Wim Wenders

The New German Cinema of the 1970s was arguably the last film movement that truly changed the direction of narrative cinema; and Wim Wenders, alongside his friends Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, belongs in its Holy Trinity. If Fassbinder was the angry enfant-terrible, and Herzog the loopy visionary, Wenders was the movement’s realist and humanist. He was also the most fascinated by American cinema and popular culture, which seemed to attract and repel him in equal measure. In major early works like Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road he took the American road movie and gave it a distinctly European twist. These films, and subsequent masterpieces like The American Friend; Paris, Texas; and Wings of Desire embrace the messiness of real life. Their narratives deliberately drift and find poetry in the quiet moments that most filmmakers leave out.