract the audience with the way the images were photographed.

After Walt leaves the doctor's' office where Travis was last seen he leaves in search of him. There's a shot of a blacktop highway that leads to infinity and a shot of a caliche road winding towards a backdrop of mesa. Walt chooses the caliche. Travis walks through green pastures. Some black cows graze. The magnitude of scale is staggering. And somehow Walt pulls up, like it's the most ordinary thing in the world. As Walt looks at Travis he comments: "What the hell happened to you anyway? You look like 40 miles of rough road." This comment not only alludes to the subtext of the previous scene--Walt guesses the rough road will lead him to Travis, which it does. But the comment also describes Harry Dean Stanton's iconic visage.

Stanton as the docile soft-spoken Travis and Stockwell as the kind and gentle Walt's performances are the foundation of the cast. Paris, Texas is serene, but something's at the core of it that is revealed to be a damaging wound that can never be healed. The first half of the movie is Walt finding Travis after he'd been missing for 4 years. Even when Walt finds him Travis refuses to tell him what happened. But it's also Travis finding his son, HUNTER (Hunter Carson).

When Travis gets to Walt's and Hunter walks downstairs, all dressed up, nice white shirt, hair combed, and pauses on the banister, it's the first big moment. We get it. There's no further explanation needed. Hunter says "hi." Travis says "hi." Hunter hasn't seen his dad in four years and he needs some time before he warms up to him. The morning following Travis' arrival he offers to walk his son home after school. Hunter complains to Anne, Walt's wife: "I don't wanna walk home. Nobody walks. Everybody drives." When Hunter gets out of school and sees Travis waiting across the street, he opts for a ride home with one of his school chums instead.

I grew up in South Texas. Nobody walked anywhere. I moved to Portland, OR when I was 19 and stayed in a big house in SE called The Dustbin full of punkers, rockers, DIY artists, Reedies, and intellectuals. All sorts of people passed through. One night there were these 3 guys who were from MN who I thought were fun to hang out with that invited me out for a walk, and I asked where. They told me nowhere. At the time I couldn't understand why someone would walk somewhere for no reason. I asked "how far?" and "when will you be back?" But I went. I think we just walked up Woodstock from 39th to 52nd or past the Plaid Pantry. I'm older now and I love to walk. For no reason. With nowhere in mind.

The same complaint can be appropriated for movies nowadays: "Nobody walks. Everybody drives." Paris, Texas walks.

Walt threads up some Super 8 film of a young Hunter, Travis, Walt, Anne and JANE (Nastassja Kinski), whom we glimpse for the first time in the film. This choice of film stock sets the images apart aesthetically, but also suggests something profound in the way it depicts the love between Travis and Jane frozen in the past. We'll never see Travis and Jane together again. The only thing left of that love is a strip of film, a memory.

The second half of Paris, Texas is Travis and Hunter going back to TX to find Jane. Okay I just gotta highlight one more of my favorite Robby Müller compositions: when Travis and Hunter eat burgers and fries in the bed of the Ford Ranchero underneath the winding snakes of highways looming over them. God that's fun to look at.

Travis finds that Jane works in a peep show where individual booths have a phone and customers make various requests as they watch her or other workers through a window. They can see her but she can't see them. We see quick fleeting glances of Jane leading up to Travis finding her by taking the role of customer in one of the booths.

Nastassja Kinski's appearance as Jane in the small room is maybe the most beautiful MCU in film history; with the soft overhead lighting, the set decoration, the color scheme, the magenta angora sweater, the choice of lens and distance of the camera to her. But this scene is also painful, especially if one is susceptible to the aftermath of losing someone from a passionate romantic relationship that ended badly. The metaphor of Jane not being able to see Travis, but still there for anyone to play out their romantic fantasies with, for only a small fee. And that it's that simple. And that there's that permanent barrier that will always keep him from ever being seen by her again.

