Wim Wenders on “connecting” with his early films: “How the heck did I come up with that?”
The New German Cinema movement arrived in the 1960s and flourished in the following decade with seminal movies emerging by filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. These directors injected German cinema with a hefty dose of realism, focusing on alienation, outsiders, displacement, and human relationships using a socially conscious lens.
Wenders made his first film in 1970, Summer in the City, although his subsequent release, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, is much more celebrated. Taking influence from the atmosphere of post-war Europe and the American dream, the movie is heralded as one of Wender’s best.
The 1970s saw Wenders hone what he does best – the road movie. Starting with Alice in the Cities, which is one Paper Moon fans will appreciate, Wenders captured drifting, uncertainty and human encounters magnificently. Although he found further success with The American Friend featuring Dennis Hopper, Wenders’ status as an influential filmmaker truly blossomed when he made 1984’s Paris, Texas.
Winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Paris, Texas is easily Wenders’ finest work – a moving tale about family troubles, loneliness and connection. Since then, he has made many other movies, some more successful than others, like Wings of Desire and Palermo Shooting, as well as several documentaries such as Buena Vista Social Club and Pina.
When a filmmaker’s career spans decades, like Wender’s, one wonders what the director thinks of their early work – made before they were given larger budgets, before they received significant acclaim. Talking to Interview Magazine, Wenders revealed how he feels connected to his early output, especially after Criterion restored many of his movies, forcing him to revisit them.
He revealed: “Well, I had to reconnect not only to these movies but also to who I was in 1971 or whenever. The oldest one we restored was The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which was the first time I ever came to New York in January of 1972, to the first edition of MoMA’s New Directors season. So I was a kid. Restoring the film 43 years later was reconnecting to the kid that made it, and that is not that easy.”
Born in 1945, Wenders was in his mid-twenties when he made his second feature, having graduated from the University of Television and Film Munich just two years before. He continued: “But on the other hand, restoration by its very name and by its very condition: you are not remaking anything. You are trying to let it shine the way it was supposed to. I had to understand what the kid wanted to say at the time and refrain from changing it.”
Wenders finds it interesting to step back in time and reflect on the cinematic choices he made decades prior, analysing how much he has grown as a filmmaker. “It was fun because sometimes you just ask yourself, ‘How the heck did I come up with that? How did I do that?’ A lot of it is, of course, quite naïve. Forty years later, you would do things quite differently. But it was a nice discovery because sometimes you see your mistakes quite clearly, and you cannot do anything about them.”
Wenders’ tenure as one of Germany’s leading auteurs, also finding success in Hollywood, is a lesson to all budding directors and creatives not to disregard your first attempts – noticing your growth is evidently an important tool for success.
