The most important movie Wim Wenders ever saw: “I had this revelation while watching it”
Stumbling upon Paris, Texas on the now-defunct streaming service Filmstruck when I was a teenager turned out to be a life-changing moment for me. I didn’t know how much it would come to shape my love for cinema, but soon, every movie was held in competition with Wim Wenders’ moving tale in the back of my mind.
I was moved by Wenders’ approach to family and identity, with Robby Müller’s sumptuous cinematography making every scene a breathtaking work of art that encapsulated the expansiveness of America – a place where dreams are often smashed to smithereens. It’s a gorgeous masterpiece that Wenders rightly won a Palme d’Or for, allowing him to become widely known outside of his native Germany.
Of course, Wenders had made various great films before Paris, Texas, like Alice in the Cities and The American Friend, but it was his 1984 film starring Harry Dean Stanton that really boosted his career in Hollywood. Since then, Wenders has found further success with movies like Wings of Desire and, more recently, Perfect Days.
Yet, Wenders began his career with the hopes of being a painter, not a director. This led him to France as a young man to study the arts, but it didn’t turn out to be the romantic and creative period he thought he’d be entering. His living quarters were cold and damp, and the amount of money in his name was next to nothing.
Thus, he essentially camped out in a local cinema, sneaking into more screenings than he’d paid for in an effort to stave off his cold and hunger. The screen drew him in, and he found himself enamoured by the movies he was watching every day, his mind blown by the potential of moving images.
That’s when Wenders realised he was going to become a director. More specifically, it was during a certain movie that he had a “revelation” about the power of cinema, and he never looked back.
Talking to the Oscars, Wenders reflected on his time as a young man in Paris, explaining, “I had a crash course in film history. I wanted to be a painter and was in Paris, freezing in my tiny room in the attic. I discovered that the cinema was a warm place where I could see three or four movies for one Franc, if I stayed in the toilet between showings. Because of that, I saw a thousand films.”
He continued, “The first retrospective I saw was an American director called Anthony Mann, and the first film where I consciously understood how movies are made was a Western he made called Man of the West. It starred Gary Cooper. It’s one of my all-time favourite movies, because I had this revelation while watching it. I could have had it with any other film, but I had it with this one. I still love all his Westerns, and Anthony Mann is one of the greatest underrated film directors in the history of cinema.”
The film saw Cooper play a former outlaw who must rejoin his old gang following a train robbery gone wrong. Julie London starred as Billie, a teacher who he meets on the train. While it didn’t receive raving reviews upon its release in 1958, Wenders fell in love with the movie.
While Wenders hasn’t made a western in the traditional sense, you can certainly feel the impact of Man of the West in Paris, Texas, which is often dubbed a neo-western, similarly dealing with themes of redemption as the main characters must try and move forward from violent pasts.