But it's the second visit Travis makes that explains it all. Sam Shepard's insight through the dialogue into the process of pathologizing in detail how a relationship disintegrated.

Jane still doesn't realize it's Travis talking to her at this point, doesn't realize that he's talking about them. Until he gets to the point where he describes when he "used to yell and throw things in the trailer." When she hears that word "trailer," she snaps to recognition. Everything about her tone changes. Memories long forgotten come flooding back.

I have this theory that I know is going to sound crackpot but it goes something like: the color red is code for the mutual love of a parent and child in Paris, Texas. When we first see Travis lost in the desert he wears a red ball cap, but its faded. When he and Walt stop in a motel the sheets on the beds are bright red. It's like Walt has that love and he's trying to take Travis to find it. Where Hunter lives, at Walt and Anne's the blinds are red. In the Super 8 movie Anne swaddles child Hunter in a red shawl. But when Travis goes to meet Jane the final time there's no more red anywhere. And the reunion between Jane and Hunter is seen by Travis outside, from a rooftop, where he's drenched in green with a sunset in the background. And the final shots of the film find Travis weeping, in a frame where we only see part of his face, from behind, and red spills into the frame from somewhere. It's like it's behind him now.

--Dregs

Beware of a Holy Whore

The last 4 years I've worked on sets for production--movies, TV, commercials--and it's the best place I could ever want to work. Of all the movies about movies, the more experience I have the more I get out of watching the ones that depict the process of production itself.

So what do we have? Both The Bad and the Beautiful (1952, Vincente Minnelli) and its sequel Two Weeks in Another Town (1962, Minnelli), Le mépris (1963, Jean-Luc Godard), Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (1971, Rainer Werner Fassbinder), La nuit américaine (1973, François Truffaut), and Living in Oblivion (1995, Tom DiCillo). I figured there would be more. Of course, there are other movies I'm not including because they only contain some sequences on set.

These films always involve bickering, creative conflict, affairs, and to some degree substance abuse. And my first reaction is hey it's not that bad, but then when I think about it, my only conclusion is oh yeah, that's right, all of that has happened even to me at some point. But it's still a lot of fun.

Initially I deliberated going to see Der Stand der Dinge (1982, Wim Wenders) because Robby Müller didn't shoot it, I had never heard of it, and because the log line I read was a film crew on location in Lisbon runs out of film and waits for funds to resume shooting, which sounded boring.

But having watched Hammett (1982, Wenders) the night before Der Stand der Dinge was to be screened in a theater, I said fuck it, I'm all in now. Restored from its original 35mm negative in 4K by the Wim Wenders Stiftung, the AFS Wim Wenders retrospective screened Der Stand der Dinge last night at the Marchesa theater and I went. And I was punching myself in the face for almost thinking about skipping it.

I don't know what happened with Hammett, but Der Stand der Dinge has the singular quality of the greatness Wim Wenders cultivates in Alice in den Städten (1974), Falsche Bewegung (1975), Im Lauf der Zeit (1976) into Der amerikanische Freund (1977). I've gotta start with the cinematography. Henri Alekan, best known for La belle et la bête (1946, Jean Cocteau), achieves photographic images that made me forget I was watching a movie and feel like I was in an art gallery discovering work that made me stop thinking and just enjoy the spectacle of viewing beauty. Der Stand der Dinge opens with sounds of wind, in a rocky barren landscape, on a post-apocalyptic figure wearing a particle-mask, oversized safety glasses, and a backpack, who carries a small handheld video camera. The black and white cinematography has a grainy, gauzed or greasy diffusion to it that gives the images a soft, classic, otherworldly German silent expressionist that probably never existed feel to it. And this phenomenal imagery doesn't stop until the end of the movie.

Wenders returns to his sparse dialogue, lyrical pacing, bypassing plot, focusing on authentic human nuances, punctuated by irreverent spontaneous humor, and casts an overall fatal, ominous sense of longing and loss in Der Stand der Dinge. The coastal Portugal resort where most of the film takes place provides endlessly gorgeous textures with the ever present beach waves serving as the aesthetically sublime dominion of black and white western European art films.

