On the Road – The Films of Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders has been ranking among the most significant auteurs of contemporary cinema for four decades. Alongside Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, he was the most prominent proponent of New German Cinema and the first director of his generation to succeed in making a leap to the United States and in creating a synthesis between mass and auteur cinema. Until today, his cinematographic oeuvre comprises more than 50 works, including 30 full-length feature films. An oeuvre in which — despite the diversity of forms and genres — recurring aspects can be discerned: the reflection on the production of images and the decline of cinema culture, the outstanding role of music, the preference for the cinema of John Ford and Yasujiro Ozu, his interest in the precise observation of movements — trips, changes of location, encounters — and, often combined with this, an ambivalent relation to "America." Many of Wenders' films are road movies narrating the escape from everyday life, new experiences and adventures, as well as restlessness, homelessness, movements of flight, and a vague quest, in which America plays a decisive role as the destination of flight — especially in Wenders' early movies.