for T and M
Alice In The Cities is still my
favorite film by Wim Wenders. I remember having seen this film on a
Sunday afternoon on Television, I think it was 1974. The film was
quite young and the things revealed in it were at that time
contemporary. As the film takes place most of its length in the
region where I was born and grew up, it offered me both. First of all
it was probably one if not the first film I saw which I identified as
a film on my time, not to mention the locations in the second half.
The fictive part of the film, its Road Movie aspect made me dream
when I was a teen at that time.
It is a film where the real world and
Cinema came together and with reality I mean the real places and
things I was familiar with. At this time I did n´t know Ozu yet.
Many years later I discovered Wenders films for myself via the detour
Ozu.
When I think about
Alice In The Cities more than 40 years later, I try to imagine
how a Japanese who was a contemporary of Ozu has looked at the things
and the places in the films of the great Japanese film director.
A lot of buildings you see in this film
do not exist anymore. A coal miner settlement we see in one scene was
close after this scene was filmed demolished.
I remember a scene in one of these
ice-cafés which you could find in the region “Ruhrgebiet” in the
1960s and 1970s (Eisdielen) which were installed mostly by Italian
immigrants.
When I saw this film on this boring
Sunday afternoon, the reality the film evoked began just in front of
my door. Today the film is like a history book which supports my
personal memories in that time.
The film is like a monument which has
to replace the buildings and all the things which were specific for
the Western Germany of the 1970s and which are gone forever. I
remember a very short excerpt from the Rolling Stones-song Angie
which was exactly my favorite song in this very year. In these 40
years something happened with this film which could not have been the
intention of a very young Wim Wenders in the year 1973. The amber
which captured the things we see in the film was probably almost
fluid and transparent in 1974 and this feeling I had for this “Now
and Here” became a memory.
Nearly the first half of the film takes
place in America which was for me in 1974 quite an abstract dream but
for me hard to reach at this time. America was a landscape which
existed at this time for me almost entirely through cinema.
One of the movements of this film is
the failed journey of a German writer. When his America excursion
fails he has to return to Germany. Before he can return to his sad
every day life he will be involved with a young mother and her
daughter. Back in Germany he has to care for a while for the girl,
because the mother´s return from America is delayed. Bugged at the
beginning by his father like duty for this child forced on him, his
actually journey just begins.
I am not sure but I can´t imagine to
have seen in 1974 this odyssey through a region very familiar to me
as engrossed as I see it now. I am only sure about one thing the
whole film as a resolution of Cinema and reality must have impressed
me a lot – or at least I felt comfortable with it.
Like we know today the two homages to
John Ford in this film were pure accidental: The excerpt of Young
Mr. Lincoln in Rüdiger Vogler´s hotel television set and the
big article in the newspaper on the death of John Ford “Versunkene
Welt” (Sunken World).
Wenders once said that the death of
John Ford just happened when he shot this scene. This shot became
over the years much more weight for me, because in these 40 years
John Ford became one of my favorite directors.
Together with Mr. And Mrs. Iyer
by Aparna Sen and Arigato-San by Hiroshi Shimizu, Alice In
The Cities is not just one of my most beloved Road Movie but a
journey itself.
As I wrote once on Cambodian Cinema
before the genocide or on a Korean Silent film screened two years ago
in the Forum, sometimes one can sense the ghosts of the people who
have seen and lived with these films. And when my generation gone and
when it will be forgotten, this film will still give in 30 or more
years an idea of how and where we have grown up in this very concrete
piece of German geography.
Rüdiger Tomczak
Screenings:
Tue, Feb, 10, Cinemaxx 8, 22.00
Thurs, Feb 12, Zeughauskino, 19.00
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