The opening movie-within-a-movie sci-fi piece uses a sinister Carpenter-like synthesizer score, which after a long gap, creeps into the world the characters inhabit outside the movie they're making.

Sam Fuller is back for his third consecutive Wenders film acting as director of photography JOE CORBY (wordplay on Hammett's DP, Joseph Biroc). Fuller is on-screen quite a bit this time and he's terrific: funny, seemingly ad-libbing, salty, world weary, cynical, and always puffing on his trademark cigar--he brings Joe Corby to life and makes this crew believable. One of Joe's complaints in a bar involves him lamenting the curse of the telephone, as he calls it: "good news, bad news, hypocritical news, news you never hoped for," and this is just one instance of a subtext of the impending fear of technology in the film. There's a later scene when DENNIS the screenwriter shows the director the movie they're shooting's assets on an Apple II computer. It's a prophetic warning: computers are going to devour the process of filmmaking.

The first two-thirds of the narrative show the humanity of the crew in a vacuum, or to be precise, placed on a will notify status--that's what the call sheet says the day before you are to show up for work when they don't officially guarantee what time you'll be starting, if at all. I can relate to the financial anxiety of the crew around this part of the movie. But the final act follows the director FRIEDRICH MUNRO (Patrick Bauchau) to LA where he's going straight to the source for finishing funds. King of the road Wenders again captures the location perfectly both tonally and photographically. Friedrich (or as the American crew call him, "fried rice") rents a large convertible, sun pouring down on him in an empty parking lot, and blasts X's "Los Angeles," cruising with the wind in his hair as Exene belts her furious anthem.

As fried rice passes a marquee what else but John Ford's The Searchers (1956) is being advertised.

Friedrich finally confronts the elusive producer GORDON (Allen Garfield) in an RV. While the mobile home drives all night, the two men discuss aesthetics, old Hollywood road movies, the economics of filmmaking and digress into other general ranting and raving as Gordon lounges with his dachshund while the aim of Der Stand der Dinge coalesces, and reinforces the bleak, hopeless demise of individual filmmaking. But oh so beautifully.

Aside from maybe the best black and white cinematography I've ever seen (as Joe Corby says: "life is in color, but black and white is more realistic"), it's the insightful musings on the process of filmmaking and entertaining glimpses into the restless crew, their hang-ups, and the little reflections and jokes that go far in delivering the most entertaining aspects of the film. Like the funny scene when the script supervisor (played by Viva) comments on the exclusion of females in the framing of the Polaroid shots her adolescent daughter takes on set; or what seems like an awkward scene where that girl and another child hear her mom in bed with another man but she says "do you think they're fucking"; or when the Geoffrey Carey played character has the hilarious moment with the child as he's hanging laundry, remembering his awkward characteristics as a teen in LA, from Clearasil, to braces, to stuttering to "wait, what was the last one, oh yeah, cancer." I hate to spoil these scenes though, the unexpected is part of the essence of why they're funny.

Der Stand der Dinge is way better than I could have imagined. Wenders at his most, eccentric and insightful. Beautiful. Very funny.

--Dregs

Strangers on a Train

The fourth film in the AFS Wim Wenders retrospective that I went to.

Unlike the previous films directed by Wim Wenders, each released annually and assembled together in his road movie trilogy (1974-1976), Der amerikanische Freund (1977, Wenders) emerges with a tightly structured plot, is steeped significantly in the noir genre, and floats lyrically in cinematic gravitas.

The tone of Der amerikanische Freund is one of foreboding. Like some of the most melodramatic pulp noir crafted by Nick Ray or Sam Fuller the protag is a virtuous everyman who falls onto the slippery path of crime and finds himself doomed to a pitfall of inescapable consequences.

