Wim Wenders started out as a painter, and one could argue that helps to explain a long-held fascination with landscapes that’s run through his career (and perhaps best exemplified in the recent “The Salt Of The Earth”). But the director, born in 1945, a key figure in New German Cinema and the holder of three Academy Award nominations (plus a Golden Lion, a Palme d’Or and an honorary Golden Bear from Venice, Cannes and Berlin respectively), has from day one been as interested in the people that fill these landscapes, and in the ways that they move.
Wenders first came to the United States in 1972 with his second feature, the New Directors/New Films premiere of “The Goalkeeper’s Fear Of The Penalty” and he never quite looked back. The journey seemed to trigger the restless wanderer in him and the painter-turned-filmmaker soon began a soulful and inquisitive examination of landscapes from America and beyond. This curiosity and peripatetic quest for answers about how human beings live, exist, suffer, and ultimately try and discover themselves has taken him all over the globe to tackle myriad topics.
Though he’s perhaps best known for the arthouse classics “Paris, Texas” and “Wings Of Desire,” Wenders has had a diverse career, managing to maintain a reputation as a beloved outsider while also mixing with the great and the not-so-great (the Bono-written, Mel Gibson-featuring “Million Dollar Hotel” being an unfortunate example of the latter). Music has always been key, particularly in his documentary work, which often features artists that Wenders admires and wants to share with the world —Pina Bausch, Sebastian Salgado, The Buena Vista Social Club.
Altogether, it’s one of the most eclectic careers of any director, both within non-fiction and fiction, which has seen Wenders tackle dramas, docs, mysteries, crime movies, killers, love, death and of course life on the road in search of something. Wenders is the subject of “Portraits Along The Road,” a touring retrospective from Janus Films of twelve of his films at present, some of which have hardly ever been seen in this country, and have now been lovingly restored, and to mark the occasion, we’ve picked out the ten most essential of his movies across a career that’s now closing on the five-decade mark. Take a look below, and let us know your favorites in the comments.
“The Goalkeeper’s Fear Of The Penalty” (1972)
At one point, a female friend of Joseph Bloch’s (Arthur Brauss) asks him why he’s pacing around and doing other random fidgety bits of business; Bloch immediately deflects the question, changing the subject to her daughter instead. Such evasiveness is part and parcel of Wim Wenders’s resolutely anti-psychological approach in this, his second feature. Despite what the title suggests, “The Goalkeeper’s Fear Of The Penalty” (also sometimes known as “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick“) has little to do with soccer and everything to do with close character observation. Even when Bloch suddenly chokes a random woman to death, he, and by extension the film, remains inexplicably unfazed—in stark contrast to the cool he loses when disputing a missed offside penalty call in the film’s opening scene. The result plays almost like a man-on-the-run thriller without the thrills, replaced instead by a near-anthropological detachment, one seemingly more interested in local color—especially bits of American culture intruding onto the German landscape—than plumbing the depths of the titular athlete/murderer. Unlike Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s stylistically similar “Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?,” there is no build-up to any violent catharsis or blinding revelations. A final dialogue exchange between Bloch and a random observer at a soccer game may explain everything or nothing—or both.