In the opening scene Nicholas Ray plays a counterfeiter colluding in a rooftop rendezvous with TOM RIPLEY (Dennis Hopper), an American business associate on a stopover from his Hamburg home to tie up some loose ends in NYC. Anytime Hopper's on-screen his magnetic effortless cool cowboy-hatted grifter project that there's a lot more to this guy we're gonna find out and boy is he funny and fun to watch.

Next back in Hamburg we meet JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN (Bruno Ganz) in an auction of a painting that places these characters in a fortuitous crossing of each others' paths. We'll learn that Zimmerman plies his trade constructing frames, and may not have much longer to live due to a leukemia diagnosis, putting him in the dilemma of how to deal with its effect on his wife and young son. With Wenders ready to be flexible combining genres in Der amerikanische Freund, all of this dark heavy subject matter gets established only to have a buddy comedy element thrown in. And it all works. Very original too.

Zimmerman is the deadpan straight man foil to Ripley's eccentric loner and the chemistry is enjoyable on a variety of levels. Thus far from what I've seen Wenders' greatest strength is character. And there's so much detail going on with Zimmerman, like his fondness for antique film/photographic novelties, passion for rock 'n' roll, and all of the different choices he makes involving his escalating high stakes embroilment in the film's straightforward plot that empathizing with him is easy and the pith of the story.

And like the best pulp crime Wenders' characters here don't feel unrelatable or like caricature, they feel like people you've met or could meet any night out. He has this humble way of expressing human objectives.

The train sequence in the third act is the high mark suspense-wise of an all around taught narrative. But somehow all still bears the brand of Wenders offbeat humor and appreciation for the requisite spontaneous aspects of life.

Robby Müller finds his compositions in urban jungles this time. The overhead angle on Zimmerman running down the escalators in Hamburg gave me vertigo. And the scenes of Zimmerman sprinting down the tunnel motorway in desperation is as good as noir imagery as evers  been done. Müller also seems as though around this time he's becoming keen on the green spike certain film stocks exhibit when photographing green flo tubes (the lamp on top of Ripley's pool table is the best example) as aesthetic device. But the red curtains and sheets in Ripley's apartment are pretty far out too. And the boat yard outside Zimmerman's Hamburg flat is perfect for the extreme long shot vistas Müller revels in.

The climax sequence of the Cad ambulance and VW bug trip also finds one of Müller's greatest examples of his style and talent.

Der amerikanische Freund is highly enjoyable even though wrought with some darkly fatal quality to it, and even though I can't say why exactly, the maniacal Hopper as Ripley writhing in spasms of release while taking selfies of himself with a Polaroid remind me of the magic of movies.

--Dregs

Schwarz und Weiß

The third film in AFS's Wim Wenders retrospective I've attended was also the third and final installment of his road movie trilogy.

But sadly I still have only a vague idea of what that label means to me, or specifically how the road movie genre is defined exactly. Apart from these three Wenders movies the only other examples I can think of are Easy Rider (1969, Dennis Hopper), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971, Monte Hellman) Scarecrow (1973, Jerry Schatzberg), Badlands (1973, Terrence Malick) Wild at Heart (1990, David Lynch), My Own Private Idaho (1991, Gus Van Sant), Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas (1998, Terry Gilliam), The Brown Bunny (2003, Vincent Gallo) and Prince Avalanche (2012, David Gordon Green).

Although I do love the variety of life experiences the genre's loose structure allows, the beautiful nature, rural and urban scenes photographed, and for the most part lack of a burdensome sense of plot getting in the way of the feeling of freestyle filmmaking. And the cool music.

Im Lauf der Zeit (1976, Wim Wenders) opens with intertitles telling us, in German, that the film was shot in black and white, at 1.66:1, and uses production sound. Last night I again, after last Friday's Falsche Bewegung (1975, Wenders) found myself spending Friday night watching a slow paced, Robby Müller shot, Wenders Road Movie and lost myself in another world. Except this time the movie was 3 hours, but no seriously it flew by.

Like Alice in den Städten (1974, Wenders) and Falsche Bewegung, the film stars Rüdiger Vogler. Vogler as the main character for the third time really has sealed my love of his work as an actor in these. This time he drives a bus that houses his mobile film mechanic shop, stopping in German towns to repair projectors in theaters. Vogler plays a character called BRUNO WINTER and encounters ROBERT LANDER (Hanns Zischler) at the beginning of the film in a sequence that builds up parallel editing of shots of Bruno parked in his bus out in the countryside getting ready to shave with shots of Robert speeding recklessly through city streets in his VW bug. Their first meeting is a wonderful collision both visually and figuratively.

Robby Müller's cinematography is again the highlight of the show. Shot on Orwo black and white 35mm, wide panning epic vistas of beautiful countryside, wonderful textures of paint chipped structures, and elegant gradients of shadows and light playing on the subjects are everywhere. And plenty of driving shots. The night exterior tracking the motorcycle through the country roads as we see a lightning bolt striking beyond in the horizon had me smiling.

Of all the trilogy Im Lauf der Zeit is the one that had me laughing out loud. Mostly it was shock laughter, as there are a few gags that arise out of graphic depictions of some bodily functions I'm definitely not used to seeing in a movie. Or when Bruno at the bumper cars ticket gate and a woman played by Lisa Kreuzer (Alice's mom in Alice in den Städten) shows up and asks for a light for her Hitler head candle completely deadpan.

Im Lauf der Zeit is really relaxing. It just feels like as long as you're in for the ride who cares about the usual priorities like plot, and an over arching theme. It's all character development and like being on vacation.

Among the later stops the duo make, the abandoned GI post recalls the candle light shack scene in The Grapes of Wrath (1940, John Ford) that Gregg Toland shot. In Alice in den Städten there was a scene in the motel the Vogler character stops in where he watches a scene from Young Mr. Lincoln (1939, Ford) along with a scene towards the end where the same character clips an obituary column of Ford titled "Lost World." And Im Lauf der Zeit has another scene where Bruno is on his truck and clips a photo from a film journal showing Ford on the set of Mogambo (1953, Ford) it looks like. So what's to be made of all this? What's the link, the reason for these references? People of the earth? Slower paced, tales set in the countryside with vast horizons and big skies? The black and white film?

Paper Moon was made by Peter Bogdanovich and released in 1973, the year before Alice in den Städten and has a shot where Ryan and Tatum O'Neil play characters eating in a diner where outside through the window a marquee can be seen that advertises Steamboat Round the Bend (1935, Ford) as its featured attraction. And Paper Moon is also shot in black and white and mostly rural. I don't know what point I'm trying to make with this, but it's impossible not to think of ADDIE when you see ALICE. I mean I'm not trying to imply anything negative about this link, if you can even call it that. Just speculating. Maybe I'm just trying to show off my memory or observation skills?

But okay, since I've already started down this road, there's also a moment in Im Lauf der Zeit when Bruno and Robert are talking about passing through the towns of Powerless and Peaceless. They mention that in between both towns is a mountain called Dead Man. Robby Müller went on to shoot Dead Man (1995, Jim Jarmusch). And Dead Man feels like a road movie for sure; also there's a shot in Im Lauf der Zeit of a symmetric 1 point perspective down a town's thoroughfare with a large tall building weighing the center in the background, just like the shot in Dead Man of the city of Machine with the smokestack; also there's a CU of the van's wheel spinning in Im Lauf der Zeit that looks and feel like the CUs of the train's wheels in Dead Man.

Apologies if anyone was expecting anything in-depth but this time here I just felt like writing a journal entry of a movie I really loved.

--Dregs

What Did I Just Watch?

Continuing the Wim Wenders series, the second entry in his road movie trilogy.

Shot on color 35mm by the amazing Robby Müller and restored at 4K in 2015 on DCP,  (1975, Wim Wenders) is droll and unpredictable throughout. It's odd.

Falsche Bewegung opens with some helicopter shots of a German town that progresses into the window of one of the houses where the film's star Rüdiger Vogler, who I'm really beginning to appreciate since Alice in den Städten (1974, Wenders), obsessively keeps playing a Troggs record then punches through windows with each of his fists. He lives with his mother and wants to be a writer, so he ventures out into the country on a train in search of inspiration.

None of this movie made any sense to me whatsoever. Yet watching it Friday night I would not have rather watched anything else. I'm still only beginning to really become familiar with the road movie as a genre. But Falsche Bewegung seems to be the best example I've seen of leaving your usual surroundings and encountering different people, who don't necessarily teach you anything although that in itself causes you to live.

Didactic film practices always rely on cause and effect. What's great about Falsche Bewegung is that it's never important where these characters came from or where they're going. So the first character the writer encounters is a girl called MIGNON played by 13 year old Nastassja Kinski (in her first movie and she's credited here as Nastassja Nakszynski). Mignon is really pretty, never speaks a word and is a magician acrobat performer who street hustles with her companion, an old man with a shady WWII Nazi past who plays a harmonica.

On a train across from them an actress played by Hannah Schygulla is drawn into the group. The final member of the group will be a poet played by Peter Kern. I'll always remember Kern as FATTY in Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975, Rainer Werner Fassbinder). Schygulla is easily one of cinemas greatest actresses who had a symbiotic chemistry with a director, in her case Fassbinder, that lasted through several films: Von Sternberg/Dietrich, Fellini/Masina, Cassavetes/Rowlands, Waters/Divine. Okay so I know I don't have a strong point to make here, but having watched dozens of Fassbinder movies and loving them so so so much I was absorbed by the nuanced creativity of Falsche Bewegung just because it used some of the same actors from Fassbinder's films, was made around the same places during the same years and is so far from resembling most mainstream more well known movies or all of the garbage on Netflix and cable TV.

Falsche Bewegung is mostly a couple of characters talking at any given time, but it's not dialogue driven. It's all about the people, but it's not character driven. I boil film down to a formula, I've always believed if a movie can nail just one aspect out of plot, dialogue, character, setting, or genre then it can fail at the other four and still work. Falsche Bewegung is a formidable example of the road movie genre and an unforgettable escape.

And again Robby Müller's cinematography painted gorgeous locations on canvasses both rural and urban, highlighted by green fluorescent sources in the nightwork, autumn foliage, sweeping valleys, giant snowy mountains in the day work.

Watching Falsche Bewegung in the theater last night was one of the rare instances I lost complete sense of time at some point during the movie. I can't wait to see where Wenders goes next.

--Dregs

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Oh, the problem of labels in film viewing. There have been certain directors that I've found where I have tried to find and watch as many of their movies as I could. Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a case of one of those directors. And it was worth it. And when I heard that he was around and working with contemporaries of his time in Germany who are called the New German Cinema, that didn't do much for me. I didn't respond to any of the other filmmakers sharing that label like I did to Fassbinder. But this is because I had not made sufficiently diligent efforts to explore the films themselves.

I've never been a big Herzog guy, but it's to my embarrassment. Especially because his name is thrown around so often. Movies either click with me or they don't, that is the mystery of the public's taste. I'd held even less of a regard for Wenders' reputation as I had Herzog's, but I've also spent less time viewing his films.

The Austin Film Society has programmed a Wim Wenders retrospective and I chose to check out some of his movies. Of particular interest for me were the early ones, which I'd never seen before.

Last night I went to a screening of a gorgeous DCP restored  Alice in den Städten (1974, Wim Wenders) not expecting a lot and found immediately that it had far exceeded any expectations for it I could have imagined. I don't know what the formal criteria are for minimalism, or if there's even a strict way of defining it as a aesthetic movement, but all I kept thinking about during Alice In the Cities is that compared to most other films it doesn't seem to be trying to do a lot, but does. And I can't think of a better way to describe that as minimalist.

Alice in den Städten starts with a young German Bohemian type with longish messy hair on a beach taking Polaroids of the landscape, as he sings "Under the Boardwalk" to himself. Then he drives, takes more pictures, checks into motels, watches TV, eats, sleeps, and listens to the radio. And the style of Alice in den Städten that's established early on will remain evident throughout its runtime: Robbie Müller's 16mm black and white cinematography, the locations, the stillness and silence.

Robby Müller is a cult hero of mine because of his diverse array of collaborators and work, which includes:

• Saint Jack (1979, Peter Bogdanovich)
• They All Laughed (1981, Bogdanovich)
• Repo Man (1984, Alex Cox)
• Paris, Texas (1984, Wenders)
• Down by Law (1986, Jim Jarmusch)
• Dead Man (1995, Jarmusch)
• Breaking the Waves (1996, Lars von Trier)
• Dancer In the Dark (2000, von Trier)

And these are only a few.Alice in den Städten is composed of so many subjective shots from driving in cars, flying on airplanes, trains, and even a ferry. And there are obviously those with the opinion of what does and doesn't belong in a movie who do not value empty shots of landscapes, but in this case it's done with such an eye for interesting images that it becomes one of the best parts of Alice in den Städten. Müller also exposes the negative in just the right light to where there's always a lot of detail and deep focus. After what I'm guessing are Florida beaches, the loner drives to NYC and in several instances the Empire State Building is in the background, like a postcard. There's also an in-camera technique used often where the lens closes as opposed to an optical fade out.

Then there're the shots that don't function solely to enhance the plot, like when Alice is on the roof of a building looking through binoculars, and a POV starts on the World Trade Center then tilts down and across other buildings and finds a seagull then tracks it. That stuff isn't planned. That stuff is creative filmmaking.

Turns out the loner is a journalist whose deadline has approached for completion of an article written about the American landscape, to be published by his bosses based out of Germany. But, the loner has only taken pictures and not written a single word. Just one quote culled from his esoteric ramblings is "when you drive through America something happens to you, the images you see change you." And that's profound for me without going into anything deeper.

Okay so if any of this sounds boring, maybe it would be, except ALICE is some little kid whose mom abandons her in the care of the loner whom she trusts to take her daughter back to Germany and meet up with in a day or two.

The kid who plays Alice delivers an amazing performance. She's precocious, critical of the loner, bright, eccentric, and always eating. The chemistry between the loner and the kid turns into this humble, honest, simple just plain old tender bond that occurs as the trip progresses. Lots of the scenes find that rare slightly off European prosaic dry humour that's what gives Alice in den Städten its quality and will pop up later in the best work of Aki Kaurismäki and Jim Jarmusch.

For being so young, it's hilarious how over everything Alice is. So the story is a little sentimental, but I'm tired of associating that word with a negative connotation. For me one of the best moments is in a photo booth, when Alice and the loner are looking into the booth's lens and Alice starts to smile, but the loner doesn't. She looks at him and sees this, then changes her facial expression to deadpan to match his. She wants to be like him. And yeah even though the movie never says who her real dad is I feel like she needs this guy, even if it's only for a few days.

Alice in den Städten is also so impressive because it doesn't portray high stakes drama, it's just a few days this dude and this kid cross paths and it's not about them teaching each other anything groundbreaking about life or anything. It's just a couple of people who don't hate each other and form a little attachment and the realization that that's pretty important in a way.

There are so many little moments that find relevance beyond logic. Like the kid slouched next to the jukebox in the German diner who hums and mumbles along to Canned Heat's "On the Road Again," for the duration of the song it seems, as the conversation between Alice and the loner continually returns to him lost in his sesh. There's a Chuck Berry concert for, I don't know, just because. But the score is so sparse, it's just a few strums of an electric guitar and can convey so much, slightly spooky, a little empty, maybe just as casual and unassuming in its charm as the rest of the movie.

--Dregs